A Taint in the Blood

20

She tumbled into a forward somersault to come up on her feet running. Round one to her. She hit the trees in three strides, just as the gun cracked again. The sound of glass breaking on the truck made her laugh beneath her breath, as did the sound of Erland’s curses.

She felt rather than saw her way to the water cache. She paused, listening. There was the sound of glass breaking. He was probably kicking out the remains of his windshield. The truck’s engine started.

She would have to stick close to the road. He’d know that and stay on it, waiting for her to emerge.

So she wormed her way under the deadfall, hoping that nothing had taken up residence in the hollow beneath in her absence. Nothing had. She felt for the oversized fleece jacket, snuggled into it and curled up into a ball. She wished for Mutt’s warm bulk next to her, wished even for, god help her, Jim, and with that thought she dropped blessedly into a deep, dreamless oblivion.

Birdsong woke her in that pale hour before dawn, three pure descending notes, repeated and answered. Kate blinked, yawned, and stretched, and reached for one of the bottles of water to relieve her morning mouth. She got to her knees to peer out from beneath the underbrush.

The dew lay heavy on the bracken, a precursor of frost. She took a moment to be thankful it wasn’t. She didn’t see anyone or hear anything but animal noises, but that didn’t mean that Erland wasn’t sitting in his truck smack in the middle of the only road leading out, waiting for her to show up so he could shoot her dead and leave her to the bears to snack on. At this point he wouldn’t care if her death looked like an accident or not. He’d risk shooting her now and coming up with an explanation later, delivered no doubt by a fine battery of expensive attorneys.

She’d been lucky so far and she knew it. Well, she thought, there’s no point in not pushing your luck when it was running in your favor. She peed where she’d slept, just to underline her determination to sleep between clean sheets that night, and pushed her way through the dead branches and into the open.

The sky was light with the anticipation of sunrise. The three-note descant sounded again, sounding like an all clear, and Kate smiled. “Thanks, Emaa,” she whispered, and began to creep forward, keeping her head at the level of the poushki while avoiding their spiked leaves. The forest floor was dense with pine needles, all the better to muffle her steps, but she watched where she placed her canvas-shod feet anyway.

She passed a cow moose with a yearling calf, so close that she could have touched them. The cow’s ears went back, but she didn’t get up, and Kate faded into the trees before she could.

The forest ended at the road. Kate peered out beneath a clump of wild roses. No sign of the truck. She had a choice here. She could start down the road, chancing discovery to move faster, or stick to the trees, where it would take much longer but would be much safer.

Erland Bannister wasn’t the type to cut his losses and get on the next jet for Rio. He had too much property and too much money and too much power to leave it all behind. His only choice, as he would see it, would be to kill Kate before she had a chance to take that all away from him.

And it probably wouldn’t hurt him to take her out. Somewhere down deep inside, the practical businessman resented the hell out of these upstart Natives, these people who hadn’t done a lick of work in three hundred years’ worth of Alaskan history and who had had it all handed to them on a platter thirty years before and now were a force with which to be reckoned-a political force, a social force, a governmental force-dangerous to offend, impossible to ignore. They were even marrying into the goddamn families of the power elite, bastardizing a line of entrepreneurs and visionaries going back a hundred years.

Well. One woman’s merchant adventurer was another woman’s pirate. Kate grinned to herself.

If she were Erland, she would have driven down to where this road intersected with the next road. There was only one way into the cabin and the same way out. Kate had to stay on or near the road to get back to Anchorage, and help. Yes, that’s what she would do.

Kate stepped out into the road and stood there for a moment.

No one shot at her.

The three notes sounded from a nearby branch, and Kate looked up to catch the cocky eye of a golden-crowned sparrow. The tiny, plump brown bird launched from the bobbing branch it had been perched on and flitted down the road from tree to tree. Kate followed.

It was a long road and the sun was sliding up over the horizon when Kate rounded a corner and saw the intersection. She stepped into a thicket of alder and peered through the leaves. She didn’t see the truck, or any other vehicle. But then, she wouldn’t have parked in sight, either. She would have wanted to lure her quarry into the open.

Okay. She was lurable. She soft-footed it down the little incline. The intersecting road was two lanes wide and the gravel hadn’t been graded in awhile. She still didn’t see the truck, so she stepped out on it, and again, no one shot her. Life was good.

She put her back to the rising sun and set off down the road at a slow trot, working out the kinks of sleeping in the woods and working up some body heat while she was at it. She’d had peanut butter and crackers for breakfast, so she wasn’t hungry, strictly speaking, but she would have killed for a big plate heaped with bacon and eggs over medium, with a big pile of crisp home fries on the side. She was fantasizing over the home fries-with onions and green, red, and yellow peppers and garlic mixed in-when she rounded a corner and saw the truck, parked with its nose downhill.

Without thinking about it, she dived for the side of the road and tumbled down a small bank, fetching up hard against a tree trunk.

“Shit,” she said before she could stop herself. She got to her feet and found herself looking down the barrel of a pistol held in the shaking hand of Oliver Muravieff.

He looked, if possible, even more terrified than Kate felt. “Uncle Erland?” he called over his shoulder. “Uncle Erland, I’ve got her.”

“Shoot her, you moron,” Kate heard Erland say, and that was all she needed to hear. She made a diving tackle for Oliver’s bad knee. It cracked when she hit it and she knew a fierce satisfaction in the sound. Amazingly, he didn’t drop the gun. He tried to point it at her, but she had his wrist in both hands. They struggled, rolling back and forth, and Kate’s biggest fear at that point was the crashing of underbrush that signified Erland’s approach.

“Drop it, you little weasel,” she said through her teeth, and at that moment the gun went off.

Kate’s ears rang with the sound of the shot, and her nostrils stung from the smell of burnt powder. She jerked back and felt her torso, her legs, her arms. There was blood on her left hand and she stared at it, horrified, before realizing that it wasn’t her blood.

She looked down at Oliver, at Oliver’s belly, where a huge red bubble was growing. “Oh fuck,” she said, and turned to meet the bull rush of Erland Bannister as he came crashing through a diamond willow. He looked past Kate to Oliver and said, “Goddamn you, Oliver, you useless little shit!” Given that moment of distraction, Kate grabbed for an overhead branch, hoisted herself up, and kicked Erland Bannister right in the chin. His jaw clicked shut and he fell backward most fortuitously against a white birch that had grown so tall its branches were a good eight feet above the ground. His skull hit the birch’s trunk with a very satisfying smack, a sound that Kate would have been happy to hear again, but there was no time. She rifled his pockets for keys and found them, and then she ran for it, flat out, right to the truck. It started at a touch and she put it in gear and floored the gas pedal.

Halfway down the hill, she met Mutt and Jim Chopin coming up in one of those anonymous black SUVs that had government issue written all over it. Fred Gamble was driving.

“Who took out the insurance policies on the kids?” Jim said.

“ Victoria did,” Kate said, “just like everyone said she did. They were maturation policies, generating funds for when the kids got old enough to retire, or to provide financing for their burials, should that be necessary before their time.”

Brendan shook his head. “She never denied taking them out, did she?”

“She never denied much of anything,” Kate said. “Erland told her he’d turn Oliver in if she did.”

“Tell me that part again. I’m having a hard time with it.”

Kate sighed and let her head fall back. “Oliver was in love with Wanda. He thought she was in love with William. Oliver drugged William with his mother’s sleeping pills, took a couple himself so they’d show up in the drug scan, and siphoned some gas out of his mother’s car, which he then ran from the fireplace to both sets of drapes. Then he put the gas can back in the garage, went upstairs, and climbed in bed to wait for the fire to catch and the smoke to rise to the second floor.”

“I still don’t get it. He broke his leg trying to get out the window.”

“I don’t think that was part of the plan.”

“Going out the window?”

“No, he meant to do that all along. It would have looked funny if he’d come down the stairs without trying to bring William with him. William’s bedroom was between his and the stairs. No, Oliver had to go out the window to make it look good.”

“It looked pretty damn good,” Fred Gamble said. “It certainly fooled an entire police force. Not to mention a jury.”

They were in Brendan’s office. Kate had been giving statements continuously since nine o’clock in the morning. It was now one o’clock in the afternoon. She was sticky with tree sap, grimy with sweat and dirt, and very, very tired. Her one consolation was the shaggy gray head pressed to her knee. She knotted her fingers in Mutt’s ruff and Mutt gave a comforting whine and leaned harder. She been glued to Kate’s side since they’d found Kate that morning. Sooner or later, such devotion was going to make it difficult to go to the bathroom, but right now it was equal parts relief and reassurance.

“And Victoria refused to speak to Charlotte because…”

“I’m guessing, to protect her,” Kate said. “ Victoria never told Charlotte that Oliver had killed William. Erland wouldn’t tell her, either, if Victoria would refuse to talk to her. He wanted a complete rift. So long as Victoria was in jail for William’s murder, no one would think to look at Oliver as a suspect. And Erland would have the heir he couldn’t provide for himself.”

“And it worked,” Jim said. “For thirty years.”

Kate nodded. “Okay, your turn. You guys have been pumping me dry for four hours. What happened here?”

“I woke up, you were gone, the boys saw you get taken, they caught the tags, Brendan found that they were registered to a buddy of Ralph Patton’s.”

“Was Ralph one of the men who took me?”

Brendan shook his head. “I had a prowl car go out to his place. He was home with his wife and kid.”

Kate looked at Gamble. “Not that I wasn’t happy to see you, Fred, but how the hell did you get involved in this?”

Gamble looked at Brendan. Brendan brushed fruitlessly at a speck of something disgusting on his tie and said to it, “I had reason to believe the FBI might have an interest in PME and all those who sail in her.”

Kate’s eyes narrowed.

“We were watching Oliver. We followed him to the cabin,” Gamble said primly. “And that’s really all we’re prepared to tell you.”

Racketeering? Money laundering? Kate wondered just what it was that had pulled PME back from the brink of bankruptcy all those years ago, and just how legal it had been.

She noticed Jim looked uncomfortable, and wondered what that was about. An enormous yawn split her face, and she decided to leave it for another day.

The phone rang. Brendan answered it, listened for a moment, said “Thanks,” and hung up. “Well, that was the crime-scene guys. They’ve been going over the cabin. Seems they found a grave.”

“What’s in it?”

“What’s left of what they think was a man.”

“Henry Cowell,” Kate said.

Brendan nodded at her. “We’ll have the lab put a rush on it, but that’s what I’m thinking.”

“He wouldn’t stay bought.”

Brendan said, “You think Erland paid him to throw the case?”

“Maybe not throw it,” Kate said, standing up and stretching. “Even old hanging Judge Kiddle might have noticed that. But Henry Cowell sure didn’t try very hard to get Victoria off.”

Back at the town house, she showered and changed into clean clothes and started to pack. Mutt knew what that meant and she was tiresomely happy about it.

Kate left her duffel by the door and called the cleaning service. They promised to come by the following morning. “Oh,” Kate said, “and there’s some fresh stuff-fruit, vegetables, some meat-in the refrigerator. Tell your people to take it all.”

She drove everything she’d bought to a shipping firm that specialized in palletizing goods and shipping them into the Bush. On the way home, she detoured over to Kevin and Jordan’s house.

Their mother opened the door. She looked sober, for the moment. Kate introduced herself in case the woman had been too drunk last time to remember her, and said, “Your boys have been eating and sleeping at my house off and on for the last couple of days. I’m leaving now, so I won’t be there for them. You’ve got two choices, ma’am. You can sober up and shape up and start taking care of them, or I can call the Division of Family and Youth Services and report you for child neglect and endangerment.”

She took Max to a late lunch to wash the taste of that out of her mouth.

“Goddamn it,” Max said with a bitterness that not even the best mixed martini would soothe.

“Not your fault,” Kate said. “It was a family conspiracy. There’s nothing harder to crack.”

“Bullshit,” Max said. He looked like a very old and very irritated eagle, with his fierce blue eyes and his hawklike nose.

Yes, he was very like Abel. Abel Int-hout, another quintessential Alaskan old fart with an independent streak as wide as the Yukon and an attitude as convivial as a wolverine’s.

“We should have figured it out,” Max said. “It’s what we’re paid to do. Instead, we imprisoned the wrong perp for thirty years.”

“Well, she’s out now, and pardoned. Plus, after all the hoo-ha dies down, there will be no stain on her character,” Kate said. “She’s going to take over PME, they say.”

“What about her cancer?”

“It’s operable, about an eighty percent survival rate. She got a second opinion. She’s going in for the operation this week.” Kate cocked an eye at him. “I gave her your number.”

“Me?” Max didn’t look so much surprised as outraged. “Why the hell did you do that?”

“She’s walking into the lion’s den, Max,” Kate said. “The FBI’s running some kind of investigation of what they are calling PME’s ‘past improprieties,” and PME’s board of directors were all hand picked by her brother. You think he won’t be trying to pull strings from the inside?“

Max snorted. “He’s never going to see the inside. He’s going to be out on bail by the end of business today.”

“All the more reason Victoria could use a sharp-eyed old fart like you to watch her back. Not too many flies on you, old man.”

He smiled, albeit reluctantly.

Kate went for the jugular. “She could use a friend about now. All three of her children are lost to her, two to death, one to jail.”

“Okay, all right, enough with the violins,” he said. “I’ll talk to her.” He denied any softening by giving her a sharp look. “What about you?”

“Me?” Kate said. “Well, my record on this case has not been what you might call stellar. I got my employer killed. I got my employer’s father killed. I hired my first employee and almost got him killed.”

Max snorted again. “I don’t know how to break this to you, Shugak, but you’re just not that powerful. You didn’t make the calls. You didn’t pull the triggers.”

“Maybe I could have been a little smoother,” she said. “A little more subtle.”

“Maybe you could,” he said, “and maybe pigs’ll fly. Anybody who hires you finds out fast that your chosen instrument is the sledgehammer, not the scalpel.”

He surprised a laugh out of her at a time when she didn’t feel much like laughing.

“Not much point in looking back,” Max said. “Waste of time. Look forward.”

He leaned forward to give her knee a sharp rap. “There’s almost always tomorrow.”

She made one more stop on the way to the airport.

“Hello, Emily,” she said, when Charlotte’s partner opened the door.

Emily’s hand went to her mouth. There was almost nothing left of the smart, aggressive attorney Kate had met just days ago. Emily looked as if she hadn’t showered since the day of Charlotte’s death. She was dressed in the same gray sweats Charlotte had been wearing the first time Kate had visited this house. Her hair was lank and her face was colorless. She’d aged ten years since the last time Kate had seen her. “Oh,” she said listlessly. “It’s you.” She walked away from the door without closing it behind her.

“Stay,” Kate said to Mutt in a soft voice, and followed Emily into the living room where she had curled up on the couch beneath a worn quilt decorated with illustrations of Holly Hobby.

“What do you want?” Emily said, still in that listless, disinterested voice.

“Has anyone told you what happened?”

Emily shook her head.

Kate told her everything.

“Oliver?” Emily said. “Oliver killed his own brother?”

“Knock it off, Emily,” Kate said.

Frightened eyes raised to meet Kate’s. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“You knew it was Oliver all along,” Kate said. “I don’t know how you figured it out, maybe it came out of being his law partner, maybe he let something slip at the office one day, but you knew.”

Emily’s eyes filled with tears.

“You were Charlotte’s heir,” Kate said. “You knew about Oliver, and when Charlotte died, you confronted Erland. You threatened to expose Oliver. He threatened to contest Charlotte’s will if you talked to me or anyone else about it. Stalemate.”

She waited. Emily picked at a loose thread on the afghan. “This house is so big, so expensive, I couldn’t afford it on my own. And I wanted to keep it, it’s all I have left of her now-”

“Surely not all,” Kate said, looking at Emily with equal parts pity and disgust.

“You don’t understand! I have to maintain a certain standard of living, I have to entertain, it’s expected by my clients!”

“So you let Erland walk away from the cold-blooded murder of the person you loved most in the world. You did that for a house? For a career?”

Emily’s face crumpled. “Don’t,” she said, warding off Kate with a shaking hand. “No more.”

Her face was contorted with pain and grief, but superceding them both was an agonizing, overwhelming guilt. She had betrayed Charlotte in life by keeping her knowledge of Oliver’s guilt a secret, and betrayed her again in death by bowing to Erland’s blackmail, and what that meant was only now becoming clear to her.

There was nothing Kate could say that would make Emily feel any worse, and suddenly the desire to do so receded. She turned and left. Behind her she could hear Emily dissolve into helpless, racking sobs.

By the time Kate hit the door, she was running.

He saw the cab and knew it was them. He busied himself with preflighting the Cessna. He was back in full trooper regalia, from the perfectly centered set of the ball cap with the trooper insignia on his head to the glossy black of his half boots, and in between everything blue pressed to a knife-edge crease and everything gold polished to a high gleam. He was the very model of a modern major general, only in this case an Alaska State Trooper sergeant, and no apologies to either Gilbert or Sullivan, thank you very much.

It felt like armor, and he welcomed it. This was it, he told himself. No more putting it off, no more allowing her to fog his mind with sex, no more following her up the stairs of that town house and down onto that enormous bed in the master bedroom. No more losing himself in that firm muscle beneath smooth skin, those tip-tilted hazel eyes, that rich ripe mouth.

He yanked his wandering imagination back under control. They were done. There had never been a “they.” He wouldn’t even be here if it weren’t for the fact that he’d spent some time with Kate Shugak, a night or two-okay, six, and he wasn’t such an asshole that he couldn’t say good-bye nicely when he had to. He wasn’t one of those guys who just walked away when it was over. No, by God, he took his leave properly, like a gentleman, and he would do no less with Kate Shugak.

The thing was, he didn’t want a relationship. He’d never wanted one. We are what our parents make us, somebody once said, and it was true. His parents were your typical suburban couple who’d had their one token child, raised him to be a functioning, productive adult, and then agreed to coexist for the rest of their lives in the neutral zone they had made of their ranch-style home. He’d never wanted anything that subdued, that lacking in passion, that colorless. If that was what marriage was about, and he had no evidence to the contrary-Bobby and Dinah Clark were clearly an aberration, Billy and Annie Mike the exception that broke the rule-then he wanted none of it.

He didn’t want passion, either, none of that headlong, the world well lost, only for you in mine eyes nonsense. Deliberately, he willed to mind Virgil and Telma Hagberg. If passion meant you were instantly blind to all of your lover’s faults, up to and including infanticide, he didn’t want any part of that, either.

No. Better to pursue a more cautious middle road, a series of well, better not call them relationships. Affairs, perhaps? How about good old carnal knowledge? Scratch the itch and move on. There was nothing wrong with single, footloose, and fancy-free.

“Look at Old Sam Dementieff,” he told the gas tank. “He must be a hundred and three, and he still scuttles down to Alaganik Bay and gets it on with Mary Balashoff every chance he gets. And that’s only when she doesn’t send word via Park Air to meet her in Anchorage first. He looks perfectly happy to me.”

The gas tank remained blandly nonresponsive.

The cab stopped on the tarmac and Kate got out. Mutt trotted over to greet Jim, who was on a stepladder, topping off the gas tank in the left wing.

Kate remembered Max’s words. “There’s almost always tomorrow.”

He was right. Tomorrow always came, and there was only one time when you didn’t see it. William, Eugene, and Charlotte were dead. Emaa was dead. Her parents were dead.

Jack was dead.

But all that was yesterday, and yesterday was past praying for. She was alive.

She looked over at the Cessna, at Jim Chopin in glorious blue and gold, checking something beneath the cowling.

Jim was alive.

Mutt gave a distinctly feminine little yip, front paws as high as she could get on the ladder, begging for attention, and Jim dropped an absent hand to pull on her ears. Kate smiled, a long, slow, anticipatory smile.

Mutt was right. So was Max. Much better to focus on today.

She saw Jim spot her, and her smile widened at his expression.

Today, there was a chance of joining the Mile High Club.