“Right. You know her?”

“No, I just … can’t stop reading and watching. I remember her name.”

“She’s in your club. She saved lives. She kept her head, hid, contacted the police. Barry and I—my partner—were right outside in the parking lot.”

“I read that, too. You were right there.”

“It’s playing out that Simone’s call came in about a minute, maybe two, after Hobart pushed in the exit door he’d left unlocked. She lost a friend that night, and another’s still in the hospital, recovering. She’s coping, but it’s rough.”

“You talked to her, too.”

“To her, to her friend Mi, to Brady and his dad.” With a sigh, Essie lifted her face to the sun. “It helps me, and I like to think maybe it helps them.”

“Why’d you become a cop?”

“Seemed like a good idea at the time.” She smiled, then sighed again as she looked out over the water. “I like order. I believe in law, but it’s the combination that works for me. It’s a good fit for me. Rules and procedure, and trying to help people. I never saw myself in a situation like Friday, but now I know I can get through it. I can do the job.”

“How do you get to be a cop?”

She turned her head, gave him a raised eyebrow. “Interested?”

“Maybe. No. Yeah,” he realized. “I am. I never thought much about what I was going to do. Just get a job eventually. I like college. My grades are okay, but I just like being there, so I haven’t been thinking too hard about what happens when I’m out. I told Brady we were waiting for the good guys, because we were. So yeah, I’d like to know how to become a cop.”

By the time she took him to his car, Reed had, for the first time, a life plan. It had forged itself out of death, but it was his life he could see rising from it.

*

Seleena McMullen had ambitions and a smoking habit. Her ambition to rise to fame as an Internet blogger put her outside the church during the funeral. As a reporter for Hot Scoops, with its somewhat questionable reputation, she didn’t get much respect from the print and on-air reporters gathered outside.

It didn’t bother her. One day, she’d be bigger than any of them.

She’d developed both the attitude and the ambition during high school and college. There’d been no question in her mind that she was smarter than any of her peers—so she didn’t have a problem letting them know it.

If that meant she had no real friends, so what? She had clients. She credited Jimmy Rodgers in eighth grade for helping her forge a clear path. By pretending to like her, telling her she was pretty—all so she’d gullibly do his homework while he laughed behind her back—he’d provided her with the impetus to start her own business.

Sure, she’d do homework assignments, for a fee.

By the time she’d graduated high school she’d had a considerable nest egg, and had grown it throughout college.

Fresh out of college, her journalism degree hot in her hand, she’d snagged a job on the Portland Press. It hadn’t lasted long. She had considered her editor and her coworkers idiots, and didn’t trouble with tact.

Still, she’d seen the Internet as the future, and at twenty-four hitched her wagon to Hot Scoops. She worked primarily out of her own apartment, and since she saw her current position as no more than a stepping-stone toward her own site, her own successful blog, she tolerated editorial interference and crap assignments.

Then the DownEast Mall Massacre fell into her lap.

She’d actually walked into the mall, on a quest for new running shoes, seconds before the first shots were fired. She’d seen one of the shooters—identified as Devon Lawrence Paulson—cutting his bloody swath, and had hunkered behind a mall map as she’d pulled out her camera, her recorder.

She had scooped every paper, network, site, and reporter.

As follow-ups she’d dogged victims, family members, hospital staff. She’d bribed an orderly and gained access long enough to get a few pictures of patients, even slipped into one of the rooms after one had been transferred down from ICU.

The recorder in her pocket had caught some of the conversation between Mi-Hi Jung and—bonus—Simone Knox for her to flesh out another story.

By her calculation, she only needed a few more to take that leap off her current stepping-stone. She’d already had offers.

And now her smoking habit tossed another into her lap.

She’d stepped away from the other reporters to have a smoke, moving a half block down to lean on a tree, smoke, and think. She could head to the cemetery when the church portion ended, but how many clicks would yet more pictures of people in black generate?

Maybe someone would faint—like the dead kid’s mother had the day before. But, well, been there, done that.

Time for more dish on the shooters, she decided, and had nearly started for her car when she spotted the cop.

Officer McVee, she thought, edging around the tree. She’d tried to pigeonhole McVee a couple of times—the young female officer who’d shot and killed John Jefferson Hobart equaled pure clickbait. McVee wasn’t the cooperative sort, but right now said cop was hanging back, avoiding the gaggle of reporters and cameras.

Waiting.

Interesting, Seleena thought, settling down to wait herself.

The casket came out, so she took a couple shots with her long lens, just in case nothing better came along. She watched McVee moving up, and spotted one more prize.

Reed Quartermaine—teenage protector of the firefighter’s kid, the kid whose mother took one in the spine.

Seleena took a couple shots of them talking, then walking together, then getting in the cop’s car. And while everyone else headed to the cemetery, she ran to her own car.

She nearly lost them twice, but considered that more good luck. If she looked like a tail, the cop might spot her.

Running potential copy in her head, she parked a good distance away, watched from the car until her quarry settled on a bench.

Pleased with the investment she’d made in the lens, she wandered as close as she dared. She was just one more person casually taking photos of the bay, of the boats.

Maybe she couldn’t get close enough to hear the conversation—the cop wouldn’t talk to her—but she had her lead as she framed her shots.

On another painful day in Rockpoint, death unites heroes of the DownEast Mall Massacre.

Oh yeah, that leap was coming soon.

CHAPTER FIVE

— Three years later —

Simone rolled up to sit and nudged the man who shared her bed.

“You gotta go.”

He grunted.

She knew his name, even knew why she’d decided to have sex with him. He looked clean, in good shape, and had wanted just what she had.

Plus he had an interesting face, sort of chipped and chiseled and sharp. In her head she’d seen him as a modern-day Billy the Kid. The hard-boned western outlaw.

It had taken her awhile to embrace the idea that one-night-stands had particular and peculiar advantages over the drama and hassle of relationships—or the pretext of them.

It wasn’t taking quite as long for her to realize they also carried a whole lot of boredom in their wake.

The guy, Ansel, dressed in the dim glow of light through the window. She hadn’t pulled the shades—why bother?

She liked looking out at New York, and didn’t mind if some of New York liked looking back at her.

He said, “I had a good time.”

She said, “Me, too,” and meant it enough that it didn’t qualify as a lie.

“I’ll call you.”

“Great.” Maybe he would, maybe he wouldn’t. It didn’t matter much either way.

Since she didn’t bother to get up, he made his own way out. When she heard the door shut, she grabbed a sleepshirt, quick-walked out to lock the apartment door.

She wanted a shower and turned into the bathroom she shared with Mi in their tiny apartment. The fact that it boasted two bedrooms and was reasonably close to the campus offset the fourth-floor walk-up, the unreliable hot water, and the sting of the monthly rent.

But they were together, in New York. Sometimes they forgot to look for the ghost of the friend who wasn’t there.

Simone showered off the sex, stuck her head under the stingy spray of lukewarm water. She’d cut her hair into a short wedge and had recently dyed it the purple of a ripe eggplant.

It made her feel different. It seemed she searched forever for something that made her feel different from the girl from Rockpoint, Maine. Something that would make her look in the mirror one day and think: Oh, there you are!

She liked New York, liked the crowds, the rush, the noise, the color. And God yes, the freedom from parental criticism, questions, and expectations.

But she knew she’d come to fulfill Tish’s dream.

She liked Columbia, had worked her ass off to get in, but knew she’d done that to be a part of Mi’s dream.