Tess Gerritsen - The Silent Girl

Frost laughed. “He sounds like a few guys I went to high school with.”

“So then what happens to him?” asked Jane.

“Sun Wukong has a whole series of adventures on earth. Sometimes he causes trouble. Sometimes, he performs good deeds. I can’t remember all the stories, but I know there was a lot of magical fighting and river monsters and talking animals. Just your typical fairy tales.”

“Fairy tales don’t spring to life,” said Jane. “They don’t shed real hair on real victims.”

“I’m just telling you what the legends say about him. He’s a complex creature, sometimes helpful, sometimes destructive. But when faced with a choice between good and evil, the Monkey King almost always chooses to do the right thing.”

Jane stared at the photo on Erin’s computer screen. At a face that, only a moment ago, had so chilled her. “So he’s not evil at all,” she said.

“No,” said Tam. “Despite his flaws, despite the chaos he sometimes causes, the Monkey King stands on the side of justice.”

THE SAVORY SCENT OF ROASTING CHICKEN AND ROSEMARY DRIFTED from Angela Rizzoli’s kitchen, and in the dining room silver and chinaware clattered as retired detective Vince Korsak set the table. Outside in the yard, Jane’s daughter, Regina, was laughing and squealing as Gabriel pushed her on a swing set. But Jane was oblivious to it all as she sat reading on her mother’s sofa, half a dozen borrowed library books spread out before her on the coffee table. Books about Asian primates and gray langurs. And books about Sun Wukong, the Monkey King. She discovered that Sun Wukong’s adventures showed up not only in books, but also in movies and Chinese operas, dances, and even a children’s television show.

In a collection of Chinese folktales, Jane found an introduction to the legend. Though the stories were written sometime during the 1500s by a Chinese author named Wu Cheng’en, the tales themselves were ancient and were said to date back to an era of ghosts and magic, a time when gods and monsters battled in both heaven and earth.

And one of the rocks of that earth, a rock that from the time of creation knew the sweet breath of the wind, the glow of moonlight, the favor of the divine, popped out a stone egg. That egg became a stone monkey. It could run and jump and climb, a monkey with eyes that flashed shafts of light so brilliant that even the Jade Emperor in heaven was startled .

The stone monkey, with neither father nor mother, soon became king of all monkeys. They lived in perfect harmony, until one day the Monkey King came to understand that Death awaited them all. So he set out to learn the secret of immortality, a journey that took him to heaven and temptation, to mischief and imprisonment. While marching to his own execution, to be burned in a crucible with alchemic flames, the Monkey King sprang free, and his fight to survive turned heaven upside down until the gods were forced to seal him inside the Mountain of the Five Elements .

There he waits in stony darkness through the centuries, until the day when he is needed. A day when evil is in the world, and the Monkey King must emerge once again to wage battle .

Jane turned the page and confronted an image of Sun Wukong, clutching a long fighting staff. Though it was just an illustration, that glimpse of the Monkey King made the hair on her arms stand straight up. She stared at sharp teeth jutting in a black mouth, at a crown of silver hair, and could not look away.

She remembered an afternoon at the zoo when she’d been six years old, and her father had held her up to see the spider monkeys. They took one look at her and the cage erupted in terrifying chaos, the monkeys shrieking and vaulting among the branches, as if they had just glimpsed the face of Satan himself. A zoo employee came running and ordered everyone, Back away, back away! I don’t know what’s scaring them! But as Jane’s father carried her from that cage of screaming monkeys, Jane knew that she was the one who’d set them off. She was the one they were terrified of. What did they see but a six-year-old girl with dark curls? she wondered. Or was there something else that they’d recognized even then? Something about who and what she’d one day become?

“So how’s it going with the monkey books?”

Korsak’s voice made her glance up with a start. He was dressed in his Sunday best-at least, the best that he was capable of pulling together for dinner at Angela Rizzoli’s. At least there were no ketchup stains on his white golf shirt and khaki Dockers. After a heart attack a few years earlier, he’d lost thirty pounds on a heart-healthy diet, but his weight was starting to creep back up again, and despite a newly punched hole in his belt it was straining against an ever-expanding belly.

“It’s for a case,” said Jane. She closed the book she’d been reading, relieved to blot out the image of Sun Wukong.

“Yeah, I heard all about it. Got yourself another weird one. Started off with that dead lady on the roof, didn’t it? Makes me wish I was back in the saddle.”

Jane looked at his belly and thought: God help any horse that you climb on.

Korsak flopped down in the armchair-the same armchair that her father used to sit in. It was weird to see him lounging in Frank Rizzoli’s old perch, but her dad had forfeited all rights to that chair the day he walked out on Angela and moved in with the Bimbo. That’s what they all called her now, though they knew her name well enough. Sandie Huffington, Sandie-with-an-e. Jane knew all about the Bimbo, including how many traffic tickets she’d racked up in the past ten years. Three. Because of the Bimbo, Vince Korsak was sitting in this armchair, fat and happy on Angela’s cooking.

Jane didn’t want to think about all the other ways that Angela made him happy.

“Chinatown,” Korsak grunted. “Strange place. Good food.”

He would, of course, mention food. “What do you remember about the Red Phoenix shooting?” she asked. “You must’ve heard the gossip back then.”

“That one was a wicked shocker. Why would a guy with a cute little girl shoot four people and blow out his own brains? Never made sense to me.” He shook his head. “Such a sweet kid, too. Real daddy’s girl.”

That surprised her. “You knew the cook’s family?”

“Not really, but I used to eat there a lot. Those Chinese, they don’t know how to take a day off, so the place was always open, all hours of the night. You could get off a late shift and still have dinner. I was there once at ten on a Sunday night, and that little girl brought out my fortune cookies. It’s like child labor. But she looked like she was happy to be hanging out with Daddy.”

“You sure it was the cook’s daughter? She would’ve been pretty young.”

“She looked pretty young. Maybe five? Cute as a button.” He gave a sad sigh. “Can’t believe a father would do that, leave a wife and kid behind. Not to mention all the other families he screwed up. A few weeks later, daughter of one of the victims got kidnapped.”

“Charlotte Dion.”

“Was that her name? I just remember it was like a Greek tragedy. Bad luck piled on top of bad luck.”

“You know the really weird part?” said Jane. “Two years earlier, the daughter of one of the other victims was snatched as well. The waiter’s kid. She disappeared on her way home from school.”

“No shit? I didn’t know that.” Korsak thought about this for a moment. “That’s freaky. Really makes you wonder if it’s more than just a coincidence.”

“One of the last things Detective Ingersoll said to me on the phone was something about girls. What happened to those girls . Those were his words.”