melia Sachs was in the city, cruising through traffic, frustrated at the noisy, tepid response of the Japanese engine.

It sounded like an ice maker. And had just about as much horsepower.

She’d called Rhyme twice but both times the line went right to voice mail. This rarely happened; Lincoln Rhyme obviously wasn’t away from home very much. And something odd was going on at the Big Building: Lon Sellitto’s phone was out of order. And neither he nor Ron Pulaski was answering his mobile.

Was 522 behind this too?

All the more reason to move fast in following up on the lead she’d discovered at her town house. It was a solid one, she believed. Maybe it was the final clue, the one missing piece of the puzzle they needed to bring this case to its conclusion.

Now she saw her destination, not far away. Mindful of what had happened to the Camaro, and not wanting to jeopardize Pam’s car too—if 522 had been behind the repossession, as she suspected—Sachs cruised around the block until she found the rarest of all phenomena in Manhattan: a legal, unoccupied parking space.

How ’bout that?

Maybe it was a good sign.

“Why are you doing this?” Ron Pulaski whispered to Mark Whitcomb as they stood in a deserted Queens alleyway.

But the killer ignored him. “Listen to me.”

“We were friends, I thought.”

“Well, everybody thinks a lot of things that turn out not to be true. That’s life.” Whitcomb cleared his throat. He seemed edgy, uncomfortable. Pulaski remembered Sachs saying that the killer was feeling the pressure of their pursuit, which made him careless. It also made him more dangerous.

Pulaski was breathing hard.

Whitcomb looked around again, fast, then back at the young officer. He kept the gun steady and it was clear he knew how to use it. “Are you fucking listening to me?”

“Goddamnit. I’m listening.”

“I don’t want this investigation to go any further. It’s time for it to stop.”

“Stop? I’m in Patrol. How can I stop anything?”

“I was telling you: Sabotage it. Lose some evidence. Send people in the wrong direction.”

“I won’t do that,” the young officer muttered defiantly.

Whitcomb shook his head, looking almost disgusted. “Yes, you will. You can make this easy or hard, Ron.”

“What about my wife? Can you get her out of there?”

“I can do anything I want.”!!!The man who knows everything…

The young officer closed his eyes, grinding his teeth together the way he’d done as a kid. He looked at the building where Jenny was being held.

Jenny, the woman who looked just like Myra Weinburg.

Ron Pulaski now resigned himself to what he had to do. It was terrible, it was foolish, but he had no choice. He was cornered.

His head down, he muttered, “Okay.”

“You’ll do it?”

“I said I would,” he snapped.

“That’s smart, Ron. Very smart.”

“But I want you to promise”—Pulaski hesitated for a fraction of a second, glancing behind Whitcomb and then back—“that she and the baby’ll be out today.”

Whitcomb caught the glance and quickly looked behind him. As he did, the muzzle of his gun moved slightly off target.

Pulaski decided he’d played it just right, and he struck fast. With his left hand the young officer shoved the gun farther away and lifted his leg, pulling a small revolver from an ankle holster. Amelia Sachs had instructed him always to have one with him.

The killer cursed and tried to back up but Pulaski kept a death grip on his shooting hand and he swung the pistol into Whitcomb’s face hard, snapping cartilage.

The man gave a muffled scream, blood streaming. The Compliance officer went down and Pulaski managed to rip his pistol out of his fingers but he couldn’t keep a grip on it himself. Whitcomb’s black weapon went cart-wheeling to the ground as the men locked together in a clumsy wrestling match. The gun clunked to the asphalt without discharging and Whitcomb, wide-eyed with panic and fury, shoved Pulaski into the wall and grabbed for his hand.

“No, no!”

Whitcomb snapped forward with a head butt and Pulaski, recalling the terror of the club hitting him in the forehead years ago, recoiled instinctively. Which gave Whitcomb just the chance he needed to shove Pulaski’s backup toward the sky, and with his other hand draw the Glock, aiming it at the young officer’s head.

Leaving him with only enough time to issue a sound bite of prayer and to fix on an image of his wife and children, a vivid portrait to carry with him to heaven.

Finally the electricity came back on, and Cooper and Rhyme quickly got back to work on the evidence from the Joe Malloy killing. They were alone in the lab; Lon Sellitto was downtown, trying to get his suspension overturned.

The pictures of the scene were unrevealing and the physical evidence wasn’t extremely helpful. The shoeprint was clearly 522’s, the same as they’d found earlier. The fragments of leaves were from houseplants: ficus and Aglaonema, or Chinese evergreen. The trace was unsourceable soil, more of the Trade Towers dust, and a white powder that turned out to be Coffee-mate. The duct tape was generic; no source could be located.

Rhyme was surprised at the amount of blood on the evidence. He thought back to Sellitto’s description of the captain.!!!He’s a crusader…

Despite his protests of detachment, he found himself very troubled by Malloy’s death—and how vicious it had been. And Rhyme’s anger burned hotter. His uneasiness too. Several times he glanced out the window, as if 522 were sneaking up at that moment, though he’d had Thom lock all the doors and windows and turn on the security cameras.

JOSEPH MALLOY HOMICIDE SCENE

• Size-11 Skechers work shoe

• Houseplant leaves: ficus and Aglaonema—Chinese evergreen

• Dirt, untraceable

• Dust, from Trade Center attack

• Coffee-mate

• Duct tape, generic, untraceable

“Add the plants and Coffee-mate to the nonplanted evidence chart, Mel.”

The technician walked to the whiteboard and penned in the additions.

“Not much. Damn, not much at all.”

Then Rhyme blinked. Another pounding on the door. Thom went to answer it. Mel Cooper moved away from the whiteboard and his hand slipped to the thin pistol on his hip.

But the visitor wasn’t 522. It was an inspector with the NYPD, Herbert Glenn. A middle-aged man, with impressive posture, Rhyme observed. His suit was cheap but the shoes were polished to perfection. Several other voices sounded in the hallway, behind.

After introductions, Glenn said, “I’m afraid I have to talk to you about an officer you work with.”

Sellitto? Or Sachs? What had happened?

Glenn said evenly, “His name is Ron Pulaski. You do work with him, don’t you?”

Oh, no.!!!The rookie…

Pulaski dead, and his wife in the bureaucratic hell of detention with her baby. What would she do?

“Tell me what happened!”

Glenn glanced behind him and gestured two other men into the room, a gray-haired man in a dark suit and a younger, shorter one, dressed similarly, but with a large bandage on his nose. The inspector introduced Samuel Brockton and Mark Whitcomb, employees of SSD. Brockton, Rhyme noted, was on the suspect list, though apparently he had an alibi for the rape/murder. Whitcomb, it turned out, was his assistant in the Compliance Department.

“Tell me about Pulaski!”

Inspector Glenn continued. “I’m afraid—” His phone rang and he took the call. Glenn glanced at Brockton and Whitcomb as he spoke in hushed tones. Finally he disconnected.

“Tell me what’s happened to Ron Pulaski. I want to know now!”

The doorbell rang and Thom and Mel Cooper ushered more people into Rhyme’s lab. One was a burly man with an FBI agent identification badge around his neck and the other was Ron Pulaski, who was in handcuffs.

Brockton pointed to a chair and the FBI agent deposited the young officer there. Pulaski was obviously shaken, and dusty and rumpled, flecked with blood, but otherwise unhurt, it seemed. Whitcomb too sat and gingerly touched his nose. He didn’t look at anyone.

Samuel Brockton showed him his ID. “I’m an agent with the Compliance Division of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Mark’s my assistant. Your officer attacked a federal agent.”

“Who was threatening me at gunpoint without identifying himself. After he’d—”

Compliance Division? Rhyme had never heard of it. But within the complex warren of Homeland Security, organizations came and went like unsuccessful Detroit cars.

“I thought you were with SSD?”

“We have offices at SSD but we’re federal government employees.”

And what the hell had Pulaski been up to? Relief now ebbing, while irritation flowed.

The rookie started to continue but Brockton silenced him. Rhyme, though, said sternly to the gray-suited man, “No, let him talk.”

Brockton debated. His eyes revealed a patient confidence that suggested Pulaski, or anyone else, could say whatever he wanted and it wouldn’t affect Brockton in the least. He nodded.

The rookie told Rhyme about meeting Whitcomb, in hopes of getting Jenny released from INS detention. The man asked him to sabotage the 522 investigation, then pulled a gun and threatened him when he refused. Pulaski had struck Whitcomb in the face with his backup gun and they’d fought.

Rhyme snapped to Brockton and Glenn, “Why’re you interfering with our case?”

Brockton now seemed to notice that Rhyme was disabled, then disregarded the fact immediately. He said in a calm baritone, “We tried it the subtle way. If Officer Pulaski had agreed we wouldn’t have to crack the whip… This case has caused a lot of headaches for a lot of people. I was supposed to be meeting with Congress and Justice all week. Had to cancel everything and hightail it back up here to see what the hell was going on… All right, this is off the record. Everybody?”

Rhyme muttered agreement, and Cooper and Pulaski concurred.

“The Compliance Division does threat analysis and provides security to private companies that might be targets of terrorists. Big players in the country’s infrastructure. Oil companies, airlines, banks. Data miners, like SSD. We have agents on site.”

Sachs had said Brockton spent a lot of time in Washington. That explained why.

“Then why lie about it, why say you’re SSD employees?” Pulaski blurted. Rhyme had never seen the young man angry. He sure was now.

“We need to keep a low profile,” Brockton explained. “You can see why pipelines and drug companies and food processors would be great targets for terrorists. Well, think what someone could do with the information that SSD has. The economy would be crippled if their computers were brought down. Or what if assassins learned details of executives’ or politicians’ whereabouts and other personal information from innerCircle?”

“Did you have Lon Sellitto’s drug test report changed?”

“No, this suspect of yours—Five Twenty-Two—must’ve done that,” Inspector Glenn said. “And had Officer Pulaski’s wife arrested.”

“Why do you want the investigation stopped?” Pulaski blurted. “Don’t you see how dangerous this man is?” He was speaking to Mark Whitcomb but the Compliance assistant continued to examine the floor and remained silent.

“Our profile is that he’s an outlier,” Glenn explained.

“A what?”

“An anomaly. He’s a nonrecurring event,” Brockton explained. “SSD has run an analysis of the situation. The profiling and predictive modeling told us that a sociopath like this will hit a saturation point any time now. He’ll stop what he’s doing. He’ll simply go away.”

“But he hasn’t, now has he?”

“Not yet,” Brockton said. “But he will. The programs’re never wrong.”

“They’ll be wrong if one more person dies.”

“We have to be realistic. It’s a balance. We can’t let anybody know how valuable SSD is as a terrorist target. And we can’t let anybody know about the Compliance Division of DHS. We have to keep SSD and Compliance off the grid as much as possible. A murder investigation puts them both on it in a very big way.”

Glenn added, “You want to follow up conventional leads, Lincoln, go ahead. Forensics, wits, fine. But you’ll have to keep SSD out of it. That press conference was a huge mistake.”

“We talked to Ron Scott in the mayor’s office, we talked to Joe Malloy. They okayed it.”

“Well, they didn’t check with the right people. It’s jeopardized our relationship with SSD. Andrew Sterling doesn’t have to provide us with computer support, you know.”

He sounded like the shoe-company president, terrified of upsetting Sterling and SSD.

Brockton added, “Okay, now, the party line is that your killer didn’t get his information from SSD. Actually, that’s the only line.”

“Do you understand that Joseph Malloy is dead because of SSD and innerCircle?”

Glenn’s face tightened. He sighed. “I’m sorry about that. Very sorry. But he was killed in the course of an investigation. Tragic. But that’s the nature of being a cop.”!!!The party line… the only line…

“So” Brockton said, “SSD is no longer part of the investigation. Understood?”

A chill nod.

Glenn gestured to the FBI agent. “You can let him go now.”

The man uncuffed Pulaski, who stood, rubbing his wrists.

Rhyme said, “Get Lon Sellitto reinstated. And have Pulaski’s wife released.”

Glenn looked at Brockton, who shook his head. “Doing that at this point in time would be an admission that maybe data-mined information and SSD were involved in the crimes. We’ll have to let those things go for the time being.”

“That is bullshit. You know Lon Sellitto’s never done any drugs in his life.”

Glenn said, “And the inquiry will clear him. We’ll let the matter run its course.”

“No, goddamnit! According to the information the killer put into the system—he’s already guilty. Just like Jenny Pulaski. All this is on their record!”

The inspector said calmly, “This is how we’ll have to leave it for now.”

The federal agents and Glenn walked to the door.

“Oh, Mark,” Pulaski called. Whitcomb turned back. “Sorry.”

The federal officer blinked in surprise at the apology and touched his bandaged nose. Then Pulaski continued, “That it was just your nose I broke. Fuck you, Judas.”

Well, the rookie’s got some backbone after all.

After they’d left, Pulaski called his wife but couldn’t get through. He angrily snapped his phone shut. “I’ll tell you, Lincoln, I don’t care what they say, I’m not just packing up.”

“Don’t worry. We’ll keep right on going. Hey, they can’t fire me—I’m a civilian. They can only fire you and Mel.”

“Well, I—” Cooper was frowning.

“Relax, Mel. I do have a sense of humor, despite what everybody thinks. Nobody’ll find out—as long as the rookie here doesn’t beat up any more federal agents. Okay, this Robert Carpenter, the SSD customer. I want him. Now.”