The Steel Kiss

She finished up the call and turned to the others in the room. “Full canvass of the neighborhood. No one saw him. He must’ve left just after setting the bomb.”

A shrug. Nothing other than Rhyme had expected.

A moment later another call. Rodney Szarnek’s name flashed onto caller ID.

Ah, let’s hope for the best.

“Answer,” Rhyme commanded.

The rock music was back. But only momentarily. Before Rhyme could say, “Shut the damn music off, please,” the officer downed the volume.

“Lincoln.”

“Rodney, you’re on speaker here with…  a bunch of people. No time for roll call. Was Todd Williams’s computer salvageable?”

A pause, which Rhyme took to be one of surprise. “Well, sure. A fall like that is nothing. You can drop a computer out of an airplane and the data’ll survive. Black boxes, you know.”

“What do you have?”

“Looks like the relationship between this Williams and your unsub is recent. I found some emails between them. I’ll send them to you.”

A moment later a secure email popped up on the screen. They read the first of the attachments accompanying it.

Hello, Todd. I read you’re blog and I feel the same way, what society is coming to is not good and electronics and the digital world are making it a much more dangerous place then it needs to be. Their has to be some way to change the system. Money is the root of it of course as you suggest, I would like to try to help in you’re cause. Can we meet?

P.G.

Archer said, “Ah. We have initials”

“Maybe,” Rhyme said. “Go on, Rodney.”

Szarnek continued, “Your unsub used an anonymous email account. Logged in from an untraceable IP. They set up a meeting for the day of the murder.”

Cooper looked over the email. “Not particularly smart. Look at the mistakes, commas, and the homonyms. Y-O-U apostrophe R-E instead of ‘your.’ And ‘Their’ too.”

Rhyme corrected, “Heteronyms. Same pronunciation, different spelling and meaning. Homonyms have the same pronunciation and same spelling but different meaning.”

Staring at the screen, Archer provided the classic example: “Bark—what a dog does and a covering on a tree. Homonym.” She then added, “But I don’t think he’s stupid. I think he’s pretending to be. Run-on sentences, the heteronyms—they’re obvious. But he uses the clause ‘as you suggest’ correctly. Not ‘like you suggest.’ ”

Rhyme agreed. “And the infinitive after ‘to try.’ It’s non-standard to say ‘try and’; you should say ‘try to.’ And using ‘then’ for ‘than’ would have been flagged by most usage checkers, even on a basic phone. No, you’re right; he’s faking.”

Szarnek broke in with, “Now for the big find. The most troubling find.”

Whitmore asked, “Which is what, Mr. Szarnek?”

“For hours before the murder—while Todd and your unsub were meeting, I assume—Todd was online. He did two things. First, he bought a database. He used a Bitcoin account and bought it from a commercial data miner. He spoofed he was an ad agency—used a real one with an account he’d hacked—and he claimed he needed the information for market research. It was a laundry list of the products that DataWise Five Thousand controllers are found in.”

“How many?”

“A lot. About eight hundred different products, nearly three million units shipped to the Northeast of the U.S., including the New York metro area. Some couldn’t do any real harm if a third party took control: computers, printers, lights. Others could be deadly: cars, trains, elevators, defibs, heart monitors, pacemakers, microwaves, ovens, power tools, furnaces, cranes—the big ones used in construction work and on docks. I’d guess sixty percent of them could be dangerous. Then, the second thing he bought, a database of purchasers of those products. Some are other equipment manufacturers. Like Midwest Conveyance. Others are individual consumers, who bought smart appliances. Names and addresses. Again, New York and Northeast mostly.”

Archer asked, “That’s available? That information?”

Another pause. Perhaps this was one of astonishment. “Data mining, Ms.… ”

“Archer.”

“You have no idea what aggregators know about you. The data collection is why when you buy, in this case, a smart stove you start getting direct-mail ads for other products that might be cloud-oriented. By buying the stove you’ve declared yourself to be in a certain demographic.”

“So he simply browses through the list and finds a dangerous product with a DataWise inside, like the escalator. He hacks in and waits so that—if he’s a decent monster—it’s not a child or pregnant woman riding to the second floor, and pushes the button.”

Sachs asked, “How did he hack it? It can’t have been that easy.”