The Broken Window

After she’d hung up, Sachs explained that since 522 knew Jorgensen’s address, she’d told the residence hotel clerk to let her know immediately if anyone called or came around asking about him. If the clerk agreed, Sachs would neglect to bring up the residence hotel with the city’s building inspection office.

“Nicely done,” Rhyme said. “You knew there were violations?”

“Not until he agreed at, oh, about the speed of light.” Sachs walked to the evidence that Pulaski had gotten from the loft near SoHo, looking it over.

“Any thoughts, Amelia?” Sellitto asked.

She stood, staring at the boards, one fingernail taking on another as she tried to make sense out of the disparate collection of clues.

“Where’d he get this?” She picked up the bag containing the printout of Myra Weinburg’s face-looking sweet and amused, her eyes on the camera that had snapped her picture. “We should find out.”

Good point. Rhyme hadn’t considered the source of the picture, merely that 522 had downloaded it from a Web site somewhere. He’d been more interested in the paper as a source of clues.

In the photo Myra Weinburg was standing beside a flowering tree, gazing back at the camera, a smile on her face. She was holding a pink drink in a martini glass.

Rhyme noticed Pulaski gazing at the picture too, his eyes troubled again.

The thing is…she looked a little like Jenny.

Rhyme noted distinctive borders and what appeared to be the strokes of some letters to the right, disappearing out of frame. “He’d’ve got it online. To make it look like DeLeon Williams was checking her out.”

Sellitto said, “Maybe we could trace him through the site he downloaded it from. How can we tell where he got it?”

“Google her name,” Rhyme suggested.

Cooper tried this and found a dozen hits, several referring to a different Myra Weinburg. The ones that related to the victim were all professional organizations. But none of the photos of her was similar to the one that 522 had printed out.

Sachs said, “Got an idea. Let me call my computer expert.”

“Who, that guy at Computer Crimes?” Sellitto asked.

“No, somebody even better than him.”

She picked up the phone and dialed a number. “Pammy, hi. Where are you?…Good. I’ve got an assignment. Go online for a Web chat. We’ll do audio by phone.”

Sachs turned to Cooper. “Can you boot up your webcam, Mel?”

The tech typed and a moment later his monitor filled with an image of Pam’s room at her foster parents’ house in Brooklyn. The face of the pretty teenager appeared as she sat down. The image was slightly distorted by the wide-angle lens.

“Hi, Pam.”

“Hi, Mr. Cooper” came the lilting voice through the speakerphone.

“I’ll take over,” Sachs said and replaced Cooper at the keyboard. “Honey, we’ve found a picture and we think it came from the Internet. Could you take a look and tell us if you know where?”

“Sure.”

Sachs held up the sheet to the webcam.

“It’s kind of glary. Can you take it out of the plastic?”

The detective pulled on latex gloves and carefully slipped the sheet out, held it up again.

“That’s better. Sure, it’s from OurWorld.”

“What’s that?”

“You know, a social-networking site. Like Facebook and MySpace. It’s the hot new one. Everybody’s on it.”

“You know about those, Rhyme?” Sachs asked.

He gave a nod. Curiously, he’d been thinking about this recently. He’d read an article in The New York Times about networking sites and virtual existence worlds like Second Life. He’d been surprised to learn that people were spending less time in the outside world and more in the virtual-from avatars to these social-networking sites to telecommuting. Apparently teenagers today spent less time out of doors than in any other period in U.S. history. Ironically, thanks to an exercise regimen that was improving his physical condition and his changing attitudes, Rhyme himself was becoming less virtual and was venturing out more. The dividing line between abled and disabled was blurring.

Sachs now asked Pam, “You can tell for sure it’s from that site?”

“Yeah. They’ve got that special border. If you look close it’s not just a line; it’s little globes, like the earth, over and over again.”

Rhyme squinted. Yes, the border was just as she’d described it. He thought back, recalling OurWorld from the article. “Hello, Pam…there are a lot of members, aren’t there?”

“Oh, hi, Mr. Rhyme. Yeah. Like, thirty or forty million people. Whose realm is that one?”

“Realm?” Sachs asked.

“That’s what they call your page. Your ‘realm.’ Who is she?”

“I’m afraid she was killed today,” Sachs said evenly. “That’s the case I told you about earlier.”

Rhyme wouldn’t have mentioned the murder to a teenager. But this was Sachs’s call; she’d know what to share and what not to.

“Oh, I’m sorry.” Pam was sympathetic but not shocked or dismayed by the hard truth.

Rhyme asked, “Pam, can anybody log on and get into your realm?”

“Well, you’re supposed to join. But if you don’t want to post anything or host your own realm you can crack in just to look around.”