“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.”
“AT LEAST NOW YOU BELIEVE ME,” Frost said, as he and Jane drove toward Boston. “Now that you’ve seen it for yourself.”
“We don’t know what we saw on that video,” she said. “I’m sure there’s a logical answer.”
“I’ve never seen a man move that fast.”
“So what do you think it was?”
Frost stared out the window. “You know, Rizzoli, there’s a lot of things in this world we don’t understand. Things so old, so strange, that we wouldn’t accept them as possibilities.” He paused. “I used to date a Chinese girl.”
“You did? When?”
“It was back in high school. She and her family had just come over from Shanghai. She was really sweet, really shy. And very old-fashioned.”
“Maybe you should’ve married her instead of Alice.”
“Well, you know what they say about hindsight. Wouldn’t have worked anyway, because her family was dead-set against any white boy. But her great-grandmother, she was okay with me. I think she liked me because I was the only one who paid attention to her.”
“Geez, Frost, is there an old lady alive who doesn’t like you?”
“I liked listening to her stories. She’d talk and Jade would translate for me. The stuff she told me about China, man, if even a fraction of it was true …”
“Like what?”
He looked at her. “Do you believe in ghosts?”
“How many dead people have we been around? If ghosts are real, we’re the ones who would’ve seen one by now.”
“Jade’s great-grandmother, she said that ghosts are everywhere in China. She said it’s because China is so old, and millions and millions of souls have passed on there. They must end up somewhere. If they’re not in heaven, then they’ve gotta be right here. All around us.”
Jane braked at a stoplight. As she waited for the light to change, she thought of how many souls might still linger in this city. How many might be at this very spot, where the two roads intersected. Add up all the dead, century by century, and Boston was surely a haunted town.
“Old Mrs. Chang, she told me stuff that sounded crazy, b
ut she believed it. About holy men who walked on water. Fighting monks who could fly through the air and make themselves invisible.”
“Sounds like she watched too many kung fu movies.”
“But legends must be based on something, don’t you think? Maybe our Western minds are too closed to accept what we can’t understand, and there’s so much more going on in this world than we’re aware of. Don’t you feel that in Chinatown? Whenever I’m there, I wonder what I’m not seeing, all the hidden clues that I’m too blind to notice. I go into those dusty herbalist shops and see all the weird dried things in jars. It’s just hocus-pocus to us, but what if that stuff can actually cure cancer? Or make you live to a hundred? China’s been a civilization for five thousand years. They must know things. Secrets they’ll never tell us.”
In the rearview mirror, Jane could see Tam’s car right behind theirs. She wondered what he would think of this conversation, whether he’d be offended by this talk of the exotic and mysterious Chinese. The light changed to green.
As she drove through the intersection she said, “I wouldn’t mention this to Tam.”
Frost shook his head. “It’d probably piss him off. It’s not like I’m racist, you know? I did date a Chinese girl.”
“And that would definitely piss him off.”
“I’m just trying to understand, to open my mind to what we’re not seeing.”
“What I’m not seeing is how this all fits together. A dead woman on the roof. An old murder-suicide. And now Ingersoll, muttering about a van watching his house. And something about girls.”
“Why wouldn’t he tell you over the phone? Who does he think is listening in?”
“He wouldn’t say.”
“Whenever someone starts talking about their phone being bugged, those psycho warning bells go off for me. Did he sound paranoid?”
“He sounded worried. And he mentioned her. He said he’d promised to keep her out of it.”
“Iris Fang?”
“I don’t know.”
Frost looked ahead at the road. “Old cop like him, he’s probably gonna be armed. We better take this nice and slow. Don’t spook him.”
Fifteen minutes later, Jane pulled up in front of Ingersoll’s residence, and Tam parked right behind them. They all got out of their cars, doors thudding shut simultaneously. Inside the triple-decker town house, the lights were on, but when Frost rang the doorbell no one answered. He rang again and rapped on the window.
“I’ll call him,” said Jane, tapping in Ingersoll’s number on her cell phone. They could hear his phone ringing somewhere inside the residence. Four rings, and then the answering machine picked up with the terse recording. Not here now. Leave a message.
“Can’t see anything in there,” said Tam, trying to peer through the curtained front windows.
Jane hung up and said to Frost, “You keep trying the bell. Tam, let’s go around to the back. Maybe he can’t hear us.”
As she and Tam headed around the side of the building, she could hear Frost still banging on the front door. The narrow path between buildings was unlit and overgrown with shrubbery. She smelled wet leaves, felt her shoes sink into sodden grass. Through a window, she glimpsed the blue glow of Ingersoll’s TV set and she paused, looking into a living room where images flickered on the screen. On the coffee table was a cell phone and a half-eaten sandwich.
“This window isn’t latched,” said Tam. “I can climb in. You want me to?”
They looked at each other in the shadows, both of them considering the consequences of entering a house without permission or a warrant.
“He did invite us,” she said. “Maybe he’s just sitting in the john where he can’t hear us.”
Tam slid open the window. In seconds he was up and over the sill, slithering into the house without a sound. How the hell did he do that? she wondered, eyeing the chest-high sill. The man really would make a superb cat burglar.
“Detective Ingersoll?” Tam called out as he walked into the next room. “It’s Boston PD. Are you here?”
Jane considered huffing and flailing her way through the window as well, then decided that by the time she could finally scale that sill, Tam would have the front door unlocked.
“Rizzoli, he’s in here! He’s down!”
Tam’s shout swept away all indecision. She grasped the sill and was about to launch herself through the window headfirst when she heard bushes rustle and footsteps thudded in the darkness.
Back of the house. Suspect in flight.
She took off in pursuit and reached the rear of the building just in time to see a dark figure scramble over the fence and drop to the other side.
“Frost! I need backup!” she screamed, sprinting to the fence. Sheer adrenaline sent her up and over it, splinters lancing her palms. She landed on the other side, and the impact of her shoes hitting the pavement pounded straight up her shins.
Her quarry was in view. A man.
She heard someone scrabble over the fence behind her but didn’t glance back to see if it was Frost or Tam. She stayed focused on the figure ahead. She was gaining on him, close enough to see that he was all in black. Definitely dressed for crime. But not fast enough to outrun this girl cop.
Her backup’s footsteps fell behind, but she didn’t slow down, didn’t give her quarry any chance to slip away. Already she was within a few dozen yards of him.
“Police!” she yelled. “Freeze!”
He darted right, slipping between buildings.
That pissed her off. Fueled by outrage, she sprinted around the corner and found herself in an alley. It was dark here, too dark. Her footsteps echoed back as she pounded ahead, half a dozen paces, then slowed. Stopped.
Where is he? Where did he go?
Weapon drawn, heart hammering, she scanned the shadows. Saw trash cans, heard broken glass clatter away.
The bullet slammed into her back, right between her shoulder blades. The impact sent her flying and she sprawled on her belly, her palms scraping across pavement. Her weapon flew out of her hands. The Kevlar vest had saved her, but the force of the bullet stole the breath from her lungs and she lay stunned, her gun somewhere out of reach.
Footsteps slowly approached, and she struggled to her knees, fumbled around for her weapon.
The footsteps came to a halt right behind her.
She twisted around to see the man’s silhouette towering above her. Shadows hid his face, but enough light spilled into the alley from a distant streetlamp that she saw him raise his arm. Saw the faint gleam of the gun he was pointing at her head. It would be a quick and efficient end, without killer and victim ever glimpsing each other’s eyes. Gabriel, she thought. Regina. I never got the chance to tell you how much I love you both.
She heard Death whisper in the night, felt it hiss like the wind past her ear. Something splashed her face and she blinked. When she opened her eyes again, the silhouette looming over her was already toppling forward. It landed across her legs like a felled tree. Trapped under the man’s weight, she felt liquid warmth soaking into her clothes. Recognized all too well that coppery smell.
Something breathed in the darkness, something that now loomed where the gunman had stood only seconds before. She saw no face, just a black oval and a halo of silvery hair. It said not a word but as it turned away, something flashed in its hand, a bright arc of reflected light that was there and gone again. She heard what she thought was the wind as shadow swooped across shadow. Then she was alone, still pinned against the hard pavement by a man who spilled his last blood onto her clothes.
“Rizzoli? Rizzoli!”
She struggled to free herself from the deadweight trapping her legs. “I’m here! Frost!”
The beam of a flashlight flickered in the distance. Moved closer, sweeping back and froth across the alley.
With a grunt of effort, Jane finally managed to shove the body away. Shuddering at the touch of dead flesh, she scrabbled backward. “Frost,” she said.
The light
landed squarely in her eyes, and she raised a hand against its glare.
“Jesus,” Frost cried. “Are you—”
“I’m okay. I’m fine!” She took a deep breath and felt the lingering ache of the bullet’s impact in her Kevlar vest. “At least, I think so.”
“All this blood …”
“Not mine. It’s his.”
Frost aimed his flashlight at the body, and she sucked in a shocked breath that made her ribs hurt. The body was lying chest-down, and the decapitated head had rolled a few feet away. The eyes stared up at them, the mouth open as though in a last gasp of surprise. Jane gaped at the cleanly severed neck and was suddenly aware of her soaked trousers, the fabric clinging to her legs. The night began to spin and she stumbled away and sagged against a building where she dropped her head, desperately fighting the need to throw up.
“What happened?” said Frost.
“I saw it,” she whispered. “The thing. Your creature on the roof.” Her legs seemed to melt away beneath her and she slid all the way down to sit crumpled against the wall. “It just saved my life.”
A long silence passed. Wind swept the alley, scattering grit that stung her eyes and pelted her face. I should be dead, she thought. I should be lying here with a bullet in my brain. Instead I’m going to go home tonight. I’m going to hug my husband and kiss my baby. And I owe this miracle to whatever it was that swooped out of the night.
She lifted her head and looked at Frost. “You must have seen it. Just now.”
“I didn’t see anything.”
“It would have run right past you when you came into the alley.”
He shook his head. “It’s like what happened on the roof. I was the only one who saw it, and you didn’t believe me.”
She focused again on the body. On the gun that was still clutched in the headless corpse’s hand. “I believe you now.”