The Stone Monkey

Rhyme replied. “Battery Park City or one of the developments around there.”
    “How’d you figure that out?” Sellitto asked.
    “That montmorillonite? It’s bentonite. That’s a clay used as slurry to keep groundwater out of foundations when construction crews dig deep foundations. When they built the World Trade Center they sunk the foundation sixty-five feet down to the bedrock. The builder used millions of tons of bentonite. It’s all over the place down there.”
    “But they use bentonite in a lot of places,” Cooper pointed out.
    “Sure, but the other trace materials Sachs found are from there too. That whole area is landfill and it’s full of rusted metal and glass trace. And the ash? To clear the old piers down there the builders burned them.”
    “And it’s only twenty minutes from Chinatown,” Deng pointed out.
    Thom wrote this on the evidence chart.
    Still, it was a huge area and contained many high-density buildings: hotels, apartments and office buildings. They would need more information in order to narrow down exactly where the Ghost might be staying.
    Sonny Li was pacing, walking in front of the board.
    “Hey, Loaban, I got some ideas too.”
    “About what?” Rhyme grumbled. The man reeked of cigarette smoke. Rhyme had never smoked but he felt a huge burst of crip envy—that this man could partake in his vices all by himself, without having to track down a conspirator to help him.
    Fucking surgery better do something, he thought.
    “Hey, Loaban, you listening?”
    “Go ahead, Sonny,” Rhyme said, distracted.
    “I was at crime scene too.”
    “Yeah,” Sachs said, giving him an exasperated look. “Walking around, smoking.”
    “See,” Rhyme explained, trying against his nature to be patient, “anything that comes into the crime scene after the perpetrator can contaminate it. That makes it harder to find the evidence that would lead to the suspect.”
    “Hey, Loaban, you think I don’t know that? Sure, sure, you pick up dust and dirt and put in gas chromatograph and then spectrometer and use scanning electron microscope.” The complicated English words fell awkwardly from his tongue. “Match against databases.”
    “You know about forensic equipment?” Rhyme asked, blinking in surprise.
    “ Know about it? Sure, we use that stuff. Hey, I study at Beijing Institute of Forensics. Got nice medal. Second inclass. I know all that, I’m saying.” He added testily, “We not back in Ming dynasty, Loaban. I got own computer—Windows XP. All kinds databases too. And cell phone and pager.”
    “Okay, Sonny, got the point. What’d you see at the scene?”
    “Disharmony. That what I saw.”
    “Explain,” Rhyme said.
    “Harmony very important in China. Even crime has harmony. At that place back there, that warehouse, no harmony at all.”
    “What’s a harmonious killing?” Coe asked wryly.
    “The Ghost find man who betray him. He torture him, kill him and leave. But, hey, Hongse, remember? Place all destroyed. Posters of China torn up, statues of Buddha and dragons broken . . . . Han Chinese not do that.”
    “That’s the racial majority in China—the Han,” Eddie Deng explained. “But the Ghost’s Han, isn’t he?”
    “Sure, but he not do it. Office got messed up after Tang killed. I hear her say that.”
    Sachs confirmed this.
    “Probably Ghost left and then those men work for him, they vandal the office. I’m thinking he hire ethnic minority for his ba-tu.”
    “Muscle, thugs,” Deng translated.
    “Yeah, yeah, thugs. Hire them from minorities. Mongols, Manchus, Tibetans, Uighurs.”
    “That’s crazy, Sonny,” Rhyme said. “Harmony?”
    “Crazy?” Li replied, shrugging broadly. “Sure, you right, Loaban. I crazy. Like when I say you find Jerry Tang first, I crazy. But, hey, you listen me then, we maybe found Tang when he alive, strap him down and use ox prod till he tell us where is Ghost.” The entire team turned to him inshock. Li hesitated a moment then laughed. “Hey, Loaban, joke.”
    Though Rhyme wasn’t completely sure he was kidding.
    Li continued, pointing at the board, “You want evidence? Okay, here evidence. Shoeprints. Smaller than Ghost’s. Han—Chinese—not big people. Like me. Not big like you. But people from west and north minorities, lot of them even smaller than us. There, you like that forensic stuff, Loaban? Thought you would. So go find some minorities. You get lead to Ghost, I’m saying.”
    Rhyme glanced at