She scrambled up right behind Tam, her hands gripping slippery metal, the breeze chilling the sweat on her face. She heard Frost grunt, saw the silhouette of his legs flailing against the night sky as he pulled himself over the edge and onto the rooftop. Jane felt his movements transmitted through the rungs as the fire escape shuddered, and for a panic-stricken moment she thought the brackets might give way, that the weight of three bodies would make the whole rickety structure twist off in a screech of metal and fling them to the pavement below. She froze, gripping the ladder, afraid that even a puff of wind would tip them into disaster.
A shriek above her made every hair stand up on the back of her neck. Frost.
She looked up, expecting to see his body hurtling toward her, but all she glimpsed was Tam as he scaled the last rungs and vanished onto the rooftop. She clambered after him, sick with dread. As she reached the roof edge, a piece of asphalt tile crumbled at her touch and dropped away, plummeting into darkness below. With shaking hands, she pulled herself up over the edge and crawled onto the roof. Spotted Tam crouched a few feet away.
Frost. Where is Frost?
She jumped to her feet and scanned the roof. Glimpsed a shadow flitting away, moving so swiftly that it might only have been a cat darting with feline grace into the darkness. Under the night sky, Jane saw empty rooftops, one blending into the next, an aerial landscape of slopes and valleys, jutting chimneys and ventilation shafts. But no Frost.
Dear God, he’s fallen. He’s on the ground somewhere, dead or dying.
“Frost?” Tam yelled as he circled the roof. “Frost?”
Jane pulled out her cell phone. “This is Detective Rizzoli. Beach and Knapp Street. Officer down—”
“He’s here!” Tam yelled. “Help me pull him up!”
She spun around and saw Tam kneeling at the roof’s edge, as if he were about to take a swan dive to the street below. She thrust the phone back into her pocket and ran to his side. Saw Frost clinging with both hands to the rain gutter, his feet dangling above a four-story plummet. Tam dropped to his belly and reached down to grab Frost’s left wrist. The roof sloped here, and a misstep could send them both sliding off the edge. Jane flopped onto her belly beside Tam and grabbed Frost’s right wrist. Together they pulled, straining to drag him up across gritty tiles that snagged Jane’s jacket and scraped her skin. With a loud grunt, Frost flopped onto the roof beside them, where he sprawled, gasping.
“Jesus,” he whispered. “Thought I was dead!”
“What the hell, did you trip and fall?” said Jane.
“I was chasing it, but I swear, it was flying over this roof, like a bat out of hell.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Didn’t you see it?” Frost sat up; even in the darkness Jane could see he was pale and shaking.
“I didn’t see anything,” said Tam.
“It was right there, standing where you are now. Turned and looked straight at me. I jumped back and lost my footing.”
“It?” said Jane. “Are we talking about a man or what?”
Frost let out a trembling breath. Turning, he gazed across the sweep of Chinatown rooftops. “I don’t know.”
“How can you not know?”
Slowly Frost rose to his feet and stood facing the direction that the thing—whatever it was—had fled. “It moved too fast to be a man. That’s all I can tell you.”
“It’s dark up here, Frost,” said Tam. “When you’re hyped up on adrenaline, it’s hard to be sure of what you’re seeing.”
“I know it sounds crazy, but there was something here, something I’ve never seen before. You’ve got to believe me!”
“Okay,” Jane said, clapping him on the shoulder. “I believe you.”
Frost looked at Tam. “But you don’t, do you?”
In the darkness, they saw Tam’s shoulder lift in a shrug. “It’s Chinatown. Weird stuff happens here.” He laughed. “Maybe there’s more to that ghost tour than we thought.”
“It was no ghost,” said Frost. “I’m telling you, it was flesh and blood, standing right there. It was real.”
“No one saw it but you,” said Tam.
Frost stalked away across the roof and stood staring down at the street below. “That may not be entirely true.”
Jane followed him to the edge and saw the fire escape that they’d clambered up only moments earlier. Below them was Knapp Street, dimly lit by the glow of a streetlamp.
“Do you see it?” said Frost, and he pointed toward the corner, at what was mounted on the building.
A surveillance camera.
SEVENTEEN
Even at nine thirty PM, the employees of Dedham Security were on the job, monitoring properties all over the Greater Boston area.
“Bad guys usually get to work after dark,” said Gus Gilliam as he walked the trio of detectives past a bank of surveillance monitors. “So we have to stay awake, too. If any of our alarms gets tripped, we’re talking to Boston PD like that.” He snapped his fingers. “You ever need a security system, call us.”
Tam surveyed the video feeds on the monitors. “Wow. You really do have eyes all over the city.”
“All over Suffolk County. And our cameras are actually operational. Half the security cameras you see mounted around town are just dummies that don’t record a damn thing. So if you’re a bad guy, it’s a shell game. You don’t know which cameras are really watching and which aren’t. But when they spot any camera, they tend to shy away and go for easier pickings, so just having a camera in view is a deterrent.”
“We’re lucky that camera on Knapp Street is real,” said Jane.
“Yeah. We have about forty-eight hours’ worth of video stored on that one.” He led them into a back room, where four chairs were already set up around the monitor. “Usually gives us enough postincident time to be notified so we can save relevant footage. That particular camera was installed about five years ago. Last time we were asked to pull video off it, we caught a kid breaking a window.” He sat down at the monitor. “You said you were interested in a second-floor fire escape landing?”
“I’m hoping it’s in your camera’s field of view,” said Jane. “The building in question is about twenty, twenty-five yards away.”
“I don’t know. That could be too far to see much detail, and second floor might not be visible. Plus, we’re talking low resolution. But let’s take a look.”
As the three detectives crowded in to watch the monitor, Gilliam clicked the Play icon, and a live view of Knapp Street appeared. Two pedestrians could be seen walking past, in the direction of Kneeland Street, their backs to the camera.
“Look,” said Frost. “You can just see a corner of the fire escape.”
“Unfortunately, not the window itself,” said Jane.
“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.”
In the rearview mirror, Jane could see Tam’s car right behind theirs. She wondered what he would think of this conversation, whether he’d be offended by this talk of the exotic and mysterious Chinese. The light changed to green.
As she drove through the intersection she said, “I wouldn’t mention this to Tam.”
Frost shook his head. “It’d probably piss him off. It’s not like I’m racist, you know? I did date a Chinese girl.”
“And that would definitely piss him off.”
“I’m just trying to understand, to open my mind to what we’re not seeing.”
“What I’m not seeing is how this all fits together. A dead woman on the roof. An old murder-suicide. And now Ingersoll, muttering about a van watching his house. And something about girls.”
“Why wouldn’t he tell you over the phone? Who does he think is listening in?”
“He wouldn’t say.”
“Whenever someone starts talking about their phone being bugged, those psycho warning bells go off for me. Did he sound paranoid?”
“He sounded worried. And he mentione
d her. He said he’d promised to keep her out of it.”
“Iris Fang?”
“I don’t know.”
Frost looked ahead at the road. “Old cop like him, he’s probably gonna be armed. We better take this nice and slow. Don’t spook him.”
Fifteen minutes later, Jane pulled up in front of Ingersoll’s residence, and Tam parked right behind them. They all got out of their cars, doors thudding shut simultaneously. Inside the triple-decker town house, the lights were on, but when Frost rang the doorbell no one answered. He rang again and rapped on the window.
“I’ll call him,” said Jane, tapping in Ingersoll’s number on her cell phone. They could hear his phone ringing somewhere inside the residence. Four rings, and then the answering machine picked up with the terse recording. Not here now. Leave a message.
“Can’t see anything in there,” said Tam, trying to peer through the curtained front windows.
Jane hung up and said to Frost, “You keep trying the bell. Tam, let’s go around to the back. Maybe he can’t hear us.”
As she and Tam headed around the side of the building, she could hear Frost still banging on the front door. The narrow path between buildings was unlit and overgrown with shrubbery. She smelled wet leaves, felt her shoes sink into sodden grass. Through a window, she glimpsed the blue glow of Ingersoll’s TV set and she paused, looking into a living room where images flickered on the screen. On the coffee table was a cell phone and a half-eaten sandwich.
“This window isn’t latched,” said Tam. “I can climb in. You want me to?”
They looked at each other in the shadows, both of them considering the consequences of entering a house without permission or a warrant.
“He did invite us,” she said. “Maybe he’s just sitting in the john where he can’t hear us.”
Tam slid open the window. In seconds he was up and over the sill, slithering into the house without a sound. How the hell did he do that? she wondered, eyeing the chest-high sill. The man really would make a superb cat burglar.
The Rizzoli & Isles Series 11-Book Bundle Page 258