5:51 p.m.

An Omaha police officer waved Grace through the maze of rescue vehicles, cruisers and media vans. She didn’t know all the younger officers, including this one, but most of them knew her or at least knew who she was. It wasn’t unusual for the police and the district attorney’s office to work together, starting at the crime scene. However, it had taken a while—certainly not an overnight victory—for the Omaha Police Department and the Douglas County Sheriff’s Department to treat the only woman county prosecutor like an asset instead of a pain in the ass.

At a side door to the brick bank building another officer handed Grace a pair of latex gloves, shoe covers and a face mask. She declined the mask, slipped the paper shoe covers over her leather flats and tugged on the gloves. She followed the narrow hallway past two closed doors, one with a nameplate. Hopefully, Mr. Avery Harmon had taken the day off or left early.

Even before she reached the lobby, she could smell it. It filled her nostrils: sour and rancid, so strong she could almost taste it. She stopped at the doorway, but only because she wanted to examine the scene. She wanted to take it all in, memorize it for later, imagining the lobby without the detectives, without the coroner, without the Douglas County lab technicians.

She counted three bodies. Pakula had said there might be five. One, a woman, lay facedown close to the bank’s double glass doors that led to a small entrance. Was she a customer on her way out when the shooting began? From where she stood, Grace couldn’t tell where the bullet had entered, though it looked like a back head shot. That’s where the blood had pooled. A man in a shirt and tie lay crumpled in the doorway to a side office, his crisply starched white shirt now stained red. At the teller counter lay an old man, flat on his back. He was the closest to Grace, so close she could see his blue eyes staring up at the ceiling, one lens of his wire-rimmed glasses crushed.

“There’s another behind the counter,” Tommy Pakula said, appearing suddenly beside Grace.

“Tell me,” she said, ready to hear his version.

By now the two of them skipped formalities, grateful for the other’s direct method or what Tommy liked to call their “no-bullshit approach.”

“They left the cameras intact.” He pointed out the three various angles. “They’re the cheap son-of-a-bitching ones. Three-second delay. That one takes a picture of its piece of the bank, then that one, then the last one. One of the feds took the tapes. We’ll take a look in a little bit, but don’t expect much.”

She glanced at Pakula. He was in jeans and a yellow golf shirt. He always dressed sharp, shirts tucked in, even the jeans creased, but today there were uncharacteristic rings of sweat under his armpits and his head and forehead glistened. It was only then that Grace realized how warm it was inside the lobby. Something must have gone wrong with the A/C. No way would any of these guys have shut it off.

“Not quite sure how this went down.” Pakula always said this before he told her exactly how it went down. In the early days she thought he was just another cocky, macho cop until she realized that nine out of ten times he could get it all right: the caliber, the direction and the sequence.

“We think there were two of them. The beat cop who got a look at the car before he crashed his own said there were two of them. Makes sense inside here that there were two. I’m figuring they come in the front. One stays close to the door. The other heads for the counter. The receptionist gets it first.” He pointed to the bloody spot under the desk where there was no body. “The guy in the office hears the shot. Comes out to see what’s going on, but either he or the teller trips the silent alarm. He gets blasted. Both customers probably get it next. I’m guessing the teller behind the counter was last.”

“Did the receptionist make it?”

“We’re crossing our fingers, but she’s in bad shape. She slid under the desk after she was hit. May have saved her life. They couldn’t see her good enough to know if they’d killed her. It’s a head shot, so don’t go getting your hopes up for a witness.”

“You said the teller was last. Why?”

“Oh, yeah. This you gotta see. Don’t have a fucking hemorrhage, though, okay?”

“Why would I have a fucking hemorrhage?”

He led her around the counter, both of them stepping carefully over the old man. Grace noticed his tweed suit, shirt collar buttoned, the tie in a perfect knot. It had to be a hundred degrees out today when you figured in the humidity, and yet this guy had probably dressed up for his regular weekly trip to the bank. She was still thinking about the old man when Pakula knelt down beside the teller, gently lifting her head, the blond hair matted with blood sticking to her face, almost making it impossible for Grace to see the entrance wound. Until Pakula lifted the chin. Then she could see it, a small smudged black hole at the lower left jawline. The shooter would have had to have taken time to shove the gun up under her chin.

Grace met Pakula’s eyes and now she understood. They both recognized the wound as a trademark, the signature of a killer who purposely shattered his victims’ teeth so it would take longer to identify them.

“It’s not possible, is it?” Grace asked.

Pakula just shook his head.