The Cold Moon

eyes returned to the documents on the screen. They were newspaper stories, he could see.
    Her legs bounced with tension. “He was on the take,” she whispered.
    “Impossible.” Rhyme hadn’t known Herman Sachs, who had died of cancer before he and Sachs met. He’d been a portable, a beat cop, all his life (a fact that had given Sachs her nickname when she was working in Patrol—“the Portable’s Daughter”). Herman had cop blood in his veins—his father, Heinrich Sachs, had come over from Germany in 1937, immigrating with his fiancée’s father, a Berlin police detective. After becoming a citizen, Heinrich joined the NYPD.
    The thought that anyone in the Sachs line could be corrupt was unthinkable to Rhyme.
    “I just talked to a detective on the St. James case. He worked with Dad. There was a scandal in the late seventies. Extortion, bribes, even some assaults. A dozen or so uniforms and detectives got collared. They were known as the Sixteenth Avenue Club.”
    “Sure. I read about it.”
    “I was a baby then.” Her voice quaked. “I never heard about it, even after I joined the force. Mother and Pop never mentioned it. But he was with them.”
    “Sachs, I just can’t believe it. You ask your mother?”
    The detective nodded. “She said it was nothing. Some of the uniforms who got busted just started to name names to cut deals with the prosecutor.”
    “That happens in IAD situations. All the time. Everybody dimes out everybody else, even innocents. Then it gets sorted out. That’s all there was to it.”
    “No, Rhyme. That isn’t all. I stopped at the Internal Affairs records room and tracked down the file. Pop was guilty. Two of the cops who were part of the scam swore out affidavits about seeing him put the finger on shopkeepers and protecting numbers runners, even losing files and evidence in some big cases against the Brooklyn crews.”
    “Hearsay.”
    “ Evidence, ” she snapped. “They had evidence. His prints on the buy money. And on some unregistered guns he was hiding in his garage.” She whispered, “Ballistics traced one to an attempted hit a year before. My dad was stashing a hot weapon, Rhyme. It’s all in the file. I saw the print examiner’s report. I saw the prints. ”
    Rhyme fell silent. Finally he asked, “Then how’d he get off?”
    She gave a bitter laugh. “Here’s the joke, Rhyme. Crime Scene fucked up the search. The chain-of-custody cards weren’t filled out right, and his lawyer at the hearing excluded the evidence.”
    Chain-of-custody cards exist so that evidence can’t be doctored or unintentionally altered to increase the chances a suspect will be convicted. But there was no way that tampering had occurred in Herman Sachs’s case; it’s virtually impossible to get fingerprints on evidence unless the suspect himself actually touches it. Still, the rules have to be applied evenly and if the COC cards aren’t filled out or are wrong, the evidence will almost always be excluded.
    “Then . . . there were pictures of him with Tony Gallante.”
    A senior organized crime capo from Bay Ridge.
    “Your father and Gallante?”
    “They were having dinner together, Rhyme. I called a cop that Pop used to work with, Joe Knox—he was in the Sixteenth Avenue Club too. Got busted. I asked him about Dad, point-blank. He didn’t want to say anything at first. He was pretty shaken up I’d called but finally he admitted it was true. Dad and Knox and a couple others put the finger on store owners and contractors for over a year. They ditched evidence, they even threatened to beat up people who complained.
    “They thought Pop was going down big-time but, with the screwup, he got off. They called him the ‘fish that got away.’”
    Wiping tears, she continued to scroll through the computer files. She was reviewing official documents too—archives in the NYPD that Rhyme had access to because of the work he did for the department. He wheeled close, so close he could smell her scented soap. She said, “Twelve officers in the Sixteenth Avenue Club were indicted. Internal Affairs knew about three others but they couldn’t make the case because of evidence problems. He was one of those three,” Sachs said. “Jesus. The fish that got away . . .”
    She slumped in a chair, her finger disappearing into her hair and scraping. She realized she was doing it and dropped her hand into her lap. There was fresh blood on the nail.
    “When that thing with Nick