The Broken Window

Silence. What would happen next? Would he have a chance to fight physically? Malloy wondered. Or would he have to continue to work his way into the man’s mind? By now he’d be missed. Sellitto and Rhyme might have figured out what happened.

Then he heard a noise.

What was it?

Several clicks, followed by a tinny electronic voice. The killer was testing a tape recorder, it seemed.

Then another: the clink of metal against metal, like tools being gathered up.

And finally the disturbing screech of metal on concrete as the killer scooted his chair so close to Malloy’s that their knees touched.

Chapter Thirty-six

A bounty hunter.

They’d caught a goddamn bounty hunter.

Well, as the man corrected, a “bond recovery specialist.”

“How the fuck did that happen?” was Lincoln Rhyme’s question.

“We’re checking,” Lon Sellitto said, standing dusty and hot beside the construction site where the man who’d been following Roland Bell sat in cuffs.

He wasn’t exactly under arrest. In fact, he hadn’t done anything wrong at all; he was licensed to carry a pistol and was merely trying to effect a citizen’s arrest of a man he believed to be a wanted criminal. But Sellitto was pissed off and ordered him cuffed.

Roland Bell himself was on the phone, trying to find out if 522 had been spotted elsewhere in the area. But so far no one on the takedown teams had seen anyone fitting the scant profile of the killer. “Might as well be in Timbuktu,” Bell drawled to Sellitto and folded up his phone.

“Look-” began the bounty hunter from his curb perch.

“Shut up,” the heavy detective barked for the third or fourth time. He returned to his conversation with Rhyme. “He follows Roland, moves in and looks like he’s going to take him out. But seems he’s just serving a warrant. He thought Roland was somebody named William Franklin. They look alike, Franklin and Roland. Lives in Brooklyn and missed a trial date on an assault with a deadly, and firearm possession. The bond company’s been after him for six months.”

“Five Twenty-Two set it all up, you know. He found this Franklin in the system and sent the bondsman after him to keep us distracted.”

“I know, Linc.”

“Anybody see anything helpful? Somebody staking us out?”

“Nope. Roland just checked with all the teams.”

Silence. Then Rhyme asked, “How did he know it was a trap?”

Though that wasn’t the most important issue. There was really only one question they wanted the answer to and that was “What the hell is he really up to?”

Do They think I’m stupid?

Did They think I wouldn’t be suspicious?

They know about knowledge service providers at this point. About predicting how sixteens will act, based on past behavior and the behavior of others. This concept has been a part of my life for a long, long time. It should be part of everyone’s. How will your next-door neighbor react if you do X? How will he react if you do Y? How will a woman behave when you’re accompanying her to a car while you’re laughing? When you’re silent and fishing in your pocket for something?

I’ve studied Their transactions from the moment They became interested in me. I sorted them, analyzed Them. They’ve been brilliant at times-for instance, that trap of theirs: letting SSD employees and customers know about the investigation and waiting for me to peek at NYPD files on the Myra 9834 case. I almost did, came within an ENTER keystroke of searching but just had a feeling something was wrong. I know now I was right.

And the press conference? Ah, that transaction smelled off from the beginning. Hardly fit predictable and established patterns of behavior. I mean, for the police and the city to meet journalists at that time of night? And the particular assemblage up on the podium certainly didn’t ring true.

Of course, maybe it was legit-even the best fuzzy logic and predictive behavior algorithms get it wrong occasionally. But it was in my interest to check further. I couldn’t, even casually, talk to any of Them directly.

So instead, I did what I do best.

I looked into the closets, gazed through my secret window at the silent data. I learned more about the folks up there on the podium during the press conference: the deputy mayor, Ron Scott, and Captain Joseph Malloy-the man supervising the investigation against me.

And the third person, the professor. Carlton Soames, Ph.D.

Except…Well, he wasn’t.

He was a cop decoy.

A search engine request did turn up hits for Professor Soames on the Carnegie Mellon Web site, and on his own site as well. His C.V. was also tucked away conveniently into various other sites.

But it took me only a few seconds to open up the coding of those documents and examine the metadata. Everything about the phony prof had been written and uploaded yesterday.

Do They think I’m stupid?