Chapter 17: The Inspection

At six on Sunday morning, Desmond Finnegan came down the stairs.

His cousin came behind him carrying a gray metal box.

Four of the new guards in fresh vests followed, and behind them walked a stranger in a navy windbreaker with a health department badge pinned to it.

The stranger looked uncomfortable.

Forty staff stood in the sub-basement break room, the night crew packed shoulder to shoulder with the day shift Desmond had ordered down.

Dot stood in the doorway with Bessie parked across it.

"Mrs. Gallagher," Desmond said. "Move your cart."

"It's a fire code."

"Everything down here is a code." He smiled at the stranger. "Please. Document it."

He walked in and swept an arm across the folding table.

Coffee cups, a box of donuts and the crew's coffee fund, a coffee can with eleven dollars in it, went flying.

The can rang off the wall and rolled under the vending machine.

"Mold," he said. "Unlabeled food. An unapproved microwave."

The microwave went onto the floor with a crack.

The skinny kid made a noise.

"Every violation carries a two-hundred-twelve-dollar fine," Desmond said. "Payable now, in cash, to the company."

The cousin set the gray box on the cleared table and flipped up the lid a few inches.

Nobody moved.

I stood at the back, behind the sergeant, in a hairnet and a gray smock, and I made myself count my breaths.

I had watched him do this to other people for six days.

Not one more.

"And since I'm here," Desmond said, and his eyes slid across the room until they landed on me. "Hello, Birch."

The room turned.

"The thief," he said softly. "Who hid you?"

"I did," Dot said at once.

"I did," said the woman in the hairnet.

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