The Silent Girl: A Rizzoli & Isles Novel

by Tess Gerritsen

  Mark Mallory rose with athletic grace from the sofa. He was in his mid-thirties, fit and tan, with not even a hint of gray in his dark hair. Jane surveyed his alligator belt, his Sperry Top-Siders, and his Breitling watch, all the little clues that sneered: I have more money than you ever will. His handshake was perfunctory, a clue that he was impatient to get on with the business at hand.

  The third person in the room would have been easy to overlook, had Jane not already been alerted she was there. Mary Gilmore was about Patrick’s age, but so tiny and hunched over that she was almost invisible, swallowed up in a huge armchair by the window. As the woman struggled to stand, Frost quickly moved to her side.

  “Please don’t bother, Mrs. Gilmore. You just sit right back down, okay?” Frost urged and helped her settle back into the chair. Watching the woman beam up at him, Jane thought: What is it about Frost and older ladies? He loves them, and they all love him.

  “My daughter wanted to be here, too,” said Mrs. Gilmore. “But she couldn’t get off work, so I brought the note she got.” She pointed an arthritic hand at the coffee table. “It came in the mail the same day mine did. Every year they arrive on March thirtieth, the day my Joey died. It’s just like she’s stalking us. It’s emotional harassment. Can’t the police do something to stop her?”

  On the coffee table were three envelopes. Before touching them, Jane reached into her pocket and took out a pair of gloves.

  “There’s no point with gloves,” said Mark. “There are never any fingerprints on the letters or the envelopes.”

  Jane frowned at him. “How do you know there aren’t any prints?”

  “Detective Ingersoll had them analyzed in the crime lab.”

  “He knows about these?”

  “He gets them, too. So does anyone connected with the victims, even my father’s business associates. It’s up to a dozen people that we know about. It’s been going on for years, and the crime lab never finds anything on the envelopes or the mailings. She must wear gloves when she sends them.”

  “Mrs. Fang denies sending any notes.”

  Mark snorted. “Who else would do it? She’s the one who ran that ad in the Globe. She’s obsessed by this.”

  “But she denies sending any notes.” With gloved hands, Jane picked up the first envelope, addressed to Mrs. Mary Gilmore. It had a Boston postmark; there was no return address. She slid out the contents: a single folded sheet of paper. It was a photocopied obituary of Joseph S. Gilmore, age twenty-five, killed in the Chinatown restaurant mass murder–suicide. Survived by his mother, Mary, and his sister, Phoebe Morrison. Funeral mass celebrated at St. Monica’s. Jane flipped over the mailing and saw a single sentence written in block letters.

  I know what really happened.

  “It’s the same damn note I got,” said Mark. “The same thing we get every year. Except I get my father’s obituary.”

  “And I get Dina’s,” said Patrick quietly.

  Jane picked up the envelope addressed to Patrick Dion. Inside was the photocopied obituary of Dina Mallory, age forty, killed with her husband, Arthur, in the Red Phoenix shooting. Survived by a daughter from a previous marriage, Charlotte Dion. On the reverse side was written the same sentence that was on Mary Gilmore’s mailing:

  I know what really happened.

  “Detective Ingersoll told us the envelope’s a standard brand sold by the millions in Staples,” said Mark. “The ink’s the same as what you’d find in any Bic pen. The crime lab found microscopic starch granules inside the envelopes, indicating the sender was wearing latex gloves, and the stamps and envelopes are self-adhesive, so there’s no DNA. Every year it arrives in my mailbox on the same day. March thirtieth.”

  “The day of the massacre,” said Jane.

  Mark nodded. “As if we need to be reminded of the date.”

  “And the handwriting?” asked Jane. “Does it vary?”

  “It’s always the same block letters. The same black ink.”

  “But the note’s different this year,” said Mrs. Gilmore. She spoke so quietly her voice was almost lost in the conversation.

  Frost, standing closest to her, gently touched her on the shoulder. “What do you mean, ma’am?”

  “Before, all the other years, the notes said: Don’t you want to know the truth? But this year it’s different. This year it says, I know what really happened.”

  “It’s basically the same bullshit,” said Mark. “Just said in a slightly different way.”

  “No, the meaning is completely different this year.” Mrs. Gilmore looked at Jane. “If she knows something, why doesn’t she just come out and tell us what the truth is?”

  “We all know what the truth is, Mrs. Gilmore,” Patrick said patiently. “It’s the same answer we’ve known for nineteen years. I have complete faith that Boston PD knew what it was doing when they closed the case.”

  “But what if they were wrong?”

  “Mrs. Gilmore,” Mark said, “these notes have only one purpose: to make us pay attention to her. We all know that woman’s not exactly balanced.”

  “What do you mean by that?” asked Frost.

  “Patrick, tell them what you found out about Mrs. Fang.”

  The older man looked reluctant to speak. “I’m not sure it’s necessary to go into that right now.”

  “We’d like to hear it, Mr. Dion,” said Jane.

  Patrick looked down at his hands, resting in his lap. “Some years ago, when Detective Ingersoll was first looking into these mailings, he told me that Mrs. Fang suffers from, well, delusions of grandeur. She believes she’s descended from an ancient line of warriors. She believes it’s her sacred mission in life, as a warrior, to track down her husband’s killer and exact vengeance.”

  “Can you believe it?” Mark laughed. “It’s like something out of a Chinese soap opera. The woman is completely nuts.”

  “She is a martial arts master,” said Frost. “Her students certainly believe in her, and you’d think they’d recognize a fraud.”

  “Detective Frost,” said Patrick, “we’re not saying she’s a fraud. But surely, her claims must strike you as being more than a little absurd. I know that ancient traditions run deep in martial arts, but a lot of it is fanciful. The stuff of legends and Jackie Chan movies. What I think, and what Detective Ingersoll thinks, is that Mrs. Fang was deeply traumatized by her husband’s death. She’s never accepted it. And her way of coping with grief is to search for a deeper meaning, something that gives his death significance and makes it more than just a random act by a madman. She needs to prove that something bigger killed her husband, and she’ll never stop searching for this nameless enemy, because it’s the one thing that gives her life purpose.” Sadly, he looked around the room at Mark. At Mary Gilmore. “But we know the truth. That it was just a senseless crime committed by an unstable man. Arthur and Dina and Joey died for no reason whatsoever. It’s not easy to accept, but we do accept it. Mrs. Fang can’t.”

  “So we have to put up with that harassment,” said Mark, pointing to the mailings on the coffee table. “And we can’t get her to stop sending them.”

  “But there’s no proof she’s sending them,” said Frost.

  “Well, we do know she’s the one behind this,” said Mark, and he pulled from his pocket a folded clipping from The Boston Globe. It was the quarter-page ad that Detective Tam had earlier described to Jane, a stark box enclosed in black. Under the word INNOCENT was a smiling photo of the Red Phoenix cook, Wu Weimin. Beneath the photo was the date of the massacre, and a single sentence: THE TRUTH HAS NEVER BEEN TOLD.

  “With this ad, it’s now gotten much worse,” said Mark. “Now she’s got the whole city paying attention to her delusions. Where does this stop? When does it stop?”

  “Have any of you actually spoken to Mrs. Fang about this?” Jane looked around the room, and her gaze settled on Mark Mallory.

  He snorted. “I, for one, wouldn’t waste my time talking to her.”

  “Then yo
u haven’t gone to her residence? Tried to confront her?”

  “Why are you asking me?”

  “You seem the angriest about this, Mr. Mallory,” she observed. But was he angry enough to break into Iris’s home? To stab a warning into her pillow? She didn’t know Mark well enough to have a sense of what he was capable of.

  “Look, we’re all upset,” said Patrick, although his voice sounded weary more than anything else. “But we also know that it would be unwise to establish any contact with the woman. I called Detective Ingersoll last week, thinking he might intervene on our behalf. But he hasn’t returned my call yet.”

  “He’s out of town this week,” said Jane. She collected the mailings and slipped them into evidence bags. “We’ll speak to him about this when he returns. In the meantime, please let me know if you receive anything else like this.”

  “And we’d appreciate it if you kept us informed,” said Patrick.

  Again, she shook hands with them all. Again, Mark’s grasp was a brusque sign-off, as if he’d already decided the police were useless to him. But Patrick’s hand lingered around hers, and he walked them to the door, clearly reluctant to see them go.

  “Please call me anytime,” he said. “About this matter, or …” He paused, and a shadow seemed to pass over his eyes. “Anything else.”

  “We’re sorry this had to come up again, Mr. Dion,” said Jane. “I can see it’s hard for you.”

  “Especially since it’s so closely connected to the … other event.” He paused, his shoulders drooping. “I assume you know about my daughter.”

  Jane nodded. “I spoke to Detective Buckholz about Charlotte.”

  Just the mention of his daughter’s name made his face contract in pain. “Dina’s death was difficult. But nothing compares to losing a child. My only child. These mailings, and that ad in the newspaper, they bring it all back. That’s what really hurts, Detective. That’s why I want this stopped.”

  “I’ll do what I can, Mr. Dion.”

  Although they had already shaken hands, he grasped hers once again, a farewell that left her depressed and silent as she and Frost walked back to her car. She unlocked the doors but did not immediately climb in. Instead she stared across the lawn, at the trees, at garden paths that led into the deepening shadows of afternoon. He owns all this, yet he has nothing, she thought, and you can see it in his face. In the drooping mouth, the hollows under his eyes. Nineteen years later, the ghost of his daughter still haunted him, as it would haunt any parent. Having a child meant your heart was always at the world’s mercy.

  “Detectives?”

  Jane turned to see Mrs. Gilmore coming down the porch steps. She walked toward them with grim determination, her spine bent forward in a dowager’s hump.

  “I have to say this before you leave. I know Patrick and Mark are convinced that the matter’s been settled. That there’s no question about what happened in the restaurant. But what if they’re wrong? What if we really don’t know the truth?”

  “So you do have doubts,” said Jane.

  The woman’s mouth tightened into hard lines. “I’ll admit this. My son, Joey, wasn’t a saint. I raised him to be a good boy, I really tried. But there were so many temptations, and it’s easy to fall in with the wrong people.” She stared hard at Jane. “You probably know that Joey got into trouble.”

  “I know he was working for Kevin Donohue.”

  At the mention of that name, Mrs. Gilmore spat out: “Piece of crap! The whole Donohue clan is. But my Joey, he admired power and he liked easy money. He thought Donohue was the one who’d show him the ropes. By the time he realized what was involved, he couldn’t get out of it. Donohue wouldn’t let him.”

  “You think he had your son killed?”

  “It’s what I’ve wondered from the start.”

  “There was no evidence for it, Mrs. Gilmore.”

  The woman hacked out a cough, noisy and bronchial. “You think Donohue couldn’t buy off a few cops? He could throw any investigation.”

  “That’s a serious charge.”

  “I’m a Southie girl. I know what goes on in this town, and I know what money can buy.” Her eyes narrowed, her stare fixed on Jane. “I’m sure you do, too, Detective.”

  The implied charge made Jane stiffen. “I’ll give your concerns the attention they deserve, Mrs. Gilmore,” she said evenly and slid into her car. As she and Frost drove away, she saw the woman in the rearview mirror, still standing in the driveway and glaring after them.

  “That,” muttered Jane, “is not a nice old lady.”

  Frost gave a disbelieving laugh. “Did she just accuse us of taking bribes?”

  “That’s exactly what she did.”

  “And she looked so sweet.”

  “To you, they’re all sweet. You’ve never met one you didn’t like.” Or one who didn’t like you.

  Frost’s cell phone rang. As he answered it, she thought about how easily Frost always managed to charm the older ladies. He certainly seemed to have made inroads with Iris Fang, a woman who was still young enough to be both handsome and formidable. She remembered what Patrick had said about her: Deeply traumatized. Delusions of grandeur. Believes she’s descended from warriors. Iris might be delusional, but someone real had broken into her residence and stabbed a knife into her pillow. Whose cage did you rattle, Iris?

  Frost sighed as he hung up the cell phone. “Guess our day’s not over yet.”

  “Who was that?”

  “The realtor for the Knapp Street building. I’ve been trying to get hold of him all day. He says he’s on his way out of town tonight, but if we want to see the place, he’ll meet us in an hour.”

  “I take it we’re headed back to Chinatown?”

  Frost nodded. “Back to Chinatown.”

  IN THE FADING TWILIGHT, KNAPP STREET WAS A SHADOWY CANYON, cast in gloom between four-story brick buildings. Jane and Frost stood outside what had once been the Red Phoenix restaurant and tried to peer inside, but beyond the barred windows, Jane saw only thin curtains that were tattered and almost translucent with age.

  Frost looked at his watch. “Mr. Kwan’s now fifteen minutes late.”

  “Don’t you have a cell number for him?”

  “I don’t think he has a cell. I played phone tag with him all day through his office.”

  “A realtor who doesn’t have a cell phone?”

  “I just hope we understood each other. He had a pretty strong Chinese accent.”

  “We could really use Tam here. Where is he?”

  “He said he’d be here.”

  Jane backed into the street and peered up at the rusting fire escape and boarded-up windows. Only last week, she and the crime scene unit had walked this same block of rooftops searching for bullet casings. Just around the corner was the alley where Jane Doe’s severed hand had been found. This street, this building, seemed to be ground zero for everything that had happened. “Looks like it’s been abandoned a long time. Center of town, you’d think it’d be prime real estate.”

  “Except for the fact it’s a crime scene. Tam says that in this neighborhood, they really believe in ghosts. And a haunted building’s bad luck.” He paused, staring up the alley. “I wonder if that’s our man coming?”

  The elderly Chinese man walked with a limp, as if he had a bad hip, but he moved with surprising alacrity in his bright white Reeboks, easily stepping over a trash bag as he negotiated his way along the uneven pavement. His jacket was several sizes too large, but he wore it with panache, like a nattily dressed professor out for a night stroll.

  “Mr. Kwan?”

  “Hello, hello. You Detective Frost?”

  “Yes, sir. And this is my partner, Detective Rizzoli.”

  The man smiled, revealing two bright gold teeth. “I tell you now, I always follow the law, okay? Okay? Everything always legal.”

  “Sir, that’s not why I called you.”

  “Very good location here, Knapp Street. Three apartment upstairs. Downs
tairs, very good space for business. Maybe restaurant or store.”

  “Mr. Kwan, we’d just like to look around inside.”

  “Behind, two places for tenant to park car …”

  “Is he going to show it or sell it to us?” muttered Jane.

  “… development company in Hong Kong doesn’t want to manage anymore. So they sell for very good price.”

  “Then why hasn’t it sold?” asked Jane.

  The question seemed to take him aback, abruptly cutting off his sales patter. Eyeing her in the gloom, his wrinkles deepened into a scowl. “Bad thing happen here,” he finally admitted. “No one wants to rent or buy.”

  “Sir, we’re here only to look at the place,” said Frost.

  “Why? Empty inside, nothing to see.”

  “This is police business. Please just open the door.”

  Reluctantly, Kwan pulled out an enormous set of keys that clanked like a jailer’s ring. In the dim alley, it took an excruciatingly long time for him to find and insert the correct key in the padlock. The gate swung open with a deafening screech, and they all stepped into what had once been the Red Phoenix restaurant. Mr. Kwan flipped the light switch, and a single bare bulb came on overhead.

  “Is that the only light in here?” Jane asked.

  The realtor looked up at the ceiling and shrugged. “Time to buy lightbulbs.”

  Jane moved to the center of that gloomy space and looked around the room. As Kwan had said, the place was empty, and she saw a bare linoleum floor, cracked and yellow with age. Only the built-in cashier counter offered any hint that this had once been a restaurant dining room.

  “We have it cleaned, painted,” said Mr. Kwan. “Make it just like it was before, but still no one wants to buy.” He shook his head in disgust. “Chinese people too superstitious. They don’t even like to come inside.”

  I don’t blame them, thought Jane as a cold breath seemed to whisper across her skin. Violence leaves a mark, a psychic stain that can never be scrubbed away with mere soap and bleach. In a neighborhood as insular as Chinatown, everyone would remember what had happened in this building. Everyone would shudder as they walked past on Knapp Street. Even if this building were torn down and another erected in its place, this bloodied ground would remain forever haunted in the minds of those who knew its ugly past. Jane looked down at the linoleum, the same floor where blood had flowed. Although the walls were repainted and the bullet holes plastered over, in the seams and nooks of this floor, chemical traces of that blood still lingered. A crime scene photo that she had earlier studied suddenly clicked into her head. It was an image of a crumpled body lying amid fallen take-out cartons.