The Silent Girl (9 page)

The room suddenly felt colder. So cold that Jane’s arms prickled from the chill. “What do you mean, a curse?” she asked.

“Within a month, a host of bad things happened. Detective Staines keeled over and died of a heart attack. A technician working the crime scene unit was killed in a car accident. Detective Ingersoll’s wife had a stroke and later died. Finally, there was the girl who disappeared.”

“What girl?”

“Charlotte Dion. She was the seventeen-year-old daughter of Dina Mallory, one of the restaurant victims. A few weeks after Dina was killed in the Red Phoenix, Charlotte vanished during a school outing. She’s never been found.”

Jane could suddenly hear her own heartbeat, loud as a drum in her ears. “And you said Iris Fang’s daughter vanished, too.”

Zucker nodded. “They disappeared two years apart, but it’s still an eerie coincidence, isn’t it? Two victims of the Red Phoenix both had daughters go missing.”

“
Was
it a coincidence?”

“What else would it be? The two families didn’t know each other. The Fangs were struggling immigrants. Charlotte’s parents were Boston Brahmins. There was no other connection between them. You might as well blame it on the Red Phoenix curse.” He looked at the case file. “Or maybe it’s that building. In Chinatown, they consider it haunted. They say that when you step inside, evil attaches itself to you.” He looked at Jane. “And follows you home.”

J
ANE DID NOT LIKE COINCIDENCES. IN THE COMPLEX FABRIC OF LIFE
they happened, of course, but she always felt compelled to examine what made the threads cross, whether it was truly random or if there was some grander design at work, a pattern that could only be seen when you traced those threads back to their origins. And so she sat at her desk trying to do exactly that, tracing five disparate threads that had tragically intersected in a Chinatown restaurant nineteen years ago.

The Red Phoenix file was not a particularly thick one. For homicide detectives, a murder-suicide is a lucky catch, the kind of case that comes neatly wrapped up with a bow, justice conveniently dispensed by the perp himself in the form of a self-inflicted bullet. The police report by Staines and Ingersoll focused not on the
who
but the
why
of the shooting, and their analysis relied heavily on what Dr. Zucker had already told Jane and Frost about Wu Weimin.

So she looked instead at the four victims.

Victim number one was Joey Gilmore, age twenty-five, born and raised in South Boston. There was a great deal more information about Gilmore in the report, because he had a police record.
Burglary, trespassing, assault and battery. That record, plus his employer’s name—Donohue Wholesale Meats—instantly caught Jane’s attention. Boston PD was all too familiar with the owner of the company, Kevin Donohue, because of his deep and enduring ties to local organized crime. Over the past four decades, Donohue had advanced through the ranks from a common street thug to one of the three most powerful names in the local Irish mafia. Law enforcement knew exactly who and what Donohue was; they just couldn’t prove it in court. Not yet.

Jane pulled out the folder of crime scene photos and flipped to the image of Joey Gilmore’s body, lying on the floor amid scattered take-out cartons. He’d been felled with a single bullet to the back of his head. Dr. Zucker might call this a case of
amok
, but to Jane, it looked a hell of a lot like a gangland execution.

Victim number two was James Fang, age thirty-seven, who worked as host, waiter, and cashier in the Red Phoenix restaurant. He and his wife, Iris, had immigrated from Taiwan sixteen years earlier, when he arrived in the United States as a graduate student in Asian literature. The restaurant was merely his evening job; during the day, he taught in the after-school enrichment program at the Boston Chinatown Neighborhood Center. He and Wu Weimin were described as good friends who had worked together in the Red Phoenix for five years. There were no known conflicts between them. Jane found no mention in the report of the Fangs’ daughter, Laura, who had gone missing two years before. Perhaps Staines and Ingersoll were not even aware of the earlier tragedy that had struck the Fang family.

Victims three and four were a married couple, Arthur and Dina Mallory of Brookline, Massachusetts. Arthur was forty-eight, president and CEO of the Wellesley Group, an investment firm. No occupation was listed for Dina, age forty; judging by her husband’s job title, she did not need to work. For both Arthur and Dina, this was a second marriage, and a blending of two families. Arthur’s first wife was the former Barbara Hart, and they had a son, Mark, age twenty.
Dina’s ex-husband was Patrick Dion, and they had a daughter, seventeen. The police report specifically addressed the issue that every good homicide investigator automatically explores: any and all conflicts that resulted from the victims’ divorces and remarriages.

How bizarrely civilized that was, thought Jane. Patrick’s wife leaves him for another man, and then they all spend Christmas together. It sounded too good to be true, but the information came straight from Arthur Mallory’s own son, Mark, who would know. It was the ideal reconstituted family, all smiles and no conflict. She supposed it was possible, but she certainly could not see it happening in her own family. She tried to imagine a Rizzoli reunion that included her father, her mother, her father’s bimbo, and her mother’s new boyfriend, Vince Korsak. Now,
there
was a massacre waiting to happen, and all bets were off as to who’d be left standing.

But the Mallorys and Dions had somehow made it work. Perhaps it was for the sake of Charlotte, who would have been only twelve when her parents divorced. Like most children of divorce, she’d probably shuttled between two households, the poor little rich girl, bouncing between the homes of her mother, Dina, and her father, Patrick.

Jane turned to the last page in the file and found a brief addendum to the report:

That addendum, dated April 28, was signed by Detective Ingersoll.

Two missing girls, Laura Fang and Charlotte Dion. Both of them were daughters of victims killed in the Red Phoenix, but nothing in this report indicated that this was anything more than a sad coincidence. It was just as Dr. Zucker had said. Sometimes there is no pattern, no plan, but merely the blind cruelty of fate, which keeps no running tally of who has suffered too much.

“You know, Rizzoli, all you had to do was ask me.”

She looked up to see Johnny Tam standing beside her desk. “Ask you what?”

“About the Red Phoenix massacre. I just ran into Frost. He told me you two have been hunting down all the files. If you’d just talked to me, I could have told you all about the case.”

“How would you know about it? You were like, what, eight years old when it happened?”

“I’m assigned to Chinatown so I have to know what goes on there. The Chinese still talk about the Red Phoenix, you know. It’s like a wound that never healed. And never will, because it’s all tied up in shame.”

“Shame? Why?”

“The killer was one of our own. And by
our own
, I mean all Chinese.” He pointed to the folders on her desk. “I reviewed that case file two months ago. I spoke to Lou Ingersoll. I read the ME’s reports.” He tapped his head. “The info’s all right here.”

“I didn’t know you were familiar with it.”

“Did it occur to you to ask me? I thought I was part of the team.”

She didn’t like the accusatory note in his voice. “Yes, you’re part of the team,” she acknowledged. “I’ll try to remember it. But things’ll go a lot easier for all of us if you got rid of that chip on your shoulder.”

“I just want to be right in front of the hunt. Not treated like the geeky backup guy, which happens way too often around here.”

“What do you mean?”

“Boston PD’s supposed to be one big, happy melting pot, right?” He laughed. “Bullshit.”

For a moment she studied him, trying to read his stony expression. Suddenly she recognized herself at his age, hungry to prove herself and resentful that, too often, she was ignored. “Sit down, Tam,” she said.

Sighing, he pulled up the nearest chair and sat. “Yeah?”

“You think I have no idea what it’s like to be a minority?”

“I don’t know. Do you?”

“Look around this place. How many female homicide detectives do you see? There’s one, and you’re talking to her. I know what it’s like having guys shut me out of the loop because I’m the girl and they think there’s no way I’m good enough to do the job. You just need to learn to deal with all the jerks and the bullshit, because there’s an endless supply of both.”

“It doesn’t mean we stop calling them on it.”

“For all the difference it makes.”

“You must have made a difference. Because now they accept
you
.”

She thought about whether that was true. Remembered what her life used to be like when she’d first joined the unit and had to put up with the snickers and the tampon jokes and the deliberate snubs. Yes, things were better now, but the war had been hard-fought and had taken years.

“It’s not complaining that makes the difference,” she said. “It’s all about doing the job better than anyone else.” She paused. “I hear you aced the exam for detective on your first try.”

His nod was curt. “Top score, as a matter of fact.”

“And you’re what? Twenty-five?”

“Twenty-six.”

“That’s working against you, you know.”

“What, the fact I’m seen as just another Asian geek?”

“No. The fact you’re still a kid.”

“Great. Yet another reason not to be taken seriously.”

“The point is, there’s a dozen different reasons to feel like you’re at a disadvantage. Some are real, some are in your head. Just deal with it and do the job.”

“If you’ll try to remember that I’m part of the team. Let me do some of the legwork on the Red Phoenix, since I’m already up on it. I can make calls, talk to the victims’ families.”

“Frost already plans to interview Mrs. Fang again.”

“So I’ll talk to the other families.”

She nodded. “Fine. Now tell me where you’ve gone with the case already.”

“I first checked it out back in February, when I got assigned to District A-1 and I heard some of the Chinatown locals talking about it. I remembered the case from back when I was a kid in New York City.”

“You heard about it in New York?”

“If it’s big news and it involves someone Chinese anywhere in the country, trust me, the whole Chinese community gossips about it. Even in New York, we talked about the Red Phoenix. I remember my grandmother telling me how shameful it was that the killer was one of us. She said it reflected badly on everyone who was Chinese. It made us all look like criminals.”

“Geez. Talk about collective guilt.”

“Yeah, we’re really good at that. Grandma, she’d pitch a fit if I tried to leave the house wearing ripped jeans, because she didn’t want people to think all Chinese were slobs. I grew up with the burden of representing an entire race every time I stepped out the door. So, yeah. I already had an interest in the Red Phoenix. Then when that ad in
The Boston Globe
came out in March, I got even more interested. I read through the case file a second time.”

“What ad?”

“It came out on the thirtieth, the anniversary of the shooting. Took up about a quarter page in the local section.”

“I didn’t see it. What did the ad say?”

“It ran a photo of the cook, Wu Weimin, with the word
innocent
in bold letters.” He stared across the desks in the homicide unit. “When I saw that ad, I wanted it to be true. I wanted Wu Weimin to be innocent, just so we could erase that black mark against us.”

“You don’t really think he was innocent, do you?”

He looked at her. “I don’t know.”

“Staines and Ingersoll never doubted he was the shooter. Neither does Dr. Zucker.”

“But that ad got me thinking. It made me wonder if Boston PD got it wrong nineteen years ago.”

“Just because Wu was Chinese?”

“Because people in Chinatown never believed he did it.”

“Who paid for the ad? Did you ever find out?”

He nodded. “I called the
Globe
. It was paid for by Iris Fang.”

Jane’s cell phone rang. Even as she reached for it, she was processing that last piece of information. Wondering why, nineteen years after the event, Iris would buy an ad in defense of the man who had murdered her husband. Glancing at her phone, she saw that the incoming call was from the crime lab and she answered: “Rizzoli.”