The Broken Window

“Anyway, one scrounger was amazing. He worked for a small company. I think it was called Rocky Mountain Data in Colorado… What was his name?” Geddes squinted. “Maybe Gordon somebody. Or that might’ve been his last name. Anyway, we heard that he wasn’t too happy about SSD taking over his company. The word is he scrounged everything he could find about the company and Sterling himself-turned the tables on them. We thought maybe he was trying to dig up dirt and blackmail Sterling into stopping the acquisition. You know Andy Sterling-Andrew Junior-works for the company?”

She nodded.

“We’d heard rumors that Sterling had abandoned him years ago and the kid tracked him down. But then we also heard that maybe it was another son he abandoned. Maybe by his first wife, or a girlfriend. Something he wanted to keep secret. We thought maybe Gordon was looking for that kind of dirt.

“Anyway, while Sterling and some other people were out there negotiating the purchase of Rocky Mountain, this Gordon guy dies-an accident of some kind, I think. That’s all I heard. I wasn’t there. I was back in the Valley, writing code.”

“And the acquisition went through?”

“Yep. What Andrew wants, Andrew shall have… Now, let me throw out one thought about your killer. Andrew Sterling himself.”

“He has an alibi.”

“Does he? Well, don’t forget he is the king of information. If you control data, you can change data. Did you check out that alibi real carefully?”

“We are right now.”

“Well, even if it’s confirmed, he has men who work for him and would do whatever he wants. I mean anything. Remember, other people do his dirty work.”

“But he’s a multimillionaire. What’s his interest in stealing coins or a painting, then murdering the victim?”

“His interest?” Geddes’s voice rose, as if he were a professor talking to a student who just wasn’t getting the lesson. “His interest is in being the most powerful person in the world. He wants his little collection to include everybody on earth. And he’s particularly interested in law enforcement and government clients. The more crimes that are successfully solved using innerCircle, the more police departments, here and abroad, are going to sign on. Hitler’s first task when he came to power was to consolidate all the police departments in Germany. What was our big problem in Iraq? We disbanded the army and the police-we should have used them. Andrew doesn’t make mistakes like that.”

Geddes laughed. “Think I’m a crank, don’t you? But I live with this stuff all day long. Remember, it’s not paranoia if somebody’s really out there watching everything you do every minute of the day. And that’s SSD in a nutshell.”

Chapter Twenty-four

Awaiting Sachs’s return, Lincoln Rhyme listened absently as Lon Sellitto explained that none of the other evidence in the earlier cases-the rape and coin theft-could be located. “That’s fucking weird.”

Rhyme agreed. But his attention veered from the detective’s sour assessment to his cousin’s SSD dossier, sitting beside him on the turning frame. He tried to ignore it.

But the document drew him, needle to magnet. Looking at the stark sheets, black type on white paper, he told himself that, as Sachs had suggested, perhaps something helpful could be found in it. Then he admitted that he was simply curious.

STRATEGIC SYSTEMS DATACORP, INC. INNERCIRCLE^®DOSSIERS

Arthur Robert Rhyme

SSD Subject Number 3480-9021-4966-2083

Lifestyle

· Dossier 1A. Consumer products preferences

· Dossier 1B. Consumer services preferences

· Dossier 1C. Travel

· Dossier 1D. Medical

· Dossier 1E. Leisure-time preferences

Financial/Educational/Professional

· Dossier 2A. Educational history

· Dossier 2B. Employment history, w/income

· Dossier 2C. Credit history/current report and rating

· Dossier 2D. Business products and services preferences

Governmental/Legal

· Dossier 3A. Vital records

· Dossier 3B. Voter registration

· Dossier 3C. Legal history

· Dossier 3D. Criminal history

· Dossier 3E. Compliance

· Dossier 3F. Immigration and naturalization

The information contained herein is the property of Strategic Systems Datacorp, Inc. (SSD). The use hereof is subject to the Licensing Agreement between SSD and Customer, as defined in the Master Client Agreement. © Strategic Systems Datacorp, Inc. All rights reserved.

Instructing the turning frame to flip through the pages, he skimmed the dense document, all thirty pages of it. Some categories were full, some sparse. The voter registration was redacted, and the compliance and portions of the credit history referred to separate files, presumably because of legislation limiting access to such information.