Read Online A taint in the blood by Dana Stabenow - Free Book Online
Authors: Dana Stabenow
Tags: Fiction, General, detective, Suspense, Mystery & Detective, Women Sleuths, Mystery, Detective and Mystery Stories, Mystery Fiction, Mystery & Detective - Women Sleuths, Women Private Investigators, Fiction - Mystery, Crime & mystery, alaska, Crime thriller, Mothers and daughters, Shugak; Kate (Fictitious character), Women private investigators - Alaska, Murder Victims' Families, Arson Investigation, Women prisoners
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were no hard-and-fast rules for this kind of crime, only percentages and statistics that sometimes helped nudge the investigator in the right direction.
One thing Kate didn't understand was how Victoria Pilz Bannister Muravieff had managed to run out of money to the extent that she had to resort to murder, and filicide at that, to replenish her share of the family coffers known to all to be overflowing. That also was not in the trial transcript. Evidently, the prosecuting attorney and the jury both felt that the lure of six zeros was enough, no matter how rich you already were.
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 Bannisters were doing allying themselves with somebody named Muravieff. What made this interesting was that the marriage would have taken place years before the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act gave Alaska Natives land and money in exchange for a right-of-way down the middle of Alaska to build the Trans-Alaska Pipeline. Land and money equal power in Western society, and Alaska Natives had had very little of any of the three prior to ANCSA.
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 Bannisters. Hermann Pilz had been a German mining engineer who had come north with the Klondike stampede and stayed to start the first coal mine in Kachemak Bay, which had led to a timely investment in the Alaska Steamship Line, which evolved into a shipping company that specialized in getting freight to every community in Alaska not on the road system. Since most of the communities were not on the road system, the formation of an airline was initiated out of necessity. For a while, the Pilz name had been painted on virtually anything that moved in and out of the Alaskan Bush. Now everything was owned and managed by various holding companies that had pieces large and small of various other essential Alaskan businesses, such as grocery businesses.
Which led to the Bannisters. Isaiah Bannister had been attached to Lt. Henry Allen's army expedition in 1885 up the Kanuyaq River to the Tanana, down it to the Yukon, up it to the Koyukuk, back down to the Unalakleet-Yukon portage, and on down to St. Michael. He survived the mosquitoes and the bears and left the navy to form a company to import supplies, edible and otherwise, into Alaska. The Arctic Trading Company now owned the largest chain of grocery stores and supermarkets in the state, and Safeway and Kroger's had both been rumored to be sniffing around about a possible buyout.
Isaiah Bannister, well-established in Alaska by 1898 (it wasn't the stampeders who got rich; it was the people who sold them food and supplies), had bankrolled Hermann Pilz's Kachemak Coal Company. Hermann had reciprocated, in what was generally held to be a tit-for-tat kind of deal, by marrying Isaiah Bannister's thirty-nine-year-old spinster daughter, his lone ewe lamb, who rejoiced in the name of Calliope. Calliope had surprised everyone by bearing a son a year for five years, raising them to be good men and true, and outliving her much-younger husband by twenty-seven years.
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
One thing Kate didn't understand was how Victoria Pilz Bannister Muravieff had managed to run out of money to the extent that she had to resort to murder, and filicide at that, to replenish her share of the family coffers known to all to be overflowing. That also was not in the trial transcript. Evidently, the prosecuting attorney and the jury both felt that the lure of six zeros was enough, no matter how rich you already were.
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 Bannisters were doing allying themselves with somebody named Muravieff. What made this interesting was that the marriage would have taken place years before the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act gave Alaska Natives land and money in exchange for a right-of-way down the middle of Alaska to build the Trans-Alaska Pipeline. Land and money equal power in Western society, and Alaska Natives had had very little of any of the three prior to ANCSA.
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 Bannisters. Hermann Pilz had been a German mining engineer who had come north with the Klondike stampede and stayed to start the first coal mine in Kachemak Bay, which had led to a timely investment in the Alaska Steamship Line, which evolved into a shipping company that specialized in getting freight to every community in Alaska not on the road system. Since most of the communities were not on the road system, the formation of an airline was initiated out of necessity. For a while, the Pilz name had been painted on virtually anything that moved in and out of the Alaskan Bush. Now everything was owned and managed by various holding companies that had pieces large and small of various other essential Alaskan businesses, such as grocery businesses.
Which led to the Bannisters. Isaiah Bannister had been attached to Lt. Henry Allen's army expedition in 1885 up the Kanuyaq River to the Tanana, down it to the Yukon, up it to the Koyukuk, back down to the Unalakleet-Yukon portage, and on down to St. Michael. He survived the mosquitoes and the bears and left the navy to form a company to import supplies, edible and otherwise, into Alaska. The Arctic Trading Company now owned the largest chain of grocery stores and supermarkets in the state, and Safeway and Kroger's had both been rumored to be sniffing around about a possible buyout.
Isaiah Bannister, well-established in Alaska by 1898 (it wasn't the stampeders who got rich; it was the people who sold them food and supplies), had bankrolled Hermann Pilz's Kachemak Coal Company. Hermann had reciprocated, in what was generally held to be a tit-for-tat kind of deal, by marrying Isaiah Bannister's thirty-nine-year-old spinster daughter, his lone ewe lamb, who rejoiced in the name of Calliope. Calliope had surprised everyone by bearing a son a year for five years, raising them to be good men and true, and outliving her much-younger husband by twenty-seven years.
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
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