The Silent Girl

Forever, my young husband. A tear plops onto the frame, and I set the photo back on the desk.
    They are both gone now. First my daughter, then my husband, ripped from my arms. How do you go on living when your heart has been cut out not just once, but twice? Yet here I am, still alive, still breathing.
    For the moment.

I REMEMBER THE RED PHOENIX MASSACRE VERY WELL. IT WAS A CLASSIC case of
amok.
” Criminal psychologist Dr. Lawrence Zucker leaned back in his chair, looking across his desk at Jane and Frost with the penetrating stare that had always made Jane feel uneasy. Although Frost sat right beside her, Zucker seemed to look only at her, his gaze crawling into her mind, probing for secrets, as if she were the sole object of his curiosity. Zucker already knew too many of her secrets. He had witnessed her rocky start with the homicide unit, when she had still been battling for acceptance as the lone woman among twelve detectives. He knew about the nightmares that haunted her after a series of particularly brutal murders by a killer named the Surgeon. And he knew about the scars she would always carry on her hands, where that same killer had plunged scalpels through her flesh. With just one look, Zucker saw through all her defenses to the raw wounds beneath, and Jane resented how vulnerable that made her feel.
    She focused instead on the folder lying open on his desk. It contained his nineteen-year-old report on the Red Phoenix, including the psychological profile of Wu Weimin, the Chinese cook responsible for the shootings. She knew Zucker to be a painstakingly thoroughclinician whose analyses sometimes ran dozens of pages long, so she was surprised by how thin the file appeared.
    “This is your complete report?” she asked.
    “It’s everything I contributed to the investigation. It includes the psychological postmortem of Mr. Wu, as well as the four victim reports. There should be a copy of all this in the Boston PD file. Detective Ingersoll was the lead on that case. Have you spoken to him?”
    “He’s out of town this week and we haven’t been able to reach him,” said Frost. “His daughter says he’s up north somewhere, at some fishing camp where he has no cell phone coverage.”
    Zucker sighed. “Retirement must be nice. Seems like he left the force ages ago. What is he now, in his seventies?”
    “Which is like a hundred and ten in cop years,” said Frost with a laugh.
    Jane steered them back on topic. “The other detective on the case was Charlie Staines, but he’s deceased. So we were hoping you could share your insight into the case.”
    Zucker nodded. “The basics of what happened were apparent just from the crime scene. We know that the cook, a Chinese immigrant named Wu Weimin, walked into the dining room and proceeded to shoot four people. First to die was a man named Joey Gilmore, who’d dropped in to pick up a take-out order. Victim number two was the waiter, James Fang, reportedly the cook’s close friend. Victims three and four were a married couple, the Mallorys, who were seated at a dining table. Finally the cook walked into the kitchen, put the gun to his own temple, and killed himself. It was a case of
amok
followed by suicide.”
    “You make
amok
sound like a clinical term,” said Frost.
    “It is. It’s a Malaysian word for something Captain Cook described back in the late 1700s, when he was living among the Malays. He described homicidal outbursts without apparent motive, in which an individual—almost always male—goes into a killing frenzy. The killer slaughters everyone within reach until he’s brought down. Captain Cook thought it was a behavior peculiar to Southeast Asia, butit’s now clear that it occurs worldwide, in every culture. The phenomenon’s now got the unwieldy name of SMASI.”
    “And that stands for?”
    “Sudden Mass Assault by a Single Individual.”
    Jane looked at Frost. “Otherwise known as going postal.”
    Zucker shot her a disapproving look. “Which is unfair to postal workers. SMASI happens in every profession. Blue-collar, white-collar. Young, old. Married, single. But they’re almost always men.”
    “So what do these killers have in common?” asked Frost.
    “You can probably guess. They’re often isolated from the community. They have problems with relationships. Some sort of crisis precipitates the attack—loss of a job, collapse of a marriage. And finally, these individuals also have access to weapons.”
    Jane flipped