The Stone Monkey (Lincoln Rhyme 4)

Sachs closed her eyes in dismay. All of Rhyme's brilliant deductions--and the superhuman efforts to put together a takedown team in time had been wasted.

What Rhyme, frustrated by the lack of leads, had noticed on the evidence chart was the reference to the injured immigrant's blood. The number Sachs had found for him was that of the Medical Examiner's office. He realized the lab had never called back with results of the tests. Rhyme had bullied a forensic pathologist into quickly completing the analysis.

The doctor had found several helpful things: the presence of bone marrow in the blood, indicating a severe bone fracture; sepsis, suggesting a deep cut or abrasion, and the presence of Coxiella burnetii, a bacteria responsible for Q fever, a zoonotic disease--one transmitted from animals to people. The bacteria were often picked up in places where animals were kept for long periods of time, like pens at seaports and the holds of ships.

Which meant that the immigrant was one very sick woman.

And that in turn was something that Rhyme believed might be useful.

"Tell me about this Q fever," Rhyme had asked the pathologist.

Though it wasn't contagious or life-threatening, the symptoms of the disease could be severe, he'd learned. Headache, chills, fever, possibly even liver malfunction.

"Is it rare?" Rhyme had asked.

"Very, around here."

"Excellent," Rhyme had announced, buoyed by this news, and had Sellitto and Deng put together a team of canvassers from the Big Building--One Police Plaza downtown--and the Fifth Precinct. They began calling all the hospitals and emergency clinics in Chinatown in Manhattan and the one in Flushing, Queens, to see if any female Chinese patients had been admitted with Q fever and a badly broken, infected arm.

After only ten minutes they'd received a call from one of the officers manning the phones downtown. It turned out that a Chinese man had just brought his wife into the emergency room of a clinic in Chinatown; she fit the profile perfectly--advanced Q fever and multiple fractures. Her name was Wu Yong-Ping. She'd been admitted and her husband was there too.

Officers from the Fifth Precinct had sped to the hospital--along with Sachs and Deng--to interview them. The Wus, shaken badly over their arrest, had told the police where they were living and that their children were still in the apartment. Then Rhyme had called to tell her that he'd just gotten the AFIS results from the Jimmy Mah killing: some of the prints matched those found at prior GHOSTKILL scenes; the snakehead had committed the crime. When Wu explained that Mah's broker had gotten them the apartment Rhyme and Sachs realized that the Ghost knew where the Wus were staying and was probably on his way to kill them at that moment.

Since the bureau's crack SPEC-TAC team was still not on hand to assist on the case, Dellray, Sellitto and Peabody put together a joint takedown team of their own and would have some Chinese-American officers from the Fifth Precinct masquerade as the Wus.

But, because of one premature gunshot, the whole effort was wasted.

Dellray snapped at another agent, "Anything more on the fish-store van? How come nobody's seen it? It's got the fuckin' name of the store on the side in big ugly letters."

The agent made a call on his radio and a moment later reported, "Nothing, sir. No reports of it on the road or abandoned."

Dellray played with the knot of his purple-black tie, just visible above his body armor. "Somethin'. Ain't. Right."

"What do you mean, Fred?" Sachs asked.

But the agent didn't answer. He glanced back at the fish store and strode toward it. Sachs accompanied him. Standing near the large ice bin in the front were three Chinese--store clerks, Sachs assumed--and two NYPD police officers interviewing them.

Dellray looked over the clerks one by one and his gaze settled on an old man, whose eyes dropped immediately to the dozen gray-pink flounders resting on the bed of ice.

He pointed a finger at the man. "He told you the Ghost stole the van, right?"

"That's right, Agent Dellray," one of the cops said.

"Well, he was goddamn lying!"

Dellray and Sachs ran to the back of the shop and into the alleyway behind it. Hidden behind a large Dumpster thirty feet away they found the fish market's van.

Returning to the front of the store Dellray said to the old man, "Listen, skel, tell me what happened and don't fuck with me. We all together on that?"

"He going kill me," the man said, sobbing. "Make me say they stole van, three men. Had gun at my head. They drove down alley, hid van then got out and run. Don't know where go."

Dellray and the policewoman returned to the impromptu command post. "Can't hardly blame him. But still . . . shit and a half."

"So," she speculated, "they got onto a side street and 'jacked some wheels."

"Prob'ly. And killed the driver."

A moment later an officer indeed called in, saying that there'd been a report of a carjacking. Three armed men in ski masks had run up to a Lexus at a stoplight, ordered the couple out and sped off. Contrary to Dellray's prediction, though, the driver and passenger were unhurt.