The Trial in the Museum Basement

• Chapter 1 The Cold File
• Chapter 2 Sublevel Three
• Chapter 3 The Missing Relic
• Chapter 4 A Gavel in the Dark
• Chapter 5 The Public Defender's Oath
• Chapter 6 Dust and Evidence
• Chapter 7 Motion to Convene
• Chapter 8 The Curator's Silence
• Chapter 9 Shadows in the Stacks
• Chapter 10 Catalog Number 847
• Chapter 11 The Unofficial Record
• Chapter 12 Witnesses in the Dark
• Chapter 13 The Stenographer’s Lamp
• Chapter 14 Cross-Examining the Archive
• Chapter 15 Contempt of Court
• Chapter 16 A Lock Without a Key
• Chapter 17 The Patron's Shadow
• Chapter 18 Exhibit A
• Chapter 19 The Midnight Session
• Chapter 20 Confessions in Crate Twelve
• Chapter 21 Overruled
• Chapter 22 The Chain of Custody
• Chapter 23 A Matter of Record
• Chapter 24 The Final Rebuttal
• Chapter 25 The Verdict Beneath the Marble
• Chapter 26 Adjournment

The rain in Chicago had a habit of smelling like wet coal and forgotten promises, especially in November of 1954. Frank Miller leaned against the radiator in his office on the third floor of the Cook County Criminal Courts Building, waiting for the steam pipes to stop clanking long enough for him to hear himself think. The radiator produced a dry, scorching heat that scorched the knees of his trousers while leaving his ankles in a perpetual draft.

Frank was thirty-eight years old, possessed a cheap wool suit that had seen better decades, and held the official title of Assistant Public Defender. In practical terms, this meant he was the man the city called when somebody who couldn't afford a nickel cup of coffee found themselves accused of a felony. Most days, his docket was a gray conveyor belt of petty larcenies, drunk and disorderlies, and the occasional back-alley brawl that ended with a broken jaw and a missing wallet. He processed them, pleaded them down, and did his best to keep young men from spending their prime years in Joliet.

He wasn't looking for a crusade. Crusades required time, energy, and an expense account, none of which were provided by the County Board. But on a Tuesday afternoon, while the rain rattled against the grimy windowpane like a handful of loose gravel, Arthur Pendergast walked into his office carrying a manila folder so pale and faded it looked as though it had been dredged from the bottom of Lake Michigan.

Pendergast was the chief clerk of the court records division—a man who had spent forty years surviving on stale tobacco, black coffee, and a fanatical adherence to municipal filing codes. He dropped the folder onto Frank’s desk with a thud that dislodged a cloud of ancient cellulose.

"You're late for the three o'clock arraignments, Frank," Pendergast said, wiping his thumb across his mustache.

"The three o'clock was a petty theft out of the stockyards," Frank said, not moving from the radiator. "The kid took two hams. The meatpacking company doesn't want to press charges if he gives back the hams, but the kid ate one of them on Sunday. So now we're negotiating over the value of half-digested pork. What's the paper?"

"It’s not a ham," Pendergast said. He tapped the top of the file with a liver-spotted index finger. "It’s a state case that’s been sitting in the basement vault since nine o'clock this morning. Judge Callahan wants it off his calendar by Friday. He gave it to you because he thinks you’re the only guy in the building stupid enough not to ask questions about why it doesn't have an indictment attached."

Frank stepped away from the radiator, the wool of his trousers scraping against his skin. He walked over to the desk and pulled the folder toward him. Printed across the tab in faded blue ink was a docket number: State v. Unknown. Beneath it, someone had written in heavy pencil: Larceny / Public Property / Metropolitan Museum of History and Art.

"Unknown?" Frank asked, flipping the cover open. "You can't prosecute an 'Unknown.' The state needs a name, Arthur. It’s right there in the Constitution. They wrote it down in Philadelphia."

"They found a guy in the basement of the museum at two in the morning," Pendergast explained, leaning his palms on the edge of the desk. "He didn't have an ID. He didn't have a coat. He had a set of brass pick locks, a pair of canvas gloves, and he was sitting in front of a smashed glass display case in the Mediterranean Wing."

"What was in the display case?"

"That's the funny part," Pendergast said, cracking a yellowed smile. "Nothing. The inventory sheet in the file says the case was empty. Has been empty since 1948. But the museum security guard swears the guy was trying to steal whatever wasn't there."

Frank leafed through the four pages that comprised the total record of the crime. There was an arrest report typed on a typewriter with a stuck 'E' key, a property receipt for three rusty tension wrenches, and an affidavit signed by the museum’s head of security, a retired police captain named Timothy Vance. There was no mugshot, no fingerprint card, and no bail amount.

"Where is the defendant?" Frank asked.

"Down in the holding cell under the stairs," Pendergast said. "He hasn't said a word since they booked him. Not his name, not his lawyer, not his mother's maiden name. The desk sergeant named him 'John Doe Thirty-Four' because thirty-three died of delirium tremens over the weekend."

Frank picked up his pack of Lucky Strikes, shook out a cigarette, and lit it with a match struck against the bottom of his desk drawer. He blew a line of grey smoke toward the cracked ceiling.

"Callahan wants this wrapped up by Friday?" Frank said. "If the guy won't talk, they'll ship him to the asylum at Elgin for thirty days of observation. That’s standard."

"Callahan doesn't want him in Elgin," Pendergast said, lowering his voice. "Callahan got a call from the city attorney's office. And the city attorney got a call from the board of trustees at the museum. They don't want a trial, Frank. They don't even want a hearing. They want him to plead guilty to trespassing, take thirty days in the county jail, and vanish. But to get the plea, somebody has to stand next to him and sign the paper. That's you."

Frank walked out of his office, down the dimly lit corridor, and took the stairs down to the lockup beneath the building. The basement of the courthouse smelled of creosote and old damp wool. A single light bulb hung from a frayed cord above the steel mesh door of Cell Number Four.

Inside, sitting on a wooden bench that was bolted to the concrete floor, was a man in his late fifties. He wore a gray flannel suit that had been tailored for a man slightly larger than him, though the fabric was clean and well-kept despite twelve hours in a city cell. His hands were folded neatly in his lap. They were long, slender hands with scrubbed fingernails, not the hands of a man who spent his nights picking locks or hefting heavy crates.

Frank drew a metal folding chair up to the outside of the bars, unfolded it with a sharp metallic clatter, and sat down.

"I'm Frank Miller," he said through the mesh. "I'm a public defender. That means the county pays me a tiny amount of money to make sure the state doesn't steamroll you without at least following their own rules."

The man on the bench didn't look up. He kept his eyes fixed on a water stain near the bottom of the opposite wall.

"They're calling you John Doe Thirty-Four," Frank continued. "It lacks a certain warmth, but it’s what's on the docket. Now, the state says you broke into the Metropolitan Museum of History and Art last night. They say you had tools on you. They also say you didn't actually take anything, mostly because the box you broke into didn't have anything inside it. Does that sound accurate to you?"

The man slowly raised his head. His eyes were pale grey, clear and unhurried. He didn't look frightened, nor did he look like the sort of lunatic who usually occupied Cell Number Four.

"The case was not empty," the man said. His voice was quiet, dry, and precise, carrying the soft accent of the East Coast prep schools.

Frank paused, his cigarette halfway to his mouth. "The police report says it was."

"The police report reflects what Mr. Vance wished the police to see," the man replied. He adjusted his cuffs, revealing a thin gold wristwatch with a worn leather strap. "The case contained a ninth-century bronze weight from the Levantine coast. Catalog number 847. It was acquired by the museum in 1922 under the bequest of the late Marcus Hovey."

Frank took out a small notepad and a stub of a pencil. "And you were taking it?"

"I was attempting to verify its presence," the man said. "Which, as it turns out, was a mistake. It was already gone."

"Gone before you got there?"

"Gone for seven years," the man said softly. "The display was an empty shell, Mr. Miller. A glass box containing nothing but velvet and dust, kept in a dark gallery so the public wouldn't notice that six thousand years of history are being sold off through the back door."

Frank stared at the man through the iron grid. In his experience, defendants in municipal court fell into two distinct categories: those who were guilty and lied about it, and those who were guilty and didn't care. Occasionally, there was a third category—the ones who were completely insane and believed the Mayor of Chicago was transmitting messages to them through their dental work.

This man fit none of those descriptions. He spoke with the quiet, bored authority of a university librarian correcting a date on an index card.

"Look, mister," Frank said, leaning forward. "If you want to fight a burglary charge by claiming the museum is lying about their inventory, you need two things. First, you need a name. I can't file a motion for a guy who refuses to tell me who he is."

"My name is unimportant," the man said. "If I give you my name, my employer will post bail within thirty minutes, the charge will be amended to a misdemeanor disturbance, a fine will be paid, and the file will be sealed by order of the Circuit Court. The record will be erased."

The rain outside had turned to sleet by four o'clock, freezing into a slick, milky grease on the wide granite steps of the Cook County Courthouse. Frank Miller stood under the stone archway, his coat collar turned up against his ears, pulling hard on a second Lucky Strike. Across the avenue, the streetcars dragged their rusty pantographs along the overhead lines, showering the asphalt with blue sparks that died before they hit the slush.

He couldn't get the man in Cell Four out of his head. The guy had sat on that wooden bench like he was waiting for a train that he owned, while Frank had spent twenty minutes trying to explain the mechanics of the municipal court system to him.

"If you don't give me a name," Frank had told him, "Callahan will have you in front of a grand jury by Friday morning on a felony burglary indictment. They'll set bail at ten grand, which you can't pay because you claim you don't want your wealthy employer to know you're here. You'll sit in the county jail until March."

"March is acceptable," the man had replied, without a trace of sarcasm. "By March, the humidity in the basement will have ruined the cardboard backings on the catalog cards from the 1920 acquisition. If I am in jail, no one will be able to stop them from throwing the original dockets into the incinerator."

Then he had turned his face back toward the water stain on the wall, and that was the end of the interview.

Frank tossed his cigarette butt into a slush puddle and crossed the street toward the elevated train platform. He had two choices. He could sign the standard waiver form, hand the file back to Arthur Pendergast, and let Judge Callahan stamp a ninety-day vagrancy stretch onto John Doe Thirty-Four. It was the easy way out, the way every public defender in Chicago survived on seventy-five dollars a week without developing an ulcer before forty.

Or he could go take a look at the room where the man had been caught.

The Metropolitan Museum of History and Art occupied three city blocks of prime Michigan Avenue real estate, looking like a cross between a Greek temple and a Union Pacific locomotive terminal. It had been built in the nineties out of Indiana limestone that had long since absorbed enough coal smoke to turn the color of a wet slate shingle. A pair of bronze lions guarded the main entrance, their heads encrusted with green verdigris and pigeon droppings.

Frank walked past the lions, pushed through the heavy brass turnstiles, and found himself in the Great Hall. The air inside was completely different from the street—it smelled of lavender oil, floor wax, and the dry, dead heat of a coal furnace operating at full blast. A few dozen visitors were milling about in the cavernous space, their wet rubbers squeaking against the polished marble floor.

He didn't bother looking at the marble staircase or the towering plaster casts of Roman emperors. Instead, he made a straight line for the small, low-ceilinged alcove near the coat check where a brass plaque read: Administrative Offices – Security Division.

Behind a frosted glass door, Captain Timothy Vance sat behind an oak desk that looked like it had been salvaged from a police station basement. Vance was a broad-shouldered man in his early sixties with a thick neck, a brush-cut mustache, and a silver star pinned to the lapel of a dark blue serge jacket. He was reading the Daily News and eating a ham sandwich out of a wax paper wrapper.

"We're closed for private consultations after four, pal," Vance said without looking up from the sports section.

Frank took out his county ID badge, the thin silver-plated star mounted in a scuffed leather flap, and dropped it onto the newspaper.

Vance looked at the badge, then looked up at Frank. His eyes were small, dark, and set deep beneath a pair of bushy eyebrows that had turned white before the rest of his hair. He didn't look impressed.

"Public Defender's office," Vance said, blowing a crumbs-laden breath out his nose. "What, did they send you down here to beg for a reduced charge on that vagrant we picked up last night? Tell Callahan he can have him. We don't care about the trespass. We just want him off the property."

"I'm his attorney," Frank said, taking a seat in a wooden armchair without waiting for an invitation. "And he's not a vagrant. His suit cost more than my monthly paycheck, and his shoes were made by a cobbler in Boston."

"I don't care if he's the King of England's brother," Vance said, folding his newspaper with three sharp, practiced snaps. "He was in the building after hours. He bypassed two locked doors, disabled a mechanical trip-wire on the gallery floor, and was caught with a set of burg-tools in his pocket right in front of a shattered display case. That’s third-degree burglary, counselor. In Illinois, that's three to five in Joliet."

"Except nothing was stolen," Frank noted gently.

"Because my guard caught him before he could bag it."

"Your police report says the display case was empty before he smashed the glass," Frank said. He leaned forward, resting his forearms on his knees. "It says Catalog Number 847 was removed from display in 1948 for restoration. It says the case was just sitting there waiting for a new liner."

Vance’s jaw twitched slightly. He picked up a toothpick from a small glass tray and inserted it between his back teeth. "So what? The guy's an idiot. He broke into an empty box. That doesn't make him innocent of the break-in. It just makes him a lousy burglar."

"My client says the piece was in the case until recently," Frank said. "He says it's a ninth-century bronze weight. Levantine origin. Bequeathed by Marcus Hovey."

Vance stopped chewing on the toothpick. For a second, the room was completely silent, except for the low hum of an electric fan sitting on top of a filing cabinet in the corner.

"Your client is a liar," Vance said smoothly, though his voice had dropped an octave. "And he's a trespasser. He doesn't know what was in that case. Nobody knows what was in that case except the curatorial staff, and they don't talk to public defenders."

"I'd like to see the scene of the crime," Frank said.

"Gallery's closed to the public."

"I'm not the public," Frank said, pulling out a folded piece of paper from his coat pocket. It was a standard Notice of Entry and Request for Physical Inspection, signed by Frank himself and bearing the red ink stamp of the Public Defender's Division. It wasn't worth much without a judge's order behind it, but ninety percent of the people in Chicago didn't know the difference between a county stamp and a supreme court mandate. "Under Chapter 38 of the Revised Statutes, the defense has a right to view the physical location of an alleged felony before trial. Unless you want me to bring Judge Callahan down here with a squad of sheriff's deputies to open the door for me."

Vance stared at the red stamp for a long moment. He spit his toothpick into the wastebasket, stood up, and grabbed a ring of heavy brass keys from a peg on the wall.

"Five minutes," Vance said. "And you keep your hands in your pockets. You touch one frame, and I'll have you thrown in the lockup for obstructing a security officer."

They walked out of the office and through a side door that led into the back corridors of the museum. The transformation was instant. The grand marble halls gave way to narrow, unpainted brick passageways lit by bare bulbs hanging from iron conduits. The air smelled different here—colder, damper, with a thick, heavy odor of damp lime and rotting paper.

Vance led him past several locked iron doors down a flight of concrete stairs that had been worn slick in the middle by generations of workmen's boots. They reached a landing labeled Sublevel Two, but Vance didn't stop. He pushed open a heavy fire door and continued down a narrower, steeper flight of stone steps that spiraled down into the dark.

"Where are we going?" Frank asked, his leather-soled shoes slipping slightly on the cold concrete. "The Mediterranean Wing is on the second floor of the main building."

"The broken case was in the reserve gallery," Vance said over his shoulder. His shadow bounced off the curved brick wall as he moved. "We don't keep the secondary study collections up where the public walks around. Too much clutter. The school groups like the mummies and the knights in armor. Nobody gives a damn about three-thousand-year-old oil lamps from Syria."

At the bottom of the spiral stairs, they came to a steel door that looked like it belonged on a bank vault. It had a heavy brass wheel in the center and a keyhole that required a key eight inches long. Vance unlocked it with a sharp, double-click sound that echoed down the shaft, turned the wheel, and pulled the door open.

The room beyond was huge—a subterranean hall that stretched out into the gloom under Michigan Avenue. The ceiling was supported by square brick pillars every twenty feet, and between the pillars were rows of floor-to-ceiling metal shelving packed with wooden crates, plaster busts, rolled canvases, and glass-topped display cases wrapped in gray canvas dust covers.

It was Sublevel Three.

The temperature down here was noticeably lower, cold enough that Frank could see his breath in the dim yellow light from the widely spaced overhead bulbs. The air was so dry it made his nose sting, a sharp, artificial dryness generated by large iron dehumidifiers that thrummed like sleeping engines in the corners of the vault.

"This way," Vance growled, stepping into the narrow aisle between two walls of stacked wooden crates marked HOVEY BEQUEST – 1922.

Frank followed him, his feet making soft crunching sounds on the fine layer of gray dust that covered the concrete floor. He looked at the labels on the crates as he passed. Most of them had been stamped with blue stencil ink: GREEK / ROMAN / UNCATALOGED. Many of them had thick red wax seals melted over the wire closures—seals that had been cracked and broken, then roughly wired shut again.

They stopped near the far wall of the vault, where a solitary display case stood on a wooden pedestal beneath a green-shaded bank lamp.

The glass top of the case had been shattered. Jagged shards of glass lay scattered across the faded black velvet lining inside, sparkling like ice under the lamp. In the middle of the velvet was a clean, rectangular impression in the dust—a spot about six inches square where an object had rested for a very long time before being picked up.

Frank leaned over the pedestal, taking care not to touch the frame.

"Where's the rest of the dust?" he asked.

Vance frowned. "What are you talking about?"

"Look at the lining," Frank pointed with the tip of his lit cigarette, which he had pulled out without thinking. "The whole velvet floor of the case has a layer of grey grime on it. Except that rectangle in the middle, and three small circular spots near the edge where the legs of something were sitting."

"I told you," Vance said, leaning against a pillar with his arms crossed. "The piece was removed for restoration years ago."

"If it was removed six years ago," Frank said, looking closely at the velvet, "the grey dust would be inside the rectangle, too. It takes years for that kind of coal ash to build up in a basement. That spot was cleared out within the last forty-eight hours. Somebody picked that thing up on Sunday."

Vance stepped forward, his boots crunching loudly on the glass. He reached down and snatched the green-shaded lamp by its arm, swinging it away from the case so the beam shone directly into Frank's eyes.

"You're an attorney, Miller," Vance said, his voice dropping into a harsh, rasping whisper. "You aren't a detective, and you aren't an expert on old bronze. The case was empty. The report says it was empty. The Director of the Museum says it was empty. If your John Doe says anything different, he's going to be talking to a court-appointed psychiatrist in Elgin by Friday afternoon."

Frank didn't blink. He stood his ground in the glare of the lamp, feeling the cold air of Sublevel Three blowing off the unpainted masonry behind him.

"What's in Crate Twelve, Captain?" Frank asked, pointing toward a massive oak chest sitting twenty feet away, its metal corners reinforced with rusted iron bands.

Vance turned off the lamp, plunging the gallery back into a dismal, yellow twilight.

"That's none of your business," Vance said. "Inspection's over. Move your feet."

As Frank turned to follow the security chief back toward the vault door, his shoe caught on something soft sitting near the foot of the pedestal. He reached down quickly, before Vance could turn around, and scooped it off the floor.

It was a small, torn piece of brown paper—a fragment of a shipping label. On it, typed in black ink, were three words: RETURN TO ARCHIVE. Below them, written in fresh red pencil, was a single catalog number: 847.

Frank slid the paper into his coat pocket, right beside his pack of Lucky Strikes, and kept walking.

The streetlights on Michigan Avenue were coming on by the time Frank got back to the sidewalk. The snow was falling in earnest now, heavy, wet flakes that stuck to the wool of his hat and turned the gray stone of the museum into a dark, monolithic wall.

He walked three blocks south to a small, narrow bar called The Gavel, located behind the Municipal Courts building. It was a lawyer's bar—dark paneled walls, a long mahogany counter that had been stained by thousands of spilled highballs, and a back room where half the preliminary motions in Cook County were settled over roast beef sandwiches and draft beer.

Arthur Pendergast was sitting in a booth near the back, a bowl of chili and a glass of dark ale in front of him. He looked up as Frank slid into the wooden bench opposite him.

"You look like you've been digging graves," Pendergast said, wiping his mouth with a paper napkin. "Did Callahan give you an extension?"

"Callahan doesn't know I'm on it yet," Frank said. He signaled the bartender for a rye on the rocks. "Arthur, who owns the Metropolitan Museum?"

"The city owns the dirt," Pendergast said, chewing on a cracker. "The building belongs to a non-profit corporation. But the board of trustees is run by Marcus Hovey's estate and old man Van Zandt. Why?"

"What do you know about the Hovey Bequest?"

Pendergast stopped chewing. He laid his spoon down on the table with a quiet clink. He looked around the tavern, but the nearest patrons were two bailiffs three booths away who were arguing about the White Sox's pitching rotation.

"Marcus Hovey was a railway robber baron who died in 1920," Pendergast said, lowering his voice. "He spent thirty years buying up half the antiquities in the Middle East and southern Europe. When he kicked off, he left his whole collection to the museum—twelve hundred crates of ancient stuff, plus a two-million-dollar endowment to maintain it. The catch was that his nephew, Julian Hovey, got to be the life chairman of the board."

"And Julian Hovey is still alive?"

"Alive, eighty years old, and sits in a penthouse on Lake Shore Drive," Pendergast said. "He’s the guy who calls the Mayor when he doesn't like the way the garbage trucks are running down his street. Why are you asking about Hovey?"

Frank pulled the fragment of brown paper out of his pocket and laid it flat on the formica table between them.

"My John Doe didn't break into that museum to steal anything," Frank said. "He went down to Sublevel Three to stop somebody else from stealing it. Catalog Number 847 was sitting in a crate marked for shipment. It left the building on Monday."

Pendergast picked up the scrap of paper, held it near his thick glasses, and squinted at the pencil mark.

"This doesn't mean anything, Frank," Pendergast said, tossing it back. "A museum sells stuff all the time. Duplicate pieces, old study material. It's called deaccessioning. It's legal."

"Not if it's part of a restricted bequest," Frank said. "Hovey's will specified that not a single piece of his collection could ever be sold, traded, or moved out of the city limits of Chicago. If they sell one button, the whole two-million-dollar trust reverts to the State of Illinois."

Pendergast stared at Frank for three seconds, his jaw slightly open.

"Where did you learn that?"

"I read the summary in the Illinois Supreme Court reports while I was waiting for my six o'clock arraignment," Frank said. "Hovey's heirs tried to break the will in 1928. The court threw them out and said the bequest had to stay intact in the museum forever. Every single piece."

Frank took a sip of his rye, feeling the burn go all the way down to his chest.

"They aren't trying to protect the museum from my guy," Frank said. "They're trying to use the county jail to get rid of the only person who knows that the museum's trustees have been liquidating the collection behind the state's back."

Pendergast reached over and grabbed Frank's sleeve, his old fingers pinching through the wool.

"Frank, listen to me," the clerk said, his voice dropping to a harsh whisper. "You're an assistant public defender. You make forty-two hundred dollars a year. You have two suits and a five-year-old Plymouth with a bad transmission. Julian Hovey owns three judges on the Circuit Court and half the city council. If you try to turn a simple trespass charge into a public inquiry into the Hovey Trust, Callahan won't just fire you—he'll have the Bar Association pull your license before the weekend."

"They can't pull my license if I'm conducting a defense," Frank said.

"What defense?" Pendergast demanded. "Your client won't give you his name! He won't sign a petition! He's sitting in Cell Four looking at the paint peeling off the radiator!"

Frank stood up, picked his wet hat off the hook, and settled it onto his head.

"Then I'll just have to bring the court to him," Frank said.

"What does that mean?"

"It means," Frank said, leaning over the table, "that if the museum won't bring the evidence to the courthouse, I'm going to ask for a change of venue. To the basement of the Metropolitan Museum of History and Art."

Pendergast looked at him like he had suddenly grown a second head. "Callahan will never grant that. It's insane."

"Callahan wants this off his calendar by Friday," Frank said, heading for the door. "And I'm the only lawyer in the building who's stupid enough to give him what he wants."

He walked back to the Municipal Courts building through the rising storm. The streets were almost empty now, the shadows of the tall buildings stretching out over the snow like dark bars across a grey floor.

Down in the lockup, the light bulb above Cell Four was flickering, casting long, jumping shadows across the concrete corridor. The desk sergeant was asleep behind his glass window, a half-eaten doughnut sitting on a napkin next to his logbook.

Frank walked down the aisle and stood outside the iron mesh.

The man inside hadn't moved. He was still sitting on the wooden bench, his long hands folded in his lap, his pale gray eyes fixed on the damp wall.

"I went down to Sublevel Three," Frank said softly.

The man didn't turn his head, but his fingers tightened slightly against his trousers.

"The velvet was clean," Frank continued. "The dust was gone from the center of the pedestal. And I found a tag for Crate Twelve."

The man turned his head slowly. For the first time, there was something like interest in his eyes—a cold, sharp light that made him look twenty years younger.

"They are moving the collection," the man said. It wasn't a question.

"They're shipping it out through the coal tunnel," Frank said. "Probably to a private buyer in New York or London. But to prove it, I need to know who you are. I can't file a motion for a phantom."

The man stood up from the bench. He walked over to the cell door, his steps silent in his polished shoes, until he was standing six inches from the iron bars. He was taller than Frank had realized—a lean, straight-backed man who looked like he had spent his life standing at a podium.

"My name," the man said quietly, "is Henry Hovey."

Frank took a slow breath. "Julian Hovey's brother?"

"Julian's nephew," the man corrected him. "And the assistant curator of the Mediterranean Department until yesterday morning, when I discovered that my uncle's debts at the Continental Bank had reached five hundred thousand dollars."

"Your own family is looting the basement?"

"My family," Henry Hovey said, "has always regarded the basement as a private larder. They simply waited until the generation that remembered the original inventory died off before they began opening the crates."

Frank looked at the man through the mesh. The pieces were coming together now, fitting into a cold, dark structure that reached from the marble halls of Michigan Avenue all the way down to the county lockup beneath his feet.

"If I put your name on the docket," Frank said, "your uncle's lawyers will be here in twenty minutes with a writ of habeas corpus. They'll have you out of here, out of the state, and into a private sanitarium in Connecticut before the sun comes up."

"I know," Henry Hovey said.

"Which means we don't put your name on the docket," Frank said. He took out his cigarette case, selected a Lucky, and offered one through the bars. Hovey took it with a slight nod of thanks. Frank struck a match and held the flame through the wire.

"What do you propose to do, Mr. Miller?" Hovey asked, blowing a thin plume of grey smoke toward the flickering light bulb.

"Tomorrow morning at nine o'clock," Frank said, "Judge Callahan opens his court. I'm going to stand up and tell him that the state has failed to produce the physical evidence of the crime—the shattered display case and the missing property."

"And Callahan will tell you that the police report is sufficient."

"He will," Frank agreed. "Until I tell him that under the 1870 Illinois Constitution, if a crime is alleged to have occurred in a place where the evidence cannot be moved without being destroyed, the defense has the right to demand that the record be established at the scene."

Hovey smiled—a small, thin expression that didn't reach his grey eyes. "You think a Cook County judge will move his court into a dusty archive beneath Michigan Avenue?"

"Callahan is seventy-two years old," Frank said, leaning his shoulder against the cell wall. "He has gout, he hates the stairs in this building, and his daughter is married to the director of the museum's public relations committee. He'll do anything to keep this out of the papers—including sitting in a basement for two hours if he thinks it means he can bury the case before lunch."

Frank turned and started back up the dark hall toward the stairs.

"Mr. Miller," Hovey called out behind him.

Frank stopped and looked back.

"There are no windows down there," Hovey said, his voice carrying clearly down the damp concrete corridor. "Once they lock the doors behind the court, the only thing that exists is what gets entered into the stenographer's record. Make sure your stenographer has a good lamp."

"Don't worry about the record, Mr. Hovey," Frank said, settling his wet hat back onto his head. "In this county, the record is the only thing that ever stays buried."