The Stone Monkey

affected when he’d been portraying John Sung. “You set me up.”
    “Guess we did.”
    Lincoln Rhyme’s call—as they’d been driving through Brooklyn, on their way to the Changs’ real apartment in Owls Head—had been to tell Sachs that he now believed the Ghost was masquerading as John Sung. Another team of INS and NYPD cops was on their way to the Changs’ real apartment to detain them. Sellitto and Eddie Deng were setting up a takedown site at Sellitto’s house, where they could collar him without the risk of bystanders’ getting killed in a shoot-out with the homicidal snakehead and capture any bangshous with him. Rhyme assumed that they would be following Sachs from the safehouse in Chinatown or else would be summoned by the snakehead via cell phone when they arrived at the Changs’.
    As she’d listened to Rhyme’s voice, it had taken all of Sachs’s emotional strength to nod and pretend that Coe was working for the Ghost and that the man who was supposedly her friend, her doctor, the man sitting two feetfrom her and undoubtedly armed, wasn’t the killer they’d been seeking for the past two days.
    She thought too of the acupressure session last night—coming to him with her secret, with her desperate hope of being cured. She shivered with repulsion at the memory of his hands on her back and shoulders. She thought too with horror that she’d actually mentioned to him the location of the safehouse where the Wus were staying when she’d asked him if he wanted to join them.
    The Ghost asked, “How did your friend, this Lincoln Rhyme, know that I wasn’t Sung?”
    She picked up the plastic bag containing the contents of the Ghost’s pockets. Inside were the fragments of the shattered monkey amulet. Sachs held it close to his face.
    “The stone monkey,” she explained. “I found some trace under Sonny Li’s fingernails. It was magnesium silicate, like talc. Rhyme found out that it came from soapstone—which is what the amulet’s carved out of.” Sachs reached out and roughly tugged down Ghost’s turtleneck, revealing the red line from the leather cord. “What happened? He ripped it off your neck and it broke?” She released the cloth and stepped away.
    The Ghost nodded slowly. “Before I shot him he was clawing the ground. I thought he was begging for mercy but then he looked up and smiled at me.”
    So Li had scraped some of the soft stone under his nails intentionally to tell them the Ghost was actually Sung.
    Once Cooper’s report on magnesium silicate told them that the substance might be soapstone Rhyme remembered the contamination on Sachs’s hands yesterday. He realized that it might’ve come from Sung’s amulet. He’d called the officers who’d guarded Sung’s apartment and they’d confirmed that there was a back entrance to theplace, which meant that the Ghost had been able to come and go without their seeing him. He’d also asked if there was a gardening shop near the place—the likely source for the mulch that they’d found—and was told about the florist on the ground floor of the apartment building. Then he checked calls to Sachs’s cell phone; the number of the cell that’d been used to call the Uighur center showed up in her records.
    The real John Sung had been a doctor and the Ghost was not. But, as Sonny Li had told Rhyme, everyone in China knew something about Eastern medicine. What the Ghost had diagnosed about Sachs and the herbs he’d given her were common knowledge among anyone who’d been treated regularly by a Chinese doctor.
    “And your friend from the INS?” the Ghost asked.
    “Coe?” Sachs replied. “We knew he didn’t have any connection with you. But I had to pretend Coe was the spy—we needed to make sure you didn’t think we were on to you. And we needed him out of the way. If he’d found out who you were he might’ve gone after you again—like he did on Canal Street. We wanted a clean takedown. And we didn’t want him to go to jail for killing someone.” Sachs couldn’t resist adding, “Even you.”
    The Ghost merely smiled calmly.
    When she’d handed Coe over to the three cops from the precinct house, she’d explained to him what was going on. The agent, of course, had been shocked to have been sitting inches from the man who’d killed his informant in China and had begun to complain angrily that he wanted to be part of the takedown. But the order to keep him in protective custody had been issued by One Police