Chapter 2

"Reggie," Sloane said again. "The police."

"Store policy," Reggie said. "Verified incident report first."

"Policy." She said the word like it had dirt on it. "He has merchandise in that bag that he did not pay for, in front of forty cardholders, and you want paperwork."

"The scarf has a register tag on it," Reggie said. "So does the candle."

"It's a scarf on a counter."

"It's a scarf on a counter with a receipt under it."

Somewhere behind the garlands, a woman laughed at something else entirely, and the sound landed wrong in the silence. Sloane's jaw tightened. She was performing, Ned understood, and the performance had a shape she couldn't deviate from - accusation, escalation, resolution - and Reggie had just stepped off the script.

Ned kept his hands loose at his sides. He had learned in thirty-one years of loss prevention that guilty people talk and frightened people talk, and the only people who stay quiet are the ones who know exactly what the paperwork says.

Reggie's right hand had moved - not to the radio. To the inside breast pocket of his dark suit jacket, where the corner of a small notebook showed, gray, worn soft at the edges.

He'd been writing in it all night. Ned had watched him do it: once at the fragrance counter, once near the escalator, once by the children's department door. Reggie would step behind a pillar, write two lines, close the notebook, and put it away like a man putting away a cigarette.

Now Reggie glanced at Ned. Half a second. One slow blink.

Don't.

"Sir," Reggie said, to Ned, in a voice pitched for the two of them and anyone close enough to lean in. "Do you have the receipt in your possession."

"I do."

"May I see it."

"Reggie." Sloane's voice cracked up the scale. "You do not get to run this."

"I'm not running it," Reggie said. "I'm documenting it. That's the job."

A man in a gray suit near the champagne table had stopped pretending not to listen. Two cardholders drifted closer, holding flutes they'd forgotten. Under the holiday strings, Ned could hear the click of a phone camera starting up behind him - someone young, someone quick.

Sloane saw it too. That was the moment her composure changed shape. It didn't break; it hardened, the way a diamond is just carbon under pressure. She smoothed her blouse once, and when she spoke again her voice was warm, almost kind, and aimed at the room rather than at any one person in it.

"Of course," she said. "Let's do this properly. Everyone here should see how carefully we handle these things."

She picked up the receipt with two fingers, held it up - and folded it in half without reading a single line.

Ned's watch said 8:51.

"Reggie," she said pleasantly, "nobody touches this counter until I say so."