I unscrewed the thermos lid and drank the scalding chicory in short, cautious sips. Through the floorboards above us, the kitchen scanner continued to chatter in erratic, static-laced bursts. Sector Seven was clearing an abandoned boiler on Fifty-Fourth; Sector Two was reporting an open padlocked cellar door behind the municipal cold-storage plant. Gantry was methodically shaking down every cellar hole within eight blocks of Bellamy & Rowe, using thirty uniformed patrolmen to tighten a net around an imaginary fugitive while the real target sat four hundred yards from the precinct gate.
At twenty minutes past four, the telephone in the hallway did not ring. Instead, three distinct mechanical thumps sounded from the cast-iron radiator beneath the pantry window—the old steam-pipe signal the precinct captains had used during the transit strikes to communicate through the common service main connecting the terrace basements.
Martha unbolted the cellar bulkhead. The iron door groaned as she lifted it against the frost-stiffened grass of the rear court. Standing in the darkness between two cinderblock coal bins was Arthur Pendelton. He wore an unbelted tweed trench coat with the wet collar turned up against his jowls, his thin gray hair plastered to his forehead by the freezing sleet. He did not carry a leather legal valise. Under his arm was an olive-drab surveyor’s portfolio secured by two thick brass buckles, and behind him stood a tall, stooped man in a dark civilian mackinaw whose right hand rested inside his front pocket over the square outline of an automatic pistol.
"Vance," Pendelton whispered, stepping down the brick steps into the cellar before Martha lowered the iron lid behind them. "This is Special Investigator Harlan Cross from the State Attorney General’s Public Integrity Bureau. We left the state motor pool car four blocks west, behind the freight depot siding. The avenue is locked down from Forty-Sixth to Fifty-Ninth. Gantry has set up sawhorse barricades at the bridge approach and the subway entrances."
Cross stepped into the dim light of the single cellar bulb. He had the gray, hollowed-out face of an appellate clerk who spent forty weeks a year underground, his knuckles raw and his fingernails trimmed straight across. He did not introduce himself with pleasantries. He took the brown transit envelope from my hand, worked the red archival wax loose with a horn-handled pocket knife, and emptied the contents onto the flat lid of a coal bin.
He laid out the sheared lead seal #4092-B, the three fractured brass teeth from the lock tumbler, and the carbon duplicate tissue from page four hundred and twelve of Bellamy & Rowe’s master intake ledger. Then he lifted the yellow carbon slip Mercer had forced me to sign, holding it two inches from the yellow incandescent bulb.
"The razor cut across the voucher head is clean," Cross said, his voice flat, nasal, and precise. "Whoever cut this used a utility blade against a steel drafting rule. But they left the corner of the municipal watermarked seal in the left margin. You can see the bottom curve of the city crest right through the linen weave."
"Mercer cut it from the intake book in Property Room B," I told him, holding up my swollen, taped knuckles. "He left the desk stamp on the carbon copy. But look at the signature line. I didn't write my name. I wrote the state probate license number—PR-08841. It looks like a cursive scrawl if you don't know the sequence, but it matches the state register Arthur filed with the county clerk in 2012."
Pendelton reached into his surveyor’s portfolio and withdrew a heavy, bound sheaf of legal foolscap. "That isn't all Mercer left behind, Harlan. At three fifteen this morning, while Gantry was organizing his sector sweep, I had the county surrogate’s chief bailiff use the master supervisory key on the side entrance of Bellamy & Rowe. He was escorted by two uniformed state troopers."
I stared at him. "The Toledo scale?"
"The Toledo scale," Pendelton confirmed, his pale eyes narrowing behind his horn-rimmed spectacles. "The bailiff brought the duplicate brass cylinder key for the inspection housing under the counter leg. He unbolted the cast-iron plate and removed the mechanical linen register ribbon. The punch wheel stamped the mass transit delta at exactly twelve twenty-seven AM: minus six hundred and eighty grams. The bailiff photographed the fractured glass dial, the brass shavings from the hasp, and the boots prints in the slush on the showroom parquet. The tread pattern is standard department-issue Vibram service soles, size eleven."
"Mercer wears elevens," Martha said quietly from the cellar stairs. "He buys them from the quartermaster supply in Newark twice a year because his arches are fallen."
Cross slid the yellow carbon tissue, the lead seal fragments, and the Toledo scale ribbon into three transparent evidence sleeves, sealing each with blue adhesive tape. "It’s enough for an emergency state indictment, Arthur. But Gantry has the sector car perimeter closed around the county courts. If we try to walk Vance through the front rotunda at seven, Gantry’s sector sergeants will intercept him on the sidewalk under color of the active burglary warrant. Once they have him in the back of a sector cruiser, that evidence envelope won't survive the three-block drive to the precinct basement."