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.
"Gonna be tough to get ever-body on board down at the Federal Building," the agent said, "but I'll make sure it happens."
Coe's phone rang. He listened for a few moments, nodding his head. After he hung up he said, "That was INS Detention in Midtown--about that undocumented, John Sung. He was just released on bond by one of our hearing officers." Coe raised an eyebrow. "Everybody who's caught coming ashore tries for asylum--it's standard procedure. But it looks like Sung may just get it. He's a pretty well-known dissident in China."
"Where is he now?" Sachs asked.
"With the lawyer he was assigned from the Human Rights Law Center downtown. He's going to set Sung up at some apartment off Canal Street. I've got the address. He'll be there in a half hour. I'll go interview him."
"I'd rather go," Sachs said quickly.
"You?" Coe said. "You're Crime Scene."
"He trusts me."
"Trusts you? Why?"
"I saved his life. More or less."
"This is still an INS case," the young agent said adamantly.
"Exactly," Sachs pointed out. "How much do you think he's going to open up with a federal agent."
Dellray intervened. "Let Aye-melia do it."
Coe reluctantly handed her the address. She showed it to Sellitto. "We should have an RMP baby-sit outside his place." Meaning a Remote Mobile Patrol--coptalk for squad car. "If the Ghost finds out Sung's still alive he'll be a target too."
The detective jotted the address down. "Sure. I'll do it now."
"Okay, everybody, what's the theme of the investigation?" Rhyme called out.
"Search well but watch your backs," Sachs responded with a laugh.
"Keep that in mind. We don't know where the Ghost is, we don't know where--or who--his bangshou is."
Then his attention faded. He was vaguely aware of Sachs's grabbing her purse and starting to the door, just as he was aware of Coe's disgruntled sigh at his limited jurisdiction, Dellray's pacing and fashionable Eddie Deng's amusement at their running the case from this oddball command post. But these impressions were fading from his thoughts as his quick eyes made the circuit of the evidence culled from the crime scenes. He gazed at these items intently, as if imploring the inanimate evidence assembled before him to come to life, give up whatever secrets it might hold and guide them to the killer and the unfortunate prey that the snakehead was hunting.
GHOSTKILL
* * *
Easton, Long Island, Crime Scene
* Two immigrants killed on beach; shot in back.
* One immigrant wounded--Dr. John Sung. One missing.
* "Bangshou" (assistant) on board; identity unknown.
* Ten immigrants escape: seven adults (one elderly, one injured woman), two children, one infant. Steal church van.
* Blood samples sent to lab for typing.
* Vehicle awaiting Ghost on beach left without him. One shot believed fired by Ghost at vehicle. Request for vehicle make and model sent out, based on tread marks and wheelbase.
* No vehicles to pick up immigrants located.
* Cell phone, presumably Ghost's, sent for analysis to FBI.
* Ghost's weapon is 7.62mm pistol. Unusual casing.
* Ghost
is reported to have gov't people on payroll.
* Ghost stole red Honda sedan to escape. Vehicle locator request sent out.
* Three bodies recovered at sea--two shot, one drowned. Photos and prints to Rhyme and Chinese police.
* Fingerprints sent to AFIS.
Stolen Van, Chinatown
* Camouflaged by immigrants with "The Home Store" logo.
* Blood spatter suggests injured woman has hand, arm or shoulder injury.
* Blood samples sent to lab for typing.
* Fingerprints sent to AFIS.
Chapter Eleven
The Ghost waited for the three men in decadent surroundings.
Showered and dressed in clean, unobtrusive clothes, he sat on the leather couch and looked over New York Harbor from the vantage point of his eighteenth-floor apartment that was his main safehouse in New York. It was in a fancy high-rise near Battery Park City, in the southwest corner of Manhattan, not far from Chinatown but away from its crowded streets, the smells of seafood, the stink of rancid oil from the tourist restaurants. He reflected now on how elegance and comfort like this, which he'd fought hard to achieve, had long been targets of the Communist Party.
Why do you pursue the path of decadence?
You are part of the old! Do you repent your ways?
You must rid yourself of old culture, old customs, old habits, old ideas! You must reject your decadent values.
You are infected with wrong thought and wrong desires!
Wrong desires? he considered, smiling cynically to himself. Desires? Feeling the familiar crawling sensation in his groin. An urge he'd been very familiar with--and often ruled by--all his life.
Now that he'd survived the sinking of the ship and had escaped from the beach, his thoughts were returning to his normal priorities: he needed a woman badly.
He'd had none for over two weeks--a Russian prostitute in St. Petersburg, a woman with a broad mouth and breasts that lolled alarmingly toward her armpits when she lay on her back. The event was satisfying--but only barely.
And on the Fuzhou Dragon? None. Usually it was a snakehead's prerogative to ask one of the prettier women piglets to his stateroom, promising to reduce her transit fee in exchange for a night in his bed. Or, if she was traveling alone or with a weak man, simply to drag her to his cabin and rape her. What was she going to do, after all? Call the police when they arrived in the Beautiful Country?
But his bangshou, hiding out in the hold as his spy, had reported that the women piglets on the Dragon weren't particularly attractive or young and the men were defiant and smart, perfectly capable of causing trouble. So it had been a long, celibate voyage.
He now resumed fantasizing about the woman he called Yindao, the Chinese word for female genitals. The nickname was contemptuous, of course, but not particularly so in her case--for the Ghost thought of all women, except for a few businesswomen and female snakeheads he respected, solely in terms of their bodies. A number of images came to mind about the liaison he had planned with Yindao: her lying beneath him, the distinctive sound of her voice in his ear, her arching back, his hands gripping her long hair . . . such beautiful silken hair . . . . He found himself painfully aroused. For a moment he thought about forgetting the Changs and the Wus. He could meet Yindao--she was here in New York--and make the fantasies real. But, of course, it wasn't in his nature to do that. First, the piglet families would die. Then he would be able to spend long hours with her.
Naixin.
All in good time.
A glance at his watch. It was nearly 11 A.M. Where were the three Turks? he wondered.
When the Ghost had arrived at the safehouse not long ago he'd used one of the stolen cell phones he kept there to call a community center in Queens with which he'd done business several times in the past. He'd hired three men to help him find and kill the piglets. Ever paranoid and wishing to keep his connections between himself and his crimes as distant as possible, the Ghost hadn't gone to any of the traditional tongs in Chinatown; he'd hired Uighurs.
Racially the vast majority of mainland China is Han, tracing their ancestry back to the dynasty of that name, which established itself about 200 B.C. The other eight or so percent of the population is made up of minority groups like the Tibetans, Mongolians and Manchus. The Uighurs (pronounced "wee-gurs"), whose people are from western China, were one such minority. Predominantly Islamic, their native region is considered central Asia and before being annexed by China was called East Turkestan. Hence, the Ghost's name for them: "Turks."
Like the other minorities in China the Uighurs were often persecuted and under great pressure from Beijing to assimilate into Chinese culture. Separatists were often brutalized and killed and Uighurs were very vocal in their demands for independence; most of the terrorist acts in China could be traced to Uighur freedom fighters.
The Uighur community in New York was quiet, devout and peaceful. But this particular group of men from the Turkestan Community and Islamic Center of Queens was as ruthless as any triad the Ghost had ever dealt with. And since this assignment involved killing families who were Han Chinese they were the perfect choice to help him; they were motivated by both years of oppression and the generous amounts of cash the Ghost would pay them, part of which would ultimately go to the western Chinese province of Xinjiang to help fund the foundering Uighur independence movement.
Ten minutes later they arrived. Hands were shaken and they gave their names: Hajip, Yusuf, Kashgari. They were dark, quiet, thin--of smaller stature than he, and the Ghost was not particularly big. They wore black suits, gold bracelets or necklaces and fancy cell phones on their hips like badges.
Uighurs spoke Turkic, a language the Ghost didn't understand, and they weren't comfortable with any of the Chinese dialects. They settled on English. The Ghost explained what was needed and asked if they'd have any trouble killing people who were unarmed--women and children too.
Yusuf, a man in his late twenties with eyebrows that met above his nose, was the spokesman; his English was better than the others'. Without consulting them he said, "No problem. We do that. We do what you want." As if he killed women and children regularly.
And perhaps, the Ghost reflected, he did.
The Ghost gave them each $10,000 from a cashbox he kept in the safehouse and then called the head of the Turkestan community center and handed the phone to Yusuf, who told his boss in English how much money the Ghost had distributed, so there would be no dispute about underpayment and where the money had gone. They hung up.
The Ghost now said, "I'm going out for a while. I need to get some information."
"We will wait. May we have coffee?"
The Ghost nodded them into the kitchen. Then he walked to a small shrine. He lit a joss stick of incense, muttered a prayer to Yi, the divine bowman in Chinese mythology, whom the Ghost had adopted as his personal deity. He then put his pistol into an ankle holster and left his decadent apartment.
*
Sonny Li sat on a Long Island Commuter Services bus, which was nudging its way through the rain-spattered early morning traffic, as the skyline of Manhattan slowly grew larger.
Cynical and hard by nature, Li nonetheless was in awe of what he was examining. Not the massive size of the city they were approaching--Li's world was the southeast China coast, which was the most populous metropolitan sprawl on earth. Shanghai was twice the size of New York and 50 million people lived in the Pearl Delta between Hong Kong and Guangzhou.
No, what fascinated him was the bus in which he rode.
In China the main means of public transit is buses. They're cramped, filthy vehicles, often broken down, stifling in the warm months, freezing in the fall and winter, windows greasy from smoke residue and hair oil and soot. The bus stations too were old, decrepit places. Li had shot a man behind the infamous North Bus Station in Fuzhou and had himself been knifed not far from the same spot.
So Li had never seen any vehicle like this behemoth--it was huge and luxurious, with thick pad
ded seats, clean floors and spotless windows. Even on this oppressive, dank day in August the air-conditioning worked perfectly. He'd spent two weeks being violently sick every day, was virtually broke, had no idea where the Ghost was. He had no gun, not even a pack of cigarettes. But at least the bus was a blessing from heaven.
After he'd fled from the beach where the survivors of the Fuzhou Dragon had landed, Li had begged a ride from a trucker at a rest stop on the highway several kilometers away. The man had looked over his wet, disheveled clothes and let him ride in the back of the truck. After a half hour or so the trucker dropped him at a sleek bus station in a massive parking lot. Here, the driver explained, Sonny Li could take a commuter bus to where he wanted to go--Manhattan.
Li wasn't sure what was required to buy a ticket but apparently no passports or documents were necessary. He'd handed one of the twenty-dollar bills he'd stolen from redheaded Hongse's car to the clerk and said, "New York City please." He enunciated in his best accent, mimicking the actor Nicolas Cage. Speaking so clearly, in fact, that the clerk, perhaps expecting unintelligible words, blinked in surprise and handed him a computer-printed chit along with six dollars in change. He counted the money twice and decided that either the clerk had robbed him or, as he muttered under his breath in English, he was now in "one fuck expensive country."
He'd gone to a newsstand connected to the station and bought a razor and comb. In the men's room, he'd shaved and washed the salt water out of his hair and dried it with paper towels. Then he combed the thinning strands back and brushed as much sand off himself as he could. He joined the well-dressed commuters on the platform.
Now, approaching the city, the bus slowed for a tollbooth and then continued through a long tunnel. Finally it emerged into the city itself. Ten minutes later the vehicle parked on a busy commercial street.
Li climbed out like everyone else and stood on the sidewalk.
His first thought: Where're all the bicycles and motorbikes? They were the main means of private transport in China and Li couldn't imagine a city this big without millions of Seagull bicycles coursing through the streets.
His second thought: Where can I buy some cigarettes?
He found a kiosk selling newspapers and bought a pack.
When he looked at his change this time he thought: Ten judges of hell! Nearly three dollars for a single pack! He smoked at least two packs a day, three when he was doing something dangerous and needed to calm his nerves. He'd go broke in a month living here, he estimated. He lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply as he walked through the crowds. He asked a pretty Asian woman how to get to Chinatown and was directed to the subway.