A Taint in the Blood

4

She spent that night at home, putting together a bag for Anchorage and reading the file Jim had handed her when she stopped by the trooper post in Niniltna with the bladders. His attitude amused her (a sort of “Here’s what you wanted, now don’t let the door hit you in the ass on your way out” kind of thing), but she didn’t have time to ride him, so she let it go with a knowing smile, which she knew full well annoyed the hell out of him.

The file was thick, the pages yellow and frayed, and the text in IBM Selectric typescript, with multiple errors fixed with X’s or whiteout. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen a court document that wasn’t a computer printout, if ever. Jim had even managed to acquire a copy of the police file, probably as a means of avoiding her asking him for it.

She read steadily, cover to cover on both files, and was done before the lengthening shadows crept across the floor and she looked up“ to see the jagged blue-white peaks of the Quilak Mountains rearing up on the eastern horizon like destriers charging into battle, teeth bared, manes flying. Beneath their poised hooves, the Step dropped off abruptly to glacial moraine, which gave way to a long, wide valley crisscrossed by eight hundred miles of Kanuyaq River and attendant tributaries draining southward to Prince William Sound.

She sat there for a moment, just looking. It was still a source of amazement that she could sit on a couch in her own living room and without moving look up and out on such an incredible vista. “I am the luckiest person in the world,” she said out loud.

Kate Shugak wasn’t an especially humble person. She had a good opinion of her own intelligence and capabilities, and there was very little she had set out to do in life that she had not accomplished. She thought of the man she’d caught in the act of torturing a child as a prerequisite to murdering her, and she fingered the scar at her throat. She had killed him with his own knife, after he’d marked her for life. She’d saved the child, though, and what was a scar compared to the life of a child? It wasn’t the only time she had killed. The fact did not weigh heavily upon her. In each case, she had been defending herself or someone else. She had no regrets, and the only nightmares she had involved the children she hadn’t been able to save.

She was comfortable with who she was and what she had done to get there. Mostly, she did things for people. Most of the time, it helped, enough of the time it earned her a living, and she was comfortable with that, too.

She was, she admitted to herself, uncomfortable with being done for. The Park had come together as one unit, ranger and developer, subsistence and sport and commercial fisherman, lumberjack and tree-hugger, wildlife biologist and hunter, Native and white, all to build her, little old Kate Shugak, her own house. She still had trouble believing it. Old Sam had helped her to a vague understanding, but she feared she would never feel worthy of it.

She turned and looked at the living room, into which all of her former cabin could have fit with room to spare, never mind the kitchen, the bedrooms, the bathrooms. It still felt odd to have separate rooms for things, and doors into them.

“Okay,” she said out loud. “I guess I got you by doing what it is that I do, and I guess if I want to earn it out, I keep doing what it is I do.”

Mutt had mastered the art of opening the door on the first try, and she came in in time to hear the last of Kate’s announcement. She cocked a quizzical ear in Kate’s direction, received no enlightenment, and flopped down on the sheepskin in front of the couch with a sigh whose satisfaction might have had something to do with the tuft of parka squirrel fur adhering to her muzzle. “Been up on the hill again, have you, girl?” Kate said.

She made herself a cup of tea, seasoned liberally with honey, which was also low in the container, and she added that to her Costco list for town. She curled up with the tea and the two files again, leafing through them at random this time, pausing here and there to reread a section.

Whether the fire had been set in Victoria Muravieff’s house was not at issue. Traces of a trail of gasoline led from the fireplace in the living room downstairs to two different sets of drapes hanging at two windows on either side of the fireplace. It was a typically amateur attempt to hide arson, trying to simulate a wood fire in the fireplace sparking out of control and consuming the house. Kate was no arson investigator, but even she knew that it had been a long time since one had fallen for that trick.

She looked at the picture of the house in the police file. It was big and rectangular, with two stories and what had been a white paint job with pale green trim. She knew less than nothing about burn patterns, but from the smoke and char marks on the exterior of the house, it looked like the fire had started on the first floor and worked its way upstairs. A window on the extreme left of the second floor was open. The rest of the windows were broken, jagged pieces of glass still evident in the frames. What had been a nice yard had been trampled into a muddy mire.

William Muravieff, seventeen, had been asleep in an upstairs bedroom-probably not the room with the open window-when the fire had broken out. He’d been asleep, and according to the coroner’s report- Alaska had still had coroners back then-he had never woken up.

Oliver Muravieff, sixteen, had. He had managed to grope his way to the window, open it, and more or less fall out, landing awkwardly on his right leg, which had fractured in half a dozen places, which led to a charge of assault with intent. With the first-degree murder charge, and another for attempted murder, the assault charge was only gravy for the prosecutor.

The good news for Kate’s new client was that there was no physical evidence linking Victoria Pilz Bannister Muravieff with the crime.

The bad news was that there was a lot of circumstantial evidence pointing straight at her like a road sign at a crossroads with a choice of only one destination. Victoria lived in the house. The gas in the can in her garage was a chemical match for the traces of gas found in the living room. She had fought with William over how much time he was spending playing basketball, as opposed to doing his homework.

Kate snorted over that last piece of “evidence.” Like there was a parent out there who hadn’t fought with their teenager over something.

Both boys had been drugged with scopolamine. The coroner had gone on at length about the derivations of this substance (the nightshade family-chiefly from henbane). It acted by interfering with the transmission of nerve impulses. The symptoms were dilated pupils, rapid heartbeat, and dry skin, mouth, and respiratory passages. An overdose could cause delirium, delusions, paralysis, and stupor. It was found in a lot of nonprescription sedatives, one of which just happened to be found in Victoria ’s medicine cabinet.

More damning was the insurance policy-for a cool $1 million-she had taken out the week before on William. However, she had taken out insurance policies on Oliver and Charlotte as well, and Charlotte had been with her mother when William was killed.

Kate went back to the trial transcript. Certainly, Victoria hadn’t had the most vigorous defense, but it didn’t necessarily look incompetent, either. She made a note of the attorney’s name, one Henry Cowell. He was probably retired, but if he was still alive, the bar association would have his address. A talk with him might prove useful.

On the whole, despite her disdain for circumstantial evidence- like every law-enforcement professional, she wanted to find the perp standing over the body, smoking gun in hand-she was inclined to believe that the jury had come to the only possible verdict. Victoria was guilty of filicide, one of those wonderful clinical terms dreamed up by shrinks to put a bearable distance between the act and the description thereof. It was what it was, the murder of a child by its parent.

The death of a child by itself was traumatic enough. Parents were not supposed to outlive their children, it was unnatural. A child’s death guaranteed the mutual sympathy and terror of parents everywhere. The deliberate taking of a child’s life by a parent invoked a horror akin to what one might feel at a display of cannibalism.

What was that old Greek yarn, something about a husband seducing his wife’s sister and, in revenge, the wife killing their sons and feeding them to him? It would be pretty to think that such things happened only in ancient legend. Kate knew the truth, and it wasn’t pretty, not at all.

Mothers, who committed less than 13 percent of all violent crimes, committed 50 percent of filicides. Children under the age of five were the most at risk.

Kate looked back at the file. William had been seventeen. Not even close to the profile.

Filicide was usually characterized by a display of great violence- beating, shaking, stabbing, suffocation, poisoning-with little or no advance planning. And there was always postpartum psychosis, which the statistics said struck only one mother in five hundred, but which Kate had recent cause to know could sometimes lead a mother to a serial killing of her own children immediately after birth. The last time Kate had looked at the FBI stats, the experts had a mother killing a child in America every two or three days.

There were far too many ways to kill children. It happened when an exhausted mother shook a baby to make it stop crying and instead shook it to death. It happened when a fourteen-year-old got pregnant and stuffed her newborn into a garbage can. It happened when a wife tried to leave an abusive husband and, in retaliation, the husband killed all three kids, the wife, and then himself. It happened when whatever filter the parent had screwed to her lens allowed her to see the child as a threat, and it happened when that filter let her believe the best thing she could do for the child was kill it.

Kate had had coffee with a fireman awhile back, and he had told her that there was a feeling among arson investigators that filicide by fire, despite going undetected too often and being underreported more often than that, was increasing at an alarming rate. All too frequently, the fireman had said, the natural sympathy one feels for parents who have lost their children led investigators to overlook evidence that might give rise to the suspicion that the fire that took the child’s life might have been deliberately set. Most of the victims were young, he’d told her, and again she considered the age of the victim and the intended victim in this case. William had been seventeen, Oliver sixteen.

Sometimes, the children had been shot or smothered, and the fire set to cover the evidence. Sometimes, the escape routes were blocked-doors jammed, windows nailed shut.

Kate rummaged around for the picture of the Muravieff home. The photo showed the top-floor window was still wide open, one side of the curtain hanging outside, maybe because of the wind. Or, if it were Oliver’s bedroom, because of his swan dive to escape the smoke.

She wondered how hard Victoria had tried to get the boys out. She went back to the trial transcript, and surfaced a little while later with no clear answer to her question. The defense had laid out a timetable that showed where Victoria and her daughter, Charlotte, had been that evening-at a fund-raiser at her brother Erland’s for one of the gubernatorial candidates. The man had subsequently lost the election. It cheered Kate to know that the rich and famous could be just as bad at picking politicians as she was.

But she was straying from the point. Victoria and Charlotte had gone to Victoria ’s brother’s house early that afternoon to help with the preparations. Kate found that odd. Didn’t the Bannisters and the Pilzes have serfs to do that stuff for them? She had a hard time imagining Charlotte Muravieff with a vacuum cleaner in hand. She and her mother were probably needed to spread pate made from salmon that had never seen a commercial net. On ladyfingers, no doubt. Not that Kate had ever seen a ladyfinger in real life, but she was very well read, and they ate ladyfingers and cucumber and watercress a lot in English novels. None of it sounded very appetizing.

Again, she was straying from the point. Victoria and Charlotte had remained at Victoria ’s brother’s house until the party was over. Everyone who had been interviewed agreed the party broke up at 10:00 P.M. Victoria and Charlotte had arrived home a little after eleven. Victoria ’s brother’s house was in Turnagain. Victoria had lived in the valley north of Anchorage, on five acres near Bodenburg Butte, maybe an hour away by car, which fit.

When had the fire been set? The trial transcript didn’t say. Kate found that odd, and one, if not the only, point for her side. If the defense attorney could have demonstrated that the fire might have started while Victoria was on the road or even still at her brother’s, he could have given the jury reasonable doubt as to opportunity. Alternatively, if the prosecution could have made a case for the fire in the fireplace taking as many hours to travel the gas paths across the carpet to the curtains as it took Victoria and Charlotte to drive to the party, plus the length of the party itself, that would have significantly improved the state’s case.

Usually the parents in such cases were in their twenties and thirties. Victoria was thirty-six the year the fire had burned down her house and killed her son.

Still, the various inconsistencies didn’t necessarily mean anything. Serial killers were all supposed to be skinny little twenty-five-year-old white guys with no beards, usually preying on young women in their teens and twenties. And yet four months ago, Kate had helped apprehend a sixty-year-old white woman, definitely on the plump side, who was a card-carrying member of the Republican Party, who had killed five of her own children before they learned how to focus their eyes. There were no hard-and-fast rules for this kind of crime, only percentages and statistics that sometimes helped nudge the investigator in the right direction.

One thing Kate didn’t understand was how Victoria Pilz Bannister Muravieff had managed to run out of money to the extent that she had to resort to murder, and filicide at that, to replenish her share of the family coffers known to all to be overflowing. That also was not in the trial transcript. Evidently, the prosecuting attorney and the jury both felt that the lure of six zeros was enough, no matter how rich you already were.

The other thing she didn’t understand was where Mr. Muravieff was. He hadn’t even been called as a witness at the trial.

The third thing she didn’t understand, which probably had nothing to do with the case, was what the lily white clan of Pilzes and Bannisters were doing allying themselves with somebody named Muravieff. What made this interesting was that the marriage would have taken place years before the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act gave Alaska Natives land and money in exchange for a right-of-way down the middle of Alaska to build the Trans-Alaska Pipeline. Land and money equal power in Western society, and Alaska Natives had had very little of any of the three prior to ANCSA.

In the cities and in the state overall, the power structure was built on white blood, American mostly, with contributions from stampeders from all over the world, including Scandinavians looking for free land in a place physically similar to their peninsulas, and Russians escaping the Revolution.

Like every other student at the University of Alaska required to take History 341 to graduate, Kate Shugak knew all about the Pilzes and the Bannisters. Hermann Pilz had been a German mining engineer who had come north with the Klondike stampede and stayed to start the first coal mine in Kachemak Bay, which had led to a timely investment in the Alaska Steamship Line, which evolved into a shipping company that specialized in getting freight to every community in Alaska not on the road system. Since most of the communities were not on the road system, the formation of an airline was initiated out of necessity. For a while, the Pilz name had been painted on virtually anything that moved in and out of the Alaskan Bush. Now everything was owned and managed by various holding companies that had pieces large and small of various other essential Alaskan businesses, such as grocery businesses.

Which led to the Bannisters. Isaiah Bannister had been attached to Lt. Henry Allen’s army expedition in 1885 up the Kanuyaq River to the Tanana, down it to the Yukon, up it to the Koyukuk, back down to the Unalakleet-Yukon portage, and on down to St. Michael. He survived the mosquitoes and the bears and left the navy to form a company to import supplies, edible and otherwise, into Alaska. The Arctic Trading Company now owned the largest chain of grocery stores and supermarkets in the state, and Safeway and Kroger’s had both been rumored to be sniffing around about a possible buyout.

Isaiah Bannister, well-established in Alaska by 1898 (it wasn’t the stampeders who got rich; it was the people who sold them food and supplies), had bankrolled Hermann Pilz’s Kachemak Coal Company. Hermann had reciprocated, in what was generally held to be a tit-for-tat kind of deal, by marrying Isaiah Bannister’s thirty-nine-year-old spinster daughter, his lone ewe lamb, who rejoiced in the name of Calliope. Calliope had surprised everyone by bearing a son a year for five years, raising them to be good men and true, and outliving her much-younger husband by twenty-seven years.

The Muravieffs, on the other hand, didn’t come from anywhere, they were Alaskan-born and -bred, with a little Norwegian and a lot of Russian thrown in. There was another story, one not in the history books, something about a Muravieff maiden and Capt. James Cook, but that was only talk late at night around the fire, and not around Muravieff fires, either. The Muravieff ancestor of choice was Mikhael Muraviev, a Russian expatriate who patrolled the coast of Alaska from Ketchikan to Barrow as captain of a Coast Guard cutter and who left descendants in nearly every port. Pre-modern Alaska Natives admired and respected procreation in any form. The more kids you had young, particularly male kids, the better you ate when you got old.

In short, Victoria Pilz Bannister Muravieff was Alaskan history walking around on two legs, even if those legs currently languished in the Hiland Mountain Correctional Facility in Eagle River.

Kate could practically smell the trial judge’s horror at Victoria ’s crime and his unswerving conviction that she was guilty. He sustained all but one objection by the prosecution and none by the defense, although the defense didn’t make that many. When the jury returned a guilty verdict, the judge issued a life sentence without leaving the bench, and said for the record that he was sorry Alaska didn’t have a death penalty, because that was what true justice demanded and Victoria deserved.

The list of witnesses called to testify during the trial read like a Who’s Who of the previous hundred years of Alaskan history. Kate read through the names, torn between a natural reluctance to stir up that much shit and an even more natural delight at the prospect. She thought Victoria was most likely guilty as hell, but she figured Victoria ’s daughter had a bunch of money she was going to give away to someone to tilt at this windmill, and it might as well be Kate.

Besides, given that someone had tried to burn her own cabin down around her ears not four months before, the case kind of resonated with her.

She filled a duffel bag with clean clothes, set her alarm, and turned in for the night.