The gray square of velvet was still there, empty. The white card was still propped on its little brass easel. Made by hand in this shop, 1979. Above it, in gold leaf gone soft and amber with seventy years, the letters arched across the glass. From out here they read the right way. SZABO & SON. From in there they read backward, and she could see Walt through them, on the far side, turning off the lamp at the end of the counter.
She took out her phone and took a picture through the window. She looked at it. At the top of the frame, faint and ghostly, the glass had picked up something else, under the streetlight: a red-and-white band of backward letters. ERAWDRAH SILLOH.
She stood there for a minute with the phone in her hand. Then she sent the picture to Ray Dombrowski, whose number Lin had given her, with no message at all. A minute later he wrote back.
Yeah. That's what I figured. Get some sleep.
* * *
Detective Ana Ruiz was exactly as mad as Ray had said she would be, for exactly as long.
"You went back," she said. "Off duty. To the shop. Of the guy you seized property from. On a case that isn't yours." She was a small woman in her fifties with silver at her temples and a cardigan the color of a manila folder, and she sat behind a desk in the Property Crimes office on the second floor of headquarters with Ray's printouts fanned in front of her like a bad poker hand. "Do you know what a defense attorney would do with that?"
"There's no defense attorney," Ray said. "There's no defendant. That's my point."
"There's a defendant if I charge Mr. Szabo with receiving. Which, if I'm reading Sergeant Kimball's email correctly, is what everybody upstairs would like me to do by lunchtime."
"Ana."
"Detective."
"Detective. Look at the top of the picture."
She looked. She looked for a long time. Then she took off her glasses, rubbed her eyes, put the glasses back on, and turned the photograph upside down and then right side up again, which Ray had not thought to do and which he would remember later as the moment he understood why she'd lasted eight years in the unit.
"Hollis Hardware," she said.
"Yes, ma'am."