“Upstairs. Alone.”

Rhyme nodded. “All right.” What was going on here?

Sachs and Rhyme took the tiny elevator to the second floor and he wheeled into the bedroom, Sachs behind him.

Upstairs, she sat down at a computer terminal, began typing furiously.

“What’s up?” Rhyme asked.

“Give me a minute.” She was scrolling through documents.

Rhyme observed two things about her: Her hand had been digging into her scalp and her thumb was bloody from the wounding. The other was that he believed she’d been crying. Which had happened only two or three times in all the time they’d known each other.

She typed harder, pages rolled past, almost too fast to read.

He was impatient. He was concerned. Finally he had to say firmly, “Tell me, Sachs.”

She was staring at the screen, shaking her head. Then turned to him. “My father . . . he was crooked.” Her voice choked.

Rhyme wheeled closer, as her 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.”