Tess Gerritsen - The Silent Girl

“Fire escape’s here,” said Frost. He poked out his head and craned to look up toward the roof. “Hey, something’s moving up there!”

“Go, go!” said Jane.

Frost scrambled over the sill, all clumsy long arms and legs, and clanged onto the landing. Tam exited right after him, moving with an acrobat’s grace. Last out the window was Jane, and as she dropped onto the metal grate of the landing, she caught a glimpse of the street below. Saw splintered crates, broken bottles. A bad drop, any way you looked at it. She forced herself to focus on the ladder above, where Frost was clanging up the rungs, noisily announcing to the whole world that they were in pursuit.

She scrambled up right behind Tam, her hands gripping slippery metal, the breeze chilling the sweat on her face. She heard Frost grunt, saw the silhouette of his legs flailing against the night sky as he pulled himself over the edge and onto the rooftop. Jane felt his movements transmitted through the rungs as the fire escape shuddered, and for a panic-stricken moment she thought the brackets might give way, that the weight of three bodies would make the whole rickety structure twist off in a screech of metal and fling them to the pavement below. She froze, gripping the ladder, afraid that even a puff of wind would tip them into disaster.

A shriek above her made every hair stand up on the back of her neck. Frost .

She looked up, expecting to see his body hurtling toward her, but all she glimpsed was Tam as he scaled the last rungs and vanished onto the rooftop. She clambered after him, sick with dread. As she reached the roof edge, a piece of asphalt tile crumbled at her touch and dropped away, plummeting into darkness below. With shaking hands, she pulled herself up over the edge and crawled onto the roof. Spotted Tam crouched a few feet away.

Frost. Where is Frost?

She jumped to her feet and scanned the roof. Glimpsed a shadow flitting away, moving so swiftly that it might only have been a cat darting with feline grace into the darkness. Under the night sky, Jane saw empty rooftops, one blending into the next, an aerial landscape of slopes and valleys, jutting chimneys and ventilation shafts. But no Frost.

Dear God, he’s fallen. He’s on the ground somewhere, dead or dying .

“Frost?” Tam yelled as he circled the roof. “Frost?”

Jane pulled out her cell phone. “This is Detective Rizzoli. Beach and Knapp Street. Officer down-”

“He’s here!” Tam yelled. “Help me pull him up!”

She spun around and saw Tam kneeling at the roof’s edge, as if he were about to take a swan dive to the street below. She thrust the phone back into her pocket and ran to his side. Saw Frost clinging with both hands to the rain gutter, his feet dangling above a four-story plummet. Tam dropped to his belly and reached down to grab Frost’s left wrist. The roof sloped here, and a misstep could send them both sliding off the edge. Jane flopped onto her belly beside Tam and grabbed Frost’s right wrist. Together they pulled, straining to drag him up across gritty tiles that snagged Jane’s jacket and scraped her skin. With a loud grunt, Frost flopped onto the roof beside them, where he sprawled, gasping.

“Jesus,” he whispered. “Thought I was dead!”

“What the hell, did you trip and fall?” said Jane.

“I was chasing it, but I swear, it was flying over this roof, like a bat out of hell.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Didn’t you see it?” Frost sat up; even in the darkness Jane could see he was pale and shaking.

“I didn’t see anything,” said Tam.

“It was right there, standing where you are now. Turned and looked straight at me. I jumped back and lost my footing.”

“It?” said Jane. “Are we talking about a man or what?”

Frost let out a trembling breath. Turning, he gazed across the sweep of Chinatown rooftops. “I don’t know.”

“How can you not know?”

Slowly Frost rose to his feet and stood facing the direction that the thing-whatever it was-had fled. “It moved too fast to be a man. That’s all I can tell you.”

“It’s dark up here, Frost,” said Tam. “When you’re hyped up on adrenaline, it’s hard to be sure of what you’re seeing.”

“I know it sounds crazy, but there was something here, something I’ve never seen before. You’ve got to believe me!”

“Okay,” Jane said, clapping him on the shoulder. “I believe you.”

Frost looked at Tam. “But you don’t, do you?”

In the darkness, they saw Tam’s shoulder lift in a shrug. “It’s Chinatown. Weird stuff happens here.” He laughed. “Maybe there’s more to that ghost tour than we thought.”

“It was no ghost,” said Frost. “I’m telling you, it was flesh and blood, standing right there. It was real .”

“No one saw it but you,” said Tam.

Frost stalked away across the roof and stood staring down at the street below. “That may not be entirely true.”

Jane followed him to the edge and saw the fire escape that they’d clambered up only moments earlier. Below them was Knapp Street, dimly lit by the glow of a streetlamp.

“Do you see it?” said Frost, and he pointed toward the corner, at what was mounted on the building.

A surveillance camera.

EVEN AT NINE THIRTY PM, THE EMPLOYEES OF DEDHAM SECURITY were on the job, monitoring properties all over the Greater Boston area.

“Bad guys usually get to work after dark,” said Gus Gilliam as he walked the trio of detectives past a bank of surveillance monitors. “So we have to stay awake, too. If any of our alarms gets tripped, we’re talking to Boston PD like that. ” He snapped his fingers. “You ever need a security system, call us.”

Tam surveyed the video feeds on the monitors. “Wow. You really do have eyes all over the city.”

“All over Suffolk County. And our cameras are actually operational. Half the security cameras you see mounted around town are just dummies that don’t record a damn thing. So if you’re a bad guy, it’s a shell game. You don’t know which cameras are really watching and which aren’t. But when they spot any camera, they tend to shy away and go for easier pickings, so just having a camera in view is a deterrent.”

“We’re lucky that camera on Knapp Street is real,” said Jane.

“Yeah. We have about forty-eight hours’ worth of video stored on that one.” He led them into a back room, where four chairs were already set up around the monitor. “Usually gives us enough postincident time to be notified so we can save relevant footage. That particular camera was installed about five years ago. Last time we were asked to pull video off it, we caught a kid breaking a window.” He sat down at the monitor. “You said you were interested in a second-floor fire escape landing?”

“I’m hoping it’s in your camera’s field of view,” said Jane. “The building in question is about twenty, twenty-five yards away.”

“I don’t know. That could be too far to see much detail, and second floor might not be visible. Plus, we’re talking low resolution. But let’s take a look.”

As the three detectives crowded in to watch the monitor, Gilliam clicked the Play icon, and a live view of Knapp Street appeared. Two pedestrians could be seen walking past, in the direction of Kneeland Street, their backs to the camera.

“Look,” said Frost. “You can just see a corner of the fire escape.”

“Unfortunately, not the window itself,” said Jane.