Chapter 9

Halloway did not answer.

He looked at the lectern, at the head table, at the doors, at the two hundred faces that had turned toward him the way a room turns toward a sound. His hand went to the pocket where he had folded the seating card, and stopped.

"January," Osei said. "Two years ago. You asked the vault for the anonymous file and it was signed out to you. It never came back."

"It was misplaced-"

"It was lost," Osei said. "Say the word."

"Lost." The word came out of Halloway like something pulled. "The folder was in my car when my windshield was replaced. I don't know. It was gone. There was a gift agreement, there was a contact sheet, there was a card from the credit union requesting acknowledgment-"

"And in February," Osei said, "you came to me and told me the donor had asked to be identified at last. A family in Chicago. Old money. Wanted to be recognized at the spring meeting."

"I needed something to put in the report."

"You needed something to put in the report."

"It was temporary." Halloway turned to the room now, and Ruben saw the exact moment he decided to sell it. "I was going to correct it. I was going to find the man. Do you know how many anonymous gifts come through this foundation? Do you know what happens to a development director who loses a four-million-dollar file?"

"Yes," Osei said. "He gets fired. That's the procedure."

Ruben walked back across the carpet. He walked slowly, the way he did everything, and the crowd parted without being asked. He stopped about ten feet from Halloway, close enough to talk without raising his voice.

"The credit union sent me a duplicate," he said. "Because the original never came back signed. That's why I had it. That's the whole reason I had it."

"I didn't know who you were."

"You knew the amount. You knew the memo line. You knew Margaret's name." Ruben took the two halves out of his pocket and held them up, joined, so the room could see the tear. "You tore her name in half in front of two hundred people and called me a trespasser."

Halloway's mouth worked. Nothing came out of it.

At the second table, Roger Pell stood up slowly, and the woman in emerald silk put her champagne down on the cloth as if it had gone sour. Somewhere in the back, a chair scraped.

Warren Osei closed the folder.

"Board members," he said. "We will convene in the Wexler Room in ten minutes. Every gift recorded in this foundation's books for the last two years will be audited, line by line, and every donor who gave to the Chicago family will be contacted personally. By me." He paused. "And I want an answer to one question that nobody in this room can give me tonight - what do you do with two years of gifts raised in the name of people who do not exist?"

Ray Tibbs was already moving across the carpet with his two officers.