Any Taint of Vice: A Kate Shugak Story (Kate Shugak Novels) Read online

  “What happened? Was Edie blackmailing the General, too? Only this time was it with photographs of Cal and Rose?”

  “I think you’d better leave,” Vic said.

  “Careful,” Kate said. “People keep saying that to me and they keep getting dead. What did Edie know, Vic? Maybe what Oscar Square knew? That this time Cal didn’t stop at rape?”

  A voice came from behind him. “That’s enough, Ms. Shugak.” The General came down the stairs, immaculate in a heavy silk dressing gown, leather slippers on his feet, not a hair out of place. His blade of a nose was as sharp and as arrogant as ever. Kate had seen one its mirror image not an hour before.

  “Dad—” Vic stopped when his father raised a hand.

  “You have been paid for your services, Ms. Shugak,” the General said. “I am surprised to see you here again.”

  She nodded at Cal Boatwright, passed out on the couch. “I stumbled across your son again this evening, General.”

  “And returned him safely home again, for which I am prepared to thank you, again,” the General said.

  “Another check, General?” Kate said. “This isn’t one you’re going to be able to buy your son’s way out of. Too many bodies.” She looked at Vic. “Edie Venus told me your wife, Rose, ran off with her husband, Miles.”

  The two men exchanged glances. “Yes,” Vic said, “yes, that’s what happened. Rose ran away with Miles.”

  “Uh-huh,” Kate said. “I think you’re lying. I think Edie made the whole story up on the fly. I think Cal killed Rose and Edie helped you cover it up by concocting that story. And then she cleaned up the mess in Andrea Gohegan’s house yesterday, too.”

  “Why would she do that?” the General said.

  She looked at him. “Same eyes, same nose, same general age. Edie was your sister, wasn’t she?”

  “‘Was’?” the General said.

  “She was shot this evening,” Kate said, and looked at Vic.

  So did the General. “No,” he said.

  “I did it for the family,” Vic said. He looked at his father. “I did it for you, Dad.”

  “I don’t think so,” Kate said. “Cal killed Rose, didn’t he?”

  Vic Boatwright’s silence was confirmation enough.

  “And he got high and told Andrea, who was already blackmailing you, General.”

  The General stood straight and unbending. “This is the purest nonsense,” he said. “Why would I hire you if I were masterminding something this Machiavellian?”

  “Oh, I was just a hired witness, meant to track down Cal and get him out of the way. And then Vic got rid of Oscar Square just to neaten things up.”

  She looked from the General to Vic. “I don’t know why he killed your sister, though,” she said.

  Vic Boatwright was now white to the lips. The General’s expression was unyielding granite. Neither man spoke.

  “Where’s Rose’s body?” she said. “Did Edie take care of it for you?”

  Vic looked at his father. “I did it for you, Dad. I did it for the family.” He pulled a snub-nosed .38 out of his pocket. “I’ll fix this, too.”

  “I don’t think so,” Kate said, and snapped her fingers. The door, which she had taken care to leave unlatched, was nosed open by a 140-pound half wolf–half husky, up on all four toes, yellow eyes narrowed and flicking between the two men, a predator’s growl issuing steadily from deep in her throat. It froze the marrow of everyone within hearing distance, not excluding Kate.

  “You can shoot me,” Kate said, “but she’ll get to you before you can shoot her. And if you shoot her, I’ll see you dead before you hit the ground.”

  The sound of sirens approached the house.

  Vic looked from her to the General. “What do you want me to do, Dad? Dad?”

  Kate turned her back and walked out the door, Mutt at her heels.

  News filtered back to the Park later on, on the discovery of the two bodies buried at the edge of the trees in back of the helicopter pad. Of Cal’s trial and commitment. The General died at home, in his bed, a month after Vic’s trial and imprisonment. He left his considerable estate and the even larger estate belonging to his sister, which he had inherited upon her death, to Americans for Prosperity. David Koch himself gave the eulogy.

  The General’s check cleared the bank long before any of that happened.

  Author’s Note

  You always wanted to know who killed the chauffeur

  in Raymond Chandler’s Big Sleep.

  Also by Dana Stabenow

  The Kate Shugak Series

  Restless in the Grave

  Though Not Dead

  A Night Too Dark

  Whisper to the Blood

  A Deeper Sleep

  A Taint in the Blood

  A Grave Denied

  A Fine and Bitter Snow

  The Singing of the Dead

  Midnight Come Again

  Hunter’s Moon

  Killing Grounds

  Breakup

  Blood Will Tell

  Play with Fire

  A Cold-Blooded Business

  Dead in the Water

  A Fatal Thaw

  A Cold Day for Murder

  The Liam Campbell Series

  Better to Rest

  Nothing Gold Can Stay

  So Sure of Death

  Fire and Ice

  Thrillers

  Prepared for Rage

  Blindfold Game

  The Star Svensdotter Series

  Red Planet Run

  A Handful of Stars

  Second Star

  Anthologies

  Powers of Detection

  Wild Crimes

  Alaska Women Write

  The Mysterious North

  At the Scene of the Crime

  Unusual Suspects

  Read on for an excerpt from Bad Blood by Dana Stabenow, coming from Minotaur Books in February 2013:

  The Prologue

  One

  Two villages, where two rivers meet.

  A geologic age before, the runoff from Alakan Glacier high up in the Quilak Mountains chewed through a granite ridge to form a narrow canyon fifteen miles long.

  A millennium before, a massive earthquake exacerbated a fault in the ridge. Half of it cracked and slid off to the southwest. It left behind a V-shaped wedge between the confluence of two watercourses, which would one day be named Gruening River on the south side and Cataract Creek on the north.

  The tip of the vee pointed due west. The surface of the wedge was flat and topped with a thick slice of verdant soil raised a hundred feet in the air by the earthquake. That earthquake had also fractured a way to the surface through the granite uplift for an underground spring. The spring’s outflow trickled down the south face of the wedge, over time carving a channel for a little stream too steep to support a salmon run and too shallow to be good for anything but watering the blueberry bushes that grew thickly along its sides. In spring, this slope was first to thaw, snow and ice giving way to a fairyland of wildflowers, the brash orange and yellow florets of western columbine, the shy blue of forget-me-nots, the noxious brown blooms of chocolate lilies, the elegant pink paintbrush, and the dignified purple monkshood.

  By luck of the geologic draw, the land across the river remained largely undisturbed by the earthquake, a flat marsh covered in thick grass, cattails, and Alaska cotton. Over time glacial silt carried downriver filled in the marsh, and alder, diamond willow, and cottonwood grew out to the water’s edge. The force and flow of the combined currents of river and stream undercut the banks to provide habitat for river otters, mink, and marten, and carved tiny tributaries to be dammed by beavers and colonized by salmon.

  Two hundred winters before, the Mack family walked up the frozen river. It was a wide river, not too deep, with a good gravel bottom. When it thawed that spring, even on a cloudy day an endless silver horde was visible through the peaty water, a solidly packed, seemingly inexhaustible mixture of king and red and silver s
almon moving inexorably upstream. Tobold Mack, the little clan’s patriarch, had led them south from the Interior, where a wasting disease had affected the moose population. A decade of famine had led to inter-tribal competition among the local Athabascans over the remaining food sources, and a disastrous decline in population of man and beast alike.

  That summer, Tobold looked long on where the white water rushed to join the brown, at the arrows in both left by the dorsal fins of the struggling salmon, the birch stumps left by the beavers and the willow stands gnawed down by the moose. He looked up at the mountains that cut into the eastern horizon, beautiful and terrible, and yet comforting all the same in their solid impenetrability. With mountains like those at his back, a man felt safe.

  “We have walked far enough,” he said.

  They built a weir and a snug dugout on the south shore of the river. Drying racks were next, for fish in summer and moose meat in winter, and caribou when the Quilak herds came down to the river to calve in spring. Babies were born and lived, and elders survived long enough to contribute their accumulated wisdom to the tribe, and for everyone in between there was enough food easily available that there was time to sing and dance and play and laugh. Time to not only make a birchwood bowl for eating, but also carve decorations around its edge. Time to not only make a parka from beaver skins warm enough to withstand the worst winter could throw at them, but embroider the parka with trade beads and dentalium shells as well.

  This village they named Kushtaka.

  Seventy winters before the present day, Walter Estes and Percy Christianson came up the river, trappers looking for beaver. They were new to the country but not to Alaska, being Aleuts displaced from the island of Anua by the war the Japanese had brought to the great land. Walter and Percy had fought together in the islands and knew firsthand how little there was to go back to. Now they looked for a new place to call home.

  The Macks, like any Alaskans happy to see a new face in the long dark doldrums of winter, made them welcome. Estes was half-Italian and Christianson was half-Norwegian but they both comported themselves as men should, sharing the game and the fish they took in equal measure with their hosts. There was still more than enough for all, then.

  Five years later, Walter and Percy moved across the river and built their homes on top of the big wedge of rock rising in the vee between the creek and the river.

  The Macks approved. Ownership of any part of river and creek and its adjacent lands was not a concept the people of Kushtaka understood. They hunted the moose that browsed through the willow and the caribou that calved on the riverbanks, they trapped the beaver and the river otter and the muskrat, they gathered the crowberries and the blueberries that grew on the south-facing slope of the wedge, and they cut the wood of the spruce and birch and alder for fuel. They took enough, never too much, because there was always next season, and they knew from hard experience handed down from Tobold Mack himself that there was always the chance that the next season could be a bad one, with the long cold returning, scarce game, and too many mouths to feed. In this vast land, there was still plenty of room for all, and a good neighbor was always welcome in hard times.

  Percy sent for his bride, Balasha, who was half-Russian, a plump, lively woman who settled down to smoke salmon, weave grass baskets in the fashion of the Aleuts, and pop out healthy children at the rate of one every two years. Walter married Nancy Mack, who joined him up on the wedge, in the log cabin he built for her.

  They called their village Kuskulana. It was not as conveniently placed as Kushtaka, being a hard slog uphill from the salmon-rich waters of river and creek, and a longer, harder slog uphill when burdened with the hindquarter of a moose. But the spring that bubbled up provided much better drinking water than the Kushtaka wells, which were brown and brackish, and its sharp point hid a good-sized plateau that widened to the east, a good site for an airstrip. Walter, inspired by the sight of the fighters and bombers who had filled the air over the skies of the Aleutians during the war, was determined to learn to fly and promptly hacked an airstrip out of the alders, tied a red flannel shirt on a pole at one end for a windsock, and bought one of the first Piper Super Cubs.

  Twenty winters on, President Eisenhower signed Alaska’s statehood act, and among other things, the federal government began to build post offices in the Bush. Air taxies all over Alaska got federal mail contracts. Kuskulana and Kushtaka both applied for the post office, which went to Kuskulana because they had the airstrip, and Walter’s son Walter, Jr., got the mail contract.

  And because the post office was in Kuskulana, a Christiansen got the postmaster’s job, a rare prize in Bush Alaska, full-time federal employment with a steady paycheck and benefits.

  Twelve years after statehood, President Nixon signed the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, in which Alaskan tribes gave the federal government a right-of-way across aboriginal lands from Prudhoe Bay to Valdez for the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, built to bring North Slope oil to market. In exchange, the tribes received forty-four million acres and almost a billion dollars.

  Some Alaska Natives claimed that, with the formation of tribes into corporations, their homes, their ways of life, their very cultures would be forfeit, requiring them to become white in an already white world. But land and money, those two possessions by which white culture measured itself, were powerful inducements. As most tribes did after enduring three hundred years of forced secondary status, Kuskulana opted into the agreement.

  Kushtaka was one of the handful of Alaskan villages that did not.

  ANCSA money flowed into Kuskulana coffers, and the village blossomed out with new houses and the villagers with new skiffs and drifters and four-wheelers and snow machines.

  Kushtaka rechinked the steadily increasing gaps between the logs on their fifty- and hundred-year-old cabin walls, and made do with boats and Snogos inherited from their fathers.

  Kuskulana was given its pick of parcels of prime land in the area, and every Kuskulaner of any age from six months to sixty years became the proud owner of a five-acre lot, many of them on the Gruening River and several of which encroached on the land where Kushtaka’s fish wheel had stood for generations. Roger Christianson, Sr., even tried to lay claim to the fish wheel site itself. Said claim was quickly quashed, but the Kushtakans didn’t forget. It didn’t help matters when Kuskulana built their new boat landing almost directly across the river from the Kushtaka fish wheel. The wash from the Kuskulana skiffs muddied the water near the fish wheel and frightened the salmon.

  Dale and Mary Mack at Kushtaka opened a little store in their living room, stocking it with items they bought in bulk from Ahtna and Anchorage and selling them at a modest markup, dry and canned goods, cases of pop and potato chips, aspirin and Band-Aids.

  And then Roger Christianson and Silvio Aguilar opened a full-service store in its own building in Kuskulana, with everything the Macks’ store carried plus fresh fruit and vegetables and even fresh milk.

  The Macks’ store was out of business in three months. Dale Mack and Roger Christianson bumped into each other at Costco in Ahtna and had words that were witnessed by people from both villages, words that lost nothing in the retelling and only hardened the attitudes of everyone who heard it second- and thirdhand. You couldn’t trust a Kuskulaner not to steal your idea and cheat you out of your business, the Kushtakans said. Those Kushtakers, said the Kuskulaners, they hadn’t really made it into this century yet, you know? Probably wouldn’t ever, the rate they were going. They hadn’t even managed to muster the wherewithal to pay for a power line across the river, and there wasn’t a flush toilet in the entire village.

  Whereas every new house in Kuskulana had hot and cold running water.

  Teenagers of both villages, quick to pick up the elder vibe, began a series of hormone-driven confrontations at various potlatches. Outnumbered five to one, the Kushtakers took home the majority of the bruises, but so long as the hostilities were confined to the occasional tribal celebration held far a
way from either village, the adults were inclined to look the other way.

  Two years ago, the world’s second largest gold deposit was found sixty miles north-northeast of where the creek and the river met.

  Before the first backhoe was airlifted into the Suulutaq Mine, the population of Kuskulana climbed onto its many four-wheelers and beat down a serviceable trail between their village and the mine site. With ready access winter and summer, the trail made their people more attractive as employees to mine management. Given the working airstrip, Kuskulana became the designated alternative landing site in case Niniltna and Suulutaq were both socked in at the same time. Which made the Kuskulana strip eligible for federal funds for runway improvements, an electronic weather-reporting station, and the construction of a hangar.

  Kuskulana was, therefore, enthusiastically pro-mine, and their people came home to spend their paychecks.

  Kushtaka, on the wrong side of the river, sent fewer workers to the mine. Those who went seldom returned, preferring to resettle in Kuskulana and Niniltna and Ahtna and even Anchorage, where there was cable and Costco, and Beyoncé concerts only a 737 ride away. Kushtakans, fearing the drain on their population and resenting the ever-increasing wealth of their parvenu neighbors, came down hard against the mine, on the side of the fishermen and the environmentalists and the conservationists who were devoting their considerable resources to stop it.

  That September, Zeke Mack was out moose-hunting on the south side of the river. Inexplicably, he missed the bull with the four brow tines on both sides and instead put a hole through the trailing edge of the right wing of Joe Estes’s 172. Joe having just taken off from the south end of the Kuskulana airstrip and at that time 150 feet in the air.

  Joe got back down in one piece, but it soon became known in both communities where the shot had come from, and there was some subsequent conversation about just how bad Zeke’s eyesight was. A lot of laughter accompanied the conversation in Kushtaka. Laughter was conspicuous by its absence in Kuskulana, whose pilots started taking off to the north.