The Stone Monkey (Lincoln Rhyme 4)

But Cooper shook his head. "You can buy the shells in any good-sized gun shop."

Damn.

A messenger arrived with an envelope. Sellitto took it and tore the end off. He extracted a handful of photographs. He glanced at Rhyme with a raised eyebrow. "The three bodies the Coast Guard recovered from the water. About a mile offshore. Two shot. One drowned."

The photos were facial shots of the dead men, eyes partially open but glazed. One had a hole in his temple. The other two showed no sign of visible injuries. There were fingerprint cards too.

"Those two," Li said, "they crew members. Other guy, one of immigrants. Down in hold with us. Don't know name."

"Pin them up," Rhyme said, "and run the prints through AFIS."

Sellitto taped them to the board under the GHOSTKILL heading and Rhyme realized that the room had gone silent as the members of the team stared at the macabre additions to the evidence charts. He supposed that Coe and Deng had little experience with corpses. That was one thing about crime scene detail, he recalled: how fast one becomes immune to the countenance of death.

Sonny Li continued to gaze at the photos silently for a moment. He muttered something in Chinese.

"What was that?" Rhyme asked.

He glanced at the criminalist. "I said, 'judges of hell.' Just expression. We have myth in China--ten judges of hell decide where your name go in Register of Living and Dead. Judges decide when you born and when you die. Everybody in world, name is in register."

Rhyme thought momentarily of recent doctors' appointments and of his upcoming operation. He wondered exactly where his own name was entered in The Register of the Living and the Dead . . . .

The silence was then broken by another beep from the computer. Mel Cooper glanced at the screen. "Got the make of the driver's car at the beach. BMW X5. It's one of those fancy four-by-fours." He added, "I myself drive a ten-year-old Dodge. Good mileage, though."

"Put it on the chart."

As Thom wrote, Li looked at the board and asked, "Whose car that?"

Sellitto said, "We think somebody was at the beach to pick up the Ghost. That's what he was driving." A nod at the board.

"What happen him?"

"Looks like he panicked and took off," Deng said. "The Ghost shot at him but he got away."

"He leave Ghost behind?" Li asked, frowning.

"Yep," Dellray confirmed.

Rhyme ordered, "Run the make through Motor Vehicles. New York, Jersey and Connecticut too. Can you break the search down to, let's say, a hundred fifty miles outside of Manhattan?"

"Yup." Cooper logged online, heading for the secure DMV sites. "Remember when this took weeks?" he mused. With a faint hum Rhyme's wheelchair drove up to the screen in front of the tech. Only a moment later he could see the screen fill with the names and addresses of all the registered owners of X5's.

"Shit," Dellray muttered, walking close. "How many we got?"

"More popular car than I'd hoped," Cooper said. "Hundreds."

"What're the names?" Sellitto asked. "Any Chinese?"

Cooper scrolled through the list. "Sounds like two. Ling and Zhao." He looked at Eddie Deng, who nodded his confirmation. "Yep, they're Chinese."

Cooper continued, "But neither of them're close to downtown. One's in White Plains and the other's in New Jersey, Paramus."

"Have New York and Jersey troopers check 'em out," Dellray ordered.

The tech continued to scroll through the list. "Here's a possibility--there're about forty X5's registered to corporations and another fifty or so registered to leasing agents."

"Any of the corporations sound Chinese?" Rhyme asked, wishing he himself could pound on the keys and scroll quickly through the list.

"Nope," Cooper replied. "But they're all pretty generic--holding companies. You know, it'd be a bear but we could contact all of them. And the leasing companies too. Find out who's actually driving the cars."