The Broken Window

tweaker, but—
    No. No one was there.
    Which is when he felt Antwon Johnson slip the garrote around his neck—homemade apparently, from a shirt torn into strips and twisted into a rope.
    “No, wha—” Arthur was jerked to his feet. The huge man pulled him off the bench. And dragged him to the wall from which the nail protruded, the one he’dseen earlier, seven feet from the floor. Arthur moaned and thrashed.
    “Shhhh.” Johnson looked around at the deserted alcove of the hall.
    Arthur struggled but it was a struggle against a block of wood, against a bag of concrete. He slammed his fist pointlessly into the man’s neck and shoulders, then felt himself lifted off the floor. The black man hefted him up and hooked the homemade hangman’s noose to the nail. He let go and stood back, watching Arthur kick and jerk, trying to free himself.
    Why, why, why? He was trying to ask this question but only wet sputtering came from his lips. Johnson stared at him in curiosity. No anger, no sadistic gleam. Just watching with mild interest.
    And Arthur realized, as his body shivered and his vision went black, that this was all a setup—Johnson had saved him from the Lats for only one reason: He wanted Arthur for himself.
    “Nnnnnn—”
    Why?
    The black man kept his hands at his sides and leaned close. He whispered, “I’m doin’ you a favor, man. Fuck, you’d do yourself in a month or two anyway. You ain’t made for it here. Now jus’ stop fightin’ it. Go easier, you jus’ give it up, you know what I’m sayin’?”
    •   •   •
    Pulaski returned from his mission at SSD and held up the sleek gray hard drive.
    “Good job, rookie,” Rhyme said.
    Sachs winked. “Your first secret op assignment.”
    He grimaced. “It didn’t feel much like an assignment. It felt more like a felony.”
    “I’m sure we can find probable cause if we look hard enough,” Sellitto reassured him.
    Rhyme said to Rodney Szarnek, “Go ahead.”
    The computer man plugged the hard drive into the USB port on his battered laptop and typed with firm, certain strikes on the keyboard, staring at the screen.
    “Good, good . . .”
    “You have a name?” Rhyme snapped. “Somebody at SSD who downloaded the dossiers?”
    “What?” Szarnek gave a laugh. “It doesn’t work that way. It’ll take a while. I have to load it on the mainframe at Computer Crimes. And then—”
    “How long a while?” Rhyme grumbled.
    Szarnek once again blinked, as if seeing for the first time that the criminalist was disabled. “Depends on the level of fragmentation, age of the files, allocation, partitioning, and then—”
    “Fine, fine, fine. Just do the best you can.”
    Sellitto asked, “What else did you find?”
    Pulaski explained about his interviews of the remaining technicians who had access to all of the data pens. He added that he’d talked to Andy Sterling, whose cell phone confirmed that his father had called from Long Island at the time of the killing. His alibi held up. Thom updated their suspect 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
    Client of SSD (?)
    List provided by Sterling
    UNSUB recruited by Andrew Sterling (?)
    So now everyone at SSD who had access to innerCircle knew of the investigation . . . and still the bot guarding the NYPD “Myra Weinburg Homicide” file had not reported a single attempted intrusion. Was 522 being cautious? Or did the concept of the trap miss the mark? Was the entire premise that the killer was connected to SSD completely wrong? It occurred to Rhyme that they’d been so awed by the power of Sterling and the company that they were neglecting other potential suspects.
    Pulaski produced a CD. “Here are the clients. I looked it over fast. There’re about three hundred fifty of them.”
    “Ouch.” Rhyme grimaced.
    Szarnek loaded the disk and opened it up on a spreadsheet. Rhyme looked over the data on his flat-screen