The Stone Monkey Page 6

  He tensed. Not far away a white van suddenly appeared out of a field on the other side of a church and turned onto the road. It was the piglets! The Ghost lifted his pistol again but the vehicle disappeared into the fog. Lowering the gun, the Ghost took several deep breaths. After a moment he grew serene. He was plagued by troubles at the moment, yes, but he'd experienced much adversity in his life, far worse than this.

  You are part of the old.

  You will reform your ways.

  You will die for your old beliefs . . . .

  A reversal, he'd come to learn, was merely a temporary unbalance and even the most horrific events in his life had ultimately been harmonized by good fortune. His abiding philosophy was found in one word: naixin. This translated as "patience" in Chinese but meant something more in the Ghost's mind. The English equivalent would be "All in good time." He had survived these forty-some years because he'd outlasted trouble and danger and sorrow.

  For the moment the piglets had gotten away. Their deaths would have to wait. Now there was nothing to do but escape from the police and the INS.

  He put his old pistol into his pocket and trudged through the rain and wind along the beach toward the lights of the small town. The closest building was a restaurant, in front of which was a car with its engine running.

  So, some good fortune already!

  And then, glancing out to sea, he saw something that actually made him laugh. Yet more good luck: not far offshore he saw another piglet, a man struggling to stay afloat. At least he could kill one more of them before he escaped to the city.

  The Ghost pulled his gun from his pocket and started back toward the shoreline.

  *

  The wind was wearing him down.

  Making his way toward the small town, Sonny Li slogged through the sand. He was a slight man and in the hard, dangerous world in which he made his way he relied on bluff and surprise and wits (weapons too, of course), not on physical strength. He was now at his limits, exhausted from this morning's ordeal.

  The wind . . . Twice it actually knocked him to his knees.

  No more, he thought. Despite the risk of being seen, struggling through the soft sand was simply too much for him and he stumbled back onto the rain-swept asphalt road and continued toward the lights of the small village. He pushed forward as best he could, afraid that the snakehead would leave before Li found him.

  But a moment later he received the reassurance that the man was still here: several more gunshots.

  Li struggled up a hill and peered into the streaming wind and rain but he could see no one. The sound had apparently been carried some distance on the wind.

  Discouraged, he continued forward. For ten endless minutes he battled his way along the road, throwing his head back occasionally and letting the rain soak his parched mouth. After all the seawater he'd swallowed he was desperately thirsty.

  Then he saw, on his right, a small orange life raft sitting on the beach. He assumed that it was the Ghost's. He looked up and down the shore for the snakehead but it was impossible to see very far through the mist and the rain.

  He started toward the raft, thinking that perhaps he could follow the man's footprints and find him hiding in town. But as he took a step off the road a flashing light appeared. He wiped the rain from his eyes and squinted. The light was blue and moving rapidly toward him along the road.

  INS? Security bureau officers?

  Li hurried into some dense bushes on the far side of the asphalt. He crouched and watched the light grow brighter as the vehicle in which it was mounted, a sporty yellow convertible, materialized out of the rain and murk and skidded to a stop 100 meters away. In a crouch Li began to move slowly toward the car.

  *

  Amelia Sachs stood on the rain-swept beach, staring down at the woman's body, slumped in the grotesque pose of death.

  "He's killing them, Rhyme," Amelia Sachs, dismayed, whispered into the headset mike of her Motorola SP-50 handy-talkie. "He's shot two of them, a man and a woman. In the back. They're dead."

  "Shot them?" The criminalist's voice was hollow and she knew that he was shouldering the responsibility for yet more deaths.

  The ESU officer trotted toward her, holding his machine gun ready. "No sign of him," the man shouted over the wind. "People in that restaurant a half click up the road said that somebody stole a car about twenty minutes ago." The officer gave Sachs the description of a Honda and the tag number and she relayed it to Rhyme.

  "Lon'll put it on the wire," he said. "Was he alone?"

  "Think so. Because of the rain there're no footprints in the sand but I found some in the mud, where he was standing to shoot the woman. He was by himself then."

  "So we'll assume his bangshou's still unaccounted for. He could've gotten to shore in another raft. Or he might've been in the wrecked one."

  Her hand near her weapon, she scanned the scenery. Fog-bleached forms of rocks and dunes and brush surrounded her. A man with a gun would be invisible.

  Then she said, "We're going to look for the immigrants, Rhyme."

  She expected him to disagree, to tell her to run the scene first, before the raging elements destroyed all the evidence. But he said simply, "Good luck, Sachs. Call me back when you start on the grid." The line went dead.

  Search well but watch your back. . . .

  The two officers trotted along the beach. They came across a second raft, a smaller one, beached a hundred yards from the first. Sachs's instinctive reaction was to search it for evidence but she stayed true to her immediate mission and, arthritis stabbing her joints, ran with the wind at her back as she scanned the landscape for the immigrants--and signs of an ambush or a hidey-hole where the Ghost might've gone to ground.

  They found neither.

  Then she heard sirens in the distance, carried on the streaming wind, and saw the carnival of emergency vehicles speed into town. The dozen or so residents who'd been ensconced in the restaurant and gas station now braved the weather to find out exactly what kind of excitement the storm had brought to their miniature town.

  The first mission of a crime scene officer is controlling the scene--so that contamination is minimal and evidence doesn't vanish, either accidentally or at the hands of souvenir hunters or the perp himself, masquerading as a bystander. Sachs reluctantly gave up her search for other immigrants and crew--there were plenty of other people to do that now--and ran to the NYPD blue-and-white crime scene bus to direct the operation.

  As the CS techs roped off the beach with yellow tape, Sachs pulled the latest in forensic couture over her soaked jeans and T-shirt. The NYPD's new crime scene overalls, a hooded full-body suit made of white Tyvek, prevented the searcher from sloughing off his or her own trace evidence--hair, skin or sweat, for instance--and contaminating the scene.

  Lincoln Rhyme approved of the suit--he'd lobbied for something similar when he'd been running the Investigation and Resources Division, which oversaw Crime Scene. Sachs wasn't so pleased, however. The fact that the overalls made her look like an alien from a bad space movie wasn't the problem; what troubled her was that it was brilliant white--easily spotted by any perps who, for whatever reason, might wish to hang around the crime scene and try out their marksmanship on cops picking up evidence. Hence, Sachs's pet name for the garb: "the bull's-eye suit."

  A brief canvass of the patrons in the restaurant, employees of the gas station and residents living in the few houses on the beach yielded nothing except facts they'd already learned about the Honda in which the Ghost had escaped. No other vehicles had been stolen and no one had seen anybody swimming to shore or hiding out on land or even heard the gunshots over the wind and rain.

  So it fell exclusively to Amelia Sachs--and Lincoln Rhyme--to wring from the crime scene whatever information about the Ghost, the crew and the immigrants might reside here.

  And what a crime scene it was, one of the biggest they'd ever run: a mile of beach, a road and, on the other side of the asphalt strip, a maze of scruffy
brush. Millions of places to search. And possibly still populated by an armed perp.

  "It's a bad scene, Rhyme. The rain's let up a little but it's still coming down hard and the wind's twenty miles an hour."

  "I know. We've got the Weather Channel on." His voice was different now, calmer. The sound spooked her a bit. It reminded her of the eerily placid quality of his voice when he talked about endings, about killing himself, about finality. "All the more reason," he prodded, "to get on with the search, wouldn't you say?"

  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. 'Funny'? 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?"