The Broken Window

He thought to himself: Let’s just postulate that he didn’t do it. If not, then the consequences were significant. Because this wasn’t simply a case of mistaken identity; the evidence matched too closely-including a conclusive connection between her blood and his car. No, if Art was innocent, then someone had gone to a great deal of trouble to set him up.

“I’m thinking he was framed.”

“Why?”

“Motive?” he muttered. “We don’t care at this point. The relevant question now is how. We answer that, it can point us to who. We might get why along the way, but that’s not our priority. So we start with a premise that someone else, Mr. X, murdered Alice Sanderson and stole the painting, then framed Arthur. Now, Sachs, how could he have done it?”

A wince-her arthritis again-and she sat. She thought for several moments, then said, “Mr. X followed Arthur and followed Alice. He saw they had an interest in art, put them together at the gallery and found their identities.”

“Mr. X knows she owns a Prescott. He wants one but can’t afford it.”

“Right.” Sachs nodded at the evidence chart. “Then he breaks into Arthur’s house, sees that he owns Pringles, Edge shave cream, TruGro fertilizer, and Chicago Cutlery knives. He steals some to plant. He knows what shoes Arthur wears, so he can leave the footprint, and he gets some of the dirt from the state park on Arthur’s shovel…

“Now, let’s think about May twelfth. Somehow Mr. X knows that Art always leaves work early on Thursdays and goes running in a deserted park-so he doesn’t have an alibi. He goes to the vic’s apartment, kills her, steals the painting and calls from a pay phone to report the screams and seeing a man take the painting to a car that looks a lot like Arthur’s, with a partial tag number. Then he heads out to Arthur’s house in New Jersey and leaves the traces of blood, the dirt, the washcloth, the shovel.”

The phone rang. The caller was Arthur’s defense lawyer. The man sounded harried as he reiterated everything that the assistant district attorney had explained. He offered nothing that might help them and, in fact, tried several times to talk them into pressuring Arthur to take a plea. “They’ll nail him up,” the man said. “Do him a favor. I’ll get him fifteen years.”

“That’ll destroy him,” Rhyme said.

“It won’t destroy him as much as a life sentence.”

Rhyme said a chilly good-bye and hung up. He stared again at the evidence board.

Then something else occurred to him.

“What is it, Rhyme?” Sachs had noticed that his eyes were rising to the ceiling.

“Think maybe he’s done this before?”

“How do you mean?”

“Assuming the goal-the motive-was to steal the painting, well, it’s not exactly a onetime score. Not like a Renoir you fence for ten million and disappear forever. The whole thing smells like an enterprise. The perp’s hit on a smart way to get away with a crime. And he’s going to keep at it until somebody stops him.”

“Yeah, good point. So we should look for thefts of other paintings.”

“No. Why should he steal just paintings? It could be anything. But there’s one common element.”

Sachs frowned then provided the answer. “Homicide.”

“Exactly. Since the perp frames somebody else, he has to murder the victims-because they could identify him. Call somebody at Homicide. At home if you need to. We’re looking for the same scenario: an underlying crime, maybe a theft, the vic murdered and strong circumstantial evidence.”

“And maybe a DNA link that might’ve been planted.”

“Good,” he said, excited at the thought they might be on to something here. “And if he’s sticking to his formula, there’ll be an anonymous witness who gave nine-one-one some specific identifying information.”

She walked to a desk in the corner of the lab, sat and placed the call.

Rhyme leaned his head back in his wheelchair and observed his partner on the phone. He noticed dried blood in her thumbnail. A mark was just visible above her ear, half hidden by her straight red hair. Sachs did this frequently, scratching her scalp, teasing her nails, damaging herself in small ways-both a habit and an indicator of the stress that drove her.

She was nodding, and her eyes took on a focused gaze, as she wrote. His own heart-though he couldn’t feel it directly-had speeded up. She’d learned something significant. Her pen dried up. She tossed it onto the floor and whipped out another as quickly as she drew her pistol in combat shooting competitions.

After ten minutes she hung up.

“Hey, Rhyme, get this.” She sat next to him, in a wicker chair. “I talked to Flintlock.”

“Ah, good choice.”

Joseph Flintick, his nickname intentionally or otherwise a reference to the old-time gun, had been a homicide detective when Rhyme was a rookie. The testy old guy was familiar with nearly every murder that had been committed in New York City-and many nearby-during his lengthy tenure. At an age when he should have been visiting his grandchildren, Flintlock was working Sundays. Rhyme wasn’t surprised.