The Silent Girl (16 page)

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. Downstairs, 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.

Here is the spot where Joey Gilmore died
.

She looked across the cashier counter, and the memory of another crime scene photo superimposed itself on that patch of floor: the body of James Fang, his glasses askew, dressed in his trim waiter’s vest and black pants. He had crumpled into the nook behind the register, dollar bills scattered around him.

She turned. Stared at the corner where a four-top table had once been. She imagined Dina and Arthur Mallory sitting at that table, sipping tea, warming themselves after the chill of a March night. That image suddenly vanished, replaced by the police photos taken hours later. Arthur Mallory, still in his chair, slumped forward over the spilled teacups. And a few feet away his wife, Dina, lying facedown on the floor, her chair tipped over in her panic to escape. Standing in this vacant room, Jane could hear the echo of gunshots, the clatter of breaking china.

She turned toward the kitchen, where the cook had died. Suddenly she did not want to step through that doorway. It was Frost who walked in first, who flipped the light switch. Again, only a single bulb came on. She followed him, and in the dim glow she saw the blackened cookstove, a refrigerator, and stainless-steel countertops. The concrete floor was pockmarked with wear.

She moved to the cellar door. Here, with his body blocking that door, was where Wu Weimin, the cook, had drawn his final breath. Staring down, she almost imagined that the floor was darker here, the concrete still stained with old blood. She remembered how eerily intact his face had been, except for the lone bullet hole punched into his temple. That bullet had ricocheted within his skull, shredding gray matter, but it had not immediately killed him. They knew this because of how copiously he had bled during his final moments while his heart continued to pump and his wound spilled a waterfall that poured down the cellar steps.

She opened the door and peered down a wooden stairway that descended into darkness. A light cord dangled overhead. She gave it a tug, but nothing happened; this bulb had burned out.

Frost crossed the kitchen to another door. “Does this lead outside?”

“Goes to back of building,” said Mr. Kwan. “Parking.”

Frost opened the door and saw another locked gate. “The alley’s here. Report said this is how the cook’s wife walked in. She heard a gunshot, came down to check on her husband, and found him dead in the kitchen.”

“So theoretically, if that door was unlocked, any intruder could have come in that way,” said Jane.

Kwan looked back and forth at the two detectives, and he seemed confused. “What intruder? Cook, he kill himself.”

“We’re reexamining the incident, Mr. Kwan,” said Frost. “Just to be certain nothing was missed.”

The realtor shook his head in dismay. “That was very bad thing for Chinatown,” he muttered, no doubt surrendering all hope of unloading this cursed building. “Better to forget about it.” He squinted at his watch. “If you finished now, we leave, okay? I lock up.”

Jane glanced up toward the second floor. “Wu Weimin and his family lived on the second floor. Could you take us up to their apartment?”

“Nothing to see,” said Kwan.

“Nevertheless, we need to look at it.”

He sighed deeply, as though they were asking him for a favor beyond all human measure. Once again he took out his heavy key ring and went through the painstaking process of locating the right key. Judging by how many were jangling on that enormous ring, this man controlled half the properties in Chinatown. At last, he found the right one and led them out the kitchen exit, into the back alley.

Like the front entrance to the Red Phoenix restaurant, the door to the upstairs apartments was secured behind a steel gate. The shadows had deepened to night, and Frost had to shine his flashlight on the lock so Kwan could insert the key. Rusty hinges squealed as he swung open the gate, and yet another key had to be inserted into another lock before he could open the inner door.

Inside was blackness. The stairwell light had burned out, so Jane turned on her flashlight and saw steps leading upward, the railing
rubbed smooth by the oils of countless hands sliding over wood. The darkness seemed to magnify the sound of their shoes creaking on the steps, and she heard Mr. Kwan’s labored breathing behind them as he struggled to climb the stairs.

At the top of the flight, she paused outside the door to the second-floor apartment. It was unlocked, yet she did not want to open that door, did not want to see what lurked beyond. She stood with her hand frozen on the knob, the metal cold as ice against her skin. Only when she heard Mr. Kwan reach the top step, wheezing right behind her, did she finally push open the door.

She and Frost stepped into what had once been the home of Wu Weimin.

The windows were boarded shut, closing off any light from outside. Although the apartment had been vacant for years, she could still smell the scents left by those who had once lived here. The ghostly fragrance of incense and oranges still lingered, trapped in the tomb-like darkness. As her flashlight beam skittered across the wood floor, she saw the gouges and scratches of a century’s worth of wear, scars left by scraping chair legs and dragged furniture.

She crossed to a doorway at the far end of the room, and when she walked through it, the scent of incense, the presence of ghosts, seemed stronger. These windows, too, were covered by boards, and her flashlight seemed a feeble weapon to cut through the curtain of darkness. Her beam swept across the wall, across the scars of old nail holes and a Rorschach blot of mold.

A face stared back at her.

She gasped and jerked backward, colliding with Frost.

“What?” he said.

Shock had frozen her voice; all she could do was shine her light at the framed portrait hanging on the wall. As she approached it, the smell of incense grew overpowering. Beneath the portrait was a low table where she saw the remains of joss sticks, burned down to nubs among a mound of ashes. On a porcelain plate were five oranges.

“It’s him,” Frost murmured. “It’s a photo of the cook.”

It took Jane a moment to see it, but as she stared at the face she realized he was right. The man in the photo was indeed Wu Weimin, but this was no homicidal maniac glaring back at them. In this picture he was laughing as he clutched a fishing pole, a Boston Red Sox cap tilted rakishly on his head.
A happy man on a happy day
.

“This looks like some kind of shrine to his memory,” said Frost.

Jane picked up an orange from the plate and took a sniff. Saw that the stem end was tinged with green. Real, she thought. She turned to Mr. Kwan, whom she could barely make out in the doorway. “Who else has a key to this building?”

“No one,” he said, rattling his jailer’s ring. “I have the only key.”

“But these oranges are fresh. Someone’s been in here recently. Someone left this offering and burned this incense.”

“These keys
always
with me,” he insisted, noisily jangling the ring for emphasis.

“The gate downstairs has a dead bolt,” said Frost. “There’s no way you could pick the lock.”

“Then how could anyone …” She went dead silent. Turned toward the doorway.

Footsteps were thumping up the stairs.

In an instant her weapon was drawn and clutched in both hands. Pushing aside Mr. Kwan, she quickly slipped out of the bedroom. As she eased her way across the living room, she felt her heart banging, heard Frost’s footsteps creaking on her right. Smelled incense and mold and sweat, a dozen details assaulting her at once. But it was the stairwell door she focused on, a black portal to something that was now climbing toward them. Something that suddenly took on the shape of a man.

“Freeze!” Frost commanded. “Boston PD!”

“Whoa, Frost.” Johnny Tam gave a startled laugh. “It’s just me.”

Behind her, Jane heard Mr. Kwan give a squawk of fear. “Who is he? Who is he?”

“What the hell, Tam,” said Frost, huffing out a breath as he holstered his weapon. “I could have blown your head off.”

“You did tell me to meet you here, didn’t you? I would’ve gotten here sooner, but I got stuck in traffic coming back from Springfield.”

“You talk to the owner of that Honda?”

“Yeah. Said it was stolen right out of his driveway. And that wasn’t his GPS in the car.” He swept his flashlight around the room. “So what’s going on in here?”

“Mr. Kwan’s giving us a tour of the building.”

“It’s been boarded up for years. What’s there to see?”

“More than we expected. This is Wu Weimin’s apartment.”

Tam’s flashlight revealed patches of mold and crumbling plaster from the ceiling. “This place looks like it’s from the lead-paint era.”

“No lead paint here,” snapped Kwan. “No asbestos, either.”

“But look what we did find,” said Jane, turning back toward the bedroom. “Someone’s been visiting this apartment. And they left behind …” She halted, her beam frozen on blank wall.

“Left behind what?”

I must be looking at the wrong spot, she thought, and shifted her light. Again, she saw blank wall. She swept the beam all around the room until she flashed on the little table with the joss sticks and oranges. Above it, the wall was empty.

“What the hell?” Frost whispered.

Through the pounding of her own heart, she heard three gun holsters simultaneously snick open. As she slid out her weapon, she whispered: “Tam, take Mr. Kwan into the stairwell and stay with him. Frost, you’re with me.”

“Why?” protested Mr. Kwan as Tam pulled him out of the room. “What’s going on?”

“Doorway there,” she murmured, her light shining on a black rectangle.

Together she and Frost inched toward it, their beams wildly crisscrossing, scanning every dark corner. Her breath was a roar in her ears, every sense sharpened to diamond points. She registered the smell of the darkness, the strobe-like glimpses as her beam flicked
here, there. The weight of the gun, heavy and reassuring.
On the rooftop, Jane Doe had a gun, too, and it didn’t save her
.

She thought of blades slicing through wrist bones, through neck and windpipe, and she dreaded stepping through that doorway and confronting what waited on the other side.

One, two, three. Do it
.

She was first through, dropping to a crouch as she swung the light around. Heard Frost’s harsh breathing behind her as she glimpsed a porcelain toilet, a sink, a rust-stained bathtub. No bogeyman with a blade.

Another doorway.

Frost took the lead this time, slipping through into a bedroom where wallpaper hung peeling, like a room shedding its skin. No furniture, nowhere to hide.

Through one more doorway, and they were back in the living room. Back in familiar territory. Jane walked out into the stairwell, where Tam and Mr. Kwan stood waiting.