Jeffery Deaver - The Stone Monkey

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."