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Usually the parents in such cases were in their twenties and thirties. Victoria was thirty-six the year the fire had burned down her house and killed her son.
Still, the various inconsistencies didn’t necessarily mean anything. Serial killers were all supposed to be ski
One thing Kate didn’t understand was how Victoria Pilz Ba
The other thing she didn’t understand was where Mr. Muravieff was. He hadn’t even been called as a witness at the trial.
The third thing she didn’t understand, which probably had nothing to do with the case, was what the lily white clan of Pilzes and Ba
In the cities and in the state overall, the power structure was built on white blood, American mostly, with contributions from stampeders from all over the world, including Scandinavians looking for free land in a place physically similar to their peninsulas, and Russians escaping the Revolution.
Like every other student at the University of Alaska required to take History 341 to graduate, Kate Shugak knew all about the Pilzes and the Ba
Which led to the Ba
Isaiah Ba
The Muravieffs, on the other hand, didn’t come from anywhere, they were Alaskan-born and -bred, with a little Norwegian and a lot of Russian thrown in. There was another story, one not in the history books, something about a Muravieff maiden and Capt. James Cook, but that was only talk late at night around the fire, and not around Muravieff fires, either. The Muravieff ancestor of choice was Mikhael Muraviev, a Russian expatriate who patrolled the coast of Alaska from Ketchikan to Barrow as captain of a Coast Guard cutter and who left descendants in nearly every port. Pre-modern Alaska Natives admired and respected procreation in any form. The more kids you had young, particularly male kids, the better you ate when you got old.
In short, Victoria Pilz Ba
Kate could practically smell the trial judge’s horror at Victoria ’s crime and his unswerving conviction that she was guilty. He sustained all but one objection by the prosecution and none by the defense, although the defense didn’t make that many. When the jury returned a guilty verdict, the judge issued a life sentence without leaving the bench, and said for the record that he was sorry Alaska didn’t have a death penalty, because that was what true justice demanded and Victoria deserved.
The list of witnesses called to testify during the trial read like a Who’s Who of the previous hundred years of Alaskan history. Kate read through the names, torn between a natural reluctance to stir up that much shit and an even more natural delight at the prospect. She thought Victoria was most likely guilty as hell, but she figured Victoria ’s daughter had a bunch of money she was going to give away to someone to tilt at this windmill, and it might as well be Kate.
Besides, given that someone had tried to burn her own cabin down around her ears not four months before, the case kind of resonated with her.
She filled a duffel bag with clean clothes, set her alarm, and turned in for the night.
5
George touched down at Merrill Field just before 10:00 A.M. Mutt gave him a loving farewell with the rough end of her tongue, which he pretended to hate. “When do you want to come back?” he said, tossing her duffel into the back of the cab he’d called for fifteen minutes out.
“I don’t know,” Kate said.
“One of the long jobs?”
“I’m dotting the i’s and crossing the‘t’s of a thirty-year-old case. I figure it’ll take me twenty-four hours, if that. I’ll stretch it out a little for the sake of the fee, but not much.”
George pulled a small, extremely tattered spiral notebook that had served, or something very like it, as Chugach Air Taxi’s reservation system for as long as Kate had known him. It was as covered in airplane grease as George was. “This is the twenty-third, so okay, I’ll put you down for a return on the twenty-eighth. I’ve got the Bingleys coming out with their kids for school shopping that morning.”
“Sounds good.” He was lifting off the end of runway 24 as the cab went through the light at sixth and Karluk. Mutt recognized the Cessna and gave a farewell bark, which frightened the taxi driver, a middle-aged Russian emigrant who had been prepared to admire Kate until he got a load of her bodyguard.
Fifteen minutes later, they were deposited on the doorstep of one of a row of town houses lining the north shore of Westchester Lagoon. Kate unlocked the door and they went in. It was a barn of a place, three stories, including the garage. The kitchen, dining room, living room, a small room meant to be a den, and a three-quarter bath were on the second floor, the third floor given over to more bedrooms and bathrooms. Kate tossed her duffel onto the couch, turned on the refrigerator, and checked the phone for a dial tone. There was one, and she turned on the answering machine.