Chapter 3

They stood there in the doorway for ninety seconds, and in those ninety seconds Ruben learned a great deal.

A board member drifted over - broad-shouldered, red-faced, a name tag that said ROGER PELL - and Halloway turned him away with a hand on the arm and a laugh.

"Just a mix-up at the door, Roger. Nothing you need."

"The Chicago people get in all right?" Pell asked.

"Flight's running late out of O'Hare," Halloway said. "You know how it is."

Ruben watched Pell nod and walk off satisfied, and he counted. That was the third time since he had stepped inside that he had heard the word Chicago out of Grant Halloway's mouth. Not once had the man said a family name. Not once had he said a company, a city neighborhood, a foundation, a lawyer, a trustee - nothing you would say if you had ever actually spoken to the people who wrote the check.

"You've got a donor flying in," Ruben said.

"From Chicago. Yes."

"What's their name?"

Halloway's smile came back, thinner. "I don't discuss donors with people who walk in off the street."

Across the ballroom, near the head table, a woman in a plain navy sheath dress turned away from a physician mid-sentence and looked toward the doors.

Dr. Elena Vasquez. Chief of pediatric oncology. She was strikingly beautiful in a room built entirely out of expensive clothing - warm olive skin, high cheekbones, black hair pulled into a low twist, one small mole beside her left eye - and she wore no jewelry but a slim gold watch and a badge turned face-in against her chest. She had a way of looking at a person that made them answer honestly.

She was looking at Ruben now.

He had met her four years ago, in a hallway on the third floor, when he carried in six folding chairs for the families who slept upright in the waiting room because there was nowhere to lie down. She had helped him unfold them. She had not asked his name.

"You know her?" Halloway asked, tracking his gaze.

"Not the way you mean."

"Then keep your eyes at the back of the room and your hands in your pockets until Ray gets here."

Ruben did not move. He thought about the piece of paper in his right coat pocket - soft at the folds from three years of being carried, faded to the color of weak tea. He had looked at it maybe two hundred times.

And he thought about the bottom of it, where the credit union had left the receipt stub attached, and where a man in a midnight-blue tuxedo had signed his name in blue ink to acknowledge that the money had been received.

"Mr. Halloway," Ruben said. "You countersigned the receipt."

Halloway blinked.

"You signed for it," Ruben said. "I have your handwriting in my pocket."