I laid the torn slip down next to my leather-bound ledger, pulled the steel-cased pen from my pocket, and signed line four of the master transit log, recording Marcus’s bench gauge number right beside my own name.
"The cutting lab on Mercer Street has three setting benches standing empty right now," I said, handing him the duplicate carbon copy with the fresh blue ink. "We start cutting the winter consignment on Monday morning at six o'clock. Pack your chest, son. You're done working behind display glass."
CHAPTER 4: The Ledger Under The Concrete
The arcade administration office smelled of damp plaster, stale urn coffee, and the cold metal of two four-drawer filing cabinets that had not been moved away from the wall since the promenade was rebuilt in the early nineties. Arthur Vance sat behind the laminate desk with his coat unbuttoned, his silver pen resting untouched across an open pad of carbon summons slips. On the other side of the dividing rail, the municipal officers stood with their thumbs hooked into their duty belts, watching the rain run down the glass transoms that looked out over Tenth Street.
Victoria sat in the straight-backed oak chair beside the radiator. The tailored lines of her blazer had begun to crease across the elbows where she held her forearms locked against her ribs. She had refused the water Officer Harris brought in from the concourse cooler. She had refused to look at the blue clipboard the senior consignment auditor had laid across the center table.
"The audit seal on Suite 104 is an administrative measure, Arthur," she said, her voice dry and brittle, pitched toward her uncle’s lowered head. "It is an exploratory freeze pending clarification of the carrier’s electronic entry. It does not constitute a finding. You know as well as David Thorne does that the regional board allows forty-eight hours to reconcile an intake variance before any formal report reaches the insurance clearinghouse."
Arthur Vance did not look up from his blank summons pad. His thumbs rubbed small, slow circles against the edge of the Formica veneer. "The board allows forty-eight hours when the transfer code is illegible, Victoria. They don't allow forty minutes when the master deed holder is standing on the runner with the severed intake leaf in his fingers and the terminal shows a direct-to-safe routing under your personal code."
"The boy ran the keystrokes," she said, her chin lifting toward the door, where Marcus stood near the corridor jamb with his wooden toolbox resting on the floor between his work boots. "Marcus had the override card for the bench scale. I gave it to him three weeks ago so he could clear commercial parcels while I was handling the estate appraisals in the back gallery. If there is a routing script assigned to DSC-904, it was queued from the workbench keyboard."
Henderson, the state auditor, did not pause in her writing. Her fountain pen made a steady, scratchy rhythm against the blue ledger sheets. "The terminal log doesn't lie about physical location, Ms. Vance. The direct routing command was entered at two twelve this afternoon from terminal one. Terminal one is the raised register behind the bullet-resistant partition at the front counter. The workbench keyboard is registered as station four. Station four was offline between one forty-five and two thirty while the bench polisher was drawing maximum amperage on circuit seven. Marcus couldn't have queued that ticket from his bench if he had wanted to."
Victoria’s hands tightened around her forearms, her manicured nails digging into the dark wool of her sleeves. "Then someone reached over the partition while I was in the vault. The arcade was full of delivery staff. We have couriers coming through the arcade every half-hour from the regional trade center. Anyone could have touched that screen."
"Nobody reached over that partition," I said, stepping up to the rail. The damp canvas of my jacket was beginning to dry under the hiss of the baseboard radiator, leaving faint gray chalk lines along the seams where the highway salt had soaked in during the morning run. "You didn't leave the counter between one o'clock and the moment my truck pulled into the cross-alley. Harris’s desk log shows you signed the delivery register for the water bottles at one thirty, and you were standing at that front glass when my helper dropped the curb ramp at three."
Victoria turned her eyes on me then, the contempt stripped down to a cold, frantic hatred. "You think twelve years of driving flatbeds through the terminal gives you the right to walk into an appraisal house and direct an audit? You're a lease signatory on an archival document, Mercer. You haven't looked at a balance sheet for this arcade since your father’s estate cleared probate. You don't know the margin on commercial stone settings. You don't know the cost of the floor insurance or the city taxes Arthur pays every quarter to keep these doors unlocked."
"I know what ninety-four carats of cut beryl costs when it disappears from a transit bill," I said. "And I know why Vance Appraisals LLC was incorporated four months ago under an address that leads to a mail drop on Ninth Street."
Arthur Vance’s pen finally rolled off the pad, clicking twice against the metal rim of the desk before landing on the linoleum floor. He looked up at his niece, his face gray beneath the yellow fluorescent tubes. "A mail drop? You told the partnership committee that Vance Appraisals was an operating branch of the family retail firm. You told us it was handling the secondary certifications for the estate auctions."