t’s not just about knowing generally what people buy,” Sachs explained. “It’s knowing the specifics about all the vics and the fall guys. Look at three of the crimes. Your cousin’s case, the Myra Weinburg case and the coin theft. Five Twenty-Two not only knew the kind of shoe the fall guys wore. He knew the sizes.”

Rhyme said, “Good. Let’s find out where DeLeon Williams and Arthur buy their footwear.”

A fast call to Judy Rhyme and one to Williams revealed that the shoes were bought mail order—one through a catalog, one through a Web site, but both directly from the companies.

“All right,” Rhyme said, “pick one, give them a call and find out how the shoe business works. Flip a coin.”

Sure-Track won. And it took only four phone calls to reach somebody connected with the company, the president and CEO, no less.

Water was sounding in the background, splashing, children laughing, as the man asked uncertainly, “A crime?”

“Nothing to do with you directly,” Rhyme reassured him. “One of your products is evidence.”

“But not like that guy who tried to blow up the airplane with a bomb in his shoe?” He stopped talking, as if even bringing this up was a breach of national security.

Rhyme explained the situation—the killer’s getting personal information about the victims, including specifics about Sure-Track shoes, as well as his cousin’s Altons and the other fall guy’s Bass walkers. “Do you sell through retail locations?”

“No. Only online.”

“Do you share information with your competitors? Information about customers?”

A hesitation.

“Hello?” Rhyme asked the silence.

“Oh, we can’t share information. That would be an antitrust violation.”

“Well, how could somebody have gotten access to information about customers of Sure-Track shoes?”

“That’s a complicated situation.”

Rhyme grimaced.

Sachs said, “Sir, the man we’re after is a killer and rapist. Do you have any thoughts about how he could’ve learned about your customers?”

“Not really.”

Lon Sellitto barked, “Then we’ll get a fucking warrant and take your records apart line by line.”

Not the subtle way Rhyme would have handled it but the sledge-hammer approach worked just fine. The man blurted, “Wait, wait, wait. I might have an idea.”

“Which is?” Sellitto snapped.

“Maybe he… okay, if he had information from different companies maybe he got it from a data miner.”

“What’s that?” Rhyme asked.

This pause was one of surprise, it seemed. “You never heard of them?”

Rhyme rolled his eyes. “No. What are they?”

“What it sounds like. Information service companies—they dig through data about consumers, their purchases and houses and cars, credit histories, everything about them. They analyze it and sell it. You know, to help companies spot market trends, find new customers, target direct-mail pieces and plan advertising. Things like that.”!!!Everything about them…

Rhyme thought: Maybe we’re on to something here. “Do they get information from RFID chips?”

“Sure they do. That’s one of the big sources for data.”

“What data miner does your company use?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Several of them.” His voice was reticent.

“We really need to know,” Sachs said, playing good cop to Sellitto’s bad. “We don’t want anybody else to get hurt. This man is very dangerous.”

A sigh floated over the man’s debate. “Well, I suppose SSD is the main one. They’re pretty big. But if you’re thinking that somebody from there was involved in a crime, impossible. They’re the greatest guys in the world. And there’s security, there’s—”

“Where are they based?” Sachs asked.

Another hesitation. Come on, damnit, Rhyme thought.

“In New York City.”

Five Twenty-Two’s playground. The criminalist caught Sachs’s eye. He smiled. This was looking promising.

“Any others in the area?”

“No. Axciom, Experian and Choicepoint, the other big ones, aren’t around here. But, believe me, nobody from SSD could be involved. I swear.”

“What does SSD stand for?” Rhyme asked.

“Strategic Systems Datacorp.”

“Do you have a contact there?”

“Not anybody in particular exactly.” He said this fast. Too fast.

“You don’t?”

“Well, there are sales reps we deal with. I can’t recall their names at the moment. I could check it and find out.”

“Who runs the company?”

Another pause. “That would be Andrew Sterling. He’s the founder and CEO. Look, I guarantee nobody there would do anything illegal. Impossible.”

Then Rhyme realized something: The man was scared. Not of the police. Of SSD itself. “What are you worried about?”

“It’s just…” In a confessional tone he said, “We couldn’t function without them. We’re really… partnered with them.”

Though, from his tone, the spurious verb seemed to mean “desperately dependent on.”

“We’ll be discreet,” Sachs said.

“Thank you. Really. Thank you.” The relief was obvious.

Sachs politely thanked him for his cooperation, drawing an eye roll from Sellitto.

Rhyme disconnected. “Data mining? Anybody heard of it?”

Thom said, “I don’t know SSD but I’ve heard of data miners. It’s the business of the twenty-first century.”

Rhyme glanced at the evidence chart. “So if Five Twenty-Two works for SSD or is one of their customers he could find out everything he’d need about who bought shave cream, rope, condoms, fishing line—all the evidence he could plant.” Then another idea struck him. “The head of the shoe company said that they sell the data for mailing lists. Arthur had gotten some direct mail about that Prescott painting, remember? Five Twenty-Two could have found out about it from their mailing lists. Maybe Alice Sanderson was on a list too.”

“And look—the crime-scene photos.” Sachs walked to the whiteboards and pointed to several pictures from the coin-theft scene. Direct-mail pieces sat prominently on the tables and floor.

Pulaski said, “And, sir? Detective Cooper mentioned E-ZPass. If this SSD mines their data, then the killer might’ve been able to find out exactly when your cousin was in the city and when he headed home.”

“Jesus,” Sellitto muttered. “If it’s true, this guy’s stumbled on one hell of an M.O.”

“Check out this data mining, Mel. Google it. I want to know for sure if SSD is the only one in the area.”

A few keystrokes later: “Hmm. I got over twenty million hits for ‘data mining.’”

“Twenty million?”

Over the next hour, the team watched as Cooper narrowed the list of the top data miners in the country—about a half dozen. He downloaded hundreds of pages of information from their sites and other details. Comparing the various data miners’ client lists with the products used as evidence in the 522 case, it appeared that SSD was the most likely single source of all the information and was, in fact, the only one based in or near New York.

“If you want,” Cooper said, “I can download their sales brochure.”

“Oh, we want, Mel. Let’s see it.”

Sachs sat next to Rhyme and they looked over the screen as the SSD Web site appeared, topped by the company’s logo: a watchtower with a window, from which radiated lines of illumination.

“Knowledge is Power”… The most valuable commodity in the 21st Century is information, and SSD is the number-one leader in using knowledge to handcraft your strategies, to redefine your goals and to help you structure solutions to meet the myriad challenges you’ll be facing in today’s world. With more than 4,000 clients in the U.S. and abroad, SSD sets the industry standard as the pre-eminent Knowledge Service Provider on earth.

THE DATABASE

innerCircle® is the largest private database in the world, with key information on 280 million Americans and 130 million citizens of other countries. innerCircle® resides on our proprietary Massively Parallel Computer Array Network (MPCAN®), the most powerful commercial computer system ever assembled.

innerCircle® presently holds more than 500 petabytes of information—that equals trillions of pages of data—and we anticipate that soon the system will grow to an exabyte of data, an amount so vast that it would take only five exabytes to store the transcript of every word spoken by every human being in history!

We have troves of personal and public information: telephone numbers, addresses, vehicle registration, licensing information, buying histories and preferences, travel profiles, government records and vital statistics, credit and income histories and much, much more. We get these data into your hands at the speed of light, in a form that’s easily accessible and instantly usable, uniquely tailored to your specific needs.

innerCircle® grows at the rate of hundreds of thousands of entries a day.

THE TOOLS

• Watchtower DBM®, the most comprehensive database management system in the world. Your partner in strategic planning, Watchtower® helps you target your goals, extracts the most meaningful data from innerCircle® and delivers a winning strategy directly to your desk, 24/7, via our lightning-fast and super-secure servers. Watchtower® meets and exceeds the standards that SQL set years ago.

• Xpectation® predictive behavior software, based on the latest artificial intelligence and modeling technology. Manufacturers, service providers, wholesalers and retailers… want to know where your market is going and what your customers will want in the future? Then this is the product for you. And, law enforcers, take note: With Xpectation® you can predict where and when crimes will occur, and most important, who is likely to commit them.

• FORT® (Finding Obscure Relationships Tool), a unique and revolutionary product which analyzes millions of seemingly unrelated facts to determine connections human beings couldn’t possibly discover on their own. Whether you’re a commercial company wishing to know more about the marketplace (or about your competitors) or a law enforcement organization faced with a difficult criminal case, FORT® will give you the edge!

• ConsumerChoice® monitoring software and equipment allows you to determine consumers’ accurate responses to advertising, marketing programs and new or proposed products. Forget subjective focus group opinions. Now, through biometric monitoring, you can gather and analyze individuals’ true feelings about your potential plans—often without their awareness that they’re being observed!

• Hub Overvue® information consolidation software. This easy-to-use product allows you to control every database within your organization—and, in appropriate circumstances, within other companies’ operations as well.

• SafeGard®, security and identity verification software and services. Whether your concerns are terrorist threats, corporate kidnapping, industrial espionage or employee or customer theft, SafeGard® assures that your facilities will remain secure, letting you concentrate on your core business. This division includes the world’s leading background verification, security and substance-screening companies, used by corporate and government clients throughout the world. The SafeGard® Division of SSD is also home to the industry leader in biometric hardware and software, Bio-Chek®.

• NanoCure® medical research software and services. Welcome to the world of microbiologic intelligent systems for the diagnosis and treatment of illness. Working with M.D.’s, our nanotechnologists are crafting solutions to the common health problems facing today’s populace. From monitoring genetic issues to developing injectible tags to help in detecting and curing persistent, deadly illnesses, our NanoCure® Division is working to create a healthy society.

• On-Trial® civil litigation support systems and services. From products liability to anti-trust cases, On-Trial® streamlines document handling and deposition and evidence control.

• PublicSure® law enforcement support software. This is THE system for the consolidation and management of criminal and allied public records stored in international, federal, state and local databases. Through PublicSure® search results can be downloaded to offices, patrol car computers, PDA’s or cell phones within seconds of the request, helping investigators bring cases to speedy conclusions and enhancing the preparedness and security of officers in the field.

• EduServe®, scholastic support software and services. Managing what children learn is vital in a successful society. EduServe® helps school boards and teachers in facilities from K to 12 most efficiently utilize their resources and offer services that guarantee the best education per tax dollar spent.

Rhyme laughed in disbelief. “If Five Twenty-Two can get his hands on all this information… well, he’s the man who knows everything.”

Mel Cooper said, “Okay, listen to this. I was looking at the companies that SSD owns. Guess one of them.”

Rhyme replied, “I’ll go with whatever the hell their initials were—DMS. The maker of that RFID tag in the book, right?”

“Yep. You got it.”

No one said anything for some moments. Rhyme noticed everyone in the room was looking at the glowing window logo of SSD on the computer screen.

“So,” Sellitto muttered, eyes on the chart. “Where do we go from here?”

“Surveillance?” suggested Pulaski.

“That makes sense,” Sellitto said. “I’ll give S and S a call, set up some teams.”

Rhyme gave a cynical glance. “Surveillance at a company with, what? A thousand employees?” He shook his head, then asked, “You know Occam’s razor, Lon?”

“Who the fuck is Occam? A barber?”

“A philosopher. The razor’s a metaphor—cutting away unnecessary explanations for a phenomenon. His theory was that when you have multiple possibilities the simplest is almost always the correct one.”

“So what’s your simple theory, Rhyme?”

Staring at the brochure, the criminalist answered Sachs, “I think you and Pulaski should go pay a visit to SSD tomorrow morning.”

“And do what?”

He gave a shrug. “Ask if anybody who works there is the killer.”