The Stone Monkey

close to one of the plants.
    “Can we search house by house near the treatment plants?” Sellitto asked.
    Rhyme shook his head. There were a number of treatment plants in Queens and given the fickle winds in the New York City area, the Changs could be living in a several block radius around any of them. Without narrowing the search down further—by finding the print shop where Sam Chang would be working, say—a door-to-door search would take forever.
    The rest of the evidence didn’t help much. The morphine that the man had killed himself with had come from a clinic in China and therefore was of no use to them forensically.
    “Morphine can kill you?” Sellitto asked.
    “The rumor is that’s how the writer Jack London killed himself,” pointed out Lincoln Rhyme, whose knowledge of suicide techniques was as extensive as his command of historical criminal trivia. “Besides, in the right dosage, anything can kill you.”
    Sachs then added that the old man had no subway transfers or other receipts on him to suggest where he might’ve come from.
    But, Rhyme was soon reminded, Amelia Sachs was not the only cop to have run the crime scene in the Ghost’s high-rise.
    Sonny Li said, “Hey, Loaban, I found things too when I search Ghost’s place. You want to hear?”
    “Go ahead.”
    “Got some good stuff, I’m saying. Okay, there a statue of the Buddha across from door, facing it. No stereos or redcolor in his bedroom. Hallway painted white. Bookcases had doors on them. Had statue of eight horses. All mirrors very tall so they not cut off part of head when you look in them. Had brass bells with wooden handles—he keep them in western part of room.” He nodded at the apparent significance of this. “Figure it out, Loaban?”
    “No,” Rhyme snapped. “Keep going.”
    Li patted his shirt for his cigarettes then let his arms fall to his side. “Over my desk at security bureau office in Liu Guoyuan I got sign.”
    “Another expression?”
    “ Ju yi fan san . It mean: Learning three things from one example. From Confucius saying: ‘If I show man corner of object and he not able to figure out what other three corners look like, then I not bother to teach him again.’”
    Not a bad motto for a forensic detective, Rhyme reflected. “And you deduced something helpful, something we can use from a statue of eight horses and brass bells?”
    “Feng shui, I’m saying.”
    “Arranging furniture and things for good luck,” Thom said. When Rhyme glanced at him he added, “It was on a show on the Home and Garden Channel. Don’t worry—I watched it on my own time.”
    Impatient Rhyme said, “So he lives in a good-luck apartment, Li. What’s the evidentiary point?”
    “Hey, congratulations, Sonny,” Thom said. “You got the last-name treatment. He saves that for his really good friends. Note that I’m only ‘Thom.’”
    “Speaking of which, Thom, I believe you’re here merely to write. Not to editorialize.”
    “The point, Loaban? Pretty clear to me,” Li continued.“The Ghost hire somebody to arrange his room and guy he hire do fuck good job. Know his stuff. Maybe know other places the Ghost has apartments.”
    “Okay,” Rhyme said. “That’s useful.”
    “I go check feng shui men in Chinatown. What you think?”
    Rhyme caught Sachs’s eye and they laughed. “I need to write a new criminalistics textbook. This time I’ll add a woo-woo chapter.”
    “Hey, know what our leader Deng Xiaoping say. He say it not matter if cat black or white, so long as it catches mouse.”
    “Well, go catch yourself a mouse, Li. Then come on back here. I need some more baijiu. Oh, and Sonny?”
    The Chinese cop glanced at him.
    “Zaijian.” Rhyme carefully pronounced the word he’d learned on a Chinese language translation website.
    Li nodded. “‘Goodbye.’ Yes, yes. You even pronounce good, Loaban. Zaijian.”
    The Chinese cop left and they returned to the evidence. But the team made no headway and an hour went by without any word from the officers who were canvassing the quick-print shops in Queens.
    Rhyme stretched his head back into the pillow. He and Sachs gazed at the charts, Rhyme feeling a too-familiar sensation: the desperate hope that evidence long picked over would yield just one more nugget even though you knew there was nothing else for it to reveal.
    “Should I talk to the Wus again, or John Sung?” she asked.
    “We don’t need more witnesses,” Rhyme murmured. “We need more