The Broken Window

reluctance to return to SSD and his embarrassment at not knowing about Excel. A run-in between Pulaski and Cassel was a credible explanation.
    The officer asked, “What was Cassel up to?”
    Szarnek flipped through the printouts. “I couldn’t tell you exactly.” He stopped and proffered the pageto the young cop, shrugging. “Take a look, if you want. Here are some of the dossiers he accessed.”
    Pulaski shook his head. “I don’t know any of these guys.” He read some names out loud.
    “Wait,” Rhyme barked. “What was the last one?”
    “Dienko . . . Here, it’s mentioned again. Vladimir Dienko. You know him?”
    “Shit,” said Sellitto.
    Dienko—the defendant in the Russian organized crime investigation, the one whose case had been dropped because of witness and evidentiary problems. Rhyme said, “And the one just before him?”
    “Alex Karakov.”
    This was an informant against Dienko who had been in hiding, under an assumed identity. He’d disappeared two weeks before trial, presumed dead, though no one could figure out how Dienko’s men had gotten to him. Sellitto took the sheets from Pulaski and flipped through them. “Jesus, Linc. Addresses, ATM withdrawals, car registrations, phone logs. Just what a hitman would need to get close for a clip. . . . Oh, and get this. Kevin McDonald.”
    “Wasn’t he the defendant in some RICO case you were working on?” Rhyme asked.
    “Yep. Hell’s Kitchen, arms dealing, conspiracy. Some drugs and extortion. He got off too.”
    “Mel? Run all the names on that list through our system.”
    Of the eight names that Rodney Szarnek had found in the reassembled files, six had been defendants in criminal cases over the past three months. All six had either been acquitted or had had seriouscharges against them dropped at the last minute because of unexpected problems with witnesses and evidence.
    Rhyme gave a laugh. “This’s pretty serendipitous.”
    “What?” Pulaski asked.
    “Buy a dictionary, rookie.”
    The officer sighed and said patiently, “Whatever it means, Lincoln, it’s probably not a word I’ll ever want to use.”
    Everybody in the room laughed, Rhyme included. “Touché. What I mean is we’ve coincidentally stumbled on something very interesting, if you will, Mel. NYPD has files on the SSD servers, through PublicSure. Well, Cassel’s been downloading information about the investigation, selling it to the defendants and erasing all traces of it.”
    “Oh, I can see him doing it,” Sachs said. “Don’t you think, Ron?”
    “Don’t doubt it for a minute.” The young officer added, “Wait . . . Cassel was the one who gave us the CD of the customers’ names—he’s the one who fingered Robert Carpenter.”
    “Of course,” Rhyme said, nodding. “He changed the data to implicate Carpenter. He needed to point the investigation away from SSD. Not because of the Five Twenty-Two case. But because he didn’t want anybody looking over the files and finding that he’d been selling police records. And who better to give to the wolves than somebody who’d tried to become a competitor?”
    Sellitto asked Szarnek, “Anybody else involved from SSD?”
    “Not from what I found. Just Cassel.”
    Rhyme then looked at Pulaski, who was staring at the evidence board. His eyes displayed the same hard edge Rhyme had seen earlier that day.
    “Hey, rookie? You want it?”
    “Want what?”
    “The case against Cassel?”
    The young officer considered this. But then his shoulders slumped and, laughing, he said, “No, I don’t think so.”
    “You can handle it.”
    “I know I can. I just . . . I mean, when I run my first case solo I want to make sure I’m doing it for the right reasons.”
    “Well said, rookie,” Sellitto muttered, lifting his coffee mug toward the young man. “Maybe there’s hope for you after all. . . . All right. If I’m suspended at least I can finish up that work around the house that Rachel’s been nagging me to do.” The big detective grabbed a stale cookie and ambled out the door. “ ’Night, everybody.”
    Szarnek assembled his files and disks and placed them on a table. Thom signed the chain-of-custody card as the criminalist’s attorney-in-fact. The techie left, reminding Rhyme, “And when you’re ready to join the twenty-first century, Detective, give me a call.” A nod at the computers.
    Rhyme’s phone rang—it was a call for Sachs, whose dismembered mobile wouldn’t be