The Broken Window

operative any time soon. Rhyme deduced from the conversation that the caller was in the precinct house in Brooklyn and that her car had been located at a pound not far away.
    She made plans with Pam to drive to the place tomorrow morning in the girl’s car, which had been found in a garage behind Peter Gordon’s town house. Sachs went upstairs to get ready for bed, and Cooper and Pulaski left.
    Rhyme was writing a memo for the deputy mayor, Ron Scott, describing 522’s M.O. and suggesting they look for other instances in which he’d committed crimes and framed somebody for them. There’d be other evidence in the hoarder’s town house, of course, but he couldn’t imagine the amount of work involved in searching that crime scene.
    He finished the e-mail, sent it on its way and was speculating what Andrew Sterling’s reaction might be to one of his underlings’ selling data on the side, when his phone rang. An unknown number on caller ID.
    “Command, answer phone.”
    Click.
    “Hello?”
    “Lincoln. It’s Judy Rhyme.”
    “Well, hello, Judy.”
    “Oh, I don’t know if you heard. They dropped the charges. He’s out.”
    “Already? I knew it was in the works. I thought it might take a little longer.”
    “I don’t know what to say, Lincoln. I guess, I mean: thank you.”
    “Sure.”
    She said, “Hold on a minute.”
    Rhyme heard a muted voice, her hand over the mouthpiece, and supposed she was talking to one of the children. What were their names again?
    Then he heard: “Lincoln?”
    How curious that his cousin’s voice was instantly familiar to him, a voice he hadn’t heard for years. “Well, Art. Hello.”
    “I’m downtown. They just released me. All the charges are dropped.”
    “Good.”
    How awkward is this?
    “I don’t know what to say. Thank you. Thank you so much.”
    “Sure.”
    “All these years . . . I should have called before. I just . . .”
    “That’s okay.” What the hell’s that supposed to mean? Rhyme wondered. Art’s absence from his life wasn’t okay, it wasn’t not okay. His responses to his cousin were mere filler. He wanted to hang up.
    “You didn’t have to do what you did.”
    “There were some irregularities. It was an odd situation.”
    Which meant absolutely nothing either. And Lincoln Rhyme wondered too why he was deconstructing the conversation. It was some defense mechanism, he supposed—and this thought was as tedious as the others. He wanted to hang up. “You’re okay, after what happened in detention?”
    “Nothing serious. Scary, but this guy got to me in time. Helped me down off the wall.”
    “Good.”
    Silence.
    “Well, thanks again, Lincoln. Not a lot of people would have done this for me.”
    “I’m glad it worked out.”
    “We’ll get together. You and Judy and me. And your friend. What’s her name?”
    “Amelia.”
    “We’ll get together.” A long silence. “I’d better go. We have to get home to the kids. Okay, you take care.”
    “You too . . . Command, disconnect.”
    Rhyme’s eyes settled on his cousin’s dossier from SSD.
    The other son . . .
    And he knew that they’d never “get together.” So it ends, he thought. Feeling at first troubled—that with the click of a disconnecting phone something that might have been now would not be. But Lincoln Rhyme concluded that this was the only logical end to the events of the past three days.
    Thinking of SSD’s logo, he reflected that, yes, their lives had coincided once again after all these years, but it was as if the two cousins remained separated by a sealed window. They’d observed each other, they’d shared some words, but that was to be the extent of their contact. It was now time to return to their different worlds.

Chapter Fifty-one
    At 11:00 A.M. Amelia Sachs stood in a scruffy lot in Brooklyn. Choking back tears, she was gazing at the corpse.
    The woman who had been shot at, who had killed in the line of duty, who talked her way onto point in dynamic hostage-rescue ops was now paralyzed with grief.
    Rocking back and forth, her index finger digging into the quick of her thumb, nail against nail, until a minor stain of blood appeared. She glanced down at her fingers. Saw the crimson but didn’t stop the compulsion. She couldn’t.
    Yes, they’d found her beloved 1969 Chevrolet Camaro SS.
    But what the police apparently hadn’t known was that the car had been sold for scrap, not just impounded for missed payments. She and Pam were standing in