The Broken Window

Sterling, Sachs and Pulaski now came to the end of a long corridor and entered an exterior office, where two assistants had their desks, both of which were filled with perfectly ordered stacks of papers, file folders, printouts. Only one assistant was in at the moment, a young man, handsome, in a conservative suit. His nameplate read Martin Coyle. His area was the most ordered-even the many books behind him were arranged in descending order of size, Sachs was amused to see.

“Andrew.” He nodded a greeting to his boss, ignoring the officers as soon as he noted that they hadn’t been introduced. “Your phone messages are on your computer.”

“Thank you.” Sterling glanced at the other desk. “Jeremy’s going to look over the restaurant for the press junket?”

“He did that this morning. He’s running some papers over to the law firm. About that other matter.”

Sachs marveled that Sterling had two personal assistants-apparently one for the inside work, the other handling out-of-the-office matters. At the NYPD detectives shared, if they had help at all.

They continued on to Sterling’s own office, which wasn’t much bigger than any other she’d seen in the company. And its walls were free of decoration. Despite the SSD logo of the voyeuristic window in the watchtower, Andrew Sterling’s were curtained, cutting off what would be a magnificent view of the city. A ripple of claustrophobia coursed through her.

Sterling sat in a simple wooden chair, not a leather swivel throne. He gestured them into similar ones, though padded. Behind him were low shelves filled with books but, curiously, they were stacked with spines facing up, not outward. Visitors to his office couldn’t see his choice of reading matter without walking past the man and looking down or pulling out a volume.

The CEO nodded at a pitcher and a half dozen inverted glasses. “That’s water. But if you’d like some coffee or tea, I can have some fetched.”

Fetched? She didn’t think she’d ever heard anyone actually use the word.

“No, thank you.”

Pulaski shook his head.

“Excuse me. Just one moment.” Sterling picked up his phone, dialed. “Andy? You called.”

Sachs deduced from the tone that it was someone close to him, though it was clearly a business call about a problem of some sort. Yet Sterling spoke emotionlessly. “Ah. Well, you’ll have to, I think. We need those numbers. You know, they’re not sitting on their hands. They’ll make a move any day now… Good.”

He hung up and noticed Sachs watching him closely. “My son works for the company.” A nod at a photo on his desk, showing Sterling with a handsome, thin young man who resembled the CEO. Both were wearing SSD T-shirts at some employee outing, maybe one of the inspirational retreats. They were next to each other but there was no physical contact between them. Neither was smiling.

So one question about his personal life had been answered.

“Now,” he said, turning his green eyes on Sachs, “what’s this all about? You mentioned some crime.”

Sachs explained, “There’ve been several murders in the past few months in the city. We think that someone might’ve used information in your computers to get close to the victims, kill them and then used that and other information to frame innocent people for the crimes.”

The man who knows everything…

“Information?” His concern seemed genuine. He was perplexed too, though. “I’m not sure how that could happen but tell me more.”

“Well, the killer knew exactly what personal products the victims used and he planted traces of them as evidence at an innocent person’s residence to connect them to the killing.” From time to time the eyebrows above Sterling’s emerald irises narrowed. He seemed genuinely troubled as she gave him the details about the theft of the painting and coins and the two sexual assaults.

“That’s terrible…” Troubled by the news, he glanced away from her. “Rapes?”

Sachs nodded grimly and then explained how SSD seemed to be the only company in the area that had access to all the information the killer had used.

He rubbed his face, nodding slowly.

“I can see why you’re concerned… But wouldn’t it be easier for this killer just to follow the people he victimized and find out what they bought? Or even hack into their computers, break into their mailboxes, their homes, jot down their license plate numbers from the street?”

“But see, that’s the problem: He could. But he’d have to do all of those things to get the information he needed. There’ve been four crimes at a minimum-we think there could probably be more-and that means up-to-date information on the four victims and four men he’s setting up. The most efficient way to get that information would be to go through a data miner.”

Sterling gave a smile, a delicate wince.

Sachs frowned and cocked her head.

He said, “Nothing wrong with that term, ‘data miner.’ The press has latched on to it and you see it everywhere.”

Twenty million search-engine hits…