The Stone Monkey

chest strap of his seat belt as if he were holding the rip cord of a parachute during a skydive.
    “Did you see that?” Sachs asked casually as a cab ignored the siren and light on the CS bus and pulled out directly in front of her to make the exit at Houston Street.
    “We moving real fast,” Li said then seemed to remember that he didn’t want to distract her and he stopped talking again.
    “Which way, Eddie?” Sachs asked.
    “The Bowery, turn left, two more blocks then a right.”
    She pulled off onto a rain-slick Canal Street at fifty, controlled the skid before they went into a garbage truck and accelerated into Chinatown, the tires, goosed by the big cop engine, steaming up the wheel wells.
    Li muttered something in Chinese.
    “What?”
    “Ten judges of hell,” he translated his own words.
    Sachs recalled—the ten judges of hell, who kept the book called The Register of the Living and the Dead, containing the name of everybody in the world. The balance sheet of life and death.
    My father, Herman, she thought, is already inscribed on the dead side.
    Where does my name fall in the register? she wondered.
    And the names of people I’m now close to? The people yet to be?
    Thinking of life and death . . .
    “Ah, Ms. Sachs. Here you are.”
    “Hello, Doctor.”
    “I’ve just been meeting with Lincoln Rhyme’s physician.”
    “Yes?”
    “I’ve got to talk to you about something.”
    “You’re looking like it’s bad news, Doctor.”
    “Uhm, Officer,” Deng interrupted her thoughts. “I think that’s a red light ahead of us.”
    “Got it,” she said and slowed to thirty to sweep through the intersection.
    “Gan,” Li whispered. Then offered what Sachs had guessed was the translation: “Fuck.”
    Three minutes later the crime scene bus skidded to a stop in front of an alley surrounded by a small crowd of on-lookers,kept back by a spider strand of yellow police tape and a half-dozen uniformed officers from the Patrol division. The front door to what seemed to be a small warehouse was open. Sachs climbed out, followed by Deng, who called, “Hey, Detective,” to a blond man in a suit. He nodded and Deng introduced her to a homicide detective from the Fifth Precinct.
    “You’re running the scene?” he asked.
    Sachs nodded. “What is this place?”
    “Warehouse. Owner’s clean, looks like. We’ve contacted him and he doesn’t know anything except that the victim—name was Jerry Tang—worked here. Eight arrests, two convictions. Mostly he boosts wheels and drives getaway. Does— did —some muscle work.”
    He nodded at the silver BMW four-by-four in the alley. An X5. This was the SUV that Tang had driven out to Long Island to pick up the Ghost this morning. There was a bullet hole in the back door from the Ghost’s gunshot as Tang had fled, abandoning him.
    A patrol officer responding to some screams had noticed a late-model BMW four-by-four next to the building where the commotion had come from. Then he’d seen the bullet hole in the back and, with his partner, they’d entered the warehouse.
    And found what was left of Jerry Tang. He’d been tortured with a knife or razor—skin was missing, including his eyelids—then killed.
    Rhyme, she knew, hated to be one-upped by other law enforcers almost as much as he hated being one-upped by perpetrators and when it turned out that Sonny Li, the crow detective, had been right—that the Ghost’s first mission was to kill the man who’d abandoned him—the criminalist’s mood darkened even more. It hadn’t helped, ofcourse, that Li’d said, “Hey, should have listen to me, Loaban. Should have listen.”
    The detective from the Fifth now continued, “We’ve got two canvassers from downtown, checking out wits. Oh, there they are now.”
    Sachs nodded to two detectives she’d worked with before. Bedding and Saul were no longer needed to track down registered owners of BMW X5’s and were back at their usual assignment: post-crime canvassing, “spadework,” as it was called. They were known for their consummate skill in double-teaming witnesses. Despite their different heights, builds and complexions (one had freckles), their identical sandy hair and their demeanor resulted in their nickname: the Twins. They were also known as the Hardy Boys.
    “Got here twenty minutes after the first sighting,” said either Bedding or Saul. The tall one.
    “Was a teenage girl on her way home from drama club at school. Heard a scream in