Jeffery Deaver - The Stone Monkey

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 the 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 other 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 snake-head wasn't in any hurry to leave, he took off."

"So he got abandoned," Sellitto observed.