The Silent Girl

already spotted more blood on the stairs, and on the front porch where the door had been left wide open, alerting Iris’s neighbors that something was very wrong.
    Jane turned to Frost. “You’re sure about the time? It was nine PM when you left last night?”
    He nodded, a dazed look in his eyes. “I didn’t see anyone else around when I came out of the house. And I was parked right outside.”
    “Why were you here?”
    “To talk to her. I felt bad about what happened. About taking the sword.”
    “You came to apologize for doing your job?”
    “Sometimes, Rizzoli, the job makes me feel like an asshole, okay?” he shot back. “Here’s a woman who was already a victim. Shelost her husband and her daughter. And we turn her into a suspect. We interrogate her. We made her a victim all over again.”
    “I don’t know what Iris Fang is. I do know that she’s been at the center of this from the beginning. Everything that’s happened seems to revolve around
her
.” Jane’s cell phone rang. “Rizzoli,” she answered.
    It was Tam on the line. “Kevin Donohue says he has an alibi for last night.”
    “And his men?”
    “That’s the problem. They’re each other’s alibis. All three swear they spent the evening together in Donohue’s residence, watching TV. Which means we can’t believe a word from any of them.”
    “So we can’t rule them out.”
    “We can’t prove it in court, either.”
    Jane hung up and turned in frustration to the window. On the street below, a trio of elderly Chinese women stood staring up at her, chattering among themselves.
What do they know that they’re not telling us?
Nothing about Chinatown was ever straightforward, nothing was as it seemed. It was like peering through a silk screen, never getting a clear image, a complete picture.
    She turned to Frost. “Maybe Bella will finally talk to us. It’s time to put all our cards on the table.”
    B ELLA LOOKED EVEN MORE HOSTILE TODAY , her hands closed in fists, gaze hard as diamonds. “It’s
your
fault this happened,” she said. “I should have been there. I would have stopped it.”
    Jane looked into those glittering eyes and suddenly imagined the young woman springing up like a wildcat, attacking with teeth and claws. But she kept her voice calm as she said: “So you knew this would happen? You knew they would take her?”
    “We’re wasting time! She needs me.”
    “How will you help her when you don’t even know where she is?”
    Bella opened her mouth to speak, then glanced at the one-way mirror, as if aware that others were watching.
    “Why don’t we start at the beginning, Bella,” said Jane. “With who you really are. Not the name you called yourself in California, but the name you were born with.” Jane placed a photocopy of a birth certificate on the table. “It’s signed by a Chinatown doctor. You were born right here in Boston. A home birth, at a Knapp Street address. Your father’s name was Wu Weimin.”
    Bella didn’t answer, but Jane read the acknowledgment in her eyes. Not that she needed it; the document was only exhibit number one. Jane brought out other photocopied documents. Her records from the San Francisco public schools where the girl was registered under the name Bella Li. The death certificate of her mother, who went by the name of Annie Li, dead at age forty-three of stomach cancer. It was all there in black and white, the paper trail that Jane’s team had doggedly pursued over the last forty-eight hours, a trail obscured in that pre-9/11 era by different jurisdictions, and by the hidden world in which undocumented aliens moved. A world in which a lone mother and child could so easily vanish and reappear under new names.
    “Why did you come back to Boston?” asked Jane.
    Bella looked her in the eye. “
Sifu
Fang asked me to come. She’s not well, and she needed another instructor at her school.”
    “Yes, that’s the story you keep telling us.”
    “Is there a different story?”
    “It has nothing to do with what happened in the Red phoenix? Nothing to do with your father killing four people?”
    Bella’s face snapped taut. “My father was innocent.”
    “Not according to the official report.”
    “And official reports are
never
wrong.”
    “If it’s wrong, then what’s the truth?”
    Bella glared back. “He was murdered.”
    “Is that what your mother told you?”
    “My mother wasn’t there!”
    Jane paused, suddenly registering the unspoken meaning of