The Stone Monkey

incense burning.”
    “It stinks,” Rhyme concluded.
    “No, no,” Sonny Li said. “Peaceful. Very peaceful.”
    No, it stank, petulant Rhyme thought. He glanced at the bag she carried and wrinkled his nose. “And what is that?”
    “Medicine. For my arthritis.”
    “That stinks even more than the incense. What do you do with it?”
    “Make it into tea.”
    “Probably tastes so vile that you forget about the pain inyour joints. Hope you enjoy it. I’ll stick to scotch.” He examined her closely for a moment. “Enjoy your visit with Dr. Sung, Sachs?”
    “I—” she began uneasily, troubled by his edgy tone.
    “How’s he doing?” Rhyme asked blithely.
    “Better,” she answered.
    “Talk much about his home in China? Where he travels? Whom he spends time with?”
    “What’re you getting at?” she asked cautiously.
    “I’m just curious if what occurred to me occurred to you?”
    “And that would be?”
    “That Sung was the Ghost’s bangshou . His assistant. His co -conspirator.”
    “What?” she gasped.
    “Apparently it didn’t,” Rhyme observed.
    “But there’s no way. I’ve spent some time talking to him. He can’t have any connection with the Ghost. I mean—”
    “As a matter of fact,” Rhyme interrupted, “he doesn’t. We just got a report from the FBI office in Singapore. The Ghost’s bangshou on the Dragon was Victor Au. The prints and picture match one of the three bodies the Coast Guard found this morning at the site of the sinking.” He nodded toward the computer.
    Sachs looked at the picture on Rhyme’s screen and then glanced at the whiteboard on which were taped the Coast Guard’s pictures of the bodies. Au was the one who’d drowned, not been shot.
    Rhyme said sternly, “Sung’s clean. But we didn’t know that until ten minutes ago. I told you to be careful, Sachs. And you just dropped by Sung’s to socialize. Don’t go getting careless on me.” His voice rose, saying, “And that goes for everybody!”
    Search well but watch your back. . . .
    “Sorry,” she muttered.
    What was distracting her? Rhyme wondered again. But he said only, “Back to work, boys and girls.” Then nodded at the electrostatic shoeprints from the Tang crime scene that Thom had mounted on the evidence board. There was not much they could tell except that the Ghost’s shoeprints, though an average size shoe, about an 8 in America, were larger than the three prints of his accomplices.
    “Now, what about the trace that was in the Ghost’s shoes, Mel?”
    “Okay, Lincoln,” the tech said slowly, looking over the screen of the chromatograph. “We’ve got something here. Very old oxidized iron flakes, old wood fibers and ash and silicon—looks like glass dust. And then the main act is a dark, low-luster mineral in large concentrations—montmorillonite. Alkaline oxide too.”
    Okay, Rhyme mused. Where the hell did it come from? He nodded slowly then closed his eyes and began, figuratively, to pace.
    When he’d been head of IRD—the Investigation and Resources Division of the NYPD, the forensic unit—Rhyme had walked everywhere in New York City. He carried small bags and jars in his pockets for the samples of soil and concrete and dust and vegetation he’d collect to add to his knowledge of the city. A criminalist must know his territory in a thousand different ways: as sociologist, cartographer, geologist, engineer, botanist, zoologist, historian.
    He realized that there was something familiar about the trace that Cooper was describing. But what?
    Wait, there’s a thought. Hold on to it.
    Damn, it slipped away.
    “Hey, Loaban?” a voice called, but from a distance. Rhyme ignored Li and continued to walk intently through, then fly over, the various neighborhoods of the city.
    “Is he—?”
    “Shhhhh,” Sachs said firmly.
    Freeing him to continue on his journey.
    He sailed over the Columbia University tower, over Central Park with its loam and limestone and wildlife excrement, through the streets of Midtown coated with the residue of the tons of soot that fall upon them daily, the boat basins with their peculiar mix of gasoline, propane and diesel fuel, the decaying parts of the Bronx with their lead paint and old plaster mixed with sawdust as filler . . . .
    Soaring, soaring . . .
    Until he came to one place.
    His eyes opened.
    “Downtown,” he said. “The Ghost’s downtown.”
    “Sure.” Alan Coe shrugged. “Chinatown.”
    “No, not Chinatown,”