The Stone Monkey (8 page)

She looked up and down the beach. "It's just... Everything's too big. There's too much here."

"How can it be too big, Sachs? We work every scene one foot at a time. Doesn't matter if it's a square mile or three feet. It just takes longer. Besides, we
love
big scenes. There're so many wonderful places to find clues."

Wonderful, she thought wryly.

And, starting closest to the large deflated raft, she began walking the grid. The phrase described one technique for physically searching a crime scene for clues, in which the CS officer covers the floor or ground in one direction, back and forth, like mowing a lawn, then turns perpendicular and covers the same ground again. The theory behind this method of searching is that you see things from one angle that you might miss when looking at them from a different angle. Although there were dozens of other methods of searching crime scenes, all of them faster, the grid—the most tedious type of search—was also the most likely to yield gold. It was the one that Rhyme insisted that Sachs use—just as he'd done with the officers and techs who worked for him at NYPD forensics. Thanks to Lincoln Rhyme, "walking the grid" had become synonymous with searching a crime scene among cops in the metropolitan area.

Soon she was out of sight of the village of Easton and the only sign that she wasn't alone was the diffuse flashing of the emergency vehicle lights, like blood pulsing through pale skin, unsettling and eerie.

But soon the lights too vanished in the fog. The solitude—and a creepy sense of vulnerability—curled snug around her. Oh, man, I don't like this. The fog was worse here and the sounds of the rain tapping loudly on the hood of her suit, the waves and the wind would mask an attacker's approach.

She slapped the grip of her black Glock pistol for reassurance and kept on the grid.

"I'm going to go quiet for a while, Rhyme. I've got this feeling there's somebody still here. Somebody watching me."

"Call me when you're through," he said. His hesitant tone suggested there was something more he wished to say but after a moment the line clicked off.

Watch your back....

For the next hour, through the wind and rain, she searched the beach and road and the foliage beyond, like a child hunting for seashells. She examined the intact raft, in which she found a cell phone, and the deflated one, which two ESU officers had muscled up onto the beach. Finally she assembled her collection of evidence, shell casings, blood samples, fingerprints and Polaroids of footprints.

Then she paused and looked around. Then she clicked on the radio and was patched through to a cozy town house light-years away. "Something's funny, Rhyme."

"That's not helpful, Sachs. Tunny'? What does that mean?"

"The immigrants ... ten or so of them, they just vanish. I don't understand it. They leave a shelter on the beach then cross the road and hide in the bushes. I see the prints in the mud on the other side of the road. Then they just disappear. I guess they've gone inland to hide but I can't find any tracks. And nobody's going to give a ride to hitchhikers like them around here and none of the people in town saw any trucks waiting to pick them up. There aren't any tire treads here anyway."

"All right, Sachs, you've just walked in the Ghost's footsteps. You've seen what he's done, you know who he is, you've been where he's been. What's going through your mind?"

"I—"

"You're the Ghost now," Rhyme reminded in a lulling voice. "You're Kwan Ang, nicknamed Gui, the Ghost. You're a multimillionaire, a human trafficker—a snakehead. A killer. You've just sunk a ship and killed over a dozen people. What's in your mind?"

"Finding the rest of them," she answered immediately. "Finding them and killing them. I don't want to leave. Not yet. I'm not sure why but I have to find them." For an instant an image jolted her mind. She
did
see herself as the snakehead, filled with a salivating lust to find the immigrants and kill them. The sensation was harrowing. "Nothing," she whispered, "is going to stop me."

"Good, Sachs," Rhyme replied softly, as if he was afraid of breaking the thin wire that was connecting a portion of her soul to the snakehead's. "Now, think about the immigrants. They're being pursued by someone like that. What would
they
do?"

It took her a moment to transform herself from a heartless murderer and snakehead into one of the poor people on that ship, appalled that the man she'd paid her life's savings to had betrayed her in this way, had killed people she'd grown close to, perhaps family members too. And was now compelled to kill her.

"I'm not going to hide," she said firmly. "I'm getting the hell out of here as fast as I can. Any way I can, as far away as possible. We can't go back into the ocean. We can't walk. We need a ride."

"And how would you get one?" he asked.

"I don't know," she said, feeling the frustration of being close to an answer yet having it evade her.

"Any houses inland?" he asked.

"No."

"Any trucks at the gas station?"

"Yes, but the troopers asked the attendants. None of 'em're missing."

"Anything else?"

Sachs scanned the street. "Nothing."

"There can't be
nothing,
Sachs," he scolded. "These people're running for their lives. They escaped
somehow.
The answer's there. What else do you see?"

She sighed and began reciting, "I see a stack of discarded tires, I see a sailboat upside down, I see a carton of empties—Sam Adams beer. In front of the church there's a wheelbarrow—"

"Church?" Rhyme pounced. "You didn't mention a church before."

"It's Tuesday morning, Rhyme. The place is closed and ESU cleared it."

"Get over there, Sachs. Now!"

Stiffly she began to walk toward the place but had no clue what she might find that would be helpful.

Rhyme explained, "Didn't you do vacation Bible school, Sachs? Ritz crackers, Hawaiian Punch and Jesus on summer afternoons? No potluck picnics? No youth group conventions?"

"Once or twice. But I spent most of my Sundays rebuilding carburetors."

"How do you think churches get the younguns to and from their little theological diversions? Minivans, Sachs. Minivans—with room for a dozen people."

"Could be," she added skeptically.

"And maybe not," Rhyme conceded. "But the immigrants didn't sprout wings and fly, did they? So let's check out the more likely possibilities."

And, as so often happened, he was right.

She walked around to the back of the church and examined the muddy ground: footprints, tiny cubes of broken safety glass, the pipe used to shatter the window, the tread marks of a van.

"Got it, Rhyme. A bunch of fresh prints. Damn, that's smart. ... They walked on rocks, grass and weeds. To avoid the mud so they wouldn't leave prints. And it looks like they got into the van and it drove away through a field before it turned onto the road. So nobody'd see it on the main street."

Rhyme ordered, "Get the scoop on the van from the minister."

Sachs asked a trooper to call the minister of the church. A few minutes later the details came back—it was a white Dodge, five years old, with the name of the church on the side. She took down the tag number then relayed this to Rhyme, who said he would in turn put out another vehicle locator request, in addition to the one on the Honda, and tell the Port Authority police to pass the word to the toll takers at the bridges and tunnels, on the assumption that the immigrants were headed for Chinatown in Manhattan.

She walked the grid carefully behind the church but found nothing else. "I don't think there's much more we can do here, Rhyme. I'm going to log the evidence in and get back." She disconnected the call.

Returning to the crime scene bus, she packed away the Tyvek suit then logged in what she'd found and attached the chain of custody cards that must accompany every item collected at a crime scene. She told the techs to get everything to Rhyme's town house ASAP. Though it seemed hopeless she wanted to make another sweep for survivors. Her knees were on fire—the chronic arthritis inherited from her grandfather. The disease often bothered her but now, alone, she allowed herself the luxury of moving slowly; whenever she was among fellow officers she tried hard not to show the pain. She was afraid that if the brass got wind of her condition they'd desk her for disability.

After fifteen minutes, though, of not finding any sign of more immigrants, she started toward her Camaro, which was the only vehicle left on this portion of the beach. She was alone; the ESU officer who'd accompanied her here had opted for a safer ride back to the city.

The fog was lighter now. A half mile away, on the other side of the town, Sachs could just make out two Suffolk County rescue trucks and an unmarked Ford sedan parked nearby. She believed it was an INS vehicle.

Sachs dropped stiffly into the front seat of her Camaro, found a piece of paper and began to write out notes of what she'd observed at the scene to present to Rhyme and the team back at his town house. The wind buffeted the light car and the rain pelted the steel bodywork furiously. Sachs happened to glance up in time to see a dramatic spume of seawater flying ten feet into the air as it hit a jutting black rock.

She squinted hard and wiped the steam off the inside of the windshield with her sleeve.

What is that? An animal? Some wreckage from the
Fuzhou Dragon?

No, she realized with a start; it was a man. He clung desperately to the rock.

Sachs grabbed her Motorola, clicked to the local ops frequency and radioed, "This is NYPD Crime Scene Five Eight Eight Five to Suffolk County Rescue at Easton Beach. You copy?"

"Roger, Five Eight Eight Five. Go ahead."

"I'm a half click east of the town. I've got a vic in the water. I need some help."

"K," came the reply, "we're on our way. Out."

Sachs stepped out of the car and started down to the shore. She saw a large wave lift the man off the rock and pitch him into the water. He tried to swim but he was injured—there was blood on his shirt—and the best he could do was keep his head above water, but just barely. He went down once and struggled to the surface.

"Oh, brother," Sachs muttered, glancing back at the road. The yellow rescue truck was just then moving forward off the sand.

The immigrant gave a choked cry and slipped under the waves. No time to wait for the pros.

From the police academy she knew the basic lifesaving rule: "Reach, throw, row then go." Meaning, try to rescue a drowning victim from the shore or a boat before you yourself swim out to save him. Well, the first three weren't options at all.

So, she thought: Go.

Ignoring the searing pain in her knees, she ran toward the ocean, stripping off her gun and ammo belt. At the shoreline she unlaced her standard-issue shoes, kicked them off and, eyes focused on the struggling swimmer, waded into the cold, turbulent water.

Crawling from the bushes, Sonny Li got a better look at the woman with the red hair as she pulled off her shoes and plowed into the rough water then kicked away from the shore toward somebody struggling in the waves.

Li couldn't make out who it was—either John Sung or the husband of the couple who'd sat next to him in the raft—but, in any case, his attention was drawn back immediately to the woman, whom he'd been studying from his hiding spot in the bush since she'd arrived at the beach over an hour ago.

Now, she wasn't his type of girl. He didn't care for Western women, at least the ones he'd seen around Fuzhou. They
were
either on the arms of rich businessmen (tall and beautiful, casting disdainful glances at the Chinese men who'd stare at them) or tourists with their husbands and children (badly dressed, casting disdainful glances at men spitting on the sidewalks and the bicyclists who never let them cross the street).

This woman, though, intrigued him. At first he hadn't been able to figure out what she was doing here; she'd arrived in her bright yellow car, accompanied by a soldier with a machine gun. Then she'd turned her back and he'd glimpsed NYPD on her windbreaker. So, she was a public security bureau officer. Safely hidden across the road, he'd watched her search for survivors and clues.

Sexy, he'd thought, despite his vast preference for quiet, elegant Chinese women.

And that hair! What a color! It inspired him to give her a nickname, "Hongse," pronounced hoankseh, Chinese for "red."

Looking up the road, Li saw a yellow emergency truck speeding toward them. As soon as it turned into a shallow parking lot and stopped he crawled to the edge of the road. There was a chance he'd be spotted, of course, but he had to act now, before she returned. He waited until the rescue workers' attention was on Hongse and then scrabbled across the road and up to the yellow car. It was an old one, the sort you saw in American TV shows like
Kojak
and
Hill Street Blues.
He wasn't interested in stealing the car itself (most of the security bureau officers and soldiers had left but there were still enough nearby to pursue and capture him—especially behind the wheel of a car as bright as an egg yolk). No, at the moment he just wanted a gun and some money.

Opening the passenger door of the yellow car, he eased inside and began going through the map box. No weapons. He angrily thought of his Tokarev pistol sitting at the bottom of the ocean. No cigarettes either. Fuck her. ... He then went through her purse and found about fifty dollars in one-color money. Li pocketed the cash and looked over a paper she'd been writing on. His spoken English was good—thanks to American movies and the
Follow Me
program on Radio Beijing—but his reading skills were terrible (which hardly seemed fair considering that English only had 25 or so letters while the Chinese language had 40,000). After some stumbling, he recognized the Ghost's real name, Kwan Ang, in English, and made out some other writing. He folded this up and slipped it into his pocket then scattered the rest of the sheets on the ground outside the open driver's side door, so it would look as if the wind had blown them away.