he privacy and dignity of our citizens [are] being whittled away by sometimes imperceptible steps. Taken individually, each step may be of little consequence. But when viewed as a whole, there begins to emerge a society quite unlike any we have seen—a society in which government may intrude into the secret regions of a [person’s] life.

—SUPREME COURT JUSTICE WILLIAM O. DOUGLAS

Okay, the computer helped,” Lincoln Rhyme acknowledged.

He was referring to innerCircle, the Watchtower database management program and SSD’s other programs. “But it was mostly the evidence,” he said stridently. “The computer pointed me in a general direction. That’s all. We took over from there.”

It was well after midnight and Rhyme was speaking to Sachs and Pulaski, both seated nearby in the lab. She’d returned from 522’s town house, where the medics had reported that Robert Jorgensen would survive; the bullet had missed major organs and blood vessels. He was in the Columbia-Presbyterian intensive care facility.

Rhyme continued his explanation of how he’d found out that Sachs was in an SSD security guard’s town house. He told her about her massive Compliance dossier. Mel Cooper called it up on the computer for her to look at. She scrolled through it, her face ashen at the amount of information inside. Even as they watched, the screen flickered as it updated.

“They know everything,” she whispered. “I don’t have a single secret in the world.”

Rhyme went on to tell her how the system had compiled a list of her positions after she had left the precinct house in Brooklyn. “But all the computers could do was give a rough direction of your travel. It came up blank for a destination. I kept looking at the map and realized that you were headed in the general direction of SSD—which, by the way, their own goddamn computer didn’t figure out. I called and the lobby guard said that you’d just spent a half hour there, asking about employees. But nobody knew where you’d gone after that.”

She explained how her lead had taken her to SSD: The man who’d broken into her town house had dropped a receipt from a coffee shop next to the company. “That told me the perp had to be an employee or somebody connected to SSD. Pam got a look at the guy’s clothes—blue jacket, jeans and a cap—and I figured the security guards might know of employees who’d worn that outfit today. The ones who were on duty didn’t remember seeing anyone like that so I got the names and addresses of guards who were off duty. I started canvassing them.” A grimace. “Never occurred to me that Five Twenty-Two was one of them. How’d you know he was a guard, Rhyme?”

“Well, I knew you were looking for an employee. But was it one of the suspects or somebody else? The goddamn computer wasn’t any help so I turned to the evidence. Our perp was an employee who wore unstylish work shoes and had traces of Coffee-mate on him. He was strong. Did those mean he had some physical job in the lower rungs of the company? Mailroom, deliveryman, janitor? Then I recalled the cayenne pepper.”

“Pepper spray,” Sachs said, sighing. “Of course. It wasn’t food at all.”

“Exactly. A security guard’s main weapon. And the voice-disguise box? You can buy them at stores that sell security equipment. Then I talked to the head of security at SSD. Tom O’Day.”

“Right. We met him.” A nod at Pulaski.

“He told me a lot of security guards worked only part-time, which’d give Five Twenty-Two plenty of time to practice his hobby outside the office. I ran the other evidence past O’Day. The bits of leaf we found could’ve come from the plants in the security guards’ lunch room. And they have Coffee-mate there, not real milk. I told him Terry Dobyns’s profile and asked for a list of all the guards who were single and had no children. Then he cross-referenced their time sheets with the times of the killings for all the crimes going back two months.”

“And you found one who was out of the office at the time—John Rollins, aka Peter Gordon.”

“No, I found that John Rollins was in the office every time the crime occurred.”

“In the office?”

“Obviously. He got into the office management system and changed the time sheets to give himself an alibi. I had Rodney Szarnek check the metadata. Yep, he was our man. I called it in.”

“But, Rhyme, I don’t understand how Five Twenty-Two got the dossiers. He had access to all the data pens but everybody was searched when they left, even him. And he didn’t have online access to innerCircle.”

“That was the one stumbling block, yep. But we have Pam Willoughby to thank. She helped me figure it out.”

“Pam? How?”

“Remember she told us that nobody could download the pictures from the social-networking site, OurWorld, but the kids just took pictures of the screen?”!!!Oh, don’t worry, Mr. Rhyme. A lot of times people miss the obvious answer…

“I realized that’s how Five Twenty-Two could get his information. He didn’t need to download thousands of pages of dossiers. He just copied what he needed about the victims and the fall guys, probably late at night when he was one of the only people in the pens. Remember we found those flecks from yellow pads? And at the security station the X-ray or metal detectors wouldn’t pick up paper. Nobody’d even think about it.”

Sachs said that she’d seen maybe a thousand yellow pads surrounding his desk in his secret room.

Lon Sellitto arrived from downtown. “The fucker’s dead,” he muttered, “but I’m still in the system for being a goddamn crackhead. All I can get out of them is, ‘We’re working on it.’”

But he did have some good news. The district attorney would reopen all the cases in which 522 had apparently fabricated evidence. Arthur Rhyme had been released outright, and the status of the others would be reviewed immediately, the likelihood being that they’d be released within the next month.

Sellitto added, “I checked on the town house where Five Twenty-Two was living.”

The Upper West Side residence had to be worth tens of millions. How Peter Gordon, employed as a security guard, had been able to afford it was a mystery.

But the detective had the answer. “He wasn’t the owner. Title’s held by a Fiona McMillan, an eighty-nine-year-old widow, no close relatives. She still pays the taxes and utility bills. Never misses a payment. Only, funny thing—nobody’s seen her in five years.”

“About the time SSD moved to New York.”

“I figure he got all the information he needed about assuming her identity and killed her. They’re going to start searching for the body tomorrow. They’ll start with the garage and then try the basement.” The lieutenant then added, “I’m putting together the memorial service for Joe Malloy. It’s on Saturday. If you want to be there.”

“Of course,” Rhyme said.

Sachs touched his hand and said, “Patrol or brass, they’re all family and it’s the same pain when you lose somebody.”

“Your father?” Rhyme asked. “Sounds like something he’d say.”

A voice from the hallway intruded: “Heh. Too late. Sorry. Just got word you closed the case.” Rodney Szarnek was strolling into the lab, ahead of Thom. He was holding a stack of printouts and once again was speaking to Rhyme’s computer and ECU system, the equipment, not the human beings.

“Too late?” Rhyme asked.

“The mainframe finished assembling the empty-space files that Ron stole. Well, that he borrowed. I was on the way here to show them to you and heard that you nailed the perp. Guess you don’t need them now.”

“Just curious. What’d you find?”

He walked forward with a number of printouts and displayed them to Rhyme. They were incomprehensible. Words, numbers and symbols, and large gaps of white space in between.

“I don’t read Greek.”

“Heh, that’s funny. You don’t read Geek.”

Rhyme didn’t bother to correct him. He asked, “What’s the bottom line?”

“Runnerboy—that nym I found earlier—did download a lot of information from innerCircle secretly and then he erased his tracks. But they weren’t the dossiers of any of the victims or anybody else connected with the Five Twenty-Two case.”

“You got his name?” Sachs asked. “Runnerboy’s?”

“Yeah. Somebody named Sean Cassel.”

The policewoman closed her eyes. “Runnerboy… And he said he was training for a triathlon. I didn’t even think about it.”

Cassel was the sales director and one of their suspects, Rhyme reflected. He now noticed that Pulaski was reacting to the news. The young officer blinked in surprise and glanced at Sachs with a lifted eyebrow and a faint but dark smile of recognition. He recalled the officer’s reluctance to return to SSD and his embarrassment at not knowing about Excel. A run-in between Pulaski and Cassel was a credible explanation.

The officer asked, “What was Cassel up to?”

Szarnek flipped through the printouts. “I couldn’t tell you exactly.” He stopped and proffered the page to the young cop, shrugging. “Take a look, if you want. Here are some of the dossiers he accessed.”

Pulaski shook his head. “I don’t know any of these guys.” He read some names out loud.

“Wait,” Rhyme barked. “What was the last one?”

“Dienko… Here, it’s mentioned again. Vladimir Dienko. You know him?”

“Shit,” said Sellitto.

Dienko—the defendant in the Russian organized crime investigation, the one whose case had been dropped because of witness and evidentiary problems. Rhyme said, “And the one just before him?”

“Alex Karakov.”

This was an informant against Dienko who had been in hiding, under an assumed identity. He’d disappeared two weeks before trial, presumed dead, though no one could figure out how Dienko’s men had gotten to him. Sellitto took the sheets from Pulaski and flipped through them. “Jesus, Linc. Addresses, ATM withdrawals, car registrations, phone logs. Just what a hitman would need to get close for a clip… Oh, and get this. Kevin McDonald.”

“Wasn’t he the defendant in some RICO case you were working on?” Rhyme asked.

“Yep. Hell’s Kitchen, arms dealing, conspiracy. Some drugs and extortion. He got off too.”

“Mel? Run all the names on that list through our system.”

Of the eight names that Rodney Szarnek had found in the reassembled files, six had been defendants in criminal cases over the past three months. All six had either been acquitted or had had serious charges against them dropped at the last minute because of unexpected problems with witnesses and evidence.

Rhyme gave a laugh. “This’s pretty serendipitous.”

“What?” Pulaski asked.

“Buy a dictionary, rookie.”

The officer sighed and said patiently, “Whatever it means, Lincoln, it’s probably not a word I’ll ever want to use.”

Everybody in the room laughed, Rhyme included. “Touché. What I mean is we’ve coincidentally stumbled on something very interesting, if you will, Mel. NYPD has files on the SSD servers, through PublicSure. Well, Cassel’s been downloading information about the investigation, selling it to the defendants and erasing all traces of it.”

“Oh, I can see him doing it,” Sachs said. “Don’t you think, Ron?”

“Don’t doubt it for a minute.” The young officer added, “Wait… Cassel was the one who gave us the CD of the customers’ names—he’s the one who fingered Robert Carpenter.”

“Of course,” Rhyme said, nodding. “He changed the data to implicate Carpenter. He needed to point the investigation away from SSD. Not because of the Five Twenty-Two case. But because he didn’t want anybody looking over the files and finding that he’d been selling police records. And who better to give to the wolves than somebody who’d tried to become a competitor?”

Sellitto asked Szarnek, “Anybody else involved from SSD?”

“Not from what I found. Just Cassel.”

Rhyme then looked at Pulaski, who was staring at the evidence board. His eyes displayed the same hard edge Rhyme had seen earlier that day.

“Hey, rookie? You want it?”

“Want what?”

“The case against Cassel?”

The young officer considered this. But then his shoulders slumped and, laughing, he said, “No, I don’t think so.”

“You can handle it.”

“I know I can. I just… I mean, when I run my first case solo I want to make sure I’m doing it for the right reasons.”

“Well said, rookie,” Sellitto muttered, lifting his coffee mug toward the young man. “Maybe there’s hope for you after all… All right. If I’m suspended at least I can finish up that work around the house that Rachel’s been nagging me to do.” The big detective grabbed a stale cookie and ambled out the door. “’Night, everybody.”

Szarnek assembled his files and disks and placed them on a table. Thom signed the chain-of-custody card as the criminalist’s attorney-in-fact. The techie left, reminding Rhyme, “And when you’re ready to join the twenty-first century, Detective, give me a call.” A nod at the computers.

Rhyme’s phone rang—it was a call for Sachs, whose dismembered mobile wouldn’t be operative any time soon. Rhyme deduced from the conversation that the caller was in the precinct house in Brooklyn and that her car had been located at a pound not far away.

She made plans with Pam to drive to the place tomorrow morning in the girl’s car, which had been found in a garage behind Peter Gordon’s town house. Sachs went upstairs to get ready for bed, and Cooper and Pulaski left.

Rhyme was writing a memo for the deputy mayor, Ron Scott, describing 522’s M.O. and suggesting they look for other instances in which he’d committed crimes and framed somebody for them. There’d be other evidence in the hoarder’s town house, of course, but he couldn’t imagine the amount of work involved in searching that crime scene.

He finished the e-mail, sent it on its way and was speculating what Andrew Sterling’s reaction might be to one of his underlings’ selling data on the side, when his phone rang. An unknown number on caller ID.

“Command, answer phone.”!!!Click.

“Hello?”

“Lincoln. It’s Judy Rhyme.”

“Well, hello, Judy.”

“Oh, I don’t know if you heard. They dropped the charges. He’s out.”

“Already? I knew it was in the works. I thought it might take a little longer.”

“I don’t know what to say, Lincoln. I guess, I mean: thank you.”

“Sure.”

She said, “Hold on a minute.”

Rhyme heard a muted voice, her hand over the mouthpiece, and supposed she was talking to one of the children. What were their names again?

Then he heard: “Lincoln?”

How curious that his cousin’s voice was instantly familiar to him, a voice he hadn’t heard for years. “Well, Art. Hello.”

“I’m downtown. They just released me. All the charges are dropped.”

“Good.”

How awkward is this?

“I don’t know what to say. Thank you. Thank you so much.”

“Sure.”

“All these years… I should have called before. I just…”

“That’s okay.” What the hell’s that supposed to mean? Rhyme wondered. Art’s absence from his life wasn’t okay, it wasn’t not okay. His responses to his cousin were mere filler. He wanted to hang up.

“You didn’t have to do what you did.”

“There were some irregularities. It was an odd situation.”

Which meant absolutely nothing either. And Lincoln Rhyme wondered too why he was deconstructing the conversation. It was some defense mechanism, he supposed—and this thought was as tedious as the others. He wanted to hang up. “You’re okay, after what happened in detention?”

“Nothing serious. Scary, but this guy got to me in time. Helped me down off the wall.”

“Good.”

Silence.

“Well, thanks again, Lincoln. Not a lot of people would have done this for me.”

“I’m glad it worked out.”

“We’ll get together. You and Judy and me. And your friend. What’s her name?”

“Amelia.”

“We’ll get together.” A long silence. “I’d better go. We have to get home to the kids. Okay, you take care.”

“You too… Command, disconnect.”

Rhyme’s eyes settled on his cousin’s dossier from SSD.!!!The other son…

And he knew that they’d never “get together.” So it ends, he thought. Feeling at first troubled—that with the click of a disconnecting phone something that might have been now would not be. But Lincoln Rhyme concluded that this was the only logical end to the events of the past three days.

Thinking of SSD’s logo, he reflected that, yes, their lives had coincided once again after all these years, but it was as if the two cousins remained separated by a sealed window. They’d observed each other, they’d shared some words, but that was to be the extent of their contact. It was now time to return to their different worlds.