Jeffery Deaver - The Broken Window

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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.”

Ah, home at last.

I close the door.

And lock out the world.

I breathe deeply and, setting my backpack on the couch, go into the spotless kitchen and drink some pure water. No stimulants for me at the moment.

That edgy thing again.

The town house is a nice one. Prewar, huge (it would have to be when you live the way I do, given my collections). Not easy to find the perfect place. It took me some time. But here I am, largely unnoticed. It’s obscenely easy to be virtually anonymous in New York. What a marvelous city! Here, the default mode of existence is life off the grid. Here, you have to fight to be noticed. Many sixteens do that, of course. But then, the world’s always had more than its share of fools.

Still, listen, you need to keep up appearances. The front rooms of my town house are simple and tastefully decorated (thank you, Scandinavia). I don’t socialize here much but you need a façade to seem normal. You have to function in the real world. If you don’t, sixteens begin to wonder if there’s something going on, if you’re someone other than you seem.

And it’s a short step from that to someone coming round, poking into your Closet and taking everything away from you. Everything you’ve worked so hard for.

Everything.

And that’s the worst of the worst.

So you make sure your Closet is secret. You make sure your treasures are hidden behind curtained or blocked windows, while you maintain your other life in full view, the sunlit side of the moon. To stay off the grid it’s best to have a second living space. You do what I’ve done: keep this Danish modern patina of normalcy clean and ordered, even if it grates on your nerves like steel on slate to be there.

You have a normal house. Because that’s what everybody has.

And you maintain a pleasant connection with associates and friends. Because that’s what everyone does.

And you date occasionally and entice her to spend the night and you go through the motions.

Because that too is what everyone does. No matter that she doesn’t get you as hard as when you’ve smooth talked your way into a girl’s bedroom, smiling, aren’t we soul mates, look at everything we have in common, with a tape recorder and a knife in your jacket pocket.

Now, I pull the shades in the bay windows and head to the back of the living room.

“Wow, this is like a really neat place… It looks bigger from the outside.”

“Yeah, funny how that happens.”

“Hey, you’ve got a door in your living room. What’s through there?”

“Oh, that. Just storage. A closet. Nothing to see. Want some wine?”

Well, what’s through there, Debby Sandra Susan Brenda, is where I’m headed right now. My real home. My Closet, I call it. It’s like a keep-that last defensible spot of a medieval castle-the sanctuary in the center. When all else failed, the king and his family would retreat to the keep.

I enter mine through that magic doorway. It actually is a closet, a walk-in, and inside you’ll see hanging clothes and shoe boxes. But push them aside and you’ll find a second door. It opens on to the rest of the house, which is far, far bigger than the façade’s horrifying blond Swedish minimalism.

My Closet…

I enter it now and lock the doors behind me and turn on the light.

Trying to relax. But after today, after the disaster, I’m having trouble shaking the edgy.

This isn’t good this isn’t good this…

I drop into my desk chair and boot up the computer as I stare at the Prescott painting in front of me, courtesy of Alice 3895. What a touch he had! The eyes of the family members are fascinating. Prescott managed to give each one a different gaze. It’s clear they’re all related; the expressions are similar in that way. Yet they’re also different, as if each is imagining a different aspect of life as a family: happy, troubled, angry, mystified, controlling, controlled.

It’s what a family is all about.

I suppose.

I open the backpack and take out the treasures I’ve acquired today. A tin canister, a pencil set, an old cheese grater. Why would somebody throw these away? I also unload some practical items I’ll use in the next few weeks: some preapproved credit mailings that people carelessly discarded, credit card vouchers, phone bills… Fools, I was saying.