Chapter 5

The corridor behind my office smelled like bleach and rink rubber, and there were three men in it.

They had Mabel.

Or nearly. One of them - the young one, Kowalczyk, whose kid I'd paid through St. Scholastica - had a hand around her arm. She was not screaming. She was doing something worse. She had gone entirely limp and small and silent the way a child does when she has learned that screaming brings more hands, and she looked at me over Kowalczyk's shoulder and her face did not ask for help. Her face said, I knew it.

"Let go," I said.

"Chairman." Rusk didn't move. "Mr. Kade's orders. The child's a ward-of-the-state situation. We're taking her to the west entrance where a county car-"

"There is no county car," Tessa said. "I'm on the line with the county right now. You're holding a child in a private building on a night the Duluth PD are ten minutes out with a blizzard on the bridge. You want to explain to them why you're carrying her across a service lot in a whiteout?"

"Sir." Rusk looked at me with something almost like pity. "I've worked for this company eleven years. The Kades run security. Not the foundation."

"The foundation," I said, "funds your salary line, and I fund the foundation, and twenty years ago I poured the concrete under your feet. Mabel." I crouched. It hurt. "This is the part where it gets loud. When I say go, I want you to go with Miss Moreau and not look back. All right?"

She nodded. Small. Fast.

"Go."

I knew the building because I had drawn it. When I was sixty-eight and Karin was sick and I could not sit still in a hospital room, I drove out here every night and walked the concrete and made the contractors move door frames four inches. I knew that the corridor at the end of the service hall opened onto the Zamboni bay, and that the Zamboni bay turned left into a tunnel under the south stands, and that the tunnel doors are heavy steel because I paid extra for them.

Tessa grabbed Mabel's hand and ran.

Kowalczyk started after them. I got in front of him. It was not a fight, because a seventy-six-year-old man does not win fights, but it was a delay, and I had spent my whole life buying time with my body and standing where I said I would stand. He stopped.

"Chairman, move."

"Touch me," I said, "and you will finish your career explaining to a jury why you put your hands on a man with a stent."

Behind him, Rusk's radio squawked. I heard the tunnel door boom open against the wall, Tessa's boots, the girl's small scuffling steps.

Then I heard the door slam, and the bolt throw.

And I heard Julian's voice from the far end of the corridor, calm as a Sunday: "Lock it."

Rusk looked at the tunnel. Then at me. Then he did the arithmetic of his mortgage and his pension and his eleven years, and he stepped sideways, and he walked away down the service hall with his men, and the corridor was empty except for me and the sound of my own breathing and a steel door with a bolt on the wrong side.

I put my hand on the cold plate and I said, through it, "Tessa. Are you hurt?"

"No, sir." Her voice came through the steel muffled but level. "We're in the tunnel. The girl's with me. It's cold as hell and the door's locked from your side, and sir, there's no phone signal down here. Mine and hers are both dead."

"Are you all right, Mabel?"

A pause.

"Yes, sir," said a very small voice through half an inch of steel.

I leaned my forehead on the door. I had built this building. I knew its bones better than I knew my own.

And I knew exactly who had the only other key.