Dana Stabenow - A Taint in the Blood

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.”

“Absence makes the heart grow fonder,” Kate said, and watched him try to pretend that he’d forgotten she was standing there. “What can I do for you, Jim?” She let her eyes linger on his mouth. It was wide and firm and she already knew he could kiss.

With a fascination he couldn’t help, he let his eyes roam, too. Then he remembered why he was there and said in a gruff voice, “Where’s Kurt Pletnikoff?”

She blinked. “Kurt?”

“You heard me. I know he came to town. George said he followed you in today.”

“What?”

“Where is he?”

Her eyes narrowed. “What do you want with him anyway? I told you I’d stop him poaching bears for bladders, and I did.”

“Oh, really? That must be why Dan called me this morning and said he’d found another carcass.”

“What?” she said again, smile vanishing. “Where?”

He pulled off his cap and smacked it against his thigh. “Just below the Step, if you can believe that. Jesus, the nerve of this guy, shooting a bear that close to the ranger station. If Dan had caught him at it, I’d be working a homicide investigation right now. Anyway, that’s it. Kurt’s going down. Where is he?”

“He didn’t shoot it,” she said. “Not that bear anyway.”

“How do you know?”

She thought back to the man she had confronted in the cabin the day before. “I just know.”

Jim rolled his eyes. “Well, that’s it, then. I’m totally convinced. I’ll head on back to the Park and find out who really did it.”

“Kurt’s not why you’re here,” she said softly.

“What? What are you talking about?”

“You’re the one who followed me to town, not Kurt.”

They were still standing in the entryway. He was a step, two at the most, from the front porch, ten feet from the door of his borrowed truck, thirty feet from the street and escape. He turned his head a fraction of an inch at a time and found her looking at him. He’d never been able to determine the color of her eyes. Sometimes they were hazel, sometimes brown, sometimes even green. Now they just looked dark, a little slumberous, and far too knowing.

He was suddenly and acutely aware of how alone they were in this house, how far they were from the Park and all the prying eyes and listening ears that helped him keep his balance on the tightrope of his libido. At the moment, his safety net of Auntie Vi and Auntie Joy and Auntie Balasha and Old Sam and Bernie and Bobby and Dinah was two hundred miles away.

A small plane buzzed far overhead. Outside, light was fading from the sky, and stars not seen for four months were winking into existence to preen themselves in the still mirror of the lagoon. Inside, the silence was still and heavy with expectation.

“Kate,” he said, or tried to say. His tongue felt thick.

A slow smile curled lips that looked fuller and redder than they had a moment before. “Jim,” she said, softly mocking. She stepped forward, and in spite of the red lights and the sirens going off in his head, he couldn’t stop himself. He leaned down into her kiss.