Tess Gerritsen - The Silent Girl

“She’s done nothing wrong.”

In the doorway he stops and looks straight at me. “It’s not always clear what’s right and what’s wrong. Is it?”

I stare back at him, thinking: Could he know? Is he giving me permission for what I’m about to do? But he merely smiles and walks away.

I lock the door behind him. The conversation has left me off balance, unable to focus. What to make of such a man, I wonder as I head up the stairs to change my clothes. Yet again, he makes me think of my husband. His kindness, his patience. His open mind, so ready to welcome possibilities. Am I a vain fool to entertain such an unlikely friendship? I am distracted, mulling over the conversation, and I miss the clues that should have warned me. The tremor in the air. The faint scent of unfamiliar flesh. Only when I flip my bedroom light switch and nothing happens do I suddenly realize I am not alone.

The bedroom door slams shut behind me. In the darkness, I cannot see the blow hurtling toward my head, but my instincts spring to life. Something whooshes just above me as I duck and spin toward the bed, where my sword is concealed. Not the decoy reproduction that I surrendered to the police, but the real Zheng Yi. For five centuries she has been passed down from mothers to daughters, a legacy meant to protect us, defend us.

Now, more than ever, I need her.

My attacker lunges, but I slip away like water and roll to the floor. Reach under the box spring for the niche where Zheng Yi is hidden. She fits into my hand like an old friend and makes a musical sigh as she slides from her scabbard.

In one fluid motion I rise and whirl to face the enemy. The creak of the floor announces his location, to my right. Just as I shift weight to attack, I hear the footfall, but this one is behind me.

Two of them .

It’s the last thought I have before I fall.

JANE CROUCHED DOWN BESIDE IRIS’S BED, READING THE EVIDENCE and not liking what it said to her. There were red splatters on the floor and on the edge of the sheets where a body had fallen. The blood loss was minimal, certainly not enough to be fatal. Rising to her feet, she stared down at smeared drops, across which a body had been dragged. She had already spotted more blood on the stairs, and on the front porch where the door had been left wide open, alerting Iris’s neighbors that something was very wrong.

Jane turned to Frost. “You’re sure about the time? It was nine PM when you left last night?”

He nodded, a dazed look in his eyes. “I didn’t see anyone else around when I came out of the house. And I was parked right outside.”

“Why were you here?”

“To talk to her. I felt bad about what happened. About taking the sword.”

“You came to apologize for doing your job?”

“Sometimes, Rizzoli, the job makes me feel like an asshole, okay?” he shot back. “Here’s a woman who was already a victim. She lost her husband and her daughter. And we turn her into a suspect. We interrogate her. We made her a victim all over again.”

“I don’t know what Iris Fang is. I do know that she’s been at the center of this from the beginning. Everything that’s happened seems to revolve around her .” Jane’s cell phone rang. “Rizzoli,” she answered.

It was Tam on the line. “Kevin Donohue says he has an alibi for last night.”

“And his men?”

“That’s the problem. They’re each other’s alibis. All three swear they spent the evening together in Donohue’s residence, watching TV. Which means we can’t believe a word from any of them.”

“So we can’t rule them out.”

“We can’t prove it in court, either.”

Jane hung up and turned in frustration to the window. On the street below, a trio of elderly Chinese women stood staring up at her, chattering among themselves. What do they know that they’re not telling us? Nothing about Chinatown was ever straightforward, nothing was as it seemed. It was like peering through a silk screen, never getting a clear image, a complete picture.

She turned to Frost. “Maybe Bella will finally talk to us. It’s time to put all our cards on the table.”

BELLA LOOKED EVEN MORE HOSTILE TODAY, her hands closed in fists, gaze hard as diamonds. “It’s your fault this happened,” she said. “I should have been there. I would have stopped it.”

Jane looked into those glittering eyes and suddenly imagined the young woman springing up like a wildcat, attacking with teeth and claws. But she kept her voice calm as she said: “So you knew this would happen? You knew they would take her?”

“We’re wasting time! She needs me.”

“How will you help her when you don’t even know where she is?”

Bella opened her mouth to speak, then glanced at the one-way mirror, as if aware that others were watching.

“Why don’t we start at the beginning, Bella,” said Jane. “With who you really are. Not the name you called yourself in California, but the name you were born with.” Jane placed a photocopy of a birth certificate on the table. “It’s signed by a Chinatown doctor. You were born right here in Boston. A home birth, at a Knapp Street address. Your father’s name was Wu Weimin.”

Bella didn’t answer, but Jane read the acknowledgment in her eyes. Not that she needed it; the document was only exhibit number one. Jane brought out other photocopied documents. Her records from the San Francisco public schools where the girl was registered under the name Bella Li. The death certificate of her mother, who went by the name of Annie Li, dead at age forty-three of stomach cancer. It was all there in black and white, the paper trail that Jane’s team had doggedly pursued over the last forty-eight hours, a trail obscured in that pre-9/11 era by different jurisdictions, and by the hidden world in which undocumented aliens moved. A world in which a lone mother and child could so easily vanish and reappear under new names.

“Why did you come back to Boston?” asked Jane.

Bella looked her in the eye. “ Sifu Fang asked me to come. She’s not well, and she needed another instructor at her school.”

“Yes, that’s the story you keep telling us.”

“Is there a different story?”

“It has nothing to do with what happened in the Red phoenix? Nothing to do with your father killing four people?”

Bella’s face snapped taut. “My father was innocent.”

“Not according to the official report.”

“And official reports are never wrong.”

“If it’s wrong, then what’s the truth?”

Bella glared back. “He was murdered.”

“Is that what your mother told you?”

“My mother wasn’t there!”

Jane paused, suddenly registering the unspoken meaning of those last words, my mother wasn’t there . She remembered the glow of luminol on the cellar step, the bloody imprint of a child’s shoe. “But someone was there,” Jane said quietly. “Someone who was hiding in the cellar when it happened.”

Bella went absolutely still. “How did you…”

“The blood told us. Even if you try to wash it away, its traces remain. Decades later, with a chemical spray, we can still see it. We found your footprint on the cellar steps, and on the kitchen floor, leading toward the exit. Footprints that someone had wiped away by the time the police arrived that night.” Jane leaned in closer. “Why did your mother do it, Bella? Why did she try to erase the evidence?”

Bella didn’t answer, but Jane saw the inner debate play out on her face, a struggle between telling the truth and keeping it secret.