The Stone Monkey

land. And sped away from the limp corpses and the flotsam that were like floating tombstones marking the graves of Captain Sen and his crew and the many people who’d become Chang’s friends over the past weeks.
    •   •   •
    “He scuttled the ship.”
    Lon Sellitto’s voice was a whisper. “Christ.” The phone dropped away from his ear.
    “What?” Harold Peabody said, shocked. A fat hand rose to his cumbersome glasses and removed them. “He sank it?”
    The detective nodded a grim confirmation.
    “Lord, no,” Dellray said.
    Lincoln Rhyme’s head, one of the few parts of his physique that was still mobile, turned toward the heavyset cop. Shocked at this news, he felt a wave of heat pass through his entire body—solely an emotional sensation, of course, when it sped below his neck.
    Dellray stopped pacing and Peabody and Coe stared at each other. Sellitto looked down at the yellow parquet ashe listened once more into the phone and then looked up. “Jesus, Linc, the ship’s gone. With everybody on board.”
    Oh, no . . .
    “The Coast Guard doesn’t know exactly what happened but they picked up an underwater explosion and ten minutes later the Dragon vanished from the radar.”
    “Casualties?” Dellray asked.
    “No idea. The cutter’s still a few miles away. And they don’t know the location—nobody on board the Dragon hit any emergency distress signals. They send out the exact coordinates.”
    Rhyme stared at the map of Long Island, its eastern end split like a fishtail. His eye was on a red sticker that marked the Dragon ’s approximate location. “How far offshore?”
    “About a mile.”
    Rhyme’s sweeping mind had run through a half-dozen logical scenarios of what might happen when the Coast Guard interdicted the Fuzhou Dragon, some optimistic, others involving some injury and the loss of life. Criminal apprehension was a trade-off and you could minimize the risks but never completely eliminate them. But drowning everyone on board? All those families and children? No, that thought had never occurred to him.
    Christ, he’d lain in his luxurious $3000 bed and listened to the INS’s little problem of the Ghost’s whereabouts as if it were a diverting game at a cocktail party. Then he’d drawn his conclusions and snappily given them the solution.
    And he’d let it go at that—never thinking one step further, never thinking that the immigrants might be at such terrible risk.
    Illegals’re called “the vanished”—if they try to cheat a snakehead, they’re killed. If they complain, they’re killed. They just disappear. Forever.
    Lincoln Rhyme was furious with himself. He knew how dangerous the Ghost was; he should have anticipated this deadly turn. He closed his eyes momentarily and adjusted the burden somewhere in his soul. Give up the dead, he often told himself—and the CS techs who’d worked for him—and he reiterated this command silently now. But he couldn’t quite give them up, not these poor people. The sinking of the Dragon was different. These dead weren’t corpses at a crime scene, whose glassy eyes and rictus grin you learned to ignore in order to do your job. Here were whole families dead because of him.
    After they’d interdicted the ship, arrested the Ghost and run the crime scene, his involvement in the case would end, Rhyme had thought, and he’d get back to preparing for his surgery. But now he knew he couldn’t abandon the case. The hunter within him had to find this man and bring him to justice.
    Dellray’s phone rang and he answered. After a brief conversation he snapped off the call with a long finger.
    “Here’sa deal. The Coast Guard thinks a coupla motorized rafts’re heading toward shore.” He stalked to the map and pointed. “Prob’ly around here. Easton—little town on the road to Orient Point. They can’t get a chopper in the air with the storm being’s nasty as it is but they got some cutters on the way to look for survivors and we’re going to get our people at Port Jefferson out to where the rafts’re headed.”
    Alan Coe brushed his red hair, only slightly darker than Sachs’s, and said to Peabody, “I want to go out there.”
    The INS supervisor replied pointedly, “I’m not making personnel decisions around here.” A none-too-subtle comment about the fact that Dellray and the FBI were running the show, one of many such barbs that had been exchanged between the two agents over the past few days.
    “How ’bout