A taint in the blood (11 page)

'The hell you say," Brendan said, and chucked a manila envelope at her.

Inside were a list of names and addresses, both business and home.

"It's the witness list from the Muravieff trial—who's still around, and where," Brendan said.

Kate met his eyes and dropped her voice an octave. "I have never wanted you more," she said.

He flung back his head, roaring with laughter. She waited for it to subside. "What do you think?"

He gave her his wide and uncomplicated trademark grin. "She's in jail, isn't she?"

"Come on, Brendan."

"I haven't read the file, just the witness list. You want my professional opinion?"

"Always."

"You're going to put an eye out, you keep fluttering your eyelashes at me that way," he said. "Okay, all right, I'll read it. You at Jack's?"

She nodded.

"Johnny?"

"With Auntie Vi. I don't know how long this case is going to take, and school starts in a couple of weeks."

Brendan dropped his eyes and shook his head.

"Why are you smiling?" Kate said.

"You really think you've got a chance of getting her out?"

Kate remembered the stubborn line of Charlotte's mouth. "I'm being paid to think so."

"Ah." There was a wealth of understanding in the one word. "I'll look at the trial transcript. I just had a case settle, so I can squeeze a half hour into my schedule."

"And on a Saturday, too," Kate said. "Thanks, Brendan."

He cocked an eyebrow. "How grateful are you?"

She laughed, and watched him dribble steak juice down the front of his polyester suit (Sears, on sale), but it sort of matched the dull brown color, not to mention the—what was it, oatmeal? — he'd left there at breakfast that morning. "One more thing," she said.

"What?"

"Could you find out if the investigating officer is still around?"

"What's his name?"

"Charles Baltzo. Sgt. Charles Baltzo."

"Sure, why not, since it looks like I'm working for you instead of the state this week anyway."

"Brendan-"

He laughed. "Lighten up, Shugak. That was a joke." He burped behind a napkin and sat back. "So what else you got on the agenda?"

"I talked to Victoria today."

"Yeah? And?"

"And she fired me."

He stared at her. "You're kidding me."

"But it didn't take, since she wasn't the one who hired me."

"Interesting, this is," he said. "And unexpected."

"Stop talking like Yoda. Do you know anything about Victoria Muravieff, Brendan? Like what she's been doing in prison for the last thirty years?"

"Sure. She's even been written up in the paper a couple of times. According to the local editorial writers, she's a cross between Socrates and Anne Sullivan."

"And that doesn't impress you?"

"I don't have to tell you how easy it is to be the good guy in prison, Kate," he said. "No drugs, no booze, no men to fight over, no kids to drive you crazy. She's an intelligent woman with, evidently, a strong drive to succeed. She's in prison, I might add, because she succeeded at murder."

"She got caught."

"I said she was intelligent. I didn't say she was smart enough to get away with murder. Very few people are."

Kate sighed.

"Ah hell, Kate," he said. "If it was easy, everybody^ be doing it."

On the way home, Kate stopped in at City Market to load up on groceries, and, as was her deplorable wont when she was in Anchorage, she overdid it on the fresh fruit and vegetable front. It was hard to be in the produce section of any Anchorage grocery store with a lot of money in the bank. She consoled herself with the thought that the back of George's Cessna was large and that she could take home whatever was left over at the end of the job.

She made herself an enormous fruit salad with Auntie Vi's special sweet dressing made from mayonnaise, white vinegar, and honey. She ate it at the dining room table, next to the window overlooking the lagoon, watching walkers, joggers, bladers, and bikers on the bike trail that ran next to the water's edge. When she was done, she looked at Mutt and said, "Let's go scare some of those sissy city dogs."

They walked around the lagoon and through the tunnel beneath the railroad tracks that led to the coastal trail. It was a beautiful evening, clear, with a warm breeze, which was strong enough to keep the bugs off but light enough not to dissipate the rich aroma rising up off the massed
Rosa rugosa
bushes crowding the fence. Mutt trotted next to her, looking down her lupine nose at the dogs going in the other direction, who had to be kept on leashes and still lunged out to the ends of them, barking hysterically at anything that moved. When a pair of Dobermans got especially yappy, she snapped her teeth together, just once. It sounded like the cock of a pistol. They shut up. If they'd had tails, they would have tucked them between their legs. Their owner, clinging desperately to the other end of their leashes, glared at Kate.

"She's like that around dogs with no manners," Kate told him.

They went over a bridge that crossed a creek whose mud banks were exposed by low tide. Where the creek's current debouched into the inlet, the white backs of beluga whales gleamed against the grayish brown water. Eating on the salmon fixing to head upstream to spawn, Kate thought, and raised her eyes to the horizon, where the block of Foraker and the arc of Denali stood out in white relief against the deep blue sky. It was a beautiful day, and she was in a comfortable house in a great Anchorage neighborhood, a house that was paid for, but she couldn't help wondering if it was as beautiful a day in another and much less crowded neighborhood two hundred miles to the northeast.

There was an answer for that. The sooner she got the job done, the sooner she could go home.

"Go ahead," she said to Mutt, and like an arrow loosed from a bow, Mutt leaped the boulders piled against the bank, landed on the strip of sand below, and streaked off, not in pursuit of anything—she knew better than that in town—but just indulging in a nice little minimarathon to stretch her legs. She was going to be hungry later on, and she wasn't going to be happy with the dog food Kate had bought at the store.

Kate started walking again, hands in her pockets, a frown on her face. A fat woman with frizzy blond hair who was doing something that looked like slow-motion karate saw the frown and lost her balance.

Kate was having difficulty reconciling the woman who had burned down her home to kill her sons in order to get the insurance money with Saint Victoria of Hiland Mountain Correctional Facility. She wondered if perhaps Victoria had had a habit—drugs or alcohol maybe. It happened in the best of families, and a substance-abuse problem all too frequently led to other problems, which often included bankruptcy. It could have been one way Victoria, even with her moneyed background, could have wound up desperate enough for funds that she'd committed filicide. Kate added another to the list of questions she was accumulating for Charlotte.

A short rise through a thick growth of birch trees and the trail opened out into a fenced playing field where what looked like a hundred ten-year-olds swarmed around a soccer ball. Two benches were bolted to the pavement at the edge of a cliff. On one of the benches, a young couple in bike pants and helmets sat with their legs up on the crossbars of their bicycles, glowing with sweat and gulping down water from bottles that matched their bikes.

Kate went to the edge of the cliff and shouted, "Mutt! Come!" and sat down on the other bench. There was a short silence from the young couple, followed by a concerned murmur when Mutt came galloping up the cliff a few moments later, her tongue flopping out of the side of her mouth. She skidded to a halt in front of Kate and set her teeth in the hem of Kate's jeans.

"Knock it off," Kate said, but Mutt kept tugging until she pulled Kate off the bench. Mutt leaped away and crouched down, her tail wagging furiously.

"Uh, are you okay?" the man asked.

"I'm fine," Kate said, shaking with laughter. She got to her feet. "Okay," she told Mutt, "you wanna play, let's play."

Mutt gave a joyous bark and headed for the cliff. She was halfway down the narrow, twisty little trail before Kate hit the edge. Mutt sprinted the rest of the way and waited for Kate at the bottom. Fortunately, the tide was out, exposing the narrow strip of sand between the cliff and the vast expanse of glacial silt that made up the mud flats of the northern reaches of Cook Inlet. "Okay," Kate said menacingly, "let's see what you got."

They roughhoused up and down the beach for thirty minutes, until Mutt's coat and Kate's hair were filled with sand. Other dogs and owners appeared and then disappeared as quickly. The couple on the bench came to the fence to watch the crazy woman running with her wolf, and soon they were joined by others. The light started to go, and Kate woke up to the fact that the sun was beginning to set. She suspected she'd have bruises the next day, but she felt good anyway, loose and ready for action. "Not that there's going to be any action," she told Mutt.

She labored back up the cliff to the trail, where the crowd had dispersed, and they headed for home.

Victoria Pilz Bannister Muravieff had looked straight as an arrow when Kate had met her that day, but that didn't mean anything. Some of the pleasantest people Kate had met had been in prison, where confinement had separated them from their drug of choice and they were sober and straight for the first time in their lives. Prison was detox at its simplest.

Myra Hartsock, case in point.

Back at the town house, she showered and put on one of Jack's blue shirts, the tail of which hit her knees, and a pair of his thick wool socks. She'd just come back downstairs for a snack and to find a movie to watch when the doorbell rang. She looked at the clock on the bookcase, a solid dark green jade cutout of Alaska, the numbers pegged out in gold nuggets and a small plaque beneath announcing "John 'Jack' Morgan, Investigator of the Year," presented by the Anchorage Police Department. She remembered that year, and the case that had precipitated the award.

The doorbell rang again. Mutt raised her head and gave Kate a questioning look. It was almost 10:00
p.m.
"All right," Kate told her, "I'll answer it, but I'm not in the mood for wrestling with Brendan."

She looked through the sidelight and a smile started at the corners of her mouth. She opened the door and pulled it wide. "Well, hey. Jim."

Jim glared down at her. "Where is he?"

"Where's who?" Kate said, running her eyes over him and taking her time about it. It really was worth the effort; even on days when she hadn't been able to stand the sight of him, Jim Chopin was, well, just this short of magnificent, especially suited up in his state trooper's uniform. "Come on in," she said.

He hesitated. Her smile broadened. She pulled the door wider and raised one eyebrow ever so slightly.

It was obvious she had little on beneath the oversized man's shirt. Jim might actually have blushed, but he shouldered by her before she could be certain and closed the door firmly behind him before Kate could show off that length of bare leg to anyone else. Mutt hurtled out of the living room, reared up to place both paws on Jim's shoulders, and gave him the tongue bath of his life.

He couldn't help but laugh. "All right, Mutt. All right, damn it, knock it off. Jeeze." He wiped his face in the crook of his arm and looked down at her gazing up at him adoringly, tongue lolling out of one side of her mouth, tail wagging hard enough to achieve liftoff. "You'd think we hadn't howdied in a month."