Chapter 3

Rusk made the call from the doorway with one finger in his ear, the way people do when they're repeating an address they've repeated too many times.

"Halstead and Vane. Jeweler's Row. Two-forty-one. Yeah. Uh-huh. No, he's still here."

Dov had drifted all the way in by then. Marisol Reyes stood at the edge of the alcove with her ring cloth folded into a square, and behind her the display hall had gone quiet in the particular way a room goes quiet when everyone has decided at the same moment to keep working and listen instead.

"Read the watch," Emmett said.

Trent looked up from the tablet. "What?"

"The tray. Open it and read the engraving on the bridge. It's cut on the movement side, under the balance cock. You'll need the loupe." He nodded at the cord around his own neck. "You can use mine."

"Why would I do that."

"Because the form says it's there, and you've got a customer on the phone who says it isn't mine. Read it. Then decide."

"I'm not opening a four-hundred-thousand-dollar house asset so a stranger can tell me what's written on it."

"Then read the will."

The room stopped.

Trent's hand, the one resting on the tray, went still. His left hand, the one at his side, was not still. There was a fine tremor in it that had not been there two minutes ago, and Nadia saw it because she was standing close enough to see his cuff, and she had watched that hand sign for deliveries a hundred times.

"What will," Trent said.

"The one you've already read," Emmett said. "You read it three weeks ago. That's when you went into the schedule and changed the line."

Nobody said anything.

"You amended it," Emmett said. "You took out the rider. There was a rider on that schedule since 1994, and three weeks ago it stopped being there, and the log says who did it and when." He hadn't raised his voice. He never did. "I'm not guessing. I've seen the log. I saw it when the service department printed the schedule for the insurance review in October."

"You saw a house document."

"I see all of them. I sign off on all of them."

"You sign off-" Trent stopped. Started again. "You're a repairman with a grudge and a good hand for pencil. That's all you are. That's all you've ever been."

"Then it costs you nothing to open the tray."

Trent did not open the tray.

He picked it up instead, both hands, and moved it off the counter, walking it back toward the vault door behind the back-office wall - the door with the brass handle and the keypad and the camera above it, the door that had been there longer than the alarm system, the door where the house's real value slept at night.

"Rusk," he said over his shoulder. "Take him to the back office. Police can pick him up there."

Rusk came in from the doorway. He was a big man and he moved slowly, and when he put his hand on Emmett Doyle's upper arm, Emmett did not shake it off. He simply set his feet and did not move.

"I'll wait here," he said.

"You'll wait where you're put."

"I'll wait here."

"Rusk."

"I'll wait here," Emmett said a third time, in exactly the same voice, like a man reading the same measurement off the same gauge.

Behind the counter, low down, out of sight, in the drawer under the register, Nadia Pruitt's phone lit up inside a nest of pens and receipt rolls. She had typed the message with one thumb while pretending to straighten the card terminal, and she had typed it to a number she was not supposed to have, from a contact sheet she was not supposed to have read.

Mr. Alcott is giving away Mr. Vane's watch. The one from the picture in the basement.

She had signed it with her initials and her extension, because she couldn't think of anything braver.

The drawer buzzed twice.

She pulled it open an inch and looked down at the screen through the gap between her body and the counter.

Coming now. - C.V.

Nadia closed the drawer, put both hands flat on the black glass, and looked at the door.