Hailey paused for the briefest of seconds, wondering now if this was such a good place to hide. But then she heard the elevator doors whiffing open at the end of the hall, and she made the only decision she could. She dashed inside the room, shutting the door as well as she could behind her. Then she turned, her back against the knob, and tried to catch her breath.

The room was large, with a big picture window overlooking the dark and undulating murk of the Mystic River. The decor of the room was more beige upon beige, from the oversized bed to the thick curtains by the window to the walls. There was a framed print above the bed, a colorful, comic-strip drawing of a blond woman looking into a hand mirror—assuredly something expensive, rare, and mostly ignored by the type of people who would stay overnight in a casino overlooking the Mystic—and a flat-screen TV on a dresser directly across. But Hailey’s attention was immediately drawn to a chair in the corner by the window, because it was facing the door and because it was also occupied.

The man in the chair looked to be about fifty and disheveled, wearing a suit jacket too small for his rounded shoulders and gray pants that didn’t match. His belt wasn’t around his pants, which was odd. Stranger still, the belt wasn’t gone; it was, in fact, tied tightly around the man’s left wrist, pinning the man’s hand against the arm of the chair.

“Sorry, the door was open,” Hailey started to say, then paused, as her mind digested what she was seeing. The man was staring right at her, eyes open, but the look on his face wasn’t right.

“Are you…OK?” she said.

The man didn’t answer. It was then that Hailey noticed: he didn’t answer because there was a two-inch bullet hole in the middle of his forehead.

Chapter Three

Chapter Three

As the elevator doors whiffed open and Nick Patterson stepped out into the carpeted hallway bisecting the sixth floor of the Encore Boston Harbor hotel, he felt something sweeping through his chest that he hadn’t felt in so long, it took him another step before he realized what it was.

Hope.