The Broken Window

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?
    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.
    “He’s the most vindictive prick I’ve ever done business with.”
    Sellitto told him that, yes, his name had been provided by SSD. At this news Carpenter closed his eyes momentarily. The anger was lessening, replaced by dismay.
    “What did he say about me?”
    “It seems you downloaded information about the victims just before they were killed. In several murders over the past few months.”
    Carpenter said, “This’s what happens when Andrew’s upset. He gets even. I never thought it’d be like that. . . .” Then he frowned. “Over the past few months? This downloading—when was the most recent?”
    “In the last couple weeks.”
    “Well, it couldn’t be me. I’ve been locked out of the Watchtower system since early March.”
    “Locked out?”
    Carpenter nodded. “Andrew blocked me.”
    Sellitto’s phone trilled, Mel Cooper calling back. He explained that at least two of the sources had confirmed Carpenter’s whereabouts. Sellitto had the tech call Rodney Szarnek to double-check the data on the CD Pulaski had been given. He snapped the phone shut and told Carpenter, “Why were you blocked out?”
    “See, what happened was I have a data-warehousing company, and—”
    “ Data warehousing?”
    “We store data that companies like SSD process.”
    “Not, like, a warehouse where you store merchandise?”
    “No, no. It’s all computer storage. On servers out in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Anyway, I got . . . well, you could say I got seduced by Andrew Sterling. All his success, the money. I wanted to start mining the data too, like SSD, not just storing it. I was going to carve out a niche market in a few industries that SSD isn’t that strong in. I wasn’t really competing, it wasn’t illegal.”
    Sellitto could hear the desperation in the man’s voice as he justified whatever he’d done.
    “It was only nickel-and-dime stuff. But Andrew found out and locked me out of innerCircle and Watchtower. He threatened to sue me. I’ve been trying to negotiate but today he fired me. Well, terminated our contract. I really didn’t do anything wrong.” His voice cracked. “It was just business. . . .”
    “And you think Sterling changed the files to make it look like you were the killer?”
    “Well, somebody at SSD had to.”
    So the bottom line, Sellitto reflected, is that Carpenter’s not a suspect and this was all a big fucking waste of time. “I don’t have any more questions. ’Night.”
    But