Jeffery Deaver - The Cold Moon

Sachs reached down and grabbed something under the table. Her hand emerged with another Glock. She must've clipped it there earlier! She spun to the front door, training the pistol on Henson. "Drop the weapon! Get down on the floor!" The ESU officer shifted his gun back to the deputy mayor.

Wallace, thinking in panic: Oh, Christ, it's a sting… All a setup.

"Now!" Sachs shouted again.

Henson muttered, "Shit." He did as he was told.

Wallace continued to grip Sachs's Glock. He looked down at it.

Her eyes on Henson, Sachs turned slightly toward Wallace. "That piece you're holding's unloaded. You'd die for no reason."

Disgusted, he dropped the gun on the table, held his hands up.

Mystified, Inspector Flaherty was scooting back in her chair, standing up.

Sachs said into her lapel, "Entry teams, go."

The front door crashed open and a half dozen cops pushed inside-ESU officers. Following them were Deputy Inspector Halston Jefferies and the head of Internal Affairs Division, Captain Ron Scott. A young blond patrolman entered too.

The ESU officers muscled Wallace to the floor. He felt the pain in his hip and joints. Henson was cuffed as well. The deputy mayor looked outside and saw the two other officers from the One One Eight, the ones who'd been standing guard in front. They were lying on the cold sidewalk, in restraints.

"Hell of a way to find out," Amelia Sachs said to no one as she reloaded her own Glock and slipped it back in her holster. "But it sure answers our question."

The query she'd referred to wasn't about Robert Wallace's guilt-they'd learned beforehand that he was one of Baker's partners; it was about whether Marilyn Flaherty had been involved too.

They'd set up the whole thing to find out, as well as get a taped admission from Wallace.

Lon Sellitto, Ron Scott and Halston Jefferies had established a command post in a van up the street and hidden the ESU sniper in the back room to make sure Wallace and the cop with him didn't start shooting before Sachs had a chance to tape the conversation. Pulaski was supposed to take the front door with one team, and another one would take the back. But at the last minute they learned that Wallace had other officers with him, cops from the 118, who might or might not be crooked, so they'd had to change plans a bit.

Pulaski, in fact, nearly walked right into Wallace's cops outside the storefront and ruined the whole thing.

The rookie said, "Inspector Jefferies pulled me into the command van just before those guys outside saw me."

Jefferies snapped, "Walking down the street like a Boy Scout on a fucking hike. You want to stay alive on the streets, kid, keep your goddamn eyes open." The inspector's rage seemed tame in comparison with yesterday's tantrum, Sachs noted. At least he wasn't spitting.

"Yessir. I'll be more careful in the future, sir."

"Jesus Christ, they let anybody into the academy these days."

Sachs tried to repress a smile. She turned to Flaherty. "Sorry, Inspector. We just had to make sure you weren't a player." She explained her suspicions and the clues that had led her to believe that the inspector might've been working with Baker.

"The Mercedes?" Flaherty asked. "Sure, it was mine. And, sure, you were being tailed. I had an officer from Op Div keeping an eye on you and Pulaski. You were both young, you were inexperienced and you might've been way out of your league. I gave him my own car to use because you would've noticed a pool vehicle right away."

The expensive car had indeed thrown her off and actually started her thinking in another direction. If the mob wasn't involved, she was beginning to wonder that maybe Pulaski had called it wrong about Creeley's partner, Jordan Kessler, and that the businessman might somehow be involved in the deaths. Maybe, she'd speculated, Creeley and Sarkowski had gotten caught up in one of the Enron-style investigations currently under way and were killed because of something they'd learned about corporate fraud at a client's company. Kessler seemed to be the only player in the game who could afford a vehicle like an AMG Merc.

But now she realized that the case was all about corrupt cops, and the ash in Creeley's fireplace wasn't from doctored accounting records but simply evidence that they'd burned to make sure they destroyed any records of the extortion money, as she'd originally speculated.

Now the inspector's attention turned to Robert Wallace. She asked Sachs, "How'd you find him?"

"Tell him, Ron," she instructed Pulaski.

The rookie began. "Detective Sachs here ascertained…" He paused.

"Detective Sachs found a bunch of trace in Baker's vehicle and house that gave us the idea, well, gave Detectives Sachs and Rhyme the idea that maybe the other person involved lived near a beach or marina."

Sachs took it up. "I didn't think that DI Jefferies was involved because he wouldn't request a file sent to his own precinct if he wanted to destroy it. Somebody else had it routed there and intercepted it before it was logged in. I went back to him and asked if anybody had been in the file room lately, somebody who might have a connection to the case. Somebody had. You." A glance at Wallace. "Then I asked the next logical question. Did you have a Maryland connection? And you sure did. Just not an obvious one."

Thinking inside the box…

"Oh, Jesus Christ," he muttered. "Baker told me you'd mentioned Maryland. But I never thought you'd find it."

Ron Scott, the IAD head, said to Flaherty, "Wallace has a boat docked at his place on the South Shore of Long Island. Registered in New York but built in Annapolis. She's The Maryland Monroe. " Scott looked him over and gave a cold laugh. "You boat people really love your puns."

Sachs said, "The sand, seaweed and saltwater trace in Baker's car and house match those at his marina. We got a warrant and searched the boat. Got some good evidence. Phone numbers, documents, trace. Over four million in cash-oh, and a lot of drugs too. Plenty of liquor, probably perped. But I'd say the booze's the least of your problems."

Ron Scott nodded to two ESU officers. "Get him downtown. Central Booking."

As he was led out, Wallace called back, "I'm not saying anything. If you think I'm going to name names, you can forget about it. I'm not confessing."

Flaherty gave the first laugh Sachs had ever heard from her. "Are you mad, Robert? Sounds like they've got enough evidence to put you away forever. You don't need to say a word. Actually, I'd just as soon you didn't open your goddamn mouth ever again."

Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils.

– LOUIS-HECTOR BERLIOZ

Alone now, Rhyme and Sachs looked over the tables containing the evidence that had been collected in both the St. James corruption scandal and the Watchmaker case.

Sachs was concentrating hard, but Rhyme knew she was distracted. They'd stayed up late and talked about what had happened. The corruption was bad enough but that officers themselves had actually tried to kill other cops shook her even more.

Sachs claimed she was still undecided about quitting the force but one look at her face told Rhyme that she was going to leave. He also knew she'd had a couple of phone calls with Argyle Security.

There was no doubt.

Rhyme now glanced at the small rectangle of white paper sitting in her briefcase open in his lab: the envelope containing Sachs's letter of resignation. Like the glaring light of the full moon in a dark sky, the whiteness of the letter was blinding. It was hard to see it clearly, it was hard to see anything else.