Dana Stabenow - A Taint in the Blood

Only it wasn’t they. It was only one man, whom Kate recognized as Erland the moment he stepped out. She couldn’t believe it. She was even a little annoyed. Was she, Kate Shugak, so easily dealt with that the task required only one man, and that one man not accustomed to doing his own heavy lifting? Had no one considered the possibility that she might escape and do some heavy lifting of her own?

He saw the open door and halted, half in and half out of the vehicle. She began to descend the tree in stealth mode, glad her hair was no longer long enough to catch on spruce needles as she went.

She froze halfway down when he reached into the truck and took the keys out. Damn.

He walked up to the door. “Kate?” he said.

She came up behind him, the canvas and fallen spruce needles masking her steps. “Go on in,” she said.

He jumped and swore, and it did her heart all the good in the world. He sucked air in and let it out in an explosive breath. “You are one hell of a woman,” he said with what sounded like sincere regret.

“Well, don’t sound so sorry about it,” she said. “Go on, go in. Sit down.”

“How the hell did you get loose?”

“Sit,” Kate said, and leaned up against the wall next to the open door.

He sat, looking at her through the gloom. “Can we have a light? I think there’s an oil lamp around somewhere.”

One of the things Kate had learned during a five-year intensive stint with the Anchorage DA was that, contrary to popular fiction, bright lights did not make people spill their guts. On the contrary, the darker the room, the more forthcoming the secrets. “I like it the way it is,” she said.

She sensed rather than saw him shrug. “You’re the boss.”

She didn’t believe that for a New York minute. “Who killed William Muravieff?” she asked.

“Ah,” he said.

Kate waited out the silence that followed. Erland Bannister was not the kind of man to be held accountable for his actions by anyone, from the IRS on down to Kate Shugak. Perhaps especially Kate Shugak, Alaska Native, female, two societies to which Erland had entree but not membership and to both of which he almost certainly felt superior.

“First of all, I didn’t kill him,” he said finally.

“I did sort of figure that out on my own,” Kate said. “Was it Oliver?”

There was another, longer silence. “Ah, Kate,” he said, and there was a world of sorrow in the words.

“Was it really that petty?” she said. “William had the girl Oliver wanted, and Oliver killed him for it?”

Again she sensed the shrug. “When you’re sixteen and male, girls are all your thinking about. And Wanda was something.”

He still hadn’t admitted anything, but then she wasn’t wearing a wire, either. “And you let Victoria take the fall. It was just so convenient. She was making so much noise over your decision to replace your union employees with contract hires, and then, lo and behold, she gets arrested for murdering her own son. Her trial knocks your restructuring of the family business off the front pages long enough for you to get the dirty work done and over with, and then, my god, she’s found guilty. You must have thought you’d died and gone to heaven.”

“I kept hoping she’d beat the rap, right up until the verdict,” he said heavily.

“Bullshit,” Kate said. “She wouldn’t let her sons work for you after you announced what you were going to do, would she? And you didn’t have any sons of your own to carry on the family business. With Victoria in jail, you naturally assumed custody of Oliver, and put him right to work. What happened, Erland? Did he figure he had you by the short ones, since you were covering up each other’s dirty secrets? Is that how he could go to school and be a lawyer and start his own firm, leaving you high and dry?”

Silence.

“And then, thirty years later,” Kate said, “certainly long enough for all the buried skeletons to have long since deteriorated, Victoria gets cancer and her daughter hires me so she doesn’t have to die in jail. And you start tying up loose ends and a loose cannon. Eugene Muravieff, who was hiding in plain sight so he could stay in touch with his kids. And then Charlotte, because I wouldn’t leave it alone, and the only way you could see to make that happen was to kill my employer.”

Erland must have read Disraeli. Never apologize, never explain. Arrogant but effective, especially when faced with three felony counts of murder, not to mention a felony count of kidnapping.

“You must have wished that Victoria had choked to death on a bone,” Kate said into the silence. “She was always more trouble than she was worth anyway. Marrying that worthless Eugene. Finding out you were cooking the books.”

A stir. “What?” he said, and his voice was no longer sorrowful.

Kate checked to see that the doorway was still clear. “Of course you were embezzling funds, Erland,” she said. “ Victoria was working in accounts payable, where she found evidence of double billing.”

“How do you know all this?” Erland’s voice was very cold and very clear, and Kate instantly remembered one of the voices she’d heard when she first came to in the cabin. “You shouldn’t have hit her at all.” Of course not, Kate thought, a fist in the face is too obvious-the ME would have had no trouble recognizing it for what it was, and it would no doubt have been inconsistent with the other injuries her corpse would have presented when it washed ashore in Turnagain Arm. A dead giveaway-pardon the expression, she thought-that foul play had been done. She was equally certain that Erland wanted it to look like an accident. Not so much like his father after all.

But who had he been talking to? “She told me,” Kate said.

“She told you?” he said. “You’ve seen her since she got out? Where is she?”

“Tell me something, Erland,” Kate said. “Did you farm me out?”

“What?” he said.

“Did you farm out my kidnapping,” she said. “I was just wondering. Sooner or later, you weren’t going to want any witnesses. I’m figuring it was sooner, and maybe that’s why you came up here alone.”

For the first time, she heard tension in his voice. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Sure you do,” she said, and dived out the doorway in the same instant that he drew the gun and fired.

She tumbled into a forward somersault to come up on her feet running. Round one to her. She hit the trees in three strides, just as the gun cracked again. The sound of glass breaking on the truck made her laugh beneath her breath, as did the sound of Erland’s curses.

She felt rather than saw her way to the water cache. She paused, listening. There was the sound of glass breaking. He was probably kicking out the remains of his windshield. The truck’s engine started.

She would have to stick close to the road. He’d know that and stay on it, waiting for her to emerge.

So she wormed her way under the deadfall, hoping that nothing had taken up residence in the hollow beneath in her absence. Nothing had. She felt for the oversized fleece jacket, snuggled into it and curled up into a ball. She wished for Mutt’s warm bulk next to her, wished even for, god help her, Jim, and with that thought she dropped blessedly into a deep, dreamless oblivion.

Birdsong woke her in that pale hour before dawn, three pure descending notes, repeated and answered. Kate blinked, yawned, and stretched, and reached for one of the bottles of water to relieve her morning mouth. She got to her knees to peer out from beneath the underbrush.

The dew lay heavy on the bracken, a precursor of frost. She took a moment to be thankful it wasn’t. She didn’t see anyone or hear anything but animal noises, but that didn’t mean that Erland wasn’t sitting in his truck smack in the middle of the only road leading out, waiting for her to show up so he could shoot her dead and leave her to the bears to snack on. At this point he wouldn’t care if her death looked like an accident or not. He’d risk shooting her now and coming up with an explanation later, delivered no doubt by a fine battery of expensive attorneys.