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Then another one: The bodies of the Ghost's victims in Li's town in China, lying bloody on the sidewalk in front of the cafe.
And he pictured another terrible sight, one that had not yet happened: Hongse dead, lying in darkness. Loaban too, his face as still in death as his body had been in life.
Sonny Li rolled to his knees and began crawling toward his enemy.
*
The crime scene bus left twenty-foot skid marks on the Chinatown street, which was slick with runoff from the melting ice from bins at a nearby fish market.
Amelia Sachs, her face grim, jumped out, accompanied by INS agent Alan Coe and Eddie Deng. They ran through the pungent alleyway toward the cluster of uniformed officers from the Fifth Precinct. The men and women stood casually, looking as matter-of-fact as police always did at crime scenes.
Even scenes of homicides.
Sachs slowed and gazed down at the body.
Sonny Li was lying on his stomach on the filthy cobblestones. Eyes partially open, palms flat beside him, level with his shoulders, as if he were about to start a series of push-ups.
Sachs paused, filled with the desire to drop to her knees and grip the man's hand. She'd walked the grid many times in the years she'd worked with Rhyme, but this was her first scene involving a fellow cop--fellow cop and, she could now say, friend.
A friend too of Rhyme's.
Still, she resisted the temptation toward sentiment. This was, after all, a crime scene no different from any other and, as Lincoln Rhyme often pointed out, one of the worst contaminants at scenes was careless cops.
Look past it, ignore who the victim is. Remember Rhyme's advice: Give up the dead.
Well, that'd be damn tough to do. For both of them. But for Lincoln Rhyme especially. Sachs had noticed that in the past two days Rhyme had formed an improbable bond with this man, as close as he'd come to a friendship since she'd known him. She was now aware of the painful silence of a thousand conversations never to occur, of a thousand laughs never to be shared.
But then she thought of someone else: Po-Yee, soon to be another victim of the man who'd committed this crime, if they didn't find him. And so Sachs put the pain away, the same way she closed and locked the storage box in which her Colt .45 competition shooting pistol rested.
"We did what you wanted," said another officer, a detective in a gray suit. "Nobody got closer'n this. Only the EMS tech was in." A nod toward the body. "He's DCDS."
Cop initials perfunctorily signifying the category of lifelessness: deceased confirmed dead at the scene.
Agent Coe walked slowly up to her. "I'm sorry," the agent said, running his hand through his scarlet hair. There seemed to be little genuine sadness in his voice, however.
"Yeah."
"He was a good man."
"Yes, he was." She said this bitterly, thinking: And he was a hell of a better cop than you are. If you hadn't fucked up yesterday we'd've gotten the Ghost. Sonny would still be alive and Po-Yee and the Changs would be safe.
She motioned to the cops. "I've got to run the scene. Could I have everybody out of here?"
Oh, man, she thought, dismayed at what she now had to do--though she was anticipating not the difficult and sad task of searching the scene but something far more arduous.
She pulled her headset on and plugged it into her radio.
Okay. Just go ahead. Do it.
She made the call to Central and was patched through to the phone.
A click.
"Yes?" Rhyme asked.
She said, "I'm here."
A pause then: "And?"
