Tess Gerritsen - The Silent Girl

“It might be enough.” Frost leaned in closer to read the date and time on the recording. “Go back around two hours. Seven thirty. Let’s see if we can catch a glimpse of our intruder.”

Gilliam rewound to 7:30 PM.

At 7:35, an elderly woman walked slowly along Knapp Street, arms weighed down by grocery sacks.

At 7:50, Johnny Tam appeared outside the Red Phoenix restaurant. He peered into the window, looked at his watch, then vanished through the unlocked front door. A moment later he reemerged, glanced up toward the apartment windows above. Circling toward the back of the building, he disappeared around the corner.

At 8:06, something jerked into view on the fire escape. It was Frost, tumbling clumsily out of the window. He jumped to his feet and climbed out of view.

“What the hell?” Frost murmured. “Nothing came out ahead of me. I know I chased something up that ladder.”

“It doesn’t show up,” said Jane.

“And there’s you, Rizzoli. How come Tam doesn’t show up, either? He came out right after me.”

Tam snorted. “Maybe I’m a ghost.”

“Your problem is the field of view,” said Gilliam. “We’re catching just a corner of the fire escape, so the camera misses anyone who makes a more, er, graceful entry and exit.”

“In other words, Frost and I make lousy cat burglars,” said Jane.

Gilliam smiled. “And Detective Tam here would make a good one.”

Jane sighed. “So we caught nothing on this camera.”

“Assuming this was the only time the intruder entered.”

Jane remembered the scent of incense, the fresh oranges on the plate. Someone was regularly visiting that apartment, leaving offerings in memory of Wu Weimin. “Go back,” she said. “Two nights ago and move forward.”

Gilliam nodded. “Worth a look.”

On the monitor, time wound back to 9:38 PM, forty-eight hours earlier. As the video once again advanced to 10:00 PM, then to midnight, pedestrians walked past, their movements accelerated and shaky. By 2:00 AM, Knapp Street was deserted, and they watched an unchanging view of pavement across which only a stray bit of paper fluttered.

At 3:02 AM, Jane saw it.

It was just the twitch of a shadow on the fire escape landing, but it was enough to make her rock forward in her chair. “Stop. Go back!” she snapped.

Gilliam reversed the video and froze the image on a shadow darkening the fire escape.

“It doesn’t look like much,” said Tam. “It could be nothing but a cat casting that shadow.”

“If someone went into that building,” said Frost, “they’ve gotta come out again, right?”

“Then let’s see what happens next,” said Gilliam, and he advanced the video. They watched as the minutes progressed. Saw two clearly drunken men stagger down Knapp Street and around the corner.

Seconds later Jane gave a gasp. “There.”

Gilliam froze the image and stared at a crouching shadow on the fire escape. Softly he said: “What the hell is that?”

“I told you I saw something,” said Frost. “That’s it. ”

“I don’t even know what we’re looking at,” said Tam. “You can’t see a face, you can’t even be sure it’s a man.”

“But it’s bipedal,” said Frost. “Look how it’s down on its haunches. Like it’s about to leap.”

Jane’s cell phone rang, the sound so startling that she had to take a breath and steady her voice before she answered. “Detective Rizzoli.”

“You left a message on my voice mail,” a man said. “I’m returning your call. This is Lou Ingersoll.”

She sat up straight in her chair. “Detective Ingersoll, we’ve been trying to reach you all week. We need to talk to you.”

“About what?”

“A homicide in Chinatown. Happened last Wednesday night. Victim is a Jane Doe, female in her thirties.”

“You do know that I’ve been retired from Boston PD for sixteen years? Why are you asking me about this?”

“We think this death could be connected to one of your old cases. The Red Phoenix massacre.”

There was a long silence. “I don’t think I want to talk about this on the phone,” he said.

“How about in person, sir?”

She heard his footsteps moving across the floor. Heard his labored breaths. “Okay, I think that vehicle’s gone now. Wish I’d gotten the goddamn license plate.”

“What vehicle?”

“The van that’s been parked across the street ever since I got home. Probably the same son of a bitch who broke in while I was up north.”

“What, exactly, is going on?”

“Come over now, and I’ll give you my theory.”

“We’re in Dedham. It’ll take us half an hour, maybe more. You sure we can’t talk about it now?”

She heard his footsteps moving again. “I don’t want to say anything over the phone. I don’t know who’s listening, and I promised I’d keep her out of this. So I’ll just wait till you get here.”

“What is this all about?”

“Girls, Detective,” he said. “It’s all about what happened to those girls.”

“AT LEAST NOW YOU BELIEVE ME,” Frost said, as he and Jane drove toward Boston. “Now that you’ve seen it for yourself.”

“We don’t know what we saw on that video,” she said. “I’m sure there’s a logical answer.”

“I’ve never seen a man move that fast.”

“So what do you think it was?”

Frost stared out the window. “You know, Rizzoli, there’s a lot of things in this world we don’t understand. Things so old, so strange, that we wouldn’t accept them as possibilities.” He paused. “I used to date a Chinese girl.”

“You did? When?”

“It was back in high school. She and her family had just come over from Shanghai. She was really sweet, really shy. And very old-fashioned.”

“Maybe you should’ve married her instead of Alice.”

“Well, you know what they say about hindsight. Wouldn’t have worked anyway, because her family was dead-set against any white boy. But her great-grandmother, she was okay with me. I think she liked me because I was the only one who paid attention to her.”

“Geez, Frost, is there an old lady alive who doesn’t like you?”

“I liked listening to her stories. She’d talk and Jade would translate for me. The stuff she told me about China, man, if even a fraction of it was true…”

“Like what?”

He looked at her. “Do you believe in ghosts?”

“How many dead people have we been around? If ghosts are real, we’re the ones who would’ve seen one by now.”

“Jade’s great-grandmother, she said that ghosts are everywhere in China. She said it’s because China is so old, and millions and millions of souls have passed on there. They must end up somewhere. If they’re not in heaven, then they’ve gotta be right here. All around us.”

Jane braked at a stoplight. As she waited for the light to change, she thought of how many souls might still linger in this city. How many might be at this very spot, where the two roads intersected. Add up all the dead, century by century, and Boston was surely a haunted town.

“Old Mrs. Chang, she told me stuff that sounded crazy, but she believed it. About holy men who walked on water. Fighting monks who could fly through the air and make themselves invisible.”

“Sounds like she watched too many kung fu movies.”

“But legends must be based on something, don’t you think? Maybe our Western minds are too closed to accept what we can’t understand, and there’s so much more going on in this world than we’re aware of. Don’t you feel that in Chinatown? Whenever I’m there, I wonder what I’m not seeing, all the hidden clues that I’m too blind to notice. I go into those dusty herbalist shops and see all the weird dried things in jars. It’s just hocus-pocus to us, but what if that stuff can actually cure cancer? Or make you live to a hundred? China’s been a civilization for five thousand years. They must know things. Secrets they’ll never tell us.”