The Stone Monkey

lobby with more ESU officers. “We’ve sealed all the exits,” he said.
    Sachs nodded. “What floor?” she asked the elderly woman.
    “I was on nineteen. West wing. They seemed awfully close.”
    A young man in a business suit had joined them. “No,no, no,” he said. “I’m sure they were from fifteen. South. Not west.”
    “You sure?” Haumann asked.
    “Absolutely.”
    “I don’t think so,” the woman offered in gentle disagreement. “They were higher. And it was definitely the west wing of the building.”
    “Great,” Haumann muttered. “Well, we’ve gotta move. We could have injureds. We’ll search everywhere.”
    Sachs’s Motorola clattered again. “Central to Crime Scene Five Eight Eight Five.”
    “Go ahead, Central.”
    “Landline patch.”
    “Go ahead, K.”
    “Sachs, are you there?” Lincoln Rhyme’s voice said.
    “Yeah, go ahead. I’m here with Lon and Bo and ESU.”
    “Listen,” the criminalist said, “I’ve been talking to dispatch and correlating the reports from the people in the building who called nine-one-one. It looks like the shots came from either the eighteenth or nineteenth floors, somewhere in the middle of the west side of the building.”
    The speaker was a squawk box, not a headset; anyone nearby could hear the transmission. “Okay, you all hear that?” Haumann asked his officers.
    They nodded.
    “We’re going to sweep, Rhyme,” she said. “I’ll call you back.”
    Haumann divided his officers into three teams, one for each floor—eighteen and nineteen—and one to divide up further and sweep the stairwells.
    Sachs noticed Coe nearby. He was checking his own pistol—the large Glock with which he was a proven bad shot—and had sidled over to one of the ESU teams. Shewhispered to Haumann, “Keep him off the entry. He’s trouble in a tac situation.”
    Sachs had some credibility with the head of ESU—he’d seen her under fire—and Haumann agreed. He walked over to Coe and spoke with him. Sachs didn’t hear the exchange but since this was an NYPD operation, Haumann must’ve pulled jurisdictional rank and ordered the agent to stand down. After a moment of heated discussion, the INS agent’s face was nearly as red as his hair. But Haumann had never lost the will—and demeanor—of the drill sergeant he had once been and Coe soon gave up his futile protests. He turned away and stormed out the front door, pulling out his cell phone, undoubtedly to lodge a protest with Peabody or somebody at the Federal Building.
    The ESU head left a small team to guard the lobby then he, Sachs and a group of officers stepped into one of the elevators and started up to the eighteenth floor.
    They crowded away from the door when it opened and one officer looked out with a metal mirror attached to a wand. “Clear.”
    Out they stepped, moving cautiously along the carpet, trying to remain quiet though their equipment rang like mountain climbers’.
    Haumann gave the hand signals that meant to spread out. Two officers, armed with MP5 machine guns, joined Sachs and together they deployed to start the search. Bracketed by the two large cops, machine guns ready, Sachs picked a door and knocked.
    There was an odd sound from inside, a faint clunk, as if something heavy was being set down next to the door. She glanced at the ESU officers, who leveled their weapons at the doorway. With a satisfying zip of Velcro, Sachs drew her pistol from her holster and stood back slightly.
    Another clunk from inside, a scraping of metal.
    What the hell was that noise?
    A chain rattled.
    Sachs put a few pounds of nervous pressure on the trigger guard of her weapon, though not on the trigger itself, and tensed as the door opened.
    A tiny, gray-haired woman looked up at them. “You’re the police,” she said. “You’re here about those firecrackers I complained about.” She stared at the large machine guns the ESU officers carried. “Oh. Well. Look at this.”
    “That’s right, ma’am,” Sachs said, noticing that the clunking sound had been a stool, which the woman had apparently set on the floor to be able to look out through the security peephole.
    She grew wary. “But you wouldn’t have those guns if they were just firecrackers, right?”
    “We’re not sure what they were, ma’am. We’re trying to find out where the sounds came from.”
    “I think it’s 18K, up the hall. That’s why I thought they were firecrackers—because an Oriental man lives there. Or Asian, or