The Broken Window (47 page)

I guarantee it will ruin him for the case, if not destroy him altogether.

I go into room three of my Closet and find one of my video cams. Batteries are nearby. And in room two I collect the Krusius in its old box. There’s still a brown wash of dried blood on the blade. Nancy 3470. Two years ago. (The court has just turned down the final appeal of her murderer, Jason 4971, the grounds for reversal being fabricated evidence, a claim that even his attorney probably found pathetic.) The razor is dull. I remember meeting some resistance from Nancy 3470’s ribs; she thrashed around more than I expected. No matter. A little work with one of my eight grinding wheels, then a leather strop and I’ll be in business.

Now, the adrenaline from the hunt was flooding through Amelia Sachs.

The evidence in her garden had led her on a convoluted trail but she had a gut feeling—excuse me, Rhyme—that this present mission would be productive. She parked Pam’s car along the city street and hurried to the address of the next person on her list of a half dozen, one of whom she desperately hoped would give her the final clue to 522’s identity.

Two had been unsuccessful. Would the third one be the answer? Driving around town like this was a sort of macabre scavenger hunt, she reflected.

It was evening now and Sachs checked the address under a streetlight, found the town house and walked up the few steps to the front door. She was reaching for the bell when something began to nag.

She paused.

Was it the paranoia she’d been feeling all day? A sense of being watched?

Sachs glanced around fast—at the few men and women on the street; at the windows of the residences and small shops nearby… But nobody seemed threatening. Nobody seemed to be paying attention to her.

She began to press the buzzer again but lowered her hand.

Something was off…

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What?

Then she understood. It wasn’t that she was being watched; it was a scent that troubled her. And with a jolt she knew what it was: mold. She was smelling mold, the scent coming from the very town house where she now stood.

Just a coincidence?

Sachs silently walked down the stairs and around to the side of the place into the cobblestoned alley.

The building was very large—narrow from the front but quite deep. She moved farther into the alley and eased up to a window. Which was covered with newspaper. Scanning the side of the building; yes, they were all covered over. She recalled Terry Dobyns’s words:
And the windows will be painted black or
taped over. He has to keep the outside world away…

She’d come here merely to get information—this
couldn’t
be 522’s place; the clues didn’t add up. But she knew now that they’d been wrong; there was no doubt this was the killer’s home.

She reached for her phone but suddenly heard a scuttling on the alley cobblestones behind her. Eyes wide, forsaking the phone for the gun, she turned fast. But before her hand made it to the Glock’s grip, she was tackled hard. She slammed into the side of the town house. Stunned, she dropped to her knees.

Glancing up, gasping, she saw the hard dots of eyes in the killer’s face, saw the stained blade of the razor he held as it began its journey to her throat.

Command, call Sachs.”

But the phone went to voice mail.

“Damnit, where is she? Find her… Pulaski?” Rhyme wheeled his chair around to face the young man, who was on the phone. “What’s the story with Carpenter?”

He held up a hand. Then hung up. “I finally got his assistant. Carpenter left work early, had some errands. He should be home by now.”

“I want somebody over there. Now.”

Mel Cooper tried paging Sachs and, when there was no response, said, “Nothing.” He made a few other calls and reported, “Nope. No luck.”

“Did Five Twenty-Two get her service dropped, like the electricity?”

“No, they say the accounts’re active. It’s just that the devices are disabled—broken or the batteries removed.”

“What? Are they sure?” The dread within him began to expand.

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The doorbell rang and Thom went to answer it.

Lon Sellitto, his shirt half untucked and face sweaty, strode into the room. “They can’t do anything about the suspension. It’s automatic. Even if I take another test they have to keep it active until IA investigates.

Fucking computers. I had somebody call PublicSure. They’re quote ‘looking into it,’ which you know what that means.” He glanced at Pulaski. “What happened with your wife?”

“Still in detention.”

“Jesus.”

“And it gets worse.” Rhyme told Sellitto about Brockton, Whitcomb and Glenn and the Compliance Division of Homeland Security.

“Shit. Never heard of it.”

“And they want us to hold off on the investigation, at least as far as SSD’s involved. But we’ve got another problem. Amelia’s missing.”

“What?” Sellitto barked.

“Looks that way. I don’t know where she was going after she went to her town house. She never called… Oh, Christ, the power was out, the phones were off. Check voice mail. Maybe she called.”

Cooper dialed the number. And they learned that Sachs
had
called. But she’d said only that she was following up on a lead and said nothing more. She asked that Rhyme call her and she’d explain.

Rhyme jammed his eyes closed in frustration.

A lead…

To where? One of their suspects. He gazed at the chart.

Andrew Sterling, President, Chief Executive Officer

Alibi—on Long Island, verified. Confirmed by son

Sean Cassel, Director of Sales and Marketing

No alibi

Wayne Gillespie, Director of Technical Operations

No alibi

Samuel Brockton, Director, Compliance Department

Alibi—hotel records confirm presence in Washington

Peter Arlonzo-Kemper, Director of Human Resources

Alibi—with wife, verified by her (biased?)

Steven Shraeder, Technical Service and Support Manager, day shift
Alibi—in office, according to time sheets

Faruk Mameda, Technical Service and Support Manager, night shift
No alibi

Alibi for groundskeeper’s killing (in office, according to time sheets)
Client of SSD (?)

Robert Carpenter (?)

UNSUB recruited by Andrew Sterling (?)

Runnerboy?

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Did the lead involve one of them?

“Lon, go check out Carpenter.”

“What, like, ‘Hi, I used to be a cop but will you let me question you ’cause I’m such a nice person even though you don’t have to’?”

“Yeah, Lon, just like that.”

Sellitto turned to Cooper. “Mel, gimme your shield.”

“My shield?” the tech asked nervously.

“I won’t get it scratched,” the big man muttered.

“I’m more worried about getting
me
suspended.”

“Welcome to the fucking club.” Sellitto took the badge and got Carpenter’s address from Pulaski. “I’ll let you know what happens.”

“Lon, be careful. Five Twenty-Two’s feeling cornered. He’s going to hit back hard. And remember he’s—”

“The son of a bitch who knows everything.” Sellitto stalked out of the lab.

Rhyme noticed Pulaski staring at the charts. “Detective?”

“What?”

“There’s something else I’m thinking of.” He tapped the whiteboard containing the suspects’ names.

“Andrew Sterling’s alibi. Well, when he was on Long Island he told me his son was hiking in Westchester. He’d called Andy from out of town, and we could see the time in his phone records. That checked out.”

“So?”

“Well, I remembered Sterling said his son took the train to Westchester. But when I talked to Andy, he said he
drove
up there.” Pulaski cocked his head. “And there’s something else, sir. The day the groundskeeper was killed, I checked the time sheets. I saw Andy’s name. He left right after Miguel Abrera, the janitor. I mean, seconds afterwards. I didn’t think about it because Andy wasn’t a suspect.”

“But the son doesn’t have any access to innerCircle,” Cooper said, nodding at the suspect chart.

“Not according to what his father said. But…” Pulaski shook his head. “See, Andrew Sterling’s been so helpful, we took whatever he told us at face value. He said that nobody but those people on the suspect list have access. But we don’t know that independently. We never verified who could or couldn’t log into innerCircle.”

Cooper offered, “Maybe Andy went through his dad’s PDA or computer to get a passcode.”

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“You’re on a roll, Pulaski. Okay, Mel, you’re top dog now. Get a tactical team over to Andy Sterling’s house.”

Even the best predictive analysis, powered by brilliant artificial brains like Xpectation, can’t get it right all the time.

Who in a million years would have guessed that Amelia 7303, sitting stunned and handcuffed twenty feet away, would have come right to my door?

Some luck, I must say. I was just about to head off to get Thom’s vivisection under way when I noticed her through the window. My life seems to work that way, good fortune a trade-off for the edginess.

I consider the situation calmly. Okay, her colleagues at the police department don’t suspect me; she only came here to show me the composite picture I found in her pocket, along with a list of six other people.

Two at the top are crossed off. I’m unlucky number three. Someone will surely ask about her; when they do I’ll say, yes, she came here to show me the composite and then left. And that’ll be it.

I’ve dismantled her electronics and am placing them in appropriate boxes. I’d considered using
her
phone to record the final, thrashing moments of Thom Reston. It has a nice symmetry, an elegance. But, of course, she’ll have to vanish completely. She’ll go to sleep in my basement, next to Caroline 8630 and Fiona 4892.

Disappear completely.

Not as tidy as it could be—police do love to have the body—but it’s good news for me.

I’ll get to take a proper trophy this time. No mere fingernails from my Amelia 7303…

Well, what’s the goddamn story?” Rhyme snapped to Pulaski.

The rookie was three miles away, in Manhattan, at the Upper East Side town house of Andrew Sterling, Jr.

“Have you gone in? Is Sachs there?”

“I don’t think Andy’s the one, sir.”

“You
think
? Or he isn’t the one?”

“He’s not the one.”

“Explain.”

Pulaski told Rhyme that, yes, Andy Sterling had lied about his activities on Sunday. But not to cover up his role as a killer and rapist. He’d told his father he’d taken the train to Westchester to go hiking but the
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truth was that he’d driven, as he’d let slip when talking to Pulaski.

With two ESU officers and Pulaski in front of him, the flustered young man blurted out why he’d lied to his father when he said he’d been on Metro North. Andy himself didn’t have a driver’s license.

But his boyfriend did. Andrew Sterling might have been the world’s number-one purveyor of information but he didn’t know his son was gay, and the young man had never summoned the courage to tell him.

A call to Andy’s boyfriend confirmed that they were both out of town at the time of the killings. The E-ZPass operations center confirmed that this was the case.

“Damn, okay, get on back here, Pulaski.”

“Yes, sir.”

Walking along the dusky sidewalk, Lon Sellitto was thinking, Shit, should’ve gotten Cooper’s
gun
too.

Of course, borrowing a shield was one thing if you were suspended but a weapon was something else.

That would’ve moved the sorta bad into the shitstorm bad, if Internal Affairs found out.

And it’d give them grounds to legitimately suspend him, when the drug test came back clean.

Drugs. Shit.

He found the address he sought, Carpenter’s, a town house on the Upper East Side in a quiet neighborhood. The lights were on but he saw no one inside. He strode up to the doorway and pressed the buzzer.

He believed he heard some noise from inside. Footsteps. A door.

Then nothing for a long minute.

Sellitto instinctively reached for where his weapon had once been.

Shit.

Finally the curtain on a side window parted and fell back. The door opened and Sellitto found himself looking at a solidly built man, hair combed over. He was gazing at the illicit gold shield. His eyes flickered with uncertainty.

“Mr. Carpenter—”

He got nothing else out before the uneasiness vanished and the man’s face screwed up in pure anger and he raged, “Goddamn. Goddamnit!”

Lon Sellitto hadn’t been in a fight with a perp for years, and he now realized that this man could easily beat him bloody and then cut his throat. Why the hell didn’t I borrow Cooper’s gun after all, whatever happened?

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But, it turned out, Sellitto wasn’t the source of the anger.

It was, curiously, the head of SSD.

“That fucker Andrew Sterling did this, right? He called you? He’s implicated me in those murders we keep hearing about. Oh, Christ, what’m I going to do? I’m probably already in the system and Watchtower’s got my name on lists all over the country. Oh, man. What a fucking idiot I’ve been, getting caught up in SSD.”

Sellitto’s concern diminished. He put away the badge and asked the man to step outside. He did.

“So I’m right—Andrew’s behind this, isn’t he?” Carpenter snarled.

Sellitto didn’t reply but asked his whereabouts at the time Malloy had died earlier that day.

Carpenter thought back. “I was in meetings.” He volunteered the name of several officials from a large bank in town, their phone numbers too.

“And Sunday afternoon?”

“My friend and I had some people over. A brunch.”

An easily verifiable alibi.

Sellitto phoned Rhyme to give him what he’d found. He got Cooper, who said he’d check the alibis.

After he’d disconnected, the detective turned back to the agitated Bob Carpenter.