Books by Stephen Mack Jones

August Snow

Lives Laid Away

Dead of Winter

Copyright © 2021 by Stephen Mack Jones

Published by

Soho Press, Inc.

227 W 17th street

New York, NY 10011

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Jones, Stephen Mack, 1954- author.

Title: Dead of winter / Stephen Mack Jones.

Description: New York, NY : Soho Crime [2021]

Series: The August Snow novels ; 3

Identifiers: LCCN 2020052288

ISBN 978-1-64129-102-6

eISBN 978-1-64129-103-3

Classification: LCC PS3610.O6289 D43 2021

DDC 813/.6—dc23

Interior design by Janine Agro, Soho Press, Inc.

Printed in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For the strong, brave women who have often picked me up, patched me up, dusted me off and pushed me forward: my mom, Evelyn Louise; MK + Lauren + Christina; Mars; Karen B.; Aunt Sadie; and, of course, Viva La Valentina!

Also for Dr. Marc Lindy & the artist Nan Capogna . . .
the best of humanity

1

1

My house is quietly becoming Frankenstein’s monster.

Carlos Rodriguez and Jimmy Radmon, my good friends and partners in the business of flipping houses in the southwest Detroit neighborhood of Mexicantown, have for the past several years used my house as a laboratory guinea pig for features they’d like to integrate into our renovations. Several months ago, it was “smart house” features: light switches, door locks and thermostats I could operate through an app on my smartphone.

“It’s seamless technology, boss man,” Jimmy told me. “You don’t even need no key or nothin’!”

“What if I drop my phone in a gas station toilet?” I said.

“Then you’re kind of screwed, boss,” Carlos said. “You don’t want to reach inside a gas station toilet. Toilet snakes are poisonous, man.”

“Toilet snakes?” Jimmy said.

“He’s yankin’ your chain, Jimmy,” I said.

“Don’t be doin’ that, man!” Jimmy said, punching Carlos in the shoulder.

Without my having given them my permission to install it, or even a key to the house, a vented gas fireplace log (with remote) appeared in my living room. I hadn’t used the fireplace since I’d moved back to the house, my late parents’, after my $12 million wrongful dismissal dustup with the Detroit Police Department. Every Michigan winter since then the hearth had seemed like a sad waste of a hole in the wall.

In the winters of my childhood, my parents would sometimes sit in front of the fireplace staring at a wood log burning, my mother swaddled in a wool throw blanket, my father’s strong arm around her shoulders.

“What are we doing?” I’d ask after a while, not understanding how something with no plot or exposition could be so interesting.

“Thinking,” my father once answered.

“Or not thinking,” added my mother.

It’s quite possible I hadn’t used the fireplace for exactly this reason: remembrance of those long-ago times with my beloved parents might prove a bit difficult on top of whatever moderate Afghanistan-induced PTSD I brought with me here back in the world.