Tess Gerritsen - The Silent Girl

“Because they took turns snatching the girls. Mallory abducted some of them, Dion took the others. We’ve already found six bodies on Dion’s property, and I’m sure we’ll find others.”

“But not Charlotte’s. I guarantee you won’t find her there.”

“How do you know?”

“When I worked that case, I didn’t do a half-assed job, okay? It may have been nineteen years ago, but I remember the details. Last night, I pulled out my old notes, just to be sure of my facts. I know Patrick Dion was in London the day Charlotte went missing. He flew home that evening, right after he got the news.”

“Okay, so you’re right about that detail. It’s easy to confirm.”

“I’m also right about Mark Mallory. He couldn’t have snatched Charlotte, either, because he had an alibi, too. He was visiting his mother. She’d had a stroke a year earlier, and she was in a rehab hospital.”

She eyed him in the fading daylight. Buckholz was defending his own record, so he couldn’t possibly be objective. Judging by his wasted face, his frayed shirt, retirement had not been kind to him. He practically lived at Doyle’s, as if only there, surrounded by cops, did he feel alive again. Useful again.

Humor the old guy . She gave him a sympathetic nod. “I’ll review the case file and get back to you.”

“You think you can just brush me off? I was a good cop, Rizzoli. I checked out that boy. When you’re talking about abduction, you always look at the family first, so I took a good long look at her stepbrother. Every move he made that day. There was no way Mark Mallory could have snatched Charlotte.”

“Because he said he was visiting his mother? Come on, Hank. You can’t take his word, or his mother’s. She would have lied to protect her own kid.”

“But you can trust the medical record.”

“What?”

He reached into his jacket and pulled out a folded paper, which he thrust at her. “I got that from Barbara Mallory’s hospital chart. It’s a photocopy of the nurses’ notes. Look at the entry for April twentieth, one PM.”

Jane scanned down to what the nurse had written at that time. BP 115/80, Pulse 84. Patient resting comfortably. Son here visiting and requests that his mother be moved to a quieter room, away from nurses’ station .

“At one PM,” said Buckholz, “Charlotte Dion was with her school group in Faneuil Hall. The teachers first noticed her missing around one fifteen. So tell me how Mark Mallory, who’s sitting in his mom’s hospital room twenty-five miles away, manages to snatch his stepsister off a street in Boston only fifteen minutes later?”

Jane read and reread the nurse’s entry. There was no mistaking the date and time. This is all wrong, she thought.

Except it wasn’t. It was there in black and white.

“Stop making it look like I screwed up,” said Buckholz. “It’s obvious that your two perps didn’t take Charlotte.”

“Then who did?” Jane murmured.

“We’ll probably never find out. I’m betting it was just some guy who saw her and made an opportunistic grab.”

Some guy . A perp they had yet to identify.

She drove home with the photocopied page on the seat beside her and thought about the odds. Two killers in her family, and Charlotte gets snatched by an unrelated stranger? She pulled into her apartment parking space and sat brooding, not yet ready to walk into the noise and the chaos of motherhood. She thought about what they knew for certain: that Dion and Mallory had been stalking and killing girls together. That they’d buried at least six bodies on Dion’s property. Had Charlotte discovered her father’s secret? Was that the real reason they had to dispose of her? Had it been arranged through a third party, so that both Patrick and Mark had solid alibis?

Jane massaged her scalp, overwhelmed by the questions. Once again, the mystery revolved around Charlotte. What she knew and when she learned about it. And with whom she shared it. She thought of the last photos ever taken of Charlotte, at the funeral of her mother and stepfather. She remembered how Charlotte had been flanked by her father and Mark. Surrounded by enemies and unable to escape.

Jane sat up straight, suddenly struck by the answer that should have been obvious from the beginning.

Maybe she did .

AT NOON, JANE CROSSED THE NEW HAMPSHIRE BORDER AND DROVE north, into Maine. It was a soft May day, the trees leafed out in their spring flush, a golden haze hanging over fields and forest. But by the time she reached Moosehead Lake in the late afternoon, the air had turned chilly. She parked her car, wrapped a wool scarf around her neck, and walked to the landing, where a motorboat was moored.

A boy of about fifteen, his blond hair tousled in the wind, waved at her. “You Mrs. Rizzoli? I’m Will, from the Loon Point Lodge.” He took her overnight bag. “Is this all the luggage you brought?”

“I’m only staying for one night.” She glanced around the dock. “Where’s the skipper?”

Grinning, he waved his hand. “Right here. Been driving this boat since I was eight. In case you’re nervous, I’ve made this crossing, oh, a few thousand times.”

Still dubious about the kid’s skills as a skipper, she climbed aboard and buckled on the offered life jacket. As she settled onto the bench she noticed the boxes filled with groceries, and the bundle of newspapers with The Boston Globe on top. Obviously this boat trip had also been a shopping run for the boy.

As he started up the engine, she asked: “How long have you worked at the lodge?”

“All my life. My mom and dad own it.”

She took a closer look at the boy. Saw a strong jaw and sun-bleached hair. He was built like a lifeguard, slim but muscular, the kind of kid who’d look right at home on a California beach. He seemed utterly at ease as he guided the boat away from the pier. Before she could ask him any more questions, they were skimming across choppy water, the motor too noisy for conversation. She held on to the gunwale and stared at dense forest, at a lake so vast that it stretched ahead of them like a sea.

“It’s beautiful here,” she said, but he didn’t hear her; his attention was focused on their destination across the water.

By the time they reached the opposite shore, the sun was dropping toward the horizon, leafing the water with flame and gold. She saw rustic cabins ahead, and a cluster of canoes pulled up on the bank. On the pier, a towheaded girl stood waiting to catch the mooring line. As soon as Jane caught a closer look at the girl’s face, she knew that these two were brother and sister.

“This troublemaker here is Samantha,” Will said with a laugh and he affectionately mussed the girl’s hair. “She’s our general gofer around here. You need a toothbrush, extra towels, whatever, just give her a shout.”

As the girl went scampering up the pier with the guest’s bag, Jane said: “She looks like she’s about eight, nine? Don’t you both go to school?”

“We’re homeschooled. Too hard getting to town in the winter. My dad always tells us that we’re the luckiest kids in the world, to be living out here in paradise.” He led her up the path to one of the cabins. “Mom put you in this one. It’s got the most privacy.”

They climbed the steps to the screened porch, and the door squealed shut behind them. Samantha had brought Jane’s bag into the cabin and it sat on a rustic luggage rack at the foot of the bed. Jane looked up at open beams, at walls of knotty pine. A fire was already crackling in the stone hearth.