Chapter 45

WE RAN ACROSSthe crowded square and pushed through the ring of people at the police tape around the bank. The alarms inside were still squealing, but the big glass doors were open and cops were running in and out. One passed me with his hands covered in blood, rubbing them on the front of his shirt, looking dazed.

I knew Hope was on the edge. Anyone who had lived for long enough in the kind of environment she had was probably pretty close to manic-depressive.

I spend so much of my job hoping I’m wrong. I hoped, as I pushed through the crowd, that somehow I’d made a mistake while joining the dots. Connecting the yachting magazine to the missing couple who had disappeared at sea. Maybe I was jumping to conclusions—leaping down a rabbit hole that would take me nowhere. I hoped I’d walk into the bank manager’s office and find the missing couple there, safe.

I wasn’t so lucky.

There was a man in his fifties on his back on the marble floor, bleeding to death in a huddle of paramedics. He’d been shot or stabbed, it looked like. The situation was so desperate that the paramedics had forgone getting him to the hospital and were trying to stem the bleeding right there, in front of everyone. There were female bank tellers in snappy red suits crying in each other’s arms. I grabbed one and yanked her away from the tearful huddle.

“Who is he?”

“I don’t know.” She wiped her running mascara. “He came in with her, the shooter. They were a couple. Mr. Yim saw them in the office. We didn’t hear the gunshots. They walked in together, and then she walked out. Someone saw blood and went in and found them.”

I turned the corner and glanced into Yim’s office. He was slumped against the back wall, his face gray, a bullet hole in his neck. Two men were holding a dark jacket against his wounds. But it was clearly over.

I heard the man on the ground struggling against the paramedics assisting him.

“She’s still on board!” he cried, taking gasps of breath. “She’s got her! She’s got my wife!”