The Stone Monkey

Chinese designers, which were as stylish as anything produced in Milan or Paris.
    The teenager had planned to study fashion in Beijing and become a famous designer herself—possibly after a year or two of modeling.
    But now her father had ruined that.
    She dropped onto the bed, grabbed the phony cloth of her cheap running suit and tugged at it in a fury, wanted to rip it to pieces.
    What would she do with her life now?
    Work in a factory, stitching together crappy clothes like this. Making two hundred yuan a month and giving it to her pathetic parents. Maybe that would be how she’d spend the rest of her life.
    That would be her career in the fashion business. Slavery . . . She was—
    A sharp knock on the door interrupted her thoughts.
    Gasping in fright, she sat up fast, picturing the snake-head in the raft, a gun in his hand. The pop of the shots as he killed the drowning victims. She walked into the living room and turned the volume on the TV down. Lang looked up with a frown but she touched his lips to keep him silent.
    A woman’s voice called, “Mr. Wu? Are you there, Mr. Wu? I have a message from Mr. Chang.”
    Chang, she recalled, the man who had saved them from the hold of the ship and sailed the raft to shore. She liked him. She liked his son too, the one with the Western name William. He was sullen and lean and handsome. Cute but a risk: he was clearly triad bait.
    “It’s important,” the woman said. “If you’re there, open the door. Please. Mr. Chang said you’re in danger. I worked with Mr. Mah. He’s dead. You’re in danger too. You need a new place to stay. I can help you find one. Can you hear me?”
    Chin-Mei couldn’t get the sound of the gun out of her mind. The terrible man, the Ghost, shooting at them. The explosion in the ship, the water.
    Should she go with this woman? Chin-Mei debated.
    “Please . . . ” More pounding.
    But then she heard her father’s words ordering her to stay, not to open the door for anyone. And as angry as she was, as wrong as she thought her father was in so many ways, she couldn’t disobey him.
    She’d wait here silently and not let anyone in. When her parents returned she would give them the message.
    The woman in the alleyway must’ve gone—there wasno more knocking. Chin-Mei turned up the volume on the TV again and fixed a cup of tea for herself.
    She sat for a few minutes, studying the outfits of the American actresses on a sitcom.
    Then she heard the click of a key in the latch.
    Her father was back already? She leapt up, wondering what had been wrong with their mother. Was she all right now? Did she have to stay in hospital?
    Just as she got to the door and said “Father—” it opened fast and a small, swarthy man pushed inside, slammed the door behind him and pointed a pistol at her.
    Chin-Mei screamed and tried to run to Lang but the man leapt forward and grabbed her around the waist. He flung her to the floor. He took her sobbing brother by the collar and dragged him across the room to the bathroom, pushed him inside. “Stay there, be quiet, brat,” he snarled in bad English. He pulled the door shut.
    The girl wrapped her arms around her chest and scrabbled away from him. She stared at the key. “How . . . where did you get that?” Afraid that he’d killed her parents and taken it from them.
    He didn’t understand her Chinese, though, and she repeated it in English.
    “Shut your mouth. If you scream again I’ll kill you.” He took a cell phone from his pocket and made a call. “I’m inside. The children are here.”
    The man—dark and Arab-looking, probably from western China—nodded as he listened, looking Chin-Mei up and down. Then he gave a sour sneer. “I don’t know, seventeen, eighteen . . . Pretty enough . . . All right.”
    He disconnected the call.
    “First,” he said in English, “some food.” He seized herhair and dragged the sobbing girl into the kitchen. “What do you have to eat here?”
    But all she could hear were those three words looping over and over through her mind.
    First, some food  . . . first, some food . . .
    And then?
    Wu Chin-Mei began to cry.
    •   •   •
    In Lincoln Rhyme’s town house, gray and gloomy thanks to the storm’s early dusk, the case wasn’t moving at all.
    Sachs sat nearby, calmly sipping that disgusting-smelling tea of hers, which irritated the hell out of Rhyme for no particular reason.
    Fred Dellray was back, pacing and squeezing his