Dana Stabenow - A Taint in the Blood

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.

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.