"I'm all right, Wendell. Thank you."
"Twenty-two years I've been mopping this floor," Wendell said, low, so that only Desmond could hear. "I've seen that happen maybe a dozen times. Never once seen anybody wait for the radio before they grabbed." He shook his head. "Go on. You're late."
Desmond walked. He did not run. He walked down the concourse toward the crew room at B38 with his garment bag over his shoulder and his roller bag rattling behind him and Dolores Lindqvist's tapestry purse held against his chest in both arms, carefully, the way Ines Garrido had carried the urn, and he did not look back, and he did not walk light.
* * *
Sergeant Whitfield took Curtis's statement standing up, by the window, with the patrolman writing in a notebook and the science teacher from Kansas sitting ten feet away texting the video to the sergeant's phone. Brent the guard had already been walked off toward the B-concourse security office by a supervisor who had arrived out of breath and furious.
Curtis told it well. He always told things well. He told it the way he told a client why the install was six weeks behind schedule: calmly, with the facts in order, every one of them true and arranged so that the shape they made was the shape he needed. He saw a man running. He saw a woman's purse. He made a split-second decision. There had been a lot of thefts in airports lately, it was in the news. He'd been the victim of a violent robbery himself, once, years ago, in Philadelphia. He was not a racist. His best friend in college was. Well, his roommate, freshman year. He hadn't even seen what the guy looked like, really. It was all very fast.
Whitfield listened to all of it without changing her expression. When he was done she looked down at her phone, where the video was playing silently, and watched it for about thirty seconds. Then she turned the screen toward him.
"Mr. Lindqvist. You yelled 'stop' once. Then you yelled 'he's got somebody's purse.' Then you put both hands on him. That's about four seconds. In those four seconds did you see him take that purse from anyone?"
"No, but..."
"Did you see a woman chasing him?"
"No."
"Did you hear anybody yell thief, help, anything like that?"
"No."
"So the whole case, as far as you were concerned, was a man running in an airport with a purse."