Jeffery Deaver - The Cold Moon

Sachs bridled at Wallace's comment- kills a few people -but she couldn't deny that their goals were the same. She wanted to see the Creeley case through to the end.

For the second time in one day she found herself saying, "I can handle both cases. I promise you it won't be a problem."

In her mind she heard a skeptical voice saying, Let's hope, Sachs.

Amelia Sachs collected Ron Pulaski from Rhyme's, a kidnapping she gathered the criminalist wasn't too pleased about, though the rookie didn't seem very busy at the moment.

"How fast've you had her up to?" Pulaski touched the dashboard of her 1969 Camaro SS. Then he said quickly, "I mean 'it,' not 'her.'"

"You don't need to be so politically correct, Ron. I've been clocked at one eighty-seven."

"Whoa."

"You like cars?"

"More, I like cycles, you know. My brother and I had two of 'em when we were in high school."

"Matching?"

"What?"

"The cycles."

"Oh, because we're twins, you mean. Naw, we never did that. Dress alike and stuff. Mom wanted us to but we were dorky enough as it was. She laughs now, of course-'cause of our uniforms. Anyway, when we were riding, it wasn't like we could just go out and buy whatever we wanted, two matching Hondas 850s or whatever. We got whatever we could, second-or third-hand." He gave a sly grin. "One night, Tony was asleep, I snuck into the garage and swapped out the engines. He never caught on."

"You still ride?"

"God gives you a choice: children or motorcycles. The week after Jenny got pregnant, some lucky dude in Queens got himself a real fine Moto Guzzi at a good price." He grinned. "With a particularly sweet engine."

Sachs laughed. Then she explained their mission. There were several leads she wanted to follow up on: The other bartender at the St. James-Gerte was her name-would be arriving at work soon and Sachs needed to talk to her. She also wanted to talk to Creeley's partner, Jordan Kessler, who was returning from his Pittsburgh business trip.

But first there was one other task.

"How'd you like to go undercover?" she asked.

"Well, okay, I guess."

"Some of the crew from the One One Eight might've gotten a look at me at the St. James. So this one's up to you. But you won't be wearing any wires, anything like that. We're not getting evidence, just information."

"What do I do?"

"In my briefcase. On the backseat." She downshifted hard, skidded through a turn, straightened the powerful car. Pulaski picked up the briefcase from the floor. "Got it."

"The papers on top."

He nodded, looking them over. The heading on an official-looking form was Hazardous Evidence Inventory Control. Accompanying it was a memo that explained about a new procedure for doing periodic spot checks of dangerous evidence, like firearms and chemicals, to make sure they were properly accounted for.

"Never heard about that."

"No, because I made it up." She explained that the point was to give them a credible excuse to go into the bowels of the 118th Precinct and compare the evidence logs with the evidence actually present.

"You tell them you're checking all the evidence but what I want you to look at is the logs of the narcotics that've been seized in the past year. Write down the perp, date, quantity and the arrests. We'll compare it with the district attorney's disposition report on the same cases."

Pulaski was nodding. "So we'll know if any drugs disappeared between the time they were logged in and when the perp went to trial or got pled out… Okay, that's good."

"I hope so. We won't necessarily know who took them but it's a start. Now, go play spy." She stopped a block away from the 118th, on a shabby street of tenements in the East Village. "You comfortable with this?"

"Never done anything quite like it, gotta say. But, sure, I'll give it a shot." He hesitated, looking over the form, then took a deep breath and climbed out of the car.

When he was gone, Sachs made some calls to trusted, and discreet, colleagues in the NYPD, the FBI and the DEA to see if any organized crime, homicide or narcotics cases at the 118th had been dropped or were stalled under circumstances that might be suspicious. No one had heard of anything like that but the statistics revealed that despite its shining conviction record, there'd been very few organized crime investigations out of the house. Which suggested that detectives might be protecting local gangs. One FBI agent told her that some of the traditional mob had been making forays into the East Village once again, now that it was becoming gentrified.

Sachs then called a friend of hers running a gang task force in Midtown. He told her that there were two main posses in the East Village-one Jamaican, one Anglo. Both dealt in meth and coke and wouldn't hesitate to kill a witness or take out somebody who'd tried to cheat them or wasn't paying on time. Still, the detective said, staging a death to look like a suicide by hanging just wasn't the style of either gang. They'd cap him on the spot with a Mac-10 or an Uzi and head off for a Red Stripe or a Jameson.

A short time later, Pulaski returned, with his typical voluminous notes. This boy writes down everything, Sachs reflected.

"So how'd it go?"

Pulaski was struggling to keep from grinning. "Okay, I guess."

"You nailed it, hm?"

A shrug. "Well, the desk sergeant wasn't going to let me in but I gave him this look, like what the hell're you doing, stopping me. You want to call Police Plaza and tell 'em they're not getting the form thanks to you? He backed right down. Surprised me."

"Good job." She tapped her fist to his, and she could see how pleased the young man was at his performance.

Sachs pulled away from the curb and they headed out of the East Village. When she thought they were far enough away from the house, she pulled over and they started comparing the two sets of figures.

After ten minutes they had the results. The quantities noted in the precinct log and the DA's report were very close. Only about six or seven ounces of pot and four of cocaine were unaccounted for, over the entire year.

Pulaski said, "And none of the evidence logs looked doctored. I figured that might be something to look for too."

So one motive-that the St. James crew and Creeley were selling drugs boosted from the 118th's evidence locker-wasn't in play. This small amount missing could've been lost because of crime scene testing or spillage or inaccurate logging at the scene.

But even if the cops weren't stealing from the locker, they might still have been dealing, of course. Maybe the cops scored the drugs directly from a source. Or they were perped at a bust before they were logged into evidence. Or Creeley himself might've been the supplier.

Pulaski's first undercover operation answered one question but others remained.

"Okay, onward and upward, Ron. Now, tell me, you want a bartender or a businessman?"

"I don't really care. How 'bout we flip a coin?"

"The Watchmaker probably bought the clocks at Hallerstein's Timepieces," Mel Cooper announced to Rhyme and Sellitto, hanging up the phone. "The Flatiron District."

Before he'd been dragged off by Sachs on the Creeley case, Pulaski had tracked down the Northeast wholesaler for Arnold Products. The head of the distribution company had just returned the rookie's call.

Cooper reported that the distributor didn't keep records by serial number, but that if the clocks had been sold in the New York area, it would have been at Hallerstein's, the only outlet there. The store was located south of Midtown in the neighborhood named after the historic triangular building on Fifth Avenue and Twenty-third Street, which resembled an old-time flatiron.