A Taint in the Blood

5

George touched down at Merrill Field just before 10:00 A.M. Mutt gave him a loving farewell with the rough end of her tongue, which he pretended to hate. “When do you want to come back?” he said, tossing her duffel into the back of the cab he’d called for fifteen minutes out.

“I don’t know,” Kate said.

“One of the long jobs?”

“I’m dotting the i’s and crossing the‘t’s of a thirty-year-old case. I figure it’ll take me twenty-four hours, if that. I’ll stretch it out a little for the sake of the fee, but not much.”

George pulled a small, extremely tattered spiral notebook that had served, or something very like it, as Chugach Air Taxi’s reservation system for as long as Kate had known him. It was as covered in airplane grease as George was. “This is the twenty-third, so okay, I’ll put you down for a return on the twenty-eighth. I’ve got the Bingleys coming out with their kids for school shopping that morning.”

“Sounds good.” He was lifting off the end of runway 24 as the cab went through the light at sixth and Karluk. Mutt recognized the Cessna and gave a farewell bark, which frightened the taxi driver, a middle-aged Russian emigrant who had been prepared to admire Kate until he got a load of her bodyguard.

Fifteen minutes later, they were deposited on the doorstep of one of a row of town houses lining the north shore of Westchester Lagoon. Kate unlocked the door and they went in. It was a barn of a place, three stories, including the garage. The kitchen, dining room, living room, a small room meant to be a den, and a three-quarter bath were on the second floor, the third floor given over to more bedrooms and bathrooms. Kate tossed her duffel onto the couch, turned on the refrigerator, and checked the phone for a dial tone. There was one, and she turned on the answering machine.

The Subaru Forester in the garage needed a wash but it started just fine. The first stop was an Anchorage branch of Last Frontier Bank, just to make sure Charlotte ’s check was good. It was, and the cashier’s reaction to all those zeros had Kate, momentarily forgetting her own response, toying with the idea of applying for a loan. She remembered in time that she didn’t need to buy anything her checking account couldn’t cover and got the hell out of there.

Hiland Mountain Correctional Facility housed women convicts and male sex offenders, which Kate had never understood. She’d been in and out of the place often when she’d worked for Jack, but a new governor had been elected since then and all the faces were new, including the fresh-faced young woman riding the desk out front, who hadn’t been lied to by enough cons to have lost her innocence. She frowned prettily at Kate. “You want to see Victoria Muravieff?”

“Yes, Officer.”

The young woman, whose badge was difficult to sort out from all the other patches and shields adorning her bountiful bosom but whose name Kate thought might be T. Offerut, looked Kate over. Kate tolerated the examination of her attire-her usual jeans, T-shirt, and tennis shoes, no coat because it was in the blisteringly high seventies-with what passed for her for equanimity.

The young woman realized that the frown was producing an unsightly line across her forehead, smoothed it away with one hand, and turned the frown into a smile. “Of course, you must be the one from UAA,” she said, as if that and that alone would explain the jeans.

Kate didn’t deny it.

“May I see some identification, please?”

Kate produced her driver’s license, was deemed to be who she really was, and was permitted entry. When the door closed behind her with a solid thud, she had the same reaction she always did: an overwhelming wave of claustrophobia, which was not alleviated by the wall of windows that lined one side of the large room to which she had been admitted and which looked out on a spectacular view of the Chugach Mountains. The worst part of Kate’s job with the district attorney had been having to enter various correctional facilities around the state voluntarily to interview perps. She’d hated it then, and she hated it now. She took a deep breath, trying to fill her lungs with fresh air that wasn’t there.

The room was filled with long tables and plastic bucket chairs, and there were a couple of kids running around, obviously on visits to their mothers, who were hunched over tables, talking either to their mothers or their lawyers. At another table, a group of women were laboring over some arts and crafts project. A couple of them were in bright orange jumpsuits, which meant that they had misbehaved in some way on the inside, which could mean anything from petty theft to assault. A majority of them were Native and black, big surprise.

Kate was ushered to a chair at the end of one table and told firmly to wait there. She sat. Lunch was being cooked somewhere- burgers, at a guess-and her stomach growled.

“Kate Shugak?”

She looked up and saw a woman standing in front of her. The last time Kate had seen her, Kate had been seated in the witness chair and she had been at the defendant’s table next to a public defender who was trying to impeach Kate’s testimony. Kate searched her memory and dredged up a name and, with a little more effort, a case file. “Myra Hartsock,” she said. Child endangerment, fourth offense, and the judge had taken away her children and evidently thrown enough jail time at her to keep her in Hiland for six years.

“Are you here to see me?” Myra said.

“No,” Kate said.

“I’m sober now.”

“I see that.”

“And I’m straight. I been straight for four, going on five years now.”

“Good for you.”

Myra hesitated, hands clenched on the edge of her tray. “My kids,” she said. “I see them sometimes.”

“Really.”

Myra nodded. “My mother brings them here to visit me.”

“Good for her.”

“I read to them, and we play games.”

“Good for you.”

Myra gestured with her head. “I’ve been working in the prison greenhouse. My case officer says she thinks she can place me in a job pretty easy when I get out.”

“Good for her.”

Myra took a deep breath. “Because I’m coming up for parole in seven months.”

“Really?”

“You could speak for me at my hearing.”

“I could,” Kate agreed.

Myra ’s look of hope faded. “But you won’t.”

“No.”

Myra bared her teeth. “Bitch.”

“Backatcha,” Kate said.

Myra started to cry. “Why won’t you help me?”

“Because your kids come first for me,” Kate said, “like they should have with you. Reading to them and playing games with them one or twice a month doesn’t make up for the fact that Andy had to learn how to write left-handed because you broke his right hand in so many places that he can’t even brush his teeth with it, and that Kay will probably be in therapy for the rest of her life because you sold her for money you used to buy booze and drugs.”

“I was a drunk and a junkie back then!” Myra said, her voice rising. “I told you-I don’t do that anymore!”

“You don’t in this adult day-care center of yours,” Kate said. “Doesn’t mean you won’t when you get out again. Best thing that can happen to your kids is for you to be away from them as long as possible. If I had my druthers it’d be forever.”

“Let’s move it along, Myra, shall we?” a guard said, coming up behind her.

He took her arm. She yanked free, glared at Kate, and stomped off.

Kate could feel the eyes on her from all over the room. Oh yeah, it was old home week for her here at Hiland Mountain, a regular felons reunion. A few minutes later, the officer returned, Victoria Pilz Bannister Muravieff in tow.

She didn’t look anything at all like Kate had imagined she would. For one thing, she didn’t look ill, and for another, she didn’t look sixty-seven. She was a tall woman with a thick head of gray hair cut bluntly to a determined jawline and parted over her right eye. Her brow was broad, her eyebrows arched, her nose so high-bridged as to be almost hooked, which it probably would be eventually, her mouth full and firm. She was wearing street clothes, a faded pink T-shirt tucked into a pair of button-front Levi’s, and tennis shoes with Velcro fasteners.

She moved with a brisk step, her shoulders square, no hint of osteoporosis about her. Her cheeks were pink, her wrinkles confined for the most part to the corners of her eyes and mouth, beneath her chin, and on the backs of her hands. Her eyes were dark blue and direct, fixing Kate with a puzzled stare. “You aren’t Caroline.

Kate got up and offered her hand. “No, I’m Kate Shugak.”

Victoria took it automatically in a strong, cool grip, one firm pump and release. “I’m sorry. Have we met?”

“No,” Kate said.

The older woman looked at the table and then at the floor next to Kate’s chair. “Didn’t you bring them?”

“Bring what?”

“The GED workbooks,” the older woman said impatiently.

“I didn’t know I was supposed to,” Kate said.

Victoria Pilz Bannister MuraviefF put her hands on her hips and looked down her nose at Kate. “How the devil am I supposed to teach my class without workbooks? Listen, Ms. Shugak, if this is another end run by the university around my program, I have told you people before that I won’t-”

“I don’t work for the university,” Kate said.

Victoria halted. “Then who the hell are you?”

“I told you. Kate Shugak.”

Victoria tapped her foot. “Is that supposed to mean something to me?” Her eyes narrowed. “Wait a minute. Any relation to Ekaterina Shugak?”

“My grandmother.”

“I see.” A brief pause. “I knew her.”

“Everyone did,” Kate said. There was a sick feeling rising in the pit of her stomach. “Have you talked to your daughter lately?”

All trace of expression wiped itself from Victoria ’s face. Her eyes narrowed and her mouth settled into a thin line. “What’s Charlotte got to do with this?”

“She hired me,” Kate said.

Victoria folded her arms. “To do what?”

“To look into your case.”

“What case?”

The sick feeling intensified. “The case that put you in here, Ms. MuraviefF. The murder of your son.”

The tapping foot had stilled, but the older woman’s shoulders were so tight, Kate thought they might break off if someone tapped them. From the corner of her eye, Kate could see people turning to look at them, and she could hear conversations dropping off one by one into an expectant silence. Into it, Kate said, “Your daughter thinks you were wrongly convicted, Ms. MuraviefF, and she hired me to prove it. I’d like to ask you some questions, if I may. First, I’ll need-”

“You may not,” the other woman said in a taut voice.

Kate, thrown off her stride, said blankly, “I beg your pardon?”

“Tell Charlotte I fired you,” the other woman said. And with that, she marched off.

Kate watched her go, not a little mystified, and recollected herself only when one of the officers started to move toward her. She held up a hand and headed for the door.

She dropped the visitor badge off at the desk. As she was going out, another woman was coming in with a large box. Kate held the door for her, and as it closed behind her, she heard the fresh-faced young guard say, “Caroline, hey. I thought you weren’t coming. I thought you’d sent someone else today.”

Kate kept going. Mutt was sunbathing on the hood of the Forester. “Let’s go,” Kate told her. She started the engine and drove out of the parking lot. About a mile down the road, she pulled a U-turn and drove back up the hill and into the parking lot, this time pulling into a space about two rows down and ten spaces over.

Mutt gave her a quizzical look. “To confuse anyone inside who’s monitoring the cameras on the roof,” Kate said, pointing them out.

Mutt looked pointedly at the door. Kate leaned over to open it up and Mutt got back up on the hood.

The sun beat down. Kate rolled down first her window, then the one on the passenger side, then the two back windows. She kicked herself for not bringing a book, and cleaned out the glove compartment in lieu of reading. There was the car manual, a near-empty box of Wash ‘n Dries, a handful of lemon drops, a Reese’s Cup that was silver with age but which Kate ate anyway, and a comb with a few strands of short, dark, curly hair caught in its teeth. She touched them gently. How strange that something grown by a man dead for almost two years could feel so alive.

Kate had read in various places how scientists were mapping the human chromosome down to the last molecule, and how it might be possible in the future to reconstruct a human being from the DNA in a strand of hair. They wouldn’t have the same life experience, of course, the same memories. The all new and improved Jack Morgan wouldn’t necessarily like Jimmy Buffett, for example, and Jimmy Buffett had been responsible for bringing Jack and Kate together.

She became aware that she could no longer see the hair or the comb for the tears in her eyes. She blinked them away and put the comb back in the glove compartment.

The sun beat down some more. Mutt rolled onto her back, paws in the air in a disgusting display of abandon. Kate considered starting the engine just to see how high Mutt could jump from a prone position.

An hour passed. The woman Kate had passed in the doorway came out and went to her car, a beige Toyota Camry that looked, if possible, even more beige beneath an unregarded layer of mud and dust. Kate opened the door of the Subaru. Mutt jumped as if someone had given her a nudge with a cattle prod and then slid down from the hood in an ignominious heap. She leaped to her feet and pretended that she had meant to do that.

Kate approached the woman as she was about to get in her car. “Excuse me?”

The woman looked over her shoulder. “Yes? May I help you?”

“My name is Kate Shugak.”

The woman looked puzzled. “I’m sorry. Have we met?”

Twice in one day. If this kept up, Kate was going to get an inferiority complex. “No. I’ve been retained by Victoria Muravieff’s daughter to look into her case.”

The woman looked more puzzled. “What case?”

Kate sighed. “Listen, I’m fresh off a plane and I’m hot, and I’m hungry and I’m thirsty. Have you-what was your name?”

“Caroline Landry,” the woman said, and then looked as if she wished she hadn’t.

“So, Caroline, have you had lunch?”

Caroline Landry hesitated, clearly trying to decide if Kate was dangerous or not. “No.”

“Great. You like Mexican food?”

They found a table at Garcia’s in Eagle River. “I’ll buy,” Kate said, absorbed in the menu.

“I’ll buy my own, thanks,” Caroline Landry said.

“It’s an expense,” Kate said.

“For what job?”

“Charlotte Muravieff has retained me to look into her mother’s murder conviction,” Kate said.

Landry was still staring at Kate with her mouth slightly open when the waiter arrived. Kate ordered tostaditos to start and fajitas for the main course. Landry’s mouth relaxed into a smile. “You are hungry,” she said.

“Don’t get a lot of Mexican food in Niniltna,” Kate said. “I’m making up for lost time.”

“Tostada salad,” Landry told the waiter, “and something tells me I’m going to need a margarita.”

The waiter, a slim young man with a hopeful smile, looked at Kate. She shook her head. “Water’s fine. If you could bring me a couple of wedges of lime, that would be good.”

The margarita came and, surprise, so did the lime, and in her head Kate ratcheted up the tip. Landry took a long swallow of her drink. “Oh yeah,” she said, putting it down, “that hits the spot. Okay, what do you want to know?”

“Anything you can tell me, Ms. Landry.”

“Caroline.”

“Kate. You know Victoria Muravieff. She thought I’d come in your place today.”

“Yes,” Caroline said. “I work with her.”

“Work with her?”

Caroline raised an eyebrow. “Yes, work with her. Victoria runs the education department at Hiland.”

“A prisoner runs the education department?”

“Pretty much. The governor cut the budget a couple of years back, so the Department of Corrections had to cut fripperies like education. At this point, it’s pretty much up to the prisoners to drum up interest and funding from local groups and agencies if they want anything in the way of programming out there.”

“How’s that working?” Kate said.

“Pretty good, actually,” Caroline said. “A local computer supply store funded a course in Microsoft certification. A local cellist started a chamber orchestra with chairs underwritten by the Trial Lawyers Association.”

Kate laughed. “A natural.”

Caroline smiled. “It seems so. At any rate, there’s a waiting list to get in.”

“Do they perform?”

“Yes, in-house. They’re agitating to perform outside the facility, but the director hasn’t been beaten into submission quite yet. Another woman comes out every three weeks to teach classes in bead art, with supplies donated by the Bead Society, which puts on a show every year of inmate art. They call it Con Art.”

“You’re kidding me.”

“Nope. They got a write-up in the paper and a story on television, and now they’ve got so many submissions that they think they’re going to have to start jurying it.”

“Are they selling?”

Caroline nodded. “Oh yeah, check out the gift shop the next time you’re there. And then there’s the greenhouse. They make a lot of hanging baskets and start a lot of vegetables, and sell them, too. Victoria’s working on some of the master gardeners in town to start a master gardener’s program at the prison.”

“And you were bringing GED workbooks in.”

“Yeah. We’ve got so many inmates wanting to make up for time lost in their real lives that we’ve pretty much got a class going nonstop. It’s hard for some of them to finish because they’re not in for long enough.” She realized the humor of that last observation at the same time Kate did, and this time they both laughed. Lunch arrived, and Kate inhaled the aroma of charred beef with vast satisfaction.

When she’d gotten on the right side of most of it, she said, “Who’s She‘?” When Caroline gave her a blank look, she said, “You said ”we’ve pretty much got a class going nonstop.“ You and who else?”

“I thought I said,” Caroline said with some surprise. “It’s all Victoria. None of this would be happening without her.”

According to Caroline Landry, Victoria Muravieff had been committed to Hiland Mountain Correctional Facility the day the verdict had been returned in her trial, some thirty years before, with a B.A. in education already in her pocket. “She was a bookkeeper before…” Caroline hesitated. “Well, she was a bookkeeper. She enrolled in a correspondence course for her BA practically the day she arrived, and after that she went for her master’s. I think she got the first in eighteen months and the second a year later.” She smiled. “I’ve read her thesis. ”Teaching on the Inside: Why Prisons Need Schools.“”

“Yeah?” Kate said, suspending her construction of the perfect fajita for a moment. “How bad was it?”

“It wasn’t bad at all,” Caroline said sharply. “It was even published, and I understand it’s a reference work for prisons across the nation.”

“My mistake,” Kate said, and went back to building her fajita. She’d read a lot of dissertations turned into books, enough to know that most academics can’t write worth shit, but she wasn’t being paid to interrupt the flow of information with literary criticism.

Mollified by Kate’s compliance, Caroline said, “After that, she got the head of the education department out here at that time to take her on as her assistant. Trustee, in prisonspeak. She’s…” Caroline hesitated again. “Do you know who she is? Her family?”

Kate nodded.

“Well, she’s managed to bribe, seduce, or coerce all of them and all of their friends into donating something in the way of money or books over the past thirty years. The education program here is privately funded; it wouldn’t exist without her. And the people she has helped-my God, you wouldn’t believe some of the stories, women who have never had any decent role models or positive reinforcement in their lives.” She paused. “One time, Victoria was reading some student essays out loud. Some of these essays were so bad they’d make a first grader blush, but Victoria has this way of making even the most hopeless people believe they can achieve something. After class, one of the women came forward and said to Victoria, ”Nobody ever told me I could do anything before.“ I wanted to cry. That woman”-Caroline pointed her fork at Kate-“that woman went on to get her GED, and when she got out, she had twelve college credits. She went on to complete a degree in accounting.”

“What’d she do to put her in jail in the first place?”

A brief pause. “Check kiting,” Caroline said a little reluctantly. She met Kate’s eyes and they both laughed again.

“You like her,” Kate said. “Victoria.”

“I revere her,” Caroline said.

“Ah, but would you want her to move in next door to you when she gets out?”

Caroline flushed and she played with her food. “Do you think there’s a chance that you’ll get her out?”

“You think she should be out?”

There was a brief silence while Caroline stared out the window that looked out on the parking lot. “Her crime was horrific. I have a son. I can’t imagine-”

“You think she did it, then?” Kate said, surprised.

Caroline met her eyes. “She’s never denied it. She pled not guilty at her trial, but that’s the last time she said she didn’t do it to anyone, so far as I know.”

Kate raised an eyebrow.

“Okay,” Caroline said, “I looked up the trial after I started working with her. I wanted to know who I was dealing with. She’s never denied doing it to me,” she repeated.

“Did you ask?”

“Once, yes, when I was new to the program, when I didn’t know who she was. I learned afterward that it’s best not to know what they’ve done. It’s easier to work with them when you don’t know.” She hesitated. “It was hard,” she said in a low voice, “hard to come back to work with her after I’d read the newspaper accounts of the trial.”

I’ll bet, Kate thought, remembering some of the women she’d been responsible for putting away. She wouldn’t have worked with any of them at gunpoint, starting with Myra Hartsock. “What did she say? When you asked if she’d done it?”

“She said, ”The jury thought so.“”

“That’s all?”

“That’s all.”

Kate contemplated this for a moment. “Do you think she did it? Do you think she killed her son for the insurance money?”

“Everybody in prison is innocent,” Caroline said, “to hear them tell it.”

Kate nodded. “I know. I’ve spent a fair amount of time putting people in them. They’re all as pure as the driven snow.”

Caroline turned the now-empty margarita glass between her fingers. “But Victoria…”

“Yes?”

Caroline shoved her glass to one side and leaned forward. “Listen, Kate, Victoria Muravieff has been a phenomenal force at that prison. It’s practically an adjunct institution for the University of Alaska. I’m the liaison between the two, my job is predicated on there being an education department at Hiland, and the education department is there only because Victoria is.”

“You’ll lose your job if I get her out, is that what you’re saying?”

Caroline flushed again. “No, of course not.” She sat back. “Well, yes, but that’s not what I meant. I’m just saying-look, if I’d met Victoria on the outside, I would have been proud to call her my friend. Guilty, innocent, I don’t know. She’s made a real difference every day she’s been in that place. It’s not too much to say that she has literally changed lives. She has given hope to people who never knew before what that word meant. Much less how to spell it.”

“You make her sound like some kind of saint.”

“That’s nothing,” Caroline said a little sadly. “The inmates? They think she’s a god.”