The Stone Monkey

still unaccounted for. He could’ve gotten to shore in another raft. Or he might’ve been in the wrecked one.”
    Her hand near her weapon, she scanned the scenery. Fog-bleached forms of rocks and dunes and brush surrounded her. A man with a gun would be invisible.
    Then she said, “We’re going to look for the immigrants, Rhyme.”
    She expected him to disagree, to tell her to run the scene first, before the raging elements destroyed all the evidence. But he said simply, “Good luck, Sachs. Call me back when you start on the grid.” The line went dead.
    Search well but watch your back. . . .
    The two officers trotted along the beach. They came across a second raft, a smaller one, beached a hundred yards from the first. Sachs’s instinctive reaction was to search it for evidence but she stayed true to her immediate mission and, arthritis stabbing her joints, ran with the wind at her back as she scanned the landscape for the immigrants—and signs of an ambush or a hidey-hole where the Ghost might’ve gone to ground.
    They found neither.
    Then she heard sirens in the distance, carried on the streaming wind, and saw the carnival of emergency vehicles speed into town. The dozen or so residents who’d been ensconced in the restaurant and gas station now braved the weather to find out exactly what kind of excitement the storm had brought to their miniature town.
    The first mission of a crime scene officer is controlling the scene—so that contamination is minimal and evidence doesn’t vanish, either accidentally or at the handsof souvenir hunters or the perp himself, masquerading as a bystander. Sachs reluctantly gave up her search for other immigrants and crew—there were plenty of other people to do that now—and ran to the NYPD blue-and-white crime scene bus to direct the operation.
    As the CS techs roped off the beach with yellow tape, Sachs pulled the latest in forensic couture over her soaked jeans and T-shirt. The NYPD’s new crime scene overalls, a hooded full-body suit made of white Tyvek, prevented the searcher from sloughing off his or her own trace evidence—hair, skin or sweat, for instance—and contaminating the scene.
    Lincoln Rhyme approved of the suit—he’d lobbied for something similar when he’d been running the Investigation and Resources Division, which oversaw Crime Scene. Sachs wasn’t so pleased, however. The fact that the overalls made her look like an alien from a bad space movie wasn’t the problem; what troubled her was that it was brilliant white—easily spotted by any perps who, for whatever reason, might wish to hang around the crime scene and try out their marksmanship on cops picking up evidence. Hence, Sachs’s pet name for the garb: “the bull’s-eye suit.”
    A brief canvass of the patrons in the restaurant, employees of the gas station and residents living in the few houses on the beach yielded nothing except facts they’d already learned about the Honda in which the Ghost had escaped. No other vehicles had been stolen and no one had seen anybody swimming to shore or hiding out on land or even heard the gunshots over the wind and rain.
    So it fell exclusively to Amelia Sachs—and Lincoln Rhyme—to wring from the crime scene whatever informationabout the Ghost, the crew and the immigrants might reside here.
    And what a crime scene it was, one of the biggest they’d ever run: a mile of beach, a road and, on the other side of the asphalt strip, a maze of scruffy brush. Millions of places to search. And possibly still populated by an armed perp.
    “It’s a bad scene, Rhyme. The rain’s let up a little but it’s still coming down hard and the wind’s twenty miles an hour.”
    “I know. We’ve got the Weather Channel on.” His voice was different now, calmer. The sound spooked her a bit. It reminded her of the eerily placid quality of his voice when he talked about endings, about killing himself, about finality. “All the more reason,” he prodded, “to get on with the search, wouldn’t you say?”
    She looked up and down the beach. “It’s just . . . Everything’s too big. There’s too much here.”
    “How can it be too big, Sachs? We work every scene one foot at a time. Doesn’t matter if it’s a square mile or three feet. It just takes longer. Besides, we love big scenes. There’re so many wonderful places to find clues.”
    Wonderful, she thought wryly.
    And, starting closest to the large deflated raft, she began walking the grid.