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Sachs touched his hand and said, "Patrol or brass, they're all family and it's the same pain when you lose somebody."
"Your father?" Rhyme asked. "Sounds like something he'd say."
A voice from the hallway intruded: "Heh. Too late. Sorry. Just got word you closed the case." Rodney Szarnek was strolling into the lab, ahead of Thom. He was holding a stack of printouts and once again was speaking to Rhyme's computer and ECU system, the equipment, not the human beings.
"Too late?" Rhyme asked.
"The mainframe finished assembling the empty-space files that Ron stole. Well, that he borrowed. I was on the way here to show them to you and heard that you nailed the perp. Guess you don't need them now."
"Just curious. What'd you find?"
He walked forward with a number of printouts and displayed them to Rhyme. They were incomprehensible. Words, numbers and symbols, and large gaps of white space in between.
"I don't read Greek."
"Heh, that's funny. You don't read Geek."
Rhyme didn't bother to correct him. He asked, "What's the bottom line?"
"Runnerboy--that nym I found earlier--did download a lot of information from innerCircle secretly and then he erased his tracks. But they weren't the dossiers of any of the victims or anybody else connected with the Five Twenty-Two case."
"You got his name?" Sachs asked. "Runnerboy's?"
"Yeah. Somebody named Sean Cassel."
The policewoman closed her eyes. "Runnerboy . . . And he said he was training for a triathlon. I didn't even think about it."
Cassel was the sales director and one of their suspects, Rhyme reflected. He now noticed that Pulaski was reacting to the news. The young officer blinked in surprise and glanced at Sachs with a lifted eyebrow and a faint but dark smile of recognition. He recalled the officer's reluctance to return to SSD and his embarrassment at not knowing about Excel. A run-in between Pulaski and Cassel was a credible explanation.
The officer asked, "What was Cassel up to?"
Szarnek flipped through the printouts. "I couldn't tell you exactly." He stopped and proffered the page to the young cop, shrugging. "Take a look, if you want. Here are some of the dossiers he accessed."
Pulaski shook his head. "I don't know any of these guys." He read some names out loud.
"Wait," Rhyme barked. "What was the last one?"
"Dienko . . . Here, it's mentioned again. Vladimir Dienko. You know him?"
"Shit," said Sellitto.
Dienko--the defendant in the Russian organized crime investigation, the one whose case had been dropped because of witness and evidentiary problems. Rhyme said, "And the one just before him?"
"Alex Karakov."
This was an informant against Dienko who had been in hiding, under an assumed identity. He'd disappeared two weeks before trial, presumed dead, though no one could figure out how Dienko's men had gotten to him. Sellitto took the sheets from Pulaski and flipped through them. "Jesus, Linc. Addresses, ATM withdrawals, car registrations, phone logs. Just what a hitman would need to get close for a clip. . . . Oh, and get this. Kevin McDonald."
"Wasn't he the defendant in some RICO case you were working on?" Rhyme asked.
"Yep. Hell's Kitchen, arms dealing, conspiracy. Some drugs and extortion. He got off too."
"Mel? Run all the names on that list through our system."
Of the eight names that Rodney Szarnek had found in the reassembled files, six had been defendants in criminal cases over the past three months. All six had either been acquitted or had had serious charges against them dropped at the last minute because of unexpected problems with witnesses and evidence.
Rhyme gave a laugh. "This's pretty serendipitous."
"What?" Pulaski asked.
