The Broken Window

Yep, he was our man. I called it in.”
    “But, Rhyme, I don’t understand how Five Twenty-Two got the dossiers. He had access to all the data pens but everybody was searched when they left, even him. And he didn’t have online access to innerCircle.”
    “That was the one stumbling block, yep. But we have Pam Willoughby to thank. She helped me figure it out.”
    “Pam? How?”
    “Remember she told us that nobody could download the pictures from the social-networking site, OurWorld, but the kids just took pictures of the screen?”
    Oh, don’t worry, Mr. Rhyme. A lot of times people miss the obvious answer. . . .
    “I realized that’s how Five Twenty-Two could get his information. He didn’t need to download thousands of pages of dossiers. He just copied what he needed about the victims and the fall guys, probably late at night when he was one of the only people in the pens. Remember we found those flecks from yellow pads? And at the security station the X-ray or metal detectors wouldn’t pick up paper. Nobody’d even think about it.”
    Sachs said that she’d seen maybe a thousand yellow pads surrounding his desk in his secret room.
    Lon Sellitto arrived from downtown. “The fucker’s dead,” he muttered, “but I’m still in the system for being a goddamn crackhead. All I can get out of them is, ‘We’re working on it.’ ”
    But he did have some good news. The district attorney would reopen all the cases in which 522 had apparently fabricated evidence. Arthur Rhyme had been released outright, and the status of the others would be reviewed immediately, the likelihood being that they’d be released within the next month.
    Sellitto added, “I checked on the town house where Five Twenty-Two was living.”
    The Upper West Side residence had to be worth tens of millions. How Peter Gordon, employed as a security guard, had been able to afford it was a mystery.
    But the detective had the answer. “He wasn’t the owner. Title’s held by a Fiona McMillan, an eighty-nine-year-old widow, no close relatives. She still pays the taxes and utility bills. Never misses a payment. Only, funny thing—nobody’s seen her in five years.”
    “About the time SSD moved to New York.”
    “I figure he got all the information he needed about assuming her identity and killed her. They’re going to start searching for the body tomorrow. They’ll start with the garage and then try the basement.” The lieutenant then added, “I’m putting together the memorial service for Joe Malloy. It’s on Saturday. If you want to be there.”
    “Of course,” Rhyme said.
    Sachs touched his hand and said, “Patrol or brass, they’re all family and it’s the same pain when you lose somebody.”
    “Your father?” Rhyme asked. “Sounds like something he’d say.”
    A voice from the hallway intruded: “Heh. Too late. Sorry. Just got word you closed the case.” Rodney Szarnek was strolling into the lab, ahead of Thom. He was holding a stack of printouts and once again was speaking to Rhyme’s computer and ECU system, the equipment, not the human beings.
    “Too late?” Rhyme asked.
    “The mainframe finished assembling the empty-space files that Ron stole. Well, that he borrowed. I was on the way here to show them to you and heardthat you nailed the perp. Guess you don’t need them now.”
    “Just curious. What’d you find?”
    He walked forward with a number of printouts and displayed them to Rhyme. They were incomprehensible. Words, numbers and symbols, and large gaps of white space in between.
    “I don’t read Greek.”
    “Heh, that’s funny. You don’t read Geek.”
    Rhyme didn’t bother to correct him. He asked, “What’s the bottom line?”
    “Runnerboy—that nym I found earlier— did download a lot of information from innerCircle secretly and then he erased his tracks. But they weren’t the dossiers of any of the victims or anybody else connected with the Five Twenty-Two case.”
    “You got his name?” Sachs asked. “Runnerboy’s?”
    “Yeah. Somebody named Sean Cassel.”
    The policewoman closed her eyes. “Runnerboy . . . And he said he was training for a triathlon. I didn’t even think about it.”
    Cassel was the sales director and one of their suspects, Rhyme reflected. He now noticed that Pulaski was reacting to the news. The young officer blinked in surprise and glanced at Sachs with a lifted eyebrow and a faint but dark smile of recognition. He recalled the officer’s