The Broken Window

eyebrow.
    “With caveats. You keep me informed of every development in the case. I mean everything.”
    “Sure.”
    “And, Lon, you try not being straight with me again and I’ll transfer you to Budgets. Understand me?”
    “Yeah, Captain. Absolutely.”
    “And since you’re at Lincoln’s, Lon, I assume you want a reassignment from the Vladimir Dienko case.”
    “Petey Jimenez’s up to speed. He’s done more of the legwork than I have and he’s set up the stings personally.”
    “And Dellray’s running the snitches, right? And the federal jurisdiction?”
    “That’s right.”
    “Okay, you’re off it. Temporarily . Open a file on this UNSUB—I mean, send out a memo about the file you’ve already started on the sly. And listen to me: I’m not raising any issues of innocent people being convicted wrongly. Not raising it with anybody. And you’re not going to either. That issue is not on the table. The only crime you’re running is a single rape-murder thatoccurred this afternoon. Period. As part of his M.O. this UNSUB might have tried to shift the blame to somebody else but that’s all you can say and only if the subject comes up. Don’t raise the issue yourself and, for God’s sake, don’t say anything to the press.”
    “I don’t talk to the press,” Rhyme said. Who did, if they could avoid it? “But we’ll need to look into the other cases to get an idea of how he operates.”
    “I didn’t say you couldn’t,” the captain said, firm but not strident. “Keep me posted.” He hung up.
    “Well, we got ourselves a case,” Sellitto said, surrendering to the abandoned quarter of a cookie and washing it down with the coffee.
    •   •   •
    Standing on the curb with three other men in street clothes, Amelia Sachs was talking to the compact man who’d ripped open the door of her Camaro and leveled his weapon at her. He’d turned out not to be 522 but a federal agent who worked for the Drug Enforcement Administration.
    “We’re still trying to put it together,” he said, and glanced at his boss, an assistant special agent in charge of the Brooklyn DEA office.
    The ASAC said, “We’ll know more in a few minutes.”
    Not long before, at gunpoint in the car, Sachs had lifted her hands slowly and identified herself as a police officer. The agent had taken her weapon and had checked her ID twice. He’d returned the gun, shaking his head. “I don’t get it,” he said. He apologized but his face didn’t seem to suggest he was sorry. Mostly the expression said that, well, he just didn’t get it.
    A moment later his boss and two other agents had arrived.
    Now the ASAC got a call and listened for a few minutes. He then snapped his mobile shut and explained what seemed to have happened. Not long before somebody had made an anonymous call from a pay phone reporting that an armed woman fitting Sachs’s description had just shot somebody in what seemed to be a drug dispute.
    “We’ve got an operation going on here at the moment,” he said. “Looking into some dealer and supplier assassinations.” He nodded toward his agent, the one who’d tried to arrest Sachs. “Anthony lives a block away. The operations director sent him here to assess the sit while he scrambled the troops.”
    Anthony added, “I thought you were leaving so I grabbed some old take-out bags and moved in. Man . . .” Now the import of what he’d nearly done was sinking in. He was now ashen and Sachs reflected that Glocks have a very light trigger pull. She wondered just how close she’d come to being shot.
    “What were you doing here?” the ASAC asked.
    “We had a homicide-rape.” She didn’t explain about 522’s setting up innocent people to take the fall. “I’m guessing our perp spotted me and made a call to slow up pursuit.”
    Or get me killed in a friendly fire incident.
    The federal agent shook his head, frowning.
    “What?” Sachs asked.
    “Just thinking this guy is pretty sharp. If he called NYPD—which most people would’ve—they’d know about your operation and who you were. So he calledus instead. All we’d know was that you were a shooter and we’d approach with caution, ready to take you out if you pulled a weapon.” A frown. “That’s smart.”
    “Pretty fucking scary too,” Anthony said, his face still white.
    The agents left and she made a call.
    When Rhyme answered she told him about the incident.
    The criminalist digested this, then he said, “He called the