The Stone Monkey (Lincoln Rhyme 4)

"No," Rhyme snapped. "Keep going."

Li patted his shirt for his cigarettes then let his arms fall to his side. "Over my desk at security bureau office in Liu Guoyuan I got sign."

"Another expression?"

"Ju yi fan san. It mean: Learning three things from one example. From Confucius saying: 'If I show man corner of object and he not able to figure out what other three corners look like, then I not bother to teach him again.'"

Not a bad motto for a forensic detective, Rhyme reflected. "And you deduced something helpful, something we can use from a statue of eight horses and brass bells?"

"Feng shui, I'm saying."

"Arranging furniture and things for good luck," Thom said. When Rhyme glanced at him he added, "It was on a show on the Home and Garden Channel. Don't worry--I watched it on my own time."

Impatient Rhyme said, "So he lives in a good-luck apartment, Li. What's the evidentiary point?"

"Hey, congratulations, Sonny," Thom said. "You got the last-name treatment. He saves that for his really good friends. Note that I'm only 'Thom.'"

"Speaking of which, Thom, I believe you're here merely to write. Not to editorialize."

"The point, Loaban? Pretty clear to me," Li continued. "The Ghost hire somebody to arrange his room and guy he hire do fuck good job. Know his stuff. Maybe know other places the Ghost has apartments."

"Okay," Rhyme said. "That's useful."

"I go check feng shui men in Chinatown. What you think?"

Rhyme caught Sachs's eye and they laughed. "I need to write a new criminalistics textbook. This time I'll add a woo-woo chapter."

"Hey, know what our leader Deng Xiaoping say. He say it not matter if cat black or white, so long as it catches mouse."

"Well, go catch yourself a mouse, Li. Then come on back here. I need some more baijiu. Oh, and Sonny?"

The Chinese cop glanced at him.

"Zaijian." Rhyme carefully pronounced the word he'd learned on a Chinese language translation website.

Li nodded. "'Goodbye.' Yes, yes. You even pronounce good, Loaban. Zaijian."

The Chinese cop left and they returned to the evidence. But the team made no headway and an hour went by without any word from the officers who were canvassing the quick-print shops in Queens.

Rhyme stretched his head back into the pillow. He and Sachs gazed at the charts, Rhyme feeling a too-familiar sensation: the desperate hope that evidence long picked over would yield just one more nugget even though you knew there was nothing else for it to reveal.

"Should I talk to the Wus again, or John Sung?" she asked.

"We don't need more witnesses," Rhyme murmured. "We need more evidence. I need something concrete."

More goddamn evidence . . . They needed--

Then his head swiveled fast toward the map--the original one: of Long Island. He looked at the tiny red dot about a mile off the coast of Orient Point.

"What?" Sachs asked, seeing him squint.

"Goddamn," he whispered.

"What?"

"We have another crime scene. And I forgot all about it."

"What?"