"Thank you," he said, because it was a habit, and then wished he hadn't.
The detectives came at two-twenty, two of them, a young man and an older one named Aguilar who had a cold and kept blowing his nose into a handkerchief, and Lorenz told it all again, from the beginning, sitting in the front seat of their unmarked car with the dome light on. The sound of the bag. The tick. The light. The pan. The day dot. The van. Aguilar wrote it down and asked good questions, and when Lorenz described the van the detective stopped writing and looked at his partner, and his partner said, "Hm," and Aguilar said, "Yeah," and Lorenz understood that the van meant something to them that it had not meant to Brodersen, and that he was not going to be told what. At the end, after Lorenz had explained the day dot a second time, Aguilar said, "You'd make a decent detective, you know that?" and Lorenz said, "No, sir. I'd make a decent cook," and Aguilar laughed until he coughed.
A branch manager came at a quarter to three in a fleece jacket over pajama pants and stood in front of the night drop saying, "In my box. In my box," until the young detective walked him inside to look at the vault.
At three-ten Brodersen drove him back to Baird's.
Lorenz rode in the front seat this time, under the purple horse. Neither of them spoke. Brodersen drove the five blocks slowly, with the light bar off, and pulled into the alley behind the restaurant and stopped beside the dumpster under the yellow security light, and they both sat there for a moment with the engine running.
"I've got to come in," Brodersen said. "Chain of custody. I've got to watch it go in the safe."
"I know."
Lorenz unlocked the steel back door and turned on the lights in the kitchen. It was exactly as he had left it, the flat-top shining like a black lake, the hood fans silent, the speed rack of labeled pans waiting to go into the walk-in, which he had forgotten, he realized, he had forgotten to put the mise en place into the walk-in, it had been sitting out on the rack for three hours, and he stood in the doorway and looked at it and felt the night come down on him all at once, so heavily that he had to put his hand on the door frame. Eight third pans of chives and shallots and garlic and calamansi juice, under plastic wrap, in the warm kitchen since midnight. He would have to throw all of it out. Dorrit would never know. He would know.
"You okay?" Brodersen said behind him.
"I forgot to put my mise away," Lorenz said. And then, because the cop would not understand: "The prep. For tomorrow. It sat out too long. I have to throw it out."