Dana Stabenow - A Taint in the Blood

This time, the window gave up the ghost and the stove crashed through and fell on the ground outside. The fresh air coming in through that open window was the sweetest odor Kate had ever smelled. She fetched the chair again and used the legs to clear the window frame of glass, and then she was out and on the ground.

One single-lane road that was more of a game trail led up to the front door, which was locked with a padlock. Kate went back inside for a bread knife. The cabin had never been painted and the screws securing the hasp to the doorjamb came out easily with a small application of muscle. She threw the hasp and the padlock deep into the woods, then took a long, luxurious, and much-needed pee in the outhouse out back, which came equipped with toilet paper. Ritzy.

She walked ten minutes down the road before her feet began to feel it. She heard a jet high over head. It seemed to be descending. She didn’t hear any street sounds that might indicate a road. The trees never thinned out enough to give her a view, something to tell her where she was.

She padded back up the road, went to the window of the cabin, and climbed up on the sill. She stood up, reaching for the eave of the roof. She caught it with both hands and gained the roof in a sort of scrabbling kick. It was made of corrugated metal and was warm from the day. She stood up.

There were mountains in front and behind and all around, sharp peaks, some with snow, some without. They looked slightly familiar. Soft in the distance she thought she heard the sound of running water. A creek perhaps.

The setting sun slanted on the mountains with no snow, another jet appeared over the eastern horizon, and Kate knew where she was. The cabin was located in the Chugach Mountains, somewhere between the front and back ranges. Crow Creek Valley, maybe, reasonably accessible if you knew your way around the Anchorage bowl area. The cabin probably sat on a chunk of land subdivided from some old homesteader’s claim.

Her spirits lifted. Kate liked being lost about as much as she liked getting her feet wet. She went back inside the cabin and found a can of cream of tomato soup and a can of evaporated milk. She stirred both into a pan over the working burner of the Coleman stove and had a dinner of soup and saltines spread with peanut butter, chased with another bottle of water.

They wouldn’t come until dark. They were off busily establishing their alibis, but they’d waited until the wee hours to take her, and they’d wait until the wee hours to kill her, too. But they’d come earlier tonight, because she had something Erland wanted, and they would need time to question her before they killed her. Maybe he thought she knew who had really killed William. Maybe he thought she had proof that he’d had Eugene and Charlotte killed. At any rate, no plan of his would include her leaving this place alive.

She remembered again Max’s story of Jasper Bannister and Richie Constantine and Calvin Esterhaus. How like his father was Erland Bannister?

The.22 casings showed that a gun had been fired in this cabin before. She wondered where the bullets from them had lodged, and in whom.

Erland might come armed tonight, too, but maybe not. He had left her pretty well trussed up. He wouldn’t be expecting to find her free. But then he’d locked the door, as if guaranteeing that if she did get loose, she wouldn’t get anywhere. Which she had done. But maybe he’d locked the door to keep stray hikers out. And the windows were high enough that no one smaller than a giant could look in, so he must have thought she was pretty safely shut in for the day.

She remembered the voices she’d heard the first time she’d come around. He probably wouldn’t come alone, he’d need someone to clean up after him, because guys like Erland Bannister never dirtied their hands with the cleanup work. Probably he’d bring the same someone who had kidnapped her, because using the same crew meant fewer witnesses.

All she had to defend herself was a steak knife. She knew she should walk away, right now. That was the smart thing to do. Start walking, right now, start eating up some of the mileage between her and 911.

Where was her cell phone when she needed it? Back in the town house, in her day pack. Oh yeah, some of the smarter money she’d spent this year.

On the other hand, there was no guarantee that anyone would come if she called. There were damn few Alaskans who were going to believe some wild tale about Erland Bannister murdering his nephew and contracting to murder his brother-in-law and his niece over thirty years later. Kate had some street cred, but nobody had enough to put that story over.

Although Kate was beginning to have a sneaking suspicion that she’d been wrong about who’d killed William Muravieff, and if she ran, she’d never know.

And she really, really wanted to know.

Using the steak knife, she cut rough pieces out of the canvas cot, shaped them into soles, and bored holes through which she laced the rope. The canvas was stiff and the rope was harsh against her skin. She found a man’s flannel shirt in the closet and cut up the sleeves for socks. She cut off every single hanging thread, every dangling bit of rope, because when it came time to run, she didn’t want anything tripping her up.

She tucked the steak knife into the rope around her waist. She situated the table to the left of the open door and placed the chair so that it was just out of eyesight of the doorway. She went outside to look over the forty-foot spruce tree that stood at just the right spot to give her a good view of what would come up the road later this evening. She broke a few dead branches, bent a few living ones, and made a reasonably comfortable seat, padded with the canvas left over from the cot and the remaining bits of rope, about twenty feet up. It was clearly visible from the cabin, but in her experience, people seldom looked up. She cleared what she hoped was a fairly unobvious path to the ground, then went from ground to seat and back again a couple of times to familiarize herself with hand and footholds. She wanted to be able to ascend and descend as quietly as possible.

Her hands were sticky with sap when she was done. She went back to the cabin and gathered up half a dozen bottles of water. She took three of them up the tree. The other three she secreted in a hollow beneath a fallen spruce about a hundred feet off the road. If she needed them, they’d be there. She hoped she wouldn’t.

She went back to the cabin and cleaned up the broken glass in front of the window and hauled the stove back inside. It felt a lot heavier on the way in than it had on the way out. If she was right and they came late, chances were that with no ambient light to reflect off the glass, they’d never see that it was missing. If she was lucky, they wouldn’t notice the broken stovepipe. It was amazing what people missed seeing just because they had preconceived notions of what was supposed to be in front of them.

She got another bottle of water and scrubbed the sap from her hands. She’d found a nappy fleece jacket with a broken zipper that was at least thirteen sizes too big for her, but it was heavy. She hid it in the deadfall with the water.

The sun went behind the mountains and took at least as much time to set below the horizon. The forest was filled with the sounds of the birds and the beasts going about their business, hunting, feeding, grooming. A bear sounded off in the distance, and Kate hoped he or she wasn’t heading toward the cabin.

They came, as near as she could figure, around midnight. The witching hour, the hour when the blues band in your favorite neighborhood dive was just cranking it up, the hour when even Ted Koppel was ready to pack it in for the night, so it figured. They came in a nondescript pickup, a dull gray in color, plates the old blue-on-gold Alaska plates, no hubcaps, no mag wheels.