Chapter 4

The officer arrived in eleven minutes.

He was young and wet at the shoulders and his name was Ferraro, and he stood just inside the alcove with his hat in his hand and his notebook out, and he did what any sensible person does in a room where two men are telling different stories - he asked the man with the paperwork to explain.

Trent Alcott explained beautifully.

He explained that the house had been in the same family for three generations. He explained that the piece in question was the founder's own work, the first watch Hollis Vane ever built start to finish, the single most photographed object the house owned. He explained that the item had come in for service under a ticket made out to H. Vane, a man who had been dead for thirty-one years, and that the handwriting on the ticket matched the handwriting of the man standing at the counter.

"You can see it yourself," Trent said, and turned the intake form around. "Same hand. Same pencil. He wrote a ticket to a dead man so he could walk out the front door with it."

Officer Ferraro looked at the form. He looked at Emmett.

"Sir, is this your handwriting?"

"Yes."

"Did you write the name H. Vane on the customer line?"

"Yes."

"Why?"

Emmett was quiet for a moment. The loupe swung an inch on its cord and settled.

"It's the name on the record," he said.

"That's not an answer."

"It's the only answer I have."

Ferraro wrote something down. "Do you have a receipt for this watch? A bill of sale? Anything with your name on it that connects you to this item?"

"No."

"Do you have identification?"

Emmett took out his wallet and handed over a Pennsylvania driver's license. Emmett Doyle. Sixty-one. An address on Christian Street. Organ donor. Nothing else in the wallet but forty-one dollars and a folded service receipt from a hardware store on Passyunk.

"Mr. Doyle," Ferraro said, "I need you to tell me why you believe this watch belongs to you."

"Because it does."

"That's not-"

"I know it isn't." Emmett put his hands in his coat pockets. "It's what I've got."

Trent, behind the counter, let out a breath that was almost a laugh, and Dov - four months on the floor, twenty-three years old, standing next to Marisol Reyes with his hands in his pockets - laughed too. It was a small laugh. It was the kind of laugh a person gives a story he's heard a version of before, about a man who comes in off the street with a story.

Marisol didn't laugh. She looked at the tool roll with H.V. burned into the strap, sitting on the counter where Rusk had left it, and she didn't laugh.

"Ma'am," Ferraro said to Nadia. "You were here for the whole thing. Did you see Mr. Doyle reach for the item?"

Nadia's hands were flat on the black glass. She had been standing in that exact spot for twenty minutes.

"He put his hand out," she said. "Over the counter. Toward the tray."

"Did he touch it?"

"No."

"Did he say anything threatening?"

"No."

"Did he say the watch was his?"

Nadia looked at Trent. Trent looked back at her with an expression that had no threat in it at all, which was somehow worse - it was the expression of a man who had already written something down about her and filed it.

"He said he wrote the ticket," she said.

Ferraro nodded and wrote that down too.

"All right." He closed the notebook. "Mr. Doyle, I'd like you to come down to the district and give a statement. Nobody's arresting anybody tonight unless something changes. Mr. Alcott, I'll need a copy of the insurance schedule and the purchase record."

"The schedule's on the tablet."

"Then the tablet comes with us."

Trent's jaw moved once. "That's house property."

"It's evidence, sir."

Emmett looked at the tool roll on the counter. He looked at the folded photograph, still lying flat on the black glass where he had smoothed it, and at the cropped one hanging on the wall behind the manager's shoulder, and he did not say anything, because he had learned a long time ago that the only thing a man like Trent Alcott needed to hang himself was enough rope and an audience.

The front door chimed.

Cold air came in off the street with the smell of wet stone, and the umbrellas in the brass stand by the door knocked together, and a woman in a dark green coat came through with rain on her shoulders and a leather document folder under her arm and her father's pocket watch on a chain against her chest.

Cordelia Vane stopped three feet inside the alcove.

She looked at the photograph on the counter.

Then she looked at Emmett Doyle's face.