Oge handed the letter back with great care, the way you hand someone a baby that isn't yours.
"Then it's ours," she said. It was not a question, and it was not an accusation. It was a woman setting something down on a counter where everyone could see it.
Then she looked at her watch. "I am going to check the loading dock doors, which takes me ten minutes if I walk slow, and I am going to walk slow. At eleven-fifty I arm this floor. You two figure out where that paper sleeps tonight. Not in anybody's coat pocket." She looked at Elliot over her glasses. "Not in *anybody's* coat pocket."
"Agreed," said Elliot.
"Agreed," said Roz.
Oge nodded once and walked off into the dark, slowly, keys chiming, and did not look back.
They photographed the letter on both their phones, front and back, every inch. Elliot laid it in a clean folder between sheets of acid-free tissue. They returned the empty tube to the tower beside the little carved Liesl and closed the arcade door, and then, together on the ledge, they lifted the star from its socket — and the tower sank back into the crown with a long, soft sigh, the way it had been built to, and the pyramid was only a pyramid again.
Roz locked the folder in the safe in her fifth-floor office at 11:49. At 11:50 she stood on the sidewalk in her cream coat, shoes on at last, real snow coming down on Wisconsin Avenue, and watched the sensor lights in the front windows blink from green to red.
Elliot stood beside her with his collar up.
"You did prove useful," she said, not looking at him.
"I'm aware it didn't help."
"No," she said. "It didn't." And then, after a while: "Nine o'clock tomorrow. Here. We'll fight about it at a reasonable hour."
"Nine," he said.
She walked to her car. She didn't look back either, though it cost her something not to.
IV.