She did and, though there was still some pain in her joints, she believed it much less than she'd been feeling lately. She said a surprised, "It worked."
"It's only temporary. Acupuncture lasts much longer."
"I'll think about it. Thank you." She glanced at her watch. "I should be getting back."
"Wait," Sung said, an urgency in his voice. "I'm not through with my diagnosis." He took her hand, examining the torn nails and worried skin. Normally she was very self-conscious about these bad habits of hers. But she didn't feel the least embarrassed by this man's perusal.
"In China doctors look and touch and talk to determine what is ailing a patient. It's vital to know their frame of mind--happy, sad, worried, ambitious, frustrated." He looked carefully into her eyes. "There's more disharmony within you. You want something you can't have. Or you think you can't have it. It's creating these problems." He nodded at her nails.
"What harmony do I want?"
"I'm not sure. Perhaps a family. Love. Your parents are dead, I sense."
"My father."
"And that was difficult for you."
"Yes."
"And lovers? You've had trouble with lovers."
"I scared 'em off in school--I could drive faster than most of them." This was meant as a joke, though it was true, but Sung didn't laugh.
"Go on," he encouraged.
"When I was a model the worthwhile men were too scared to ask me out."
"Why would a man be scared of a woman?" Sung asked, genuinely bewildered. "It's like yin being scared by yang. Night and day. They should not compete; they should complement and fulfill each other."
"Then the ones who had the guts to ask me out wanted pretty much only one thing."
"Ah, that."
"Yeah, that."
"Sexual energy," Sung said, "is very important, one of the most important parts of qi, spiritual power. But it's only healthy when it comes out of a harmonized relationship."
She laughed to herself. Now there's a phrase to try out on the first date: You interested in a harmonized relationship?
After a sip of tea she continued, "Then I lived with a man for a while. On the force."
"The what?" Sung asked.
"He was a cop too, I mean. It was good. Intense, challenging, I guess I'd say. We'd have dates at the small-arms range and try to outshoot each other. Only he got arrested. Taking kickbacks. You know what I mean?"
Sung laughed. "I've lived in China all my life--of course I know what kickbacks are. And now," he added, "you're with that man you work with."
"Yes."
"Maybe this is the source of the problem," Sung said quietly, studying her even more closely.
"Why d'you say that?" she asked uneasily.
"I would say you are yang--that word means the side of a mountain with the sun on it. Yang is brightness, movement, increase, arousal, beginnings, soft, spring and summer, birth. This is clearly you. But you seem to inhabit the world of the yin. That means the shadowy side of the mountain. It is inwardness, darkness, introspection, hardness and death. It is the end of things, autumn and winter." He paused. "I think perhaps the disharmony is that you aren't being true to your yang nature. You have let the yin too far into your life. Could that be the trouble?"
"I . . . I'm not sure."
"I've just been meeting with Lincoln Rhyme's physician."
"Yes?"
"I've got to talk to you about something."
Her cell phone rang and Sachs jumped at the sound. As she reached for the phone she realized that Sung's hand was still resting on her arm.
Sung eased back into the booth bench and she answered, "Hello?"
"Officer, where the hell are you?" It was Lon Sellitto.
She was reluctant to say but she glanced at the patrol car across the street and had a feeling that they might have told the detective where she was. She said, "With that witness, John Sung."
"Why?"
"Just needed to follow up on a few things."
Not a lie, she thought. Not exactly.
"Well, finish following up," the man said gruffly. "We need you here, at Rhyme's. There's evidence to look at."
Jesus, she thought. What's eating him?
"I'll be right there."
"Make sure you are," the detective snapped.
Perplexed at his attitude, she disconnected the line and said to Sung, "I have to go."
A hopeful expression on his face, the doctor asked, "Have you found Sam Chang and the others from the ship?"
"Not yet."
As she rose he startled her by asking quickly, "I'd be honored if you would come back to see me. I could continue my treatment." Sung pushed the bag of herbs and pills toward her.
She hesitated only a moment before saying, "Sure. I'd like that."
Chapter Twenty
"Hope we didn't interrupt anything important, Officer," Lon Sellitto said gruffly when she walked into Rhyme's living room.
She began to ask the detective what he meant but the criminalist himself began sniffing the air. Sachs responded with a querying glance.
"Recall my book, Sachs? 'Perfumes should not be worn by crime scene personnel because--' "
" '--odors not native to the scene may help identify individuals who have been present there.' "
"Good."
"But it's not perfume, Rhyme."
"Incense maybe?" he suggested.
"I met John Sung at a restaurant in his building. There was some incense burning."
"It stinks," Rhyme concluded.
"No, no," Sonny Li said. "Peaceful. Very peaceful."
No, it stank, petulant Rhyme thought. He glanced at the bag she carried and wrinkled his nose. "And what is that?"
"Medicine. For my arthritis."
"That stinks even more than the incense. What do you do with it?"
"Make it into tea."
"Probably tastes so vile that you forget about the pain in your joints. Hope you enjoy it. I'll stick to scotch." He examined her closely for a moment. "Enjoy your visit with Dr. Sung, Sachs?"
"I--" she began uneasily, troubled by his edgy tone.
"How's he doing?" Rhyme asked blithely.
"Better," she answered.
"Talk much about his home in China? Where he travels? Whom he spends time with?"
"What're you getting at?" she asked cautiously.
"I'm just curious if what occurred to me occurred to you?"
"And that would be?"
"That Sung was the Ghost's bangshou. His assistant. His co-conspirator."
"What?" she gasped.
"Apparently it didn't," Rhyme observed.
"But there's no way. I've spent some time talking to him. He can't have any connection with the Ghost. I mean--"
"As a matter of fact," Rhyme interrupted, "he doesn't. We just got a report from the FBI office in Singapore. The Ghost's bangshou on the Dragon was Victor Au. The prints and picture match one of the three bodies the Coast Guard found this morning at the site of the sinking." He nodded toward the computer.
Sachs looked at the picture on Rhyme's screen and then glanced at the whiteboard on which were taped the Coast Guard's pictures of the bodies. Au was the one who'd drowned, not been shot.
Rhyme said sternly, "Sung's clean. But we didn't know that until ten minutes ago. I told you to be careful, Sachs. And you just dropped by Sung's to socialize. Don't go getting careless on me." His voice rose, saying, "And that goes for everybody!"
Search well but watch your back. . . .
"Sorry," she muttered.
What was distracting her? Rhyme wondered again. But he said only, "Back to work, boys and girls." Then nodded at the electrostatic shoeprints from the Tang crime scene that Thom had mounted on the evidence board. There was not much they could tell except that the Ghost's shoeprints, though an average size shoe, about an 8 in America, were larger than the three prints of his accomplices.
"Now, what about the trace that was in the Ghost's shoes, Mel?"
br />
"Okay, Lincoln," the tech said slowly, looking over the screen of the chromatograph. "We've got something here. Very old oxidized iron flakes, old wood fibers and ash and silicon--looks like glass dust. And then the main act is a dark, low-luster mineral in large concentrations--montmorillonite. Alkaline oxide too."
Okay, Rhyme mused. Where the hell did it come from? He nodded slowly then closed his eyes and began, figuratively, to pace.
When he'd been head of IRD--the Investigation and Resources Division of the NYPD, the forensic unit--Rhyme had walked everywhere in New York City. He carried small bags and jars in his pockets for the samples of soil and concrete and dust and vegetation he'd collect to add to his knowledge of the city. A criminalist must know his territory in a thousand different ways: as sociologist, cartographer, geologist, engineer, botanist, zoologist, historian.
He realized that there was something familiar about the trace that Cooper was describing. But what?
Wait, there's a thought. Hold on to it.
Damn, it slipped away.
"Hey, Loaban?" a voice called, but from a distance. Rhyme ignored Li and continued to walk intently through, then fly over, the various neighborhoods of the city.
"Is he--?"
"Shhhhh," Sachs said firmly.
Freeing him to continue on his journey.
He sailed over the Columbia University tower, over Central Park with its loam and limestone and wildlife excrement, through the streets of Midtown coated with the residue of the tons of soot that fall upon them daily, the boat basins with their peculiar mix of gasoline, propane and diesel fuel, the decaying parts of the Bronx with their lead paint and old plaster mixed with sawdust as filler . . . .
Soaring, soaring . . .
Until he came to one place.
His eyes opened.
"Downtown," he said. "The Ghost's downtown."
"Sure." Alan Coe shrugged. "Chinatown."
"No, not Chinatown," Rhyme replied. "Battery Park City or one of the developments around there."
"How'd you figure that out?" Sellitto asked.
"That montmorillonite? It's bentonite. That's a clay used as slurry to keep groundwater out of foundations when construction crews dig deep foundations. When they built the World Trade Center they sunk the foundation sixty-five feet down to the bedrock. The builder used millions of tons of bentonite. It's all over the place down there."
"But they use bentonite in a lot of places," Cooper pointed out.
"Sure, but the other trace materials Sachs found are from there too. That whole area is landfill and it's full of rusted metal and glass trace. And the ash? To clear the old piers down there the builders burned them."
"And it's only twenty minutes from Chinatown," Deng pointed out.
Thom wrote this on the evidence chart.
Still, it was a huge area and contained many high-density buildings: hotels, apartments and office buildings. They would need more information in order to narrow down exactly where the Ghost might be staying.
Sonny Li was pacing, walking in front of the board.
"Hey, Loaban, I got some ideas too."
"About what?" Rhyme grumbled. The man reeked of cigarette smoke. Rhyme had never smoked but he felt a huge burst of crip envy--that this man could partake in his vices all by himself, without having to track down a conspirator to help him.
Fucking surgery better do something, he thought.
"Hey, Loaban, you listening?"
"Go ahead, Sonny," Rhyme said, distracted.
"I was at crime scene too."
"Yeah," Sachs said, giving him an exasperated look. "Walking around, smoking."
"See," Rhyme explained, trying against his nature to be patient, "anything that comes into the crime scene after the perpetrator can contaminate it. That makes it harder to find the evidence that would lead to the suspect."
"Hey, Loaban, you think I don't know that? Sure, sure, you pick up dust and dirt and put in gas chromatograph and then spectrometer and use scanning electron microscope." The complicated English words fell awkwardly from his tongue. "Match against databases."
"You know about forensic equipment?" Rhyme asked, blinking in surprise.
"Know about it? Sure, we use that stuff. Hey, I study at Beijing Institute of Forensics. Got nice medal. Second in class. I know all that, I'm saying." He added testily, "We not back in Ming dynasty, Loaban. I got own computer--Windows XP. All kinds databases too. And cell phone and pager."
"Okay, Sonny, got the point. What'd you see at the scene?"
"Disharmony. That what I saw."
"Explain," Rhyme said.
"Harmony very important in China. Even crime has harmony. At that place back there, that warehouse, no harmony at all."
"What's a harmonious killing?" Coe asked wryly.
"The Ghost find man who betray him. He torture him, kill him and leave. But, hey, Hongse, remember? Place all destroyed. Posters of China torn up, statues of Buddha and dragons broken . . . . Han Chinese not do that."
"That's the racial majority in China--the Han," Eddie Deng explained. "But the Ghost's Han, isn't he?"
"Sure, but he not do it. Office got messed up after Tang killed. I hear her say that."
Sachs confirmed this.
"Probably Ghost left and then those men work for him, they vandal the office. I'm thinking he hire ethnic minority for his ba-tu."
"Muscle, thugs," Deng translated.
"Yeah, yeah, thugs. Hire them from minorities. Mongols, Manchus, Tibetans, Uighurs."
"That's crazy, Sonny," Rhyme said. "Harmony?"
"Crazy?" Li replied, shrugging broadly. "Sure, you right, Loaban. I crazy. Like when I say you find Jerry Tang first, I crazy. But, hey, you listen me then, we maybe found Tang when he alive, strap him down and use ox prod till he tell us where is Ghost." The entire team turned to him in shock. Li hesitated a moment then laughed. "Hey, Loaban, joke."
Though Rhyme wasn't completely sure he was kidding.
Li continued, pointing at the board, "You want evidence? Okay, here evidence. Shoeprints. Smaller than Ghost's. Han--Chinese--not big people. Like me. Not big like you. But people from west and north minorities, lot of them even smaller than us. There, you like that forensic stuff, Loaban? Thought you would. So go find some minorities. You get lead to Ghost, I'm saying."
Rhyme glanced at Sachs and he could tell she was thinking the same thing. What can it hurt? Rhyme asked Eddie Deng, "What about it? You know these minorities?"
"I don't have a clue," he replied. "Most of the people we deal with in the Fifth Precinct are Han--Fujianese, Cantonese, Mandarin, Taiwanese . . . . "
Coe agreed, adding, "The minorities would keep to themselves."
Impatient now that there was a lead to be pursued, Rhyme snapped, "Well, who would know? I want to follow up on it. How?"
"Tongs," Li said. "Tongs know everything. Han, non-Han, everything."
"And what exactly is a tong?" Rhyme asked, having only a vague memory from some bad movie he'd watched when recovering from his accident.
Eddie Deng explained that tongs were societies of Chinese who had common interests: people who came from a particular area in China or who practiced the same trade or profession. They were shrouded in secrecy and, in the old days, met only in private--"tong" means "chamber." In the United States they arose for protection from whites and for self-governance; traditionally Chinese resolved disputes among themselves, and the head of one's tong had more power over his members than did the president of the United States.
Though they had a long tradition in crime and violence, he continued, in recent years tongs had cleaned themselves up. The word "tong" was out and they began calling themselves "public associations," "benevolent societies," or "merchant guilds." Many were still just as involved in gambling, massage parlors, extortion and money laundering as ever but they distanced themselves from violence. They hired young men with no connection to the tongs to act as enforcers.
"Outsourcing," Deng j
oked.
"Were you in one, Eddie?" Rhyme asked.
The detective polished his stylish glasses as he responded defensively, "For a while. It was a kid thing."
"Is there anybody at one we can talk to?" Sachs asked.
Deng thought for a moment. "I'd give Tony Cai a call. He helps us some--up to a point--and he's one of the best connected loabans in the area. Lot of guanxi. He runs the Eastern Chinese Public Association. They're on the Bowery."
"Call him," Rhyme ordered.
Coe shook his head. "Won't talk on the phone."
"Bugged?"
Deng said, "No, no, it's a cultural thing. For some matters you have to meet face-to-face. But there's a catch--Cai won't want to be seen around police, not with the Ghost involved."
A thought occurred to Rhyme. "Get a limo and bring him here."
"What?" Sellitto asked.
"The heads of tongs . . . they have egos, right?"
"You bet," Coe said.
"Tell him we need his help and that the mayor's sending a limo to pick him up."
While Sellitto called about the car Eddie Deng rang up Cai's community association. The conversation was in the clipped and singsongy cadence of rapidly spoken Chinese. Eddie put his hand over the mouthpiece. "Let me get this straight--I'm telling him this is at the mayor's request."
"No," Rhyme said. "Tell him it's the governor's office."
"We oughta be a little careful here, Linc," Sellitto said delicately.
"We'll be careful after we collar the Ghost."
Deng nodded, returned to the phone and they spoke some more. He hung up. "Okay. He'll do it."
Sonny Li was patting the pockets of his trousers absently, looking for cigarettes undoubtedly. He seemed uneasy.
"Hey, Loaban, I ask you something. Maybe you do me favor?"
"What?"
"I make phone call? Back to China. Cost some money I not have. But I pay you back."
"That's all right," Rhyme said.
"Who're you calling?" Coe asked bluntly.
"Private. My business."
"No. You don't have a private life around here, Li. Tell us, or no call."
The cop offered a cold glance at the INS agent and said, "Call is to my father."
Coe muttered, "I know Chinese--Putonghua and Minnanhua. I understand hao. I'll be listening."
Rhyme nodded at Thom, who got an international operator on the line and placed the call to the town of Liu Guoyuan in Fujian. He handed the receiver to Li, who took it uncertainly. He glanced at the plastic hand piece for a moment then turned away from Rhyme and the others and slowly brought it to his ear.
Rhyme suddenly saw a different Sonny Li. One of the first words he heard was "Kangmei"--Sonny's formal name. The man was obsequious, slumped, nervous, nodding like a young student as he spoke. Finally he hung the phone up and stood looking down at the floor for a moment.