The Silent Girl

the second-floor apartment. It was unlocked, yet she did not want to open that door, did not want to see what lurked beyond. She stood with her hand frozen on the knob, the metal cold as ice against her skin. Only when she heard Mr. Kwan reach the top step, wheezing right behind her, did she finally push open the door.
    She and Frost stepped into what had once been the home of Wu Weimin.
    The windows were boarded shut, closing off any light from outside. Although the apartment had been vacant for years, she could still smell the scents left by those who had once lived here. The ghostly fragrance of incense and oranges still lingered, trapped in the tomb-like darkness. As her flashlight beam skittered across the wood floor, she saw the gouges and scratches of a century’s worth of wear, scars left by scraping chair legs and dragged furniture.
    She crossed to a doorway at the far end of the room, and when she walked through it, the scent of incense, the presence of ghosts, seemed stronger. These windows, too, were covered by boards, and her flashlight seemed a feeble weapon to cut through the curtain of darkness. Her beam swept across the wall, across the scars of old nail holes and a Rorschach blot of mold.
    A face stared back at her.
    She gasped and jerked backward, colliding with Frost.
    “What?” he said.
    Shock had frozen her voice; all she could do was shine her light at the framed portrait hanging on the wall. As she approached it, the smell of incense grew overpowering. Beneath the portrait was a low table where she saw the remains of joss sticks, burned down to nubs among a mound of ashes. On a porcelain plate were five oranges.
    “It’s him,” Frost murmured. “It’s a photo of the cook.”
    It took Jane a moment to see it, but as she stared at the face she realized he was right. The man in the photo was indeed Wu Weimin, but this was no homicidal maniac glaring back at them. In this picture he was laughing as he clutched a fishing pole, a Boston Red Sox cap tilted rakishly on his head.
A happy man on a happy day
.
    “This looks like some kind of shrine to his memory,” said Frost.
    Jane picked up an orange from the plate and took a sniff. Saw that the stem end was tinged with green. Real, she thought. She turned to Mr. Kwan, whom she could barely make out in the doorway. “Who else has a key to this building?”
    “No one,” he said, rattling his jailer’s ring. “I have the only key.”
    “But these oranges are fresh. Someone’s been in here recently. Someone left this offering and burned this incense.”
    “These keys
always
with me,” he insisted, noisily jangling the ring for emphasis.
    “The gate downstairs has a dead bolt,” said Frost. “There’s no way you could pick the lock.”
    “Then how could anyone …” She went dead silent. Turned toward the doorway.
    Footsteps were thumping up the stairs.
    In an instant her weapon was drawn and clutched in both hands. Pushing aside Mr. Kwan, she quickly slipped out of the bedroom. As she eased her way across the living room, she felt her heart banging, heard Frost’s footsteps creaking on her right. Smelled incense and mold and sweat, a dozen details assaulting her at once. But it was the stairwell door she focused on, a black portal to something that was now climbing toward them. Something that suddenly took on the shape of a man.
    “Freeze!” Frost commanded. “Boston PD!”
    “Whoa, Frost.” Johnny Tam gave a startled laugh. “It’s just me.”
    Behind her, Jane heard Mr. Kwan give a squawk of fear. “Who is he? Who is he?”
    “What the hell, Tam,” said Frost, huffing out a breath as he holstered his weapon. “I could have blown your head off.”
    “You did tell me to meet you here, didn’t you? I would’ve gotten here sooner, but I got stuck in traffic coming back from Springfield.”
    “You talk to the owner of that Honda?”
    “Yeah. Said it was stolen right out of his driveway. And that wasn’t his GPS in the car.” He swept his flashlight around the room. “So what’s going on in here?”
    “Mr. Kwan’s giving us a tour of the building.”
    “It’s been boarded up for years. What’s there to see?”
    “More than we expected. This is Wu Weimin’s apartment.”
    Tam’s flashlight revealed patches of mold and crumbling plaster from the ceiling. “This place looks like it’s from the lead-paint era.”
    “No lead paint here,” snapped Kwan. “No asbestos, either.”
    “But look what we did