The Stone Monkey (Lincoln Rhyme 4)

"Look at that," he said. "His hands."

"I shot them because of the blotches," Sachs said.

Chang Jiechi's fingers and palms were covered with blue-black stains. Paint or ink. Clearly not the purple shade of postmortem lividity--which in any case wouldn't've occurred so soon after death.

"The fingers!" Rhyme called. "Look at the fingers."

She squinted and walked close. "Indentations!" She pulled the printout of Sam Chang's fingerprints off the wall and held it close to that of the father's hand. The palms and digits were different sizes--and the old man's were far more wrinkled--but the indentations Rhyme had spotted on Sam Chang's fingers and thumb were similar to the lines clearly evident on his father's.

They'd assumed that the marks on Sam Chang's fingers were from an injury of some kind. But clearly that wasn't the case.

"What's it mean?" Mel Cooper asked. "Genetic?"

"No, can't be," Rhyme said, his eyes scanning the picture of the old man's hand. He closed his eyes for a moment and let his mind fly--like one of the peregrine falcons lifting off from its bedroom window perch. Ink on his hands, indentations . . . Then his head jerked back in the chair and he looked at Sachs. "T

hey're painters! Father and son're both artists. Remember the logo of The Home Store on the van? One of them painted it."

"No," Li said, looking at the photo. "Not painters. Calligraphers. Calligraphy in China lots important. Hold brush like this." He grabbed a pen and held it perfectly vertical, gripped firmly in a triangle formed by the thumb and his first two fingers. When he released it and held his hand up, the red indentations in his fingers and thumb were identical to those in the hands of Chang and his father. Li continued, "Calligraphy considered art in China. But during Proletarian Revolution, artists persecuted bad. Lots calligraphers got jobs printing and sign painting. Doing useful things. Good for society. On boat Chang tell us he dissident and got fired from teaching job. Nobody hire him at schools. Make sense for him do printing, sign painting."

"And at the clinic Wu said that Chang had a job here lined up already," Sachs reminded.

"We know the Changs're in Queens," Rhyme said. "Let's get as many Chinese-speaking officers from the Fifth Precinct as we can to start calling quick-print, printing or sign-painting companies that've just hired somebody illegal."

Alan Coe laughed--apparently at Rhyme's naivete. "They're not going to cooperate. No guanxi."

"Here's some fucking guanxi," Rhyme snapped. "Tell them if they lie about it and we find out, the INS is going to raid their shop and--if the Changs are killed--we'll book them for accessory to murder."

"Now you think like Chinese cop," Sonny Li said with a laugh. "Using Historically Unprecedented People's Ox Prod."

Deng pulled out his cell phone and made a call to his headquarters.

Mel Cooper had run some of the trace from the safehouse on Patrick Henry Street through the gas chromatograph. He studied the results. "Something interesting here." He glanced at the bag that Sachs had marked with a felt-tip pen.

"It was on Chang's father's shoes. Nitrates, potassium, carbon, sodium . . . Biosolids. In significant amounts too."

This caught Rhyme's attention. "Biosolid" was a term undoubtedly invented by some public relations expert who was clever enough to know that the marketing potential of the product would be severely limited if the stuff was sold under its real name: processed human shit.

The fourteen waste treatment plants in New York City produced more than a thousand tons of biosolids a day and sold it throughout the country as fertilizer. For there to be significant amounts on the victim's shoes meant that the Changs were probably living quite close to one of the plants.

"Can we search house by house near the treatment plants?" Sellitto asked.

Rhyme shook his head. There were a number of treatment plants in Queens and given the fickle winds in the New York City area, the Changs could be living in a several block radius around any of them. Without narrowing the search down further--by finding the print shop where Sam Chang would be working, say--a door-to-door search would take forever.

The rest of the evidence didn't help much. The morphine that the man had killed himself with had come from a clinic in China and therefore was of no use to them forensically.

"Morphine can kill you?" Sellitto asked.

"The rumor is that's how the writer Jack London killed himself," pointed out Lincoln Rhyme, whose knowledge of suicide techniques was as extensive as his command of historical criminal trivia. "Besides, in the right dosage, anything can kill you."

Sachs then added that the old man had no subway transfers or other receipts on him to suggest where he might've come from.

But, Rhyme was soon reminded, Amelia Sachs was not the only cop to have run the crime scene in the Ghost's high-rise.

Sonny Li said, "Hey, Loaban, I found things too when I search Ghost's place. You want to hear?"

"Go ahead."

"Got some good stuff, I'm saying. Okay, there a statue of the Buddha across from door, facing it. No stereos or red color in his bedroom. Hallway painted white. Bookcases had doors on them. Had statue of eight horses. All mirrors very tall so they not cut off part of head when you look in them. Had brass bells with wooden handles--he keep them in western part of room." He nodded at the apparent significance of this. "Figure it out, Loaban?"