The Broken Window (28 page)

Rhyme thought back to the boys’ respective departures for college. It was a significant moment for Arthur, and for his father too; Henry Rhyme was ecstatic that his son had been accepted by such a fine school. But the cousins’ plans—rooming together, jousting over girls, outshining the other nerds—didn’t work out. Lincoln wasn’t accepted by M.I.T. but went instead to the University of Illinois-Champagne/Urbana, which offered Lincoln a full scholarship (and had some panache back then
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because it was located in the town where HAL, the narcissistic computer in Stanley Kubrick’s
2001: A
Space Odyssey,
was born).

Teddy and Anne were pleased their son was going to a home-state school, as was his uncle; Henry had told his nephew that he hoped the boy would return to Chicago often and continue to help him with his research, possibly even assist in his classes from time to time.

“Sorry you and Arthur won’t be rooming together,” Henry said. “But you’ll see each other summers, holidays. And I’m sure your father and I can swing some trips out to Bean Town for a visit.”

“That might work out,” Lincoln had said.

Keeping to himself that while he was devastated he hadn’t been accepted by M.I.T., there was an upside to the rejection—because he wanted never to see his goddamn cousin ever again.

All because of the red Corvette.

The incident had occurred not long after the Christmas Eve party at which he’d won the concrete piece of history, on a breathlessly cold day in February, which, sun or cloud, is Chicago’s most heartless month. Lincoln was competing in a science fair at Northwestern in Evanston. He asked Adrianna if she wanted to accompany him, thinking that he might go for the marriage proposal afterward.

But she couldn’t make it; she was going shopping with her mother at Marshall Field’s department store in the Loop, lured by a big sale. Lincoln had been disappointed but thought nothing more of it and concentrated on the fair. He won first place in the senior division, then he and his friends packed up their projects and carted everything outside. Fingers blue and breath clouding around them in the painful air, they loaded the gear in the belly of the bus and sprinted for the door.

It was then that somebody called, “Hey, check it out.
Excellent
wheels.”

A red Corvette was streaking through campus.

His cousin Arthur was at the wheel. Which wasn’t odd; the family lived nearby. What did surprise Lincoln, though, was that the girl beside Arthur, he believed, was Adrianna.

Yes, no?

He couldn’t be sure.

The clothes matched: a brown leather jacket and a fur hat, which looked identical to the one Lincoln had given her at Christmas.

“Linc, Jesus, get your ass in here. We gotta close the door.”

Still, Lincoln remained where he was, staring at the car as it fishtailed around the corner on the gray-white street.

Could she have lied to him? The girl he was considering marrying? It didn’t seem possible. And cheating on him with
Arthur
?

Trained in science, he examined the facts objectively.

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Fact One. Arthur and Adrianna knew each other. His cousin had met her months ago in the counselor’s office where she worked after class at Lincoln’s high school. They could very easily have exchanged phone numbers.

Fact Two. Arthur, Lincoln now realized, had stopped asking about her. This was odd. The boys had spent plenty of time talking about girls but recently Art hadn’t once mentioned her.

Suspicious.

Fact Three. On reflection, he decided that Adie sounded evasive when she’d demurred about the science fair. (And he hadn’t mentioned its site as Evanston, which meant she wouldn’t hesitate to cruise around the gridded streets with Art.) Lincoln was slammed with jealousy. I was going to give her a piece of Stagg Field, for God’s sake! A splinter of the true cross of modern science! He considered other times when she’d begged off seeing him under circumstances that, in retrospect, seemed strange. He counted three or four.

Still he refused to believe it. He crunched through the snow to a pay phone, and called her house and asked to speak to the girl.

“Sorry, Lincoln, she’s out with friends,” said Adrianna’s mother.

Friends…

“Oh. I’ll try her later… Say, Mrs. Waleska, did you two ever get downtown for that sale at Field’s today?”

“No, the sale’s next week… I have to get supper ready, Lincoln. You stay warm. It’s freezing outside.”

“It sure is.” Lincoln knew this for a fact. He was standing at a phone kiosk, his jaw shivering, no desire to pick up the 60 cents that had leapt from his quivering hands into the snow after he’d tried repeatedly to feed the coins into the phone.

“Jesus Christ, Lincoln, get in the bus!”

Later that night he called and managed to maintain a normal conversation for a time, before asking how her day had gone. She explained that she’d enjoyed the shopping with Mom but the crowds were terrible. Garrulous, rambling, digressive. She sounded dead guilty.

Still, he couldn’t take the matter on faith.

And so he kept up appearances. The next time Art was visiting he left his cousin in the rec room downstairs and slipped outside with a dog hair roller—exactly the sort used now by crime-scene teams—and collected evidence from the Corvette’s front seat.

He slipped the tape into a Baggie and, when he saw Adrianna next, he took some samples of fur from her hat and coat. He felt cheap, scalded with shame and embarrassment but that didn’t stop him from comparing the strands with one of the high school’s compound microscopes. They were the same—both fur from the hat and synthetic fibers from the coat.

The girlfriend he was considering marrying had been cheating on him.

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And from the quantity of fibers in Arthur’s car he concluded she’d been there more than once.

Finally, a week later, he spotted them in the car, leaving no doubt.

Lincoln didn’t bow out graciously or angrily. He just bowed out. Without the heart for a confrontation, he let his relationship with Adrianna wind down. The few times they went out were stiff and riddled with awkward silences. To his further dismay, she actually seemed upset about his growing distance. Damn it.

Did she think she could have it both ways?
She
seemed mad at
him
… even while she was cheating.

He distanced himself from his cousin too. Lincoln’s excuse was final exams, track meets and—the blessing in disguise: Lincoln’s rejection by M.I.T.

The two boys saw each other occasionally—familial obligations, graduation ceremonies—but everything had changed between them, changed fundamentally. And of Adrianna neither boy had said a single word.

At least not for many years after that.

My whole life changed. If it weren’t for you, everything would’ve been different…

Even now Rhyme found his temple throbbing. He couldn’t feel any coolness on his palms but he supposed they were sweating. These hard thoughts, though, were interrupted by Amelia Sachs, striding through the door.

“Any developments?” she asked.

A bad sign. If she’d had a breakthrough with Calvin Geddes she would have said so up front.

“No,” he admitted. “Still waiting to hear from Ron about the alibis. And no bites on the trap that Rodney put together.”

Sachs took the coffee Thom offered and lifted half a turkey sandwich from a tray.

“The tuna salad’s better,” said Lon Sellitto. “He made it himself.”

“This’ll do.” She sat beside Rhyme, offered him a bite. He had no appetite and shook his head. “How’s your cousin doing?” she asked, glancing at the open dossier on the turning frame.

“My cousin?”

“How’s he doing in detention? This has to be hard for him.”

“Haven’t had a chance to talk to him.”

“He’s probably too embarrassed to contact you. You really should call.”

“I will. What’d you find out from Geddes?”

She admitted that the meeting had yielded no great revelations. “Mostly it was a lecture on the erosion of privacy.” She gave him some of the more alarming bullet points: the personal data collected daily, the intrusions, the danger of EduServe, the immortality of data, the metadata records of computer files.

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“Anything useful to
us
?” he asked acerbically.

“Two things. First, he’s not convinced Sterling’s innocent.”

“You said he’s got an alibi,” Sellitto pointed out, taking another sandwich.

“Maybe not him personally. He might be using somebody else.”

“Why? He’s a CEO of a big company. What’s in it for him?”

“The more crime, the more society needs SSD to protect them. Geddes says he wants power.

Described him as the Napoléon of data.”

“So he’s got a hired gun breaking windows so he can step in and fix them.” Rhyme nodded, somewhat impressed with the idea. “Only it backfired. He never thought we’d tip to the fact the SSD database was behind the crimes. Okay. Put it on the list of suspects. An UNSUB working for Sterling.”

“Now, Geddes also told me that a few years ago SSD acquired a Colorado data company. Their main scrounger—that’s a data collector—was killed.”

“Any link between Sterling and the death?”

“No idea. But it’s worth checking out. I’ll make some calls.”

The doorbell rang and Thom answered. Ron Pulaski entered. He was grim-faced and sweaty. Rhyme sometimes had an urge to tell him to take it easier but since the criminalist himself didn’t, he figured the suggestion would be hypocritical.

The rookie explained that most of the alibis for Sunday checked out. “I checked with the E-ZPass people and they confirmed Sterling went through the Midtown Tunnel when he said. I tried his son to see if his dad called from Long Island just to double-check. But he was out.”

Pulaski continued, “Something else—the Human Resources director? His only alibi was his wife. She backed him up but she was acting like a scared mouse. And she was like her husband: ‘SSD is the greatest place in the world. Blah, blah, blah…’ ”

Rhyme, distrustful of witnesses in any event, didn’t make much of this; one thing he’d learned from Kathryn Dance, the body language and kinesics expert with the California Bureau of Investigation, was that even when people are telling the God’s truth to police they often look guilty.

Sachs went to their suspect list and updated it.

Andrew Sterling, President, Chief Executive Officer Alibi—on Long Island, verified. Awaiting
son’s confirmation

Sean Cassel, Director of Sales and Marketing No alibi

Wayne Gillespie, Director of Technical Operations No alibi

Samuel Brockton, Director, Compliance Department Alibi—hotel records confirm presence in
Washington

Peter Arlonzo-Kemper, Director of Human Resources Alibi—with wife, verified by her (biased?)
Steven Shraeder, Technical Service and Support Manager, day shift To be interviewed
Faruk Mameda, Technical Service and Support Manager, night shift
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To be interviewed

Client of SSD (?)

Awaiting list from Sterling

UNSUB recruited by Andrew Sterling (?)

Sachs looked at her watch. “Ron, Mameda should be in by now. Could you go back and talk to him and Shraeder? See where they were yesterday at the time of the Weinburg murder. And Sterling’s assistant should have the client list ready. If not, perch in his office until he gets it. Look important. Better yet, look impatient.”

“Go back to SSD?”

“Right.”

For some reason, he didn’t want to, Rhyme could see.

“Sure. Just let me call Jenny and check up on things at home.” He pulled out his phone and hit speed dial.

Rhyme deduced from part of the conversation that he was talking to his young son, and then, sounding even more childish, presumably the baby girl. The criminalist tuned it out.

It was then that his own phone rang; 44 was the first number on caller ID.

Ah, good.

“Command, answer phone.”

“Detective Rhyme?”

“Inspector Longhurst.”

“I know you’re working on that other case of yours but I thought you might like an update.”

“Of course. Please, go ahead. How’s the Reverend Goodlight?”

“He’s fine, if a bit scared. He’s insisting that no new security people or officers come into the safe house.

He only trusts the ones who’ve been with him for weeks.”

“Hardly blame him.”

“I have a man screening everyone who gets close. Former SAS chap. They’re the best in the business…

Now, we went through the Oldham safe house from top to bottom. Wanted to share with you what we found. Traces of copper and lead, consistent with bullets that had been milled or shaved. A few grains of gunpowder. And a few very small traces of mercury. My ballistics expert says he might be making a dum-dum bullet.”

“Yes, that’s right. Liquid mercury’s poured into the core. Causes hideous damage.”

“They also found some grease used in lubricating the receivers of rifles. And there were traces of hair
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bleach in the sink. And several dark gray fibers—cotton, quite thick with laundry starch. Our databases suggest they match the fabric in uniforms.”

“Do you think that the evidence was planted?”

“Our forensics people say not. The traces were quite minuscule.”

Blond, sniper, uniform…

“Now, one other incident set off alarms here: an attempted break-in at an NGO near Piccadilly—that’s a nongovernmental organization. A nonprofit. The office was the East African Relief Agency, Reverend Goodlight’s outfit. Guards came by and the culprit fled. He threw away his lock pick down the sewer.

But we had a stroke of luck. Fellow on the street saw where. Well, to summarize, our people found it and discovered some soil on the tool. It contained a type of hop that’s grown exclusively in Warwickshire. This hop had been processed for use in making bitter.”

“Bitter? Like beer?”

“Ale, yes. Now it so happens that we have a database of alcoholic drinks here at the Met. And their ingredients.”