The Stone Monkey

glass. “How could I miss it?” The tech seemed disheartened.
    Where had the fragments come from? Had they been embedded in a fold? What were they?
    “Oh, hell,” Sachs muttered, looking at her hands.
    “What?” Rhyme asked.
    Blushing, she held up her fingers. “That was from me. I picked it up without gloves.”
    “Without gloves?” Rhyme asked, an edge in his voice. This was a serious error by a crime scene tech. Apart from the fact that the rag contained blood, which might be tainted with HIV or hepatitis, she’d contaminated the evidence. As head of the forensic unit at the NYPD, Lincoln Rhyme had fired people for this type of lapse.
    “I’m sorry,” Sachs said. “I know what it’s from.John . . . Dr. Sung was showing me this amulet he wore. It was chipped and I guess I picked at it with my nail.”
    “Are you sure that’s it?” Rhyme demanded.
    Li nodded and said, “I remember . . . Sung let children on Fuzhou Dragon play with it. Qingtian soapstone. Worth some money, I’m saying. Good luck.” He added, “It was of Monkey. Very famous in China.”
    Eddie Deng nodded. “Sure, the Monkey King . . . He was a mythological figure. My father’d read me stories about him.”
    But Rhyme wasn’t interested in any myths. He was trying to catch a killer and save some lives.
    And trying to figure out why Sachs had made a mistake of this magnitude.
    A rookie’s mistake.
    The mistake of someone who’s distracted. And what exactly is on her mind? he wondered.
    “Throw out the—” he began.
    “I’m sorry,” she repeated.
    “Throw out that top sheet of newsprint,” Rhyme said evenly. “Let’s move on.”
    As the tech tore off the sheet of paper his computer beeped. “Incoming.” He read the screen. “Okay, we’ve got the blood types back. All samples’re from the same person—presumably from the injured woman. It’s type AB negative and the Barr Body test confirms that it’s a woman’s blood.”
    “Up on the wall, Thom,” Rhyme called. And the aide wrote.
    Before he was finished Mel Cooper’s computer summoned them again. “It’s the AFIS search results.”
    They were discouraged to find that the search of thefingerprints Sachs had collected came back negative. But as he examined the prints, which were digitized and sitting on the screen in front of them, Rhyme observed something unusual about the clearest prints they’d lifted—from the pipe used to break into the van. They knew these were the prints of Sam Chang because they matched a few lifted from the outboard motor and Li had confirmed that Chang had piloted the raft to shore. “Look at those lines,” he said.
    “Whatcha see, Lincoln?” Dellray asked.
    Rhyme said nothing to the agent but, wheeling close to the screen, ordered, “Command, cursor down . . . stop. Cursor left . . . stop.” The arrow of the cursor on the screen stopped on a line—an indentation on the pad of the index finger of Chang’s right hand. There were similar ones on his middle finger and his thumb—as if Chang had been tightly gripping a thin cord.
    “What is that?” Rhyme wondered aloud.
    “Callus? A scar?” Eddie Deng offered.
    Mel Cooper offered, “Never seen that before.”
    “Maybe it’s a cut or wound of some kind.”
    “Maybe a rope burn,” Sachs suggested.
    “No, that’d be a blister. It must be a wound of some kind. Did you see any scars on Chang’s hands?” Rhyme asked Li.
    “No. I not see.”
    Indentations, calluses and scars on fingers and palms can be revealing about the professions or hobbies of the people who leave the prints—or on the actual fingers themselves in the case of suspects or victims. These are less useful nowadays where the only physical skill required by so many professions is keyboarding or jotting notes. Still, people who are in the manual trades, for instance,or who play certain sports frequently develop distinctive markings on their hands.
    Rhyme had no idea what this pattern meant but some additional information might reveal that. He instructed Thom to write the observation down on the board. He then took a call from Special Agent Tobe Geller, one of the FBI’s computer and electronics gurus, presently assigned to the Manhattan office. He’d completed his analysis of the Ghost’s cell phone, which Sachs had found in the second raft at Easton Beach. The criminalist transferred the call to the speakerphone and a moment later Geller’s animated voice said, “Now, let me tell