The Stone Monkey

true. Rhyme nodded at a paper bag he carried. “What’ve you got?”
    He dug out a plastic bag containing the bright yellow stick of explosive and tossed it across the room to Sachs.
    She caught it one-handed. “Holy Mother, Fred,” she called.
    “S’only dynamite. And if it din’t go off with a detonator it sure ain’t gonna go bang with a little lob to left field. Hey, Aye-melia, you wanna play softball on the bureau team? That was a good catch.”
    She examined the stick of dynamite.
    “Friction ridges?” Sellitto asked.
    “Wiped clean. No prints.”
    She held it up for Rhyme, who noticed numbers printed on the side.
    “What’d the lot numbers turn up?” he asked Dellray.
    “Nothin’. Our boys said it was too old to trace. ’Nother dead end.”
    “One man’s dead end is another man’s door,” Rhyme said, reminding himself to share this saying, which he’d just made up, with Sonny Li when the Chinese cop returned. “Did they test it for markers?”
    “Nup. Said it was too old for marker additives too.”
    “Probably is. But I want to test it anyway.” He shouted to Mel Cooper, “Get it over to the lab ASAP. I want it analyzed. The works.”
    Chromatography—the analytical process of choice to test the dynamite—usually required that the samples be burned. But Rhyme wasn’t about to set fire to a piece of explosive in his town house. The NYPD lab downtown had special equipment for doing so.
    Mel Cooper called one of his technicians downtown and made arrangements for the test then handed the stick back to Dellray, giving him instructions on where to drop it off.
    “We’ll do what we can, Fred.”
    Then Cooper looked over a second bag Dellray handed him. It contained a Duracell battery, wires and a switch. “All generic, nothing helpful. It’s your tract housing of bombs,” the tech announced. “Detonator?”
    A third bag appeared. Cooper and Rhyme examined what was left of the scorched piece of metal. “Russian, military grade,” Rhyme said.
    A detonator was basically a blasting cap, which contained a core of fulminate of mercury or a similar explosive and wires, which heated up when an electrical charge was sent through them and set off the primer explosive, which in turn set off the main charge.
    There wasn’t much of this one left; it was the only part of the bomb that had actually gone off when Dellray sat on the device. Cooper put it under the compound microscope. “Not much. A Russian letter A and R . Then the numbers one and three.”
    “And nobody’s database has a record of that?”
    “Nope—and we checked ever-body: NYPD, ATF, DEA and Justice.”
    “Well, we’ll see what the lab comes up with.”
    “I owe you, Lincoln.”
    “Pay me back by getting somebody from your shop to work GHOSTKILL, Fred.”
    •   •   •
    Four blocks from the bubble tea house Sonny Li found the address of Mr. Wang, which the woman in red had given him.
    The storefront showed no indication of what the occupant did for a living but in the dusty front window sat a shrine, illuminated by a red lightbulb and sticks of incense long burnt away. The faded letters said, in Chinese, FORTUNES TOLD, TRUTH REVEALED, LUCK PRESERVED .
    Inside, a young Chinese woman behind a desk looked up at Li. On the desk in front of her were both an abacus and a laptop computer. The office was shabby but the diamond Rolex watch on her wrist suggested that the business was successful. She asked if he was here to hire her father to arrange his home or office.
    “I was pleased to see an apartment I believe your father did. Can you tell me if it was his work?”
    “Whose apartment?”
    “It was an acquaintance of another friend, who sadly has gone back to China. I don’t know his name. I do know the address, though.”
    “And that is what?”
    “Five-oh-eight Patrick Henry Street.”
    “No, no,” she said. “My father does not work there. He does no work south of Midtown. Only for uptown people.”
    “But your office is here.”
    “Because people expect it to be here. All of our clients are on the Upper East and Upper West Sides. And only a portion of them are Chinese.”
    “And you don’t live in Chinatown?”
    She laughed. “We live in Greenwich, Connecticut. Do you know it?”
    “No,” he said. Disappointed, Li asked, “Can you tell me who might’ve arranged this apartment. It was very well done.”
    “This friend, he is wealthy?”
    “Yes, very wealthy.”
    “Then I would say Mr.