The Stone Monkey (21 page)

• Blood samples sent to lab for typing.

• Injured woman is AB negative. Requesting more information about her blood.

• Vehicle awaiting Ghost on beach left without him. One shot believed fired by Ghost at vehicle. Request for vehicle make and model sent out, based on tread marks and wheelbase.

• Vehicle is a BMW X5. Checking registered owners.

• No vehicles to pick up immigrants located.

• Cell phone, presumably Ghost's, sent for analysis to FBI.

• Untraceable satellite secure phone. Hacked Chinese gov't system to use it.

• Ghost's weapon is 7.62mm pistol. Unusual casing.

• Model 51 Chinese automatic pistol.

• Ghost is reported to have gov't people on payroll.

• Ghost stole red Honda sedan to escape. Vehicle locator request sent out.

• Three bodies recovered at sea—two shot, one drowned. Photos and prints to Rhyme and Chinese police.

• Fingerprints sent to AFIS.

• No matches on any prints but unusual markings on Sam Chang's fingers and thumbs (injury, rope burn?).

• Profile of immigrants: Sam Chang and Wu Qichen and their families, John Sung, baby of woman who drowned, unidentified man and woman (killed on beach).

Stolen Van, Chinatown    

• Camouflaged by immigrants with "The Home Store" logo.

• Blood spatter suggests injured woman has hand, arm or shoulder injury.

• Blood samples sent to lab for typing.

• Injured woman is AB negative. Requesting more information about her blood.

• Fingerprints sent to AFIS.

• No matches.

Amelia Sachs had left the Camaro on the street near Rhyme's town house and was driving a crime scene bus downtown on the FDR Drive.

The vehicle was functional city property—a Ford station wagon—but she drove it pretty much the same as if she'd been behind the wheel of her gaudy yellow sports car. The time was 2:45 P.M., before rush hour, but the roads were still crowded and maneuvering through traffic took all her skill.

"Hey, Hongse," Sonny Li began nervously as she skidded around a taxi at 70 m.p.h. But he apparently preferred she keep her attention on the road and fell silent.

In the backseat were Eddie Deng, who wasn't concerned about her driving, and agent Alan Coe, who, like the Chinese cop, clearly was. He gripped the chest strap of his seat belt as if he were holding the rip cord of a parachute during a skydive.

"Did you see that?" Sachs asked casually as a cab ignored the siren and light on the CS bus and pulled out directly in front of her to make the exit at Houston Street.

"We moving real fast," Li said then seemed to remember that he didn't want to distract her and he stopped talking again.

"Which way, Eddie?" Sachs asked.

"The Bowery, turn left, two more blocks then a right."

She pulled off onto a rain-slick Canal Street at fifty, controlled the skid before they went into a garbage truck and accelerated into Chinatown, the tires, goosed by the big cop engine, steaming up the wheel wells.

Li muttered something in Chinese.

"What?"

"Ten judges of hell," he translated his own words.

Sachs recalled—the ten judges of hell, who kept the book called
The Register of the Living and the Dead,
containing the name of everybody in the world. The balance sheet of life and death.

My father, Herman, she thought, is already inscribed on the dead side.

Where does my name fall in the register? she wondered.

And the names of people I'm now close to? The people yet to be?

Thinking of life and death...

"Ah, Ms. Sachs. Here you are."

"Hello, Doctor."

"I've just been meeting with Lincoln Rhyme's physician."

"Yes?"

"I've got to talk to you about something."

"You're looking like it's bad news, Doctor."

"Uhm, Officer," Deng interrupted her thoughts. "I think that's a red light ahead of us."

"Got it," she said and slowed to thirty to sweep through the intersection.

"Gan,"
Li whispered. Then offered what Sachs had guessed was the translation: "Fuck."

Three minutes later the crime scene bus skidded to a stop in front of an alley surrounded by a small crowd of onlookers, kept back by a spider strand of yellow police tape and a half-dozen uniformed officers from the Patrol division. The front door to what seemed to be a small warehouse was open. Sachs climbed out, followed by Deng, who called, "Hey, Detective," to a blond man in a suit. He nodded and Deng introduced her to a homicide detective from the Fifth Precinct.

"You're running the scene?" he asked.

Sachs nodded. "What is this place?"

"Warehouse. Owners clean, looks like. We've contacted him and he doesn't know anything except that the victim—name was Jerry Tang-worked here. Eight arrests, two convictions. Mostly he boosts wheels and drives getaway. Does—
did
—some muscle work."

He nodded at the silver BMW four-by-four in the alley. An X5. This was the SUV that Tang had driven out to Long Island to pick up the Ghost this morning. There was a bullet hole in the back door from the Ghost's gunshot as Tang had fled, abandoning him.

A patrol officer responding to some screams had noticed a late-model BMW four-by-four next to the building where the commotion had come from. Then he'd seen the bullet hole in the back and, with his partner, they'd entered the warehouse.

And found what was left of Jerry Tang. He'd been tortured with a knife or razor—skin was missing, including his eyelids—then killed.

Rhyme, she knew, hated to be one-upped by other law enforcers almost as much as he hated being one-upped by perpetrators and when it turned out that Sonny Li, the crow detective, had been right—that the Ghost's first mission was to kill the man who'd abandoned him—the criminalist's mood darkened even more. It hadn't helped, of course, that Li'd said, "Hey, should have listen to me, Loaban. Should have listen."

The detective from the Fifth now continued, "We've got two canvassers from downtown, checking out wits. Oh, there they are now."

Sachs nodded to two detectives she'd worked with before. Bedding and Saul were no longer needed to track down registered owners of BMW X5's and were back at their usual assignment: post-crime canvassing, "spadework," as it was called. They were known for their consummate skill in double-teaming witnesses. Despite their different heights, builds and complexions (one had freckles), their identical sandy hair and their demeanor resulted in their nickname: the Twins. They were also known as the Hardy Boys.

"Got here twenty minutes after the first sighting," said either Bedding or Saul. The tall one.

"Was a teenage girl on her way home from drama club at school. Heard a scream in the building. But didn't report it till she got home. She was—"

"—afraid, you know. Can't blame her, considering what the respondings found at the scene inside. I'd be too."

"Afraid, he means. Blood everywhere. And body parts."

Sachs winced, but not from the gore; it was only because she was lifting her knees to pull on the white Tyvek crime scene suit and her arthritic joints protested painfully.

"We've talked to about eight people in the building—" Bedding or Saul said.

"—and around it. This is even more a case of the deaf and dumbs than usual."

"Yeah, most people here got the blinds too."

"We think they heard it was the Ghost who worked on Tang and that scared everybody off. Nobody'll help. The most anybody'll tell us is that two or—"

"—three or four—"

"—people, presumably men, kicked in the door to the warehouse there."

"And there was major screaming for ten minutes. Then two gunshots. Then it got quiet."

"The girl's mother called nine-one-one."

"But everybody was gone by the time Patrol got here."

Sachs looked up and down the alleyway and the street in front of the warehouse. As she'd feared, the rain had destroyed any hope of finding tread marks of whatever kind of car the Ghost and his assistants had been driving.

"Who's been inside?" she asked the blond detective from the Fifth Precinct.

"Only one uniform—to see if the vic was alive. We heard from upstairs you wanted it virgin so we didn't even let the tour doc from the Medical Examiner's office go in."

"Good," she said. "I want the patrol officer who was inside."

"I'll track 'em down."

A moment later he returned with a uniformed patrolwoman. "I was first officer. You wanted to see me?"

"Just your shoe."

"Well, okay." The woman slipped it off and handed it to Sachs, who shot a picture of the tread and noted the size of the sole so that she could differentiate it from the prints of the Ghost and his accomplices.

She then put rubber bands around her own shoes to distinguish her footprints. Looking up, she noticed Sonny Li standing in the doorway of the warehouse. "Excuse me," she said testily, "you mind standing back?"

"Sure, sure, Hongse. That big room. Man, lot to look at. But you know Confucius, right?"

"Not really," she said, concentrating on the scene.

"He write, 'Longest journey must begin with first step.' I
think
he write that. Maybe somebody else. I read Mickey Spillane more than Confucius."

"Could you wait over there, Officer Li?"

"Call me Sonny, I'm saying."

He stepped aside and Sachs walked into the warehouse. The headset went on and she clicked the Motorola handy-talkie to life.

"Crime Scene Five Eight Eight Five to Central. Need a patch to a landline, K?"

"Roger, Five Eight Eight Five. What's the number, K?"

She gave them Lincoln Rhyrne's phone number and a moment later she heard his voice. "Sachs, where are you? At the scene yet? We've got to
move
on this."

As always—and inexplicably—his feisty impatience reassured her. She scanned the carnage. "Jesus, Rhyme, this's a mess."

"Tell me," he said. "Give me the blueprint first."

"Warehouse and office combined. Thirty by fifty feet, more or less, office area about ten by twenty. A few desks and—"

"Few? Two or eighteen?"

Rhyme was hell on anyone guilty of sloppy observation.

"Sorry," she said. "Four metal desks, eight chairs, no, nine—one's overturned."

The one that Tang had been tied to when the Ghost had tortured and killed him.

"Rows of metal shelves, stacked with cardboard boxes, food inside. Canned goods and cellophane packages. Restaurant supplies."

"Okay, Thorn's ready to start writing. You
are
ready, aren't you, Thorn? Write big, so I can see it. Those words over there, I can't make them out. Redo them ... All right, all right...
Please
redo them." He then said, "Start on the grid, Sachs."

She began to search the scene, thinking: A first step ... the longest journey.

But twenty minutes of one-step-at-a-time searching revealed virtually nothing useful. She found two shell casings, which appeared to be the same as those from the Ghost's gun at the beach. But there was nothing that would lead them directly to where he might be hiding out in New York. No cigarettes, no matchbooks, no fingerprints—the assailants had worn leather gloves.

She studied the ceiling and smelled the scene—two of Rhyme's important directives to crime scene searchers—but detected nothing that would help. Sachs jumped when Rhyme's voice popped into her ear. "Talk to me, Sachs. I don't like it when you're quiet."

"The place is a mess," she repeated.

"You said that. A. Mess. That doesn't really tell us very much, now, does it? Give me details."

"It's been ransacked, drawers opened, posters torn off the walls, desks swept clean; statues, figurines, fishbowl, cups and glasses smashed."

"In a struggle?"

"I don't think so."

"Theft of anything in particular?"

"Maybe but it's mostly vandalism, I'd say."

"What're their shoe treads like?" Rhyme asked.

"All smooth."

"Stylish bastards," he muttered.

He was, she knew, hoping for some dirt or fibers that might lead them to the Ghost's safehouse but, while the gullies in deep-tread-soled shoes can retain such evidence for months, smooth-soled shoes lose trace far more quickly.

"Okay, Sachs, keep going. What do the footprints tell you?"

"I'm thinking that—"

"Don't
think,
Sachs. That's not the way to understand a crime scene. You know that. You have to
feel
it."

His seductive, low voice was hypnotizing and with each word he spoke she felt herself uneasily being transported back to the crime itself, as if she were a participant. Her palms began to sweat copiously in the latex gloves.

"He's there. Jerry Tang is at his desk and they—"

"'We,'"
Rhyme corrected sternly. "You're the Ghost, remember."

"—we kick the door in. He gets up and runs toward the back door but we get him and drag him back to his chair."

"Let's narrow it down, Sachs. You're the snakehead. You've found the man who's betrayed you. What are you going to do?"

"I'm going to kill him."

I saw crow on road picking at food. Another crow tried steal it and first crow not just scare other away
—
he chase and try to peck eyes out.

Suddenly she was filled with a burst of unfocused anger. It nearly took her breath away. "No, wait, Rhyme. It's like his death is secondary. What I really want is to hurt him. I've been betrayed and I want to hurt him bad."

"What do you do? Exactly."

She hesitated, sweating hard in the hot suit. Several places on her body itched at once. She felt like ripping a hole in the suit to scratch her skin.

"I can't—"

"'I,' Sachs. Who's 'I'? You're the Ghost, remember?"

Solidly in her own persona, though, she said, "I'm having trouble with this one, Rhyme. There's something about him, about the Ghost. He's way on the other side." She hesitated. "It feels really bad there."