A taint in the blood by Dana Stabenow Page B

investigators that filicide by fire, despite going undetected too often and being underreported more often than that, was increasing at an alarming rate. All too frequently, the fireman had said, the natural sympathy one feels for parents who have lost their children led investigators to overlook evidence that might give rise to the suspicion that the fire that took the child's life might have been deliberately set. Most of the victims were young, he'd told her, and again she considered the age of the victim and the intended victim in this case. William had been seventeen, Oliver sixteen.
     
    Sometimes, the children had been shot or smothered, and the fire set to cover the evidence. Sometimes, the escape routes were blocked—doors jammed, windows nailed shut.
     
    Kate rummaged around for the picture of the Muravieff home. The photo showed the top-floor window was still wide open, one side of the curtain hanging outside, maybe because of the wind. Or, if it were Oliver's bedroom, because of his swan dive to escape the smoke.
     
    She wondered how hard Victoria had tried to get the boys out. She went back to the trial transcript, and surfaced a little while later with no clear answer to her question. The defense had laid out a timetable that showed where Victoria and her daughter, Charlotte, had been that evening—at a fund-raiser at her brother Erland's for one of the gubernatorial candidates. The man had subsequently lost the election. It cheered Kate to know that the rich and famous could be just as bad at picking politicians as she was.
     
    But she was straying from the point. Victoria and Charlotte had gone to Victoria's brother's house early that afternoon to help with the preparations. Kate found that odd. Didn't the Bannisters and the Pilzes have serfs to do that stuff for them? She had a hard time imagining Charlotte Muravieff with a vacuum cleaner in hand. She and her mother were probably needed to spread pate made from salmon that had never seen a commercial net. On ladyfingers, no doubt. Not that Kate had ever seen a ladyfinger in real life, but she was very well read, and they ate ladyfingers and cucumber and watercress a lot in English novels. None of it sounded very appetizing.
     
    Again, she was straying from the point. Victoria and Charlotte had remained at Victoria's brother's house until the party was over. Everyone who had been interviewed agreed the party broke up at 10:00 P.M. Victoria and Charlotte had arrived home a little after eleven. Victoria's brother's house was in Turnagain. Victoria had lived in the valley north of Anchorage, on five acres near Bodenburg Butte, maybe an hour away by car, which fit.
     
    When had the fire been set? The trial transcript didn't say. Kate found that odd, and one, if not the only, point for her side. If the defense attorney could have demonstrated that the fire might have started while Victoria was on the road or even still at her brother's, he could have given the jury reasonable doubt as to opportunity. Alternatively, if the prosecution could have made a case for the fire in the fireplace taking as many hours to travel the gas paths across the carpet to the curtains as it took Victoria and Charlotte to drive to the party, plus the length of the party itself, that would have significantly improved the state's case.
     
    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 skinny little twenty-five-year-old white guys with no beards, usually preying on young women in their teens and twenties. And yet four months ago, Kate had helped apprehend a sixty-year-old white woman, definitely on the plump side, who was a card-carrying member of the Republican Party, who had killed five of her own children before they learned how to focus their eyes. There