I knew as a boy that what I did was wrong and creepy and embarrassing and, if I was on someone else’s property, a crime (you can stare and leer at someone, drooling and grinning madly to your heart’s content, if you do it from the sidewalk). But nothing would stop me. I had to get closer. I snuck up to houses in the pleasant suburban village where we lived and peered through windows. Hundreds of times. The problem with the offense is that if you’re close enough to see, you’re also close enough to be seen. The more my outrageous dangling from trees or hovering on trash cans became, the riskier were the ventures, and the police might be summoned.
Overburdened, as always, officers recognized I was weird but not a physical threat and tended to treat me as a nuisance. They left the matter of discipline and reeducation up to my father.
The self-described captain of industry was not a moral man so he was not concerned about the wrong of what his son did; it was the embarrassment and the bruising of his reputation that stung. Had his boy been a shoplifter, a pot dealer, a teen drunk, he might have been fine with those younger-days misbehaviors. But the creep factor, coupled with the fact that there was no significant police involvement and punishment meted out pushed him over the edge. He took the law into his own hands and jailed me himself. If he found out that I’d transgressed, it was solitary confinement in our house.
Not just house arrest, free to roam from room to room. Oh, no, I was locked into bedrooms, then pantries, then bathrooms, then closets — one in particular so reeking of naphtha and cedar, I’d get high. He’d leave a bucket for the personal functions.
It was on the second or third detention that I learned I could pick the locks and escape. They were mostly Home Depot hardware that could be opened with a knife blade or a straightened coat hanger. My bedroom had a rim lock — the sort with the traditional keyhole-shaped opening, the design dating back hundreds of years. This was more challenging but, well, I managed.
The first time took me an hour. The next five minutes.
I didn’t necessarily want to go anywhere but I needed to know I could.
Then the tipping point.
I had been caught at the house of a prominent lawyer. His sobbing daughter believed she had seen me gazing at her naked from outside the bathroom window. Her father sped to our house and, once inside, confronted me and my father. Denials streamed and I was tearfully upset — that I got caught, of course.
The lawyer paid little attention to me, as if I, being a mere thirteen-year-old, were a virus unable to make choices about where to float and whom to infect.
The man’s fury was focused on my father.
“Your son’s a pervert,” the lawyer muttered, which was patently untrue. My obsession isn’t and never was about sex; I want to get inside people in a different way. In fact, it was the daughter Heather who pranced into the bathroom and disrobed, while I was observing a fight between the parents in an adjoining bedroom. I blamed her. But that was not an argument to raise in the moment.
The man then said he represented powerful unions. His clients had “associates,” a benign word sculpted ominously. Did my father get the drift? If I weren’t punished, his business would be “disrupted.” The tone of his voice suggested violence was a possibility.
My father turned to me, sitting beneath the two powerful men, though he spoke to the lawyer. “Don’t worry, there’ll be consequences.”
And, yes, there were.
38
Rhyme looked up at the man accompanying Sachs into the parlor.
He was huge and imposing, a born fighter or wrestler. He was gazing at Rhyme with... what was it? He seemed intimidated. Odd, as he outweighed Rhyme by a hundred pounds easily, and was purely physical.
Then his eyes swayed to the equipment on the sterile side of the room. The look shifted to awe.
Sachs introduced Rhyme to Lyle Spencer.
So this was the security man she had told him about.
He set down a thick file folder. “The Whittaker Media complaints and threats, from the public and from employees.”
“That many?” It had to contain five hundred documents.
Spencer said, “And these are just the ones in the past year.”
Sachs said, “We’ll scan them and get started.” Rhyme’s turning frame could handle bound books but there was no device in the lab that could display and sequence single sheets of paper. She took a call on her mobile.
“Mel Cooper,” came the voice from inside the sterile portion of the lab.
“Lyle Spencer.”
Lincoln Rhyme rarely thought to introduce people.
Spencer studied the lab. “Quite the setup. But you’ve heard that before.”
“It suits. When I need something sophisticated, we farm it out.”
Spencer said, “My first job, we didn’t have anything like this in the entire county. Everything had to go to the state lab. Took forever to get results.”
“Amelia said you were L.E.”
“Detective. Albany.”
Just like Rhyme, he’d left law enforcement for a different, though allied, job. In his case, though, the move would have been voluntary. More money and less risk.
Disconnecting the call, Sachs joined them.
“That was the super of Kitt’s building.”
She’d explained that Averell’s son, the slim, gaunt-faced young man Rhyme recalled from the online pictures, had not been seen for several days. The superintendent knew this because his mailbox was full and the postman complained to him.
“Think it’s related?” Rhyme asked.
Sachs said, “The papers in the two apartments set the stage, then the Locksmith, or the Apollos, or somebody else kidnap or kill Whittaker’s son? Makes sense.”
She asked Spencer, “And he has hardly any connection to the family?”
“Not that I ever heard of.”
Rhyme said, “Where does he work?”
Sachs explained that the family didn’t know what he did. All she had was the one mobile number and email and he wasn’t responding.
“DMV,” Rhyme said.
Sachs went online to the state’s secure website and entered her username and passcode.
“He owns an Audi A6. I’ll send the tag to LPR.”
The NYPD’s license plate recognition system was made up of cameras mounted to squad cars. As officers drove through the streets of the city, the cameras constantly scanned for license plates and recorded images of the tags, along with the time and the location of each one. The result was exabytes of data. The system was a big help in finding cars whose drivers had fled accidents or were registered to suspects or those with outstanding warrants. The whole concept was controversial in that it sucked up and recorded hundreds of thousands of innocent citizens’ plates too. Civil liberties groups complained, raising privacy concerns.
Rhyme understood this worry. But, in the end, he sided with the LPR system. It had helped them close a half-dozen cases.
“He’s red-flagged now. If any cruisers have a hit I’ll get a call.”
Spencer said, “I have a meeting with Mr. Whittaker.” A nod toward Rhyme. “Confession. I could have messengered over the file or given it to Amelia. But, to be honest, I just wanted to meet you. We had some of your books in our library in Albany. I studied them.”
“Ah,” Rhyme said.
He started for the door then stopped. “Amelia told me about the Locksmith operation. It’s sensitive. If anyone asks, you’re not involved in the case.”