The Stone Monkey (Lincoln Rhyme 4)

"What I hear," Dellray said.

"I believe it," Deng said cynically. "If he's got dozens of officials in China in his pocket, why not here too?"

So, Rhyme reflected, we've got an unidentified, presumably armed assistant and a homicidal snakehead and now spies within our own ranks. It's never easy but really . . . .

A glance at Sachs, which meant: keep going. "Friction ridges?" he asked. The technical name for finger-, palm-and footprints.

She explained, "The beach was a mess--the rain and wind. I got a few partials from the outboard motor and the rubber sides of the rafts and the cell phone." She held up the cards of the prints she'd lifted. "The quality's pretty bad."

Rhyme called, "Scan 'em and get them into AFIS."

The Automated Fingerprint Identification System was a huge network of digitized federal and state fingerprint files. AFIS reduced the search time for matching prints from months to hours or even minutes in some cases.

"I also found this." She held up a metal pipe in a plastic bag. "One of them used it to break the window of the van. There were no visibles on this one so I thought we better raise the prints here."

"Go to work, Mel."

The thin man took the bag, pulled on cotton gloves and extracted the pipe, holding it only by the ends. "I'll use VMD."

Vacuum metal deposition is considered the Rolls-Royce of fingerprint-raising systems. It involves binding a microscopic coating of metal to the object to be printed and then radiating it. After a few minutes Cooper had a razor-sharp image of several latent prints. He shot pictures of them and ran the photos through the scanner then sent them off to AFIS. He handed the pictures to Thom, who pinned them up.

"That's about it for the beach, Rhyme," Sachs said.

The criminalist glanced at the chart. The evidence told him little yet. But he wasn't discouraged; this was how criminalistics worked. It was like dumping a thousand jigsaw puzzle pieces out on the table--incomprehensible at first; only after trial and error and much analysis did patterns begin to appear. He said, "The van next."

Sachs pinned up pictures of the van on the whiteboard.

Recognizing the location in Chinatown from the Polaroid, Coe said, "It's crowded around that subway station. There must've been some witnesses."

"Nobody saw a thing," Sachs said wryly.

"Where've I heard that before," Sellitto added. It was astonishing, Rhyme knew, what kind of amnesia was induced by the mere act of flashing a gold shield in front of your average citizen.

"What about the plate?" Rhyme asked.

"Stolen off a truck in a parking lot in Suffolk County," the burly homicide cop said. "No wits there either."

"What'd you find in the van?" he asked Sachs.

"They'd dug up a bunch of plants and had them in the back."

"Plants?"

"To hide the others, I'm guessing, and make it look like they were a couple of employees making deliveries for that place, The Home Store. But I didn't get much else. Just the fingerprints, some rags and the blood--the spatter was on the window and door so I'm guessing the injury was above the waist. Arm or hand, probably."

Rhyme asked, "No paint cans? Brushes? From when they painted the logo on the side."

"Nope, they ditched it all." She shrugged. "That's it, aside from the friction ridges." She handed Cooper the cards and Polaroids of the fingerprints she'd lifted from the van and he scanned and ran them: digitized them and then fed them into the AFIS.

Rhyme's eyes were glued to the chart. He studied the items for a moment the way a sculptor sizes up a raw piece of stone before he begins carving. Then he turned away and said to Dellray and Sellitto, "How do you want to handle the case?"

Sellitto deferred to the FBI agent, who said, "We gotta split the effort. Don't see a single other way to handle it. One, we'll be going after the Ghost. Two, we gotta find those families 'fore he does." He glanced at Rhyme. "We'll do the command post thing from here, if that's okay?"

Rhyme nodded. He no longer cared about the intrusion, no longer cared about his town house's conversion to Grand Central Station. Whatever it took, the criminalist was going to find the man who'd ruthlessly taken so many innocent lives.

"Now here's what I'm thinkin'," Dellray said, pacing on his long legs. "We're not fuckin' around with this guy. I'm gettin' a dozen more agents assigned to the case here in the Southern and Eastern Districts and I'll get us a SPECTAC team up from Quantico."

SPECTAC was short for Special Tactics, though it was pronounced as in "spectacular." This little-known outfit within the FBI was the best tactical unit in the country. It regularly engaged in practice operations with Delta Force and the Navy Seals--and usually won. Rhyme was glad to hear that Dellray was beefing up their side. From what they now knew about the Ghost, their present resources were inadequate. Dellray, for instance, was the only FBI agent assigned full-time to the Ghost case and Peabody was only mid-level INS.