ell, what’s the goddamn story?” Rhyme snapped to Pulaski.

The rookie was three miles away, in Manhattan, at the Upper East Side town house of Andrew Sterling, Jr.

“Have you gone in? Is Sachs there?”

“I don’t think Andy’s the one, sir.”

“You think? Or he isn’t the one?”

“He’s not the one.”

“Explain.”

Pulaski told Rhyme that, yes, Andy Sterling had lied about his activities on Sunday. But not to cover up his role as a killer and rapist. He’d told his father he’d taken the train to Westchester to go hiking but the truth was that he’d driven, as he’d let slip when talking to Pulaski.

With two ESU officers and Pulaski in front of him, the flustered young man blurted out why he’d lied to his father when he said he’d been on Metro North. Andy himself didn’t have a driver’s license.

But his boyfriend did. Andrew Sterling might have been the world’s number-one purveyor of information but he didn’t know his son was gay, and the young man had never summoned the courage to tell him.

A call to Andy’s boyfriend confirmed that they were both out of town at the time of the killings. The E-ZPass operations center confirmed that this was the case.

“Damn, okay, get on back here, Pulaski.”

“Yes, sir.”

Walking along the dusky sidewalk, Lon Sellitto was thinking, Shit, should’ve gotten Cooper’s gun too. Of course, borrowing a shield was one thing if you were suspended but a weapon was something else. That would’ve moved the sorta bad into the shitstorm bad, if Internal Affairs found out.

And it’d give them grounds to legitimately suspend him, when the drug test came back clean.

Drugs. Shit.

He found the address he sought, Carpenter’s, a town house on the Upper East Side in a quiet neighborhood. The lights were on but he saw no one inside. He strode up to the doorway and pressed the buzzer.

He believed he heard some noise from inside. Footsteps. A door.

Then nothing for a long minute.

Sellitto instinctively reached for where his weapon had once been.

Shit.

Finally the curtain on a side window parted and fell back. The door opened and Sellitto found himself looking at a solidly built man, hair combed over. He was gazing at the illicit gold shield. His eyes flickered with uncertainty.

“Mr. Carpenter—”

He got nothing else out before the uneasiness vanished and the man’s face screwed up in pure anger and he raged, “Goddamn. Goddamnit!”

Lon Sellitto hadn’t been in a fight with a perp for years, and he now realized that this man could easily beat him bloody and then cut his throat. Why the hell didn’t I borrow Cooper’s gun after all, whatever happened?

But, it turned out, Sellitto wasn’t the source of the anger.

It was, curiously, the head of SSD.

“That fucker Andrew Sterling did this, right? He called you? He’s implicated me in those murders we keep hearing about. Oh, Christ, what’m I going to do? I’m probably already in the system and Watchtower’s got my name on lists all over the country. Oh, man. What a fucking idiot I’ve been, getting caught up in SSD.”

Sellitto’s concern diminished. He put away the badge and asked the man to step outside. He did.

“So I’m right—Andrew’s behind this, isn’t he?” Carpenter snarled.

Sellitto didn’t reply but asked his whereabouts at the time Malloy had died earlier that day.

Carpenter thought back. “I was in meetings.” He volunteered the name of several officials from a large bank in town, their phone numbers too.

“And Sunday afternoon?”

“My friend and I had some people over. A brunch.”

An easily verifiable alibi.

Sellitto phoned Rhyme to give him what he’d found. He got Cooper, who said he’d check the alibis. After he’d disconnected, the detective turned back to the agitated Bob Carpenter.

“He’s the most vindictive prick I’ve ever done business with.”

Sellitto told him that, yes, his name had been provided by SSD. At this news Carpenter closed his eyes momentarily. The anger was lessening, replaced by dismay.

“What did he say about me?”

“It seems you downloaded information about the victims just before they were killed. In several murders over the past few months.”

Carpenter said, “This’s what happens when Andrew’s upset. He gets even. I never thought it’d be like that…” Then he frowned. “Over the past few months? This downloading—when was the most recent?”

“In the last couple weeks.”

“Well, it couldn’t be me. I’ve been locked out of the Watchtower system since early March.”

“Locked out?”

Carpenter nodded. “Andrew blocked me.”

Sellitto’s phone trilled, Mel Cooper calling back. He explained that at least two of the sources had confirmed Carpenter’s whereabouts. Sellitto had the tech call Rodney Szarnek to double-check the data on the CD Pulaski had been given. He snapped the phone shut and told Carpenter, “Why were you blocked out?”

“See, what happened was I have a data-warehousing company, and—”

“Data warehousing?”

“We store data that companies like SSD process.”

“Not, like, a warehouse where you store merchandise?”

“No, no. It’s all computer storage. On servers out in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Anyway, I got… well, you could say I got seduced by Andrew Sterling. All his success, the money. I wanted to start miningthe data too, like SSD, not just storing it. I was going to carve out a niche market in a few industries that SSD isn’t that strong in. I wasn’t really competing, it wasn’t illegal.”

Sellitto could hear the desperation in the man’s voice as he justified whatever he’d done.

“It was only nickel-and-dime stuff. But Andrew found out and locked me out of innerCircle and Watchtower. He threatened to sue me. I’ve been trying to negotiate but today he fired me. Well, terminated our contract. I really didn’t do anything wrong.” His voice cracked. “It was just business…”

“And you think Sterling changed the files to make it look like you were the killer?”

“Well, somebody at SSD had to.”

So the bottom line, Sellitto reflected, is that Carpenter’s not a suspect and this was all a big fucking waste of time. “I don’t have any more questions. ’Night.”

But Carpenter was having a change of heart. The anger was gone completely, replaced by an expression that Sellitto decided was desperation, if not fear. “Wait, Officer, don’t get the wrong idea. I spoke too fast. I’m not suggesting it was Andrew. I was mad. But it was just a reaction. You won’t tell him, will you?”

As he walked away the detective glanced back. The businessman actually looked like he was going to cry.

So yet another suspect was innocent.

First, Andy Sterling. Now, Robert Carpenter. When Sellitto returned he immediately called Rodney Szarnek, who said he’d find out what went wrong. The techie called back ten minutes later. The first thing he said was, “Heh. Oops.”

Rhyme sighed. “Go ahead.”

“Okay, Carpenter did download enough lists to give him the information he’d need to target the victims and fall guys. But it was over the course of two years. All part of legitimate marketing campaigns. And nothing since early March.”

“You said the information was downloaded just before the crimes.”

“That’s what it said on the spreadsheet itself. But the metadata showed that somebody at SSD had changed the dates. The information on your cousin, for instance, he got two years ago.”

“And so somebody at SSD did that to point us away from him and toward Carpenter.”

“Right.”

“Now, the big question: Who the hell rearranged the dates? That’s Five Twenty-Two.”

But the computer man said, “There’s no other information encoded in the metadata. The administrator and root-access logs aren’t—”

“Just no. That’s the short answer?”

“Correct.”

“You’re sure?”

“Positive.”

“Thanks,” he muttered. They disconnected.

The son eliminated, Carpenter eliminated…

Where are you, Sachs?

Rhyme felt a jolt. He’d almost used her first name. But it was an unspoken rule between them, they used only their last names when referring to the other. Bad luck otherwise. As if the luck could get any worse.

“Linc,” said Sellitto, pointing at the board containing the list of suspects. “The only thing I can think of is to check out every one of ’em. Now.”

“Well, how do we do that, Lon? We’ve got an inspector who doesn’t even want this case to exist. We can’t exactly…” His voice faded as his eyes settled on the profile of 522 and then the evidence charts.

His cousin’s dossier too, on the turning frame nearby.

Lifestyle

• Dossier 1A. Consumer products preferences

• Dossier 1B. Consumer services preferences

• Dossier 1C. Travel

• Dossier 1D. Medical

• Dossier 1E. Leisure-time preferences

Financial/Educational/Professional

• Dossier 2A. Educational history

• Dossier 2B. Employment history, w/income

• Dossier 2C. Credit history/current report and rating

• Dossier 2D. Business products and services preferences

Governmental/Legal

• Dossier 3A. Vital records

• Dossier 3B. Voter registration

• Dossier 3C. Legal history

• Dossier 3D. Criminal history

• Dossier 3E. Compliance

• Dossier 3F. Immigration and naturalization

Rhyme read through the document several times quickly. Then he looked at other documents taped up on the evidence boards. Something wasn’t right.

He called Szarnek back. “Rodney, tell me: How much storage space on a hard drive does a thirty-page document take up? Like that SSD dossier I have here.”

“Heh. A dossier? Text only, I assume.”

“Yes.”

“It’d be in a database so it’d be compressed… Make it twenty-five K, tops.”

“That’s pretty small, right?”

“Heh. A fart in the hurricane of data storage.”

Rhyme rolled his eyes at the response. “I’ve got one more question for you.”

“Heh. Shoot.”

Her head throbbed in agony and she tasted blood from the cut in her mouth after colliding with the stone wall.

With the razor at her throat, the killer had taken her gun and dragged her through a basement door then up steep stairs into the “façade” side of the town house, the front, a modern, stark place echoing the black-and-white decor of SSD.

Then he led her to a door against the back wall in the living room.

It turned out to be, ironically, a closet. He pushed through some stale-smelling clothes and opened another door against the back wall, dragged her inside and relieved her of her pager, PDA, cell phone, keys and the switchblade knife in the back pocket of her slacks. He shoved her against a radiator, between tall stacks of newspaper, and cuffed her to the rusty metal. She looked around at the hoarder’s paradise, moldy, dim, stinking of old, stinking of used, and filled with more junk and refuse than she’d ever seen in one place. The killer took all her gear to a large, cluttered desk. With her own knife he began to disassemble her electronics. He worked meticulously, savoring each component he extracted, as if dissecting a corpse for the organs.

Now she was watching the killer at his desk, typing on his keyboard. He was surrounded by huge stacks of newspapers, towers of folded paper bags, boxes of matches, glassware, boxes labeled “Cigarettes” and “Buttons” and “Paper Clips,” old cans and boxes of food from the sixties and seventies, cleaning supplies. Hundreds of other containers.

But she wasn’t paying attention to the inventory. She was reflecting, in shock, how he’d tricked them. Five Twenty-Two wasn’t one of their suspects at all. They were wrong about the bullying executives, the techs, the clients, the hacker, Andrew Sterling’s hired gun to drum up business for the company.

And yet he was an employee of SSD.

Why the hell hadn’t she considered the obvious?

Five Twenty-Two was the security guard who’d taken her on a tour of the data pens on Monday. She remembered the name badge. John. His last name was Rollins. He must have seen her and Pulaski arrive at the guard station in the SSD lobby on Monday and moved in quickly to volunteer to escort them to Sterling’s office. He’d then hovered nearby to find out about the purpose of their visit. Or maybe he’d even known ahead of time they were coming and arranged to be on duty that morning.!!!The man who knows everything…

Because he’d freely escorted her around the Gray Rock on Monday she should have known that the guards had access to all the pens and the Intake Center. She recalled that once you were in the pens, you didn’t need a passcode to log on to innerCircle. She still wasn’t sure how he’d smuggled out disks containing data—even he had been searched when they’d left the data pen—but somehow he’d managed to.

She squinted, hoping the pain in her skull would diminish. It didn’t. She glanced up—to the wall in front of the desk, where a painting hung—a photorealistic portrait of a family. Of course: the Harvey Prescott he’d murdered Alice Sanderson for, her death blamed on innocent Arthur Rhyme.

Her eyes finally accustomed to the dim light, Sachs was looking over the adversary. She hadn’t paid attention to him when he’d escorted her around SSD. But now she could see him clearly—a thin man, pale, a nondescript but handsome face. His hollow eyes moved quickly and his fingers were very long, his arms strong.

The killer sensed her scrutiny. He turned and looked her over with hungry eyes. Then he returned to the computer and continued typing furiously. Dozens of other keyboards, most of them broken or with the letters worn down, sat in piles on the floor. Useless to anybody else. But 522, of course, was incapable of throwing them away. Surrounding him were thousands of yellow legal pads, filled with minute, precise handwriting—the source of the flecks of paper they’d found at one of the scenes.

The smell of mold and unwashed clothing and linens was overwhelming. He must be so used to the stench he doesn’t even notice it. Or maybe he enjoys it.

Sachs closed her eyes and rested her head against a stack of newspapers. No weapons, helpless… What could she possibly do? She was furious with herself for not leaving a more detailed message with Rhyme about where she was going.

Helpless…

But then some words came to her. The slogan of the entire 522 case: Knowledge is power.

Well, get some knowledge, damnit. Figure out something about him you can use for a weapon.

Think!

SSD security guard John Rollins… That name meant nothing to her. It had never come up during the investigation. What was his connection to SSD, to the crimes, to the data?

Sachs scanned the dark room around her, overwhelmed by the amount of junk she saw.!!!Noise…

Focus. One thing at a time.

And then she noticed something against the far wall that caught her attention. It was one of his collections: a huge stack of ski-resort lift tickets.

Vail, Copper Mountain, Breckinridge, Beaver Creek.

Could it be?

Okay, it was worth the gamble.

“Peter,” she said confidently, “you and I have to talk.”

At the name, he blinked and looked her way. For an instant his eyes flickered with uncertainty. It was almost like a slap in the face.

Yes, she was right. John Rollins was—what else?—an assumed identity. In reality he was Peter Gordon, the famous data scrounger who’d died… who’d pretended to die when SSD took over the company he worked for in Colorado some years ago.

“We were curious about the faked death. The DNA? How’d you manage that?”

He stopped typing, staring up at the painting. Finally he said, “Isn’t it funny about data? How we believe them without question.” He turned to her. “If it’s in a computer, we know it has to be true. If it involves the DNA deity then it definitely has to be right. Ask no more. End of story.”

Sachs said, “So you—Peter Gordon—go missing. The police find your bike and a decomposed body wearing your clothes. Not much left after the animals, right? And they take hair and saliva samples from your house. Yep, the DNA matches. No doubt in the world. You’re dead. But it wasn’t your hair or saliva in your bathroom, was it? The man you killed, you took some hair from him and left it in your bathroom. And brushed his teeth, right?”

“And a little blood on the Gillette. You police do love your blood, don’t you?”

“Who was the man you killed?”

“Some kid from California. Hitchhiker on I-70.”

Keep him uneasy—information’s your only weapon. Use it! “We never knew why you did it, though, Peter. Was it to sabotage the SSD takeover of Rocky Mountain Data? Or was it more?”

“Sabotage?” he whispered in astonishment. “You just don’t get it, do you? When Andrew Sterling and his folks from SSD came to Rocky Mountain and wanted to acquire it, I scrounged every bit of data I could find on him and the company. And what I saw was breathtaking! Andrew Sterling is God. He’s the future of data, which means he’s the future of society. He could find data that I couldn’t even imagine existed, and use it like a gun, or like medicine, or like holy water. I needed to be part of what he was doing.”

“But you couldn’t be a data scrounger for SSD. Not for what you had planned, right? For your… other collecting? And the way you lived.” She nodded at the filled rooms.

His face grew dark, his eyes wide. “I wanted to be part of SSD. Do you think I didn’t? Oh, the places I could have gone! But that’s not the card I was dealt.” He fell silent, then he waved a hand around him, indicating his collections. “You think living this way is what I’d choose? Do you think I like it?” He voice came close to cracking. Breathing hard, he gave a faint smile. “No, my life has to be off the grid. That’s the only way I can survive. Off. The. Grid.”

“So you faked your death and stole an identity. Got yourself a new name and Social Security number, somebody who’d died.”

The emotion was gone now. “A child, yeah. Jonathan Rollins, three, from Colorado Springs. It’s easy to get a new identity. Survivalists do it every day. You can buy books on the subject…” A faint smile. “Just remember to pay cash for them.”

“And you got a job as a security guard. But wouldn’t somebody from SSD recognize you?”

“I never met anybody at the company in person. That’s the wonder of the data-mining business. You can collect data and never leave the privacy of your own Closet.”

Then his voice faded. He seemed uneasy, considering what she’d told him. Were they in fact getting close to matching Rollins with Peter Gordon? Would someone else come to the town house to check things out further? He apparently decided he couldn’t take the chance. Gordon snatched up the key to Pam’s car. He’d want to hide it. The killer examined the fob. “Cheap. No RFIDs. But everybody’s scanning the license plates now. Where’d you park?”

“You think I’d tell you?”

He shrugged and left.

Her strategy had worked, grabbing a bit of knowledge and using it as a weapon. Not much, of course, but at least she’d bought a little time.

Was it, however, enough to do what she planned: get to the handcuff key stuffed deep in her slacks pocket?