Chang fell onto the couch and sat for a long time in silence, staring at the shabby red and black carpet on the floor. Then he walked to the bedroom. William, holding Po-Yee, stared out the window. Chang began to speak to him but changed his mind and silently motioned his younger son out. The boy warily stepped into the living room and followed his father to the couch. They both sat. After a moment Chang composed himself. He asked Ronald, "Son, do you know the warriors of Qin Shi Huang?"
"Yes, Baba."
These were thousands of full-size terra-cotta statues of soldiers, charioteers and horses built near Xi'an by China's first emperor in the third century B.C. and placed in his tomb. The army was to accompany him to the afterlife.
"We're going to do the same for Yeye." He nearly choked on his sorrow. "We're going to send some things to heaven so your grandfather will have them with him."
"What?" Ronald asked.
"Things that were important to him when he was alive. We lost everything on the ship so we'll draw pictures of them."
"Will that work?" the boy asked, frowning.
"Yes. But I need you to help me."
Ronald nodded.
"Take some paper there and that pencil." He nodded toward the table. "Why don't you draw a picture of his favorite brushes--the wolf-hair and the goat. And his ink stick and well. You remember what they looked like?"
Ronald took the pencil in his small hand. He bent over the paper, began his task.
"And a bottle of the rice wine he liked," Mei-Mei suggested.
"And a pig?" the boy asked.
"Pig?" Chang asked.
"He liked pork rice, remember?"
Then Chang was aware of someone behind him. And he turned to see William looking down at his brother's drawing. Somber-faced, the teenager said, "When Grandmother died, we burned money."
It was a tradition at Chinese funerals to burn slips of paper printed to look like million-yuan notes, issued by the "Bank of Hell" so that the deceased would have money to spend in the afterworld.
"Maybe I can draw some yuan," William said.
Chang was swept with emotion at his words but he didn't embrace the boy, as he wanted desperately to do. He said simply, "Thank you, son."
The lean boy crouched down beside his brother and began to draw the bills.
When the children had finished their drawings Chang led his family outside into the backyard of their new home and, as if this were Chang Jiechi's actual funeral, he set two burning incense sticks in the ground to mark the spot where the body would have lain and then, setting afire the pictures the sons had drawn, they watched the smoke disappear into the gray sky and the ash melt into black curls.
Chapter Thirty-four
"Somebody made another move on the Wus," Sellitto said, glancing up at Rhyme from his cell phone.
"What?" Sachs asked, astonished. "In our Murray Hill safehouse?"
Rhyme wheeled around to face the detective, who said, "Dark-complected man, slight build, wearing gloves, was spotted on one of the security cameras in the alleyway. He was checking out one of the rear windows. Coincidence, you think?"
Sonny Li laughed bitterly. "With Ghost, there not coincidences."
With a concurring nod, Rhyme asked, "What happened?"
"Two of our people went after him but he got away."
The criminalist then asked, "How the hell did the Ghost find out where they were?"
"Who'd know?" Sellitto asked.
Sachs considered this. "After the shoot-out on Canal Street, one of his bangshous could've followed me to the clinic then followed the Wus to the safehouse. Hard to do but possible." She walked to the whiteboard and tapped an entry. "Or how 'bout this?"
* Ghost is reported to have gov't people on payroll.
"A spy, you thinking?" Sellitto asked.
She said, "Nobody at the bureau knew we sent them to Murray Hill. Dellray had left by the time I thought of it. That leaves somebody at the INS or NYPD."
"Well," Sellitto said, "we damn well can't keep the Wus there anymore. I'll call the U.S. Marshals and have them taken to a witness protection facility upstate." He looked at the team around him. "And that information doesn't leave this room." He placed the call and arranged to have the Wus transported in a bulletproof van.
Rhyme was growing impatient. "Somebody check with the bureau. Where the hell is Dellray's replacement? Eddie, make the call."
Deng got in touch with the bureau's ASAC. It turned out that there'd been some delay with the magical "powwow" that was supposed to result in additional agents to work GHOSTKILL.
"They said everything'll be in place this afternoon."
"What's 'everything'?" Rhyme asked caustically. "And what fucking place does it have to be in before we get the agents? Don't they know there's a killer out there?"
"You want to call them back?"
He snapped, "No. I want to look at the evidence."
Sachs's search of the crime scene at the Ghost's safehouse on Patrick Henry Street had mixed results. One discouraging fact was that the cell phone that had been instrumental in tracking down the Ghost had been abandoned in the high-rise. Had he still been using it, they might have been able to trace him. Moreover, the fact he'd left it meant that he'd probably figured out that this was how they'd found him and would now be far more careful when calling on mobiles.
Unlike the shooter killed on Canal Street, the Uighur in the safehouse did have some identification on him, a driver's license and a card with the address of the Turkestan cultural center in Queens. But Bedding and Saul and a team of tactical agents were at the center now and the head of the organization had said only that he'd heard that some unidentified Chinese man had hired a few people in the neighborhood to move furniture. He didn't know anything else. They would continue to lean on him, the twins assured, but their assessment was that he'd rather go to jail than dime out the Ghost.
The name on the lease of the Ghost's apartment didn't help either: Harry Lee. His Social Security number and references were fake and the certified rental check came from a bank in the Caribbean. "Lee" was the equivalent of "Smith" in English, Deng reported.
The body of the old man found dead from the morphine overdose, though, did reveal some clues. He'd carried in his wallet an ID card, very blurred from the seawater, that identified him as Chang Jiechi. They also found a very old scrap of paper hidden behind the ID. Deng smiled sadly. "Look at that. It's an autograph from Chiang Kai-shek, the nationalist leader. The inscription thanked Chang Jiechi for his efforts to resist the communists and keep the Chinese people free from dictatorship."
Rhyme's gaze then slipped to the row of pictures below the ones of the old man's corpse. They were close-ups of his hands. The criminalist moved his own finger slightly and eased the Storm Arrow up to the board.
"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?"
"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?"
"The ship. The Fuzhou Dragon."
GHOSTKILL
* * *
Easton, Long Island, Crime Scene
* Two immigrants killed on beach; shot in back.
* One immigrant wounded--Dr. John Sung.
* "Bangshou" (assistant) on board; identity unknown.
* Assistant confirmed as drowned body found near site where Dragon sank.
* Ten immigrants escape: seven adults (one elderly, one injured woman), two children, one infant. Steal church van.
* Blood samples sent to lab for typing.
* Injured woman is AB negative. Requesting more information about her blood.
* 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.
* Vehicle is a BMW X5.
* Driver--Jerry Tang.
* No vehicles to pick up immigrants located.
* Cell phone, presumably Ghost's, sent for analysis to FBI.
* Untraceable satellite secure phone. Hacked Chinese gov't system to use it.
* Ghost's weapon is 7.62mm pistol. Unusual casing.
* Model 51 Chinese automatic pistol.
* Ghost is reported to have gov't people on payroll.
* Ghost stole red Honda sedan to escape. Vehicle locator request sent out.
* No trace of Honda found.
* Three bodies recovered at sea--two shot, one drowned. Photos and prints to Rhyme and Chinese police.
* Drowned individual identified as Victor Au, the Ghost's bangshou.
* Fingerprints sent to AFIS.
* No matches on any prints but unusual markings on Sam Chang's fingers and thumbs (injury, rope burn?).
* Profile of immigrants: Sam Chang and Wu Qichen and their families, John Sung, baby of woman who drowned, unidentified man and woman (killed on beach).
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.
* Injured woman is AB negative. Requesting more information about her blood.
* Fingerprints sent to AFIS.
* No matches.
Jerry Tang Murder Crime Scene
* Four men kicked door in and tortured him and shot him.
* Two shell casings--match Model 51. Tang shot twice in head.
* Extensive vandalism.
* Some fingerprints.
* No matches except Tang's.
* Three accomplices have smaller shoe size than Ghost, presumably smaller stature.
* Trace suggests Ghost's safehouse is probably downtown, Battery Park City area.
* Suspected accomplices from Chinese ethnic minority. Presently pursuing whereabouts.
* Uighurs from Turkestan Community and Islamic Center of Queens.