Jeffery Deaver - The Stone Monkey

"The Fuzhou Dragon?" one man asked, his eyebrow raised. "It was on the news. They said the seas were terrible."

"Ah," Wu said, "the waves were fifteen meters high! The snakehead tried to kill us all but I got a dozen people out of the hold. And then I had to swim underwater to cut a life raft off the deck. I nearly drowned. But I managed to get us to shore."

"You did that yourself?"

He looked down sadly. "I couldn't save them all. But I tried."

Another asked him, "Is your family all right?"

"Yes," Wu answered drunkenly.

"Are you in the neighborhood?"

"Up the street."

"What is the Ghost like?" one man asked.

"He's all bluff. And a coward. He's never without a gun. If he'd put it aside and fought like a man – with a knife – I could have killed him easily."

Then Wu fell silent as Sam Chang's words began to echo in his mind. He realized he probably should not be saying these things. He changed the subject. "Can someone tell me? There's a statue I want to see. Maybe you can tell me where it is."

The man nearest Wu asked, "Statue? Which one? There are statues everywhere here."

"It's very famous. It's of a woman and she's holding her accounts."

"Accounts?" another man asked.

"Yes," Wu explained. "You see her in movies about the Beautiful Country. She's on an island somewhere, holding a lantern in one hand and a book of her business accounts in the other. She's holding the torch so she can read her register at any time of the night or day and see how much money she has. Is that here in New York?"

"Yes, she's here," one man said but he began laughing. Several of the others did too. Wu joined in though he had no idea what was so funny.

"You go down to a place called Battery Park and take a boat out to see the statue."

"I will do that."

Another man laughed. "To the lady of accounts." They all emptied their glasses and resumed the game.

Amelia Sachs returned from the witness's apartment in Chinatown and Rhyme was amused to see the harsh look with which she studied Sonny Li when he announced with consummate pride that he was a "detective with public security bureau in People's Republic of China."

"You don't say," she responded coolly.

Sellitto explained to her about the Chinese cop's presence.

"You check him out?" she asked, closely studying the man, who was nearly a foot shorter than she.

Li spoke before the detective could. "They checked me out good, Hongse. I'm clean."

"Hoankseh? What the hell's that?" she barked.

He held up his hands defensively. "Means 'red.' Only that. Nothing bad. Your hair, I'm saying. I saw you on beach, saw your hair." Rhyme believed that there was the dabbling of a flirt in his crooked-tooth smile.

Eddie Deng confirmed that the word meant only the color; there was no secondary, derogatory meaning to it.

"He's okay, Amelia," Dellray confirmed.

"Though he oughta be in a holding cell," Coe muttered.

Sachs shrugged and turned to the Chinese cop. "What'd you mean about the beach? You were spying on me?"

"Not say anything then. Afraid you send me back. Wanted chance to get Ghost too."

Sachs rolled her eyes.

"Wait, Hongse, here." He held out some crumpled dollars.

She frowned. "What's that?"

"On beach, your bag, I'm saying. I need money. I borrow it."

Sachs looked into her purse, snapped it shut loudly. "Jesus Christ." A glance at Sellitto. "Can I collar him now?"

"No, no, I am paying back. Not thief. Here. Look, all there. Ten dollar extra even."

"Ten extra? "

"Interest, I'm saying."

"Where'd you get it?" she asked cynically. "I mean, who'd you steal this from?"

"No, no, it okay."

"Well, there's a defense for you. 'It's okay.'" Sachs sighed, took the money and handed back the questionable ten.

She then told the team what the witness – John Sung – had said. Rhyme relaxed a bit more about his decision to keep Sonny Li when he heard that Sung confirmed the information Li had given them, bolstering the Chinese cop's credibility. He was troubled, though, when Sachs mentioned John Sung's story about the captain's assessment of the Ghost.

"'Break the cauldrons and sink the boats,'" she said, explaining the meaning of the expression.

"To fu chen zhou,'" Li said, nodding grimly. "That describe Ghost good. Never relax or retreat until you win."

Sachs then began to help Mel Cooper log in the evidence from the van, cataloging it and carefully filling out chain of custody cards to show at trial that the evidence was accounted for and hadn't been tampered with. She was bagging the bloody rag she'd found in the van when Cooper looked at the sheet of newsprint on the table underneath the bag she was holding. He frowned. The tech pulled on latex gloves and extracted the bloody rag from the plastic. Using a magnifying glass, he looked it over carefully.

"This's odd, Lincoln," Cooper said.

"'Odd'? What does odd mean? Give me details, give me anomalies. Give me specifics!"

"I missed these fragments. Look." He held the cloth over a large sheet of newsprint and caressed it carefully with a brush.

Rhyme couldn't see anything.

"Some kind of porous stone," Cooper said, leaning over the sheet with a magnifying glass. "How could I miss it?" The tech seemed disheartened.

Where had the fragments come from? Had they been embedded in a fold? What were they?

"Oh, hell," Sachs muttered, looking at her hands.

"What?" Rhyme asked.

Blushing, she held up her fingers. "That was from me. I picked it up without gloves."

"Without gloves?" Rhyme asked, an edge in his voice. This was a serious error by a crime scene tech. Apart from the fact that the rag contained blood, which might be tainted with HIV or hepatitis, she'd contaminated the evidence. As head of the forensic unit at the NYPD, Lincoln Rhyme had fired people for this type of lapse.

"I'm sorry," Sachs said. "I know what it's from. John… Dr. Sung was showing me this amulet he wore. It was chipped and I guess I picked at it with my nail."

"Are you sure that's it?" Rhyme demanded.

Li nodded and said, "I remember… Sung let children on Fuzhou Dragon play with it. Qingtian soapstone. Worth some money, I'm saying. Good luck." He added, "It was of Monkey. Very famous in China."

Eddie Deng nodded. "Sure, the Monkey King… He was a mythological figure. My father'd read me stories about him."

But Rhyme wasn't interested in any myths. He was trying to catch a killer and save some lives.

And trying to figure out why Sachs had made a mistake of this magnitude.

A rookie's mistake.

The mistake of someone who's distracted. And what exactly is on her mind? he wondered.

"Throw out the -" he began.

"I'm sorry," she repeated.

"Throw out that top sheet of newsprint," Rhyme said evenly. "Let's move on."

As the tech tore off the sheet of paper his computer beeped. "Incoming." He read the screen. "Okay, we've got the blood types back. All samples're from the same person – presumably from the injured woman. It's type AB negative and the Barr Body test confirms that it's a woman's blood."

"Up on the wall, Thom," Rhyme called. And the aide wrote.

Before he was finished Mel Cooper's computer summoned them again. "It's the AFIS search results."

They were discouraged to find that the search of the fingerprints Sachs had collected came back negative. But as he examined the prints, which were digitized and sitting on the screen in front of them, Rhyme observed something unusual about the clearest prints they'd lifted – from the pipe used to break into the van. They knew these were the prints of Sam Chang because they matched a few lifted from the outboard motor and Li had confirmed that Chang had piloted the raft to shore. "Look at those lines," he said.