"Maze" was the only way to describe it. A narrow path through his collections: combs, toys (a lot of dolls--one of which had probably sloughed off the hair recovered at an early crime scene), old toothpaste tubes, carefully rolled up; cosmetics, mugs, paper bags, clothing, shoes, empty food cans, keys, pens, tools, magazines, books . . . She'd never seen so much junk in her life.
Most of the lamps were off here, though a few faint bulbs cast a yellow pall on the place, and pale illumination from streetlights filtered in through stained shades and newspapers taped over the glass. The windows were all barred. Sachs stumbled several times and caught herself just before sprawling into a stack of china or a massive bin of clothespins.
Careful, careful . . .
A fall would be fatal.
Close to vomiting from the blow to her belly, she turned between two towering stacks of National Geographics and gasped, ducking just in time as Gordon turned the corner forty feet away, spotted her and, wincing in pain from his shattered arm and the blow to the face, fired two shots, left-handed. Both went wide. He started forward. Sachs wedged her elbow behind a tower of the glossy magazines and sent them cascading into the aisle, blocking it completely. She scrabbled away, hearing two more shots.
Seven fired--she always counted--but it was a Glock, still fat with eight rounds. She looked for any exit, even an unbarred window she could fling herself through, but this side of the town house had none. The walls contained shelves filled with china statuettes and knickknacks. Sachs could hear him furiously kicking aside the magazines, muttering to himself.
His face emerged over the piles as he tried to climb over the stack but the coated covers were slick as ice and he slipped twice, crying out as he used his broken arm to steady himself. Finally he scrabbled to the top. But before he could raise the gun he froze in horror, gasping. He shouted, "No! Please, no!"
Sachs had both hands on a bookcase filled with antique vases and china figurines.
"No, don't touch it. Please!"
She had recalled what Terry Dobyns had said about losing anything in his collection. "Throw the gun out here. Do it now, Peter!"
She didn't believe he would but, faced with the horror that he was about to lose what was on the shelf, Gordon was actually debating.
Knowledge is power.
"No, no, please . . ." A pathetic whisper.
Then his eyes changed. In an instant, they turned to dark dots and she knew he was going to go for the shot.
She shoved the shelf into another and two hundred pounds of ceramics turned to shards on the floor, a painful cacophony--which Peter Gordon's eerie, primal howl drowned out.
Two more shelves of ugly figurines and cups and saucers joined the destruction.
"Throw the gun down or I'll break every goddamn thing in here!"
But he'd lost control completely. "I'll kill you I'll kill you I'll kill you I'll--" He fired twice more but by then Sachs had dived for cover. She knew he'd be coming after her as soon as he surmounted the pile of National Geographics and she assessed their positions. She'd circled back toward the closet door at the front, while he was still at the back of the town house.
But to make it to the door and safety would mean a run past the doorway of the room where he was now--to judge from the sound--scrabbling over the shelves and shattered ceramics. Did he realize her predicament? Was he waiting, gun aimed at the shooting gallery she'd have to traverse in order to make it to the closet door and safety?
Or had he bypassed the roadblock and snuck around her via a route she didn't know about?
Creaks sounded throughout the murky place. Were they his footsteps? The wood settling?
Panic tickled and she spun around. She couldn't see him. She knew she had to move, fast. Go! Now! She took a deep, silent breath, willed away the pain in her knees and, keeping low, charged forward, directly past the blockade of magazines.
No shots.
He wasn't there. She stopped fast, pressing her back against the wall and forcing herself to calm her breathing.
Quiet, quiet . . .
Hell. Where, where, where? Down this aisle of shoe boxes, down this one of canned tomatoes, down this one of neatly folded clothing?
More creaks. She couldn't tell where they were coming from.
A faint sound like the wind, like a breath.
Finally Sachs made a decision--just run for it. Now! All out for the front door!
And hope he's not behind you or hasn't snuck toward the front via a different passageway.
Go!
Sachs pushed off, sprinting past more corridors, canyons of books, glassware, paintings, wires and electronic equipment, cans. Was she going the right way?
Yes, she was. Ahead of her was Gordon's desk, surrounded by the yellow pads. Robert Jorgensen's body was on the floor. Move faster. Move! Forget the phone on the desk, she told herself after briefly considering calling 911.
Get out. Get out now.
Speeding toward the closet door.
The closer she got, the more fierce the panic. Waiting for the gunshot, any moment.
Only twenty feet now . . .
Maybe Gordon believed she was hiding in the back. Maybe he was on his knees, mourning madly the destruction of his precious porcelain.
Ten feet . . .
Around a corner, pausing only to grab the crowbar, slick with his blood.
No, out the door.
Then she stopped, gasping.
Directly in front of her, she saw him, in silhouette, backlit by the glare from the closet doorway. He apparently had taken another route here, she realized in despair. She lifted the heavy iron rod.
For a moment, he didn't see her but her hope of going undetected vanished as he turned her way and dropped to the floor, lifting the gun her way, as an image of her father, then one of Lincoln Rhyme, filled her thoughts.
*
There she is, Amelia 7303, clear in my sights.
The woman who destroyed hundreds of my treasures, the woman who would take everything away from me, deprive me of all my future transactions, expose my Closet to the world. I have no time for fun with her. No time for recorded screams. She has to die. Now.
I hate her I hate her I hate her I hate her I hate her I hate her I hate her I hate her I hate her . . .
No one is going to take anything away from me, never again.
Aim and squeeze.
*
Amelia Sachs stumbled backward as the gun in front of her fired.
Then another shot. Two more.
As she fell to the floor, she covered her head with her arms, numb at first, then aware of growing pain.
I'm dying . . . I'm dying . . .
Only . . . only the only painful sensation was in her arthritic knees, where she'd landed hard on the floor, not from where the bullets must have struck her. Her hand rose to her face, her neck. No wound, no blood. He couldn't have missed her from this range.
But he had.
Then he was running forward toward her. Her eyes cold, her muscles tense as iron, Sachs gasped and gripped the crowbar.
But he continued past her, not even glancing her way.
What was this? Sachs slowly rose, wincing. Without the backlight of glare from the open closet door she saw the silhouette become distinct. It wasn't Gordon at all but a detective she knew from the nearby 20th Precinct--John Harvison. The detective held his Glock steady as he moved cautiously to the body of the man he'd just shot to death.
Peter Gordon, Sachs now understood, had been moving up silently behind her and been about to shoot her in the back. From where he'd been stalking her, he hadn't seen Harvison, low in the closet doorway.
"Amelia, you all right?" the detective called.
"Yeah. Fine."
"Other shooters?"
"Don't think so."
Sachs rose and joined the detective. All the rounds from his gun had apparently hit their target; one of them had struck Gordon's forehead directly. The resulting wound was massive. Blood an
d brain matter flecked Prescott's American Family painting above the desk.
Harvison was an intense man in his forties who'd been decorated several times for courage under fire and collaring major drug dealers. He was pure professional now and paid no attention to the bizarre setting as he secured the scene. He lifted the Glock out of Gordon's bloody hand and locked it open, slipping the gun and clip into his pocket. He moved the Taser safely aside too, though it was unlikely there'd be any miraculous resurrections.
"John," Sachs whispered, staring at the killer's ruined body. "How? How on earth did you find me?"
"Got an any-available squawk about an assault in progress at this address. I was a block away on a drug thing so I headed over." He glanced at her. "It was that guy you work with who called it in."
"Who?"
"Rhyme. Lincoln Rhyme."
"Oh." The answer didn't surprise her, though it left more questions than it settled.
They heard a faint gasp. They turned. The sound had come from Jorgensen. Sachs bent down. "Get an ambulance here. He's still alive." She put pressure on the bullet wound.
Harvison pulled out his radio and called for medics.
A moment later two other officers, from Emergency Service, burst through the doorway, guns drawn.
Sachs instructed, "The main perp's down. Probably no others. But clear the place just to make sure."
"Sure, Detective."
One ESU cop joined Harvison and they started through the packed corridors. The other paused and said to Sachs, "This is a goddamn spook house. You ever see anything like this, Detective?"
Sachs wasn't in the mood for banter. "Find me some bandages or towels. Hell, with everything he's got here, I'll bet there's a half dozen first aid kits. I want something to stop the bleeding. Now!"
V
THE MAN WHO KNOWS EVERYTHING
WEDNESDAY, MAY 25
The privacy and dignity of our citizens [are] being whittled away by sometimes imperceptible steps. Taken individually, each step may be of little consequence. But when viewed as a whole, there begins to emerge a society quite unlike any we have seen--a society in which government may intrude into the secret regions of a [person's] life.
--SUPREME COURT JUSTICE
WILLIAM O. DOUGLAS
Chapter Fifty "Okay, the computer helped," Lincoln Rhyme acknowledged.
He was referring to innerCircle, the Watchtower database management program and SSD's other programs. "But it was mostly the evidence," he said stridently. "The computer pointed me in a general direction. That's all. We took over from there."
It was well after midnight and Rhyme was speaking to Sachs and Pulaski, both seated nearby in the lab. She'd returned from 522's town house, where the medics had reported that Robert Jorgensen would survive; the bullet had missed major organs and blood vessels. He was in the Columbia-Presbyterian intensive care facility.
Rhyme continued his explanation of how he'd found out that Sachs was in an SSD security guard's town house. He told her about her massive Compliance dossier. Mel Cooper called it up on the computer for her to look at. She scrolled through it, her face ashen at the amount of information inside. Even as they watched, the screen flickered as it updated.
"They know everything," she whispered. "I don't have a single secret in the world."
Rhyme went on to tell her how the system had compiled a list of her positions after she had left the precinct house in Brooklyn. "But all the computers could do was give a rough direction of your travel. It came up blank for a destination. I kept looking at the map and realized that you were headed in the general direction of SSD--which, by the way, their own goddamn computer didn't figure out. I called and the lobby guard said that you'd just spent a half hour there, asking about employees. But nobody knew where you'd gone after that."
She explained how her lead had taken her to SSD: The man who'd broken into her town house had dropped a receipt from a coffee shop next to the company. "That told me the perp had to be an employee or somebody connected to SSD. Pam got a look at the guy's clothes--blue jacket, jeans and a cap--and I figured the security guards might know of employees who'd worn that outfit today. The ones who were on duty didn't remember seeing anyone like that so I got the names and addresses of guards who were off duty. I started canvassing them." A grimace. "Never occurred to me that Five Twenty-Two was one of them. How'd you know he was a guard, Rhyme?"
"Well, I knew you were looking for an employee. But was it one of the suspects or somebody else? The goddamn computer wasn't any help so I turned to the evidence. Our perp was an employee who wore unstylish work shoes and had traces of Coffee-mate on him. He was strong. Did those mean he had some physical job in the lower rungs of the company? Mailroom, deliveryman, janitor? Then I recalled the cayenne pepper."
"Pepper spray," Sachs said, sighing. "Of course. It wasn't food at all."
"Exactly. A security guard's main weapon. And the voice-disguise box? You can buy them at stores that sell security equipment. Then I talked to the head of security at SSD. Tom O'Day."
"Right. We met him." A nod at Pulaski.
"He told me a lot of security guards worked only part-time, which'd give Five Twenty-Two plenty of time to practice his hobby outside the office. I ran the other evidence past O'Day. The bits of leaf we found could've come from the plants in the security guards' lunch room. And they have Coffee-mate there, not real milk. I told him Terry Dobyns's profile and asked for a list of all the guards who were single and had no children. Then he cross-referenced their time sheets with the times of the killings for all the crimes going back two months."
"And you found one who was out of the office at the time--John Rollins, aka Peter Gordon."
"No, I found that John Rollins was in the office every time the crime occurred."
"In the office?"
"Obviously. He got into the office management system and changed the time sheets to give himself an alibi. I had Rodney Szarnek check the metadata. Yep, he was our man. I called it in."
"But, Rhyme, I don't understand how Five Twenty-Two got the dossiers. He had access to all the data pens but everybody was searched when they left, even him. And he didn't have online access to innerCircle."
"That was the one stumbling block, yep. But we have Pam Willoughby to thank. She helped me figure it out."
"Pam? How?"
"Remember she told us that nobody could download the pictures from the social-networking site, OurWorld, but the kids just took pictures of the screen?"
Oh, don't worry, Mr. Rhyme. A lot of times people miss the obvious answer. . . .
"I realized that's how Five Twenty-Two could get his information. He didn't need to download thousands of pages of dossiers. He just copied what he needed about the victims and the fall guys, probably late at night when he was one of the only people in the pens. Remember we found those flecks from yellow pads? And at the security station the X-ray or metal detectors wouldn't pick up paper. Nobody'd even think about it."
Sachs said that she'd seen maybe a thousand yellow pads surrounding his desk in his secret room.
Lon Sellitto arrived from downtown. "The fucker's dead," he muttered, "but I'm still in the system for being a goddamn crackhead. All I can get out of them is, 'We're working on it.' "
But he did have some good news. The district attorney would reopen all the cases in which 522 had apparently fabricated evidence. Arthur Rhyme had been released outright, and the status of the others would be reviewed immediately, the likelihood being that they'd be released within the next month.
Sellitto added, "I checked on the town house where Five Twenty-Two was living."
The Upper West Side residence had to be worth tens of millions. How Peter Gordon, employed as a security guard, had been able to afford it was a mystery.
But the detective had the answer. "He wasn't the owner. Title's held by a Fiona McMillan, an eighty-nine-year-old widow, no close relatives. She still pays the taxes and utility bills. Never misses a payment. O
nly, funny thing--nobody's seen her in five years."
"About the time SSD moved to New York."
"I figure he got all the information he needed about assuming her identity and killed her. They're going to start searching for the body tomorrow. They'll start with the garage and then try the basement." The lieutenant then added, "I'm putting together the memorial service for Joe Malloy. It's on Saturday. If you want to be there."
"Of course," Rhyme said.
Sachs touched his hand and said, "Patrol or brass, they're all family and it's the same pain when you lose somebody."
"Your father?" Rhyme asked. "Sounds like something he'd say."
A voice from the hallway intruded: "Heh. Too late. Sorry. Just got word you closed the case." Rodney Szarnek was strolling into the lab, ahead of Thom. He was holding a stack of printouts and once again was speaking to Rhyme's computer and ECU system, the equipment, not the human beings.
"Too late?" Rhyme asked.
"The mainframe finished assembling the empty-space files that Ron stole. Well, that he borrowed. I was on the way here to show them to you and heard that you nailed the perp. Guess you don't need them now."
"Just curious. What'd you find?"
He walked forward with a number of printouts and displayed them to Rhyme. They were incomprehensible. Words, numbers and symbols, and large gaps of white space in between.
"I don't read Greek."
"Heh, that's funny. You don't read Geek."
Rhyme didn't bother to correct him. He asked, "What's the bottom line?"
"Runnerboy--that nym I found earlier--did download a lot of information from innerCircle secretly and then he erased his tracks. But they weren't the dossiers of any of the victims or anybody else connected with the Five Twenty-Two case."
"You got his name?" Sachs asked. "Runnerboy's?"
"Yeah. Somebody named Sean Cassel."
The policewoman closed her eyes. "Runnerboy . . . And he said he was training for a triathlon. I didn't even think about it."
Cassel was the sales director and one of their suspects, Rhyme reflected. He now noticed that Pulaski was reacting to the news. The young officer blinked in surprise and glanced at Sachs with a lifted eyebrow and a faint but dark smile of recognition. He recalled the officer's reluctance to return to SSD and his embarrassment at not knowing about Excel. A run-in between Pulaski and Cassel was a credible explanation.