The Broken Window

where Myra Weinburg had been killed.
    Rhyme noted immediately that his expression had changed. His face was still. Pulaski often cringed or seemed perplexed or occasionally looked proud—he even blushed—but now his eyes seemed hollow, not at all like the determined gaze of earlier. He glanced at Rhyme with a nod, walked sullenly to the examination tables, handed off the evidence to Cooper and gave him the chain-of-custody cards, which the tech signed.
    The rookie stepped back, looking over the whiteboard chart Thom had created. Hands in his jeans pockets, Hawaiian shirt untucked, he wasn’t seeing a single word.
    “You all right, Pulaski?”
    “Sure.”
    “You don’t look all right,” Sellitto said.
    “Naw, it’s nothing.”
    But that wasn’t true. Something about running his first solo homicide scene had upset him.
    Finally he said, “She was just lying there, faceup, staring at the ceiling. It’s like she was alive and looking for something. Frowning, kind of curious. I guess I expected her to be covered up.”
    “Yeah, well, you know we don’t do that,” Sellitto muttered.
    Pulaski looked out the window. “The thing is . . . okay, it’s crazy. It’s just she looked a little like Jenny.” His wife. “Kind of weird.”
    Lincoln Rhyme and Amelia Sachs were similar in many ways when it came to their work. They felt you needed to summon empathy in searching crime scenes, which allowed you to feel what the perp, and the victim, experienced. This helped to better understand the scene and find evidence you otherwise might not.
    Those who had this skill, as harrowing as its consequences might be, were masters at walking the grid.
    But Rhyme and Sachs differed in one important aspect. Sachs believed it was important never to become numb to the horror of crime. You needed to feel it every time you went to a scene, and afterward. If you didn’t, she said, your heart grew hard, you moved closer to the darkness within the people you pursued. Rhyme, on the other hand, felt you should be as dispassionate as possible. Only by coldly putting aside the tragedy could you be the best police officer you could—and more efficiently stop future tragedies from occurring. (“It’s not a human being anymore,” he’d lectured his new recruits. “It’s a source of evidence. And a damn good one.”)
    Pulaski had the potential to be more like Rhyme, the criminalist believed, but at this early stage of his career he fell into Amelia Sachs’s camp. Rhyme felt for the young man now but they had a case to solve. At home tonight Pulaski could hold his wife close and silently mourn the death of the woman she resembled.
    He asked gruffly, “You with us, Pulaski?”
    “Yes, sir. I’m fine.”
    Not exactly, but Rhyme had made his point. “You processed the body?”
    A nod. “I was there with the M.E.’s tour doctor. We did it together. I made sure he wore rubber bands on his booties.”
    To avoid confusion when it came to footprints Rhyme had a policy of his crime scene searchers’ putting rubber bands around their feet, even when they were in the hooded plastic jumpsuits worn to prevent contamination from their own hair, skin cells and other trace.
    “Good.” Rhyme then glanced eagerly at the milk crates. “Let’s get going. We ruined one plan of his. Maybe he’s mad about it and is out targeting somebody else. Maybe he’s buying a ticket to Mexico. Either way, I want to move fast.”
    The young cop flipped open his notebook. “I—”
    “Thom, come on in here. Thom, where the hell are you?”
    “Oh, sure, Lincoln,” said the aide with a cheerful smile, walking into the room. “Always happy to drop everything in the face of such polite requests.”
    “We need you again—another chart.”
    “Do you?”
    “Please.”
    “You don’t mean it.”
    “Thom.”
    “All right.”
    “ ‘Myra Weinburg Crime Scene.’ ”
    The aide wrote the heading and stood ready with the marker, as Rhyme asked, “Now, Pulaski, I understand it wasn’t her apartment?”
    “That’s right, sir. A couple owned it. They’re on vacation, on a cruise ship. I managed to get throughto them. They’d never heard of Myra Weinburg. Man, you should’ve heard them; they were way upset. They didn’t have any idea who it might’ve been. And to get in he broke the lock.”
    “So he knew it was empty and that there was no alarm,” Cooper said. “Interesting.”
    “Whatta you think?” Sellitto was shaking his head. “He