Celia Voss meets us in the east gallery at ten the next morning, and I understand why she chose that room the moment I see it: it is the one with the fewest empty frames. Even so, there are three bare rectangles on the long wall where paintings hung yesterday, the plaster behind them paler than the plaster around them, sun-shadows of things no longer there.
'Thirteen works,' Celia says. She has a legal pad in front of her with a list typed and then annotated in pen, item numbers crossed through and rewritten as the overnight inventory corrected itself. Her voice has the flatness of someone reading something for the fourth time that still doesn't sound real to her. 'Confirmed as of six this morning. We'll know more by noon, but I don't expect the number to move.'
Beside her stands a man I haven't met, a badge clipped to his belt rather than flashed and folded away like last night's. Celia introduces him as Owen Rusk of the Harbor District Investigations Unit, the investigator assigned to keep the museum informed.
'I want to start with the door log,' Owen says, not unkindly, setting a photocopy on the glass case between us. 'The internal system logged the loading door opening at four fifty, and logged it again, from the inside, at six eleven. That's the only hard timestamp we have. Eighty-one minutes.'
I look at the paper. Four fifty matches what I wrote on my clipboard before I even opened the slot, and some small, useless part of me is relieved that the one thing I did right that night still exists on a page.
'Walk me through what you saw,' Owen says to me, and I do, in order, the badge wallet, the collar, the word dispatch, the hand on my collarbone, the basement, Leon's voice counting small true things in the dark. When I get to the part about the gold seal on the badge wallet, he asks me to describe it again, more slowly, and I do, and I tell him plainly that I did not get a good look at either man's face, that I could not pick either of them out of anything, and that anything I might say about their height or their age beyond ordinary adult male would be me guessing dressed up as me remembering.
'That's useful,' he says, and writes something short. 'More useful than you'd think. People usually give me their guesses as facts. You're giving me the difference.'
Leon, next to me, adds what he has: the sound of the second car, the window strip going dark, nothing about faces either, since his was turned toward the floor the whole time his arm was bent behind him.
Celia doesn't look at either of us while we talk. She looks at the list on her legal pad, at the three pale rectangles on the wall behind us, at a fourth list I can't see that must be insurance, lenders, trustees, people I will never meet who are nonetheless going to have opinions about what happened here in the dark while I was tied to a pipe.
'Eighty-one minutes,' she says finally, mostly to herself. 'For thirteen pieces. That's not luck. That's a plan.'
Owen doesn't confirm or deny it. 'We're early,' he says. 'I'd rather tell you what we know than what I think happened. Those aren't the same thing, and I've seen what happens to a case when people start treating them like they are.'
I find that I agree with him more than I expected to, standing in a room with three empty rectangles of paler plaster, holding onto the plain difference between what I saw and what I am tempted, every single minute since four fifty yesterday morning, to believe.