The Broken Window (23 page)

“Thanks. Now, one final question about employees… Even if they’re not allowed in the pens, could they download a dossier in their office?”

He was nodding, impressed by her question, it seemed, even though it suggested an SSD worker might be the killer. “Most employees can’t—again, we have to protect our data. But a few of us have what’s called ‘all-access permission.’”

Whitcomb gave a smile. “Well, but look who that is, Andrew.”

“If there’s a problem here, we need to explore all possible solutions.”

Whitcomb said to Sachs and Pulaski, “The thing is, the all-access employees are senior people here.

They’ve been with the company for years. We’re like a family. We have parties together, we have our inspirational retreats—”

Sterling held up a hand, cutting him off, and said, “We have to follow up on it, Mark. I want this rooted out, whatever it takes. I want answers.”

“Who has all-access rights?” Sachs asked.

Sterling shrugged. “I’m authorized. Our head of Sales, the head of Technical Operations. Our Human Resources director could put together a dossier, I suppose, though I’m sure he never has. And Mark’s boss, our Compliance Department director.” He gave her the names.

Sachs glanced at Whitcomb, who shook his head. “I don’t have access.”

O’Day didn’t either.

“Your assistants?” Sachs asked Sterling, referring to Jeremy and Martin.

“No… Now, as for the repair folks—the techies—the line people couldn’t assemble a dossier but we have two service managers who could. One on the day shift, one at night.” He gave her their names too.

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Sachs looked over the list. “There’s one easy way to tell whether or not they’re innocent.”

“How?”

“We know where the killer was on Sunday afternoon. If they have alibis, they’ll be off the hook. Let me interview them. Right now, if we can.”

“Good,” Sterling said and gave an approving look at her suggestion: a simple “solution” to one of his

“problems.” Then she realized something: Every time he’d looked at her this morning his gaze had met her eyes. Unlike many, if not most, men Sachs met, Sterling hadn’t once glanced over her body, hadn’t offered a bit of flirt. She wondered what the bedroom story was. She asked, “Could I see the security in the data pens for myself?”

“Sure. Just leave your pager, phone and PDA outside. And any thumb-drives. If you don’t, all the data will be erased. And you’ll be searched when you leave.”

“Okay.”

Sterling nodded to O’Day, who stepped into the hall and returned with the stern security guard who’d walked Sachs and Pulaski here from the massive lobby downstairs.

Sterling printed out a pass for her, signed it and handed it to the guard, who led her out into the halls.

Sachs was pleased that Sterling hadn’t resisted her request. She had an ulterior motive for seeing the pens for herself. Not only could she make yet more people aware of the investigation—in the hope they’d go for the bait—but she could question the guard about the security measures, to verify what O’Day, Sterling and Whitcomb had told her.

But the man remained virtually silent, like a child told by his parents not to speak to strangers.

Through doorways, up corridors, down a staircase, up another one. She was soon completely disoriented. Her muscles shivered. The spaces were increasingly confined, narrow and dim. Her claustrophobia began to kick in; while the windows were small throughout the Gray Rock, here—approaching the data pens—they were nonexistent. She took a deep breath. It didn’t help.

She glanced at his name badge. “Say, John?”

“Yes, ma’am?”

“What’s the story with the windows? They’re either small—or there aren’t any.”

“Andrew’s concerned that people might try to photograph information from outside, like passcodes. Or business plans.”

“Really? Could somebody do that?”

“I don’t know. We’re told to check sometimes—scan nearby observation decks, windows of buildings facing the company. Nobody’s ever seen something suspicious. But Andrew wants us to keep doing it.”

The data pens were eerie places, all color-coded. Personal lifestyle was blue, financial red, governmental green. They were huge spaces but that did nothing to allay her claustrophobia. The ceilings were very
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low, the rooms dim and aisles narrow between the rows of computers. A constant churning filled the air, a low tone like a growl. The air-conditioning was working like mad, given the number of computers and the electricity they’d require, but the atmosphere was close and stifling.

As for the computers, she’d never seen so many in her life. They were massive white boxes and were identified, curiously, not by numbers or letters but by decals depicting cartoon characters like Spider-Man, Batman, Barney, the Road Runner and Mickey Mouse.

“SpongeBob?” she asked, nodding at one.

John offered his first smile. “It’s another layer of security Andrew thought of. We have people looking online for anybody talking about SSD and innerCircle. If there’s a reference to the company
and
a cartoon name, like Wile E. Coyote or Superman, it might mean somebody’s a little too interested in the computers themselves. The names jump out more than if we just numbered the computers.”

“Smart,” she said, reflecting on the irony that Sterling preferred people to be numbered and his computers named.

They entered the Intake Center, painted a grim gray. It was smaller than the data pens and boosted her claustrophobia even further. As in the pens, the only decorations here were the logo of the watchtower and illuminated window, and a large picture of Andrew Sterling, a posed smile on his face. Below it was the caption “You’re Number One!”

Maybe it referred to market share or to an award the company had won. Or maybe it was a slogan about the importance of employees. Still, to Sachs it seemed ominous, as if you were at the top of a list you didn’t want to be on.

Her breathing was coming quickly as the sense of confinement grew.

“Gets to you, doesn’t it?” the guard asked.

She gave a smile. “A little.”

“We make our rounds but nobody spends more time in the pens than we have to.”

Now that she’d broken the ice and gotten John to answer in more than monosyllables, she asked him about the security, to verify if Sterling and the others were being straight.

They were, it seemed. John reiterated what the CEO had said: None of the computers or workstations in the rooms had a slot or port to download data, merely keyboards and monitors. And the rooms were shielded, the guard said; no wireless signals could get out. And he explained too what Sterling and Whitcomb had told her earlier about data from each pen being useless without the data from the others and from Intake. There wasn’t much security on the computer monitors but to get into the pens you needed your ID card, a passcode and a biometric scan—or, apparently, a big security guard watching your every move (which was just what John had been doing, and not so subtly).

The security outside the pens was tight too, as the executives had told her. Both she and the guard were searched carefully when they left each one and had to walk through both a metal detector and a thick frame called a Data-Clear unit. The machine warned,
“Passing through this system permanently
erases all digital data on computers, drives, cell phones and other devices.”

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As they returned to Sterling’s office John told her that to his knowledge nobody had ever broken into SSD. Still, O’Day regularly had them run drills to prevent security intrusions. Like most of the guards, John didn’t carry a gun but Sterling had a policy that at least two armed guards be present twenty-four hours a day.

Back in the CEO’s office, she found Pulaski sitting on a huge leather sofa near Martin’s desk. Though not a small man, he seemed dwarfed, a student who’d been sent to the principal’s office. In her absence, the young officer had taken the initiative to check on the Compliance Department head, Samuel Brockton—Whitcomb’s boss, who had all-access rights. He was staying in Washington, D.C.; hotel records showed he’d been at brunch in the dining room at the time of the killing yesterday. She noted this, then glanced over the all-access permission list.

Andrew Sterling, President, Chief Executive Officer

Sean Cassel, Director of Sales and Marketing

Wayne Gillespie, Director of Technical Operations

Samuel Brockton, Director, Compliance Department

Alibi—hotel records confirm presence in Washington

Peter Arlonzo-Kemper, Director of Human Resources

Steven Shraeder, Technical Service and Support Manager, day shift
Faruk Mameda, Technical Service and Support Manager, night shift
She said to Sterling, “I’d like to interview them as soon as possible.”

The CEO called his assistant and learned that, other than Brockton, everyone was in town, though Shraeder was handling a hardware crisis in the Intake Center and Mameda would not be coming in until three that afternoon. He instructed Martin to have them come upstairs for interviews. He’d find a vacant conference room.

Sterling told the intercom to disconnect and said, “All right, Detective. It’s up to you now. Go clear our name… or find your killer.”

Rodney Szarnek had their mousetrap in place and the young shaggy-haired officer was happily trying to hack into SSD’s main servers. His knee bobbed and he whistled from time to time, which irritated Rhyme, but he let the kid alone. The criminalist had been known to talk to himself when searching crime scenes and considering possible approaches to a case.

Takes all kinds…

The doorbell rang; it was an officer from the CS lab in Queens with a present, some evidence from one of the earlier crimes: the murder weapon, a knife, used in the coin theft and killing. The rest of the physical evidence was “in storage somewhere.” A request had been made but no one could say when, or if, it could be located.

Rhyme had Cooper sign the chain-of-custody form—even after trial, protocols must be followed.

“That’s strange: Most of the other evidence is missing,” Rhyme remarked though he realized that, being a weapon, the knife would have been retained in a locked facility in the lab’s inventory, rather than archived with nonlethal evidence.

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Rhyme glanced at the chart about the crime. “They found some of that dust in the knife handle. Let’s see if we can figure out what it is. But, first, what’s the story on the knife itself?”

Cooper ran the manufacturer’s information through the NYPD weapons database. “Made in China, sold in bulk to thousands of retail outlets. Cheap, so we can assume he paid cash for it.”

“Well, hadn’t expected much. Let’s move on to the dust.”

Cooper donned gloves and opened the bag. He carefully brushed the handle of the knife, whose blade was dark brown with the victim’s blood, and it shed traces of white dust onto the examination paper.

Dust fascinated Rhyme. In forensics the term refers to solid particles less than five hundred micrometers in size and made up of fibers from clothing and upholstery, dander from human and animal skin, fragments of plants and insects, bits of dried excrement, dirt, and any number of chemicals. Some types are aerosol, others settle quickly on surfaces. Dust can cause health problems—like black lung—and be dangerously explosive (flour dust in grain elevators, for instance) and can even affect the climate.

Forensically, thanks to static electricity and other adhesive properties, dust is often transferred from perpetrator to crime scene and vice versa, which makes it extremely helpful to police. When Rhyme was running the Crime Scene division of the NYPD he’d created a large database of dust, gathered from all five boroughs of the city and parts of New Jersey and Connecticut.

Only small amounts adhered to the knife handle but Mel Cooper collected enough to run a sample through the gas chromatograph/mass spectrometer, which breaks substances down into their component parts, then identifies each one. This took some time. It wasn’t Cooper’s fault. His hands, surprisingly large and muscular for such a slight man, moved quickly and efficiently. It was the machines that plodded away slowly, performing their methodical magic. While they waited for the results Cooper ran additional chemical tests on another sample of the dust to reveal materials the GC/MS might not find.

Eventually the results were available and Mel Cooper explained the combined analysis as he wrote the details on the whiteboard. “All right, Lincoln. We’ve got vermiculite, plaster, synthetic foam, glass fragments, paint particles, mineral wool fibers, glass fibers, calcite grains, paper fibers, quartz grains, low-temperature combustion material, metal flakes, chryso-tile asbestos and some chemicals. Looks like polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, paraffin, olefin, napthene, octanes, polychlorinated biphenyls, dibenzodioxins—don’t see those very often—and dibenzofurans. Oh, and some brominated diphenyl ethers.”

“The Trade Center,” Rhyme said.

“It is?”

“Yep.”

The dust from the collapsed World Trade Towers in 2001 had been the source of health problems for workers near Ground Zero, and variations of its composition had been in the news lately. Rhyme was well aware of its composition.

“So he’s downtown?”

“Possibly,” Rhyme said. “But you could find the dust all over the five boroughs. Let’s leave it a question
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mark for the time being…” He grimaced. “So our profile so far: a man who
might
be white or a light-skinned ethnic. Who
might
collect coins and
might
like art. And his residence or place of work
might
be downtown. He
might
have children,
might
smoke.” Rhyme squinted at the knife. “Let me see it up close.” Cooper brought the weapon to him and Rhyme stared at every millimeter of the handle. His body was defective but his eyesight was as good as a teenager’s. “There. What’s that?”

“Where?”

“Between the hasp and the bone.”