“Not really, but I used to eat there a lot. Those Chinese, they don’t know how to take a day off, so the place was always open, all hours of the night. You could get off a late shift and still have dinner. I was there once at ten on a Sunday night, and that little girl brought out my fortune cookies. It’s like child labor. But she looked like she was happy to be hanging out with Daddy.”
“You sure it was the cook’s daughter? She would’ve been pretty young.”
“She looked pretty young. Maybe five? Cute as a button.” He gave a sad sigh. “Can’t believe a father would do that, leave a wife and kid behind. Not to mention all the other families he screwed up. A few weeks later, daughter of one of the victims got kidnapped.”
“Charlotte Dion.”
“Was that her name? I just remember it was like a Greek tragedy. Bad luck piled on top of bad luck.”
“You know the really weird part?” said Jane. “Two years earlier, the daughter of one of the other victims was snatched as well. The waiter’s kid. She disappeared on her way home from school.”
“No shit? I didn’t know that.” Korsak thought about this for a moment. “That’s freaky. Really makes you wonder if it’s more than just a coincidence.”
“One of the last things Detective Ingersoll said to me on the phone was something about girls. What happened to those girls. Those were his words.”
“Those two girls? Or other girls?”
“I don’t know.”
He shook his head. “All these years later, and here we are still thinking about them. Weird to realize they’re probably nothing but skeletons now.” He paused. “But that’s not what I want to be thinking about tonight. Let’s pour some wine.”
“I thought you were a beer man.”
“Your ma’s converted me. Wine’s better for the old ticker anyway, you know.” He heaved himself out of the armchair. “Time to talk about happy things, okay?”
Not about dead people, thought Jane. Not about mass shootings and kidnapped girls. But when Gabriel came into the house holding Regina by her tiny hand, Jane couldn’t help thinking about Charlotte Dion and Laura Fang. She helped her mother carry platters to the table, a steady succession of ever-more-impressive dishes. Crisp roast potatoes. Green beans drizzled with olive oil. And finally two sumptuous roast chickens, fragrant with rosemary. But even as they sat down to eat, as she tied the bib around Regina and cut her meat into child-sized morsels, Jane was thinking about missing girls and devastated parents. How could a mother go on? She wondered if Iris Fang had ever considered ending her own misery. A leap off a rooftop, a handful of sleeping pills. How much easier than living with grief, day in and day out, pining for loved ones whom you’ll never see again.
“Something wrong with your meal, Janie?” said Angela.
Jane looked up at her mother, who had the uncanny knack of knowing exactly what had gone into the mouths of every guest seated at her dining table. “It’s great, Ma. You outdid yourself tonight.”
“Then why aren’t you eating?”
“I am.”
“You took one bite of chicken, then you started moving things around on your plate. I hope you’re not on a diet, because you don’t need to lose any weight, sweetie.”
“I’m not on a diet.”
“All these girls, they’re always on diets. Starving on salads, and for what?”
“Sure ain’t doing it for men,” mumbled Korsak around a mouthful of potatoes. “Guys like a little meat on a girl.” He winked at Angela. “Take your ma. Built like a woman’s supposed to be built.”
Jane couldn’t see what was happening under the table, but her mother suddenly bolted straight in her chair, laughing. “Vincent! Behave.”
Please behave. Because I can’t watch any more of this.
“You know,” said Korsak, slicing into his chicken. “This is a good time to bring up you know what.”
Never had three words sounded so ominous. Jane’s chin snapped up, and she looked at her mother. “What’s you know what?”
“It’s something we’ve been talking about for a while,” said Angela. “Vince and me.”
Jane glanced at her husband, but as usual Gabriel wore his FBI face, giving away nothing, even though he’d probably guessed where this conversation was going.
“Well, you know that Vince and I have been seeing each other for quite a while,” said Angela.
“Quite a while? It’s been only, what? A year and a half?”
“That’s plenty of time to get to know someone, Janie. To see that he has a good heart.” Angela beamed at Korsak, and they leaned in for a noisy, lip-smacking kiss.
“You dated Dad for three whole years,” Jane pointed out. “Look where that ended up.”
“I was fifteen when I met your father. He was only my second boyfriend.”
“You were fifteen and you’d already had a boyfriend?”
“The point is, I was just a kid, and I didn’t know what the world had to offer. I married too young, had kids too young. Only now do I know what I want.”
Jane looked at Korsak and thought: You cannot seriously be talking about him.
“That’s why we wanted you to come to dinner tonight, sweetie. You and Gabriel are going to be the first to know. I haven’t told Frankie or Mike yet because, well, you know how they are. Still attached to their dad and all, despite the fact he’s sleeping with the Bimbo.” Angela paused to take a calming breath. Just mentioning the Bimbo made her voice rise half an octave. “Your brothers, they just won’t understand. But you’re my daughter, so you know what we women have to put up with in this world. You know how unfair things are.”
“Ma, there’s no need to rush into anything.”
“Oh, we’re not going to rush. We’re going to have a nice long engagement and do it the old-fashioned way. Order real invitations from a printer. Rent a big reception hall and a caterer. And we can go shopping for dresses together, Janie! That’d be something, just you and me! I’m thinking peach or lavender, since I’m not—well, you know.”
Jane glanced at Korsak to see how he was reacting to this feminine checklist, but he just grinned like a happy sailor.
“This time, I’m going to go slow and enjoy every minute of my wedding,” said Angela. “And it’ll give your brothers a chance to adjust to it all.”
“What about Dad?”
“What about him?”
“How’s he going to adjust?”
“That’s his problem.” Angela’s gaze darkened. “He just better not try to rush up the aisle first. Ooh, I can see him doing that, you know. Marrying the Bimbo quick just to annoy me.” She looked at Korsak. “Maybe, on second thought, we should move up our date.”
“No! Ma, look, forget I even mentioned Dad.”
“I wish I could forget him, but he’s always gonna be there, like a splinter in my foot. Can’t get it out and can’t pretend it’s not there. Just constantly poking at me. I hope you never have to know what that’s like, Janie.” She paused and glanced at Gabriel. “Of course you won’t. You have such a good man here.”
A good man who’s still annoyed I’m a cop.
Gabriel wisely stayed out of the conversation and focused instead on coaxing tiny cubes of potato into Regina’s mouth.
“So now you’ve heard our big news,” said Korsak, and he lifted a glass of wine. “Here’s to family!”
“Come on, Jane! Gabriel!” urged Angela. “Let’s all toast!”
Stoically, Jane raised her glass and mumbled, “To family.”
“Just think,” said Korsak, laughing as he gave her a happy punch in the arm. “Now you can call me Dad.”
“IT’S NOT AS IF you didn’t see this coming,” said Gabriel as he and Jane drove home with Regina asleep in the backseat. “They were two lonely people, and look how happy they are now. They’re perfectly matched.”
“Yeah. She cooks. He eats.”
“They could do a lot worse.”
“They’re both on the rebound. It?
??s too soon for them to get married.”
“Life is short, Jane. You should know that better than anyone. It can be gone in an instant. All it takes is an icy road, a drunk driver.”
Or a bullet in a dark alley. Yes, she did know, because she saw life cut short far too often. Saw how every death cast ripples among the living. She remembered the ravaged face of Joey Gilmore’s mother and the grief that clouded the eyes of Patrick Dion when he spoke of his daughter, Charlotte. Even nineteen years later, those ripples were still battering the survivors.
“I dread having to break this news to my brothers,” she said.
“You don’t think they’ll take it well?”
“Frankie’s going to throw a fit. He hates the idea of Mom and another man, you know …”
“Sleeping together?”
Jane winced. “I admit, that’s what gives me the heebie-jeebies. I like Korsak. He’s a decent man and he’ll treat her right. But geez, she’s my mother.”
Gabriel laughed. “And your mother still has sex. Accept it. Just call Frankie and get it over with.”
But when they got home, she put off the assignment and avoided the phone entirely. Instead she set a kettle on the stove and sat down at the kitchen table to look at her library books again. The illustration of the Monkey King glared back at her, paws brandishing his staff, an image so threatening that only reluctantly did she touch the book to flip to the next page.
Chapter Nine. The Story of Chen O.
The great city of Ch’ang-an had long been the capital of all China. At this time, Tai Tsing of the dynasty of Tang was on the throne. The whole land was at peace.
It was a disarmingly pleasant beginning to a tale about a virtuous and scholarly young man named Chen O. After marrying a great beauty, he was appointed governor of a distant region. Together with his pregnant bride and their servants, he journeyed through the lush and flowering countryside toward his new post. But when they reached a river crossing, the charming fable suddenly transformed to a blood-splattered story of massacre when armed bandits attacked. This was not a sweet fable after all, but a tale of shrieks and terror, of butchered bodies thrown into the raging river. Only one person was not slaughtered that night: the pregnant wife, abducted for her beauty, imprisoned by the killers while she awaited the birth of her doomed child.
The scream of the teakettle wrenched Jane from the story. She looked up to see Gabriel shut off the flame and pour hot water into the teapot. She had not even heard him come into the kitchen.
“Fascinating reading?” he said.
“Jesus, this is a creepy book,” she said with a shudder. “I sure wouldn’t read these stories to my kid. Take this one, ‘The Story of Chen O.’ It’s about a massacre at a ferry crossing, and the only survivor is a pregnant woman who’s captured by the killers.”
He brought the teapot to the table and sat down across from her. All night he had been subdued, and she noticed the telltale crease between his eyebrows. A hint of a frown that she noticed only now, in the bright light of their kitchen.
“I know I can’t change your mind about this case,” he said. “I just want to register my concern again.”
She sighed. “Noted.”
“Jane, I can’t get it out of my head. The way you looked when you came home the other night. Shell-shocked. The blood all over your clothes. I haven’t seen you look so shaken up since …”
He didn’t say the name, but they both knew he was thinking of the monster who had brought them together. The man who had carved the scars on her hands, whose bloody footprints still tracked through her nightmares.
“You do remember what I do for a living?” she said.
He nodded. “And I knew there’d be days like this. I just didn’t realize how hard it would be to live with.”
“Do you ever regret it?” she asked softly.
“Marrying a cop?”
“Marrying me.”
“Well, now.” Rubbing his chin, he gave an exaggerated hmmmm. “Let me think about that.”
“Gabriel.”
He turned as the phone rang. “Why do you have to ask that question?” he said, crossing the kitchen to answer the phone. “I’m not regretting a thing. I’m just telling you I don’t like what’s happening and what you’re up against.”
“I don’t much like it, either,” she said and looked at the book again. At the story of Chen O. Like the Red Phoenix, it was a tale of slaughter. And an abducted woman, she thought, remembering Charlotte Dion.
“Jane, it’s for you.” Gabriel stood with the phone in his hand and a look of concern in his eye. “He won’t give me his name.”
She took the phone. Felt her husband watching her as she answered, “Detective Rizzoli.”
“I know you’ve been asking about me, so I figured I’d cut to the chase. Let’s you and me talk, face-to-face. Four PM tomorrow, my house. Just you and no one else. You can tell your husband he has nothing to worry about.”
“Who is this?” she demanded.
“Kevin Donohue.”
She looked up sharply at Gabriel. Barely managed to keep her voice even as she said: “What is this about, Mr. Donohue?”
“The Red Phoenix. Your investigation’s going way off the rails. I think it’s time to set a few things straight.”
ALTHOUGH BOTH FROST AND TAM SAT WATCHING HER FROM THEIR parked cars, Jane felt dangerously alone and exposed as she rang the bell at Kevin Donohue’s front gate. A moment later two beefy men strode toward her down the driveway, both of them sporting the conspicuous bulges of sidearms under their jackets. They asked her no questions, merely admitted her through the gate and locked it again behind her. As she passed under the arch, she spotted a surveillance camera mounted overhead. Every move she made was being monitored.
Following the men up the driveway, she noted the absence of trees and shrubbery. There was only a broad lawn and a concrete driveway lined with ugly lampposts, where yet more security cameras were mounted. Here was the stark evidence that being a prince of the Irish mob had its downside. You could never stop looking over your shoulder because you knew that somewhere, a bullet had your name on it.
As wealthy as he was, Donohue had depressingly pedestrian taste, something that was apparent as soon as Jane walked into the house and saw the bland pastel paintings hanging on the wall. They looked like the mass-produced landscapes for sale at every local shopping mall. Her escorts led her into the living room where an enormous man, bloated as a toad, sat in an extra-large armchair. He was in his sixties, clean-shaven and balding, with blue eyes that glared from beneath heavy lids. She didn’t need to be introduced; she already knew that this Jabba the Hutt character was Kevin Donohue, known for his impressive appetites and his equally impressive bad temper.
“Scan her, Sean,” someone said. She hadn’t noticed there was another man in the room, a skinny and nervous-looking fellow in a business suit.
One of her escorts moved toward her, holding a radio frequency scanner, and Jane snapped, “What the hell’s this all about?”
“I’m Mr. Donohue’s attorney,” the skinny man said. “Before he talks to you, we need to make sure you’re not bugged. And you’ll have to hand us your cell phone.”
“This wasn’t part of the agreement.”
“Detective Rizzoli,” rumbled Donohue, “I’m granting you the privilege of keeping your weapon, on account of your voluntarily coming here. But I don’t want any recording of this conversation. If you’re worried about your safety, I’m sure your associates parked outside will come running to your rescue at the first sign of trouble.”
For a moment Jane and Donohue traded stares. Then she handed her cell phone to the attorney and stood motionless while the bodyguard scanned her for radio signals. Only when Sean pronounced her clean did Donohue wave her toward the sofa, inviting her to sit. She chose an armchair instead, so that she would be at his eye level.
“Your reputation precedes you,” said Donohue.
“So does your
s.”
He laughed. “I see the rumors are true.”
“Rumors?”
He folded his hands on his bulging belly. “Detective Jane Rizzoli. Smart-ass tongue. Fucking bulldog.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment.”
“Which is why I’m telling you to dig somewhere else for your bones. You’re wasting your time on me.”
“Am I?”
“You’ve been asking a lot of questions about me. So has your husband. Oh yeah, I know all about your husband, Mr. Special Agent Gabriel Dean. Quite the law enforcement couple. I’m not worried that you’re gonna find anything useful, mind you. But with all these questions going around, it makes me look weak to my rivals. Like I’m about to topple. And if I look weak, that brings the vultures out.” He leaned forward, his belly flopping over his belt. “There is nothing you’re going to find, okay? Nothing that can link me to the Red Phoenix.”
“What about Joey Gilmore?”
He sighed. “You’ve been talking to his old hag of a mother.”
“She says you and Joey had a falling-out nineteen years ago.”
“Small stuff. Not worth the price of a bullet.”
“Can’t be all that small if you’re bringing in outside people to mop up now.”
“What?”
Jane glanced at Donohue’s two bodyguards. “I’m going to reach into my pocket for some pictures, okay? Don’t freak out, boys.” She pulled out two morgue photos and slid them across the coffee table toward Donohue. “Your hired help just can’t keep their heads on straight.”
Donohue stared. Of all the morgue photos Jane could have brought, she’d chosen the two that were most graphically grotesque. Jane Doe with her slashed throat gaping open. John Doe’s severed head lying beside his torso on the autopsy table. The images had their desired effect: Donohue’s face had turned as pasty as the corpses.
“Why the fuck are you showing me this?” he demanded.
“Why did you hire these two killers?”
The lawyer cut in. “This conversation has come to an end. Sean, Colin. Escort Detective Rizzoli out of the house.”