Tess Gerritsen - The Silent Girl

“Within a month, a host of bad things happened. Detective Staines keeled over and died of a heart attack. A technician working the crime scene unit was killed in a car accident. Detective Ingersoll’s wife had a stroke and later died. Finally, there was the girl who disappeared.”

“What girl?”

“Charlotte Dion. She was the seventeen-year-old daughter of Dina Mallory, one of the restaurant victims. A few weeks after Dina was killed in the Red Phoenix, Charlotte vanished during a school outing. She’s never been found.”

Jane could suddenly hear her own heartbeat, loud as a drum in her ears. “And you said Iris Fang’s daughter vanished, too.”

Zucker nodded. “They disappeared two years apart, but it’s still an eerie coincidence, isn’t it? Two victims of the Red Phoenix both had daughters go missing.”

“ Was it a coincidence?”

“What else would it be? The two families didn’t know each other. The Fangs were struggling immigrants. Charlotte’s parents were Boston Brahmins. There was no other connection between them. You might as well blame it on the Red Phoenix curse.” He looked at the case file. “Or maybe it’s that building. In Chinatown, they consider it haunted. They say that when you step inside, evil attaches itself to you.” He looked at Jane. “And follows you home.”

JANE DID NOT LIKE COINCIDENCES. IN THE COMPLEX FABRIC OF LIFE they happened, of course, but she always felt compelled to examine what made the threads cross, whether it was truly random or if there was some grander design at work, a pattern that could only be seen when you traced those threads back to their origins. And so she sat at her desk trying to do exactly that, tracing five disparate threads that had tragically intersected in a Chinatown restaurant nineteen years ago.

The Red Phoenix file was not a particularly thick one. For homicide detectives, a murder-suicide is a lucky catch, the kind of case that comes neatly wrapped up with a bow, justice conveniently dispensed by the perp himself in the form of a self-inflicted bullet. The police report by Staines and Ingersoll focused not on the who but the why of the shooting, and their analysis relied heavily on what Dr. Zucker had already told Jane and Frost about Wu Weimin.

So she looked instead at the four victims.

Victim number one was Joey Gilmore, age twenty-five, born and raised in South Boston. There was a great deal more information about Gilmore in the report, because he had a police record. Burglary, trespassing, assault and battery. That record, plus his employer’s name-Donohue Wholesale Meats-instantly caught Jane’s attention. Boston PD was all too familiar with the owner of the company, Kevin Donohue, because of his deep and enduring ties to local organized crime. Over the past four decades, Donohue had advanced through the ranks from a common street thug to one of the three most powerful names in the local Irish mafia. Law enforcement knew exactly who and what Donohue was; they just couldn’t prove it in court. Not yet.

Jane pulled out the folder of crime scene photos and flipped to the image of Joey Gilmore’s body, lying on the floor amid scattered take-out cartons. He’d been felled with a single bullet to the back of his head. Dr. Zucker might call this a case of amok , but to Jane, it looked a hell of a lot like a gangland execution.

Victim number two was James Fang, age thirty-seven, who worked as host, waiter, and cashier in the Red Phoenix restaurant. He and his wife, Iris, had immigrated from Taiwan sixteen years earlier, when he arrived in the United States as a graduate student in Asian literature. The restaurant was merely his evening job; during the day, he taught in the after-school enrichment program at the Boston Chinatown Neighborhood Center. He and Wu Weimin were described as good friends who had worked together in the Red Phoenix for five years. There were no known conflicts between them. Jane found no mention in the report of the Fangs’ daughter, Laura, who had gone missing two years before. Perhaps Staines and Ingersoll were not even aware of the earlier tragedy that had struck the Fang family.

Victims three and four were a married couple, Arthur and Dina Mallory of Brookline, Massachusetts. Arthur was forty-eight, president and CEO of the Wellesley Group, an investment firm. No occupation was listed for Dina, age forty; judging by her husband’s job title, she did not need to work. For both Arthur and Dina, this was a second marriage, and a blending of two families. Arthur’s first wife was the former Barbara Hart, and they had a son, Mark, age twenty. Dina’s ex-husband was Patrick Dion, and they had a daughter, seventeen. The police report specifically addressed the issue that every good homicide investigator automatically explores: any and all conflicts that resulted from the victims’ divorces and remarriages.

According to Arthur Mallory’s son, Mark Mallory, relations between the Mallory and Dion families were extremely cordial despite the fact Dina and Arthur left their first spouses for each other five years earlier. Even after the divorce and remarriage, Dina Mallory and her ex-husband, Patrick, remained on friendly terms, and the families often shared holiday dinners .

How bizarrely civilized that was, thought Jane. Patrick’s wife leaves him for another man, and then they all spend Christmas together. It sounded too good to be true, but the information came straight from Arthur Mallory’s own son, Mark, who would know. It was the ideal reconstituted family, all smiles and no conflict. She supposed it was possible, but she certainly could not see it happening in her own family. She tried to imagine a Rizzoli reunion that included her father, her mother, her father’s bimbo, and her mother’s new boyfriend, Vince Korsak. Now, there was a massacre waiting to happen, and all bets were off as to who’d be left standing.

But the Mallorys and Dions had somehow made it work. Perhaps it was for the sake of Charlotte, who would have been only twelve when her parents divorced. Like most children of divorce, she’d probably shuttled between two households, the poor little rich girl, bouncing between the homes of her mother, Dina, and her father, Patrick.

Jane turned to the last page in the file and found a brief addendum to the report:

Charlotte Dion, daughter of Dina Mallory, was reported missing April 24. Last seen in vicinity of Faneuil Hall while on school field trip. According to Detective Hank Buckholz, evidence points to likely abduction. Investigation continuing .

That addendum, dated April 28, was signed by Detective Ingersoll.

Two missing girls, Laura Fang and Charlotte Dion. Both of them were daughters of victims killed in the Red Phoenix, but nothing in this report indicated that this was anything more than a sad coincidence. It was just as Dr. Zucker had said. Sometimes there is no pattern, no plan, but merely the blind cruelty of fate, which keeps no running tally of who has suffered too much.

“You know, Rizzoli, all you had to do was ask me.”

She looked up to see Johnny Tam standing beside her desk. “Ask you what?”

“About the Red Phoenix massacre. I just ran into Frost. He told me you two have been hunting down all the files. If you’d just talked to me, I could have told you all about the case.”

“How would you know about it? You were like, what, eight years old when it happened?”

“I’m assigned to Chinatown so I have to know what goes on there. The Chinese still talk about the Red Phoenix, you know. It’s like a wound that never healed. And never will, because it’s all tied up in shame.”