She asked, “I want to see the Sarkowski file. Can you point me in any direction?”

Snyder hesitated. “I’ll make some calls.”

“Thanks.”

Sachs rose.

“Wait,” Snyder said. “Lemme say one thing. I called you a kid. Okay, shouldn’t’ve said that. You got balls, you don’t back down, you’re smart. Anybody can see that. But you ain’t been around long in this business. You gotta understand that what you’re thinking about the One One Eight. They’re not going to be clipping anybody. And even if something is going down, it’s not going to be black-and-white. You gotta ask yourself, What the fuck difference does it make? A few dollars here or there? Sometimes a bad cop saves a baby’s life. And sometimes a good cop takes something he shouldn’t. That’s life on the streets.” He gave her a perplexed frown. “I mean, Christ, you of all people oughta know that.”

“Me?”

“Well, sure.” He looked her up and down. “The Sixteenth Avenue Club.”

“I don’t know what that is.”

“Oh, I’ll bet you do.”

And he told her all about it.

Dennis Baker was saying to Rhyme, “I hear she’s a great shot.”

The lab was male only at the moment; Kathryn Dance had returned to the hotel to check in once again and Amelia was out on the Other Case. Pulaski, Cooper and Sellitto were here, along with Jackson the dog.

Rhyme explained about Sachs’s pistol club and the competitions she was in. Proudly he told Baker that she was very close to being the top handgun shot in the metro league. She’d be competing soon and was hoping to make the number-one slot.

Baker nodded. “Looks like she’s in as good shape as most of the rookies just out of the academy.” He patted his belly. “I should be working out more myself.”

Ironically, wheelchair-bound Rhyme was himself doing more exercising now than before the accident. He used a powered bicycle—an ergometer—and a computerized treadmill daily. He also did aqua therapy several times a week. This regimen served two purposes. It was intended to keep his muscle mass solid for the day when, as he believed, he would walk again. The exercises were also moving him further toward that goal by improving the nerve function in the damaged parts of his body. In the past few years he’d regained functions that doctors had told him he’d never again have.

But Rhyme sensed that Baker wasn’t particularly interested in Sachs’s Bowflex routines—a deduction confirmed when the man asked his next question. “I heard that you guys’re . . . going out.”

Amelia Sachs was a lantern that attracted many moths and Rhyme wasn’t surprised that the detective was checking out the availability of the flame. He laughed at the detective’s quaint term. Going out. He said, “You could put it that way.”

“Must be tough.” Then Baker blinked. “Wait, I didn’t mean what you think.”

Rhyme, though, had a pretty good idea what the detective was saying. He wasn’t referring to a relationship between a crip and somebody who was mobile—Baker seemed hardly to notice Rhyme’s condition. No, he was referring to a very different potential conflict. “Two cops, you meant.”