The Singing of the Dead (Kate Shugak Novels Book 11) by Dana Stabenow

Author:Dana Stabenow [Stabenow, Dana]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Mystery; Thriller & Suspense, Mystery, Private Investigators, Women Sleuths, Thrillers & Suspense, Crime, Crime Fiction
ISBN: 0312982887
Amazon: B003J564VW
Publisher: Minotaur Books
Published: 2007-04-02T00:00:00+00:00

10

W hat do you drive?” she asked Tony.

“A Ford Escort, also known as a McCar,” he said.

“Could I borrow it for a couple of hours?”

“Sure.” He pitched her the keys. “Two door, dark blue, should be around back of the kitchen.”

“Thanks, Tony. I'll fill her up before I bring her back.”

At the Airstream, Kate ducked beneath the crime-scene tape and opened the door. Mutt looked at Kate pleadingly from the cement square that served as the trailer's front porch. “God knows you deserve it,” Kate said. “Take the afternoon off, girl. Go.” Mutt gave a joyous bark and in two leaps was in the underbrush. A spruce hen exploded upward, squawking indignantly. The hydraulic hinge pulled the door shut behind Kate and nudged her the rest of the way inside the tiny living room. She set the envelope containing the copies of Paula's notes down on the table and took a long, slow look around.

You had to train long and hard to see the rest of the room a body was laying in. Maybe Kate was out of practice, but she didn't remember the matching flowered print of the curtains and the sofa cushions on the two couches with the table between them. Poppies, it looked like, on a dense forest green background that gave the material the look of tapestry, and almost hid the bloodstain from view.

The corresponding bloodstain on the white linoleum-tile floor had dried a hard brown. She'd been shot once, had fallen to the couch, then to the floor. They'd found no evidence that she'd hit the table.

Bookcases, homemade but sturdily built and nicely finished with a natural stain and a light coating of varnish, filled every available inch of the wall space above the couch backs, between the windows, and below the ceiling. The books were alphabetized by author, all history, all about eras of Alaskan history, World War II, gold rush days, the Civil War. Some Kate recognized from her own library: The Thousand Mile War by Brian Garfield, The Flying North by Jean Potter, Pierre Berton's The Klondike Rush , his mother's I Married the Klondike , and Murray Morgan's Confederate Raider . Little yellow sticky notes festooned the pages, where passages had been marked in light pencil.

She saw an oversized book bound in leather with fading letters on the spine, which proved to be a copy of the duke of Abruzzi's account of his expedition to climb Mount St. Elias in 1897, a book Kate had given up on acquiring when Rachel at Twice Told Tales in Anchorage had told her it was priced on the Internet at seven hundred and fifty dollars. There were photographs, and she sat down on the unstained couch and leafed through them, pausing to read a paragraph here and there.

She replaced the book on the shelf with due reverence, and wondered what other treasures Paula had hidden away in her little tin hot dog. There was no filing cabinet, no notes. Everything Paula had been working on must have been either in the notebooks or on the laptop.

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