The Silent Girl (8 page)

I stand unafraid in open view, where she, and the rest of the world, can see me. They may study me as long as they wish, but all they’ll see is a quiet and unassuming woman, my hair streaked with the first light snow of the passing years. Old age is still many years away, to be sure, but today I feel its relentless approach. I know that I am running out of time to finish what I’ve started. And with this visit by the two detectives, the journey has just taken a disturbing detour that I had not anticipated.

On the street below, the two detectives finally depart. Back to the hunt, wherever it takes them.

“
Sifu
, is there a problem?”

“I don’t know.” I turn to look at Bella, and once again marvel at how flawless and young her skin is, even in the harsh light through the window. The only imperfection is the scar on her chin, the consequence of an instant’s inattention during sparring practice. It was a mistake that she has never repeated. She stands straight and unafraid and confident. Perhaps too confident; on the battlefield, arrogance can prove fatal.

“Why did they come here?” she asks.

“They’re detectives. It’s their job to ask questions.”

“Did you learn anything else about the woman? Who she was, who sent her?”

“No.” I look out the window again, at passersby walking down Harrison Avenue. “But whoever she was, she knew how to find me.”

“She won’t be the last,” says Bella darkly.

She does not need to warn me; we both know the match has been struck and the fuse is lit.

In my office, I sink into my chair and stare at the framed photo that sits on my desk. It is a photo that I do not even need to look at, the image is so thoroughly burned into my memory. I pick it up and smile at the faces. I know the exact date the picture was taken, because it was my daughter’s birthday. Mothers may forget many things, but we always remember the day our children were born. In the picture, Laura is fourteen. She and I stand together in front of the Boston Symphony Hall, where we went to hear Joshua Bell perform. For a month before that concert, all Laura talked about was Joshua Bell this, Joshua Bell that.
Isn’t he handsome, Mommy? Doesn’t his violin practically
sing? In the photo, Laura is still aglow from watching her idol’s performance. My husband, James, was also with us that evening, but he is not in the photo; he does not appear in any of our photos because he was always the one holding the camera. How I wish I had thought, just once, to take that camera from his hands
and snap a picture of his sweet, owlish face. But it never occurred to me that the opportunity, so precious, would suddenly vanish. That his smile would survive only in my memory, his image frozen at age thirty-seven. Forever, my young husband. A tear plops onto the frame, and I set the photo back on the desk.

They are both gone now. First my daughter, then my husband, ripped from my arms. How do you go on living when your heart has been cut out not just once, but twice? Yet here I am, still alive, still breathing.

For the moment.

I
REMEMBER THE RED PHOENIX MASSACRE VERY WELL. IT WAS A CLASSIC
case of
amok.
” Criminal psychologist Dr. Lawrence Zucker leaned back in his chair, looking across his desk at Jane and Frost with the penetrating stare that had always made Jane feel uneasy. Although Frost sat right beside her, Zucker seemed to look only at her, his gaze crawling into her mind, probing for secrets, as if she were the sole object of his curiosity. Zucker already knew too many of her secrets. He had witnessed her rocky start with the homicide unit, when she had still been battling for acceptance as the lone woman among twelve detectives. He knew about the nightmares that haunted her after a series of particularly brutal murders by a killer named the Surgeon. And he knew about the scars she would always carry on her hands, where that same killer had plunged scalpels through her flesh. With just one look, Zucker saw through all her defenses to the raw wounds beneath, and Jane resented how vulnerable that made her feel.

She focused instead on the folder lying open on his desk. It contained his nineteen-year-old report on the Red Phoenix, including the psychological profile of Wu Weimin, the Chinese cook responsible for the shootings. She knew Zucker to be a painstakingly thorough
clinician whose analyses sometimes ran dozens of pages long, so she was surprised by how thin the file appeared.

“This is your complete report?” she asked.

“It’s everything I contributed to the investigation. It includes the psychological postmortem of Mr. Wu, as well as the four victim reports. There should be a copy of all this in the Boston PD file. Detective Ingersoll was the lead on that case. Have you spoken to him?”

“He’s out of town this week and we haven’t been able to reach him,” said Frost. “His daughter says he’s up north somewhere, at some fishing camp where he has no cell phone coverage.”

Zucker sighed. “Retirement must be nice. Seems like he left the force ages ago. What is he now, in his seventies?”

“Which is like a hundred and ten in cop years,” said Frost with a laugh.

Jane steered them back on topic. “The other detective on the case was Charlie Staines, but he’s deceased. So we were hoping you could share your insight into the case.”

Zucker nodded. “The basics of what happened were apparent just from the crime scene. We know that the cook, a Chinese immigrant named Wu Weimin, walked into the dining room and proceeded to shoot four people. First to die was a man named Joey Gilmore, who’d dropped in to pick up a take-out order. Victim number two was the waiter, James Fang, reportedly the cook’s close friend. Victims three and four were a married couple, the Mallorys, who were seated at a dining table. Finally the cook walked into the kitchen, put the gun to his own temple, and killed himself. It was a case of
amok
followed by suicide.”

“You make
amok
sound like a clinical term,” said Frost.

“It is. It’s a Malaysian word for something Captain Cook described back in the late 1700s, when he was living among the Malays. He described homicidal outbursts without apparent motive, in which an individual—almost always male—goes into a killing frenzy. The killer slaughters everyone within reach until he’s brought down. Captain Cook thought it was a behavior peculiar to Southeast Asia, but
it’s now clear that it occurs worldwide, in every culture. The phenomenon’s now got the unwieldy name of SMASI.”

“And that stands for?”

“Sudden Mass Assault by a Single Individual.”

Jane looked at Frost. “Otherwise known as going postal.”

Zucker shot her a disapproving look. “Which is unfair to postal workers. SMASI happens in every profession. Blue-collar, white-collar. Young, old. Married, single. But they’re almost always men.”

“So what do these killers have in common?” asked Frost.

“You can probably guess. They’re often isolated from the community. They have problems with relationships. Some sort of crisis precipitates the attack—loss of a job, collapse of a marriage. And finally, these individuals also have access to weapons.”

Jane flipped through her copy of the Boston PD report. “It was a Glock 17 with a threaded barrel, reported stolen a year earlier in Georgia.” She looked up. “Why would an immigrant on a cook’s salary buy a Glock?”

“For protection, maybe? Because he felt threatened?”

“You’re the psychologist, Dr. Zucker. Don’t you have an answer?”

Zucker’s mouth tightened. “No, I don’t. I’m not psychic. And I had no chance to interview the one person closest to him—his wife. By the time Boston PD requested my consult, she had left town and we had no idea how to find her. My psychological profile of Mr. Wu is based on interviews with other people who knew him. And that list wasn’t long.”

“One of those people was Iris Fang,” said Jane.

Zucker nodded. “Ah, yes. The wife of the waiter. I remember her very well.”

“Any reason in particular?”

“For one thing, she was a beautiful woman. Absolutely stunning.”

“We’ve just met her,” said Frost. “She’s still stunning.”

“Really?” Zucker flipped through the pages in his file. “Let’s see, she was thirty-six when I interviewed her. Which makes her … fifty-five now.” He glanced at Frost. “Must be those Asian genes.”

Jane was beginning to feel like the ignored and ugly stepsister. “Getting beyond the fact you both think she’s gorgeous, what else do you remember about Mrs. Fang?”

“Quite a lot, actually. I spoke with her several times, since she was my primary source of information about Wu Weimin. That was my first year working with Boston PD, and that particular incident was so horrific, it’s hard not to remember it. You go out for a late-night dinner in Chinatown, and instead of enjoying kung pao chicken, you end up getting slaughtered by the cook. That’s why the story attracted so much attention. It made the public feel vulnerable because anyone could have been a victim. Plus, there was the usual hysteria about dangerous illegal immigrants. How did Mr. Wu get into the country, how did he get a gun, et cetera, et cetera. I was only a few years out of my doctoral program, and there I was, consulting on one of the splashiest cases of the year.” He paused. “That was a poor choice of words.”

“What did you conclude about the shooter?” asked Frost.

“He was a rather sad character, really. He came over from Fujian province and slipped into the US when he was maybe twenty. It’s impossible to be certain about the dates, because there’s no documentation. All the information came from Mrs. Fang, who said Mr. Wu was close friends with her husband.”

“Who died in the shooting,” said Frost.

“Yes. Despite that, Mrs. Fang refused to say anything negative about Wu. She didn’t believe he did it. She called him gentle and hardworking. Said he had too much to live for. He was supporting his wife and daughter, as well as sending money to a seven-year-old son from a previous relationship.”

“So there was an ex-wife?”

“In another city. But Wu and his wife, Li Hua, had been settled in Boston for years. They lived in the apartment right above the restaurant where he worked, and pretty much kept to themselves. Probably afraid to attract attention, because they were illegal. Also, language may have made life difficult since they spoke Mandarin plus their very local dialect known as Min.”

“While most of Chinatown speaks Cantonese,” said Frost.

Zucker nodded. “Those dialects are incomprehensible to each other, and that would have isolated the Wu family. So the man’s got multiple sources of stress. He’s hiding his illegal status. He’s isolated. And he’s got a family to support. Add to that the long hours he’s working, and anyone would agree that’s a lot of pressure for any man.”

“But what made him snap?” asked Jane.

“Mrs. Fang didn’t know. The week of the shooting, she was out of the country visiting relatives. I interviewed her after she returned home, when she was still in a state of shock. The one thing she kept insisting on, again and again, was that Wu would never kill anyone. He certainly wouldn’t have killed her husband, James, because the two men were friends. She also claimed that Wu didn’t even own a gun.”

“How would she know that? She wasn’t married to the man.”

“Well, I couldn’t ask Wu’s wife. Within days of the shooting, she and her daughter packed up and disappeared. There was no Homeland Security tracking aliens back then, so it wasn’t hard for illegals to slip in and out of view, or vanish entirely. That’s what Wu’s wife did. She vanished. And even Iris Fang had no idea where they went.”

“You’re going entirely by Mrs. Fang’s word. How do you know she was telling the truth?” said Jane.

“Maybe I’m naïve, but I never doubted her sincerity, not once. There’s just something about her.” Zucker shook his head. “Such a tragic figure. I still feel sorry for her. I don’t know how anyone survives as many losses as she’s had.”

“Losses?”

“There was also her daughter.”

Jane suddenly remembered what Iris had said, about living alone. About no longer having a family. “Did her daughter die?”

“I guess I didn’t put that in my report, since it wasn’t relevant to the Red Phoenix incident. Iris and James had a fourteen-year-old daughter who’d vanished two years earlier. No trace of the girl was ever found.”

“Jesus,” said Frost. “We had no idea. She didn’t say anything about it.”

“She’s not the kind of woman who’d welcome anyone’s pity. But I remember looking in her eyes and seeing the pain. The kind of pain I couldn’t even imagine. And yet, such incredible strength.” Zucker fell silent for a moment, as though still moved by the memory of the woman’s grief.

This was pain that Jane could not imagine, either. She thought of her own daughter, Regina, only two and a half years old. Thought of trying to go on, year after year, not knowing if her child was dead or alive. That torment alone could drive a woman to madness.
And then to lose a husband as well …

“In the wake of any tragedy,” said Zucker, “there are always aftershocks. But what happened after the Red Phoenix went beyond the devastation to the immediate families. It’s as if the massacre had a curse attached to it. And it just kept claiming more and more victims.”