Siren of the Waters: A Jana Matinova Investigation, Vol. 2 Read Online Free PDF

the sink, not even a glass left out to dry. Detergent under the sink, never opened. Full bottles of this and that, still sealed. This was a person who ate out all the time. Her last stop was the refrigerator.
    She could hear Seges begin to toss the living room as she opened the freezer compartment. Frozen food was piled up in a haphazard way. Not like the contents of the rest of the apartment. Jana began pulling out the boxes of frozen food, dumping them in the sink, finally emptying the freezer. Nothing.
    She stood back and eyed the refrigerator, both of its doors open, wondering what she had missed. The only item stored on the shelves of the refrigerator door was a small kielbasa in clear plastic wrap.
    Jana pulled a knife from one of the drawers and cut herself a small piece of the sausage, chewing it as she walked back into the living room. She had a sudden pang of memory: her daughter, Katka. Always snacking on little pieces of sausage in the kitchen. Now she was grown and gone. Jana pushed the memory away.
    Seges was on the floor in the living room, the couch upside down. He was pulling at a small notebook that was taped to the underside of the sofa, finally tugging it loose from the fabric.
    He grinned, satisfied with himself. “How about a piece of sausage for this book?”
    Jana cut Seges a piece, passing it to him in exchange for the notebook. Then she sat at the dining table and carefully opened the cover. Seges leaned over her shoulder, chewing loudly on the sausage as she slowly leafed through the pages.
    “You like the sausage?” she asked offhandedly.
    “Very good.”
    “He’s not Albanian.”
    “The sausage maker?”
    “The dead man or whoever put the sausage in the refrigerator.”
    “You can tell from the notebook? The clothes? The apartment?”
    “The sausage. It’s pork. Albanians are mostly Moslem. Pork is forbidden.”
    “He could be part of the Christian minority.”
    “Perhaps. Except Christians from there don’t eat it much because it offends their neighbors. So, when they leave Albania, they haven’t acquired a taste for it. They continue not to eat it. Habit.”
    She went back to her focus on the book: columns of numbers, names, sums. But nothing that had a point of reference to allow her to give it meaning. Seges pointed to one page’s entries.
    “Truck, table, table, vegetables, stone. A shopping list? No,” he answered himself, his speech a little slurred from the kielbasa he was chewing.
    “Nobody tapes a shopping list to the underside of a couch.” Jana opened the book’s rear cover, touching the inside, holding it up to the light. “It’s water-stained. Still damp. It was taped to the couch recently. Not long ago enough for it to dry out. Our man in the car died a few days ago. Unless he was resurrected in the morgue, he could not have taped it there.”
    “So?”
    “Maybe it was the man who had the jacket with the coin in it? I think the book was originally in the freezer. Frost got on the cover, then melted when it was removed from the refrigerator.”
    “Why would the man put it in the freezer in the first place, then take it out and hide it under the couch?” He thought about it. “Maybe the fellow was afraid we wouldn’t find it in the freezer,” he joked, “so he taped it under the couch knowing we would look there.” Seges laughed at his own silliness.
    Jana silently noted Seges’s response. He was too easily convinced he was wrong, even when he was right. She decided to give him a pat on the back. “Good for you, Seges. Maybe he was afraid we wouldn’t find it in the freezer.”
    “I’m right?” Seges tried to conceal his surprise with false jocularity. “You see, you will have to listen to me from now on. I’m a certified genius.”
    “Absolute genius. The Einstein of the Slovak police.” She continued to study the contents of the book. “Can you decipher the writing?”
    “It’s in code.”
    “Brilliant, Seges. I will have to rely on you