"I checked and triple-checked. Not a hint of criminal activity. The owner, his family, any of the employees. No records. Clean with the IRS and state too. Passed a couple of audits with flying colors. And I'm working on the liquor waiver."
"Good. Thanks, Sam. I'm so psyched."
"Nick. Slow down. You sound like you're ready to sign the paperwork today. Don't you at least want to try the lasagna?"
CHAPTER 28
Amelia Sachs returned to the town house with what seemed to Rhyme measly evidence. Two milk crates containing a half-dozen paper and plastic evidence collection bags.
The damn unsub kept burning things up and turning evidence to ash. Water was the worst elemental contaminant of crime scenes; fire was a close number two.
These boxes she handed off to Mel Cooper, who was wearing a lab coat over his corduroy beige slacks and short-sleeve white shirt, as well as surgical cap and gloves. "That's all?" he asked, looking toward the door, thinking perhaps that other ECTs were bringing in more evidence.
Her grimace said it all. Nothing else would be forthcoming.
"Who was he?" Juliette Archer asked. "The victim?"
Ron Pulaski glanced through his notes: "A fifty-eight-year-old advertising account executive. Pretty senior. Abe Benkoff. He was responsible for some famous TV commercials." The young officer ran through some of them. Rhyme, never a TV watcher, had not heard of the ads, though, of course, he knew the clients: food companies, personal products, cars, airlines. "Fire marshal said they're a week away from anything specific as to how it happened but off the record: There was a gas leak from a CookSmart range and oven. Six-burner gas stovetop, an electric oven. With the DataWise you can turn the stove on remotely--both the burners and the oven. It's mostly designed to shut them off if you leave and think you might have left them on. But it works the other way too. The unsub, it seemed, disengaged the pilot light sparkers--those click, click things--and then turned the gas on.
"The marshal said the flow had to be going for close to forty minutes, given the size of the explosion. Then the unsub turned the sparkers back on. The whole place blew. Benkoff was about six feet from the front door. Looked like he was trying to get out. The gas woke him up, they think."
Archer: "Anyone else in the place?"
"No. He was married but his wife was out of town, business trip. They had two grown children. Nobody else in the building was hurt."
Sachs began a whiteboard for this crime scene.
Her phone hummed and she took a call. After a brief conversation she hung up. Shrugged to Rhyme. "Another reporter about my statement to the press--about the security patches that CIR uploaded to its clients. The story's got legs." She was pleased. Her journalistic anonymity had vanished and she was now the go-to cop for reporters writing about the dangers of smart controllers. Word apparently was spreading about the dangers of products embedded with DataWise5000 controllers. And, according to the reports, people were paying attention.
She added, "Even if companies aren't intimidated into Chaudhary's security updates, at least we can hope their customers read the stories and stay offline or unplug their appliances."
Rhyme's computer sounded with an incoming news story on an RSS feed. "He's sent out another chapter of the manifesto."
Greetings:
Another lesson delivered.
My feeling is that people, begin as innocents. Some philosopher, I don't know whom, said that way back. One of the famous ones. We are born sweet and pure: We do not have an inbred lust to possess Unnecessary things, to have a better car, a bigger hot tub, a better-definition television set. A MORE EXPENSIVE STOVE!!! We have to be taught that. But, I feel taught is not the right word. The right word is INDOCTRINATED. It's the product manufacturers, the marketers the advertisers that browbeat and intimadate us into purchasing bigger and better, suggesting we can't live without this or that.
Yes, think about it. Think about your Possesions. What do you have that you can't live without? Precious little. Close your eyes. Walk through your house in your mind. Pick up an object, look it over. Think about where you got it? A gift? From a friend? It's the FRIENDSHIP that's important not the token of it. Throw it out. Do this with one thing a day.
And, more important, stop buying things: Buying is an act of desparation and, apart from staples like clothes and simple food an addiction.
You do not NEED a kitchen appliance, that costs so much it could feed a family of four for a year. Well you've PAID the price... literally.
--The People's Guardian
"Nut job," muttered Mel Cooper.
As good a diagnosis as any.
"If he's guarding the people why is he killing them?"
"He's only killing the ones with expensive products," Rhyme pointed out.
"A distinction that's lost on me," Archer said. She scanned the diatribe carefully and said, "If he knows the premise of the philosophy, tabula rasa, he must've heard of John Locke. He's playing down his intelligence again. What look like intentional misspellings. A few unnecessary uppercasings--so to speak."
Rhyme laughed at her comment; one of those words was "Unnecessary."