The Steel Kiss

Hours before the murder. What had he done during that time? she wondered.

Pulaski added, “The driver stayed at the corner where he dropped him off—had some calls to make—and watched him for a minute. The unsub didn’t go to any of the buildings at the intersection near where they stopped; he walked a block away to another one. The driver could have dropped him there, but maybe our boy didn’t want to be seen going into a particular place.” The young officer went online, she could see, and called up a map of the city.

He tapped a satellite image, overhead, of a building. “Here it is. This has to be it.”

The picture view revealed a small building, terra-cotta in color. “Small factory, offices, warehouse?”

“Doesn’t seem residential.”

Sachs said, “Let’s go take a look.”

They left One PP and headed downstairs to her car. In ten minutes they were cruising through congested downtown traffic, Sachs pumping the accelerator in low gears when she could, cutting in and out of the lanes as aggressively as ever.

Wondering, as she often did, what would they learn?

Sometimes leads provided a minor fact to help in the investigation.

Sometimes they were a waste of time.

And sometimes they took you straight to the perp’s front door.

* * *

Mel Cooper was back in Rhyme’s Central Park West parlor.

Sorry, Amelia, Rhyme thought. After the discovery of the potential new defendant, I need him more than you do. We’ll argue later.

Evers Whitmore was present too.

The three men were staring into a dark portion of the room, where Juliette Archer sat in front of a computer, verbally commanding her computer to do her bidding.

“Up three lines. Right two words. Select. Cut… ”

So very difficult to live life without shortcuts, Rhyme thought. Being disabled put you in a very nineteenth-century world. Everything took longer. He himself had tried eye recognition, voice recognition, a laser-emitting device attached to his ear that activated portions of the screen. He had returned to the old-fashioned way, using his hand on a joystick or touchpad. This was clumsy and slow but the technique approached normal, and Rhyme had finally mastered it. He saw that Archer needed to settle into an artificiality that was right for her.

In a few minutes she wheeled about and joined them. On the screen nearby were the fruits of her work but she began to report verbally on what she’d found, without glancing toward the notes glowing on the monitors.

“Okay. CIR Microsystems. Vinay Chaudhary’s company. It’s the number one manufacturer of smart controllers in the country. Revenues of two billion annually.”

“My, that’s helpful,” the understated Whitmore said.

“The controller’s basically a small computer with a Wi-Fi or Bluetooth connection or cellular one mounted in the machine or appliance it controls. It’s really pretty simple. Say it’s mounted in a stove. The controller is online with the stove manufacturer’s cloud server. The homeowner has an app on his smartphone to communicate with the stove from anywhere in the world. He logs into the server and can send or receive signals to and from the controller—to shut the stove off or on. The manufacturer also is online with the stove, to collect data from the controller: usage information, diagnostics, maintenance scheduling, breakdowns—it can even be alerted to burned-out lights in the oven.”

Cooper asked, “Any problem with the DataWise Five Thousand controller in the past? Activating when it shouldn’t?”

“None that I could find but I was playing Google Roulette. Give me some time and I might find something more.”

“So how did it open the panel?” Rhyme mused. “A stray signal ordered the controller to open the door, something in the mall itself. Or from the cloud? Or did the DataWise just short out and send the open command itself?”

Archer looked up from the computer and said, “Have something here. Take a look at this. It’s from a blog about two months ago. Social Engineering Second-ly. That’s ‘second’ as in the unit of time, I think. Updated every second. As opposed to Monthly or Weekly. Doesn’t quite work.”

Rhyme said, “Sometimes you can be too clever for your own good.”

He and the others read: