How to Paint a Cat (Cats and Curios Mystery) Read Online Free PDF Page B

behind the tormented artist, energetically keeping pace with Monty’s agitated gait.
    It was the spiritual presence of the young man who had been viciously slain two months earlier. He was dressed in the same style of clothes he’d worn during his breakin to the Green Vase: a long-sleeved T-shirt, a pair of worn blue jeans, a baseball cap pulled down over his dark-skinned forehead, and high-top canvas sneakers.
    The bridge of Isabella’s nose crinkled and her ears turned sideways, an outward expression of her inner bafflement. Some answers eluded even her cunning insight.
    After much thought and analysis, she couldn’t figure out what Spider’s ghost was doing in Jackson Square—or why he had chosen to haunt the city’s soon-to-be inaugurated interim mayor.

The Reporter

Chapter 7
    YESTERDAY’S NEWS

    SAN FRANCISCO’S DAILY newspaper occupied an Art Deco–style building at the corner of Fifth and Mission. A square tower ridged with streamlined piping rose from the grimy front entrance. Just above street level, a series of small reliefs depicted vintage scenes of printing and reporting.
    Decades of pollution and rain had grayed the stone facade. The aging structure was as much of a relic as the Linotype presses it had once housed.
    The faded retro design seemed to fit right in with the surrounding neighborhood’s mix of auto body shops, secondhand thrift stores, seedy hotels, and industrial warehouses. The bus stop shelter across the street was scarred with countless spray paint markings. Makeshift cardboard tents had been pushed up against the back side of the shelter’s plastic sheeting, the temporary home to a rotating pool of vagrants. Scattered trash littered the sidewalk, and a stale stench of sweat and cannabis hung in the air.
    A less discerning eye might have recoiled from this grim setting. But for Hoxton Finn, one of the city’s veteran reporters, the newspaper’s offices couldn’t have been situated in a better location.
    The building was eminently functional, blessedly lacking the so-called improvements that often came with modern-day infrastructure. Automatic lighting systems that flicked on and off as a person entered and exited a room annoyed him to no end.
    As for temperature controls, the heat that emanated from the building’s network of ancient water pipes was more than sufficient. He would rather work from a cardboard box by the bus stop than behind a sealed window in a room pumped with central air.
    In terms of convenience, the spot was unmatched. One block south of Market, the paper’s offices were only a short walk to both City Hall and an underground station for the BART and Muni lines. Multiple cabstands were within a few minutes’ reach. Hox could easily get anywhere he needed to go with minimal cost and hassle.
    The gritty scene that played out each day near the building’s front steps was, in his opinion, one of the office’s highlighting features.
    There was no risk the place would ever be described as pretty.
    • • •
    AFTER MORE THAN twenty-five years of reporting, Hoxton Finn’s broad shoulders and chiseled chin were recognized throughout the city. Taxi drivers, policemen, street vendors, and bankers knew him on sight—and everyone called him Hox. He was a fixture, an eccentric in a town that venerated caricature.
    The reporter brushed all notion of celebrity aside. Divorced with no children, he preferred his own company to that of others. Gruffly succinct, he was direct in his questioning and sparing in his follow-up, a no-nonsense man living in a nonsense-filled world.
    The juxtaposition was often jarring—for both sides.
    For the last several weeks, however, the community had been spared the brunt of Hox’s caustic jabs. He’d spent every waking hour sequestered inside the newspaper’s offices, barricaded behind the locked door of a third-floor conference room.
    Piles of news clippings, Internet printouts, files, and handwritten notes were spread across the