"A pan," he said.
"A hotel pan. From a kitchen. Steel, this big," and Lorenz, with his hands behind his back, could not show him, so he said it, "twelve inches by seven, about. Two and a half deep. Somebody put it in the chute so the bags land on it and don't fall into the vault. Then they come back with a key and take them out. Everybody who banks here has the same key. That's what's happening to your missing bags. Nobody is fishing anything out of a vault. They never get to the vault. Look. You haven't looked. You never looked in the wall. Please. Just look in the wall."
For a long moment the cop did not move. He stood with one hand on the top of the door and the other hanging at his side, and the light bar threw blue and red across his face, blue, red, blue, so that it was impossible to read anything in it. Then, without a word, he shut the door again, and he walked over to the night drop, which was still hanging open, its hopper tilted back toward the dark slot.
Lorenz watched him through the side window.
Brodersen stood in front of the faceplate. He unclipped his flashlight from his belt, the long one, and clicked it on, and leaned in, and shone it down into the slot past the back edge of the hopper. He stayed like that, leaning in. Ten seconds. Twenty. Thirty. Lorenz counted them. He counted the way he counted a steak resting on the board, one, and two, and three. At forty-five the cop straightened up. He did not turn around. He stood with his back to the cruiser and his flashlight pointed at the ground and his free hand on his hip, very still, his breath going up white in the floodlight above him.
Then he went to the trunk of the cruiser and opened it, and Lorenz heard him rummaging, and he came back up the side of the car snapping on a pair of blue nitrile gloves, the same gloves Lorenz wore to portion raw chicken, and he went back to the wall and bent and reached his arm into the slot.
It took him a while. His arm was thicker than Lorenz's and the slot was narrow, and Lorenz watched him work his arm in up to the forearm and stop and swear and pull it out and push his sleeve up and try again. Then his arm came out holding something blue. He held it up in the floodlight. A zippered vinyl bank bag, royal blue, with a little brass lock dangling from the zipper pull. He turned it over in his gloved hands and looked at the side of it, and Lorenz could not see the letters from the car, but he did not need to. He watched the cop's shoulders. They dropped. Not much. An inch. The way a man's shoulders drop when he sets down something heavy he has been carrying for a long time, and finds that setting it down does not make him feel lighter at all.
Brodersen laid the blue bag on top of the night drop's open door, carefully, the way you would set down something that might break, and reached into the wall again.
This time it took longer. Lorenz saw him find it and lose it and find it again. He saw him pull and stop and feel around with his fingers, and then, with a sharp twist of his wrist, unhook something, and pull again, and then it came up out of the slot, scraping and squealing against the steel lip with a sound that set Lorenz's teeth on edge, and the cop held it up under the light.
A third pan. Stainless steel. Shallow. It caught the floodlight and threw it back so bright it hurt to look at. From each of its two short ends hung a hook of bent wire, stiff and gray, the kind of heavy wire you would cut from a coat hanger or a tomato cage, looped through a hole drilled clean through the steel lip and bent into a J so that the pan could be hung across the chute like a hammock, from the frame just below the hopper. Bags tipped off the hopper would fall eight inches and land on it, and lie there, and wait.
Brodersen turned it over slowly in his hands. He turned it back. He looked at it for a long time.