A taint in the blood (43 page)

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.

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.