title: Death Can Be Murder: A Wild Women Mystery
author:  Paulette Callen 
description: Paulette Callen Paulette Callen was born in eastern South Dakota, graduated from Concordia College in Moorhead, MN, completed a year of graduate work in theatre at the University of Minnesota, and for ten years made her home in Minneapolis, while she was active in small regional theatres. She moved to New York in 1977, where she studied acting with Herbert Berghof and began writing. Her first written work was a play Angelique, which enjoyed a staged reading at the Apple Corps Theatre in Manhattan, and a few years later, at the Attic Theatre in Jersey City. In 1994, she received their first place award for fiction from Negative Capability Press in Mobile, AL. Her first novel Charity was published by Simon and Schuster in 1997. The following year, Berkeley Signature brought out the paperback edition. Her poems, stories and essays have appeared in small journals and magazines, such as The Animals' Voice and Between the Species, A Journal of Ethics published by the Albert Schweitzer Foundation at Berkeley. Her work has appeared in anthologies, most recently Audacious Creativity and Dog Blessings. The poem See, Nadia! was included in Beyond Lament, Poets of the World Bearing Witness to the Holocaust (Northwestern University Press) and was subsequently selected by artist Carol Rosen for inclusion in her Holocaust Series, an eight-book collection of photo/text collages housed in the Whitney Museum, the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, and the University of Tel Aviv. Paulettes employment history includes the Communications Department of a large corporation, a movie theatre, a bank, the gift industry, the ASPCA, the insurance sector as well as summer stock theatres and a year-long stint with a comedy improvisation company. For nearly four years she served as a volunteer staff member for POWARS (Pet Owners with Aids Resource Services) in New York City. She lives with a rescued blind Shih Tzu on Manhattans Upper West Side.
zlib_text: **Chapter 1**
  
    
    
    
  
  The dead were her business. She lived with them, worked with them, studied
  them. She dreamed of them. And because that didn't seem to be enough, in some
  deep, secret chamber of her heart, she mourned for them.
  
  A decade as a cop had toughened her, given her a cold, clinical, and often
  cynical eye toward death and its many causes. It made scenes such as the one
  she viewed now, on a rainy night on a dark street nasty with litter, almost
  too usual. But still, she felt.
  
  Murder no longer shocked, but it continued to repel.
  
  The woman had been lovely once. Long trails of her golden hair spread out like
  rays on the dirty sidewalk. Her eyes, wide and still with that distressed
  expression death often left in them, were a deep purple against cheeks
  bloodlessly white and wet with rain.
  
  She'd worn an expensive suit, the same rich color as her eyes. The jacket was
  neatly buttoned in contrast to the jerked-up skirt that exposed her trim
  thighs. Jewels glittered on her fing