And Arthur realized, as his body shivered and his vision went black, that this was all a setup--Johnson had saved him from the Lats for only one reason: He wanted Arthur for himself.
"Nnnnnn--"
Why?
The black man kept his hands at his sides and leaned close. He whispered, "I'm doin' you a favor, man. Fuck, you'd do yourself in a month or two anyway. You ain't made for it here. Now jus' stop fightin' it. Go easier, you jus' give it up, you know what I'm sayin'?"
*
Pulaski returned from his mission at SSD and held up the sleek gray hard drive.
"Good job, rookie," Rhyme said.
Sachs winked. "Your first secret op assignment."
He grimaced. "It didn't feel much like an assignment. It felt more like a felony."
"I'm sure we can find probable cause if we look hard enough," Sellitto reassured him.
Rhyme said to Rodney Szarnek, "Go ahead."
The computer man plugged the hard drive into the USB port on his battered laptop and typed with firm, certain strikes on the keyboard, staring at the screen.
"Good, good . . ."
"You have a name?" Rhyme snapped. "Somebody at SSD who downloaded the dossiers?"
"What?" Szarnek gave a laugh. "It doesn't work that way. It'll take a while. I have to load it on the mainframe at Computer Crimes. And then--"
"How long a while?" Rhyme grumbled.
Szarnek once again blinked, as if seeing for the first time that the criminalist was disabled. "Depends on the level of fragmentation, age of the files, allocation, partitioning, and then--"
"Fine, fine, fine. Just do the best you can."
Sellitto asked, "What else did you find?"
Pulaski explained about his interviews of the remaining technicians who had access to all of the data pens. He added that he'd talked to Andy Sterling, whose cell phone confirmed that his father had called from Long Island at the time of the killing. His alibi held up. Thom updated their suspect chart.
Andrew Sterling, President, Chief Executive Officer Alibi--on Long Island, verified. Confirmed by son Sean Cassel, Director of Sales and Marketing No alibi
Wayne Gillespie, Director of Technical Operations No alibi
Samuel Brockton, Director, Compliance Department Alibi--hotel records confirm presence in Washington Peter Arlonzo-Kemper, Director of Human Resources Alibi--with wife, verified by her (biased?) Steven Shraeder, Technical Service and Support Manager, day shift Alibi--in office, according to time sheets Faruk Mameda, Technical Service and Support Manager, night shift No alibi
Client of SSD (?)
List provided by Sterling
UNSUB recruited by Andrew Sterling (?)
So now everyone at SSD who had access to innerCircle knew of the investigation . . . and still the bot guarding the NYPD "Myra Weinburg Homicide" file had not reported a single attempted intrusion. Was 522 being cautious? Or did the concept of the trap miss the mark? Was the entire premise that the killer was connected to SSD completely wrong? It occurred to Rhyme that they'd been so awed by the power of Sterling and the company that they were neglecting other potential suspects.
Pulaski produced a CD. "Here are the clients. I looked it over fast. There're about three hundred fifty of them."
"Ouch." Rhyme grimaced.
Szarnek loaded the disk and opened it up on a spreadsheet. Rhyme looked over the data on his flat-screen monitor--nearly a thousand pages of dense text.