The Stone Monkey

the desire to drop to her knees and grip the man’s hand. She’d walked the grid many times in the years she’d worked with Rhyme, but this was her first scene involving a fellow cop—fellow cop and, she could now say, friend.
    A friend too of Rhyme’s.
    Still, she resisted the temptation toward sentiment. This was, after all, a crime scene no different from any other and, as Lincoln Rhyme often pointed out, one of the worst contaminants at scenes was careless cops.
    Look past it, ignore who the victim is. Remember Rhyme’s advice: Give up the dead.
    Well, that’d be damn tough to do. For both of them. But for Lincoln Rhyme especially. Sachs had noticed that in the past two days Rhyme had formed an improbable bond with this man, as close as he’d come to a friendship since she’d known him. She was now aware of the painful silence of a thousand conversations never to occur, of a thousand laughs never to be shared.
    But then she thought of someone else: Po-Yee, soon to be another victim of the man who’d committed this crime, if they didn’t find him. And so Sachs put the pain away, the same way she closed and locked the storage box in which her Colt .45 competition shooting pistol rested.
    “We did what you wanted,” said another officer, a detective in a gray suit. “Nobody got closer’n this. Only the EMS tech was in.” A nod toward the body. “He’s DCDS.”
    Cop initials perfunctorily signifying the category of lifelessness: deceased confirmed dead at the scene.
    Agent Coe walked slowly up to her. “I’m sorry,” the agent said, running his hand through his scarlet hair. There seemed to be little genuine sadness in his voice, however.
    “Yeah.”
    “He was a good man.”
    “Yes, he was.” She said this bitterly, thinking: And he was a hell of a better cop than you are. If you hadn’t fucked up yesterday we’d’ve gotten the Ghost. Sonny would still be alive and Po-Yee and the Changs would be safe.
    She motioned to the cops. “I’ve got to run the scene. Could I have everybody out of here?”
    Oh, man, she thought, dismayed at what she now had to do—though she was anticipating not the difficult and sad task of searching the scene but something far more arduous.
    She pulled her headset on and plugged it into her radio.
    Okay. Just go ahead. Do it.
    She made the call to Central and was patched through to the phone.
    A click.
    “Yes?” Rhyme asked.
    She said, “I’m here.”
    A pause then: “And?”
    She sensed him trying to keep hope out of his voice.
    “He’s dead.”
    The criminalist gave no response for a moment. “I see.”
    “I’m sorry, Lincoln,” she said softly.
    Another pause and he said, “No first names, Sachs. Badluck, remember?” His voice nearly caught. “All right. Get going. Run the scene. Time’s running out for the Changs.”
    “Sure, Rhyme. I’m on it.”
    She quickly dressed in the Tyvek suit and went about processing the scene. Sachs did the fingernail scrapings, the substance samples, the ballistics, the footprints, the shell casings, the slugs. She took the pictures, she lifted prints.
    But she felt she was just going through the motions. Come on, she snapped at herself. You’re acting like you’re some damn rookie. We don’t have time to just collect evidence. Think about Po-Yee, think about the Changs. Give Rhyme something he can work with. Think!
    She turned back to the body and processed it more carefully, considering everything that she found, demanding in her mind that every bit of evidence explain itself, offer an explanation of where it had come from, what it might mean.
    One of the uniformed officers walked up to her but seeing her stony face he retreated quickly.
    A half hour later she’d finished bagging everything, written her name on the chain of custody cards and assembled the evidence.
    She made another call to the criminalist.
    “Go ahead,” Rhyme said grimly. How it hurt to hear the pain in his voice. For years she’d heard so much flat emotion, so much lethargy, so much resignation. That had been tough but it didn’t compare to the pain now in Rhyme’s voice.
    “He was shot three times in the chest but we’ve got four casings. One casing’s from a Model 51, probably the one we saw before. The others are .45. He was killed with that one, it looks like. Then I found the Walther that Sonny wascarrying. There was trace on his leg—yellow paper flecks and some kind of dried plant material. And there was a pile of the