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He didn't understand her Chinese, though, and she repeated it in English.
"Shut your mouth. If you scream again I'll kill you." He took a cell phone from his pocket and made a call. "I'm inside. The children are here."
The man--dark and Arab-looking, probably from western China--nodded as he listened, looking Chin-Mei up and down. Then he gave a sour sneer. "I don't know, seventeen, eighteen . . . Pretty enough . . . All right."
He disconnected the call.
"First," he said in English, "some food." He seized her hair and dragged the sobbing girl into the kitchen. "What do you have to eat here?"
But all she could hear were those three words looping over and over through her mind.
First, some food . . . first, some food . . .
And then?
Wu Chin-Mei began to cry.
*
In Lincoln Rhyme's town house, gray and gloomy thanks to the storm's early dusk, the case wasn't moving at all.
Sachs sat nearby, calmly sipping that disgusting-smelling tea of hers, which irritated the hell out of Rhyme for no particular reason.
Fred Dellray was back, pacing and squeezing his unlit cigarette, not in any better mood than anyone else. "I wasn't happy then and I ain't happy now. Not. A. Happy. Person."
He was referring to what he'd been told were "resource allocation issues" within the bureau, which were delaying their getting more agents on the GHOSTKILL team. The tall man contemptuously spat out, "They ac-tually said 'RAI,' if you kin believe it. Yep, yep. 'It's an RAI situation.' " He rolled his eyes and muttered, "Jesus loves his mother."
Dellray's take was that nobody in the Justice Department thought human smuggling was particularly sexy and therefore worth much time. In fact, despite the executive order in the nineties shifting the jurisdiction, the bureau didn't have as much experience as the INS. Dellray had tried explaining to the assistant special agent in charge that there was also the little matter that the snakehead in question was a mass murderer. The response to that was also tepid. It fell into the category of LSFH, he'd explained.
"Which is?" Rhyme asked.
" 'Let somebody else fuckin' handle it.' I made that up, butcha get the picture." The SPEC-TAC team too was still cooling their heels down in Quantico, the agent glumly added.
And they were having no better luck with the evidence from any of the crime scenes.
"Okay, what about the Honda he stole at the beach?" Rhyme barked. "It's in the system. Isn't anybody in the hinterland looking for it? I mean, it is on an emergency vehicle locator."
"Sorry, Linc," Sellitto said, after he checked with downtown. "Nothing."
SorryLincnothing . . .
It was a hell of a lot easier to find a ship in a port in Russia than it was to find ten people in his own backyard.
Then the preliminary crime scene report from the Mah killing came back. Thom held the notes up for Rhyme and turned the pages for him. There was nothing to suggest that the Ghost was behind the killing; no evidence "associated" the Ghost with the scene, the forensics term for "connected." No ballistics were involved--Mah's throat had been cut--and the carpet in his office and the hallways hadn't yielded any footprints. The techs had lifted hundreds of latents and three dozen samples of trace evidence but it would take hours to analyze them all.
All the remaining AFIS requests from the fingerprints that Sachs had lifted at the prior scenes had come back negative, with the exception of Jerry Tang's--but his identity was hardly an issue any longer, of course.
"I want a drink," Rhyme said, discouraged. "It's cocktail hour. Hell, it's after cocktail hour."
"Dr. Weaver said no alcohol before the operation," Thom pointed out.
"She said avoid it, Thom. I'm sure she said avoid. Avoidance is not abstention."
"I'm not going to argue Webster's here, Lincoln. No booze."
"The operation isn't until next week. Give me a goddamn drink."
The aide was adamant. "You've been working way too hard on this case. Your blood pressure's up and your schedule's shot to hell."
