Tess Gerritsen - The Silent Girl

“If it’s Donohue, he has a very long reach. Maybe into Boston PD itself.”

She stared at her husband. “Can the Bureau back up that charge?”

“There’s not enough evidence to make it stick. But I’ll tell you now, he’s not someone you want to fuck with, Jane. If he has a channel into Boston PD, he already knows exactly what you’re up to. He knows you’re coming for him.”

She thought about all the police officers who’d turned up at Ingersoll’s residence last night, including Lieutenant Marquette himself. How many cops had been watching her, keeping tabs on what she said, what she planned? How much of that information had leaked to Donohue?

“Last night was a gift,” said Gabriel. “You survived. Maybe you should take that gift home and savor it for a while.”

“Drop out of this case? Is that what you’re asking me to do?”

“Take a leave of absence. You need time to recover.”

“Don’t.” She stepped so close she had to crane her neck to stare him in the eye. Gabriel didn’t back down; he never did. “I don’t need to hear this from you,” she said. “Not now.”

“Then when am I going to say it? At your funeral?”

Her ringing cell phone cut into the silence between them. Snatching it up, she answered with a curt “Rizzoli.”

“Um, is this a bad time, Detective?”

“Who is this?”

“Erin. In the crime lab.”

Jane huffed out a breath. “Sorry. What do you have for me?”

“Remember those weird hairs on Jane Doe’s clothes? The ones I couldn’t identify?”

“Yeah. The gray ones.”

“I can’t wait to tell you what they are.”

THE CONVERSATION WITH GABRIEL was still weighing on Jane’s mind as she and Frost drove together to Schroeder Plaza. He knew her moods well enough to stay silent for most of the drive, but as she turned into the parking garage, he said wistfully: “I miss that part about being married.”

“Which part?” she said.

“The part about having someone worry about you. Hassle you about not taking any risks.”

“That’s supposed to be a good thing?”

“Well, isn’t it? It means he loves you. It means he doesn’t want to lose you.”

“What it means is I have to fight battles on two fronts. Do my job while Gabriel tries to tie me into a straitjacket.”

“What if he didn’t? Do you ever think of that? What it’d be like to not have him care enough to say anything? What it’d be like to not be married at all?”

She pulled into a parking space and shut off the engine. “He doesn’t want me working on this case.”

“I’m not sure I want to be working on it, either. After what we’ve both been through.”

She looked at him. “Scares you?”

“I’m not afraid to admit it.”

They heard a door slam, and both turned to see Tam step out of his car a few spaces away. “Bet it doesn’t scare him,” she muttered. “I don’t think anything rattles Bruce Lee over there.”

“It’s got to be an act. He’d be crazy not to be scared of Donohue and his boys.”

Jane pushed open her door. “Come on, before someone thinks we’re making out in here or something.”

By the time they reached the crime lab, Tam was already sitting at Erin Volchko’s microscope, peering at a slide.

“There you two are,” said Erin. “Detective Tam and I were just looking at some sample primate hair strands.”

“Any of them look like the hairs from our gal?” asked Jane.

“Yes, but microscopy can’t pinpoint the precise species. For that, I went to a different technique.” On the countertop, Erin spread out a page printed with columns in varying shades of gray. “These are keratin patterns. Hair has different protein components that you can separate by electrophoresis. What you do is wash and dry the sample, dissolve it in a soup of chemicals, and place the dissolved proteins on a thin layer of gel. Then you subject it to an electrical current. That makes the various proteins migrate across the gel at different rates.”

“And you end up with these gray columns.”

“Yes. That’s after silver staining and rinsing, to deepen the contrast.”

Frost shrugged. “Doesn’t look all that exciting.”

“But when I emailed this pattern to the Wildlife Forensics Lab in Oregon, they were able to match it against their database of keratin patterns.”

“There’s a database for that?” said Tam.

“Absolutely. Wildlife scientists around the world contribute to it. If US Customs seizes a shipment of animal skins, they need to know if those skins are from an endangered species. The database helps them identify which animal the fur comes from.” Erin opened a file folder and pulled out another sheet of keratin patterns. “Here’s what they compared our strands with. You’ll notice the protein bands line up almost perfectly with one particular specimen.”

Jane glanced back and forth between the two pages. “Column number four,” she said.

“Correct.”

“So what is number four?”

“It’s a nonhuman primate, as I guessed earlier. An Old World monkey, genus Semnopithecus . This particular species is known as the gray langur.”

“Gray?” said Jane, glancing up.

Erin nodded. “The same color as those hair strands from your Jane Doe. These monkeys are quite large, with black faces and gray or blond hair. Their range is South Asia, from China into India, both terrestrial and arboreal.” She paused. “Meaning, they live on the ground as well as in trees.” She turned to her computer and requested a Google Images search. “Here’s a photo. This is what the monkeys look like.”

What Jane saw on the screen made her hands suddenly go cold. Black face. Gray hair . She felt the ache between her shoulder blades from the bullet slamming into her Kevlar vest. Remembered hot blood splashing her face, and the silhouette looming above her in the alley, its head crowned with silver hair. “How large are these monkeys?” she asked softly.

“The males are about two and a half feet long.”

“You’re certain they don’t grow taller?”

“They’re not apes. They’re just monkeys.”

Jane looked at Frost. Saw his pale face, his stunned eyes. “It’s what you saw, isn’t it?” she asked. “On the roof.”

Erin frowned. “What did you see?”

Frost shook his head. “It was way taller than two and a half feet.”

Jane nodded. “I agree.”

Erin looked back and forth between them. “You both saw this thing?”

“It had that face,” said Frost. “And gray hair. But it couldn’t have been a monkey. And what monkey carries a sword?”

“Now, that just sent a chill up my spine,” said Erin softly. “Considering what kind of monkey this is. In India, these are also known as the Hanuman langur. Hanuman is the Hindu god known as the Monkey Warrior.”

The same chill that Erin had just felt suddenly whispered like an icy breath up the back of Jane’s neck. She thought of the creature in the alley. Remembered the gleam of its sword as it turned and slipped into the shadows.

“Is that the same character as the Monkey King?” said Tam. “Because I know that legend. There’s a Chinese version of it, too. My grandmother used to tell me the stories.”

“Who is the Monkey King?” asked Jane.

“In China, his name is Sun Wukong. He’s born from a sacred rock and he starts off as just a stone monkey. Then he transforms to flesh and blood and gets crowned king of the monkeys. He becomes a warrior and travels to heaven to learn the wisdom of the gods. But up there, he gets into all sorts of trouble.”

“So he’s a bad character?” asked Frost.

“No, not evil. Just impulsive and mischievous, like a real monkey. There’s a whole book of stories about him. How he eats all the peaches in the heavenly orchard. Drinks too much and steals a magic elixir. Gets into brawls with the Immortals, who don’t know how to deal with him. So they kick him out of heaven and temporarily lock him up inside a mountain prison.”