The Broken Window

Carpenter was having a change of heart. The anger was gone completely, replaced by an expression that Sellitto decided was desperation, if not fear. “Wait, Officer, don’t get the wrong idea. I spoke too fast. I’m not suggesting it was Andrew. I was mad. But it was just a reaction. You won’t tell him, will you?”
    As he walked away the detective glanced back. The businessman actually looked like he was going to cry.
    •   •   •
    So yet another suspect was innocent.
    First, Andy Sterling. Now, Robert Carpenter. When Sellitto returned he immediately called Rodney Szarnek, who said he’d find out what went wrong. The techie called back ten minutes later. The first thing he said was, “Heh. Oops.”
    Rhyme sighed. “Go ahead.”
    “Okay, Carpenter did download enough lists to give him the information he’d need to target the victims and fall guys. But it was over the course of two years. All part of legitimate marketing campaigns. And nothing since early March.”
    “You said the information was downloaded just before the crimes.”
    “That’s what it said on the spreadsheet itself. But the metadata showed that somebody at SSD had changed the dates. The information on your cousin, for instance, he got two years ago.”
    “And so somebody at SSD did that to point us away from him and toward Carpenter.”
    “Right.”
    “Now, the big question: Who the hell rearranged the dates? That’s Five Twenty-Two.”
    But the computer man said, “There’s no other information encoded in the metadata. The administrator and root-access logs aren’t—”
    “Just no. That’s the short answer?”
    “Correct.”
    “You’re sure?”
    “Positive.”
    “Thanks,” he muttered. They disconnected.
    The son eliminated, Carpenter eliminated . . .
    Where are you, Sachs?
    Rhyme felt a jolt. He’d almost used her first name. But it was an unspoken rule between them, they used only their last names when referring to the other. Bad luck otherwise. As if the luck could get any worse.
    “Linc,” said Sellitto, pointing at the board containing the list of suspects. “The only thing I can think of is to check out every one of ’em. Now.”
    “Well, how do we do that, Lon? We’ve got an inspector who doesn’t even want this case to exist. We can’t exactly . . .” His voice faded as his eyes settled on the profile of 522 and then the evidence charts.
    His cousin’s dossier too, on the turning frame nearby.
    Lifestyle
    Dossier 1A. Consumer products preferences
    Dossier 1B. Consumer services preferences
    Dossier 1C. Travel
    Dossier 1D. Medical
    Dossier 1E. Leisure-time preferences
    Financial/Educational/Professional
    Dossier 2A. Educational history
    Dossier 2B. Employment history, w/income
    Dossier 2C. Credit history/current report and rating
    Dossier 2D. Business products and services preferences
    Governmental/Legal
    Dossier 3A. Vital records
    Dossier 3B. Voter registration
    Dossier 3C. Legal history
    Dossier 3D. Criminal history
    Dossier 3E. Compliance
    Dossier 3F. Immigration and naturalization
    Rhyme read through the document several times quickly. Then he looked at other documents taped up on the evidence boards. Something wasn’t right.
    He called Szarnek back. “Rodney, tell me: How much storage space on a hard drive does a thirty-page document take up? Like that SSD dossier I have here.”
    “Heh. A dossier? Text only, I assume.”
    “Yes.”
    “It’d be in a database so it’d be compressed . . . Make it twenty-five K, tops.”
    “That’s pretty small, right?”
    “Heh. A fart in the hurricane of data storage.”
    Rhyme rolled his eyes at the response. “I’ve got one more question for you.”
    “Heh. Shoot.”
    •   •   •
    Her head throbbed in agony and she tasted blood from the cut in her mouth after colliding with the stone wall.
    With the razor at her throat, the killer had taken her gun and dragged her through a basement door then up steep stairs into the “façade” side of the town house, the front, a modern, stark place echoing the black-and-white decor of SSD.
    Then he led her to a door against the back wall in the living room.
    It turned out to be, ironically, a closet. He pushed through some stale-smelling clothes and opened another door against the back wall, dragged her inside and relieved her of her pager, PDA, cell phone, keys and the switchblade knife in the back pocket of her slacks. He shoved her against a radiator, between tall stacks of