Read The Boy With The Painful Tattoo: Holmes & Moriarity 3 for Free Online Page B

and pewter with royal-blue accents. The carpet was a tone-on-tone floral paisley pattern. How sad was it that I felt more at home in a hotel room than I did in my nice, new house?
    The massage was heavenly, the nap that followed even better. When I woke up, I ordered room service: the citrus-charred breast of organic chicken and—because any entrée with the word “organic” in it grants you permission to have dessert—the lemon and mixed berry cheesecake. After verifying that J.X. had still not left word, I ordered another gin and tonic.
    Clearly I had crossed a line from which there was no coming back. Which is what I had expected from the first, though not quite this soon. I’d expected enough time to organize my half of the medicine cabinet before the wrecking ball fell.
    Or maybe he was just…busy. Conventions did keep you…busy. We had kept each other busy that first convention.
    That didn’t make me feel a whole hell of a lot better. But sitting around thinking about it wasn’t going to help. While I waited for my dinner to arrive, I got out my laptop, and reluctantly checked my email. Rachel had sent me three notes. The first two urged me to grab the first plane out to Las Vegas. The third requested a genealogical search of my Swiss heritage. I sighed.
    Nothing from J.X., but getting an email rather than a phone call from him right now would only have increased my anxiety.
    Dear Christopher,
    It has come to our attention that as boyfriends go, you leave a lot to be desired.
    Yours Truly,
    Your Soon-to-be Next Ex
     
    No, I could do without that. I signed out of email and did some online shopping, downloading a couple of bestselling Scandinavian crime fiction titles, including The Boy in the Suitcase, The Keeper of Lost Causes, The Dinosaur Feather, Death Angels, and The Devil’s Star . Danish, Danish, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish. That was a pretty good sampling, and a couple of Glass Key Award winners to boot.
    When in doubt, work. That had been my mantra for most of my life, and it had never failed me yet. Of course, if I was being strictly accurate, it hadn’t done me a lot of good in the affairs of the heart department. But if there was one thing I had learned over the years, relationships came and went. Work remained constant. Work was my pole star.
    Not that I had any intention of writing Nordic noir, or whatever the hell it was Rachel wanted me to crank out this month, but it couldn’t hurt to see what the kids in the winter parkas were writing.
    Lene and Agnete led off: Holding the glass door open with her hip, she dragged the suitcase into the stairwell leading down to the underground parking lot .
    I skipped ahead and yes, a boy in a suitcase. Alive. Which made a nice change. I would wait till after I had my dinner to see if he stayed that way.
    Jussi wrote: She scratched her fingertips on the smooth walls until they bled, and pounded her fists on the thick panes until she could no longer feel her hands .
    Right. Well, that was marriage for you.
    Next S.J. Gazan’s The Dinosaur Feather . This sounded promising: Anna Bella Nor was dreaming she had unearthed Archaeopteryx, the earliest and most primitive bird known . Very good. An intellectual puzzle. I much preferred not to start out with people in agony, at least not until I was sure my hotel room minibar was stocked to see me through to the end.
    I clicked out of the other books and settled down to read The Dinosaur Feather . Room service arrived and carried in my supper. I scribbled my signature, closed the door firmly, and returned to my book and dinner. Lost china, dead bodies, and even the house on Chestnut Lane seemed a long way away now.
    The next time I looked at the bedside clock it was nine. Only nine o’clock? I could hardly keep my eyes open. I wanted nothing more than to crawl between the sheets, bury my head in the pillows and lose myself in deep, deep sleep. But that had to be the strain of the last few days, not the book.
    Clive