Dana Stabenow - A Taint in the Blood

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.