The Silent Girl (20 page)

“Pleasant image to start off the morning,” said Tam.

Maura whisked off the drape. “We haven’t undressed him yet. I assumed you all wanted to be here when we did.”

No, I don’t want to be here, thought Jane. I don’t want to see this. But she forced herself to turn to the table. Although what lay there was no surprise, she still sucked in a sharp breath at the sight of the severed head. She knew nothing yet about this man, neither his name nor his origins. The only clues they had so far came from the items removed from his pockets last night: an ammunition clip, a roll of cash, and keys to a stolen Ford van, which had been parked two blocks from Ingersoll’s residence. He carried no ID of any kind.

Tam bent over the table, his expression unruffled as he took a closer look at the severed head. He didn’t flinch when Maura peeled off the victim’s stocking cap, revealing neatly clipped brown hair. The dead man’s face was unremarkable, with an utterly average nose, average mouth, average chin. A man you’d forget a moment after you’d passed him on the street.

The hands had already been swabbed and his fingerprints collected last night upon arrival. Purple ink still stained the fingers. Maura and Yoshima worked together to remove the clothing, peeling off the sweatshirt and trousers, briefs and socks. The headless body was stocky and well muscled. A healed scar ran diagonally across the right knee—a souvenir of old surgery. Jane stared at the scar and thought: Now I know why I was able to run him down so easily last night.

Under the magnifier, Maura examined the incised soft tissues, searching for irregularities and bruising. “I don’t see any serration marks,” she said. “The wound is uniform, without secondary cuts. This was a single slice.”

“That’s what I told you,” said Jane. “It was a sword. One slash.”

Maura glanced up. “No matter how reliable I consider a witness, I always need to confirm.” She refocused on the incision. “This cut
was delivered at an odd angle. Which hand was holding the sword, right or left?”

Jane hesitated. “I didn’t see the actual slash. But as he was walking away, it was … it was in his right hand.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. Why?”

“Because this cut starts lower on the right, and angles upward as it exits the left side of the neck.”

“So?”

“This victim is about five foot ten, five eleven. If the killer attacked from behind, slashing right to left, he was probably shorter.” Maura looked at Jane. “Would you agree?”

“I was lying on my back. At that angle, everyone looks tall, especially someone with a big honking sword.” She let out a breath, suddenly aware that Maura was looking at her with the analytical gaze that so irritated her. A look that invaded her privacy, made her feel like a specimen floating in formalin.

Abruptly Jane turned from the table. “I don’t think I need to see any more of this. What’s this autopsy going to tell us? Surprise, someone whacked off his head?” She tossed the gown in the contaminated linen bin. “You guys finish up here. I’m going to check with the crime lab, find out if Ingersoll’s cell phone turned up anything.”

The anteroom door suddenly swung open, and Jane was startled to see her husband walk in. “What are you doing here?”

Special Agent Gabriel Dean was no stranger to autopsy rooms. It had been a serial murder case that introduced Jane to her husband, and over the course of that investigation they had spent more than a few malodorous hours together, bending over corpses that had been found in various stages of decomposition. Gabriel was already wearing a gown and shoe covers, and his face was focused and grim as he pulled on gloves and approached the table.

“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.”

T
HE CONVERSATION WITH
G
ABRIEL
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.”