Sachs kept a solemn face, though she was pleased. She felt like a student who'd just aced an important exam.
Which was, in effect, exactly what had happened.
Amelia Sachs was pursuing a new goal. Her father, Herman, had been a portable, a beat cop in the Patrol Services Division, all his life. Sachs now had the same rank and might've been content to remain there for another few years before moving up in the department but after the September 11 attacks she'd decided she wanted to do more for her city. So she'd submitted the paperwork to be promoted to detective sergeant.
No group of law enforcers has fought crime like NYPD detectives. Their tradition went back to tough, brilliant Inspector Thomas Byrnes, named to head up the fledgling Detective Bureau in the 1880s. Byrnes's arsenal included threats, head-knocking and subtle deductions--he once broke a major theft ring by tracing a tiny fiber found at a crime scene. Under Byrnes's flamboyant guidance the detectives in the bureau became known as the Immortals and they dramatically reduced the level of crime in a city as freewheeling back then as the Wild West.
Officer Herman Sachs was a collector of police department memorabilia, and not long before he died he gave his daughter one of his favorite artifacts: a battered notebook actually used by Byrnes to jot notes about investigations. When Sachs was young--and her mother wasn't around--her father would read aloud the more legible passages and the two of them would make up stories around them.
October 12, 1883. The other leg has been found! Slaggardy's coal bin, Five Pts. Expect Cotton Williams's confession forthwith.
Given its prestigious status (and lucrative pay for law enforcement), it was ironic that women found more opportunities in the Detective Bureau than in any other division of the NYPD. If Thomas Byrnes was the male detective icon, Mary Shanley was the female--and one of Sachs's personal heroines. Busting crime throughout the 1930s, Shanley was a boisterous, uncompromising cop, who once said, "You have the gun to use, and you may as well use it." Which she did with some frequency. After years of combating crime in Midtown she retired as a detective first-grade.
Sachs, however, wanted to be more than a detective, which is just a job specialty; she wanted rank too. In the NYPD, as in most police forces, one becomes a detective on the basis of merit and experience. To become a sergeant, though, the applicant goes through an arduous triathlon of exams: written, oral and--what Sachs had just endured--an assessment exercise, a simulation to test practical skills at personnel management, community sensitivities and judgment under fire.
The captain, a soft-spoken veteran who resembled Laurence Fishburne, was the primary assessor for the exercise and had been taking notes on her performance.
"Okay, Officer," he said, "we'll write up our results and they'll be attached to your review. But let me just say a word unofficially." Consulting his notebook. "Your threat assessment regarding civilians and officers was perfect. Calls for backup were timely and appropriate. Your deployment of personnel negated any chance the perpetrators would escape from the containment situation and yet minimized exposure. You called the illegal drug search right. And getting the personal information from the one suspect for the hostage negotiator was a nice touch. We didn't think about making that part of the exercise. But we will now. Then, at the end, well, frankly, we never thought you'd determine there was another perp in hiding. We had it planned that he'd shoot Officer Wilkins here and then we'd see how you'd handle an officer-down situation and organize a fleeing felon apprehension."
The officialese vanished and he smiled. "But you nailed the bastard."
Bang, bang.
Then he asked, "You've done the written and orals, right?"
"Yessir. Should have the results any day now."
"My group'll complete our assessment evaluation and send that to the board with our recommendations. You can stand down now."
"Yessir."
The cop who'd played the last bad guy--the one with the shotgun--wandered up to her. He was a good-looking Italian, half a generation out of the Brooklyn docks, she judged, and had a boxer's muscles. A dirty stubble of beard covered his cheeks and chin. He wore a big-bore chrome automatic high on his trim hip and his cocky smile brought her close to suggesting he might want to use the gun's reflection as a mirror to shave.
"I gotta tell ya--I've done a dozen assessments and that was the best I ever seen, babe."
She laughed in surprise at the word. There were certainly cavemen left in the department--from Patrol Services to corner offices at Police Plaza--but they tended to be more condescending than openly sexist. Sachs hadn't heard a "babe" or "honey" from a male cop in at least a year.
"Let's stick with 'Officer,' you don't mind."
"No, no, no," he said, laughing. "You can chill now. The AE's over."
"How's that?"
"When I said 'babe,' it's not like it's a part of the assessment. You don't have to, you know, deal with it official or anything. I'm just saying it 'cause I was impressed. And 'cause you're . . . you know." He smiled into her eyes, his charm as shiny as his pistol. "I don't do compliments much. Coming from me, that's something."
'Cause you're you know.
"Hey, you're not pissed or anything, are you?" he asked.
"Not pissed at all. But it's still 'Officer.' That's what you call me and what I'll call you."
At least to your face.
"Hey, I didn't mean any offense or anything. You're a pretty girl. And I'm a guy. You know what that's like. . . . So."
"So," she replied and started away.
He stepped in front of her, frowning. "Hey, hold on. This isn't going too good. Look, let me buy you a coffee. You'll like me when you get to know me."
"Don't bet on it," one of his buddies called, laughing.
The Babe Man good-naturedly gave him the finger then turned back to Sachs.
Which is when her pager beeped and she looked down to see Lincoln Rhyme's number on the screen. The word "URGENT" appeared after it.
"Gotta go," she said.
"So no time for that coffee?" he asked, a fake pout on his handsome face.
"No time."
"Well, how 'bout a phone number?"
She made a pistol with her index finger and thumb and aimed it at him. "Bang, bang," she said. And trotted toward her yellow Camaro.
JEFFERY DEAVER, a former attorney and the New York Times bestselling author internationally hailed as "the best psychological thriller writer around" (The Times, London), has most recently added to his myriad literary achievements as the author of the new James Bond novel, Carte Blanche. He has featured his acclaimed detective hero Lincoln Rhyme in nine hit novels including The Bone Collector--which became a Universal Pictures feature film starring Denzel Washington and Angelina Jolie. A six-time Edgar Award nominee, Deaver's numerous stand-alone novels include the "ingenious" (Library Journal) page-turner Edge; The Devil's Teardrop, which became a Lifetime Television movie; and The Bodies Left Behind, winner of the 2009 Best Novel of the Year award from the International Thriller Writers organization.
Visit www.jefferydeaver.com.
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THE SOURCE FOR READING GROUPS
COVER DESIGN BY RICHARD YOO * MONKEY SYMBOL BY BEN PERINI
AUTHOR PHOTOGRAPH BY JERRY BAUER
ALSO BY JEFFERY DEAVER
Carte Blanche
Edge
The Burning Wire*
Best American Mystery Stories 2009 (Editor) The Watch List (The Copper Bracelet and The Chopin Manuscript) (Contributor) Roadside Crosses**
The Bodies Left Behind
The Broken Window*
The Sleeping Doll**
More Twisted: Collected Stories, Volume Two The Cold Moon*/**
The Twelfth Card*
Garden of Beasts
Twisted: Collected Stories The Vanished Man*
The Stone Monkey*
The Blue Nowher
e
The Empty Chair*
Speaking in Tongues
The Devil's Teardrop
The Coffin Dancer*
The Bone Collector*
A Maiden's Grave
Praying for Sleep
The Lesson of Her Death Mistress of Justice
Hard News
Death of a Blue Movie Star Manhattan Is My Beat
Hell's Kitchen
Bloody River Blues
Shallow Graves
A Century of Great Suspense Stories (Editor) A Hot and Sultry Night for Crime (Editor) Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (Introduction) *Featuring Lincoln Rhyme and Amelia Sachs **Featuring Kathryn Dance
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright (c) 2003 by Jeffery Deaver
Originally published in hardcover in 2003
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ISBN 978-1-4516-4777-8
ISBN 978-0-74322777-3 (eBook)
Jeffery Deaver, The Stone Monkey
(Series: Lincoln Rhyme # 4)
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