melia Sachs walked into a tiny, deserted grocery store in Little Italy, south of Greenwich Village. The windows were painted over and a single bare bulb burned inside. The door to the darkened back room was ajar, revealing a large heap of trash, old shelves and dusty cans of tomato sauce.

The place resembled a former social club of a smalltime organized crime crew, which in fact it had been until it was raided and closed up a year ago. The landlord was temporarily the city, which was trying to dump the place, but so far, no takers. Sellitto had said it'd be a good, secure place for a sensitive meeting of this sort.

Seated at a rickety table were Deputy Mayor Robert Wallace and a clean-cut young cop, an Internal Affairs detective. The IAD officer, Toby Henson, greeted Sachs with a firm handshake and a look in his eyes that suggested if she offered any positive response to an invitation to go out with him, he'd give her the evening of her life.

She nodded grimly, focused only on doing the hard job that lay ahead. Her rethinking of the facts, looking within the box, as Rhyme urged, had produced results, which turned out to be extremely unpleasant.

"You said there was a situation?" Wallace asked. "You didn't want to talk about it over the phone."

She briefed the men about Gerald Duncan and Dennis Baker. Wallace had heard the basics but Henson laughed in surprise. "This Duncan, he was just a citizen? And he wanted to bring down a crooked cop? That's why he did this?"

"Yep."

"He have names?"

"Only Baker's. There're about eight or ten others from the One One Eight but there's someone else, a main player."

"Someone else?" Wallace asked.

"Yep. All along we were looking for somebody with a connection to Maryland... Did we get that one wrong."

"Maryland?" the IAD man asked.

Sachs gave a grim laugh. "You know that game of Telephone?"

"You mean at a kids' party? You whisper something to the person next to you and by the time it goes around, it's all different?"

"Yep. My source heard 'Maryland.' I think it was 'Marilyn.'"

"A person's name?" When she nodded, Wallace's eyes narrowed. "Wait, you don't mean...?"

"Inspector Marilyn Flaherty."

"Impossible."

Detective Henson shook his head. "No way."

"I wish I was wrong. But we've got some evidence. We found sand and saltwater trace in Baker's car. She's got a house in Connecticut, near the beach. And I've been followed by somebody in a Mercedes AMG. At first I thought it was a crew from Jersey or Baltimore. But it turns out that that's what Flaherty owns."

"A cop owns an AMG?" the Internal Affairs officer asked in disbelief.

"Don't forget Flaherty's a cop making a couple hundred thousand a year illegally," Sachs said stiffly. "And we found a black-and-gray hair about the length of hers in the Explorer that Baker had stolen from the pound. Oh, and remember: She definitely didn't want IAD to handle the case."

"Yeah, that was strange," Wallace agreed.

"Because she was going to bury the whole thing. Give it to one of her people to 'handle.' But it would've disappeared."

"Holy shit, an inspector," whispered the IAD pretty boy.

"She's in custody?" Wallace asked.

Sachs shook her head. "The problem is we can't find the money. We don't have probable cause to subpoena her bank records or get paper to search her house. That's why I need you."

Wallace said, "What can I do?"

"I've asked her to meet us here. I'm going to brief her on what happened — only a watered-down version. I want you to tell her that we've discovered Baker has a partner. The mayor's called a special commission and he's going to pull out all the stops to track them down. Tell her that Internal Affairs is totally on board."

"You're thinking she'll panic, head for the money and you'll nail her."

"That's what we hope. My partner's going to put a tracker on her car while she's in here tonight. After she leaves, we're going to tail her... Now, are you okay lying to her?"

"No, I'm not." Wallace looked down at the rough tabletop, marred with graffiti. "But I'll do it."

Detective Toby Henson had apparently lost all interest in his romantic future with Sachs. He sighed and gave an assessment that she couldn't help but agree with. "This's going to be bad."

Now, what've we learned?

Ron Pulaski, accustomed to thinking we because of the twin thing, asked himself this question.

Meaning: What've I learned in working on this case with Rhyme and Sachs?

He was determined to be the best cop he could and he spent a lot of time evaluating what he'd done right and what he'd done wrong on the job. Walking down the street now toward the old grocery store where Sachs was meeting with Wallace, he couldn't really see that he'd messed up anything too bad on the case. Oh, sure, he could've run the Explorer scene better. And he was damn sure going to keep his weaponoutside the Tyvek jump-suit from now on — and not use choke holds, unless he really had to.

But on the whole? He'd done pretty good.

Still, he wasn't satisfied. He supposed this feeling came from working for Detective Sachs. That woman set a high bar. There was always something else to check out, one more clue to find, another hour to spend on the scene.

Could drive you crazy.

Could also teach you to be one hell of a cop.

He'd really have to step up now, with her leaving. Pulaski'd heard that rumor, of course, and he wasn't very happy about it. But he'd do what was necessary. He didn't know, though, that he'd ever have her drive. After all, at the moment, hurrying down the freezing street, he was thinking of his family. He really wanted just to head home. Talk to Jenny about her day — not his, no, no — and then play with the kids. That was so fun, just watching the look in his boy's eyes. It changed so fast and so completely — when his son noticed something he'd never seen before, when he made connections, when he laughed. He and Jenny would sit on the floor with Brad in between them, crawling back and forth, his tiny fingers gripping Pulaski's thumb.

And their newborn daughter? She was round and wrinkled as an old grapefruit and she'd lie nearby in the SpongeBob bassinet and be happy and perfect.

But the pleasure of his family would have to wait. After what was about to happen, it was going to be a long night.

He checked street numbers. He was two blocks from the storefront where he'd be meeting Amelia Sachs. Thinking: What else've I learned?

One thing: You damn well better have learned to steer clear of alleys.

A year ago he'd nearly been beaten to death because he'd been walking too close to a wall, with a perp hiding around the corner of a building. The man had stepped out and walloped him in the head with a billy club.

Careless and stupid.

As Detective Sachs had said, "You didn't know. Now you do."

Approaching another alley now, Pulaski veered to the left to walk along the curb — in the unlikely event that somebody, a mugger or junkie, was hiding in the alley.

He turned and looked down it, saw the empty stretch of cobblestones. But at least he was being smart. That's the way it was, being a cop, learning these small lessons and making them a part of —

The hand got him from behind.

"Jesus," he gasped as he was pulled through the open door of the van at the curb, which he hadn't seen because he was staring into the alley. He gasped and started to call out for help.

But his assailant — Deputy Inspector Halston Jefferies, his eyes cold as the moon overhead — slapped his hand over the rookie's mouth. Somebody else grabbed Pulaski's gun hand and in two seconds flat he'd disappeared into the back of the van.

The door slammed shut.

The front door of the old grocery store opened and Marilyn Flaherty walked inside, closed the door behind her and latched it.

Unsmiling, she looked around the bleak store, nodded at the other officers and Wallace. Sachs thought she looked even more tense than usual.

The deputy mayor, playing it cool, introduced her to the IAD detective. She shook his hand and sat at the battered table, next to Sachs.

"Top secret, hm?"

Sachs said, "This's turned into a hornets' nest." She watched the woman's face carefully as she laid out the details. The inspector kept up the great stone face, giving nothing away. Sachs wondered what Kathryn Dance would see in her stiff-backed posture, the tight lips, the quick, cold eyes. The woman was virtually motionless.

The detective told her about Baker's partner. Then added, "I know how you feel about Internal Affairs but, with all respect, I've decided we need to bring them in."

"I —"

"I'm sorry, Inspector." Sachs turned toward Wallace.

But the deputy mayor said nothing. He simply shook his head, sighed, then glanced at the IAD man. The young officer pulled out his weapon.

Sachs blinked. "What... Hey, what're you doing?"

He trained the gun on the space midway between her and Flaherty.

"What is this?" the inspector gasped.

"It's a mess," Wallace said, sounding almost regretful. "It's a real mess. Both of you, keep your hands on the table."

The deputy mayor looked them over, while Toby Henson handed his own gun to Wallace, who covered the women.

Henson wasn't IAD at all; he was a detective out of the 118th, part of the inner circle of the extortion ring, and the man who'd helped Dennis Baker murder Sarkowski and Creeley. He now pulled on leather gloves and took Sachs's Glock from her holster. He patted her down for a backup piece. There was none. He searched the inspector's purse and removed her small service revolver.

"You called it right, Detective," Wallace said to Sachs, who stared at him in shock. "We've got a situation... a situation." He pulled out his cell phone and made a call to one of the officers in front, also part of the extortion scheme. "All clear?"

"Yep."

Wallace disconnected the phone.

Sachs said, "You? It was you? But..." Her head swivelled toward Flaherty.

The inspector asked, "What's this all about?"

The deputy mayor nodded at the inspector and said to Sachs, "Wrong in a big way. She had nothing to do with it. Dennis Baker and I were partners — but business partners. On Long Island. We grew up there. Had a recycling company together. It went bust and he went to the academy, became a cop. I got another business up and running. Then I got involved in city politics and we stayed in touch. I became police liaison and ombudsman and got a feel for what kind of scams worked and what didn't. Dennis and I came up with one that did."

"Robert!" Flaherty snapped. "No, no..."

"Ah, Marilyn..." was all the silver-haired man could muster.

"So," Amelia Sachs said, her shoulders sagging, "what's the scenario here?" She gave a grim laugh. "The inspector kills me and then kills herself. You plant some money in her house. And..."

"And Dennis Baker dies in jail — he messes with the wrong inmate, falls down the stairs, who knows? Too bad. But he should've been more careful. No witnesses, that's the end of the case."

"You think anybody's going to buy it? Somebody at the One One Eight'll turn. They'll get you sooner or later."

"Well, excuse me, Detective, but we have to put out the fires we've got, don't you think? And you're the biggest fucking fire I've got at the moment."

"Listen, Robert," Flaherty said, her voice brittle, "you're in trouble but it's not too late."

Wallace pulled on gloves. "Check the street again, tell them to get the car ready." The deputy mayor picked up Sachs's Glock.

The man walked to the door.

Wallace's eyes turned cold as he looked over Sachs and took a firm grip on the pistol.

Sachs stared into his eyes. "Wait."

Wallace frowned.

She looked him over, eerily calm under the circumstances, he thought. Then she said, "ESU One, move in."

Wallace blinked. "What?"

To the deputy mayor's shock, a man's voice shouted from the darkened back room, "Nobody move! Or I will fire!"

What was this?

Gasping, Wallace looked into the doorway, where an ESU officer was standing, his H&K machine gun's muzzle moving from the politician to Henson at the front door.

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."