The Silent Girl

scene?”

“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.”