Excerpt from A Deeper Sleep by Dana Stabenow, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

What little snow had fallen that winter had melted off in a four-day chinook that was the lump of coal in the Park’s stocking the week of Christmas. At five thirty in the afternoon, it had already been dark for an hour and a half and with nothing to reflect what light there was, anything beyond the reach of the Blazer’s headlights looked like a black hole. The good news was that the road was drivable at all. It wasn’t maintained in winter and normally became a snow machine track from October to May, but not this year.

Kate peered up at the sky. “Lights’ll be out tonight, I bet.”

“Yeah.” He didn’t bother looking at the stars; he was watching for the next moose. “Ever thought about getting a telescope?”

“Binoculars work.”

“Yeah.” He was silent for a moment. “In high school my junior class drove to Tucson and visited the planetarium at the University of Arizona. They had it pointed right at the Orion nebula. It was amazing, like this huge pink and purple star had exploded right across the sky.”

She checked the exterior temperature readout. Thirteen below. The red digital three changed to a four as she watched. “Couldn’t stay out very long to look, it’d be too cold.”

“That’s why God invented Carhartts.”

She laughed, a low husk of sound that transported him instantly back to the moments in the clearing that afternoon, waiting without enthusiasm for Willard to show.

Fortunately, Mutt was sitting between them. And if Mutt failed, there was always the shotgun bolted to the dash. Although Jim wasn’t entirely sure shotguns worked on witches.

They passed a Suburban going in the opposite direction. It was easily identified, bright orange with the left front fender missing and the right front fender caved into the wheel well, hanging on through sheer force of will.

“Howie Katelnikof, headed to Bernie’s,” Jim said.

“Probably thinking he’s going to find Willard there,” Kate said, not without satisfaction. “And probably got a customer waiting for Auntie Balasha’s fuel oil.”

Jim thought she was probably right about that. “Howie should choose his roommates more carefully.”

They thought about Howie’s other roommate, which naturally led them to think about the murder trial under way in Ahtna, now before the jury. “All of the evidence was circumstantial.” She remembered the story about Jim’s first trial. “Again.”

He turned to look at her but Mutt was in the way, and it was too dark to see her expression anyway. “Louis Deem’s a wrong guy, Kate.”

“You haven’t been around the Park long enough to know how wrong,” Kate said. “Louis Deem was broken before he was born.”

“Why didn’t you do something?” Because as had every practicing police officer who had ever served the cause of justice in the Park, he knew doing something was what Kate did best.

Kate remembered the time she had tried to. “You assume it was up to me.”

Jim thought this over. It didn’t take him long. “Ekaterina?”

“Emaa was his godmother.”

Jim snorted. Half his time on the job was spent disentangling the lies one Park rat told to alibi another because they were second cousins twice removed.

“Yeah, I know,” she said, not very apologetically, “but it mostly works for us.”

“Not this time.”

She shifted in her seat and craned her head to peer through the window, still looking for the northern lights. “No. Not this time.”

Copyright © 2007 by Dana Stabenow. All rights reserved.