“This is the man from the alley?” he asked bluntly. “The one who almost killed you?”
“Hello to you, too, sweetheart,” said Jane. She looked at Tam. “In case you’re wondering who this crasher is, this is my husband, Gabriel. And I have no idea why he’s here.”
Gabriel’s attention remained fixed on the cadaver. “What do we know about him so far?”
“We? Since when did you join the team?” asked Jane.
“Since this man took a shot at you.”
“Gabriel.” She sighed. “We can talk about it later.”
“The time to talk about it is now.”
She stared at her husband, trying to understand what was happening here. Trying to read his face, stony under the glare of morgue lights. “What is this all about?”
“It’s about fingerprints.”
“We’ve gotten nothing back on him from AFIS.”
“I’m talking about Jane Doe’s fingerprints. The woman on the rooftop.”
“We didn’t get any match on hers, either,” said Maura. “She’s not in the FBI database.”
“I sent a black notice to Interpol,” he said. “Because it’s clear to me this is adding up to something bigger. A lot bigger. Think of how Jane Doe was dressed. The weapon she was carrying. The fact she had no ID and was driving a stolen vehicle.” He looked at the corpse. “Like this man.”
“You’ve heard back from Interpol?” said Jane.
He nodded. “An hour ago. She’s in their database. Not her name, but her fingerprints. They turned up on components of a car bomb that exploded in London two years ago. It killed the driver, an American businessman.”
“Are we talking about terrorism?” asked Tam.
“Interpol believes the bomb was a hit by organized crime. A paid assassination. Your woman on the rooftop was clearly a professional, and I’m guessing this man was, as well.” He looked at Jane. “A Kevlar vest isn’t going to save you, Jane. Not against people like this.”
Jane gave a startled laugh. “Man, we really hit the jackpot, didn’t we?”
“You have a daughter,” said Gabriel. “We have a daughter. Think about this.”
“What’s there to think about?”
“Whether Boston PD can handle this.”
“Hold it right there. Can we take this into the next room, please?” She glanced at her colleagues. “Excuse me,” she muttered and pushed through the swinging door. It wasn’t until she and Gabriel were in the hallway and out of earshot that she blurted out: “What do you think you’re doing here?”
“I’m trying to keep my wife alive.”
“This is my turf, okay? I decide what happens here.”
“Do you have any idea what you’re dealing with?”
“I’m going to figure it out.”
“In the meantime, you’re taking bullets and collecting dead bodies.”
“Yeah. It’s turning into quite a collection.”
“Including a cop. Ingersoll knew how to defend himself, and now he’s in a body bag.”
“So you want me to drop out? Run home and hide under the bed?” She snorted. “That is so not going to happen.”
“Who brings in professional killers, Jane? Anyone who’d hire a hit on an ex-cop is not afraid of Boston PD. He’s not afraid of you. This has got to be organized crime. The Russian mob. Or Chinese—”
“Kevin Donohue,” she said.
Gabriel paused. “Irish mafia?”
“We’re already digging for dirt on him. One of his men named Joey Gilmore died in the Chinatown massacre. Gilmore’s mother believes it was really a paid hit on her son, ordered by Donohue. Ingersoll was the lead detective on that massacre.”
“If it’s Donohue, he has a very long reach. Maybe into Boston PD itself.”
She stared at her husband. “Can the Bureau back up that charge?”
“There’s not enough evidence to make it stick. But I’ll tell you now, he’s not someone you want to fuck with, Jane. If he has a channel into Boston PD, he already knows exactly what you’re up to. He knows you’re coming for him.”
She thought about all the police officers who’d turned up at Ingersoll’s residence last night, including Lieutenant Marquette himself. How many cops had been watching her, keeping tabs on what she said, what she planned? How much of that information had leaked to Donohue?
“Last night was a gift,” said Gabriel. “You survived. Maybe you should take that gift home and savor it for a while.”
“Drop out of this case? Is that what you’re asking me to do?”
“Take a leave of absence. You need time to recover.”
“Don’t.” She stepped so close she had to crane her neck to stare him in the eye. Gabriel didn’t back down; he never did. “I don’t need to hear this from you,” she said. “Not now.”
“Then when am I going to say it? At your funeral?”
Her ringing cell phone cut into the silence between them. Snatching it up, she answered with a curt “Rizzoli.”
“Um, is this a bad time, Detective?”
“Who is this?”
“Erin. In the crime lab.”
Jane huffed out a breath. “Sorry. What do you have for me?”
“Remember those weird hairs on Jane Doe’s clothes? The ones I couldn’t identify?”
“Yeah. The gray ones.”
“I can’t wait to tell you what they are.”
THE CONVERSATION WITH GABRIEL was still weighing on Jane’s mind as she and Frost drove together to Schroeder Plaza. He knew her moods well enough to stay silent for most of the drive, but as she turned into the parking garage, he said wistfully: “I miss that part about being married.”
“Which part?” she said.
“The part about having someone worry about you. Hassle you about not taking any risks.”
“That’s supposed to be a good thing?”
“Well, isn’t it? It means he loves you. It means he doesn’t want to lose you.”
“What it means is I have to fight battles on two fronts. Do my job while Gabriel tries to tie me into a straitjacket.”
“What if he didn’t? Do you ever think of that? What it’d be like to not have him care enough to say anything? What it’d be like to not be married at all?”
She pulled into a parking space and shut off the engine. “He doesn’t want me working on this case.”
“I’m not sure I want to be working on it, either. After what we’ve both been through.”
She looked at him. “Scares you?”
“I’m not afraid to admit it.”
They heard a door slam, and both turned to see Tam step out of his car a few spaces away. “Bet it doesn’t scare him,” she muttered. “I don’t think anything rattles Bruce Lee over there.”
“It’s got to be an act. He’d be crazy not to be scared of Donohue and his boys.”
Jane pushed open her door. “Come on, before someone thinks we’re making out in here or something.”
By the time they reached the crime lab, Tam was already sitting at Erin Volchko’s microscope, peering at a slide.
“There you two are,” said Erin. “Detective Tam and I were just looking at some sample primate hair strands.”
“Any of them look like the hairs from our gal?” asked Jane.
“Yes, but microscopy can’t pinpoint the precise species. For that, I went to a different technique.” On the countertop, Erin spread out a page printed with columns in varying shades of gray. “These are keratin patterns. Hair has different protein components that you can separate by electrophoresis. What you do is wash and dry the sample, dissolve it in a soup of chemicals, and place the dissolved proteins on a thin layer of gel. Then you subject it to an electrical current. That makes the various proteins migrate across the gel at different rates.”
“And you end up with these gray columns.”
“Yes. That’s after silver staining and rinsing, to deepen the contrast.”
Frost shrugged. “Doesn�
�t look all that exciting.”
“But when I emailed this pattern to the Wildlife Forensics Lab in Oregon, they were able to match it against their database of keratin patterns.”
“There’s a database for that?” said Tam.
“Absolutely. Wildlife scientists around the world contribute to it. If US Customs seizes a shipment of animal skins, they need to know if those skins are from an endangered species. The database helps them identify which animal the fur comes from.” Erin opened a file folder and pulled out another sheet of keratin patterns. “Here’s what they compared our strands with. You’ll notice the protein bands line up almost perfectly with one particular specimen.”
Jane glanced back and forth between the two pages. “Column number four,” she said.
“Correct.”
“So what is number four?”
“It’s a nonhuman primate, as I guessed earlier. An Old World monkey, genus Semnopithecus. This particular species is known as the gray langur.”
“Gray?” said Jane, glancing up.
Erin nodded. “The same color as those hair strands from your Jane Doe. These monkeys are quite large, with black faces and gray or blond hair. Their range is South Asia, from China into India, both terrestrial and arboreal.” She paused. “Meaning, they live on the ground as well as in trees.” She turned to her computer and requested a Google Images search. “Here’s a photo. This is what the monkeys look like.”
What Jane saw on the screen made her hands suddenly go cold. Black face. Gray hair. She felt the ache between her shoulder blades from the bullet slamming into her Kevlar vest. Remembered hot blood splashing her face, and the silhouette looming above her in the alley, its head crowned with silver hair. “How large are these monkeys?” she asked softly.
“The males are about two and a half feet long.”
“You’re certain they don’t grow taller?”
“They’re not apes. They’re just monkeys.”
Jane looked at Frost. Saw his pale face, his stunned eyes. “It’s what you saw, isn’t it?” she asked. “On the roof.”
Erin frowned. “What did you see?”
Frost shook his head. “It was way taller than two and a half feet.”
Jane nodded. “I agree.”
Erin looked back and forth between them. “You both saw this thing?”
“It had that face,” said Frost. “And gray hair. But it couldn’t have been a monkey. And what monkey carries a sword?”
“Now, that just sent a chill up my spine,” said Erin softly. “Considering what kind of monkey this is. In India, these are also known as the Hanuman langur. Hanuman is the Hindu god known as the Monkey Warrior.”
The same chill that Erin had just felt suddenly whispered like an icy breath up the back of Jane’s neck. She thought of the creature in the alley. Remembered the gleam of its sword as it turned and slipped into the shadows.
“Is that the same character as the Monkey King?” said Tam. “Because I know that legend. There’s a Chinese version of it, too. My grandmother used to tell me the stories.”
“Who is the Monkey King?” asked Jane.
“In China, his name is Sun Wukong. He’s born from a sacred rock and he starts off as just a stone monkey. Then he transforms to flesh and blood and gets crowned king of the monkeys. He becomes a warrior and travels to heaven to learn the wisdom of the gods. But up there, he gets into all sorts of trouble.”
“So he’s a bad character?” asked Frost.
“No, not evil. Just impulsive and mischievous, like a real monkey. There’s a whole book of stories about him. How he eats all the peaches in the heavenly orchard. Drinks too much and steals a magic elixir. Gets into brawls with the Immortals, who don’t know how to deal with him. So they kick him out of heaven and temporarily lock him up inside a mountain prison.”
Frost laughed. “He sounds like a few guys I went to high school with.”
“So then what happens to him?” asked Jane.
“Sun Wukong has a whole series of adventures on earth. Sometimes he causes trouble. Sometimes, he performs good deeds. I can’t remember all the stories, but I know there was a lot of magical fighting and river monsters and talking animals. Just your typical fairy tales.”
“Fairy tales don’t spring to life,” said Jane. “They don’t shed real hair on real victims.”
“I’m just telling you what the legends say about him. He’s a complex creature, sometimes helpful, sometimes destructive. But when faced with a choice between good and evil, the Monkey King almost always chooses to do the right thing.”
Jane stared at the photo on Erin’s computer screen. At a face that, only a moment ago, had so chilled her. “So he’s not evil at all,” she said.
“No,” said Tam. “Despite his flaws, despite the chaos he sometimes causes, the Monkey King stands on the side of justice.”
THE SAVORY SCENT OF ROASTING CHICKEN AND ROSEMARY DRIFTED from Angela Rizzoli’s kitchen, and in the dining room silver and chinaware clattered as retired detective Vince Korsak set the table. Outside in the yard, Jane’s daughter, Regina, was laughing and squealing as Gabriel pushed her on a swing set. But Jane was oblivious to it all as she sat reading on her mother’s sofa, half a dozen borrowed library books spread out before her on the coffee table. Books about Asian primates and gray langurs. And books about Sun Wukong, the Monkey King. She discovered that Sun Wukong’s adventures showed up not only in books, but also in movies and Chinese operas, dances, and even a children’s television show.
In a collection of Chinese folktales, Jane found an introduction to the legend. Though the stories were written sometime during the 1500s by a Chinese author named Wu Cheng’en, the tales themselves were ancient and were said to date back to an era of ghosts and magic, a time when gods and monsters battled in both heaven and earth.
And one of the rocks of that earth, a rock that from the time of creation knew the sweet breath of the wind, the glow of moonlight, the favor of the divine, popped out a stone egg. That egg became a stone monkey. It could run and jump and climb, a monkey with eyes that flashed shafts of light so brilliant that even the Jade Emperor in heaven was startled.
The stone monkey, with neither father nor mother, soon became king of all monkeys. They lived in perfect harmony, until one day the Monkey King came to understand that Death awaited them all. So he set out to learn the secret of immortality, a journey that took him to heaven and temptation, to mischief and imprisonment. While marching to his own execution, to be burned in a crucible with alchemic flames, the Monkey King sprang free, and his fight to survive turned heaven upside down until the gods were forced to seal him inside the Mountain of the Five Elements.
There he waits in stony darkness through the centuries, until the day when he is needed. A day when evil is in the world, and the Monkey King must emerge once again to wage battle.
Jane turned the page and confronted an image of Sun Wukong, clutching a long fighting staff. Though it was just an illustration, that glimpse of the Monkey King made the hair on her arms stand straight up. She stared at sharp teeth jutting in a black mouth, at a crown of silver hair, and could not look away.
She remembered an afternoon at the zoo when she’d been six years old, and her father had held her up to see the spider monkeys. They took one look at her and the cage erupted in terrifying chaos, the monkeys shrieking and vaulting among the branches, as if they had just glimpsed the face of Satan himself. A zoo employee came running and ordered everyone, Back away, back away! I don’t know what’s scaring them! But as Jane’s father carried her from that cage of screaming monkeys, Jane knew that she was the one who’d set them off. She was the one they were terrified of. What did they see but a six-year-old girl with dark curls? she wondered. Or was there something else that they’d recognized even then? Something about who and what she’d one day become?
“So how’s it going with the monkey books?”
Korsak’s voice made her glance up with a start. He was dresse
d in his Sunday best—at least, the best that he was capable of pulling together for dinner at Angela Rizzoli’s. At least there were no ketchup stains on his white golf shirt and khaki Dockers. After a heart attack a few years earlier, he’d lost thirty pounds on a heart-healthy diet, but his weight was starting to creep back up again, and despite a newly punched hole in his belt it was straining against an ever-expanding belly.
“It’s for a case,” said Jane. She closed the book she’d been reading, relieved to blot out the image of Sun Wukong.
“Yeah, I heard all about it. Got yourself another weird one. Started off with that dead lady on the roof, didn’t it? Makes me wish I was back in the saddle.”
Jane looked at his belly and thought: God help any horse that you climb on.
Korsak flopped down in the armchair—the same armchair that her father used to sit in. It was weird to see him lounging in Frank Rizzoli’s old perch, but her dad had forfeited all rights to that chair the day he walked out on Angela and moved in with the Bimbo. That’s what they all called her now, though they knew her name well enough. Sandie Huffington, Sandie-with-an-e. Jane knew all about the Bimbo, including how many traffic tickets she’d racked up in the past ten years. Three. Because of the Bimbo, Vince Korsak was sitting in this armchair, fat and happy on Angela’s cooking.
Jane didn’t want to think about all the other ways that Angela made him happy.
“Chinatown,” Korsak grunted. “Strange place. Good food.”
He would, of course, mention food. “What do you remember about the Red Phoenix shooting?” she asked. “You must’ve heard the gossip back then.”
“That one was a wicked shocker. Why would a guy with a cute little girl shoot four people and blow out his own brains? Never made sense to me.” He shook his head. “Such a sweet kid, too. Real daddy’s girl.”
That surprised her. “You knew the cook’s family?”
The Silent Girl Page 15