The Stone Monkey

you, this is an excessively interesting phone.”
    Rhyme didn’t know the young man well but he remembered curly hair, an easy disposition and a consuming passion for anything containing microchips.
    “Howsat?” Dellray asked.
    “First of all, don’t get your hopes up. It’s virtually untraceable. We call ’em ‘hot phones.’ The memory chip’s been deactivated so that the phone doesn’t record the last call dialed or incoming calls—the log features are out completely. And it’s a satellite phone—you can call anywhere in the world and you don’t need to go through local service providers. The signals are relayed through a government network in Fuzhou. The Ghost or somebody working for him hacked into the system to activate it.”
    Dellray snapped, “Well, let’s juss call somebody in the People’s fuckin’ Republic and tell ’em this bad guy’s using their system.”
    “We tried that. But the Chinese position is that nobody can hack their phone system so we must be mistaken. Thank you for your interest.”
    “Even if it means helpin’ collar the Ghost?”
    Geller said, “I mentioned Kwan Ang by name. They still weren’t interested. Meaning they were probably paid off.”
    Guanxi . . .
    Rhyme thanked the young agent and they hung up. Score one for the Ghost, the criminalist thought angrily.
    They were somewhat more successful with the firearms database. Mel Cooper found that the shell casings matched one of two weapons, both of them dating back nearly fifty years: a Russian Tokarev 7.62mm automatic was one type. “But,” Cooper continued, “I’m betting he was using the Model 51, a Chinese version of the Tokarev. Virtually the same gun.”
    “Yeah, yeah,” Sonny Li said. “Gotta be 51, I’m saying. I had Tokarev but lost it in ocean. More peoples in China got 51’s.”
    “Ammunition?” Rhyme asked. “He might need to replenish it here somewhere.” He was thinking that if the ammo was rare they might stake out the most likely places the Ghost would go to purchase more.
    But Cooper shook his head. “You can buy the shells in any good-sized gun shop.”
    Damn.
    A messenger arrived with an envelope. Sellitto took it and tore the end off. He extracted a handful of photographs. He glanced at Rhyme with a raised eyebrow. “The three bodies the Coast Guard recovered from the water. About a mile offshore. Two shot. One drowned.”
    The photos were facial shots of the dead men, eyes partially open but glazed. One had a hole in his temple. The other two showed no sign of visible injuries. There were fingerprint cards too.
    “Those two,” Li said, “they crew members. Other guy,one of immigrants. Down in hold with us. Don’t know name.”
    “Pin them up,” Rhyme said, “and run the prints through AFIS.”
    Sellitto taped them to the board under the GHOSTKILL heading and Rhyme realized that the room had gone silent as the members of the team stared at the macabre additions to the evidence charts. He supposed that Coe and Deng had little experience with corpses. That was one thing about crime scene detail, he recalled: how fast one becomes immune to the countenance of death.
    Sonny Li continued to gaze at the photos silently for a moment. He muttered something in Chinese.
    “What was that?” Rhyme asked.
    He glanced at the criminalist. “I said, ‘judges of hell.’ Just expression. We have myth in China—ten judges of hell decide where your name go in Register of Living and Dead. Judges decide when you born and when you die. Everybody in world, name is in register.”
    Rhyme thought momentarily of recent doctors’ appointments and of his upcoming operation. He wondered exactly where his own name was entered in The Register of the Living and the Dead . . . .
    The silence was then broken by another beep from the computer. Mel Cooper glanced at the screen. “Got the make of the driver’s car at the beach. BMW X5. It’s one of those fancy four-by-fours.” He added, “I myself drive a ten-year-old Dodge. Good mileage, though.”
    “Put it on the chart.”
    As Thom wrote, Li looked at the board and asked, “Whose car that?”
    Sellitto said, “We think somebody was at the beach to pick up the Ghost. That’s what he was driving.” A nod at the board.
    “What happen him?”
    “Looks like he panicked and took off,” Deng said. “The Ghost shot at him but he got away.”
    “He leave Ghost behind?” Li asked, frowning.
    “Yep,” Dellray confirmed.
    Rhyme