Date: Wed, 7 Jul 2021 17:16:40 -0400
From: Rick Heathen <rick.heathen@gmail.com>
Subject: Millstone and Roche 2, Chapter 5

Millstone & Roche 2 - (The Case of Pure Blue Murder) - Chapter 5

I wrote this story for Nifty, a nifty site if there ever was one. Nifty
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All Rights Reserved © 2021, Rick Haydn Horst Formerly known as Rick
Heathen

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events,
locales, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination
or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living
or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Thank you for delving into this work; I hope you enjoy it.

Note: label names [Main Source] and [Journal Entry] have been changed to
make it easier. It's difficult to get anything updated at Nifty. It will be
corrected throughout on the final ebook, however.


The Case of Pure Blue Murder: a Millstone & Roche Investigation, By Rick
Haydn Horst


CHAPTER FIVE

[Millstone's Sources]

Our SUV had several improvements over the roadster. It could carry
equipment in the cabin and three more people, it was safer, and we hadn't
felt beholden to Winter for our using it. I admit though, the roadster had
its own pluses. It got better gas mileage than the SUV--especially on the
highway, we could put the top down, it could fit into tighter parking
spaces, and most importantly of all, while wearing our seatbelts in the
roadster, Max had access to three inches of my cock to blow me while I
drove. In the SUV? Not so much. The wider vehicle meant the seats sat
farther apart. A handy was the most I could hope for, and that would have
been a mistake. I could only imagine the difficulty of cleaning up after
firing a barrage of 16 cum shots into the crevices of the passenger
side. So, that was not gonna happen.

With us so busy that morning, I worried that I would have one of my
spontaneous erections. My cock kinda worked like a time bomb that would
prime itself almost at random, and sometimes it took little to get it
started. We had seen on the sidewalks the occasional nude and scantily clad
individual celebrating Bare as You Dare Day, but apparently, most of the
celebrants were in the Roman Park. However, as the day wore on, more and
more were walking around the city, and I tried to ignore them, but I had
the sexiest man in Franklin with me everywhere I went. Sometimes, at the
right moment, I could just look at Max and my insides would turn to
jelly. That's when the tickling sensation on the underside of the head of
my cock would start, and I would have no power to control it.

Unlike a lot of places that I had visited, I noticed the citizens of
Franklin walked a lot. It reminded me of New York in that regard, but there
it was a necessity; in Franklin, it seemed more like a choice.

In our need to reach the Belcaro that morning, we probably would have just
walked the three blocks to the nightclub on Brie Street, but in getting to
know Tucker, I learned he had to limit his sun exposure. At 12 times more
likely to develop certain types of skin cancer than the rest of us, he took
that seriously, and we couldn't blame him. He offered us a ride in his new
Jeep, so we took him up on it.

In the few minutes through the traffic lights, Edgerton asked about the
footprint evidence found at The Crypt, and we could only draw one
reasonable conclusion.

"So, the person who opened the case hadn't pounded a stake through the
victim's heart," said Edgerton.

Tucker whipped his head toward Edgerton in the passenger seat. "Oh my god!
Is that how they died? Holy shit..."

"Maybe. Only the pathologist can tell us for sure. When I spoke to the
vamps, they all gave one another an alibi, but now it seems likely that one
or more of them is lying. Tucker, have you ever been to The Crypt?"

He shook his head. "No, I always avoided the Goth clubs. I wouldn't have
wanted them to think of me as a gawker."

"So, let me get this straight," he said, "being thought a sadist is fine,
but a gawker's just going too far."

Tucker laughed. "Life's funny like that, isn't it?"

Naturally, the Belcaro had no valet during the day, so Tucker took a
parking space closer to the door along with the two other vehicles parked
in the otherwise empty lot.

As one would expect, the nightclub had a totally different vibe in the
stark light of day. The building lost all its iconic appeal created by the
dramatic illumination. The bright blue glass looked washed out, and the
daylight displayed the building's less attractive features that the heavy
shadows helped to hide.

Under the covered drop-off, we could see a metal plate on the wall about
chest high by the main entrance. Edgerton walked to it, opened it, pressed
a button inside, and waited.

"Hello?" said a voice.

Edgerton displayed his badge to the camera. "I'm Detective Sergeant Wade
Edgerton. We wish to speak with Dante Fabrioni in person. It's important."

"That's me. What's this about?"

"It's about the police wishing to speak with you," he said, "I know this is
probably a little early for you, and for that, I apologize, but it's
unavoidable."

"Alright. I'll come down."

A second later, the door buzzed, and we could hear an unlocking
click. Edgerton pulled the handle of the windowless door, and we all
entered.

Once the door closed behind us, the brilliant sunshine outside had left us
sightless in the darkened hallway where we met a disconcerting
silence. Upon reaching the ground floor, a bell rang out and the light from
a widening crack spilled into the hallway from the lift's
interior. Standing before us, wearing a black robe and house shoes, was the
handsome-faced bartender who duped me out of $300 the previous evening. It
was Dante Fabrioni leaning against the open door to prevent its closing. I
glanced at Max, and he was equally surprised.

The man rubbed an eye, not having quite awakened from his slumber. "Good
morning, good afternoon...whichever it is." When his hand left his eye, he
looked up. "Oh, it's you," he said the moment he saw Max and me, and he
hadn't tried too hard to suppress his smile.

"We could say the same," said Max.

I was less than amused as well. "You could have told us who you were."

"And ruin my fun? Why would I do that?" He turned to Edgerton. "With your
presence, detective, I take it this is more than a matter of a mere $300."
He stared at Tucker while Edgerton spoke to him.

"Yesterday afternoon, you received a shipment of Caeruleum Occidentum and
signed for it at 5:43 according to our invoice copies."

"Yeah, that sounds right. What's this about?" He eyed Edgerton.

"The driver turned up dead in his motel room this morning."

"He did?" He thought for a moment, glancing at our faces, then shook his
head. "Well, I wouldn't have killed him. He wasn't the hunky guy who
delivered my previous orders, but he made me happy. He gave me my wine in a
careful, timely manner with a smile on his face and a polite, `have a good
evening,' on his lips. What more could I ask?"

"I'm not here to accuse you of killing him," said Edgerton, "but we would
like to talk to you about it."--he tipped his head a little--"This will
take more than a few minutes, so you might want to get comfortable. And we
would like to see that case of wine if we may."

Dante took a deep breath and sighed. "Yeah, alright. Come on up." He moved
to the side of the lift so we could enter.

He pulled a card from his pocket and gazed over at me. "Managed it, anyway,
didn't you?" He let the reader above the buttons read the card, and the
doors closed.

"You had your fun at my expense."

"If it's any consolation, the money went to a good cause," he said. "The
bartender's wife had had a difficult pregnancy, and she went into labor
last night, so Linsey wanted to be there. I let her go on the clock, and
your $300 made up for the tips she would have lost."

"How did it go?" asked Max.

"Thanks to the miracle of modern medicine, the mother and baby girl are
fine."

When the lift doors opened, we entered a hallway as we had on the other
floors the night before, except that the hall of the third floor held a
round lobby sofa in tufted brown leather. He had the end of the hallway
walled off as though it were an exterior wall with a set of solid wood
doors carved in an old-world Italian design with forged iron studs.

We followed him beyond the door and found ourselves in a cozy Italian
bar. The beautiful and well-loved bar top and bar back could easily have
been 100 years old. A conspicuous antique copper espresso machine, adorned
with an eagle, had sat off to the side. The bar had three booths and a few
sets of comfortable seating, that included a brown leather couch and
chairs, where we took up residence as Dante fetched the wine. He wheeled in
the case from a back room and grabbed a pair of scissors from behind the
bar. He carefully laid the case onto the leather ottoman in front of
me. Without the case from The Crypt beside it to make a fine comparison, as
far as I could tell, it looked the same as the other, including the straps
which had the same "OC" logo repeated across them.

"You've yet to open it," I said.

"I still have a couple of bottles from the last case. I just got it early
to save on the shipping with the others. But I checked the seals upon
delivery, so I know it's good."

"Save on the shipping with the others?" asked Edgerton. "What does that
mean?"

"With the other people making orders," he said. "DiSCo--that's the
shipper--isn't like the main shipping companies that most people use; they
don't do routing and transfers. They make single-vehicle special deliveries
across the country. So, the more deliveries they can make within a
fifty-mile radius means the cost of shipping is divided by the number of
drop-offs. Initially, I would have paid for it all, but when I told a
friend from the Franklin Nightclub Association about the wine, he decided
to buy a case as a birthday present. So, the shipping would have been
halved for each of us. I made my order, he made his order, and just before
Prego Imports sent it out, someone else made an order, so when Prego
emailed me that they were sending it out, they let me know they divided the
shipping into thirds, which saved me a further seven hundred and fifty
dollars."

"Do you still have that email?" I asked.

He pulled out his phone. "It's in my trash, but I'll forward it to
you. What's an email address for that?"

Edgerton gave him his own, and upon receiving it, he checked the email. "It
has the address for the import company and a phone number." Edgerton
gestured to the container. "Okay, go ahead."

After Dante made two snips of the straps, I unlatched the case and opened
it. The lid felt different, heavier. The interior looked identical to what
I remember from a couple of hours earlier. It had the same foam interior,
the same blue waxed bottles sticking up with their OC logo stamped into the
wax on top. I pulled out a bottle and immediately I could tell a
difference. "This doesn't feel right," I said. The bottle looked the same,
it was the same color bottle, the same wax, the same label. I said to Dante
who sat by me on the couch, "You deal with a lot of wine; you tell me. Is
it my imagination?"

I handed him the bottle and the moment he held it, he felt it too, and he
wasn't happy. "It's noticeably lighter," he said, "by several ounces." He
handed it back, gazing upon Edgerton. "I paid almost 200 thousand dollars
for that case. What is this?"

I looked closer at the label. It had all the typical characteristics, and
in the same locations as far as I could tell. I really needed one of the
other bottles for a proper comparison, but then I noticed it. "This
morning, Officer Sawyer told us that the vintner began production in 2005,
but this says the vintage is 2000."

"Besides the difference in weight, that must have been what the guy at The
Crypt looked for," said Max.

"Shouldn't we open one?" asked Tucker. "Just to see what's inside."

We all looked to Edgerton who took a moment. "Yeah. We need to know."

Dante held out his hand. "If you will allow me..."

I handed him the bottle, and we joined him at the bar. He set a wine glass
before him and carefully cut away the top of the soft blue wax seal and
removed the metal cover used to protect the cork. With able hands that had
uncorked innumerable bottles over the years, he used a trusty screw and
removed this one with ease. Attached to the cork was cotton filler, and
once out of the way, he tipped the bottle to pour the contents into the
wine glass, and like dimes from an old slot machine, out came a trickle of
little blue pills.

"Is that generic Viagra?" asked Dante.

"One moment..." Edgerton fished into the pocket of his jacket for a slim
case that held several instruments, including a long pair of tweezers. He
picked a pill from the glass, and we studied it. One side of the pill had
the word "MURDER" written on it in tiny lettering, and on the other side,
we saw a rudimentary depiction of a stereotypical chalk outline. It looked
like the ones they used years ago for the press to photograph after
someone's murdered body was taken away. The police no longer do that; it
contaminates the crime scene.

Max also studied the pill over Edgerton's shoulder. "That looks like
Ecstasy to me."

"Have any of you ever seen these before?" I asked.

"I haven't," said Max to which Tucker and Dante concurred.

"Neither have I," said Edgerton. "The start of something new, maybe? We
need Narcotics in on this to see what they say and run a few tests of it."
He dropped the pill into the glass, pulled a small evidence bag from his
kit, and poured the pills from the glass into it.

"Iota works for William Bennet in Boxly," said Tucker, and we all turned to
him. "He asked Farron in the men's room last night if anyone was selling
some Ecstasy. Maybe he was looking for these pills."

"I hope not," said Edgerton as we returned to our seats. "Bennet is bad
news."

Tucker said to Dante, "I saw you have security bring Iota up here. So, what
happened?"

"So, that's where I saw you," he said. "I saw you at the balcony wall last
night. If I hadn't had so many irons in the fire, I would have spoken to
you. They brought Iota up, but I didn't invite him into my home; I met them
in the hallway. I told him that I knew who he was, what he was, and I
barred him from the club. He said he didn't know what I was talking
about. It's bad for business for customers to see someone ejected from the
club, so they quietly escorted him down the fire escape from the piano
bar."

Max got my attention. "Millstone...," he said and tapped the clock on his
phone. "We have an appointment in thirty minutes with a client who would
not appreciate our lack of punctuality."

"Oh shit...right," I said and turned to Edgerton. "Are you good for the
moment?"

"Yeah, you go. This will take a bit longer," he said. "Tucker, will you
stay? We need to talk."

"That would be helpful," I said to him. "You can tell us what we miss, and
Max and I will just walk the three blocks."

When Tucker indicated that he would stay, Max and I departed.


[Tucker's Journal]

When Millstone and Max made to leave, I rotated around taking the seat that
Millstone had vacated on the couch by Dante, and something unexpected
happened. Wade had his back to it, so he hadn't seen, but we sat in
silence, as Wade texted an officer in Narcotics a message along with a
photo of the pills. From where I sat, I could see the entrance to the
hallway that led to the rest of Dante's apartment, and when we heard the
door snap shut behind Millstone and Max, someone stepped into view in the
hallway, perhaps thinking we had all left. It was Gerhardt Last, wearing a
blue t-shirt that he couldn't have worn the night before, and nothing
else. I thought how he must be working his way through the entire Fabrioni
family. The moment he saw us, he disappeared again, but Dante noticed that
I saw him. Of course, Dante couldn't know that I recognized the man's
identity, but it seemed clear from his subtle reaction that, for reasons
unknown, we weren't supposed to know he was there. So, I gave Dante some
standard disarming indicators, and they worked like a charm. I looked him
in the eye, and with a flash of raised eyebrows, I gave him a surreptitious
wink with a knowing smile. Afterward, I acted as though it never happened,
and everything went back to normal.

"I've asked Sergeant Rhodes in Narcotics about it," said Wade, "and he's
never seen these either."

"What about my wine?"

"I'm sorry, but we most likely can't get it back. It seems likely that
because this case and the one at The Crypt look identical to a casual
observer, that fact probably applies to all three cases, and the new driver
got them mixed up. For some reason, they sent them without packing slips on
the cases. The delivery man probably thought they were all the same because
the packaging and invoices indicated they were."

"Well, they would be, wouldn't they?" I asked.

"Exactly. If they were trying something new, it failed. I suspect this case
probably should have gone to the third location in Boxly where your case
went. If Bennet is involved, I wouldn't have wanted to stand within easy
reach when he discovered his wine bottles were full of wine. If he has a
connection to the chapel, we'll find it, and we will probably need to go
there."

"To Boxly...," I said. "Have their police any animosity toward ours?"

He nodded. "The Franklin Coppers have a far better baseball team than the
Boxly Blackjacks. We always win, so you can imagine how they take losing to
a team made up of, in their view, a bunch of freaks."--he turned to
Dante--"If we find your case of wine, I will do my best to get it for
you. In the meantime, I have Narcotics putting the word out that the police
have this case in their possession. The drug barons need to know you no
longer have it because they might kill you to get it. They may have killed
the delivery driver and Bartholomew Beausoleil."

Dante gasped. "Barty is dead?"

"Yes. I understand he was your friend; I'm sorry for your loss."--Wade
began pushing the cotton filler back into the bottle--"I would give it a
day before you leave your home to let the word spread."--he slipped the
bottle into the case with the cork before closing it up--"We need to get
this downstairs," he said to me. "Uniform is on the way."

Dante asked him, "How did Barty die?"

"He had a wooden stake through his heart, but that may or may not have
happened post-mortem. We'll know in a few hours."

"I can't believe he's gone," said Dante, "I spoke with him last night. He
said he received his wine and thanked me for the recommendation. If that's
how he died though, then I'm glad; that's how he would have wanted to go."

"Really...," said Edgerton.

"Oh, yes."


When Wade and I passed through the door, I began texting Max about
Gerhardt. "So, what would you want to talk to me about? Is this about my
giving input? I know I'm new at this, I probably should have just kept
quiet and observed."

"No, not at all. I'm pleased with your input. Let's discuss it in the Jeep
after uniform takes this away."

On the ground floor, when the lift doors closed behind us, we stood in the
near pitch-black hallway navigating our way by the faint illumination of
the exit sign and a sliver of sunshine leaking through the bad seal of the
main entryway. We both leaned against the inside door while we waited, each
of us standing on opposite sides of that sliver of light, and I felt Wade's
hand on my stomach beneath my shirt.

"Did you enjoy pretending to be a sadist? Was it fun? That's alright if it
was. I imagine it could be."

"At times it was great fun, but the persona required maintenance, and that
had a profound effect on my life. That part was an odious chore."

"What do you mean?"

"I only used that persona to get masochists to think that within my pants
lay the solution to their ongoing sexual needs, and their belief that I got
off on hurting them went along with that. However, once word got around,
people knew me as a hardcore sadist, and that caused me to have to remain
in character whenever I left the apartment. After a while, it got tedious,
and it turned many interesting people off who would have liked the real
me. The short-term personas were usually much more fun."

"So, what started all the pretending?"

I took a deep breath. "It started with my first persona. After that, the
others seemed easy."

"What was it?"

"The first one was my hardest and the least fun of all, but fortunately it
had an expiration date. Because of the abuse at the group home, I took on
two after-school jobs just to stay away from Declan O'Neill who ran the
home. I needed the money, but if I worked it gave him less time to abuse
me, and that was on top of being made to fuck his wife every night. I think
he hated me because I could do something for her that he couldn't. Anyway,
after I went to the police, I contacted Charles Stanley, the pro bono
lawyer who became my avuncular friend. I knew that fifteen was the minimum
age for emancipation in Maryland. I told Charles that I wanted out of the
system. With the money from my two jobs, my grades in school, and my clean
record, I fit the criteria. My biggest problem was that I was an abused,
skinny, 15-year-old kid who had to convince myself and the court that I
needed no one to take care of me. So, my first persona was that of Adult."

"Oh my god..." He pulled me to him, wrapped his arms around me, and hugged
me tightly.

"After my emancipation, I had two years of court-ordered therapy for the
abuse. Since then, I've done a lot of work on myself. I'm not the same
person anymore. Along the way, I just discovered that I have a knack for
pretending, and it's come in handy over the years. It saved me from some
early scrapes in Baltimore. And when I played the lead in the high school
dramas; I never had a dry eye in the house."

He pulled back from me. "How can I know that anything you just told me is
true?"

I laughed. "You and your detective mind, I swear. I figured that question
would come up sooner or later, and it's completely fair to ask. I know some
people might say this to throw you off, so you'll believe them without
bothering, but I absolutely insist that you run a full background check on
me; I want no secrets or doubts between us."

"We had checked a bit when we suspected you of murder," he said, "but we
didn't go all the way back."

"You're welcome to search all the way back to conception if you
like. Although I must warn you, you'll find the reading of my first nine
months a total drudge."


Once Wade had relinquished the case to the officers in the patrol car, and
we climbed into the Jeep, I discovered why he had asked me several of the
things that he had that morning. I doubted he set me up by his questions
but rather was feeling me out before making his request.

"I want to ask you for something, and so that you know, you're welcome to
turn me down flat."

"Yes, you can have my hand in marriage," I said. "The rest of the body
comes with it, of course. It's kind of a package deal."

"Well, man can't live by handjobs alone."

"Oh, I don't know about that. This left hand of mine's pretty magical."

I have loved to hear Wade laugh and making him laugh has been one of my
joys in life. Once he came around, he made his request of me, and it was
nice to know he had that much confidence in me.

"I would like you to go to The Crypt tonight, pretend to be a goth, and
keep your eyes and ears open. They're having Barty's memorial there at
midnight."

"What are you expecting me to witness?"

"I don't know what the autopsy results will say, but just from what Dante
said to us, I suspect one or more of them is involved. To stake someone
through the heart is illegal, either before or after their death. But the
problem is, we need some evidence, and I want to know the full
circumstances of what occurred."

"Isn't this dangerous? Why not choose some trained officer?"

"I admit that I don't know this for a fact, but I think the only person in
danger is now dead. And I'm not asking you to catch a killer; it's just a
fact-finding mission. But I'm asking you because I trust you, and you have
the qualities necessary to make it work. You're strong and capable of
defending yourself if anything should happen--I don't think it will; it's
just a memorial service. You're smart, and you think fast. You enjoy
pretending, and you have enough bad boy vibe to successfully convinced
people for years of your sadism, so vampire goth should be easy. Also,
you're a remarkably handsome man with a pallor virtually that of an
albino. All of which, I find extremely appealing, by the way. Besides, I
can't ask any of the cops at the precinct, most of them have suntans--which
doesn't exactly say `vampire'--and with all of them, a change of clothing
wouldn't make them anything other than what they are."

"So, they can't act," I said.

He shook his head. "They couldn't even mime their way out of a paper bag."

I agreed to do it, but I told him that I would need to inform Millstone and
Max. At that point, they were probably talking to Johann, so I would have
to wait.


I took Wade back to his SUV, and he told me that after our discussion with
Dante, he had questions to ask the owner of the motel. So, I went with him
to the front office.

The faulty air conditioner in room 20 should have told me something because
the place seemed to have gone downhill from when I stayed there, the office
smelled like a septic tank. No one met us at the desk, so Wade rang the
bell.

A haggard-looking man came from the back with a hand to his head like he
had a headache, and he spoke like he had a hangover. "Hello. I'm
Harold. Would you like a room for one night or two? Or even an hour or
two. At this point, I really don't care."

Wade showed him his badge. "I'm Detective Sergeant Edgerton of the Franklin
PD. I have a question about the man in room 20. Had someone booked his room
for him or was he a walk-in?"

After checking his computer, he said, "A corporation made the reservation
on July 8th. A company called Disco."--he turned to me--"And here we all
thought disco was dead. Apparently, it just incorporated."

"What was the reservation for?"

"For last night, a room with a queen bed, and I made a note that they made
the request for room 20."

"Really... DiSCo is a shipping company. We know they've made nearby
deliveries in the past. Can you tell me if they reserved rooms here for
their drivers on other occasions?"

Harold shook his head. "I don't think so."

"Are you sure?"

"I make all the reservations in the system. There's no way I could have let
a name like Disco go without a witty one-liner, and I would have remembered
that."

Wade smiled a little. "I believe you." Wade gestured down the hallway from
where the man came. "The smell. What's going on with that?"

"I apologize. We had a problem with the plumbing yesterday. Don usually has
these things fixed, but he woke up ill this morning, and I have a terrible
headache."

Wade made a quick glance at me, and back to Harold and pointed down the
hall. "Is Don back that way?"

"Yes, he's lying down."

"I'm going to ask you to go outside with my partner Tucker, and I will
bring Don to you outside."

"Why? What for?"

"You've both been exposed to sewer gasses. Go with Tucker, and when you get
outside take deep breaths of fresh air, okay? Tucker, when you get out
there call Nine-One-One, give them my name and tell them what happened."

"Right," I said. "Come along, Harold. We both need some fresh air."

About 6 minutes later, several emergency services arrived, including the
fire department. It took some effort to get Don out of the building, but
Wade managed it, and Don did not look good. Wade probably saved their
lives. Apparently, Harold had been in and out of the office that morning
because of the murder, but Don hadn't.

I needed to accomplish a lot before the memorial that night, so while the
ambulance crew tended the couple, Wade took me to my Jeep.

I said, "It's never a dull moment with you, is it?"

"The job has its dull moments, but those never last. Something's always
happening somewhere in this city. I need to hand this scene over to
uniform, and head back to the precinct." He put his hands on my hips,
pulled me toward him, and rocked his pelvis on my cock with a sexy little
smile on his face. When he started speaking, he had used a slow and
intimate voice that sounded almost seductive. "Something you should
know...pay attention to your time with me, because one day when I seriously
ask you to marry me, you will need all this experience to make an informed
decision."

"When you ask?"

He nodded. "Count on it." He then pulled my face to his, kissed me with
great passion, told me he would see me later, and then walked to one of the
uniformed officers at the scene.

After that morning, he acted released from all his restraints, and he
showed me more of himself. I found his confident and assertive approach
refreshing. Masochists are so passive, and they always made me above
them. Or more likely, thinking me a real sadist, they assumed I would, even
in my feigned narcissism, view them as beneath me. On that day, I witnessed
Wade in his element, and I loved his can-do and in-charge attitude. I think
he wanted me to see that, in our relationship, we could be equals. I
couldn't believe anyone as incredible as Detective Sergeant Wade Edgerton
could possibly want me, but he did.

------------

Please send questions, comments, or complaints to
RickHaydnHorst@gmail.com. I would enjoy reading what you have to say. I ask
for patience, I'm writing this as I go, like I did the first novel, and
it's going to take time. Keep checking back!