The Silent Girl

looked down at his hands, resting in his lap. “Some years ago, when Detective Ingersoll was first looking into these mailings, he told me that Mrs. Fang suffers from, well, delusions of grandeur. She believes she’s descended from an ancient line of warriors. She believes it’s her sacred mission in life, as a warrior, to track down her husband’s killer and exact vengeance.”
    “Can you believe it?” Mark laughed. “It’s like something out of a Chinese soap opera. The woman is completely nuts.”
    “She is a martial arts master,” said Frost. “Her students certainly believe in her, and you’d think they’d recognize a fraud.”
    “Detective Frost,” said Patrick, “we’re not saying she’s a fraud. But surely, her claims must strike you as being more than a little absurd. I know that ancient traditions run deep in martial arts, but a lot of it is fanciful. The stuff of legends and Jackie Chan movies. What I think, and what Detective Ingersoll thinks, is that Mrs. Fang was deeply traumatized by her husband’s death. She’s never accepted it. And her way of coping with grief is to search for a deeper meaning, something that gives his death significance and makes it more than justa random act by a madman. She needs to prove that something bigger killed her husband, and she’ll never stop searching for this nameless enemy, because it’s the one thing that gives her life purpose.” Sadly, he looked around the room at Mark. At Mary Gilmore. “But we know the truth. That it was just a senseless crime committed by an unstable man. Arthur and Dina and Joey died for no reason whatsoever. It’s not easy to accept, but we do accept it. Mrs. Fang can’t.”
    “So we have to put up with that harassment,” said Mark, pointing to the mailings on the coffee table. “And we can’t get her to stop sending them.”
    “But there’s no proof she’s sending them,” said Frost.
    “Well, we do know she’s the one behind
this
,” said Mark, and he pulled from his pocket a folded clipping from
The Boston Globe
. It was the quarter-page ad that Detective Tam had earlier described to Jane, a stark box enclosed in black. Under the word INNOCENT was a smiling photo of the Red Phoenix cook, Wu Weimin. Beneath the photo was the date of the massacre, and a single sentence: THE TRUTH HAS NEVER BEEN TOLD .
    “With this ad, it’s now gotten much worse,” said Mark. “Now she’s got the whole city paying attention to her delusions. Where does this stop? When does it stop?”
    “Have any of you actually spoken to Mrs. Fang about this?” Jane looked around the room, and her gaze settled on Mark Mallory.
    He snorted. “I, for one, wouldn’t waste my time talking to her.”
    “Then you haven’t gone to her residence? Tried to confront her?”
    “Why are you asking
me
?”
    “You seem the angriest about this, Mr. Mallory,” she observed. But was he angry enough to break into Iris’s home? To stab a warning into her pillow? She didn’t know Mark well enough to have a sense of what he was capable of.
    “Look, we’re all upset,” said Patrick, although his voice sounded weary more than anything else. “But we also know that it would be unwise to establish any contact with the woman. I called DetectiveIngersoll last week, thinking he might intervene on our behalf. But he hasn’t returned my call yet.”
    “He’s out of town this week,” said Jane. She collected the mailings and slipped them into evidence bags. “We’ll speak to him about this when he returns. In the meantime, please let me know if you receive anything else like this.”
    “And we’d appreciate it if you kept us informed,” said Patrick.
    Again, she shook hands with them all. Again, Mark’s grasp was a brusque sign-off, as if he’d already decided the police were useless to him. But Patrick’s hand lingered around hers, and he walked them to the door, clearly reluctant to see them go.
    “Please call me anytime,” he said. “About this matter, or …” He paused, and a shadow seemed to pass over his eyes. “Anything else.”
    “We’re sorry this had to come up again, Mr. Dion,” said Jane. “I can see it’s hard for you.”
    “Especially since it’s so closely connected to the … other event.” He paused, his shoulders drooping. “I assume you know about my daughter.”
    Jane nodded. “I spoke to Detective Buckholz about Charlotte.”
    Just the mention of his daughter’s name made his face contract in