The Silent Girl

“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 mentioned 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.

“Detective Ingersoll?” Tam called out as he walked into the next room. “It’s Boston PD. Are you here?”

Jane considered huffing and flailing her way through the window as well, then decided that by the time she could finally scale that sill, Tam would have the front door unlocked.

“Rizzoli, he’s in here! He’s down!”

Tam’s shout swept away all indecision. She grasped the sill and was about to launch herself through the window headfirst when she heard bushes rustle and footsteps thudded in the darkness.

Back of the house. Suspect in flight.

She took off in pursuit and reached the rear of the building just in time to see a dark figure scramble over the fence and drop to the other side.

“Frost! I need backup!” she screamed, sprinting to the fence. Sheer adrenaline sent her up and over it, splinters lancing her palms. She landed on the other side, and the impact of her shoes hitting the pavement pounded straight up her shins.

Her quarry was in view. A man.

She heard someone scrabble over the fence behind her but didn’t glance back to see if it was Frost or Tam. She stayed focused on the figure ahead. She was gaining on him, close enough to see that he was all in black. Definitely