The Cold Moon

changed his mind. He glanced at his breath billowing from his mouth. “Jesus, Linc, with what the city coughs up for you, you can afford to pay your heating bill, you know. Is that coffee? Is it hot?”
    Thom poured him a cup and Sellitto clutched it in one hand as he opened his briefcase with the other. “Finally got it.” He nodded at what he now extracted, an old Redweld folder disfigured with faded ink and pencil notations, many of the entries crossed out, evidence of years of frugal municipal government reuse.
    “The Luponte file?” Rhyme asked.
    “That’s it.”
    “I wanted it last week,” the criminalist grumbled, the inside of his nose stinging from the cold. Maybe he’d tell the repairman he’d pay the bill in one to five months. He glanced at the folder. “I’d almost given up. I knowhow much you love clichés, Lon. Does the phrase ‘day late and a dollar short’ come to mind?”
    “Naw,” the detective said amiably, “the one I’m thinking of is ‘If you do somebody a favor and they complain, then fuck ’em.’”
    “That’s a good one,” conceded Lincoln Rhyme.
    “Anyway, you didn’t tell me how classified it was. I had to find that out on my own, and I needed Ron Scott to track it down.”
    Rhyme was staring at the detective as he opened the file and browsed through it. He felt an acute sense of uneasiness, wondering what he would find inside. Could be good, could be devastating. “There should be an official report. Find it.”
    Sellitto dug through the folder. He held up the document. On the cover was an old typewritten label that read Anthony C. Luponte, Deputy Commissioner. The folder was sealed with a fading piece of red tape that said, Classified.
    “Should I open it?” he asked.
    Rhyme rolled his eyes.
    “Linc, tell me when the good mood’s going to kick in, will you?”
    “Put it on the turning frame. Please and thank you.”
    Sellitto ripped open the tape and handed the booklet to Thom.
    The aide mounted the report in a device like a cookbook holder, to which was attached a rubber armature that turned the pages when instructed by a tiny movement from Rhyme’s finger on his ECU touch pad. He now began to flip through the document, reading and trying to quell the tension within him.
    “Luponte?” Sachs looked up from an evidence table.
    Another page turned. “That’s it.”
    He kept reading paragraph after paragraph of dense city government talk.
    Oh, come on, he thought angrily. Get to the goddamn point. . . .
    Would the message be good or bad?
    “Something about the Watchmaker?” Sachs asked.
    So far, there’d been no leads to the man, either in New York or in California, where Kathryn Dance had started her own investigation.
    Rhyme said, “It doesn’t have anything to do with him.”
    Sachs shook her head. “But that’s why you wanted it.”
    “No, you assumed that’s why I wanted it.”
    “What’s it about then, one of the other cases?” she asked. Her eyes wentto the evidence boards, which revealed the progress of several cold cases they’d been investigating.
    “Not those.”
    “Then what?”
    “I could tell you a lot sooner if I wasn’t interrupted so much.”
    Sachs sighed.
    At last he came to the section he sought. He paused, looked out the window at the stark brown branches populating Central Park. He believed in his heart that the report would tell him what he wanted to hear but Lincoln Rhyme was a scientist before all else and distrusted the heart.
    Truth is the only goal. . . .
    What truths would the words reveal to him?
    He looked back at the frame and read the passage quickly. Then again.
    After a moment he said to Sachs, “I want to read you something.”
    “Okay. I’m listening.”
    His right finger moved on the touch pad and the pages flipped back. “This is from the first page. Listening?”
    “I said I was.”
    “Good. ‘This proceeding is and shall be kept secret. From June eighteenth to June twenty-ninth, ninety seventy-four, a dozen New York City police officers were indicted by a grand jury for extorting money from shopkeepers and businessmen in Manhattan and Brooklyn and accepting bribes to fail to pursue criminal investigations. Additionally, four officers were indicted for assault pursuant to these acts of extortion. Those twelve officers were members of what was known as the Sixteenth Avenue Club, a name that has become synonymous with the heinous crime of police corruption.’”
    Rhyme heard Sachs take