The Broken Window (20 page)

She leaned forward and kissed him again.

Just as the doorbell rang jarringly and the intercom clattered, “Mr. Rhyme? Amelia? Hi, it’s Pam. Can you buzz me in?”

Rhyme laughed. “Or she might’ve called from the front steps.”

They sat in one of the upstairs bedrooms, Pam and Sachs.

The room was the girl’s for whenever she wished to stay. A stuffed animal or two sat neglected on the shelf (when your mother and stepfather are running from the FBI, toys don’t figure much in your childhood) but she had several hundred books and CDs. Thanks to Thom there always were plenty of clean sweats and T-shirts and socks. A Sirius satellite radio set and a disk player. Her running shoes too;
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Pam loved to speed along the 1.6-mile path surrounding the Central Park reservoir. She ran from love of running and she ran from hungry need.

The girl now sat on the bed, carefully painting gold polish on her toenails, cotton balls separating the canvases. Her mother had forbidden this, as well as makeup (“out of respect for Christ,” however that was supposed to work), and once sprung from the far-right underground she took up small, comforting additions to her persona, like this, some ruddy hair tint and the three ear piercings. Sachs was relieved she didn’t go overboard; if anybody had a reason to slingshot herself into the weird, it was Pamela Willoughby.

Sachs was lounging in a chair, feet up, her own toenails bare. A breeze carried into the small room the complicated mix of spring scents from Central Park: mulch, earth, dew-damp foliage, vehicle exhaust.

She sipped her hot chocolate. “Ouch. Blow on it first.”

Pam whistled into her cup and tasted it. “It’s good. Yeah, hot.” She returned to her nails. In contrast to her visage earlier in the day, the girl’s face was troubled.

“You know what those are called?” Sachs was pointing.

“Feet? Toes?”

“No, the bottoms?”

“Sure. The bottoms of feet and the bottoms of toes.” They laughed.

“Plantars. And they have prints too, just like fingerprints. Lincoln convicted somebody once because the perp kicked somebody unconscious with his bare foot. But he missed once and whacked the door. Left a print on it.”

“That’s cool. He should write another book.”

“I’m after him to,” Sachs said. “So what’s up?”

“Stuart.”

“Go on.”

“Maybe I shouldn’t’ve come. It’s stupid.”

“Come on. I’m a cop, remember. I’ll sweat it out of you.”

“Just, Emily called and it was weird her calling on Sunday, like, she never does, and I’m thinking, okay, something’s going on. And it’s like she really doesn’t want to say anything but then she does. And she said she saw Stuart today with somebody else. This girl from school. After the soccer game. Only he told me he was going right home.”

“Well, what are the facts? Were they just talking? Nothing wrong with that.”

“She said she wasn’t sure but it, you know, kind of looked like he was hugging her. And then when he saw somebody looking at him, he kind of walked away real fast with her. Like he was trying to hide.”

The toenail project came to a stop, halfway done. “I really, really like him. It’d suck if he didn’t want to
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see me anymore.”

Sachs and Pam had been to a counselor together—and, with Pam’s agreement, Sachs had spoken to the woman alone. Pam would be undergoing a lengthy period of post-traumatic stress, not only from her lengthy captivity with a sociopath parent but from a particular episode in which her stepfather had nearly sacrificed her life while trying to murder police officers. Incidents like this one with Stuart Everett, small to most people, were amplified in the girl’s mind and could have devastating effects. Sachs had been told not to add to her fears but not to downplay them either. To look at each one carefully and try to analyze it.

“Have you guys talked about seeing other people?”

“He said… well, a month ago he said he wasn’t. I’m not either. I told him that.”

“Any other intelligence?” Sachs asked.

“Intelligence?”

“I mean, have any of your other friends said anything?”

“No.”

“Do you know any of
his
friends?”

“Kind of. But not like I could ask them anything about it. That’d be way uncool.”

Sachs smiled. “So spies aren’t going to work. Well, what you should do is just ask him. Point-blank.”

“You think?”

“I think.”

“What if he says he
is
seeing her?”

“Then you should be thankful he’s honest with you. That’s a good sign. And then you convince him to dump the bimbo.” They laughed. “What you do is say that you just want to date one person.” The start-up mother in Sachs added quickly, “We’re not talking about getting married, not moving in. Just dating.”

Pam nodded quickly. “Oh, absolutely.”

Relieved, Sachs continued, “And he’s the one you want to see. But you expect the same thing from him.

You have something important, you relate to each other, you can talk, you’ve got a connection and you don’t see that very much.”

“Like you and Mr. Rhyme.”

“Yeah, like that. But if he doesn’t want it, then okay.”

“No, it’s not.” Pam frowned.

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“No, I’m just telling you what you say. But then tell him
you’re
going to be dating other people too. He can’t have it both ways.”

“I guess. But what if he says fine?” Her face was dark at the thought.

A laugh. Sachs shook her head. “Yep, it’s a bummer when they call your bluff. But I don’t think he will.”

“All right. I’m going to see him tomorrow after class. I’ll talk to him.”

“Call me. Let me know.” Sachs rose, lifted away the polish and capped it. “Get some sleep. It’s late.”

“But my nails. I’m not finished.”

“Don’t wear open-toed.”

“Amelia?”

She paused at the doorway.

“Are you and Mr. Rhyme going to get married?”

Sachs smiled and closed the door.

III

THE FORTUNE TELLER

MONDAY, MAY 23

With uncanny accuracy, computers predict behavior by sifting through mountains of data about customers collected by businesses. Called predictive analytics, this automated crystal ball gazing has become a $2.3 billion industry in the United States and is on track to reach $3 billion by 2008.

—CHICAGO TRIBUNE

They’re pretty big…

Amelia Sachs sat in Strategic Systems Datacorp’s sky-high lobby and reflected that the shoe company president’s description of SSD’s data mining operation was, well,
pretty
understated.

The Midtown building was thirty stories high, a gray spiky monolith, the sides smooth granite flashing
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with mica. The windows were narrow slits, which was surprising given the stunning views of the city from this location and elevation. She was familiar with the building, dubbed the Gray Rock, but had never known who owned it.

She and Ron Pulaski—no longer in play clothes but wearing a navy suit and navy uniform, respectively—sat facing a massive wall on which were printed the locations of the SSD offices around the world, among them London, Buenos Aires, Mumbai, Singapore, Beijing, Dubai, Sydney and Tokyo.

Pretty big…

Above the list of satellite offices was the company logo: the window in the watchtower.

Her gut twisted slightly as she recalled the windows in the abandoned building across the street from Robert Jorgensen’s residence hotel. She recalled Lincoln Rhyme’s words about the incident with the federal agent in Brooklyn.

He knew exactly where you were. Which means he was watching. Be careful, Sachs…

Looking around the lobby, she saw a half dozen businesspeople waiting here, many of them uneasy, it seemed, and she recalled the shoe company president and his concern about losing SSD’s services. She then saw, almost en masse, their heads swivel, looking past the receptionist. They were watching a short man, youthful, enter the lobby and walk directly toward Sachs and Pulaski over the black-and-white rugs. His posture was perfect and his stride long. The sandy-haired man nodded and smiled, offering a fast greeting—by name—to nearly everybody here.

A presidential candidate. That was Sachs’s first impression.

But he didn’t stop until he came to the officers. “Good morning. I’m Andrew Sterling.”

“Detective Sachs. This is Officer Pulaski.”

Sterling was shorter than Sachs by several inches but he seemed quite fit and had broad shoulders. His immaculate white shirt featured a starched collar and cuffs. His arms seemed muscular; the jacket was tight-fitting. No jewelry. Crinkles radiated from the corners of his green eyes when that easy smile crossed his face.

“Let’s go to my office.”

The head of such a big company… yet he’d come to them, rather than having an underling escort them to his throne room.

Sterling walked easily down the wide, quiet halls. He greeted every employee, sometimes asking questions about their weekends. They ate up his smiles at reports of an enjoyable weekend and his frowns at word of ill relatives or canceled games. There were dozens of them, and he made a personal comment to each.

“Hello, Tony,” he said to a janitor, who was emptying the contents of shredded documents into a large plastic bag. “Did you see the game?”

“No, Andrew, I missed it. Had too much to do.”

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“Maybe we should start three-day weekends,” Sterling joked.

“I’d vote for that, Andrew.”

And they continued down the hall.

Sachs didn’t think she
knew
as many in the NYPD as Sterling said hello to in their five-minute walk.

The decor of the company was minimal: some small, tasteful photographs and sketches—none in color—overwhelmed by the spotless white walls. The furniture, also black or white, was simple—expensive Ikea. It was a statement of some kind, she guessed, but she found it bleak.

As they walked, she ran through what she’d learned last night, after saying good night to Pam. The man’s bio, patched together from the Web, was sparse. He was an intensely reclusive man—a Howard Hughes, not a Bill Gates. His early life was a mystery. She’d found no references at all to his childhood, or his parents. A few sketchy pieces in the press had put him on the radar at age seventeen, when he’d had his first jobs, mostly in sales, working door-to-door and telemarketing, moving up to bigger, more expensive products. Finally computers. For a kid with “7/8 of a bachelor’s degree from a night school,”

Sterling told the press, he found himself a successful salesman. He’d gone back to college, finishing the last one-eighth of the degree and completing a master’s in computer science and engineering in short order. The stories were all very Horatio Alger and included only details that boosted his savvy and status as a businessman.

Then, in his twenties, had come the “great awakening,” he said, sounding like a Chinese communist dictator. Sterling was selling a lot of computers but not enough to satisfy him. Why wasn’t he more successful? He wasn’t lazy. He wasn’t stupid.

Then he realized the problem: He was inefficient.

And so were a lot of other salesmen.

So Sterling learned computer programming and spent weeks of eighteen-hour days, in a dark room, writing software. He hocked everything and started a company, one based on a concept that was either foolish or brilliant: Its most valuable asset wouldn’t be owned by his company but by millions of other people, much of it free for the taking—information about themselves. Sterling began compiling a database that included potential customers in a number of service and manufacturing markets, the demographics of the area in which they were located, their income, marital status, the good or bad news about their financial and legal and tax situations, and as much other information—personal and professional—as he could buy, steal or otherwise find. “If there’s a fact out there, I want it,” he was quoted as saying.

The software he wrote, the early version of the Watchtower database management system, was revolutionary at the time, an exponential leap over the famed SQL—pronounced “sequel,” Sachs had learned—program. In minutes Watchtower would decide which customers would be worthwhile to call on and how to seduce them, and which weren’t worth the effort (but whose names might be sold to other companies for their own pitches).

The company grew like a monster in a science fiction film. Sterling changed the name to SSD, moved it to Manhattan and began to collect smaller companies in the information business to add to his empire.

Though unpopular with privacy rights organizations, there’d never been a hint of a scandal at SSD, à la Enron. Employees had to earn their salaries—no one received obscenely high Wall Street bonuses—but if the company profited, so did they. SSD offered tuition and home-purchasing assistance, internships for
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children, and parents were given a year of maternity or paternity leave. The company was known for the familial way it treated its workers and Sterling encouraged hiring spouses, parents and children. Every month he sponsored motivational and team-building retreats.

The CEO was secretive about his personal life, though Sachs learned that he didn’t smoke or drink and that no one had ever heard him utter an obscenity. He lived modestly, took a surprisingly small salary and kept his wealth in SSD stock. He shunned the New York social scene. No fast cars, no private jets.

Despite his respect for the family unit among SSD employees, Sterling was twice divorced and unmarried at the moment. There were conflicting reports about children he’d fathered in his youth. He had several residences but he kept their whereabouts out of the public record. Perhaps because he knew the power of data, Andrew Sterling appreciated its dangers too.

Sterling, Sachs and Pulaski now came to the end of a long corridor and entered an exterior office, where two assistants had their desks, both of which were filled with perfectly ordered stacks of papers, file folders, printouts. Only one assistant was in at the moment, a young man, handsome, in a conservative suit. His nameplate read
Martin Coyle
. His area was the most ordered—even the many books behind him were arranged in descending order of size, Sachs was amused to see.