Robert B. Parker’s Revenge Tour

Twenty-Eight

Chapter Two of the unknown author’s manuscript was waiting for me outside my office this time.

By now Melanie Joan and Samantha were on their way to The Newbury, where Samantha had booked a function room for the press conference about Richard Gross’s murder. Melanie Joan had finally come downstairs wearing a black Brunello Cucinelli dress, ready to go play the part of grieving friend, since grieving mistress, the role she really wanted, was out of the question.

I knew it was a Cucinelli because she told us all, Samantha and Spike and me, before she went back upstairs to change her shoes.

“She seems to have rallied,” Spike said. “At least sartorially.”

“For the best possible reason,” Samantha whispered. “Cameras and microphones await.”

I watched them get into Spike’s Mercedes and drive off. I had decided to skip the show, already thinking about how I was going to keep her safe going forward without asking Spike to put his life permanently on hold. I knew he’d do it for me, being Spike. I would do the same for him. But I wasn’t going to ask him.

I walked to the office, taking my time in Chamber of Commerce weather, temperature in the low seventies, no clouds, trying not to project about the immediate future. Mine, Melanie Joan’s, even Spike’s. Before she’d gotten dressed, Melanie Joan and I had spent a long time at the kitchen table, as I explained that it simply wasn’t logical to believe Richard Gross’s death wasn’t bound to her current circumstances, and the threats against her, and the danger she was still in. That, if anything, the threat level had now been raised to whatever was highest, orange or red. I could never keep my threat colors straight.

But she seemed secure in the belief that all she needed was Spike, and me, to protect her from everything, including another insurrection.

I walked across the Public Garden to Boylston and then made the right and went up the stairs and saw the white padded envelope on the floor, with my name written in Magic Marker on the outside.

I picked it up, unlocked my new and improved Schlage deadbolt, sat down behind my desk, opened the envelope, and immediately saw this written across the top page, in what I had a bad feeling was real blood this time:

I didn’t hesitate and called Frank Belson and told him what I had. He asked where I was. I told him my office. He said he forgot I had an office, and that he was on his way. While I waited, I read the pages, with A Girl and Not a God open next to them. Once again it was the same story beginning to unfold. And these pages had the same handwriting, same faded yellow paper as Chapter One.

Belson arrived twenty minutes later. He bagged the top page and said he was going to take it to the state police lab himself. But then he had never been one for delegating, any more than his former boss, Martin Quirk, had. His new boss, a woman named Glass, made him seek any possible opportunity to get as far away from her, and the office, as possible.

“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” I said to him.

“Jesus,” he said. “I hope not.”

“It’s going to be Gross’s blood, isn’t it?” I said.

He was out the door without answering me. He called a few hours later from the lab in Sudbury.

“It’s a match with Gross,” he said.

There was a pause.

“A message written in blood?” Frank Belson said. “What the fuck?”

I told him he’d taken the words right out of my mouth.