The Silent Girl

calling off the wedding, just to keep him happy.” His deep sigh ended on what sounded close to a whimper, and he turned to stare at the booth across the aisle. At a toddler in a high chair who took one look at him and wailed. The mother shot Korsak a dirty look and pulled the baby into her arms. Poor Korsak, homely enough to scare small children who couldn’t see past his coarse exterior to the kind heart inside.
But Mom sees it. And she deserves a good man like him
.
    “It’s okay,” she said. “I’ll talk to Frankie.” If that didn’t work, she’d also give her brother a good whack upside the head.
    His head lifted. “You’d do that for me? Really?”
    “Why wouldn’t I?”
    “I don’t know. I got the idea you weren’t wicked crazy about me and your ma, you know. Getting it on.”
    “I just don’t want to hear the sweaty details, okay?” She reached across the table and gave him an affectionate punch on the arm. “You’re cool, Korsak. And you make her happy. That’s all I care about.” She stood up. “I gotta get home. You okay now?”
    “I love her. You know that.”
    “I know, I know.”
    “I love you, too.” He scowled and added: “But
not
your brother.”
    “That I totally understand.”
    She left him to his seafood platter and exited through the crowded bar. Just as she reached the door, she heard someone call out: “Rizzoli!”
    It was retired Detective Buckholz, who had investigated Charlotte Dion’s disappearance nineteen years ago. He was sitting at his usual place at the counter, a glass of scotch in front of him. “I gotta talk to you,” he said.
    “I’m on my way home.”
    “Then I’ll walk out with you.”
    “Could we talk tomorrow, Hank?”
    “No. I got something to say, and it’s really bugging me.” He drained his glass and slapped it down on the bar. “Let’s step outside. Too damn noisy in here.”
    They walked out of Doyle’s and stood in the parking lot. It was a cool spring evening, the smell of damp earth in the air. Jane zipped up her jacket and glanced at her parked car, wondering how long this would take and whether she had time to pick up milk on the way home.
    “You know your case against Patrick Dion and Mark Mallory? You got it wrong,” he said.
    “What do you mean?”
    “It’s been plastered all over the news. Two rich guys hunting girls together for twenty-five years. The whole country’s talking about it, wondering why we didn’t notice it. Why we didn’t stop them.”
    “They were smart about it, Hank. They didn’t escalate and they didn’t get sloppy. They managed to stay in control.”
    “Patrick Dion had alibis for some of those disappearances.”
    “Because they took turns snatching the girls. Mallory abducted some of them, Dion took the others. We’ve already found six bodies on Dion’s property, and I’m sure we’ll find others.”
    “But not Charlotte’s. I guarantee you won’t find her there.”
    “How do you know?”
    “When I worked that case, I didn’t do a half-assed job, okay? It may have been nineteen years ago, but I remember the details. Last night, I pulled out my old notes, just to be sure of my facts. I
know
Patrick Dion was in London the day Charlotte went missing. He flew home that evening, right after he got the news.”
    “Okay, so you’re right about that detail. It’s easy to confirm.”
    “I’m also right about Mark Mallory. He couldn’t have snatched Charlotte, either, because he had an alibi, too. He was visiting his mother. She’d had a stroke a year earlier, and she was in a rehab hospital.”
    She eyed him in the fading daylight. Buckholz was defending his own record, so he couldn’t possibly be objective. Judging by his wasted face, his frayed shirt, retirement had not been kind to him. He practically lived at Doyle’s, as if only there, surrounded by cops, did he feel alive again. Useful again.
    Humor the old guy
. She gave him a sympathetic nod. “I’ll review the case file and get back to you.”
    “You think you can just brush me off? I was a
good
cop, Rizzoli. I checked out that boy. When you’re talking about abduction, you always look at the family first, so I took a good long look at her stepbrother. Every move he made that day. There was no way Mark Mallory could have snatched Charlotte.”
    “Because he said he was visiting his mother? Come on, Hank. You can’t take his word, or his mother’s. She would have lied to protect her own kid.”
    “But you can