Chapter 4

They suspended Emmett at 9:04.

Colin Reedy, the house manager, did it the way you'd ask a man to step out of a photograph. He held out his hand for the badge. Emmett unclipped it from his jacket and put it in Reedy's palm, and Reedy said I'm sorry, Em, and Emmett said It's all right, Colin, and that was the whole conversation.

Then they walked him toward the loading dock, because the front doors had reporters at them now.

The loading dock was down the service hall, past the boiler room, and it was open to the alley. The rain had turned the asphalt black and shiny. A white van was backed in with its rear doors open.

Priya Raman stood at the bumper with a clipboard. Two men in plain jackets were carrying crates out of the basement and sliding them into the van, one after another, and each crate had the same stencil on the side.

Emmett stopped walking.

He had a key ring still in his pocket - Reedy had taken the badge, not the keys, because the keys belonged to the building and the badge belonged to the job. He looked at the crates for four seconds. Then he turned and went down the service stairs, and nobody in the alley was looking at him.

The basement smelled like cold concrete and old paper. Forty-two crates, stacked three high along the wall. He opened the nearest one with his pocket knife and lifted the panel out and held it up under the bare bulb.

It weighed almost nothing. It had a sheen to it, a flat printed sheen, and along the bottom edge, where the crate had rubbed it, the coating was lifting in a thin plastic curl.

Emmett carried it up the service stairs, through the door, and out into the lobby.

He laid it on the marble in front of three hundred people.

For one full second, nobody spoke. Then Fabian Cross moved faster than a man his age had any business moving.

"There," he said, into the microphone, and his voice was steady as a rail. "There. He's cut one down. That's what he's been doing all night."

Two of Cross's men reached the panel before anyone else. They lifted it face-down, and Priya Raman threw a tablecloth over it, and they carried it out through the loading dock and slid it into the van with the rest.

Emmett stood on the marble with his empty hands open.

Officer Pryor took his arm and sat him down in the chair by the coat check. The van's taillights went red and then small and then gone, down the alley, into the rain.

Dez Pruitt was standing at the service door with a pen in his hand. He had written the license plate on the back of his own knuckles.