Jeffery Deaver - The Broken Window

It was then that somebody called, “Hey, check it out. Excellent wheels.”

A red Corvette was streaking through campus.

His cousin Arthur was at the wheel. Which wasn’t odd; the family lived nearby. What did surprise Lincoln, though, was that the girl beside Arthur, he believed, was Adrianna.

Yes, no?

He couldn’t be sure.

The clothes matched: a brown leather jacket and a fur hat, which looked identical to the one Lincoln had given her at Christmas.

“Linc, Jesus, get your ass in here. We gotta close the door.”

Still, Lincoln remained where he was, staring at the car as it fishtailed around the corner on the gray-white street.

Could she have lied to him? The girl he was considering marrying? It didn’t seem possible. And cheating on him with Arthur ?

Trained in science, he examined the facts objectively.

Fact One. Arthur and Adrianna knew each other. His cousin had met her months ago in the counselor’s office where she worked after class at Lincoln’s high school. They could very easily have exchanged phone numbers.

Fact Two. Arthur, Lincoln now realized, had stopped asking about her. This was odd. The boys had spent plenty of time talking about girls but recently Art hadn’t once mentioned her.

Suspicious.

Fact Three. On reflection, he decided that Adie sounded evasive when she’d demurred about the science fair. (And he hadn’t mentioned its site as Evanston, which meant she wouldn’t hesitate to cruise around the gridded streets with Art.) Lincoln was slammed with jealousy. I was going to give her a piece of Stagg Field, for God’s sake! A splinter of the true cross of modern science! He considered other times when she’d begged off seeing him under circumstances that, in retrospect, seemed strange. He counted three or four.

Still he refused to believe it. He crunched through the snow to a pay phone, and called her house and asked to speak to the girl.

“Sorry, Lincoln, she’s out with friends,” said Adrianna’s mother.

Friends…

“Oh. I’ll try her later… Say, Mrs. Waleska, did you two ever get downtown for that sale at Field’s today?”

“No, the sale’s next week… I have to get supper ready, Lincoln. You stay warm. It’s freezing outside.”

“It sure is.” Lincoln knew this for a fact. He was standing at a phone kiosk, his jaw shivering, no desire to pick up the 60 cents that had leapt from his quivering hands into the snow after he’d tried repeatedly to feed the coins into the phone.

“Jesus Christ, Lincoln, get in the bus!”

Later that night he called and managed to maintain a normal conversation for a time, before asking how her day had gone. She explained that she’d enjoyed the shopping with Mom but the crowds were terrible. Garrulous, rambling, digressive. She sounded dead guilty.

Still, he couldn’t take the matter on faith.

And so he kept up appearances. The next time Art was visiting he left his cousin in the rec room downstairs and slipped outside with a dog hair roller-exactly the sort used now by crime-scene teams-and collected evidence from the Corvette’s front seat.

He slipped the tape into a Baggie and, when he saw Adrianna next, he took some samples of fur from her hat and coat. He felt cheap, scalded with shame and embarrassment but that didn’t stop him from comparing the strands with one of the high school’s compound microscopes. They were the same-both fur from the hat and synthetic fibers from the coat.

The girlfriend he was considering marrying had been cheating on him.

And from the quantity of fibers in Arthur’s car he concluded she’d been there more than once.

Finally, a week later, he spotted them in the car, leaving no doubt.

Lincoln didn’t bow out graciously or angrily. He just bowed out. Without the heart for a confrontation, he let his relationship with Adrianna wind down. The few times they went out were stiff and riddled with awkward silences. To his further dismay, she actually seemed upset about his growing distance. Damn it. Did she think she could have it both ways? She seemed mad at him …even while she was cheating.

He distanced himself from his cousin too. Lincoln’s excuse was final exams, track meets and-the blessing in disguise: Lincoln’s rejection by M.I.T.

The two boys saw each other occasionally-familial obligations, graduation ceremonies-but everything had changed between them, changed fundamentally. And of Adrianna neither boy had said a single word. At least not for many years after that.

My whole life changed. If it weren’t for you, everything would’ve been different…

Even now Rhyme found his temple throbbing. He couldn’t feel any coolness on his palms but he supposed they were sweating. These hard thoughts, though, were interrupted by Amelia Sachs, striding through the door.

“Any developments?” she asked.

A bad sign. If she’d had a breakthrough with Calvin Geddes she would have said so up front.

“No,” he admitted. “Still waiting to hear from Ron about the alibis. And no bites on the trap that Rodney put together.”

Sachs took the coffee Thom offered and lifted half a turkey sandwich from a tray.

“The tuna salad’s better,” said Lon Sellitto. “He made it himself.”

“This’ll do.” She sat beside Rhyme, offered him a bite. He had no appetite and shook his head. “How’s your cousin doing?” she asked, glancing at the open dossier on the turning frame.

“My cousin?”

“How’s he doing in detention? This has to be hard for him.”

“Haven’t had a chance to talk to him.”

“He’s probably too embarrassed to contact you. You really should call.”

“I will. What’d you find out from Geddes?”

She admitted that the meeting had yielded no great revelations. “Mostly it was a lecture on the erosion of privacy.” She gave him some of the more alarming bullet points: the personal data collected daily, the intrusions, the danger of EduServe, the immortality of data, the metadata records of computer files.

“Anything useful to us ?” he asked acerbically.

“Two things. First, he’s not convinced Sterling’s innocent.”

“You said he’s got an alibi,” Sellitto pointed out, taking another sandwich.

“Maybe not him personally. He might be using somebody else.”

“Why? He’s a CEO of a big company. What’s in it for him?”

“The more crime, the more society needs SSD to protect them. Geddes says he wants power. Described him as the Napoléon of data.”

“So he’s got a hired gun breaking windows so he can step in and fix them.” Rhyme nodded, somewhat impressed with the idea. “Only it backfired. He never thought we’d tip to the fact the SSD database was behind the crimes. Okay. Put it on the list of suspects. An UNSUB working for Sterling.”

“Now, Geddes also told me that a few years ago SSD acquired a Colorado data company. Their main scrounger-that’s a data collector-was killed.”

“Any link between Sterling and the death?”

“No idea. But it’s worth checking out. I’ll make some calls.”

The doorbell rang and Thom answered. Ron Pulaski entered. He was grim-faced and sweaty. Rhyme sometimes had an urge to tell him to take it easier but since the criminalist himself didn’t, he figured the suggestion would be hypocritical.

The rookie explained that most of the alibis for Sunday checked out. “I checked with the E-ZPass people and they confirmed Sterling went through the Midtown Tunnel when he said. I tried his son to see if his dad called from Long Island just to double-check. But he was out.”

Pulaski continued, “Something else-the Human Resources director? His only alibi was his wife. She backed him up but she was acting like a scared mouse. And she was like her husband: ‘SSD is the greatest place in the world. Blah, blah, blah…’”