The Stone Monkey Page 9

Chang himself spent a lot of time on his old laptop computer. The Internet had become the main means for dissidents in China to communicate with the outside world, though doing so was very difficult. Chang's modem was woefully slow and the public security bureaus, as well as agents from the People's Liberation Army, were constantly looking for emails and postings by dissidents. Chang had a firewall on his computer that would often give a beep, signaling that the government was trying to break into his system. He'd log off immediately and have to establish a new service provider account. His laptop too, he thought sadly, was sleeping forever inside the Fuzhou Dragon.

  As Chang dictated the address, the tong leader looked up from the keyboard. "So you'll be staying in Queens?"

  "Yes. A friend arranged a place for us."

  "Is it a big place? Is it comfortable for all of you? Don't you think my broker could do better? I'm thinking he could. I have contacts in Queens."

  "He is my best friend's brother. He's already arranged for the lease."

  "Ah, friend's brother. Good. Well, we have an affiliated association there. The Flushing Neighborhood and Merchants Association. Very big. Powerful. That's the new Chinatown in the New York area: Flushing. Maybe you won't like your apartment. Maybe the children won't be safe. That's possible, don't you think? Go to the association and mention my name."

  "I'll remember that."

  Mah nodded toward the computer screen and asked Wu, "You're both at this address?"

  Chang started to say that they were but Wu interrupted. "No, no. I want to stay in Manhattan, Chinatown here. Can your broker find us a house?"

  "But--" Chang said, frowning.

  "You don't mean house, do you?" Mah inquired, amused. "There are no houses." He added, "That you could afford."

  "An apartment then?"

  Mah said, "Yes, he has temporary rooms. You can get a place today and then stay there until he finds you a permanent home." As Mah typed some more and the hiss of the modem filled the office, Chang put his hand on Wu's arm and whispered, "No, Qichen, you must come with us."

  "We're staying in Manhattan."

  Leaning closer so that Mah could not hear, Chang whispered, "Don't be a fool. The Ghost will find you."

  Wu laughed. "Don't worry about him."

  "Don't worry? He just killed a dozen of our friends." Gambling with Wu's own life was one thing but to risk his wife and children was unthinkable.

  But Wu was adamant. "No. We are staying here."

  Chang fell silent as Mah logged off the computer and then wrote a note, handed it to Wu. "This is the broker. He's only a few blocks from here. You'll pay him a fee." He added, "I won't charge you for this. Am I generous? Everybody says Jimmy Mah is generous. Now, for Mr. Chang's car." Mah made a call and began to speak quickly into the phone. He made arrangements for a van to be brought around. He hung up and turned to the two men. "There. That concludes our business. Isn't it a pleasure to work with reasonable men?"

  They rose in unison and shook hands.

  "Do you want a cigarette to take with you?" he asked Wu, who took three.

  When the immigrants were at the door Mah asked, "One thing. This Mexican snakehead? There's no reason for him to come after you, is there? You're even with him?"

  "Yes, we're even."

  "Good. Don't we have enough reason to look over our shoulders?" Mah asked jovially. "Aren't there enough demons after us in this life?"

  Chapter Ten

  In the distance, sirens pierced the early morning air.

  The sound grew louder and Lincoln Rhyme hoped it would mark the arrival of Amelia Sachs. The evidence she'd gathered at the beach had already arrived, delivered by a young tech who'd sheepishly entered the den of the legendary Lincoln Rhyme without a word and scurried about to deposit the bags and stacks of pictures as the criminalist gruffly directed.

  Sachs herself had been diverted on the way back from the beach, however, to run a secondary crime scene. The church van stolen at Easton had been found in Chinatown--abandoned in an alley next to an uptown subway stop forty-five minutes ago. The van had slipped past the roadblocks because not only did it sport stolen plates but one of the immigrants had painted over the name of the church and replaced it with a good facsimile of the logo for a local home improvement store.

  "Smart," Rhyme had said, with some dismay; he didn't like smart perps. He'd then called Sachs--who was speeding back to the city on the Long Island Expressway--and ordered her to meet a crime scene bus downtown and process the van.

  The INS's Harold Peabody was gone--summoned to juggle press conferences and calls from Washington about the fiasco.

  Alan Coe, Lon Sellitto and Fred Dellray remained, as did the trim, hedgehog-haired detective Eddie Deng. An addition as well: Mel Cooper, slim, balding, reserved. He was one of the NYPD's top forensic lab workers and Rhyme often borrowed him. Walking silently on his crepe-soled Hush Puppies, which he wore during the day because they were comfortable and at night because they gave him good traction for ballroom dancing, Cooper was assembling equipment, organizing examination stations and laying out the evidence from the beach.

  At Rhyme's direction Thom taped a map of New York City on the wall, next to the map of Long Island and the surrounding waters, which they'd used in following the Fuzhou Dragon's progress. Rhyme stared at the red dot that represented the ship and he once again felt the pain of guilt that his lack of foresight had resulted in the deaths of the immigrants.

  The sirens grew louder then stopped outside his window, which faced Central Park. A moment later the door opened and Amelia Sachs, limping slightly, hurried into the room. Her hair was matted and flecked with bits of seaweed and dirt and her jeans and work shirt were damp and sandy.

  Those in the room nodded distracted greetings. Dellray studied her clothes and lifted an eyebrow.

  "Had some free time," she said. "Went for a swim. Hi, Mel."

  "Amelia," Cooper said, shoving his glasses higher on his nose. He blinked at her appearance.

  Rhyme noted with eager anticipation what she carried: a gray milk crate, filled with plastic and paper bags. She handed the evidence to Cooper and started for the stairs, calling, "Back in five."

  A moment later Rhyme heard the shower running and, indeed, five minutes after she'd left, she was back, wearing some of the clothes she kept in his bedroom closet: blue jeans and a black T-shirt, running shoes.

  Wearing rubber gloves, Cooper was laying the bags out, organizing them according to the scenes--the beach and the van in Chinatown. Rhyme gazed at the evidence and felt--in his temples, not his numb chest--a quickening of his heart, the breathtaking excitement of a hunt that was about to begin. Indifferent toward sports and athletics, Rhyme nonetheless supposed that this edgy exhilaration was what ski racers, for instance, felt when they stood at the top of a run, looking down the mountain. Would they win? Would the course defeat them? Would they make a tactical mistake and lose by a fraction of a second? Would they be injured or die?

  "Okay," he said. "Let's get to it." He looked around the room. "Thom? Thom! Where is he? He was here a minute ago. Thom!"

  "What, Lincoln?" The harried aide appeared in the doorway, with a pan and dish towel in hand.

  "Be our scribe . . . write our pithy insights down"--a nod at the whiteboard--"in that elegant handwriting of yours."

  "Yes, bwana." Thom started back to the kitchen.

  "No, no, just leave it," Rhyme groused. "Write!"

  Sighing, Thom set down the pan and wiped his hands on the towel. He tucked his purple tie into his shirt to protect it from the marker and walked to the whiteboard. He'd been an unofficial member of several forensic teams here and he knew the drill. He now asked Dellray, "You have a name for the case yet?"

  The FBI always named major investigations with acronymlike variations of the key words describing the case--like ABSCAM. Dellray pinched the cigarette that rested behind his ear. He said, "Nup. Nothing yet. But less just do it ourselves and make Washington live with it. How 'bout t
he name of our boy? GHOSTKILL. That good enough for ever-body? That spooky enough?"

  "Plenty spooky," Sellitto agreed though with the tone of someone who was rarely spooked.

  Thom wrote this at the top of the whiteboard and turned back to the law enforcers.

  Rhyme said, "We've got two scenes: the beach in Easton and the van. The beach first."

  As Thom was writing the heading Dellray's phone rang and he took the call. After a brief conversation he hung up and told the team what he'd just learned: "No other survivors so far," he said. "And the Coast Guard hasn't found the ship. But they did recover some bodies out to sea. Two shot, one drowned. ID on one of them had merchant papers. Nothing on the other two. They're sending prints and pictures to us and copies to China."

  "He even killed the crew?" Eddie Deng asked in disbelief.

  "What do you expect?" Coe responded. "You know him by now. You think he'd leave a single witness alive?" A grim laugh. "Besides, with the crew dead he won't have to pay the balance due for chartering the boat. And back in China he'll probably claim that the Coast Guard fired on them and sank the Dragon."

  But Rhyme had no time for anger at the Ghost or for dismay at the cruel potential of the human heart. "Okay, Sachs," he said curtly. "The beach. Tell us what happened."

  She leaned against a lab table and consulted her notes. "Fourteen people came ashore in a life raft about a half mile east of Easton, on the road to Orient Point." She walked to the wall and touched a spot on the Long Island map. "Near the Horton Point lighthouse. As they got closer to shore the raft hit some rocks and started to deflate. Four of the immigrants were thrown into the water and were washed down the beach. The other ten stayed together. They stole the church van and got away."

  "Photos of the footprints?" Rhyme asked.

  "Here you go," Sachs said, handing Thom an envelope. He taped up Polaroids. "I found them under a shelter near the raft. It was too wet to use electrostatic," she explained to the team. "I had to take pictures."

  "And fine artwork they are too," Rhyme said, wheeling back and forth in front of them.

  "I'm counting nine," Dellray said. "Why you sayin' ten, Amelia?"

  "Because," Rhyme said, "there's a baby, right?"

  Sachs nodded. "Right. Under the shelter I found some patterns in the sand I couldn't identify, looked like something had been dragged but there were no footprints in front of it--only behind. I figured it was a crawling child."

  "Okay," Rhyme said, studying the sizes of the shoes, "looks like we've got seven adults and/or older teens, two young children and one infant. One of the adults could be elderly--he's shuffling. I say 'he' because of the shoe size. And somebody's injured--probably a woman, to judge from the size of her shoes. The man next to her is helping her."

  Sachs added, "There were bloodstains on the beach and in the van."

  "Samples of the blood?" Cooper asked.

  "There wasn't much on the raft or the beach--the rain had washed most of it away. I got three samples from the sand. And plenty in the van, still wet." She found a plastic bag containing some vials. Handed it to him.

  The tech prepared samples for typing and filled out a form. He called in an expedited request for typing and gendering into the serology lab at the Medical Examiner's office and arranged for a uniformed officer to take the samples downtown.

  Sachs continued her scenario. "Now, the Ghost--in a second launch--landed about two hundred yards east of where the immigrants did."

  Her fingers disappeared into her abundant red hair and worried the flesh of her scalp. Sachs would often injure herself in minor ways like this. A beautiful woman, a former fashion model, she often had stubby, sometimes bloody fingernails. Rhyme had given up trying to figure out where this painful compulsion came from but, oddly, he envied her. The same cryptic tensions drove him as well. The difference was that he didn't have her safety valve of fidgety motion to bleed off the stress.

  He silently sent out a plea to Dr. Weaver, his neurosurgeon: Do something for me. Release me just a little from this terrible confinement. Please . . . Then he slammed the door on these personal thoughts, angry with himself, and turned his attention back to Sachs.

  "Then," she continued with a splinter of emotion in her voice, "then he started tracking down the immigrants and killing them. He found two who'd fallen off the raft and killed them. Shot them in the back. He wounded one. The fourth immigrant's still missing."

  "Where's the wounded one?" Coe asked.

  "They were taking him to a trauma center then to the INS Manhattan detention facility. He said he doesn't know where the Ghost or the immigrants might've been going once they got here." Sachs again consulted her soggy handwritten notes. "Now there was a vehicle on the road near the beach but it left--fast, spun the wheels and skidded to make a turn. I think the Ghost took a shot at it. So we may have a witness, if we can track down the make and model. I got dimensions of the wheelbase and--"

  "Wait," Rhyme interrupted. "What was it near? The car?"

  "Near?" she asked. "Nothing. It was just parked by the roadside."

  The criminalist frowned. "Why would somebody park there on a stormy day before dawn?"

  "Drivin' by and saw the rafts?" Dellray suggested.

  "No," Rhyme said. "In that case he would've gone for help or called. And there weren't any nine-one-ones reporting anything. No, I think the driver was there to pick up the Ghost but when it turned out the snakehead wasn't in any hurry to leave, he took off."

  "So he got abandoned," Sellitto observed.

  Rhyme nodded.

  Sachs handed a sheet of paper to Mel Cooper. "Dimensions of the wheelbase. And here are pictures of the tread marks."

  The tech scanned the marks into the computer and then sent the image, along with the dimensions, to the NYPD's VI--Vehicle Identifier--database. "Shouldn't be long," Cooper's calm voice reported.

  Young detective Eddie Deng asked, "What about the other trucks?"

  "What other trucks?" Sachs asked.

  Coe filled in. "The terms of a smuggling contract include land transport too. There should've been some trucks to take the immigrants back to the city."

  Sachs shook her head. "I didn't see any sign of them. But when he sank the ship the Ghost probably called the driver and had them go back to the city." She looked over the evidence bags again. "I found this . . . " She held up a bag containing a cell phone.

  "Excellent!" Rhyme said. He'd dubbed clues like this "NASDAQ evidence," after the high-tech-heavy stock market. Computers, cell phones, personal electronic organizers. A whole new breed of evidence, these telltale devices could provide huge amounts of information about perps and the people they'd been in contact with. "Fred, let's get your people to look it over."

  "Gotcha."

  The bureau had recently added a computer and electronics team to the New York office. Dellray made a call and arranged for an agent to pick up the cell phone and take it to the federal forensics lab downtown for analysis.

  Rhyme said, musing, "Okay, he's hunting them down, shooting the immigrants, shooting at the driver who abandoned him. He's doing it by himself, right, Sachs? No sign of the mysterious assistant?"

  She nodded at the footprint Polaroids. "No, I'm sure the Ghost was the only one in the second raft and the only one shooting."

  Rhyme frowned. "I don't like unidentified perps out there someplace when we're running crime scenes. Nothing on who this bangshou is?"

  Sellitto muttered, "Nope. Not a clue. The Ghost's got dozens of them around the world."

  "And no sign of the fourth immigrant? The other one who fell out of the raft?"

  "No."

  The criminalist then asked Sachs, "What about ballistics?"

  Sachs held up a plastic bag containing shell casings for Rhyme to examine.

  "Seven-point-six-two millimeter," he said, "but the brass's an odd length. And it's uneven. Cheap." Though he had a body that couldn't move, his eyes were as sharp as those of the peregrine falcons that liv
ed on the windowsill outside his bedroom upstairs. "Check out the casings online, Mel."

  When Rhyme had been head of NYPD forensics he'd spent months putting together databases of evidence standards--samples of substances and materials along with the sources they came from, like motor oil, thread, fibers, dirt and so on--to facilitate tracing evidence found at crime scenes. One of the largest, and most often used, databases was the compilation of bullet shell casings and slugs information. The combined FBI and NYPD collection had samples and digitized images of nearly every projectile that had ever been fired from a weapon in the past hundred years.

  Cooper opened the plastic bag and then reached in with chopsticks--appropriately, considering the case they were now working on. This was the tool that Rhyme had found was the least damaging to evidence and he'd ordered all his techs to learn to use the sticks, preferring them to tweezers or forceps, which could too easily crush delicate samples.

  "Back to your captivating narrative about the beach, Sachs."

  She continued. "Things were heating up by now. The Ghost had been on land for a while. He knew the Coast Guard had a rough idea of his location. He found the third immigrant in the water, John Sung, shot him, then stole the Honda and left." She glanced at Rhyme. "Any word about it?"

  An emergency vehicle locator notice had gone out to all nearby law enforcement agencies. As soon as the stolen red Honda was spotted anywhere in the New York metropolitan area, Sellitto or Dellray would get a call. But there'd been no word, the homicide detective told her. Then added, "The Ghost's been to New York before, though, plenty of times. He'd know the transit system. I'd guess he stuck to back roads west until he got close to the city then dumped the car and took the subway into town. He's got to be here by now."

  Rhyme noticed a frown of concern on the FBI agent's face. "What is it, Fred?"

  "I wish we'da found the prick 'fore he got over the city line."

  "Why?"

  "Reports my people're feeding me're that he's got a nice, tidy network in town. Tongs and street gangs in Chinatown, course. But it's way beyond that--even got people in the government on his 'roll."

  "Government?" Sellitto asked, surprised.

  "What I hear," Dellray said.

  "I believe it," Deng said cynically. "If he's got dozens of officials in China in his pocket, why not here too?"