The Silent Girl

find,” said Jane, turning back toward the bedroom. “Someone’s been visiting this apartment. And they left behind …” She halted, her beam frozen on blank wall.
    “Left behind what?”
    I must be looking at the wrong spot, she thought, and shifted her light. Again, she saw blank wall. She swept the beam all around the room until she flashed on the little table with the joss sticks and oranges. Above it, the wall was empty.
    “What the hell?” Frost whispered.
    Through the pounding of her own heart, she heard three gun holsters simultaneously snick open. As she slid out her weapon, she whispered: “Tam, take Mr. Kwan into the stairwell and stay with him. Frost, you’re with me.”
    “Why?” protested Mr. Kwan as Tam pulled him out of the room. “What’s going on?”
    “Doorway there,” she murmured, her light shining on a black rectangle.
    Together she and Frost inched toward it, their beams wildly crisscrossing, scanning every dark corner. Her breath was a roar in her ears, every sense sharpened to diamond points. She registered the smell of the darkness, the strobe-like glimpses as her beam flickedhere, there. The weight of the gun, heavy and reassuring.
On the rooftop, Jane Doe had a gun, too, and it didn’t save her
.
    She thought of blades slicing through wrist bones, through neck and windpipe, and she dreaded stepping through that doorway and confronting what waited on the other side.
    One, two, three. Do it
.
    She was first through, dropping to a crouch as she swung the light around. Heard Frost’s harsh breathing behind her as she glimpsed a porcelain toilet, a sink, a rust-stained bathtub. No bogeyman with a blade.
    Another doorway.
    Frost took the lead this time, slipping through into a bedroom where wallpaper hung peeling, like a room shedding its skin. No furniture, nowhere to hide.
    Through one more doorway, and they were back in the living room. Back in familiar territory. Jane walked out into the stairwell, where Tam and Mr. Kwan stood waiting.
    “Nothing?” said Tam.
    “That photo didn’t walk off on its own.”
    “We were right here in the stairwell the whole time. No one came by us.”
    Jane reholstered her gun. “Then how the hell …”
    “Rizzoli!” called out Frost. “Look at this!”
    They found him standing by the window in the bedroom where the portrait had hung. Like all the other windows, this one had been boarded over, but when Frost nudged the board, it easily swiveled aside, suspended in place by only a single nail above the frame. Jane peered through the opening and saw that the window faced Knapp Street.
    “Fire escape’s here,” said Frost. He poked out his head and craned to look up toward the roof. “Hey, something’s moving up there!”
    “Go, go!” said Jane.
    Frost scrambled over the sill, all clumsy long arms and legs, and clanged onto the landing. Tam exited right after him, moving with anacrobat’s grace. Last out the window was Jane, and as she dropped onto the metal grate of the landing, she caught a glimpse of the street below. Saw splintered crates, broken bottles. A bad drop, any way you looked at it. She forced herself to focus on the ladder above, where Frost was clanging up the rungs, noisily announcing to the whole world that they were in pursuit.
    She scrambled up right behind Tam, her hands gripping slippery metal, the breeze chilling the sweat on her face. She heard Frost grunt, saw the silhouette of his legs flailing against the night sky as he pulled himself over the edge and onto the rooftop. Jane felt his movements transmitted through the rungs as the fire escape shuddered, and for a panic-stricken moment she thought the brackets might give way, that the weight of three bodies would make the whole rickety structure twist off in a screech of metal and fling them to the pavement below. She froze, gripping the ladder, afraid that even a puff of wind would tip them into disaster.
    A shriek above her made every hair stand up on the back of her neck.
Frost
.
    She looked up, expecting to see his body hurtling toward her, but all she glimpsed was Tam as he scaled the last rungs and vanished onto the rooftop. She clambered after him, sick with dread. As she reached the roof edge, a piece of asphalt tile crumbled at her touch and dropped away, plummeting into darkness below. With shaking hands, she pulled herself up over the edge and crawled onto the roof. Spotted Tam crouched a few feet away.
    Frost. Where is Frost?
    She jumped to