The Broken Window

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 beenso 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.”
    “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, ofcourse, 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. . . .

Chapter Forty-four
    “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 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