The Broken Window (Lincoln Rhyme 8)

It was well after midnight and Rhyme was speaking to Sachs and Pulaski, both seated nearby in the lab. She'd returned from 522's town house, where the medics had reported that Robert Jorgensen would survive; the bullet had missed major organs and blood vessels. He was in the Columbia-Presbyterian intensive care facility.

Rhyme continued his explanation of how he'd found out that Sachs was in an SSD security guard's town house. He told her about her massive Compliance dossier. Mel Cooper called it up on the computer for her to look at. She scrolled through it, her face ashen at the amount of information inside. Even as they watched, the screen flickered as it updated.

"They know everything," she whispered. "I don't have a single secret in the world."

Rhyme went on to tell her how the system had compiled a list of her positions after she had left the precinct house in Brooklyn. "But all the computers could do was give a rough direction of your travel. It came up blank for a destination. I kept looking at the map and realized that you were headed in the general direction of SSD--which, by the way, their own goddamn computer didn't figure out. I called and the lobby guard said that you'd just spent a half hour there, asking about employees. But nobody knew where you'd gone after that."

She explained how her lead had taken her to SSD: The man who'd broken into her town house had dropped a receipt from a coffee shop next to the company. "That told me the perp had to be an employee or somebody connected to SSD. Pam got a look at the guy's clothes--blue jacket, jeans and a cap--and I figured the security guards might know of employees who'd worn that outfit today. The ones who were on duty didn't remember seeing anyone like that so I got the names and addresses of guards who were off duty. I started canvassing them." A grimace. "Never occurred to me that Five Twenty-Two was one of them. How'd you know he was a guard, Rhyme?"

"Well, I knew you were looking for an employee. But was it one of the suspects or somebody else? The goddamn computer wasn't any help so I turned to the evidence. Our perp was an employee who wore unstylish work shoes and had traces of Coffee-mate on him. He was strong. Did those mean he had some physical job in the lower rungs of the company? Mailroom, deliveryman, janitor? Then I recalled the cayenne pepper."

"Pepper spray," Sachs said, sighing. "Of course. It wasn't food at all."

"Exactly. A security guard's main weapon. And the voice-disguise box? You can buy them at stores that sell security equipment. Then I talked to the head of security at SSD. Tom O'Day."

"Right. We met him." A nod at Pulaski.

"He told me a lot of security guards worked only part-time, which'd give Five Twenty-Two plenty of time to practice his hobby outside the office. I ran the other evidence past O'Day. The bits of leaf we found could've come from the plants in the security guards' lunch room. And they have Coffee-mate there, not real milk. I told him Terry Dobyns's profile and asked for a list of all the guards who were single and had no children. Then he cross-referenced their time sheets with the times of the killings for all the crimes going back two months."

"And you found one who was out of the office at the time--John Rollins, aka Peter Gordon."

"No, I found that John Rollins was in the office every time the crime occurred."

"In the office?"

"Obviously. He got into the office management system and changed the time sheets to give himself an alibi. I had Rodney Szarnek check the metadata. Yep, he was our man. I called it in."

"But, Rhyme, I don't understand how Five Twenty-Two got the dossiers. He had access to all the data pens but everybody was searched when they left, even him. And he didn't have online access to innerCircle."

"That was the one stumbling block, yep. But we have Pam Willoughby to thank. She helped me figure it out."

"Pam? How?"

"Remember she told us that nobody could download the pictures from the social-networking site, OurWorld, but the kids just took pictures of the screen?"

Oh, don't worry, Mr. Rhyme. A lot of times people miss the obvious answer. . . .

"I realized that's how Five Twenty-Two could get his information. He didn't need to download thousands of pages of dossiers. He just copied what he needed about the victims and the fall guys, probably late at night when he was one of the only people in the pens. Remember we found those flecks from yellow pads? And at the security station the X-ray or metal detectors wouldn't pick up paper. Nobody'd even think about it."

Sachs said that she'd seen maybe a thousand yellow pads surrounding his desk in his secret room.

Lon Sellitto arrived from downtown. "The fucker's dead," he muttered, "but I'm still in the system for being a goddamn crackhead. All I can get out of them is, 'We're working on it.' "

But he did have some good news. The district attorney would reopen all the cases in which 522 had apparently fabricated evidence. Arthur Rhyme had been released outright, and the status of the others would be reviewed immediately, the likelihood being that they'd be released within the next month.

Sellitto added, "I checked on the town house where Five Twenty-Two was living."

The Upper West Side residence had to be worth tens of millions. How Peter Gordon, employed as a security guard, had been able to afford it was a mystery.

But the detective had the answer. "He wasn't the owner. Title's held by a Fiona McMillan, an eighty-nine-year-old widow, no close relatives. She still pays the taxes and utility bills. Never misses a payment. O

nly, funny thing--nobody's seen her in five years."

"About the time SSD moved to New York."

"I figure he got all the information he needed about assuming her identity and killed her. They're going to start searching for the body tomorrow. They'll start with the garage and then try the basement." The lieutenant then added, "I'm putting together the memorial service for Joe Malloy. It's on Saturday. If you want to be there."

"Of course," Rhyme said.