Thinking again, Wally, I took the stairs to the third level, my joints still aching, and hiked on down to Wally’s surveillance room.

  The first thing I did after pulling Wally’s chair up to the console was to restart the video system. The monitors blinked on in no particular order, the room getting lighter as they did, and as vista after vista popped on-screen reassuringly empty, I felt a slight easing of the tension I’d accumulated during the evening. I’d had occasional Phantom of the Opera moments when it seemed inescapably obvious that the mall would by now have spawned its own disfigured specter, perhaps someone who was scarred for life and driven mad after being trampled by Black Friday crowds and had lurked here in the shadows, probably on the third floor of Gabriel’s, ever since. But if he was out there, he wasn’t in camera range.

  I pulled open the little cupboard under Wally’s end of the console and shone my light into it. I don’t know exactly what I was hoping to find, but what was there exceeded all reasonable expectations: a zigzag of perforated graph paper from an old printer and a little wire-bound appointment book. The graph paper was what Wally had promised me, a graphic representation of the dates the stores were especially crowded and the shoplifting levels they’d reported each week during the month just past. I put the graphs aside for the moment and focused on the appointment book.

  It was for 2013, so Wally didn’t have a lot of appointments, but then, neither did I. And I found exactly what I needed in the section for phone numbers and email addresses. It was the second entry (directly beneath Mom) on the page reserved for those whose names began with M: Mul-T-Key, it read. Wendy Straub. And a phone number, complete with extension. The corner of the page had been folded down to make it easier to locate. But that didn’t necessarily mean anything. Maybe he just called his mom a lot.

  Close to four a.m. now. Des Moines, where Mul-T-Key was housed, was on Central time, so if the business opened at nine, I could put in a call a little after seven.

  I squeezed my eyes closed and rubbed them with my palms, producing a nice display of retinal fireworks, and then, for a change of pace, I rubbed at the bridge of my nose while I looked at the factors in play. One dead woman. One locked and empty department store, open only on the ground floor via a dead escalator that was in plain view of eighty to a hundred people during business hours. Sealed off on the second and third floors behind very exotic locks that opened only with very exotic keys.

  Expensive exotic keys.

  And I’d found four of them tucked away into odd corners of four shops, little shops with nothing either to distinguish them or to lump them together: a paper goods store, a bad prints store, a watch store—little more than a booth, really—and a place where teenage girls went to economize on second-rate cosmetics. Of the four shops, I’d met three proprietors: Jackie (paper), her personal TARDIS stuck in the 1960s; Milt (watches), chewing his cuticles; and LaShawn, the owner and sole employee of KissyFace. I’d briefly seen LaShawn do makeovers on a couple of her customers, and she was the Michelangelo of makeup as far as I was concerned. Four small shopkeepers, and in each I’d found an unusual, expensive, impossible-to-duplicate key.

  And, of course, there could have been even more of them, in the safes or cash registers I didn’t (all right, couldn’t) open, or hidden in places I didn’t think to look in, and there were people who might have taken the keys home, and there were the eighty or ninety vendors in the bazaar, and then there was old Sam of Sam’s Saddlery, who had changed his lock—

  Oh, for Christ’s sake. I’d been so absorbed in the mechanics of find the key, open the lock, that I hadn’t even—

  I shut down the cameras again, went back out into the mall, climbed the stairs—I didn’t feel like I deserved the elevator after being such a bonehead—used my picks on Sam’s new lock, and went in.

  And found nothing.

  Well, not quite nothing. Just nothing interesting. A bundle of mail addressed to a PO Box. He’d probably picked it up on his way to work and then forgotten to take it home. There were three penciled notes, each more insistent than the last, demanding the rent from, I supposed, whoever owned the place where he lived, a couple of redlined notices from his bank about his checking account being overdrawn, and some other snipes from creditors, but after two full days at Edgerton Mall, I figured Sam wasn’t the only one who was getting goosed by the banks. The curtain behind the counter slid aside to reveal a storeroom, three rows of shelves neatly stacked with leather-smelling merchandise. I played the penlight over it without going in, and gave up out of sheer discouragement. The whole place, not just Sam’s but the entire mall, had the distinctive funk of bounced checks, unpaid bills, and debt accruing on the doorstep.

  With things so generally dire, why was Vlad in such a swivet about some shoplifting?

  I needed to get the cameras going again, so I closed up Sam’s store and went back down to Wally’s place, turned the record function back on, and tore three unused appointment sheets from his book. I took the lists Amanda and I had drawn up and started making comparisons. I’d asked shopkeepers when they and their employees took lunch, and Amanda had asked the workers in the food court whom they had seen in the staff dining area while Bonnie was meeting her maker up in Gabriel’s. And now I had a third line of data: people who had a Mul-T-Key and were careless enough to leave it where I could find it. I added a fourth data point: discrepancies between Amanda’s list and mine—someone who said he or she had eaten in the food court at the right time but who hadn’t been seen there.

  This was not the world’s most interesting task, and I kept slipping off the edge of the page into a nod that, unresisted, would have led straight to sleep, so the lists took a long time to reconcile. I was only about 60 percent of the way through when I sensed movement on the video monitors and looked up to see the cleaning crew trailing in downstairs with push brooms, waste cans, and the other tools of the trade. I checked my phone, and it was almost seven-forty. Nine-forty in Des Moines.

  I opened Wally’s appointment book, picked up the phone on his console, and dialed. Eyes closed, I listened to the ring on the other end, punched up the extension when it was requested, and said, “Wendy Straub, please.”

  “It’s me, Wally,” the woman on the other end said cheerfully. “I know your number by sight now. Are you telling me you need another one? What are you doing with them, eating them?”

  27

  Never

  I finished collating the data from my lists and Amanda’s while keeping one eye on the screens so I could pick my exit time. I wanted to get out of Wally’s at a point when I’d be less conspicuous because the cleaning crews were on multiple screens. But I also needed to avoid bumping into any of them as I exited Wally’s lair. Over the hours I’d spent squinting down at my checklist, hard to read in the light from the monitors, it had slowly become apparent that virtually no one met all four criteria. Either they were in the dining area during the window of time I was checking or they weren’t but they’d gone somewhere else, with someone who would substantiate their story, or they had told me in the first place that they hadn’t gone to lunch, that they’d eaten in their shop because there was no one else to cover. And, of course, almost none of them had a Mul-T-Key.

  Exactly one person, LaShawn of KissyFace, had a key, hadn’t been in the dining area, and had told me that she had been.

  LaShawn was a happy, even giggly, permanent post-teen who would still be a post-teen in her seventies, who wore more cosmetics than Nefertiti, and lost business all day long because she just loved to putter with her customers’ makeup. Give her one customer who was willing to sit at the counter and let LaShawn redo her eyes, and anyone else in the store not being beautified could wait for attention until they qualified for Social Security without being served or, if they were feeling larcenous, could have emptied the shop. They probably could have taken the brush from her fingers without her noticing. I’d watched her for about ten minutes back on the first day, when I was gathering impressions, and no matter what the collated data said, LaShawn was too big-hearted, too spontaneous, too damn nice to have had anything to do with Bonnie’s death. I know people can hide their real natures, but LaShawn was as clear as a glass of water—she was a little girl who had loved to play with makeup and had grown into a big little girl who still loved to play with makeup and had found a way to do it for a living, although it couldn’t have been much of a living.

  Also, she was pretty in a heavily made-up kind of way and she looked like a huge amount of fun, and twice I’d seen one of the guys from Boots to Suits sitting in the shop, apparently waiting for her before she went on a break. Maybe she’d said she was eating lunch because what she was really doing was none of my business.

  I blew out a lungful of frustration, looked up, and saw cleaning-crew movement on six screens, none of them depicting areas near me. That would have to do. I put everything except the graphs back where I’d found it, hung the keys from their hook, rechecked Wally’s closet door to make sure it was locked, lined up the chairs at the console so they were exactly as he’d left them, and then went to the door with the graphs and the pages torn from Wally’s appointment book tucked under my arm. A seventh screen showed movement, and I figured that was enough camouflage so I wouldn’t stand out, especially to someone who was watching all the screens at once in high-speed reverse. I put the baseball cap on again—three members of the cleaning crew shared my taste in headgear—opened the door, and went out.

  And found myself squinting because the crew had turned on some of the overhead illumination, but then I ducked into the stairway to the second level, where it was dimmer, and I waited there a moment until my eyes had adjusted. When the glare had subsided I went on down to level two, took a quick look around, and took the no admittance hallway to the employees’ eating area. Since I had it to myself, I sat where Shlomo usually sat.

  I knew instinctively that LaShawn wasn’t the person I was looking for, but out of curiosity I checked the graph to see how much stuff she’d reported as stolen, and it was about as high as I would have expected. I’d actually watched her get ripped off, I’d seen a couple of teenagers palm a puff or a tube or a spritzer, and beat it.

  So since I had yet another data point available, Wally’s graph, I thought I’d check to see how often LaShawn’s heavy losses occurred in a week during which there had been unusually large crowds in her store.

  Someone came in behind me, and I turned to see one of the cap-wearers, broom in hand. I said, “Good morning. Tell me when you need me to move,” and he nodded and started sweeping the perimeter of the room.

  Never.

  Never?

  I looked at the graph again because I thought I’d misread it. I still got never. There was no week when she was especially crowded that LaShawn reported heavier theft than usual.

  I became aware that I was hearing furniture being moved, and I looked up and saw the guy in the cap sliding the tables toward the walls, onto the area he’d swept, so he could do the rest of the room. My head was ringing with what I’d just seen on the chart, but I must have gotten up and helped him move the tables because the next time I realized where I was, I was sitting at a table at the edge of the room and studying the printout as a whole.

  The conclusion was inescapable. Thanks to Wally’s thoughtfulness in plotting the graphs, it was impossible to miss. The correlation between crowds and higher losses was essentially zero, which is to say it was low enough to be random, maybe six to nine percent. There was no actual relationship between hordes of customers and a rise in shoplifting.

  It wouldn’t be accurate to say that I’d had a good idea of what was happening in Edgerton, but whatever wispy inklings I had were related to those odd crowds, the atypical movement I thought I’d caught sight of once or twice when looking down at the ground floor. I had erected a rickety bamboo structure of suppositions that was based in part on the assumption that there was something nonrandom, something intentional, about the movement of some of the people in the holiday crowds who had chosen Edgerton.

  And, apparently, there wasn’t. I supposed Wally’s graph could have been intended to mislead, but I doubted it. The surveillance footage was still available, so the contradictions would have been spotted in minutes by anyone who could count.

  So my airy, improbable bamboo structure collapsed into an unsorted collection of sticks, and I sat there in that brightly lit room, a little before 8:00 a.m., having been up for more than twenty-four hours straight, and a line from Sherlock Holmes popped into my mind: “How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?”

  Okay, my bamboo structure hadn’t been impossible, but it had been wildly improbable, and now even that was consigned to the reject pile. And I was about twelve hours away from the deadline by which I was supposed to report my findings to Vlad. I got up, stretched, and made a rapid, almost involuntary, internal decision to give up. Instantly, a huge weight was lifted from my shoulders and I drew what felt like my first deep breath in two days. The whole world was waiting outside, flawed though it might be, and it was Christmas Eve day. I could actually leave Edgerton. I shrugged off the residual tension in my neck and shoulders and figured I’d exit with the cleaning crew. I waved at a couple of them, one baseball cap to another, as I went down the stairs, since the escalator was still off, and then I stood on the ground floor, looking up at Edgerton Mall in all its empty melancholy. Saying an unfond goodbye.

  Now that I had a little distance, it presented itself as a sort of closed ecosystem, a walled-in environment, a psychological and moral Galápagos, where certain kinds of behavioral mutations had been encouraged until they produced a place in which pretty much everyone acted differently here than they did in the outside world: here it was all about selling and buying in all its variations, and other human beings were divided into subspecies: customers or vendors or competitors or obstructions. At the end of the day, you rated the progress of your life in dollars and cents. And the ones who couldn’t adapt left their lifeless fossils behind.

  The North Pacific Gyre unexpectedly presented itself to me as an equally accurate parallel: out in the middle of the largest body of water on earth, currents from all over the globe had brought together millions and millions of objects, fragments of objects, bits and pieces of everything that floats. It had all entered the water for different reasons and in different parts of the world, but the currents that had swept it away led inexorably to the Gyre, and once something arrived there, it could never leave. Here in this mall the fragments were people, and the currents that brought them here were need or sustenance or ambition or even aesthetics, like Bonnie’s love of bric-a-brac; or delight, like LaShawn’s relationship to makeup; or even death, like the grandfather whose books were being sold so inexpertly in the bazaar. And, not to stretch a point, Edgerton, like the Gyre, was a dying region, its vitality sapped by refuse and entropy, its remaining vitality slowly draining as people like Bonnie faced up to the long decline they were sharing and prepared for the inevitable end of their reason for being here.

  Nothing can leave the Gyre.

  Something cold ran up my back. I straightened, not so much a movement as a spasm, and I thought I saw the however improbable, as Holmes put it, sail into view.

  What Sam had said to me: “A deposit I have. A penalty I have.”

  For once, I knew where to look.

  When Cranmer had led Wally and me to the security office to question us the previous day, we’d passed a door that said site management in tarnished, dusty, fake brass letters. Wally told me later that the Edgerton Partnership, or whatever it was called, had fired the last site manager a year and a half ago, but he hadn’t said anything about whether they’d taken the files with them.

  The hallway leading to the security office and the site manager’s space, another employees only domain, was at the south end of the structure. Keeping an eye open for the single security guard who had raised the airplane door at the north end to let the cleaning crew in, I silently opened the door to the hallway. The door at the far end, which belonged to the security office where Cranmer had interviewed me, was closed, and between me and it was a thin, dark-skinned, tired-looking Hispanic kid, maybe seventeen, another member of the baseball cap league, with a big, triple-wide push broom. This was probably his last chore of the morning, since the second guard would arrive right about then to open the other airplane door to admit early-bird employees. The kid returned my nod but still launched a rill of dirt at my shoes and socks, and then meticulously swept around me to the door and out through it, letting it close behind him. If our positions had been reversed and I’d been a seventeen-year-old who swept decaying malls all night, I’d have aimed for the shoes, too.

  I didn’t have much time. The second security guy was due any minute. He’d probably join up with the other one and make an immediate beeline for their office. That would take them past the site manager’s empty room, so it didn’t seem like a good plan to be picking the lock to that room when they came by. And in fact, as I began to mess around with my picks, I heard the second of the big doors groan creakingly upward.

  The site manager had not been shortchanged with the kind of lock they’d slapped onto Wally’s door. This was a lock with muscles. I was making slow progress when I heard the airplane door slam into its housing—all the way up—and I knew without even thinking about it that it was the guard who looked like he bench-pressed school buses. The image of his huge shoulders and small, shaved head fueled a burst of inspired improvisation with the picks, and just as I caught the sound of the two of them chatting as they approached the corridor, the lock yielded with a sullen, resentful click, and I was in.

 

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