The officer asked, "What was Cassel up to?"
Szarnek flipped through the printouts. "I couldn't tell you exactly." He stopped and proffered the page to the young cop, shrugging. "Take a look, if you want. Here are some of the dossiers he accessed."
Pulaski shook his head. "I don't know any of these guys." He read some names out loud.
"Wait," Rhyme barked. "What was the last one?"
"Dienko . . . Here, it's mentioned again. Vladimir Dienko. You know him?"
"Shit," said Sellitto.
Dienko--the defendant in the Russian organized crime investigation, the one whose case had been dropped because of witness and evidentiary problems. Rhyme said, "And the one just before him?"
"Alex Karakov."
This was an informant against Dienko who had been in hiding, under an assumed identity. He'd disappeared two weeks before trial, presumed dead, though no one could figure out how Dienko's men had gotten to him. Sellitto took the sheets from Pulaski and flipped through them. "Jesus, Linc. Addresses, ATM withdrawals, car registrations, phone logs. Just what a hitman would need to get close for a clip. . . . Oh, and get this. Kevin McDonald."
"Wasn't he the defendant in some RICO case you were working on?" Rhyme asked.
"Yep. Hell's Kitchen, arms dealing, conspiracy. Some drugs and extortion. He got off too."
"Mel? Run all the names on that list through our system."
Of the eight names that Rodney Szarnek had found in the reassembled files, six had been defendants in criminal cases over the past three months. All six had either been acquitted or had had serious charges against them dropped at the last minute because of unexpected problems with witnesses and evidence.
Rhyme gave a laugh. "This's pretty serendipitous."
"What?" Pulaski asked.
"Buy a dictionary, rookie."
The officer sighed and said patiently, "Whatever it means, Lincoln, it's probably not a word I'll ever want to use."
Everybody in the room laughed, Rhyme included. "Touche. What I mean is we've coincidentally stumbled on something very interesting, if you will, Mel. NYPD has files on the SSD servers, through PublicSure. Well, Cassel's been downloading information about the investigation, selling it to the defendants and erasing all traces of it."
"Oh, I can see him doing it," Sachs said. "Don't you think, Ron?"
"Don't doubt it for a minute." The young officer added, "Wait . . . Cassel was the one who gave us the CD of the customers' names--he's the one who fingered Robert Carpenter."
"Of course," Rhyme said, nodding. "He changed the data to implicate Carpenter. He needed to point the investigation away from SSD. Not because of the Five Twenty-Two case. But because he didn't want anybody looking over the files and finding that he'd been selling police records. And who better to give to the wolves than somebody who'd tried to become a competitor?"
Sellitto asked Szarnek, "Anybody else involved from SSD?"
"Not from what I found. Just Cassel."
Rhyme then looked at Pulaski, who was staring at the evidence board. His eyes displayed the same hard edge Rhyme had seen earlier that day.
"Hey, rookie? You want it?"
"Want what?"
"The case against Cassel?"
The young officer considered this. But then his shoulders slumped and, laughing, he said, "No, I don't think so."
"You can handle it."
"I know I can. I just . . . I mean, when I run my first case solo I want to make sure I'm doing it for the right reasons."
"Well said, rookie," Sellitto muttered, lifting his coffee mug toward the young man. "Maybe there's hope for you after all. . . . All right. If I'm suspended at least I can finish up that work around the house that Rachel's been nagging me to do." The big detective grabbed a stale cookie and ambled out the door. " 'Night, everybody."
Szarnek assembled his files and disks and placed them on a table. Thom signed the chain-of-custody card as the criminalist's attorney-in-fact. The techie left, reminding Rhyme, "And when you're ready to join the twenty-first century, Detective, give me a call." A nod at the computers.
Rhyme's phone rang--it was a call for Sachs, whose dismembered mobile wouldn't be 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.
Chapt
er 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 the car impound lot, which could have been a set in a Scorsese film, or The Sopranos, a junkyard stinking of old oil and smoke from a trash fire. Loud, mean gulls hovered nearby, white vultures. She wanted to draw her weapon and empty the clip into the air to send them fleeing in terror.
A crushed metal rectangle was all that remained of the car, which had been with her since her teenage days. The vehicle was one of her father's three most important legacies to her, the others being his strength of character and his love of police work.
"I got the paperwork. It's all, you know, in order." The uneasy head of the scrap yard was brandishing the limp printouts that had turned her car into an unrecognizable cube of steel.
"Sold for the basket" was the expression; it meant selling a car for parts and, whatever was left, for scrap. Which was idiotic, of course; you're not going to make any money selling forty-year-old pony car parts from a gray-market yard in the South Bronx. But as she'd learned all too well in the course of this case, when a computer in authority gives instruction, you do as you're told.
"I'm sorry, lady."
"She's a police officer," Pam Willoughby said harshly. "A detective."
"Oh," he said, considering the further implications of the situation and not liking them much. "Sorry, Detective."
Still, he had his in-order paperwork shield. He wasn't all that sorry. The man stood beside them for a few minutes, rocking from one foot to another. Then wandered away.
The pain within her was far worse than the greenish bruise from the 9-millimeter slug that had punched her belly last night.
"You okay?" Pam asked.
"Not really."
"Like, you don't get freaked much."
No, I don't, Sachs thought. But I'm freaked now.
The girl twined her red-streaked hair around her fingers, perhaps a tame version of Sachs's own nervous touch. She looked once more at the ugly square of metal, about three by four feet, sitting amid a half dozen others.
Memories were reeling. Her father and teenage Amelia, sharing Saturday afternoons in their tiny garage, working on a carburetor or clutch. They'd escaped to the back for two reasons--for the pleasure of the mechanical work in each other's company, and to escape the moody third party in the family: Sachs's mother.
"Gaps?" he'd asked, playfully testing her.
"Plug," teenage Amelia had replied, "is zero three five. Points, thirty to thirty-two dwell."
"Good, Amie."
Sachs recalled another time--a date, her first year in college. She and a boy who went by the name of C.T. had met at a burger place in Brooklyn. Their vehicles surprised each other. Sachs in the Camaro--yellow at the time, with tar black stripes for accent--and he atop a Honda 850.
The burgers and sodas vanished fast, since they were only a few miles from an abandoned airstrip and a race was inevitable.
He was off the line first, given that she was inside a ton and a half of vehicle, but her big block caught him before the half mile--he was cautious and she wasn't--and she steered into the drift on the curves and kept ahead all the way to the finish.
Then her favorite drive of all time: After they'd concluded their first case together, Lincoln Rhyme, largely immobilized, strapped in beside her, windows down and wind howling. She rested his hand on the gearshift knob as she shifted and she remembered him shouting over the slipstream, "I think I can feel it. I think I can!"
And now the car was gone.
Sorry, lady . . .
Pam climbed down the embankment.
"Where are you going?"
"You shouldn't go down there, miss." The owner, outside the office shack, was waving the paperwork like a warning semaphore.
"Pam!"
But she wouldn't be stopped. She walked up to the mass of metal and dug around inside. She tugged hard and pulled out something, then returned to Sachs.
"Here, Amelia." It was the horn button emblem, with the Chevrolet logo.
Sachs felt the tears but continued to will them away. "Thanks, honey. Come on. Let's get the hell out of here."
They drove back to the Upper West Side and stopped for recuperative ice cream; Sachs had arranged for Pam to take the day off from school. She didn't want her to be around Stuart Everett, and the girl was only too happy to agree.
Sachs wondered if the teacher would take no for an answer. Thinking of the trashy flicks--a la Scream and Friday the 13th--that she and Pam sometimes watched late at night, fortified with Doritos and peanut butter, Sachs knew that old boyfriends, like horror movie killers, sometimes have a way of rising from the dead.
Love makes us weird. . . .
Pam finished her ice cream and patted her stomach. "I so needed that." Then she sighed. "How could I be so stupid?"
In the girl's ensuing laugh--eerily adult--Amelia Sachs heard what she believed was the final shovel of earth on the grave of the hockey-masked killer.
They left Baskin-Robbins and walked toward Rhyme's town house, several blocks away, planning a girls' night out, along with another friend of Sachs's, a policewoman she'd known for years. She asked the girl, "Movie or play?"
"Oh, a play . . . Amelia, when does an off-Broadway play become an off-off-Broadway play?"
"That's a good question. We'll Google it."
"And why do they call them Broadway plays when there aren't any theaters on Broadway?"
"Yeah. They should be 'near Broadway' plays. Or 'right around the corner from Broadway' plays."
The pair walked along the east-west side street, approaching Central Park West. Sachs was suddenly aware of a pedestrian nearby. Somebody was crossing the street behind them, moving in their general direction, as if following them.
She felt no alarm, putting the breeze of concern down to the paranoia from the 522 case.
Relax. The perp's dead and gone.
She didn't bother to look back.
But Pam did.
And screamed shrilly, "It's him, Amelia!"
"Who?"
"The guy who broke into your town house. That's him!"
Sachs spun around. The man in the blue plaid jacket and baseball cap. He moved toward them fast.
She slapped her hip, going for her gun.
Which wasn't there.
No, no, no . . .
Since Peter Gordon had fired the weapon, the Glock was now evidence--as was her knife--and both were at Crime Scene Unit in Queens. She hadn't had the chance to go downtown and do the paperwork for a replacement.
Sachs now froze, recognizing him. It was Calvin Geddes, an employee of Privacy Now. She couldn't make sense of this, and wondered if they'd been wrong. Were Geddes and 522 in on the murders together?
He was now just yards away. Sachs could do nothing but step between Geddes and Pam. She balled her fists up as the man stepped close and reached into his jacket.
Chapter Fifty-two
The doorbell rang, and Thom went to answer it.
Rhyme heard some heated words from the front entryway. A man's voice, angry. A shout.
Frowning, he glanced at Ron Pulaski, who had his weapon out of his high-riding holster, and pointed it up, ready to fire. He held it expertly. Amelia Sachs was a good mentor.
"Thom?" Rhyme called.
He didn't answer.
A moment later
a man appeared in the doorway, wearing a baseball cap, jeans and an ugly plaid jacket. He blinked in shock as Pulaski aimed the gun toward him.
"No! Wait!" the man cried, ducking and lifting a hand.
Then Thom, Sachs and Pam entered immediately behind him. The policewoman saw the weapon and said, "No, no, Ron. It's okay. . . . He's Calvin Geddes."
It took Rhyme a moment to recall. Ah, that's right: with the Privacy Now organization, and the source of the lead about Peter Gordon. "What's this all about?"
Sachs said, "He's the one who broke into my place. It wasn't Five Twenty-Two."
Pam nodded, confirming this.
Geddes stepped closer to Rhyme and reached into his jacket pocket and extracted some blue-backed documents. "Pursuant to New York State civil procedure laws, I'm serving you this subpoena in connection with Geddes et al. versus Strategic Systems Datacorp, Inc." He held them out.
"I got one too, Rhyme." Sachs held up her own copy.
"And I'm supposed to do what with those?" Rhyme asked Geddes, who continued to proffer the documents.
The man frowned, then looked down at the wheelchair, aware of Rhyme's condition for the first time. "I, well--"
"He's my attorney-in-fact." Rhyme nodded to Thom, who took the papers.
Geddes began, "I'm--"
"You mind if we read it?" Rhyme asked acerbically, with a nod toward his aide.
Thom did so, aloud. It was a subpoena requesting all the paper and computer files, notes and other information that Rhyme had in his possession that related to SSD, its Compliance Division and evidence of SSD's connections with any governmental body.
"She told me about Compliance." Geddes nodded toward Sachs. "It didn't make any sense at all. Something was fishy about it. No way would Andrew Sterling volunteer to work with the government on privacy issues if he didn't get something big out of the arrangement. He'd fight them tooth and nail. That made me suspicious. Compliance is about something else. I don't know what. But we're going to find out."
He explained that the suit was under federal and state privacy acts and for various civil violations of common law and constitutional rights of privacy.
Rhyme reflected that Geddes and his attorneys would have a pretty pleasant surprise when they had a look at the Compliance dossiers. One of which he just happened to have in a computer not ten feet from where Geddes now stood. And which he would be more than delighted to hand over, given Andrew Sterling's refusal to help find Sachs after she'd disappeared.
He wondered which would be in worse trouble, Washington or SSD, when the press learned of the Compliance operation.