The Stone Monkey

cut in the side from the rifling. “It’s a forty-five ACP. Octagonal profile on the lands and grooves, right-hand twist. I’m guessing one complete twist every fifteen, sixteen inches. I’ll look that up and—”
    “Don’t bother,” Rhyme said shortly. “It’s a Glock.” The unsexy but dependable Austrian pistols were increasingly popular throughout the world, among criminals and police alike. “What’s the wear on the barrel?”
    “Sharp profile.”
    “So it’s new. Probably the G36.” He was surprised. This compact but extremely powerful handgun was expensive and wasn’t widely available yet. In the United States you found it mostly among federal agents.
    Useful, useful? he wondered.
    Not yet. All it told them was the type of gun, not where the weapon or the ammunition had been purchased. Still, it was evidence and it belonged on the board.
    “Thom  . . . Thom!” Rhyme shouted. “We need you!”
    The aide appeared immediately. “There’re other things I need—”
    “No,” Rhyme said. “There aren’t other things. Write.”
    The aide must have sensed Rhyme’s despondency over the death of Sonny Li and said nothing in response to the sharp command. He picked up the marker and walked to the whiteboard.
    Cooper then opened Li’s clothes over a large sheet of clean, blank newsprint. He dusted the items of clothing with a brush and examined the trace that had fallen onto the paper. “Dirt, flecks of paint, the yellow paper particles that probably were from the bag and the dried plant material—spices or herbs—that Amelia mentioned,” Cooper said.
    “She’s checking out the plant stuff right now. Just bag them and put them aside for the time being.” Rhyme, who over the years had grown immune to the horror of crime scenes, nonetheless felt a pang as he looked at the dark blood on Li’s clothing. The same clothing he’d worn in this very room not long ago.
    Zaijian, Sonny. Goodbye.
    “Fingernail scrapings,” Cooper announced, examining the label on another plastic bag. He mounted the trace on a slide in the compound microscope.
    “Project it, Mel,” Rhyme said and turned to the computer screen. A moment later a clear image appeared on the large flat screen. What do we have here, Sonny? You fought with the Ghost, you grabbed him. Was there anything on his clothes or shoes that was transferred to you?
    And if so, will it send us to his front door?
    “Tobacco,” the criminalist said, laughing sadly, thinking of the cop’s addiction to cigarettes. “What else do we see? What are those minerals there? What do you think, Mel? Silicates?”
    “Looks like it. Let’s run some through the GC/MS.”
    The gas chromatograph/mass spectrometer would determine exactly what the substance was. Soon the results came back—magnesium and silicate.
    “That’s talc, right?”
    “Yep.”
    The criminalist knew that talcum powder was commonly used by some people as a deodorant, by workers who wore tight-fitting rubber gloves for protection and by those who engaged in certain sexual practices using latex clothing. “Go online and find out everything you can about talc and magnesium silicate.”
    “Will do.”
    As Cooper was typing madly, Rhyme’s phone rang. Thom answered it and put the call on the speaker.
    “Hello?” he asked.
    “Mr . . . . Rhymes please.”
    “Rhyme is the name, yes. Who’s this?”
    “Dr. Arthur Winslow at Huntington Medical Center.”
    “Yes, Doctor?”
    “There’s a patient here, a Chinese man. His name is Sen. He was medevaced to us after the Coast Guard rescued him from a sunken ship off the North Shore.”
    Not exactly the Coast Guard, Rhyme thought. But he said, “Go ahead.”
    “We were told to contact you with any news about him.”
    “That’s right.”
    “Well, I think there’s something you ought to know.”
    “And what would that be?” Rhyme asked slowly, though his meaning was really: Get to the point.
    •   •   •
    He sipped the bitter coffee even though he hated it.
    Seventeen-year-old William Chang sat in the back of the Starbucks not far from the family’s apartment in Brooklyn. He wanted Po-nee tea—made the way his mother prepared it, brewed in an old iron pot—but he kept drinking the coffee as if he were addicted to the muddy, sour drink. Because that is what the pompadoured ba-tu across from him was now sipping; for William to drink tea would seem like a weakness.
    Wearing the same black leather jacket he’d been