“Yes, sir. I think I see the body. Between the cruiser and the water.”

Sure enough, a man in a blue uniform lay sprawled across some muddy sand near a patch of weeds. From eight hundred feet, he looked like a G.I. Joe doll cast aside by a bored little boy. But he wasn’t. He was Deke Dunn.

“Take us in, Sergeant. Double quick.”

“Yes, sir. Hold on.”

THE FEMALE LOAN OFFICER who escorted Caitlin into the vault of the Royal Cotton Bank was far too curious for her taste. She was only allowing Caitlin access to the boxes because she was a personal friend of Sherry Harden, who was on the access list. The waspish loan officer had treated Caitlin with marked coolness in the lobby, probably because of the generally liberal columns she wrote for the Examiner. Caitlin didn’t care what the nosy bitch thought about her. It had nauseated her even to enter a building owned by Brody Royal, though she appreciated the irony of Henry keeping his backup files in a bank belonging to the man he meant to destroy with them.

“I hate to be rude,” Caitlin said, after the woman had inserted her keys into the large drawers, “but I need some privacy.”

The loan officer stepped back as though Caitlin had slapped her. “We have a room for that.”

“Look, I’m really in a hurry.”

After giving a prim shake of the head, the loan officer angrily left the vault.

Caitlin crouched before the two numbered drawers, her heart accelerating. She’d expected regular bank boxes, but both these drawers were triple size. She turned the nearest key, then with some effort dragged open the stainless steel drawer.

A warm glow spread through her chest. There had to be three or four thousand photocopied pages stuffed into the drawer. As quickly as she could, she unlocked the adjacent drawer and gasped when she saw what was inside: several external hard drives; a Ziploc bag containing thumb drives and SD cards; and perhaps most intriguing, a stack of Moleskine notebooks held together by a thick blue rubber band.

“I think I just had an orgasm,” she murmured. There was no way she and her team could wade through all this in time to write any sort of comprehensive story by tomorrow. Simply scanning the documents would take days.

She got to her feet and hurried back to the bank’s lobby. Sighting the loan officer across the room, Caitlin beckoned her over with an urgent wave. The woman took her sweet time about coming, but when she finally arrived, Caitlin said, “I’m going to need some boxes and a cart.”

“We don’t provide boxes.”

“How about garbage bags, then? I’ll pay you for them. But I know you’ve got a cart somewhere, and I need it ASAP.”