Tess Gerritsen - The Silent Girl

Like the front entrance to the Red Phoenix restaurant, the door to the upstairs apartments was secured behind a steel gate. The shadows had deepened to night, and Frost had to shine his flashlight on the lock so Kwan could insert the key. Rusty hinges squealed as he swung open the gate, and yet another key had to be inserted into another lock before he could open the inner door.

Inside was blackness. The stairwell light had burned out, so Jane turned on her flashlight and saw steps leading upward, the railing rubbed smooth by the oils of countless hands sliding over wood. The darkness seemed to magnify the sound of their shoes creaking on the steps, and she heard Mr. Kwan’s labored breathing behind them as he struggled to climb the stairs.

At the top of the flight, she paused outside the door to the second-floor apartment. It was unlocked, yet she did not want to open that door, did not want to see what lurked beyond. She stood with her hand frozen on the knob, the metal cold as ice against her skin. Only when she heard Mr. Kwan reach the top step, wheezing right behind her, did she finally push open the door.

She and Frost stepped into what had once been the home of Wu Weimin.

The windows were boarded shut, closing off any light from outside. Although the apartment had been vacant for years, she could still smell the scents left by those who had once lived here. The ghostly fragrance of incense and oranges still lingered, trapped in the tomb-like darkness. As her flashlight beam skittered across the wood floor, she saw the gouges and scratches of a century’s worth of wear, scars left by scraping chair legs and dragged furniture.

She crossed to a doorway at the far end of the room, and when she walked through it, the scent of incense, the presence of ghosts, seemed stronger. These windows, too, were covered by boards, and her flashlight seemed a feeble weapon to cut through the curtain of darkness. Her beam swept across the wall, across the scars of old nail holes and a Rorschach blot of mold.

A face stared back at her.

She gasped and jerked backward, colliding with Frost.

“What?” he said.

Shock had frozen her voice; all she could do was shine her light at the framed portrait hanging on the wall. As she approached it, the smell of incense grew overpowering. Beneath the portrait was a low table where she saw the remains of joss sticks, burned down to nubs among a mound of ashes. On a porcelain plate were five oranges.

“It’s him,” Frost murmured. “It’s a photo of the cook.”

It took Jane a moment to see it, but as she stared at the face she realized he was right. The man in the photo was indeed Wu Weimin, but this was no homicidal maniac glaring back at them. In this picture he was laughing as he clutched a fishing pole, a Boston Red Sox cap tilted rakishly on his head. A happy man on a happy day .

“This looks like some kind of shrine to his memory,” said Frost.

Jane picked up an orange from the plate and took a sniff. Saw that the stem end was tinged with green. Real, she thought. She turned to Mr. Kwan, whom she could barely make out in the doorway. “Who else has a key to this building?”

“No one,” he said, rattling his jailer’s ring. “I have the only key.”

“But these oranges are fresh. Someone’s been in here recently. Someone left this offering and burned this incense.”

“These keys always with me,” he insisted, noisily jangling the ring for emphasis.

“The gate downstairs has a dead bolt,” said Frost. “There’s no way you could pick the lock.”

“Then how could anyone…” She went dead silent. Turned toward the doorway.

Footsteps were thumping up the stairs.

In an instant her weapon was drawn and clutched in both hands. Pushing aside Mr. Kwan, she quickly slipped out of the bedroom. As she eased her way across the living room, she felt her heart banging, heard Frost’s footsteps creaking on her right. Smelled incense and mold and sweat, a dozen details assaulting her at once. But it was the stairwell door she focused on, a black portal to something that was now climbing toward them. Something that suddenly took on the shape of a man.

“Freeze!” Frost commanded. “Boston PD!”

“Whoa, Frost.” Johnny Tam gave a startled laugh. “It’s just me.”

Behind her, Jane heard Mr. Kwan give a squawk of fear. “Who is he? Who is he?”

“What the hell, Tam,” said Frost, huffing out a breath as he holstered his weapon. “I could have blown your head off.”

“You did tell me to meet you here, didn’t you? I would’ve gotten here sooner, but I got stuck in traffic coming back from Springfield.”

“You talk to the owner of that Honda?”

“Yeah. Said it was stolen right out of his driveway. And that wasn’t his GPS in the car.” He swept his flashlight around the room. “So what’s going on in here?”

“Mr. Kwan’s giving us a tour of the building.”

“It’s been boarded up for years. What’s there to see?”

“More than we expected. This is Wu Weimin’s apartment.”

Tam’s flashlight revealed patches of mold and crumbling plaster from the ceiling. “This place looks like it’s from the lead-paint era.”

“No lead paint here,” snapped Kwan. “No asbestos, either.”

“But look what we did find,” said Jane, turning back toward the bedroom. “Someone’s been visiting this apartment. And they left behind…” She halted, her beam frozen on blank wall.

“Left behind what?”

I must be looking at the wrong spot, she thought, and shifted her light. Again, she saw blank wall. She swept the beam all around the room until she flashed on the little table with the joss sticks and oranges. Above it, the wall was empty.

“What the hell?” Frost whispered.

Through the pounding of her own heart, she heard three gun holsters simultaneously snick open. As she slid out her weapon, she whispered: “Tam, take Mr. Kwan into the stairwell and stay with him. Frost, you’re with me.”

“Why?” protested Mr. Kwan as Tam pulled him out of the room. “What’s going on?”

“Doorway there,” she murmured, her light shining on a black rectangle.

Together she and Frost inched toward it, their beams wildly crisscrossing, scanning every dark corner. Her breath was a roar in her ears, every sense sharpened to diamond points. She registered the smell of the darkness, the strobe-like glimpses as her beam flicked here, there. The weight of the gun, heavy and reassuring. On the rooftop, Jane Doe had a gun, too, and it didn’t save her .

She thought of blades slicing through wrist bones, through neck and windpipe, and she dreaded stepping through that doorway and confronting what waited on the other side.

One, two, three. Do it .

She was first through, dropping to a crouch as she swung the light around. Heard Frost’s harsh breathing behind her as she glimpsed a porcelain toilet, a sink, a rust-stained bathtub. No bogeyman with a blade.

Another doorway.

Frost took the lead this time, slipping through into a bedroom where wallpaper hung peeling, like a room shedding its skin. No furniture, nowhere to hide.

Through one more doorway, and they were back in the living room. Back in familiar territory. Jane walked out into the stairwell, where Tam and Mr. Kwan stood waiting.

“Nothing?” said Tam.

“That photo didn’t walk off on its own.”

“We were right here in the stairwell the whole time. No one came by us.”

Jane reholstered her gun. “Then how the hell…”

“Rizzoli!” called out Frost. “Look at this!”

They found him standing by the window in the bedroom where the portrait had hung. Like all the other windows, this one had been boarded over, but when Frost nudged the board, it easily swiveled aside, suspended in place by only a single nail above the frame. Jane peered through the opening and saw that the window faced Knapp Street.