ven hearing Judy’s voice, taking tearful comfort in its familiarity, Arthur Rhyme couldn’t stop thinking about the tattooed white guy, the sizzling meth freak, Mick.

The guy kept talking to himself, he slipped his hands inside his pants every five minutes or so, and he seemed to turn his eyes to Arthur almost as frequently.

“Honey? Are you there?”

“Sorry.”

“I have to tell you something,” Judy said.

About the lawyer, about the money, about the children. Whatever it was, it would be too much for him. Arthur Rhyme was close to exploding.

“Go ahead,” he whispered, resigned.

“I went to see Lincoln.”

“You what?”

“I had to… You don’t seem to believe the lawyer, Art. This isn’t going to just fix itself.”

“But… I told you not to call him.”

“Well, there’s a family involved here, Art. It’s not just what you want. There’s me and the children. We should’ve done it before.”

“I don’t want him involved. No, call him back and tell him thanks but it’s fine.”

“Fine?” Judy Rhyme blurted. “Are you crazy?”

He sometimes believed she was stronger than he was—probably smarter too. She’d been furious when he’d stormed out of Princeton after being passed over for the professorship. She’d said he was behaving like a child having a tantrum. He wished he’d listened to her.

Judy blurted, “You’ve got this idea that John Grisham is going to show up in court at the last minute and save you. But that’s not going to happen. Jesus, Art, you ought to be grateful I’m doing!!!something.”

“I am,” he said quickly, his words darting out like squirrels. “It’s just—”

“Just what? This is a man who nearly died, was paralyzed over his whole body and now lives in a wheelchair. And he’s stopped everything to prove you’re innocent. What the hell are you thinking of? You want your children to grow up with a father in prison for murder?”

“Of course not.” He wondered again if she really believed his denial that he hadn’t known Alice Sanderson, the dead woman. She wouldn’t think he’d killed her, of course; she’d wonder if they’d been lovers.

“I have faith in the system, Judy.” God, that sounded weak.

“Well, Lincoln is the system, Art. You should give him a call and thank him.”

Arthur hesitated, then asked, “What does he say?”

“I just talked to him yesterday. He called to ask about your shoes—some of the evidence. But I haven’t heard from him again.”

“Did you go see him? Or just call?”

“I went to his place. He lives on Central Park West. His town house is real nice.”

A dozen memories of his cousin came to mind, rapid-fire.

Arthur asked, “How does he look?”

“Believe it or not, pretty much like when we saw him in Boston. Well, no, actually he looks in better shape now.”

“And he can’t walk?”

“He can’t move at all. Just his head and shoulders.”

“What about his ex? Do he and Blaine see each other?”

“No, he’s seeing someone else. A policewoman. She’s very pretty. Tall, redhead. I have to say, I was surprised. I shouldn’t have been, I guess. But I was.”

A tall redhead? Arthur thought immediately of Adrianna. And tried to put that memory aside. It refused to leave.!!!Tell me why, Arthur. Tell me why you did it.

A snarl from Mick. His hand was back in his pants. His eyes flickered hatefully toward Arthur.

“I’m sorry, honey. Thanks for calling him. Lincoln.”

It was then that he felt hot breath on his neck. “Yo, getoffadaphone.”

A Lat was standing behind him.

“Offadaphone.”

“Judy, I have to go. There’s only one phone here. I’ve used up my time.”

“I love you, Art—”

“I—”

The Lat stepped forward and Arthur hung up, then slipped back to his bench in a corner of the detention area. He sat staring at the floor in front of him, the scuff in the shape of a kidney. Staring, staring.

But the distressed floor didn’t hold his attention. He was thinking of the past. More memories joined those of Adrianna and his cousin Lincoln… Arthur’s family’s home on the North Shore. Lincoln’s in the western suburbs. Arthur’s stern king of a father, Henry. His brother, Robert. And shy, brilliant Marie.

Thinking too of Lincoln’s father, Teddy. (There was an interesting story behind the nickname—his given name wasn’t Theodore; Arthur knew how it had come about but, curiously, he didn’t think Lincoln did.) He’d always liked Uncle Teddy. A sweet guy, a little shy, a little quiet—but who wouldn’t be in the shadow of an older brother like Henry Rhyme? Sometimes when Lincoln was out, Arthur would drive to Teddy and Anne’s. In the small, paneled family room, uncle and nephew would watch an old movie or talk about American history.

The spot on the Tomb’s floor now morphed into the shape of Ireland. It seemed to move as Arthur stared, eyes fixed on it, willing himself away from here, disappearing through a magic hole into the life Out There.

Arthur Rhyme felt complete despair now. And he understood how naive he’d been. There were no magical exit routes, and no practical ones either. He knew Lincoln was brilliant. He’d read all the articles in the popular press he could find. Even some of his scientific writing:!!! “The Biologic Effects of Certain Nanoparticulate Materials… ”

But Arthur understood now that Lincoln could do nothing for him. The case was hopeless and he’d be in jail for the rest of his life.

No, Lincoln’s role in this was perfectly fitting. His cousin—the relative he’d been closest to while growing up, his surrogate brother—ought to be present at Arthur’s downfall.

A grim smile on his face, he looked up from the spot on the floor. And he realized that something had changed.

Weird. This wing of detention was now deserted.

Where had everybody gone?

Then approaching footsteps.

Alarmed, he glanced up and saw somebody moving toward him fast, feet scuffling. His friend, Antwon Johnson. Eyes cold.

Arthur understood. Somebody was attacking him from behind!

Mick, of course.

And Johnson was coming to save him.

Leaping to his feet, turning… So frightened he felt like crying. Looking for the tweaker, but—

No. No one was there.

Which is when he felt Antwon Johnson slip the garrote around his neck—homemade apparently, from a shirt torn into strips and twisted into a rope.

“No, wha—” Arthur was jerked to his feet. The huge man pulled him off the bench. And dragged him to the wall from which the nail protruded, the one he’d seen earlier, seven feet from the floor. Arthur moaned and thrashed.

“Shhhh.” Johnson looked around at the deserted alcove of the hall.

Arthur struggled but it was a struggle against a block of wood, against a bag of concrete. He slammed his fist pointlessly into the man’s neck and shoulders, then felt himself lifted off the floor. The black man hefted him up and hooked the homemade hangman’s noose to the nail. He let go and stood back, watching Arthur kick and jerk, trying to free himself.

Why, why, why? He was trying to ask this question but only wet sputtering came from his lips. Johnson stared at him in curiosity. No anger, no sadistic gleam. Just watching with mild interest.

And Arthur realized, as his body shivered and his vision went black, that this was all a setup—Johnson had saved him from the Lats for only one reason: He wanted Arthur for himself.

“Nnnnnn—”

Why?

The black man kept his hands at his sides and leaned close. He whispered, “I’m doin’ you a favor, man. Fuck, you’d do yourself in a month or two anyway. You ain’t made for it here. Now jus’ stop fightin’ it. Go easier, you jus’ give it up, you know what I’m sayin’?”

Pulaski returned from his mission at SSD and held up the sleek gray hard drive.

“Good job, rookie,” Rhyme said.

Sachs winked. “Your first secret op assignment.”

He grimaced. “It didn’t feel much like an assignment. It felt more like a felony.”

“I’m sure we can find probable cause if we look hard enough,” Sellitto reassured him.

Rhyme said to Rodney Szarnek, “Go ahead.”

The computer man plugged the hard drive into the USB port on his battered laptop and typed with firm, certain strikes on the keyboard, staring at the screen.

“Good, good…”

“You have a name?” Rhyme snapped. “Somebody at SSD who downloaded the dossiers?”

“What?” Szarnek gave a laugh. “It doesn’t work that way. It’ll take a while. I have to load it on the mainframe at Computer Crimes. And then—”

“How long a while?” Rhyme grumbled.

Szarnek once again blinked, as if seeing for the first time that the criminalist was disabled. “Depends on the level of fragmentation, age of the files, allocation, partitioning, and then—”

“Fine, fine, fine. Just do the best you can.”

Sellitto asked, “What else did you find?”

Pulaski explained about his interviews of the remaining technicians who had access to all of the data pens. He added that he’d talked to Andy Sterling, whose cell phone confirmed that his father had called from Long Island at the time of the killing. His alibi held up. Thom updated their suspect chart.!!!Andrew Sterling, President, Chief Executive Officer

Alibi—on Long Island, verified. Confirmed by son

Sean Cassel, Director of Sales and Marketing

No alibi

Wayne Gillespie, Director of Technical Operations

No alibi

Samuel Brockton, Director, Compliance Department

Alibi—hotel records confirm presence in Washington

Peter Arlonzo-Kemper, Director of Human Resources

Alibi—with wife, verified by her (biased?)

Steven Shraeder, Technical Service and Support Manager, day shift

Alibi—in office, according to time sheets

Faruk Mameda, Technical Service and Support Manager, night shift

No alibi

Client of SSD (?)

List provided by Sterling

UNSUB recruited by Andrew Sterling (?)

So now everyone at SSD who had access to innerCircle knew of the investigation… and still the bot guarding the NYPD “Myra Weinburg Homicide” file had not reported a single attempted intrusion. Was 522 being cautious? Or did the concept of the trap miss the mark? Was the entire premise that the killer was connected to SSD completely wrong? It occurred to Rhyme that they’d been so awed by the power of Sterling and the company that they were neglecting other potential suspects.

Pulaski produced a CD. “Here are the clients. I looked it over fast. There’re about three hundred fifty of them.”

“Ouch.” Rhyme grimaced.

Szarnek loaded the disk and opened it up on a spreadsheet. Rhyme looked over the data on his flat-screen monitor—nearly a thousand pages of dense text.

“Noise,” Sachs said. She explained what Sterling had told her about data’s being useless if it’s corrupt, too sparse or too plentiful. The tech scrolled through the swamp of information—which clients had bought which lists of data-mined details… Too much information. But then Rhyme had a thought. “Does it show the time and date of when the data was downloaded?”

Szarnek examined the screen. “Yes, it does.”

“Let’s find out who downloaded information just before the crimes.”

“Good, Linc,” Sellitto said. “Five Twenty-Two’d want the most up-to-date data possible.”

Szarnek considered this. “I think I can hack together a bot to handle it. Might take some time but, yeah, it’s doable. Just let me know exactly when the crimes occurred.”

“We can get you those. Mel?”

“Sure.” The tech began to compile the details of the coin theft, the painting theft and two rapes.

“Hey, you’re using that program Excel?” Pulaski asked Szarnek.

“That’s right.”

“What is it, exactly?”

“Your basic spreadsheet. Mostly used for sales figures and financial statements. But now people use it for a lot of things.”

“Could I learn it?”

“Sure. You can take a course. Say, the New School or Learning Annex.”

“Should have boned up on it before now. I’ll check them out, those schools.”

Rhyme believed he now understood Pulaski’s reticence to go back to SSD. He said, “Put that low on your list, rookie.”

“What’s that, sir?”

“Remember, people hassle you in all sorts of different ways. Don’t assume they’re right and you’re wrong just because they know something you don’t. The question is: Do you need to know it to do a better job? Then learn it. If not, it’s a distraction and to hell with it.”

The young officer laughed. “Okay. Thanks.”

Rodney Szarnek took the CD and the portable hard drive and bundled up his computer to head down to the Computer Crimes Unit and its mainframe.

After he left, Rhyme glanced at Sachs, who was on the phone, tracking down information on the data scrounger killed in Colorado several years ago. He couldn’t hear the words but she was clearly getting relevant information. Her head was forward, lips moist, and she tugged at a strand of hair. Her eyes were sleek and focused. The pose was extremely erotic.

Ridiculous, he thought. Concentrate on the goddamn case. He tried to push the sensation away.

He was only somewhat successful.

Sachs hung up the phone. “Got something from the Colorado State Police. That data scrounger’s name was P. J. Gordon. Peter James. Goes mountain biking one day and never comes home. They found his bike at the bottom of a cliff, battered up. It was beside a deep river. The body shows up twenty miles downstream a month or so later. Positive DNA match.”

“Investigation?”

“Not much of one. Kids’re always killing themselves with bikes and skis and snowmobiles in that area. It was ruled accidental. But a few open questions remained. For one thing, it seemed that Gordon had tried to break into the SSD servers in California—not the database but the company’s own files and some employees’ personal ones. Nobody knows if he got inside or not. I tried to track down other people from the company, Rocky Mountain Data, to find out more. But nobody’s around anymore. Looks like Sterling bought the company, took its database and let everybody go.”

“Anybody we can call about him?”

“No family that the state police could find.”

Rhyme was nodding slowly. “Okay, this is an interesting premise, if I can use your flavor-of-the-week participle, Mel. This Gordon’s doing his own data mining in SSD’s files and finds something about Five Twenty-Two, who realizes he’s in trouble, about to be found out. Then he kills Gordon and makes it look like an accident. Sachs, the police in Colorado have any case files?”

She sighed. “Archived. They’ll look for them.”

“Well, I want to find out who at SSD was with the company back then, when Gordon died.”

Pulaski called Mark Whitcomb at SSD. After a half hour he called back. A conversation with Human Resources revealed that dozens of employees were with the company at that time, including Sean Cassel, Wayne Gillespie, Mameda and Shraeder, as well as Martin, one of Sterling’s personal assistants.

The large number meant that the Peter Gordon matter wasn’t much of a lead. Rhyme hoped, though, that if they got the full Colorado State Police report, maybe he could find some evidence that pointed them toward one of the suspects.

He was staring at the list when Sellitto’s phone rang. He took the call. The criminalist saw the detective stiffen. “What?” he snapped, glancing at Rhyme. “No shit. What’s the story?… Call me as soon as you know.”

He hung up. His lips were pressed together and a frown crossed his face. “Linc, I’m sorry. Your cousin. Somebody moved on him in detention. Tried to kill him.”

Sachs walked over to Rhyme, rested her hand on his shoulder. He could feel alarm in the gesture.

“How is he?”

“The director’ll call me back, Linc. He’s in the emergency clinic there. They don’t know anything yet.”