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skin. He wore his hair cropped short and had a small tattoo or birthmark on his neck, slightly behind his left ear. His face seemed as calm as his walk—why? What did he have to feel calm about?
    Armed robberies and hostage crises were out of Theresa’s area of expertise. She had no idea what had happened, what would happen, or what they wanted to happen. She had no way to orient herself, no way to plan a series of examinations or chemical tests that would give her information or direction. She could only stand and watch.
    His partner must have driven the Mercedes; this guy was too tall, so the seat would have been farther back. Unless he had stolen the car and driven it without moving the seat—unlikely, as most men needed to be comfortable while they drove.
    There. An interesting piece of deduction that told her absolutely nothing. It certainly didn’t tell her why they’d tried to rob a bank without a driver, allowing themselves to be separated from their getaway vehicle. That worried her. It meant they were stupid, and stupidity was dangerous.
    She tore herself from the eyepiece and took a moment to run through her usual reaction to any crisis: a mental head count. Where is my daughter? Rachael would be in her eleventh-grade trigonometry class right now, with her cell phone turned off; a final exam had been scheduled, and she’d turned down a date the night before to study for it. My mother? She was at her job at the cornerdiner, trying to introduce the clientele to whatever she last saw on the Food Network. It was more a restaurant than a diner, and without a TV, unless the staff had a break room—did they have a break room? Tess couldn’t remember. Paul? He was in the bank across the street with his hands on his head. All not present, but accounted for.
    “Shouldn’t we try to communicate with them? Or pretend to, long enough to distract them while the”—she had to make herself say it—“hostages get out through another door?”
    Apparently Frank had already sussed out the lobby’s structure. “No. The Sixth Street entrance is the only way in or out of the public lobby. On the opposite wall, there’s two elevators to the upper floors and a door to the employee lobby. The employee lobby has an exit onto Superior Avenue and the parking garage; however, inside the employee lobby is a heavily armed team of Federal Reserve security officers. So our guys have two choices. They can go out the back door into the arms of the Fed security force—”
    “Or they can come out the front, into the sights of CPD snipers.”
    “Exactly. Either way is okay with me.”
    “Unless they take a hostage with them.” Jason spoke up. He seemed to be hunting for an outlet. “Then the situation would get even worse. Here, you’ll be able to see for yourself.”
    Theresa shuddered, suffering from a mental picture of Paul moving forward, a gun at his spine, serving as a human buffer between the robbers and the snipers. Suddenly, waiting and letting the hostage takers calm down seemed to be a good idea.
    She watched Jason set a small box in the window seat between two paintings, one of Clio, the muse of history, and the otherdepicting a winged figure with a book. A thin wire connected the box to both the monitor and a laptop on the reading table.
    “Thanks for the use of your monitor, Ms. Elliott,” the young man said. “We have three, but they’re all built into our un-air-conditioned van.”
    “Can you see something?” Theresa moved around the table.
    “In a minute.” Jason tapped the laptop’s keys, and the screen flicked through a number of windows before a black-and-white montage of four pictures popped up. Theresa gasped.
    She saw Paul immediately, in the lower left-hand corner. That camera—labeled “West”—faced the center of the east side of the lobby. A gap there led to a hallway and elevator banks behind a marble reception desk. In front of the desk sat seven people. Paul, in his gray blazer, sat