The Stone Monkey

the building. But didn’t report it till she got home. She was—”
    “—afraid, you know. Can’t blame her, considering what the respondings found at the scene inside. I’d be too.”
    “Afraid, he means. Blood everywhere. And body parts.”
    Sachs winced, but not from the gore; it was only because she was lifting her knees to pull on the white Tyvek crime scene suit and her arthritic joints protested painfully.
    “We’ve talked to about eight people in the building—” Bedding or Saul said.
    “—and around it. This is even more a case of the deaf and dumbs than usual.”
    “Yeah, most people here got the blinds too.”
    “We think they heard it was the Ghost who worked on Tang and that scared everybody off. Nobody’ll help. The most anybody’ll tell us is that two or—”
    “—three or four—”
    “—people, presumably men, kicked in the door to the warehouse there.”
    “And there was major screaming for ten minutes. Then two gunshots. Then it got quiet.”
    “The girl’s mother called nine-one-one.”
    “But everybody was gone by the time Patrol got here.”
    Sachs looked up and down the alleyway and the street in front of the warehouse. As she’d feared, the rain had destroyed any hope of finding tread marks of whatever kind of car the Ghost and his assistants had been driving.
    “Who’s been inside?” she asked the blond detective from the Fifth Precinct.
    “Only one uniform—to see if the vic was alive. We heard from upstairs you wanted it virgin so we didn’t even let the tour doc from the Medical Examiner’s office go in.”
    “Good,” she said. “I want the patrol officer who was inside.”
    “I’ll track ’em down.”
    A moment later he returned with a uniformed patrol-woman. “I was first officer. You wanted to see me?”
    “Just your shoe.”
    “Well, okay.” The woman slipped it off and handed it to Sachs, who shot a picture of the tread and noted the size of the sole so that she could differentiate it from the prints of the Ghost and his accomplices.
    She then put rubber bands around her own shoes to distinguish her footprints. Looking up, she noticed Sonny Li standing in the doorway of the warehouse. “Excuse me,” she said testily, “you mind standing back?”
    “Sure, sure, Hongse. That big room. Man, lot to look at. But you know Confucius, right?”
    “Not really,” she said, concentrating on the scene.
    “He write, ‘Longest journey must begin with first step.’ I think he write that. Maybe somebody else. I read Mickey Spillane more than Confucius.”
    “Could you wait over there, Officer Li?”
    “Call me Sonny, I’m saying.”
    He stepped aside and Sachs walked into the warehouse. The headset went on and she clicked the Motorola handy-talkie to life.
    “Crime Scene Five Eight Eight Five to Central. Need a patch to a landline, K?”
    “Roger, Five Eight Eight Five. What’s the number, K?”
    She gave them Lincoln Rhyme’s phone number and a moment later she heard his voice. “Sachs, where are you? At the scene yet? We’ve got to move on this.”
    As always—and inexplicably—his feisty impatience reassured her. She scanned the carnage. “Jesus, Rhyme, this’s a mess.”
    “Tell me,” he said. “Give me the blueprint first.”
    “Warehouse and office combined. Thirty by fifty feet, more or less, office area about ten by twenty. A few desks and—”
    “Few? Two or eighteen?”
    Rhyme was hell on anyone guilty of sloppy observation.
    “Sorry,” she said. “Four metal desks, eight chairs, no, nine—one’s overturned.”
    The one that Tang had been tied to when the Ghost had tortured and killed him.
    “Rows of metal shelves, stacked with cardboard boxes, food inside. Canned goods and cellophane packages. Restaurant supplies.”
    “Okay, Thom’s ready to start writing. You are ready, aren’t you, Thom? Write big, so I can see it. Those words over there, I can’t make them out. Redo them . . . All right,all right . . . Please redo them.” He then said, “Start on the grid, Sachs.”
    She began to search the scene, thinking: A first step . . . the longest journey.
    But twenty minutes of one-step-at-a-time searching revealed virtually nothing useful. She found two shell casings, which appeared to be the same as those from the Ghost’s gun at the beach. But there was nothing that would lead them directly to where he might be hiding out in New York. No cigarettes, no matchbooks, no fingerprints—the assailants