Chapter 2

Frear reached out two fingers and tilted the plastic sleeve toward himself without taking it. He read the way a man reads a parking ticket.

The photograph: a younger man, same gray eyes, same straight nose, dark hair instead of white. Beside it, in the museum's old typeface, WALTER KIMBROUGH. Below that, NIGHT WATCHMAN. And stamped at the bottom edge, 1979.

Frear's hand came away. He straightened his cuff.

"That's museum property," he said.

"I know," the old man said. "I brought it back."

The quartet shifted into the next movement. A woman in emerald silk laughed at something near the fountain. Frear glanced over his shoulder at the stairs, at the chairman, at four hundred guests who had paid for a flawless evening.

"You brought it back," he repeated.

"Tonight seemed like the night."

"From where?"

"From my house."

Frear's laugh was short and entirely for himself. "Mr. - Kimbrough. Do you understand how this looks? You're standing on a red carpet you don't have a ticket for, holding museum property from 1979, and you won't tell me where it's been for forty-five years."

"I told you where it's been."

"Your house."

"Yes."

"Whose badge is it?"

"Mine."

Frear's tongue touched his back teeth. He was good at this - at the door, at the clipboard, at the small surgical humiliations that kept an institution's evenings clean. He had built a career on the difference between a guest and a problem. The problem here was that the old man was not embarrassed, and embarrassment was the lever.

Across the rotunda, past the columns, a woman in a gray suit came out of the west corridor carrying a records box. She was around fifty, close-cropped hair, reading glasses pushed up into it. On top of the box lay a long flat binder with a strip of yellow tape on the spine. She walked carefully, the way people walk with archives.

Frear didn't see her. His eyes were on the badge.

Above, on the landing, the chairman touched his breast pocket. It was a small gesture - two fingers, quick - and he did it without looking down, the way a man checks a wallet, or a wound. Then he took his hand away and turned back to the lectern, and the toast everyone had come to hear did not begin.

"Do you have identification?" Frear said.

The old man's open hand didn't move. "I have that."

"That's a 1979 badge."

"Yes."

"I need something current."

"I don't have anything current," Walt said. "I retired in 1998."

Frear went very still. Then he did the thing that changed the evening. He lifted his left hand to his earpiece and pressed it with two fingers.

"Door one," he said quietly. "I need two officers at the rotunda carpet."