The Stone Monkey

some free time,” she said. “Went for a swim. Hi, Mel.”
    “Amelia,” Cooper said, shoving his glasses higher on his nose. He blinked at her appearance.
    Rhyme noted with eager anticipation what she carried: a gray milk crate, filled with plastic and paper bags. Shehanded the evidence to Cooper and started for the stairs, calling, “Back in five.”
    A moment later Rhyme heard the shower running and, indeed, five minutes after she’d left, she was back, wearing some of the clothes she kept in his bedroom closet: blue jeans and a black T-shirt, running shoes.
    Wearing rubber gloves, Cooper was laying the bags out, organizing them according to the scenes—the beach and the van in Chinatown. Rhyme gazed at the evidence and felt—in his temples, not his numb chest—a quickening of his heart, the breathtaking excitement of a hunt that was about to begin. Indifferent toward sports and athletics, Rhyme nonetheless supposed that this edgy exhilaration was what ski racers, for instance, felt when they stood at the top of a run, looking down the mountain. Would they win? Would the course defeat them? Would they make a tactical mistake and lose by a fraction of a second? Would they be injured or die?
    “Okay,” he said. “Let’s get to it.” He looked around the room. “Thom? Thom! Where is he? He was here a minute ago. Thom!”
    “What, Lincoln?” The harried aide appeared in the doorway, with a pan and dish towel in hand.
    “Be our scribe  . . . write our pithy insights down”—a nod at the whiteboard—“in that elegant handwriting of yours.”
    “Yes, bwana.” Thom started back to the kitchen.
    “No, no, just leave it,” Rhyme groused. “Write!”
    Sighing, Thom set down the pan and wiped his hands on the towel. He tucked his purple tie into his shirt to protect it from the marker and walked to the whiteboard. He’d been an unofficial member of several forensic teams here and he knew the drill. He now asked Dellray, “You have a name for the case yet?”
    The FBI always named major investigations with acronymlike variations of the key words describing the case—like ABSCAM. Dellray pinched the cigarette that rested behind his ear. He said, “Nup. Nothing yet. But less just do it ourselves and make Washington live with it. How ’bout the name of our boy? GHOSTKILL. That good enough for ever-body? That spooky enough?”
    “Plenty spooky,” Sellitto agreed though with the tone of someone who was rarely spooked.
    Thom wrote this at the top of the whiteboard and turned back to the law enforcers.
    Rhyme said, “We’ve got two scenes: the beach in Easton and the van. The beach first.”
    As Thom was writing the heading Dellray’s phone rang and he took the call. After a brief conversation he hung up and told the team what he’d just learned: “No other survivors so far,” he said. “And the Coast Guard hasn’t found the ship. But they did recover some bodies out to sea. Two shot, one drowned. ID on one of them had merchant papers. Nothing on the other two. They’re sending prints and pictures to us and copies to China.”
    “He even killed the crew?” Eddie Deng asked in disbelief.
    “What do you expect?” Coe responded. “You know him by now. You think he’d leave a single witness alive?” A grim laugh. “Besides, with the crew dead he won’t have to pay the balance due for chartering the boat. And back in China he’ll probably claim that the Coast Guard fired on them and sank the Dragon .”
    But Rhyme had no time for anger at the Ghost or for dismay at the cruel potential of the human heart. “Okay, Sachs,” he said curtly. “The beach. Tell us what happened.”
    She leaned against a lab table and consulted her notes.“Fourteen people came ashore in a life raft about a half mile east of Easton, on the road to Orient Point.” She walked to the wall and touched a spot on the Long Island map. “Near the Horton Point lighthouse. As they got closer to shore the raft hit some rocks and started to deflate. Four of the immigrants were thrown into the water and were washed down the beach. The other ten stayed together. They stole the church van and got away.”
    “Photos of the footprints?” Rhyme asked.
    “Here you go,” Sachs said, handing Thom an envelope. He taped up Polaroids. “I found them under a shelter near the raft. It was too wet to use electrostatic,” she explained to the team. “I had to take pictures.”
    “And fine artwork they are too,” Rhyme