Chapter 92

Chapter 92—Jack sleeps deeply

—perhaps too deeply 

11:27 a.m., Friday, December 30 

Instinctively, Jack quickly reached into his jacket pocket and removed the small .38 Special revolver Roger had given him earlier. He walked over to the door and examined the lock. There were no signs of forced entry. “Who ever got in here either picked it, or had a key,” he muttered.”
Jack then locked the door, and glanced around to see what might be missing. “The bag with Reg’s belongings,” he said. “It’s gone.”
Jack had slept so soundly that he never heard the burglar slip in and take the bag.
“They obviously didn’t want to kill me,” Jack reasoned. “And apparently they didn’t want anything except for that bag of Reg’s clothes.”
He then looked down and saw the rectangular stain on the table where he had spread out the note from Reginald. “They took the puzzle,” Jack said aloud. “Could it be that’s really what they were after?”
With the .38 still in his hand, Jack walked back into the bedroom. He found all of his belongings right where he had left them.
“Must be they were only after Reg’s stuff,” he thought. “The puzzle probably escaped Roger’s attention, because it was stuck by the blood to the inside of the pocket. But these guys knew that there was something else. And they knew that Roger had returned Reg’s belongings to me. The intrigue here just doesn’t stop.”
Jack reasoned that there must be some serious significance to the puzzle that Reg had created. “The only two things that I can think of that would prompt Reg to create such a puzzle would be money, or politics. At this point, it seems unlikely that it had to do with politics. In that respect, Reg was a lot like me—he did not view himself as a political animal. Basically, Reg viewed politics as a means to make money. So, that would suggest that the note related to money.”
The more Jack thought about it, the more certain he grew that Reginald would be writing about money. “And that would make a lot of sense,” he reasoned. “Reg had all that gold to deal with. Perhaps that note explains where he hid it.”
Just then Jack’s cell phone rang again.