The Silent Girl: A Rizzoli & Isles Novel

by Tess Gerritsen

  “The Red Phoenix,” said Jane softly. “Wu Weimin.”

  “His death was called a suicide.”

  “What are you going to call this one, Maura?”

  Maura sighed. “We have no witnesses, do we?”

  Jane shook her head. “Bella said that she and Iris were upstairs when it happened. They didn’t see it.”

  “But there was another intruder in the house,” Frost pointed out. “You said you saw him.”

  “I don’t know what I saw.” Jane looked toward the garden. There, last night by moonlight, she had caught a glimpse of something slipping into the woods. “I don’t think I’ll ever know.”

  Maura turned as the second body was wheeled out of the house. “I could call Patrick Dion’s death a suicide, but it’s too similar to the Red Phoenix, Jane. It feels staged.”

  “I think it’s meant to be similar. It’s meant to be an echo from the past. Justice completing its circle.”

  “Justice doesn’t qualify as a manner of death.”

  Jane looked at her. “Maybe it should.”

  “Hey, Frost! Rizzoli!” Detective Tam waved to them from a grove of trees, where he stood with a team of criminalists.

  “What is it?” said Jane.

  “Cadaver dog’s just scented on something!”

  The missing girls. Surely there were more names that had not made it onto Ingersoll’s list, other girls who’d vanished in the years since Charlotte Dion disappeared. And what more convenient place to hide the bodies than in this private sanctuary, closed off from prying eyes? As they approached the CSU team, she saw the dog watching her with alert eyes, tail happily wagging. The dog was the only cheerful one among them. The men and women gathered in the shadow of those trees stood silent and grim-faced because they understood what most likely lay beneath their feet.

  “The soil’s been disturbed here,” Tam said, pointing to a patch of bare earth under the trees. “It was covered with loose brush to conceal it.”

  A recent burial. Jane looked around at the tree-shaded grounds and the dense shrubbery, at all the secret spots hidden by shade and brush. This was evil on a scale she could scarcely comprehend. How many bodies are lying here, she wondered. How many silent girls who will finally be able to speak? Suddenly she felt overwhelmed by the task ahead of them. She was bruised, hungry, and weary of death.

  “Frost, I think I’ll leave this to you. I’m going home,” she said and walked away, back across the lawn. Back into the sunshine.

  “Rizzoli,” said Tam. He followed her toward the driveway. “Just wanted to let you know, I spoke to the hospital a little while ago. Iris Fang is out of surgery and awake.”

  “Is she going to be okay?”

  “She took a bullet to the thigh and lost a lot of blood, but she’ll recover. She seems to be a pretty tough bird.”

  “We should all be so tough.”

  It was bright on that driveway with the morning sun in their faces. Tam pulled sunglasses from his pocket and slipped them on. “Maybe I should head over to the hospital? Get a statement from her?” he suggested.

  “Later. Right now, I need you here. Brookline asked us to assist, so we’re going to be spending a lot of time on this property.”

  “So I’m staying with the team?”

  She squinted at him, the sun’s glare piercing her tired eyes. “Yeah, until we wrap this up, I’ll ask your District A-1 supervisor to let us keep you. That is, if you want to stay with homicide.”

  “Thanks. I’d like that a lot,” he said simply. As he turned to leave, she suddenly noticed a bright streak reflecting off the back of his head. Clinging to his jet-black hair, the lone strand stood out like glitter. A silver hair.

  “Tam?” she said.

  He turned. “Yeah?”

  For a moment she just looked at him, wanting to read his eyes, but he was wearing sunglasses, and in those mirrored lenses all she saw was her own reflection. She remembered how he’d slipped so quickly and silently through Ingersoll’s window. Remembered how the Knapp Street surveillance camera had captured both her and Frost clumsily tumbling onto the fire escape, but not Tam. Maybe I’m a ghost, he had joked. Not a ghost, she thought, but someone just as elusive. Someone who’d been present at every step of the investigation, who knew what was being said and what was being planned. She could not see his expression, could not probe for secrets, but she knew they were there, waiting to be discovered. Secrets that she decided she would let him keep.

  For now.

  “Did you have a question, Rizzoli?” he asked.

  “Never mind,” she said. And she turned and walked away.

  IT WAS HAPPY HOUR at J. P. Doyle’s, and the bar was packed with so many off-duty cops that Jane had trouble spotting Korsak. Only after the waitress pointed her toward the dining room did she finally find him, sitting alone in a booth keeping company with a fried seafood platter and a pint of ale.

  “Sorry I’m late,” she said. “What’s doin’?”

  “Hope you don’t mind that I already ordered.”

  She eyed his mound of deep-fried shrimp. “Guess you’re off the diet, huh?”

  “Don’t get on my case, okay? Day’s been lousy like a bastard and I need my comfort food, I really do.” He stabbed four shrimp and stuffed them into his mouth. “You gonna order something or what?”

  She waved over the waitress, ordered a small salad, and watched Korsak polish off another half dozen shrimp.

  “That all you’re eating?” he asked when her order arrived.

  “I’m going home for supper. Haven’t spent much time there the past few days.”

  “Yeah, I hear it’s been a real circus over there in Brookline. How many bodies they dig up so far?”

  “Six, all look to be females. It’ll be months before we’re done searching the property, and they may have other burial spots we don’t know about. So we’re looking at Mark Mallory’s residence as well.”

  Korsak lifted his ale in a toast. “What is it you ladies like to say? You go, girl!”

  She looked at his grease-splattered shirt and thought: He has the man breasts to actually pull off that phrase. She raised her glass of water and they made an impressive clunk, splashing beer on his ever-shrinking mound of shrimp.

  “Just one fly in the ointment,” she said as she picked up her fork. “There’s no way I’ll ever close the files on either John Doe or Jane Doe. And it was her death that set off the whole thing.”

  “Never found the sword that killed her?”

  “Vanished. Probably walked off that night with whatever I saw disappear into the trees. We’re never going to get anyone to confess. But I have a pretty good idea who did it.”

  “Enough to convict?”

  “Honestly? I don’t want to convict. Sometimes, Korsak, just doing my job means I’d have to do the wrong thing.”

  Korsak laughed. “Don’t ever let Dr. Isles hear you say that.”

  “No, she wouldn’t understand,” Jane agreed. What Maura understood was facts, and those facts had led to the conviction of Officer Wayne Graff a few days ago. Yes or no, black or white, for Maura the line was always perfectly clear. But the longer that Jane was a cop, the less certain she was of where that line between right and wrong was drawn.

  She dug into her salad and took a bite. “So what’s doing with you? What’d you want to talk to me about?”

  He sighed and put down his fork. Very few things, other than an empty plate, could make Vince Korsak surrender his fork. “You know I love your mom,” he said.

  “Yeah, I think I got that part figured out.”

  “I mean, I really love her. She’s fun and smart and sexy.”

  “You can stop right there.” She set down her own fork. “Just tell me where this is going.”

  “All’s I want is to marry her.”

  “And she’s already said yes. So?”

  “The problem is your brother. He calls her three times a day, trying to talk her out of it. It’s pretty cle
ar he despises me.”

  “Frankie doesn’t like any kind of change, period.”

  “He’s got her all upset and now she’s thinking of calling off the wedding, just to keep him happy.” His deep sigh ended on what sounded close to a whimper, and he turned to stare at the booth across the aisle. At a toddler in a high chair who took one look at him and wailed. The mother shot Korsak a dirty look and pulled the baby into her arms. Poor Korsak, homely enough to scare small children who couldn’t see past his coarse exterior to the kind heart inside. But Mom sees it. And she deserves a good man like him.

  “It’s okay,” she said. “I’ll talk to Frankie.” If that didn’t work, she’d also give her brother a good whack upside the head.

  His head lifted. “You’d do that for me? Really?”

  “Why wouldn’t I?”

  “I don’t know. I got the idea you weren’t wicked crazy about me and your ma, you know. Getting it on.”

  “I just don’t want to hear the sweaty details, okay?” She reached across the table and gave him an affectionate punch on the arm. “You’re cool, Korsak. And you make her happy. That’s all I care about.” She stood up. “I gotta get home. You okay now?”

  “I love her. You know that.”

  “I know, I know.”

  “I love you, too.” He scowled and added: “But not your brother.”

  “That I totally understand.”

  She left him to his seafood platter and exited through the crowded bar. Just as she reached the door, she heard someone call out: “Rizzoli!”

  It was retired Detective Buckholz, who had investigated Charlotte Dion’s disappearance nineteen years ago. He was sitting at his usual place at the counter, a glass of scotch in front of him. “I gotta talk to you,” he said.

  “I’m on my way home.”

  “Then I’ll walk out with you.”

  “Could we talk tomorrow, Hank?”

  “No. I got something to say, and it’s really bugging me.” He drained his glass and slapped it down on the bar. “Let’s step outside. Too damn noisy in here.”

  They walked out of Doyle’s and stood in the parking lot. It was a cool spring evening, the smell of damp earth in the air. Jane zipped up her jacket and glanced at her parked car, wondering how long this would take and whether she had time to pick up milk on the way home.

  “You know your case against Patrick Dion and Mark Mallory? You got it wrong,” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s been plastered all over the news. Two rich guys hunting girls together for twenty-five years. The whole country’s talking about it, wondering why we didn’t notice it. Why we didn’t stop them.”

  “They were smart about it, Hank. They didn’t escalate and they didn’t get sloppy. They managed to stay in control.”

  “Patrick Dion had alibis for some of those disappearances.”

  “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.