The Silent Girl

breath and steady her voice before she answered. “Detective Rizzoli.”
    “You left a message on my voice mail,” a man said. “I’m returning your call. This is Lou Ingersoll.”
    She sat up straight in her chair. “Detective Ingersoll, we’ve been trying to reach you all week. We need to talk to you.”
    “About what?”
    “A homicide in Chinatown. Happened last Wednesday night. Victim is a Jane Doe, female in her thirties.”
    “You do know that I’ve been retired from Boston PD for sixteen years? Why are you asking me about this?”
    “We think this death could be connected to one of your old cases. The Red Phoenix massacre.”
    There was a long silence. “I don’t think I want to talk about this on the phone,” he said.
    “How about in person, sir?”
    She heard his footsteps moving across the floor. Heard his labored breaths. “Okay, I think that vehicle’s gone now. Wish I’d gotten the goddamn license plate.”
    “What vehicle?”
    “The van that’s been parked across the street ever since I got home. Probably the same son of a bitch who broke in while I was up north.”
    “What, exactly, is going on?”
    “Come over now, and I’ll give you my theory.”
    “We’re in Dedham. It’ll take us half an hour, maybe more. You sure we can’t talk about it now?”
    She heard his footsteps moving again. “I don’t want to say anything over the phone. I don’t know who’s listening, and I promised I’d keep her out of this. So I’ll just wait till you get here.”
    “What is this all about?”
    “Girls, Detective,” he said. “It’s all about what happened to those girls.”
    “A T LEAST NOW YOU BELIEVE ME,” Frost said, as he and Jane drove toward Boston. “Now that you’ve seen it for yourself.”
    “We don’t know what we saw on that video,” she said. “I’m sure there’s a logical answer.”
    “I’ve never seen a man move that fast.”
    “So what do you think it was?”
    Frost stared out the window. “You know, Rizzoli, there’s a lot of things in this world we don’t understand. Things so old, so strange, that we wouldn’t accept them as possibilities.” He paused. “I used to date a Chinese girl.”
    “You did? When?”
    “It was back in high school. She and her family had just come over from Shanghai. She was really sweet, really shy. And very old-fashioned.”
    “Maybe you should’ve married her instead of Alice.”
    “Well, you know what they say about hindsight. Wouldn’t have worked anyway, because her family was dead-set against any white boy. But her great-grandmother, she was okay with me. I think she liked me because I was the only one who paid attention to her.”
    “Geez, Frost, is there an old lady alive who doesn’t like you?”
    “I liked listening to her stories. She’d talk and Jade would translate for me. The stuff she told me about China, man, if even a fraction of it was true …”
    “Like what?”
    He looked at her. “Do you believe in ghosts?”
    “How many dead people have we been around? If ghosts are real, we’re the ones who would’ve seen one by now.”
    “Jade’s great-grandmother, she said that ghosts are everywhere in China. She said it’s because China is so old, and millions and millions of souls have passed on there. They must end up somewhere. If they’re not in heaven, then they’ve gotta be right here. All around us.”
    Jane braked at a stoplight. As she waited for the light to change, she thought of how many souls might still linger in this city. How many might be at this very spot, where the two roads intersected. Add up all the dead, century by century, and Boston was surely a haunted town.
    “Old Mrs. Chang, she told me stuff that sounded crazy, but
she
believed it. About holy men who walked on water. Fighting monks who could fly through the air and make themselves invisible.”
    “Sounds like she watched too many kung fu movies.”
    “But legends must be based on something, don’t you think? Maybe our Western minds are too closed to accept what we can’t understand, and there’s so much more going on in this world than we’re aware of. Don’t you feel that in Chinatown? Whenever I’m there, I wonder what I’m not seeing, all the hidden clues that I’m too blind to notice. I go into those dusty herbalist shops and see all the weird dried things in jars. It’s just hocus-pocus to us, but what if that stuff can actually cure cancer? Or make you live to a hundred? China’s been a