The Silent Girl (17 page)

“Nothing?” said Tam.

“That photo didn’t walk off on its own.”

“We were right here in the stairwell the whole time. No one came by us.”

Jane reholstered her gun. “Then how the hell …”

“Rizzoli!” called out Frost. “Look at this!”

They found him standing by the window in the bedroom where the portrait had hung. Like all the other windows, this one had been boarded over, but when Frost nudged the board, it easily swiveled aside, suspended in place by only a single nail above the frame. Jane peered through the opening and saw that the window faced Knapp Street.

“Fire escape’s here,” said Frost. He poked out his head and craned to look up toward the roof. “Hey, something’s moving up there!”

“Go, go!” said Jane.

Frost scrambled over the sill, all clumsy long arms and legs, and clanged onto the landing. Tam exited right after him, moving with an
acrobat’s grace. Last out the window was Jane, and as she dropped onto the metal grate of the landing, she caught a glimpse of the street below. Saw splintered crates, broken bottles. A bad drop, any way you looked at it. She forced herself to focus on the ladder above, where Frost was clanging up the rungs, noisily announcing to the whole world that they were in pursuit.

She scrambled up right behind Tam, her hands gripping slippery metal, the breeze chilling the sweat on her face. She heard Frost grunt, saw the silhouette of his legs flailing against the night sky as he pulled himself over the edge and onto the rooftop. Jane felt his movements transmitted through the rungs as the fire escape shuddered, and for a panic-stricken moment she thought the brackets might give way, that the weight of three bodies would make the whole rickety structure twist off in a screech of metal and fling them to the pavement below. She froze, gripping the ladder, afraid that even a puff of wind would tip them into disaster.

A shriek above her made every hair stand up on the back of her neck.
Frost
.

She looked up, expecting to see his body hurtling toward her, but all she glimpsed was Tam as he scaled the last rungs and vanished onto the rooftop. She clambered after him, sick with dread. As she reached the roof edge, a piece of asphalt tile crumbled at her touch and dropped away, plummeting into darkness below. With shaking hands, she pulled herself up over the edge and crawled onto the roof. Spotted Tam crouched a few feet away.

Frost. Where is Frost?

She jumped to her feet and scanned the roof. Glimpsed a shadow flitting away, moving so swiftly that it might only have been a cat darting with feline grace into the darkness. Under the night sky, Jane saw empty rooftops, one blending into the next, an aerial landscape of slopes and valleys, jutting chimneys and ventilation shafts. But no Frost.

Dear God, he’s fallen. He’s on the ground somewhere, dead or dying
.

“Frost?” Tam yelled as he circled the roof.
“Frost?”

Jane pulled out her cell phone. “This is Detective Rizzoli. Beach and Knapp Street. Officer down—”

“He’s here!” Tam yelled. “Help me pull him up!”

She spun around and saw Tam kneeling at the roof’s edge, as if he were about to take a swan dive to the street below. She thrust the phone back into her pocket and ran to his side. Saw Frost clinging with both hands to the rain gutter, his feet dangling above a four-story plummet. Tam dropped to his belly and reached down to grab Frost’s left wrist. The roof sloped here, and a misstep could send them both sliding off the edge. Jane flopped onto her belly beside Tam and grabbed Frost’s right wrist. Together they pulled, straining to drag him up across gritty tiles that snagged Jane’s jacket and scraped her skin. With a loud grunt, Frost flopped onto the roof beside them, where he sprawled, gasping.

“Jesus,” he whispered. “Thought I was dead!”

“What the hell, did you trip and fall?” said Jane.

“I was chasing it, but I swear, it was
flying
over this roof, like a bat out of hell.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Didn’t you see it?” Frost sat up; even in the darkness Jane could see he was pale and shaking.

“I didn’t see anything,” said Tam.

“It was right there, standing where you are now. Turned and looked straight at me. I jumped back and lost my footing.”

“It?” said Jane. “Are we talking about a man or what?”

Frost let out a trembling breath. Turning, he gazed across the sweep of Chinatown rooftops. “I don’t know.”

“How can you not know?”

Slowly Frost rose to his feet and stood facing the direction that the thing—whatever it was—had fled. “It moved too fast to be a man. That’s all I can tell you.”

“It’s dark up here, Frost,” said Tam. “When you’re hyped up on adrenaline, it’s hard to be sure of what you’re seeing.”

“I know it sounds crazy, but there was
something
here, something I’ve never seen before. You’ve got to believe me!”

“Okay,” Jane said, clapping him on the shoulder. “I believe you.”

Frost looked at Tam. “But you don’t, do you?”

In the darkness, they saw Tam’s shoulder lift in a shrug. “It’s Chinatown. Weird stuff happens here.” He laughed. “Maybe there’s more to that ghost tour than we thought.”

“It was no ghost,” said Frost. “I’m telling you, it was flesh and blood, standing right there. It was
real
.”

“No one saw it but you,” said Tam.

Frost stalked away across the roof and stood staring down at the street below. “That may not be entirely true.”

Jane followed him to the edge and saw the fire escape that they’d clambered up only moments earlier. Below them was Knapp Street, dimly lit by the glow of a streetlamp.

“Do you see it?” said Frost, and he pointed toward the corner, at what was mounted on the building.

A surveillance camera.

E
VEN AT NINE THIRTY PM, THE EMPLOYEES OF DEDHAM SECURITY
were on the job, monitoring properties all over the Greater Boston area.

“Bad guys usually get to work after dark,” said Gus Gilliam as he walked the trio of detectives past a bank of surveillance monitors. “So we have to stay awake, too. If any of our alarms gets tripped, we’re talking to Boston PD like
that.
” He snapped his fingers. “You ever need a security system, call us.”

Tam surveyed the video feeds on the monitors. “Wow. You really do have eyes all over the city.”

“All over Suffolk County. And
our
cameras are actually operational. Half the security cameras you see mounted around town are just dummies that don’t record a damn thing. So if you’re a bad guy, it’s a shell game. You don’t know which cameras are really watching and which aren’t. But when they spot any camera, they tend to shy away and go for easier pickings, so just having a camera in view is a deterrent.”

“We’re lucky that camera on Knapp Street is real,” said Jane.

“Yeah. We have about forty-eight hours’ worth of video stored
on that one.” He led them into a back room, where four chairs were already set up around the monitor. “Usually gives us enough postincident time to be notified so we can save relevant footage. That particular camera was installed about five years ago. Last time we were asked to pull video off it, we caught a kid breaking a window.” He sat down at the monitor. “You said you were interested in a second-floor fire escape landing?”

“I’m hoping it’s in your camera’s field of view,” said Jane. “The building in question is about twenty, twenty-five yards away.”

“I don’t know. That could be too far to see much detail, and second floor might not be visible. Plus, we’re talking low resolution. But let’s take a look.”

As the three detectives crowded in to watch the monitor, Gilliam clicked the Play icon, and a live view of Knapp Street appeared. Two pedestrians could be seen walking past, in the direction of Kneeland Street, their backs to the camera.

“Look,” said Frost. “You can just see a corner of the fire escape.”

“Unfortunately, not the window itself,” said Jane.

“It might be enough.” Frost leaned in closer to read the date and time on the recording. “Go back around two hours. Seven thirty. Let’s see if we can catch a glimpse of our intruder.”

Gilliam rewound to 7:30
PM
.

At 7:35, an elderly woman walked slowly along Knapp Street, arms weighed down by grocery sacks.

At 7:50, Johnny Tam appeared outside the Red Phoenix restaurant. He peered into the window, looked at his watch, then vanished through the unlocked front door. A moment later he reemerged, glanced up toward the apartment windows above. Circling toward the back of the building, he disappeared around the corner.

At 8:06, something jerked into view on the fire escape. It was Frost, tumbling clumsily out of the window. He jumped to his feet and climbed out of view.

“What the hell?” Frost murmured. “Nothing came out ahead of me. I know I chased something up that ladder.”

“It doesn’t show up,” said Jane.

“And there’s you, Rizzoli. How come Tam doesn’t show up, either? He came out right after me.”

Tam snorted. “Maybe I’m a ghost.”

“Your problem is the field of view,” said Gilliam. “We’re catching just a corner of the fire escape, so the camera misses anyone who makes a more, er, graceful entry and exit.”

“In other words, Frost and I make lousy cat burglars,” said Jane.

Gilliam smiled. “And Detective Tam here would make a good one.”

Jane sighed. “So we caught nothing on this camera.”

“Assuming this was the only time the intruder entered.”

Jane remembered the scent of incense, the fresh oranges on the plate. Someone was regularly visiting that apartment, leaving offerings in memory of Wu Weimin. “Go back,” she said. “Two nights ago and move forward.”

Gilliam nodded. “Worth a look.”

On the monitor, time wound back to 9:38
PM
, forty-eight hours earlier. As the video once again advanced to 10:00
PM
, then to midnight, pedestrians walked past, their movements accelerated and shaky. By 2:00
AM
, Knapp Street was deserted, and they watched an unchanging view of pavement across which only a stray bit of paper fluttered.

At 3:02
AM
, Jane saw it.

It was just the twitch of a shadow on the fire escape landing, but it was enough to make her rock forward in her chair. “Stop. Go back!” she snapped.

Gilliam reversed the video and froze the image on a shadow darkening the fire escape.

“It doesn’t look like much,” said Tam. “It could be nothing but a cat casting that shadow.”

“If someone went into that building,” said Frost, “they’ve gotta come out again, right?”

“Then let’s see what happens next,” said Gilliam, and he advanced
the video. They watched as the minutes progressed. Saw two clearly drunken men stagger down Knapp Street and around the corner.

Seconds later Jane gave a gasp.
“There.”

Gilliam froze the image and stared at a crouching shadow on the fire escape. Softly he said: “What the hell is that?”

“I
told
you I saw something,” said Frost. “That’s
it.
”

“I don’t even know what we’re looking at,” said Tam. “You can’t see a face, you can’t even be sure it’s a man.”

“But it’s bipedal,” said Frost. “Look how it’s down on its haunches. Like it’s about to leap.”

Jane’s cell phone rang, the sound so startling that she had to take a breath and steady her voice before she answered. “Detective Rizzoli.”

“You left a message on my voice mail,” a man said. “I’m returning your call. This is Lou Ingersoll.”

She sat up straight in her chair. “Detective Ingersoll, we’ve been trying to reach you all week. We need to talk to you.”

“About what?”

“A homicide in Chinatown. Happened last Wednesday night. Victim is a Jane Doe, female in her thirties.”

“You do know that I’ve been retired from Boston PD for sixteen years? Why are you asking me about this?”

“We think this death could be connected to one of your old cases. The Red Phoenix massacre.”

There was a long silence. “I don’t think I want to talk about this on the phone,” he said.

“How about in person, sir?”

She heard his footsteps moving across the floor. Heard his labored breaths. “Okay, I think that vehicle’s gone now. Wish I’d gotten the goddamn license plate.”

“What vehicle?”

“The van that’s been parked across the street ever since I got home. Probably the same son of a bitch who broke in while I was up north.”

“What, exactly, is going on?”

“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.”