The Stone Monkey (17 page)

But Wu Qichen made one mistake.

The economic face of China was changing drastically. Economic free zones were prospering and even the top politicos had been speaking favorably of private business—the Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping himself had said, "To be wealthy is glorious." But Wu neglected to remember the first rule of Chinese life: that the CCP—the Chinese Communist Party-runs the show. Wu was bluntly vocal in his call for closer economic ties with Taiwan, ending the iron rice bowl system of guaranteed employment regardless of productivity, and cracking down on party and government officials' taking bribes and levying arbitrary taxes on businesses. Ironically Wu didn't even care about what he advocated; his point was merely to attract the attention of Western trading partners—in Europe and America—who, he dreamed, would come to
him
with money to invest because he was the voice of the new Chinese economy.

But it wasn't the West who listened to the skinny man; it was the cadres and secretaries of the Communist Party. Suddenly governmental inspectors began appearing at the Wus' stores, finding dozens of violations of health and safety codes—many of which they simply made up on the spot. Unable to pay the crushing fines, the brothers were soon broke.

As shamed as he was by his lowered station, though, Wu refused to give up on his goal of becoming rich. And so, seduced by the fat opportunities in the Beautiful Country, Wu Qichen had bundled up his family and risked immigrating illegally. He would become a landlord in Chinatown. He would ride to work in a limousine and—when, finally, he was able to travel back to China—he would walk into the Paradise Hotel and stay in the grandest suite, the penthouse, the very room to which as a young man he had carried hundreds of bags.

No, his dreams had been delayed too long; the Ghost would not drive him from the city of money.

Wu now found a Chinese medicine store. He stepped inside and talked to the herbalist about his wife's condition. The doctor listened carefully and diagnosed deficient
qi
—the life spirit—and obstructed blood, both of which were aggravated by excessive cold. He put together a bundle of herbs for Wu, who reluctantly paid the huge bill of eighteen dollars, furious once again that he'd been taken advantage of.

Leaving the herbalist, he continued down the street to a Chinese grocery store. He stepped inside quickly, before his courage broke, found a basket and grabbed some groceries he didn't need. He swooped past the drug section, picking up a box of women's pads for his daughter. He walked quickly to the counter and kept his eyes on a glass container of ginseng root throughout the entire transaction. The gray-haired woman rang up the purchase and, though she didn't smile or call attention to his purchase, Wu knew she was laughing at him. He left the store with his head down and his face as red as the Chinese flag.

Wu turned in the direction of his apartment but after five minutes of fast walking he slowed and began meandering through the side streets. He was concerned about his wife, of course, and about leaving his children but, gods of heaven, this day had been a nightmare. He'd nearly been killed in a shipwreck, he'd lost all his possessions, had been cheated by Jimmy Mah and the real estate broker. And, worst of all, he'd endured the shame and humiliation of buying what was in the bag in his hand right now. He decided that he needed some diversion, some male companionship.

It took only a few minutes to find what he'd sought: A Fujianese gambling den. After showing his money to the guard in front he was admitted.

He sat silently for a time, playing thirteen points, smoking and drinking some
baijiu.
He won a little money and began to feel better. Another cup of the powerful, clear spirits, then another and finally he relaxed—making sure, though, that the grocery bag was completely hidden beneath his chair.

Eventually he struck up a conversation with the men around him and from the thirty dollars he won—a huge sum to him—he bought them drinks. Drunk and in good humor, he told a joke and a number of the men laughed hard. With the conspiratorial tone of men alone they all shared stories of disobedient wives and disrespectful children, the places they now lived and what jobs they had—or were seeking.

Wu lifted his cup. "Here is to Zai Chen," he announced drunkenly. This was the god of wealth and one of the most revered throughout China. Wu believed that he had a special connection with this folk deity.

The men all tossed back their drinks.

"You're new here," an old man said. "When did you come over?"

Pleased that he had the spotlight among his equals, Wu bragged in a whisper, "Just this morning. On the ship that sank."

"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, Thorn," Rhyme called. And the aide wrote.

Before he was finished Mel Coopers 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.

"Whatcha see, Lincoln?" Dellray asked.

Rhyme said nothing to the agent but, wheeling close to the screen, ordered, "Command, cursor down ... stop. Cursor left... stop." The arrow of the cursor on the screen stopped on a line—an indentation on the pad of the index finger of Chang's right hand. There were similar ones on his middle finger and his thumb—as if Chang had been tightly gripping a thin cord.

"What is that?" Rhyme wondered aloud.

"Callus? A scar?" Eddie Deng offered.

Mel Cooper offered, "Never seen that before."

"Maybe it's a cut or wound of some kind."

"Maybe a rope burn," Sachs suggested.

"No, that'd be a blister. It must be a wound of some kind. Did you see any scars on Changs hands?" Rhyme asked Li.

"No. I not see."

Indentations, calluses and scars on fingers and palms can be revealing about the professions or hobbies of the people who leave the prints—or on the actual fingers themselves in the case of suspects or victims. These are less useful nowadays where the only physical skill required by so many professions is keyboarding or jotting notes. Still, people who are in the manual trades, for instance, or who play certain sports frequently develop distinctive markings on their hands.

Rhyme had no idea what this pattern meant but some additional information might reveal that. He instructed Thorn to write the observation down on the board. He then took a call from Special Agent Tobe Geller, one of the FBI's computer and electronics gurus, presently assigned to the Manhattan office. He'd completed his analysis of the Ghost's cell phone, which Sachs had found in the second raft at Easton Beach. The criminalist transferred the call to the speakerphone and a moment later Geller's animated voice said, "Now, let me tell you, this is an
excessively
interesting phone."