A taint in the blood (23 page)

He walked away before Bruce could answer. "May I?" Bruce said.

"Certainly," Kate said, patting her hair and maybe fluttering her eyelashes a little. What the hell, give ol' Bruce a thrill while she figured out what the hell the governor's chief of staff had to say to little old Kate Shugak from the Park. "We've met before, you know," she said in breathless, confiding accents. She leaned forward and looked at him with wide, admiring eyes, or what she was hoping might be a close approximation thereof.

He looked astounded. "No," he said in a tone of nattering disbelief. He gave her the once-over and flashed his teeth again. "I'm sure I would remember if we had."

He'd been in some kind of supervisory position with the Department of Corrections at the Cook Inlet Pretrial Facility, back in the days when Kate used to be an investigator for the Anchorage district attorney. She had never liked the glad-handing, brownnosing little prick from the first time she'd watched him oil his way out of responsibility for the prisoner suicide that had happened on his watch. It had never been made officially known, but the employee grapevine said that he'd had his feet up on his desk, reading the newspaper instead of watching the monitors in the mods, one of which was trained on the suicide's cell. The dead guy had been put on a suicide watch, too, so it wasn't like Bruce Abbott wouldn't have known the guy was at risk.

Kate decided that now was not the time to remind Bruce Abbott of past misdeeds. She smiled instead.

Under the influence of those admiring eyes, Bruce puffed out his chest and started dropping names. Every sentence began 'The governor said to me" and every other sentence began "And then I said to the governor" and all of their conversations were liberally sprinkled with references to the political high and mighty, both state and federal. Any local contacts, it went without saying, were dismissed as being too paltry even to mention.

Kate threw in a couple of bright-eyed "Reallys!" and one "Fascinating!" and stifled a yawn, but his acute political instincts told Bruce he was losing his audience. He switched on his smile again. "You're being spoken of in high places, Kate. I may call you Kate?"

Something told her that what Bruce Abbott said next would turn out to be why she had been invited to this party. "Really," she said. "I can't imagine what anyone in the governor's office might have to say about little old me."

His eyes narrowed fractionally, and for a moment she thought she might have overdone it. But his smile switched on again, brighter than ever, accompanied this time by a fruity chuckle. "Oh, I didn't mean to mislead you, Kate. Not necessarily the governor's office, but certainly at high levels."

"Really," she said for what felt like the seventeenth time. The secret to a successful interrogation was to make the suspect do all of the talking. She would not ask what "they" had been saying about her. Besides, Bruce was dying to tell her, and why should she thwart him, poor man?

Realizing she was about to doze off with her eyes wide open, she pulled herself together.

"Yes, you have been mentioned as quite the little up-and-comer," Bruce said.

"Have I?" Kate said. "Really, I can't imagine why. As you know, Bruce, I'm not in politics myself."

"Not everyone can be," he said earnestly, "some just don't have the gift for it. But we need you out here, too." A gesture encompassed the greater part of the Great Unwashed, of which Kate presumed he meant she was a voting member. Not that she'd voted for his boss, but she didn't find it necessary to say so at this very moment. She batted her eyelids again. Her eyes were drying out from trying to keep them open.

Bruce smiled and patted her hand again. "Yes, being Ekaterina Shugak's granddaughter, well, that certainly puts you first on any list."

"I'm on a list?" Kate said, suddenly wide awake.

He beamed his teeth at her. "Of course you are," he said warmly, "and first on it, like I said."

"For what?" Kate said, and kicked herself for asking.

He smoothed the lapel of his jacket. "As I'm sure you know, the Alaska state troopers are opening a new post in Niniltna. You live there, I believe?"

"I do," Kate said.

"And of course you used to be an investigator for the Anchorage district attorney."

"I did," she said.

He smiled some more. "The Department of Public Safety is thinking of assigning a VPSO to Niniltna."

She stiffened, enough so that he noticed. "Are they?" she said. The words were bitten off more than spoken.

"Indeed, yes," he said, looking a bit bewildered, clearly not expecting hostility as a reaction to his good news.

He was easy to read. Jobs of any kind were scarce in the Alaskan Bush. Surely she knew what this meant? A monthly salary, in a village with only two others, the trooper and the postmaster. Medical insurance, workman's comp, a retirement plan. He couldn't understand her lack of enthusiasm, or for that matter the complete absence of overwhelming gratitude that he had come to expect from these little chats. The current governor of Alaska was a past master at the art of patronage, and Bruce Abbott the designated dispenser thereof. It was a job he clearly enjoyed, and now Kate was ruining it for him.

She took pity on him, in spite of the anger building beneath her breastbone. He was just a go-fer, after all, a yes-man, a beck-and-call boy who only implemented the decisions made by the people in authority. He would never wield that authority himself, but credit where credit was due, he would never want to. He was a round peg in a thoroughly round hole, he'd found his niche, and he knew it. "I appreciate the thought, Bruce, but I really wouldn't be the right person for the job."

Bruce didn't just look disappointed, he looked aghast. It might have been the first time anyone had ever turned down the governor's offer of a job. "But—but the salary. The—the benefits," he said, actually stuttering. "Oh, if you're worried about the time it would take you to go through the academy in Sitka to qualify, I've been instructed to tell you that in your case, because of your training—we've been told you did a year at Quantico right after taking your degree in social justice from UAF—and your experience on the job—your record is, hell, it's flawless—well, after all that, the state would be willing to waive the academy requirement. We don't have that many people of your caliber available, Kate."

She almost lost her temper. Almost, but not quite. She was here on a fact-finding mission, not to indulge her evil twin. She rose to her feet and plastered a false smile on her face. "I'm sorry, Bruce."

"But we like to recruit VPSOs locally whenever we can!" He stood up. "You're Alaskan-born and -bred, Kate, and what's more, you live in the very place you'll be posted in!"

She forbore from pointing out that that wasn't always a good thing in the Bush. All too often when the village public safety officers arrested someone, either they were related to the perp or the rest of the village was. It was frequently an argument for arresting no one, no matter how severe the crime. "There are a lot of people who would like and would be suited for the Niniltna VPSO job." She wondered at the near panic she saw on his face, but not enough to relent. "I'm sorry," she repeated, and headed for the door.

By the time she got there, Erland Bannister had returned to the love seat and was standing in close consultation with Bruce Abbott. Oliver was with them, a little apart, a frown on his face as he watched her slip out the door.

11

Kate's temper was not improved when she got home and found Jim Chopin waiting on her doorstep. Repressing a wish that he'd been in the driveway, so she could run over him, she drove into the garage. She slammed out of the Subaru and stormed into the town house, steaming down on the front door like Patton's Third Army. She yanked it open and bellowed, "How dare you! How
dare
you!"

Amazingly, he didn't hear her, having apparently been struck deaf at the sight of her in party clothes. His expression one of dumb fascination, his eyes followed the V of the jacket's neckline to the soft hint of cleavage. He swallowed audibly and opened his mouth, but nothing came out.

"Did you do it?" she said fiercely. "Answer me!"

"Do what?" he croaked.

"Pull strings at the Department of Public Safety to get me the VPSO job!"

He blinked. "Huh?"

"The job that would have me working as your second number in the Park, you moron!" She poked him in the chest. "Did you try to get me that job?"

Mutt, observing all this from a safe distance, turned tail and vanished into the den, where she intended to remain until the decibel level fell.

Jim pulled off his hat, as if it had suddenly become too tight for his head. "I don't know what the hell you're talking about, Kate." He dared to look at her again, knowing it was a mistake. He shouldn't look. If he looked, he'd want to touch, and that wasn't why he was here. Damn it.

He hadn't told her, and she hadn't asked, that he was still in town because he'd been called to testify at a trial involving the bust of a marijuana grow in the Valley he'd been TDY'd to the previous summer. And this under protest and only because the arresting officer scheduled to testify—a man he'd been assisting at the time—had been called Outside because of a death in the family. And now here he was, on the doorstep of this town house tonight, and pretty damn late it was, and where the hell had she been at this hour dressed like that?

Didn't matter. He was here to make it clear to Kate Shugak once and for all that there was no relationship of any kind going on between the two of them, not even sex. Not even "sex with no complications—when its over, we go our separate ways, no harm, no foul." Nope, not even that.

The jacket, made of some rich fabric that clung to every curve, the whispering black silk of the tuxedo pants tailored in so masculine a fashion that when worn by a woman they were nothing more or less than a blatant invitation to get her out of them. Which he suddenly knew he was going to do, given half the chance.

He ran a finger around the inside of his collar. Okay. He'd tell her it was over in the morning.

She stamped back into the house, pausing only to kick off her shoes. Jim followed her inside, watching her very fine ass move inside the black silk, and closed the door behind them.

"God, my feet," she said, leaning a hand against the wall and raising one foot to rub at it.

He eyed the shoes. They had a barely discernible heel. "Sit," he said, and steered her into the living room. She sank into the easy chair with a sigh, and he sat on the coffee table and lifted her feet into his lap. He began to knead them.

"Oh." Her head fell back against the chair. "Yesssss."

He'd heard that sound before, just not in this context. He had to shift a little where he was sitting. He cleared his throat. "Where did you go in that getup?"

She opened her eyes and looked down at herself. "Not bad, huh?"

"It's fucking spectacular and you know it."

She looked up, startled at the grim sound of his voice. He didn't look happy, either. She sniffed the arm of the jacket and made a face. "Ick. Everybody was smoking like a chimney. I'll have to wash my hair."

"Where were you?" he said again. He'd been thumping on the door once every hour since 7:30 P.M. He arrested stalkers for less egregious behavior. The thought did not please him.

"At a party."

"I deduced that from the camouflage. Whose party?"

"Erland Bannister's."

His hands stilled. "You're kidding me."

"Nope. Big-ass house down on the flats below the Turnagain Bluff." She wriggled her feet suggestively and he started massaging them again. "Oh yeaaah."

She moaned and he wanted to cry.

"I was scared to death there was going to be an earthquake the whole time I was there," she said, "and that we were all going to fall into Cook Inlet."