The Broken Window

plain wooden chair, ironically mimicking Rhyme’s stiff posture in his TDX. Sterling said in a soft voice, “Sam Brockton talked to you. Inspector Glenn too.” Not a splinter of uneasiness in the voice. No emotion at all, in fact, though a pleasant smile rested on his face.
    “I want to see my partner’s dossier. The officer you met, Amelia Sachs. Her whole dossier.”
    “What do you mean, ‘whole,’ Captain Rhyme?”
    The criminalist noted that Sterling had used his title, which wasn’t common knowledge. “You know exactly what I mean.”
    “No, I don’t.”
    “I want to see her 3E Compliance dossier.”
    Another hesitation. “Why? It’s nothing. Some technical government filing information. Privacy Act disclosures.”
    But the man was lying. CBI agent Kathryn Dance had given him some insights into kinesics—body language—and the analysis of how people communicate. A hesitation before answering is often a sign of coming deception, since the subject is trying to formulate a credible, but false, answer. One speaks quickly when telling the truth; there’s nothing to fabricate.
    “Why don’t you want me to see it, then?”
    “There’s just no reason to. . . . It wouldn’t help you at all.”
    Lie.
    Sterling’s green eyes remained calm, though once they flicked sideways, and Rhyme realized he’d glanced at where Ron Pulaski would appear on his screen; the young officer was back in the lab, standing behind Rhyme.
    “Then answer me a question.”
    “Yes?”
    “I was just talking to an NYPD computer man. I had him estimate how big my cousin’s SSD dossier was.”
    “Yes?”
    “He said a thirty-page dossier of text would be about twenty-five K in size.”
    “I’m as concerned as you are about your partner’s well-being but—”
    “I doubt that very much. Now listen to me.” A slightly raised eyebrow was Sterling’s only response. “A typical dossier is twenty-five kilobytes of data. But your brochure says you have over five hundred petabytes of information. That’s so much data most people can’t even comprehend it.”
    Sterling wasn’t responding.
    “If a dossier averages twenty-five K, then the database for every human being on Earth would take up maybe a hundred and fifty billion K, to be generous. But innerCircle has more than five hundred trillion K. What’s in the rest of innerCircle’s hard drive space, Sterling?”
    Another hesitation. “Well, lots of things . . . Graphics and photographs, they take up a huge amount of space. Administrative data, for instance.”
    Lie.
    “And tell me why would somebody have a Compliance file in the first place? Who has to comply with what?”
    “We make sure that everyone’s file complies with the requirements of the law.”
    “Sterling, if that file isn’t on its way to my computer in five minutes I’m going straight to the Times with the story that you aided and abetted a criminal who used your information to rape and murder. The Compliance Division folks in Washington aren’t going to save you from those headlines. And the story’ll run above the fold. I guarantee that.”
    Now Sterling simply laughed, his face exuding confidence. “I don’t think that will happen. Now, Captain, I’m going to say good-bye.”
    “Sterling—”
    The screen went black.
    Rhyme closed his eyes in frustration. The criminalist maneuvered his chair to the whiteboards containing the evidence charts and the list of suspects. He staredat Thom’s and Sachs’s lettering, some scrawled fast, some penned methodically.
    But no answers presented themselves.
    Where are you, Sachs?
    He knew she lived on the edge, that he would never suggest she avoid the high-risk situations she seemed drawn to. But he was furious that she’d followed up on her damn lead without backup.
    “Lincoln?” Ron Pulaski asked softly. Rhyme glanced up to see the young officer’s eyes unusually cold as he stared at the crime-scene pictures of Myra Weinburg’s body.
    “What?”
    He turned to the criminalist. “I have an idea.”
    •   •   •
    The face, with the bandaged nose, was now filling the high-def screen.
    “You do have access to innerCircle, don’t you?” Ron Pulaski asked Mark Whitcomb in a cool voice. “You said you weren’t cleared but you are.”
    The Compliance assistant sighed. But finally he said, “That’s right.” Holding eye contact with the webcam briefly, then looking away.
    “Mark, we have a problem. We need you to help