The Stone Monkey (Lincoln Rhyme 4)

Li struggled up a hill and peered into the streaming wind and rain but he could see no one. The sound had apparently been carried some distance on the wind.

Discouraged, he continued forward. For ten endless minutes he battled his way along the road, throwing his head back occasionally and letting the rain soak his parched mouth. After all the seawater he'd swallowed he was desperately thirsty.

Then he saw, on his right, a small orange life raft sitting on the beach. He assumed that it was the Ghost's. He looked up and down the shore for the snakehead but it was impossible to see very far through the mist and the rain.

He started toward the raft, thinking that perhaps he could follow the man's footprints and find him hiding in town. But as he took a step off the road a flashing light appeared. He wiped the rain from his eyes and squinted. The light was blue and moving rapidly toward him along the road.

INS? Security bureau officers?

Li hurried into some dense bushes on the far side of the asphalt. He crouched and watched the light grow brighter as the vehicle in which it was mounted, a sporty yellow convertible, materialized out of the rain and murk and skidded to a stop 100 meters away. In a crouch Li began to move slowly toward the car.

*

Amelia Sachs stood on the rain-swept beach, staring down at the woman's body, slumped in the grotesque pose of death.

"He's killing them, Rhyme," Amelia Sachs, dismayed, whispered into the headset mike of her Motorola SP-50 handy-talkie. "He's shot two of them, a man and a woman. In the back. They're dead."

"Shot them?" The criminalist's voice was hollow and she knew that he was shouldering the responsibility for yet more deaths.

The ESU officer trotted toward her, holding his machine gun ready. "No sign of him," the man shouted over the wind. "People in that restaurant a half click up the road said that somebody stole a car about twenty minutes ago." The officer gave Sachs the description of a Honda and the tag number and she relayed it to Rhyme.

"Lon'll put it on the wire," he said. "Was he alone?"

"Think so. Because of the rain there're no footprints in the sand but I found some in the mud, where he was standing to shoot the woman. He was by himself then."

"So we'll assume his bangshou's still unaccounted for. He could've gotten to shore in another raft. Or he might've been in the wrecked one."

Her hand near her weapon, she scanned the scenery. Fog-bleached forms of rocks and dunes and brush surrounded her. A man with a gun would be invisible.

Then she said, "We're going to look for the immigrants, Rhyme."

She expected him to disagree, to tell her to run the scene first, before the raging elements destroyed all the evidence. But he said simply, "Good luck, Sachs. Call me back when you start on the grid." The line went dead.

Search well but watch your back. . . .

The two officers trotted along the beach. They came across a second raft, a smaller one, beached a hundred yards from the first. Sachs's instinctive reaction was to search it for evidence but she stayed true to her immediate mission and, arthritis stabbing her joints, ran with the wind at her back as she scanned the landscape for the immigrants--and signs of an ambush or a hidey-hole where the Ghost might've gone to ground.

They found neither.

Then she heard sirens in the distance, carried on the streaming wind, and saw the carnival of emergency vehicles speed into town. The dozen or so residents who'd been ensconced in the restaurant and gas station now braved the weather to find out exactly what kind of excitement the storm had brought to their miniature town.

The first mission of a crime scene officer is controlling the scene--so that contamination is minimal and evidence doesn't vanish, either accidentally or at the hands of souvenir hunters or the perp himself, masquerading as a bystander. Sachs reluctantly gave up her search for other immigrants and crew--there were plenty of other people to do that now--and ran to the NYPD blue-and-white crime scene bus to direct the operation.

As the CS techs roped off the beach with yellow tape, Sachs pulled the latest in forensic couture over her soaked jeans and T-shirt. The NYPD's new crime scene overalls, a hooded full-body suit made of white Tyvek, prevented the searcher from sloughing off his or her own trace evidence--hair, skin or sweat, for instance--and contaminating the scene.

Lincoln Rhyme approved of the suit--he'd lobbied for something similar when he'd been running the Investigation and Resources Division, which oversaw Crime Scene. Sachs wasn't so pleased, however. The fact that the overalls made her look like an alien from a bad space movie wasn't the problem; what troubled her was that it was brilliant white--easily spotted by any perps who, for whatever reason, might wish to hang around the crime scene and try out their marksmanship on cops picking up evidence. Hence, Sachs's pet name for the garb: "the bull's-eye suit."

A brief canvass of the patrons in the restaurant, employees of the gas station and residents living in the few houses on the beach yielded nothing except facts they'd already learned about the Honda in which the Ghost had escaped. No other vehicles had been stolen and no one had seen anybody swimming to shore or hiding out on land or even heard the gunshots over the wind and rain.

So it fell exclusively to Amelia Sachs--and Lincoln Rhyme--to wring from the crime scene whatever information about the Ghost, the crew and the immigrants might reside here.

And what a crime scene it was, one of the biggest they'd ever run: a mile of beach, a road and, on the other side of the asphalt strip, a maze of scruffy

brush. Millions of places to search. And possibly still populated by an armed perp.

"It's a bad scene, Rhyme. The rain's let up a little but it's still coming down hard and the wind's twenty miles an hour."

"I know. We've got the Weather Channel on." His voice was different now, calmer. The sound spooked her a bit. It reminded her of the eerily placid quality of his voice when he talked about endings, about killing himself, about finality. "All the more reason," he prodded, "to get on with the search, wouldn't you say?"