A Taint in the Blood

19

She woke up thirsty in the middle of the night and slid from the bed. Jim rolled to one side but didn’t wake up. She pulled on his T-shirt and padded downstairs to get herself a glass of water.

In the cold dark before dawn, she knew Erland Bannister was never going to bite. All he had to do was wait for her to leave. She was beaten, and she hated it. She couldn’t remember the last time it had happened. “Some days you get the bear,” she said out loud, “and some days the bear gets you.”

It was the thought of Charlotte Muravieff that bothered her most. Charlotte, that middle-aged Alaskan icon with the alternative, pampered, extremely well-funded lifestyle. Charlotte, not Victoria, very possibly the victim of a thirty-year miscarriage of justice, Charlotte, not Eugene Muravieff, whom Kate had very probably gotten killed just by looking for him, Charlotte, not William, a seventeen-year-old boy barely on the cusp of manhood, who never had a chance at life. Kate thought of the first time she had seen Charlotte, so desperate, so determined. She thought of her at Erland’s party, when Kate had scored off the phoniest person in a room full of phonies, and Charlotte had looked so pleased and grateful.

It seemed about all Kate was going to be able to do for Charlotte.

She heard a noise in the backyard and went to look out the window. The boys’ tent was silent and dark. She opened the door just to be sure, and had just enough time to see two dark figures coalesce out of the gloom before something dropped over her head and everything went black.

“Hey!” she yelled stupidly, and a sledgehammer hit her face and everything went blacker.

Three different cannonballs hit Jim at once and he came awake thrashing and yelling. He slid off the bed in an ignominious heap just about the time someone switched on the overhead light. He blinked up at it. “Kate? What the hell is going on?”

He was engulfed by a seething swarm of what looked like ten kids and sounded like twenty dogs, all yelling and barking.

“What the hell?” he said in frustration. He was rewarded by another burst of sound, and he put back his head and bellowed, “Quiet!”

Silence fell. The melee resolved itself into two frightened boys and one angry dog, who snarled at him in a way that reminded him of the time Kate had been-

“Kate?” he said. “Kate!” He got to his feet, scooping up his jeans as he ran. She wasn’t in the bathroom, in the kitchen, watching a movie. “Kate!” he bellowed, even though he knew it was useless. He turned to head back upstairs and had to stop before he ran over the boys and the dog, who had followed on his heels and were now staring up at him with equal anxiety over their faces, furred and furless.

Jim felt his heart stop. Yes, he did, and it did, it simply stopped in his chest for one interminable moment. His mouth opened and closed again. With a thump that deafened him, his heart resumed beating, fast and high up in his throat. His voice, when it managed to get out around his heart, was a low croak. “Where is she?”

Mouths opened and closed, including Mutt’s. He couldn’t hear anything. “What?” he said. “What?”

Sound returned without warning and he winced away from it. “They took her!”

One of the boys-Kevin? Jordan? Jim couldn’t remember. God help him, he couldn’t remember. What kind of cop was he? This boy took Jim’s arm and led him to the living room and more or less shoved him down on the couch. He put his hand on the back of Jim’s head, preparatory to pushing Jim’s head between his knees, when Jim raised a hand to stop him. “It’s okay, kid,” he told him. “I’m okay. Thanks. You did good.”

“What?” the kid mouthed. Jim still couldn’t hear him, but that was because the other boy was back up to one thousand decibels. He flapped his hand and it ceased. Mutt nosed beneath his arm, emitting a continual anxious whine, and that scared Jim more than any other single thing in the last five minutes. If Mutt had even a smidgeon of a clue as to where Kate was, she’d have been on her trail and long gone. Instead, Mutt crowded next to him, restless, even whimpering. He couldn’t remember ever hearing Mutt whimper.

“Who took her?” he said, enunciating even these few words with extreme care, because his tongue felt inexplicably too large for his mouth.

The older kid spoke. “Two men. They had something thrown over her, a blanket or a coat or something, and they hit her and then they threw her in the back of a van.”

“A van?”

The kid nodded.

“What color?”

The kid hesitated, and Jim’s heart sank. “It was dark,” the kid said.

“Of course it was dark; it’s four in the fucking morning,” Jim said, and caught himself when he saw the kids’ expressions.

The older kid swallowed and said, “No, I meant the van was dark, dark blue, maybe, maybe even black.”

Jim’s heart lifted again. “Did you-is there a chance-can you remember one or two or any of the numbers on the license plate?”

The kid reeled off the number like an off-duty cop. Jim stared at him, mouth slightly open. “What?” he said.

The kid did it again. “They’d daubed mud on the plate, but the streetlight hit it just right when they turned, and I-”

Jim lunged out of his chair and grabbed the kid up by his shoulders, the boy’s feet dangling two feet from the floor, and almost kissed him. The kid was afraid he was going to, but Jim set him down on the floor and thumped him on the shoulder hard enough to knock him forward a step. “Good job, kid,” he said fervently, “I mean really good job.”

He was halfway out the door before he thought about the boys, and he paused just long enough to bellow over his shoulder, “Don’t move from this spot, do you hear? And don’t open the door to anyone except me! And call your damn parents, damn it!”

Later, he wouldn’t remember very much about the drive uptown, but the expression on the face of the willowy blonde who was sharing Brendan’s bed that night would stay with him for a while. Mutt didn’t help, prowling next to him, ears lying back, fangs slightly bared, and an expression in her great yellow eyes that was not at all human.

Brendan took one look at Jim’s face and said, “What?”

His response was not adequate to the occasion, evidently, because Mutt leapt up on his table and barked once right in his face.

“Holy Mary Mother of God,” Brendan said. The blonde screamed and slammed the bedroom door.

“They took Kate,” Jim said tightly.

“Who took her?” Brendan said, but he knew as well as Jim did.

“I’ve a got tag number,” Jim said, and reeled it off.

A laptop sat on a crowded desk, and Brendan booted it up. “It’ll be stolen,” Brendan said over his shoulder.

Jim paced up and down in an agony of suspense. Mutt stood stiff-legged in the doorway, glowering and occasionally growling, although apparently just on general principles. Brendan cast an unfriendly eye in Jim’s direction. “And where the hell were you when she got took?”

“Asleep,” Jim said.

Brendan looked at him.

“Just find the fucking van!”

The computer beeped and a screen popped up. Brendan scrolled down. “Your van is registered to a Paul Cassanovas. And lookie here-it has in fact been reported stolen. Let me pull up the police report.” Brendan tapped some keys, another agonizing wait, and a second screen popped up. “Mr. Cassanovas reported it stolen yesterday when he parked it at the Dimond Fred Meyer and forgot the keys in the ignition when he went inside to buy groceries.”

“He left the car running in August?” Jim said.

“It happens, only usually it’s the driveway, when they run back inside in the morning. But you’re right: Usually you run across this kind of thing in the winter, when its cold and they want to come back to a warm car. Hmmm. Let’s do a search on Mr. Cassanovas in the corrections database, shall we?”

A minute later, Brendan said, “Bingo. Mr. Cassanovas has served time for B and E, burglary, theft.”

“Has he got an address?”

“Yes, but wait.” Brendan tapped a few more keys. “Last known address was a boarding house on Ingra. Here.” Brendan scribbled the number down. “Call them, see if he’s there.”

Jim snatched up Brendan’s phone and punched in the number.

“Not only does Mr. Cassanovas have an address-” Brendan said.

A sleepy, surly voice swore at Jim but answered his questions before the receiver slammed down. “He checked out last week,” Jim said.

“-he has known associates.”

“Who? Names, addresses.”

Brendan’s lips thinned. “The only one who matters is Ralph Patton.”

“Son of a bitch,” Jim said, “they’ve got her, goddamn it, they’ve got her.”

“Son of a bitch,” Brendan echoed, still looking at the computer screen.

“What?”

“Guess who Mr. Cassanova’s counsel was?”

“Son of a bitch,” Jim said again.

“Well, yeah,” Brendan said, “but he’s also known as Oliver Muravieff. Wait a minute. Where are you going?”

“I’m going to talk to Oliver Muravieff about a little matter concerning his billable hours.”

Moving faster than anyone had a right to expect of a man of his size, Brendan was up and had his hand around Jim’s arm. “Wait a minute,” he said. “Let’s think about this. And after we’ve thought, let’s call the cops.”

The next thing Brendan knew he was slammed up against the wall. “Take it easy, Jesus, Jim,” he said. A door cracked open and the frightened face of a neighbor peeped out. “It’s okay, Mrs. Hartzberg,” he told her. “Everything’s fine. Just go on back to bed.”

It wasn’t easy to be serene with two hundred pounds of pissed-off trooper in his face, not to mention the snarling, snapping half wolf next to the trooper, but, to his credit, Brendan managed it. “Just calm down a minute,” he said. Brendan let go of Jim’s wrists, where his hands weren’t doing much good anyway, and raised both hands, palms out. “Just take a beat here and think this through.”

“There’s nothing to think about, Brendan. We can’t call the cops.”

“Why not?”

“Because they’re his family’s cops,” Jim said. “They let Patton go on command. They’re not going to help us.”

“Come on, Jim, you don’t really believe that. Jim. Jim!”

Jim let Brendan go and walked out, Mutt moving like the hunter she was at his side.

He was conscious enough of what he was going to do to stop at the town house to pick up shirt, jacket, and his sidearm, although the latter was too big not to attract too much of the wrong kind of notice. It would have to go in the glove compartment. His backup piece, a.38, he strapped to his ankle.

He looked in the mirror and saw a grim-eyed civilian staring back at him. Whatever happened next, the troopers were going to come in for as little blame as possible. He looked up Oliver Muravieff in the phone book and copied down the number.

He went back downstairs and told the boys, “Pack up your stuff. I’m taking you home.”

They were frightened and silent during the ride. As he pulled into their driveway, he said, “Can you get in?”

“We hide a key outside,” the older one said as the younger one slid from the Subaru. “Mister?”

“What?”

“Could you… could you maybe call us when you find her?”

The forlorn little voice pierced Jim’s self-absorption the way nothing else could have, and he looked at the kid, really looked at him for the first time since he’d gotten back from Brendan’s. “Yes,” he said. “I will. Better, I’ll bring her here so you can talk to her yourselves.”

“Thanks,” the kid said, and trudged after his brother.

Jim watched them for a second, and then he got out of the car. “Hey,” he said.

The boys stopped and looked back at him.

“You did good, getting that license plate number,” he said. “You’re the reason I’m going to find her.”

The kids’ faces lightened a little, and he climbed back in the car and drove downtown, where he found a parking space within walking distance of Oliver’s building. He got out to case it. It had an underground parking garage, so he would have to do it the hard way. He went back to the Subaru and waited with hard-won patience for the clock to read 8:00 a.m.

At 8:01 A.M., Oliver Muravieff arrived, his silver Miyata disappearing into the underground parking lot.

At 8:05 a.m., Jim dialed Oliver’s office number from Kate’s cell phone. “Yes,” he said in a voice from which any trace of impatience or worry had been completely erased. “I’m an old friend of Mr. Muravieff’s from law school, and I’ve got an eight-hour layover before I head for Barrow. I just wanted to know if he was in his office. I’d like to drop in and say hello… He’ll be there for the next couple of hours? Splendid, I’ll see you soon.” He dropped his voice to what he’d been told was a sexy baritone. “Listen, do me a favor. Don’t tell him I’m coming. I want to surprise him. Thanks.”

He disconnected. “Stay,” he said to Mutt.

She wasn’t having any.

“I mean it, goddamn it,” he said. “Get back in that fucking truck!”

A couple of young attorneys who hadn’t been practicing long enough to take such scenes in their stride scurried by, not making eye contact.

Jim squatted down on his haunches and took Mutt’s head in his hands. She was alternately whining and growling. “She’s not here,” Jim said, trying to shake some sense into her. “She’s not here, damn it, but the guy I’m going to see will know where they’ve got her, and that’s when I’ll need you. Mutt, please, get in the truck.” He stood up and held the door open. “Get in, and stay,” he said.

She eyed him narrowly. It was her choice, and they both knew it. There was no way he was going to bundle 140 pounds of snarling, snapping half husky, half wolf unwilling back in the truck if she didn’t want to go there on her own. “I’ll need backup, girl,” he told her, painfully conscious of seconds ticking away. “Best they don’t know I’ve got it yet. Get in. Please. Get in.”

She whined, she snarled some more, she even nipped at his calf on her way by, but she got in. He heaved a sigh of relief, and as a sign of trust, he rolled down the window halfway. “I know you could take this out if you wanted to-hell, you could probably take out the door if you wanted to-but I’m trusting you to stay here and wait for me. Stay,” he repeated.

She looked at him, ears a little flattened, lips slightly drawn back, teeth gleaming in the morning sun. She did not look friendly.

“Well, for sure no one’s going to steal that Subaru,” he said.

“Hello, darling,” he said to Oliver’s receptionist, affecting the slow drawl he had used earlier on the phone. “Which way is that old boy’s office?”

The receptionist fluttered her eyelashes and said, “I’m afraid Mr. Muravieff has someone with him just now-oh, no, I believe he’s just leaving,” and she turned to smile as her boss came through the door behind her desk.

Oliver Muravieff’s client barely registered on Jim’s peripheral vision. “Ollie!” he said in his biggest, boomiest voice. “How the hell are you!” And he steamed forward, hand extended.

Oliver’s hand came up either in greeting or in self-defense. “I’m sorry?” he said, his brow creasing, “I’m not sure I-”

Jim pushed him back into his office before he could finish the sentence. He stumbled a little over his cane, and when he got his balance back, he looked at Jim with the beginnings of a scowl. “Who the hell are you?”

“All right, you little motherfucker, where is Kate Shugak?” Jim said.

“Who?” Oliver said. But he took just a little too long to say it.

Jim kicked the cane out of Oliver’s hand. “Where is Kate Shugak?”

Oliver fell awkwardly, and Jim heard a sound that might have been the crack of a bone. Oliver yelled.

The door started to open, but Jim slammed it shut and raised his voice. “Ollie, old buddy, you’re just as clumsy catching that ball as you were in college. Ifs okay, honey. He’s just taken himself a tumble, but we’re fine!”

Oliver stared up at him in pain and disbelief. “Who the hell do you think you are,” he said, “barging into my office, assaulting me verbally, assaulting me physically? Do you know what a felony is?”

Jim took a step forward. “If I commit one, I’ll hire you to get me off. Just like you got Paul Cassanovas off. It’s what you do.”

“Paul Cassanovas? What’s he got to do with anything?”

“He’s a client of yours.”

“So? I’ve got a lot of clients.”

“This client hangs out with a guy name of Ralph Patton.”

Oliver was recovering a little of his sangfroid. He looked at his cane as if to pick it up. Jim took another step forward, and Oliver abandoned the idea for the moment. “Again,” he said, “what does any of this have to do with you barging in here and assaulting me?”

“Paul Cassanovas just had his van stolen.”

Oliver rolled his eyes. “Look, Mr.-whoever you are-I-”

“Yesterday,” Jim said, “about eight hours before somebody coldcocked Kate Shugak and tossed her into the back of it.”

There was a moment of silence. Oliver appeared to be thinking deeply. “There’s no way you can know that.”

“There were two eyewitnesses. How do you think I traced the van?”

“I knew nothing of this,” Oliver said. His face had paled and he was breathing a little faster.

“Yeah,” Jim said, “you did, and you’re going to take me to her.”

“Is that so?” a voice said, and Jim looked around to see Fred Gamble of the Federal Bureau of Investigation step into the room.

She woke to a dull, throbbing ache that seemed to take up the whole left side of her head. She couldn’t see and she could barely breathe through the covering over her face. For a moment, she panicked, and then she forced herself into deep, shallow respiration, one breath at a time. She tried to move her hands, her feet, couldn’t. She could barely feel them.

There was a narrow concave surface beneath her. She tried to roll and hit an edge. She rolled back to the center. A cot perhaps. She could smell wood smoke, or the residue of it. She was in a cabin, maybe?

She was also hearing voices.

Was there pain in heaven? Certainly there were voices. Joan of Arc had heard them; it stood to reason Kate Shugak would hear them, too. Of course, Joan had been given directions. Maybe the Woman Who Keeps the Tides or Calm Waters’ Daughter would give Kate a sign.

She moved again and her head fell off. She couldn’t stop a low, agonized groan.

Maybe it was hell. Definitely pain in hell, according to the preachers, lots and lots, and Kate had sinned, big-time. She wished she was sinning right now, back at the town house, upstairs in that king-size bed with Jack.

That wasn’t right. Jim, that was it, Jim in that enormous bed and her having her way with him.

Was he one of the voices?

“I only hit her once,” someone said.

“You shouldn’t have hit her at all,” another voice said coldly and clearly.

Nope. Not Jim, neither one of them. But the voice did sound familiar.

She went away for a little while, hiding from the pain, and when she woke up again, the stifling cover had been removed from her face. She sucked in lungfuls of clean, cool air. They hadn’t gagged her, hallelujah, but of course that only meant there was no one within shouting distance. Still, she had to try.

She gathered everything she had, took as deep a breath as she could, and produced a small croak. She waited a moment and tried again. “Help,” she said, gaining volume. “Can anybody hear me? Help! Help! HELP!”

No one replied. She heard the rustle of wind in the trees, a flock of chickadees talking among themselves, and what might have been the heavy footstep of a moose. Nothing else.

She looked around her, her restraints permitting her limited movement. The wood smoke had been a clue. She was in a cabin, a small one-room affair, studiedly rustic, filled with Adirondack furniture Kate recognized from a catalog she’d read once when she’d been stuck on a long flight with no books. There was a little woodstove and a counter with a Coleman stove and a pink plastic dish tub and a matching pink plastic dish drainer on it. There was a shelf beneath holding a variety of canned goods and a cardboard box with the top cut away to form a tray, holding bottles of water.

Kate had a sudden raging thirst. She rolled toward the edge of the cot and discovered that, along with tying her hands and feet, they had tied her to the cot. She looked down and saw that she was still wearing Jim’s T-shirt, which had rucked up to her waist, and she was so enraged and so thirsty that she cursed at the top of her voice for a full minute.

When she was done, she felt much better. Her head still hurt and her right eye was swollen almost shut. Her vision in that eye might even be a little foggy, but she could still see fine out of the other. She looked the room over again. She twisted around on the cot and saw that it had folding legs. She considered the possibilities.

The ropes around her hands and feet were tight, tight enough to cause her hands and feet to swell. The rope around her body, the one tying her to the cot, was a little looser. One end of it was connected to her hands, the other tied off to itself in a slipknot.

She smiled, showing all her teeth and displaying a distinct and unnerving resemblance to Mutt, had anyone been there to see it. She began rocking back and forth in the cot, back and forth, back and forth, until the cot began to rock up on its legs, an inch, two inches, three, six, twelve. It was a heavy sea and Kate was wallowing in the troughs, way up and way down, the rope cutting into her now-bare stomach as she flung her body weight at it, until finally, the cot nipped over at last and Kate splatted face first against the floor.

It didn’t do the injury to her face any good, and she groaned again.

It was a wood floor, poorly finished and dirty. In the end, that was what got her moving again. She pulled her knees to her chest and, using her shoulders and her head, began to inch her way toward the counter, the rope attaching her to the cot really cutting into her now, and the cot on her back weighing a lot more than it looked.

She’d about given up hope of ever reaching the counter, stopped even looking up to see how far away it was, when the cot bumped into it. She looked up, and there on a shelf not a foot away loomed the bottles of water. Alaska Glacierblend. Virgin Water from the Eklutna Glacier. It might as well still be frozen in the Eklutna Glacier, for all the good it was doing her.

Kate felt tears well into her eyes and forced them back by a massive effort of sheer will. She managed to get her knees beneath her again and tried to snag a bottle with her teeth, but the damn cot kept getting in the way. That gave her an idea, and she used one of the poles of the cot frame to knock one of the bottles down. It rolled beneath the shelf.

“FUCK!” she yelled. “Mutt! Where are you, damn it! There’s never a goddamn wolf around when you need one!”

Which was patently unfair, considering how many times Mutt had galloped to her rescue, but Kate wasn’t in a fair frame of mind. She used the cot pole to knock another bottle to the floor and this time managed to pounce on it before it got away. She finally got the bottle in between her chin and her chest and wriggled it down to her hands, which were bound wrist to wrist. She could open them just far enough to grasp the bottle near the cap, although-sweet Jesus!-the flexing of her fingers hurt like a bastard. Her breath hissed through her teeth as her hands fumbled at the cap.

She was ready to bite it off with her teeth, but the seal broke and the cap unscrewed easily enough. She slid the bottle carefully upward through her hands and took the neck in her teeth and tilted the bottle upward. Cool, clean water flooded down her throat. She choked on it, and some got up her nose, but she drank the rest of it down, every single wonderful drop.

She let the empty bottle fall and watched it roll beneath the counter. The floor seemed to slant that way. She hoped the contractor had charged Erland Bannister an arm and a leg for extremely shoddy workmanship.

For she had no doubt as to the identity of her kidnapper. Charlotte Bannister had hired Kate Shugak to get Victoria Muravieff out of jail, and in so doing, Kate had stumbled into a can of worms, which had turned out to be a nest of vipers. Of them all, Erland’s bite would be the most poisonous.

Really her only question at this point was why he hadn’t killed her outright. What did she know that he needed to know before he did?

She put those thoughts behind her. Her thirst satisfied for the moment, now she had to get free.

She knelt on the floor in a sort of crouch beneath the cot, which was roped to her like an over affectionate dog.

Mutt, Jim, wherever you are, please be on your way here. Please have seen me get tossed into the back of that vehicle; please be on the trail of that vehicle right now.

She pushed those thoughts away, too.

The cot’s poles ran through two sleeves, one at either edge of the canvas that formed the bed. She couldn’t look around behind her to see how the legs were attached. She tried to stand up, but the poles were longer than she was tall. She bent over, as far over as she could, and tried to stand again.

This time, she made it, although her blood pounded through to her bound feet. The aft portion of the cot’s legs dragged behind her on the floor, and she could only manage the smallest hop, the poles scraping behind her. She hopped and scraped, nevertheless, until the upright ends of the poles bumped into the wall of the cabin. She hopped up and down, knocking the ends of the poles against the wall. Slowly, a fraction of an inch at a time, the poles began to slide into their canvas sleeves, until the sleeves extended beyond the poles and the canvas was flopping down in her face. Still Kate hopped, bent over, her back beginning to ache, the side of her face one enormous hammering pain, thumping the ends of the poles into the wall.

Eventually, she noticed that the rope had slid up the cot a little, too-not much, but maybe just enough. About that time, the rope around her must have caught on the cot legs, or maybe the legs had caught on the canvas, or maybe both, so it was now or never. She had one thing in her favor: The rope that bound her was half-inch polypro, plastic rope, which if improperly knotted had a tendency to lose tension and slip. These knots were at best granny knots and they were already loose. She crouched down, nose to knees, and began to wriggle.

After that, it was almost easy. She dragged the cot back to the counter, managing to collapse its legs and fold the poles together. The canvas hung down, making a nuisance of itself, but Kate managed to reach the Coleman stove with her bound hands. Heart knocking against her ribs, she turned the right knob in front of the right burner. Nothing, not a damn thing, not even so much as a hiss of fuel.

“Shit,” she said, and tried for the other knob.

This time she heard the clicking of an automatic ignition and could have shouted for joy. The burner lighted with what looked to Kate like a positively joyous flame. Without a moment of hesitation, she held her bound hands over the burner, as close as she could get. The rope began to sizzle. She lowered her hands more, careless of the heat on her wrists, and the rope began to melt. She strained with all her muscles, pulling the rope against itself, and it separated suddenly without any warning. Her left hand hit the cot and toppled it to the floor, and her right hand hit the plastic tub and sent it flying across the cabin.

The ropes binding her feet were quickly untied. She rummaged through the items on the counter and the shelves, looking for a weapon. There was a box of silverware, including a few bread knives with serrated edges. She set them aside.

She remembered the water bottles rolling beneath the counter, and dropped down to peer into the narrow space. It was dark and she couldn’t see anything. She reached beneath with one hand, feeling around in the darkness, hoping a big rat wasn’t waiting there to bite her. Were there rats in Alaska? She couldn’t remember ever seeing one.

She shook her head angrily, concentrating. The sleeve was shoved back from her shoulder and it scraped the bottom of the shelf, picking up a splinter. She pulled out the empty water bottle, the full bottle, a church key, three metal beer caps, seven kernels of popcorn, a couple of blue plastic poker chips, a thick rubber band, a steak knife, and a handful of.22 shell casings.

The steak knife was a welcome sight. The shell casings were not.

She didn’t make the mistake of running for it, not yet. She walked back and forth across the cabin, stepping carefully and opening and closing her hands. God, they hurt, like her feet, and her head. She was so tired. She wanted to set the cot back up and take a nap. She was certainly dressed for it.

That brought her back to her senses in a hurry, and she rifled through the cabin’s one closet, formed by hanging a wire across a corner, where she found a pair of women’s slacks cropped above the ankles. They were too tight in the hips and too loose in the waist, but she put them on and fashioned a belt from the polypro and knotted Jim’s T-shirt at her waist. There was nothing in the way of shoes, which was a damned shame.

The cabin had four windows, one in every wall. Each looked out on trees standing in what looked like late-afternoon sun. Five o’clock, maybe. This time of year, maybe six. Kate went to the door and found it locked from the outside. She picked up a chair and sent it through the nearest window. The glass cracked and prismed but didn’t fall.

“Safety glass?” Kate said out loud. “I don’t think so, you son of a bitch.” She took the chair to the little woodstove and used it to knock the chimney down. There was a small poof of soot, no more, someone had been burning Red Devil regularly in the little stove. Little, but heavy, it was made of cast iron. Kate stooped and got both arms around it and lifted, grunting. Later, when the adrenaline rush abated, causing her muscles to feel the strain, she would realize just how angry she had been, because she now raised that stove up off the floor, staggered over to the window, and reared back to send the stove into the window.

This time, the window gave up the ghost and the stove crashed through and fell on the ground outside. The fresh air coming in through that open window was the sweetest odor Kate had ever smelled. She fetched the chair again and used the legs to clear the window frame of glass, and then she was out and on the ground.

One single-lane road that was more of a game trail led up to the front door, which was locked with a padlock. Kate went back inside for a bread knife. The cabin had never been painted and the screws securing the hasp to the doorjamb came out easily with a small application of muscle. She threw the hasp and the padlock deep into the woods, then took a long, luxurious, and much-needed pee in the outhouse out back, which came equipped with toilet paper. Ritzy.

She walked ten minutes down the road before her feet began to feel it. She heard a jet high over head. It seemed to be descending. She didn’t hear any street sounds that might indicate a road. The trees never thinned out enough to give her a view, something to tell her where she was.

She padded back up the road, went to the window of the cabin, and climbed up on the sill. She stood up, reaching for the eave of the roof. She caught it with both hands and gained the roof in a sort of scrabbling kick. It was made of corrugated metal and was warm from the day. She stood up.

There were mountains in front and behind and all around, sharp peaks, some with snow, some without. They looked slightly familiar. Soft in the distance she thought she heard the sound of running water. A creek perhaps.

The setting sun slanted on the mountains with no snow, another jet appeared over the eastern horizon, and Kate knew where she was. The cabin was located in the Chugach Mountains, somewhere between the front and back ranges. Crow Creek Valley, maybe, reasonably accessible if you knew your way around the Anchorage bowl area. The cabin probably sat on a chunk of land subdivided from some old homesteader’s claim.

Her spirits lifted. Kate liked being lost about as much as she liked getting her feet wet. She went back inside the cabin and found a can of cream of tomato soup and a can of evaporated milk. She stirred both into a pan over the working burner of the Coleman stove and had a dinner of soup and saltines spread with peanut butter, chased with another bottle of water.

They wouldn’t come until dark. They were off busily establishing their alibis, but they’d waited until the wee hours to take her, and they’d wait until the wee hours to kill her, too. But they’d come earlier tonight, because she had something Erland wanted, and they would need time to question her before they killed her. Maybe he thought she knew who had really killed William. Maybe he thought she had proof that he’d had Eugene and Charlotte killed. At any rate, no plan of his would include her leaving this place alive.

She remembered again Max’s story of Jasper Bannister and Richie Constantine and Calvin Esterhaus. How like his father was Erland Bannister?

The.22 casings showed that a gun had been fired in this cabin before. She wondered where the bullets from them had lodged, and in whom.

Erland might come armed tonight, too, but maybe not. He had left her pretty well trussed up. He wouldn’t be expecting to find her free. But then he’d locked the door, as if guaranteeing that if she did get loose, she wouldn’t get anywhere. Which she had done. But maybe he’d locked the door to keep stray hikers out. And the windows were high enough that no one smaller than a giant could look in, so he must have thought she was pretty safely shut in for the day.

She remembered the voices she’d heard the first time she’d come around. He probably wouldn’t come alone, he’d need someone to clean up after him, because guys like Erland Bannister never dirtied their hands with the cleanup work. Probably he’d bring the same someone who had kidnapped her, because using the same crew meant fewer witnesses.

All she had to defend herself was a steak knife. She knew she should walk away, right now. That was the smart thing to do. Start walking, right now, start eating up some of the mileage between her and 911.

Where was her cell phone when she needed it? Back in the town house, in her day pack. Oh yeah, some of the smarter money she’d spent this year.

On the other hand, there was no guarantee that anyone would come if she called. There were damn few Alaskans who were going to believe some wild tale about Erland Bannister murdering his nephew and contracting to murder his brother-in-law and his niece over thirty years later. Kate had some street cred, but nobody had enough to put that story over.

Although Kate was beginning to have a sneaking suspicion that she’d been wrong about who’d killed William Muravieff, and if she ran, she’d never know.

And she really, really wanted to know.

Using the steak knife, she cut rough pieces out of the canvas cot, shaped them into soles, and bored holes through which she laced the rope. The canvas was stiff and the rope was harsh against her skin. She found a man’s flannel shirt in the closet and cut up the sleeves for socks. She cut off every single hanging thread, every dangling bit of rope, because when it came time to run, she didn’t want anything tripping her up.

She tucked the steak knife into the rope around her waist. She situated the table to the left of the open door and placed the chair so that it was just out of eyesight of the doorway. She went outside to look over the forty-foot spruce tree that stood at just the right spot to give her a good view of what would come up the road later this evening. She broke a few dead branches, bent a few living ones, and made a reasonably comfortable seat, padded with the canvas left over from the cot and the remaining bits of rope, about twenty feet up. It was clearly visible from the cabin, but in her experience, people seldom looked up. She cleared what she hoped was a fairly unobvious path to the ground, then went from ground to seat and back again a couple of times to familiarize herself with hand and footholds. She wanted to be able to ascend and descend as quietly as possible.

Her hands were sticky with sap when she was done. She went back to the cabin and gathered up half a dozen bottles of water. She took three of them up the tree. The other three she secreted in a hollow beneath a fallen spruce about a hundred feet off the road. If she needed them, they’d be there. She hoped she wouldn’t.

She went back to the cabin and cleaned up the broken glass in front of the window and hauled the stove back inside. It felt a lot heavier on the way in than it had on the way out. If she was right and they came late, chances were that with no ambient light to reflect off the glass, they’d never see that it was missing. If she was lucky, they wouldn’t notice the broken stovepipe. It was amazing what people missed seeing just because they had preconceived notions of what was supposed to be in front of them.

She got another bottle of water and scrubbed the sap from her hands. She’d found a nappy fleece jacket with a broken zipper that was at least thirteen sizes too big for her, but it was heavy. She hid it in the deadfall with the water.

The sun went behind the mountains and took at least as much time to set below the horizon. The forest was filled with the sounds of the birds and the beasts going about their business, hunting, feeding, grooming. A bear sounded off in the distance, and Kate hoped he or she wasn’t heading toward the cabin.

They came, as near as she could figure, around midnight. The witching hour, the hour when the blues band in your favorite neighborhood dive was just cranking it up, the hour when even Ted Koppel was ready to pack it in for the night, so it figured. They came in a nondescript pickup, a dull gray in color, plates the old blue-on-gold Alaska plates, no hubcaps, no mag wheels.

Only it wasn’t they. It was only one man, whom Kate recognized as Erland the moment he stepped out. She couldn’t believe it. She was even a little annoyed. Was she, Kate Shugak, so easily dealt with that the task required only one man, and that one man not accustomed to doing his own heavy lifting? Had no one considered the possibility that she might escape and do some heavy lifting of her own?

He saw the open door and halted, half in and half out of the vehicle. She began to descend the tree in stealth mode, glad her hair was no longer long enough to catch on spruce needles as she went.

She froze halfway down when he reached into the truck and took the keys out. Damn.

He walked up to the door. “Kate?” he said.

She came up behind him, the canvas and fallen spruce needles masking her steps. “Go on in,” she said.

He jumped and swore, and it did her heart all the good in the world. He sucked air in and let it out in an explosive breath. “You are one hell of a woman,” he said with what sounded like sincere regret.

“Well, don’t sound so sorry about it,” she said. “Go on, go in. Sit down.”

“How the hell did you get loose?”

“Sit,” Kate said, and leaned up against the wall next to the open door.

He sat, looking at her through the gloom. “Can we have a light? I think there’s an oil lamp around somewhere.”

One of the things Kate had learned during a five-year intensive stint with the Anchorage DA was that, contrary to popular fiction, bright lights did not make people spill their guts. On the contrary, the darker the room, the more forthcoming the secrets. “I like it the way it is,” she said.

She sensed rather than saw him shrug. “You’re the boss.”

She didn’t believe that for a New York minute. “Who killed William Muravieff?” she asked.

“Ah,” he said.

Kate waited out the silence that followed. Erland Bannister was not the kind of man to be held accountable for his actions by anyone, from the IRS on down to Kate Shugak. Perhaps especially Kate Shugak, Alaska Native, female, two societies to which Erland had entree but not membership and to both of which he almost certainly felt superior.

“First of all, I didn’t kill him,” he said finally.

“I did sort of figure that out on my own,” Kate said. “Was it Oliver?”

There was another, longer silence. “Ah, Kate,” he said, and there was a world of sorrow in the words.

“Was it really that petty?” she said. “William had the girl Oliver wanted, and Oliver killed him for it?”

Again she sensed the shrug. “When you’re sixteen and male, girls are all your thinking about. And Wanda was something.”

He still hadn’t admitted anything, but then she wasn’t wearing a wire, either. “And you let Victoria take the fall. It was just so convenient. She was making so much noise over your decision to replace your union employees with contract hires, and then, lo and behold, she gets arrested for murdering her own son. Her trial knocks your restructuring of the family business off the front pages long enough for you to get the dirty work done and over with, and then, my god, she’s found guilty. You must have thought you’d died and gone to heaven.”

“I kept hoping she’d beat the rap, right up until the verdict,” he said heavily.

“Bullshit,” Kate said. “She wouldn’t let her sons work for you after you announced what you were going to do, would she? And you didn’t have any sons of your own to carry on the family business. With Victoria in jail, you naturally assumed custody of Oliver, and put him right to work. What happened, Erland? Did he figure he had you by the short ones, since you were covering up each other’s dirty secrets? Is that how he could go to school and be a lawyer and start his own firm, leaving you high and dry?”

Silence.

“And then, thirty years later,” Kate said, “certainly long enough for all the buried skeletons to have long since deteriorated, Victoria gets cancer and her daughter hires me so she doesn’t have to die in jail. And you start tying up loose ends and a loose cannon. Eugene Muravieff, who was hiding in plain sight so he could stay in touch with his kids. And then Charlotte, because I wouldn’t leave it alone, and the only way you could see to make that happen was to kill my employer.”

Erland must have read Disraeli. Never apologize, never explain. Arrogant but effective, especially when faced with three felony counts of murder, not to mention a felony count of kidnapping.

“You must have wished that Victoria had choked to death on a bone,” Kate said into the silence. “She was always more trouble than she was worth anyway. Marrying that worthless Eugene. Finding out you were cooking the books.”

A stir. “What?” he said, and his voice was no longer sorrowful.

Kate checked to see that the doorway was still clear. “Of course you were embezzling funds, Erland,” she said. “ Victoria was working in accounts payable, where she found evidence of double billing.”

“How do you know all this?” Erland’s voice was very cold and very clear, and Kate instantly remembered one of the voices she’d heard when she first came to in the cabin. “You shouldn’t have hit her at all.” Of course not, Kate thought, a fist in the face is too obvious-the ME would have had no trouble recognizing it for what it was, and it would no doubt have been inconsistent with the other injuries her corpse would have presented when it washed ashore in Turnagain Arm. A dead giveaway-pardon the expression, she thought-that foul play had been done. She was equally certain that Erland wanted it to look like an accident. Not so much like his father after all.

But who had he been talking to? “She told me,” Kate said.

“She told you?” he said. “You’ve seen her since she got out? Where is she?”

“Tell me something, Erland,” Kate said. “Did you farm me out?”

“What?” he said.

“Did you farm out my kidnapping,” she said. “I was just wondering. Sooner or later, you weren’t going to want any witnesses. I’m figuring it was sooner, and maybe that’s why you came up here alone.”

For the first time, she heard tension in his voice. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Sure you do,” she said, and dived out the doorway in the same instant that he drew the gun and fired.