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I ALL BUT danced back into the dining room, shimmying to Clay’s side and perching on the tabletop at his elbow.

“There’s an incredibly attractive journalist here to see you,” I told my friend.

“Uh-huh,” Clay said and lifted his coffee mug, making no move to stand.

“She wants to speak to the Hero of the Inn,” I said. “Sounds like it’s mostly about the Zoe Savage thing. But she’s also curious about you turning up in Boston with the missing evidence needed to solve the Georgette Winter-Lee cold case.”

I’d let Clay hand in the evidence box Shauna Bulger had posted back to the inn from an unknown location, considering that my reputation with the Boston Police wouldn’t help its already difficult chain-of-evidence situation. From what I’d heard, my former colleagues in the force had reopened the cases and were looking into the late Norman Driver’s whereabouts in 1989 around the time of Georgette’s brutal slaying. Convictions would be difficult, particularly without testimony from Mark Bulger about how he’d obtained the packages of evidence or from Shauna about how she’d retrieved the box from her husband’s safe.

Searches for Shauna had been undertaken in all of the woodland from Crane Beach to Manchester-by-the-Sea, but no trace of her had been found. Wanted ads on the TV had dredged the bottom of the barrel, receiving the usual false sightings and rumors. But Shauna Bulger was gone. Whoever she had become when she was attacked in her home, she was living somewhere as that woman now. Forgetting day by day the life that she had lived as Mark Bulger’s wife, and as my friend. Someone new, but not someone who would kill again.

That was my guess—my hope, anyway.

Clay sipped his coffee, and I nudged him so that he almost sloshed it over the edge of his cup as he set it back down.

“Come on, Clay,” I needled. “You never know! That woman waiting out there might be your future fian—”

“Don’t say it,” Clay growled. He hid it well, but at the corner of his mouth, I saw the barest hint of a smile. “I’ll go out there and get rid of her, if you just. Don’t. Say it.”

I watched him go, and in a few moments, the sheriff and the journalist appeared beyond the French doors. While at first the young woman seemed to be wincing against gruff proclamations and that unbreachable stop sign of a hand, I folded my arms and watched as Clay’s posture slowly straightened, and his lips grew into a smile while the two of them talked. Soon he was shrugging humbly and she’d dropped a hip, looked like she was teasing him, making him laugh so that his belly jiggled. It made me feel warm and hopeful to watch Clay giving love another chance.

I looked at my watch, calculating the hours until I needed to go and pick up my own second chance and bring her home.

TURN THE PAGE FOR A BONUS THRILLER FROM JAMES PATTERSON AND CANDICE FOX!

BLACK BLUE

Single-minded detective Harriet Blue won’t rest until she stops a savage killer targeting female college students. But new clues point to a predator more chilling than she could ever have imagined.