The Silent Girl

TWENTY-TWO

MAURA AWAKENED JUST AFTER DAWN, AND WAS HAPPY TO SEE that the sun was shining. She’d cook pancakes and sausages for the boy, and then they’d set off to tour Boston. First on the schedule was the Freedom Trail and the North End, then they’d go for a picnic and a run with the dog at Blue Hills Reservation. She’d planned a day packed with so many activities that there would be little time for awkward silences, for all the reminders that they were still very much strangers. Six months ago, in the Wyoming mountains, she had trusted Julian “Rat” Perkins with her life. Now she had to acknowledge that this hulking teenager with the enormous feet was still a mystery to her. She wondered if he felt the same way about her. Did he worry that she would abandon him, the way everyone else in his life had?

She pulled on jeans and a T-shirt, appropriate attire for a romp with the dog. Thought about the chicken-and-avocado sandwiches she planned to make, and wondered if Rat liked avocados. Had he ever tasted an avocado or alfalfa sprouts or tarragon? I know so little about him, she thought. Yet here he is, a part of my life.

She walked down the hall and noticed that his bedroom door was open. “Rat?” she said. Peeking in, she did not see him.

In the kitchen, she found him sitting in front of the laptop computer that she’d left on the table the night before. The dog lay at his feet and his ears pricked up at the sight of Maura, as if here at last was someone who’d pay attention to him. Looking over the boy’s shoulder, she was startled to see an autopsy image on the screen.

“Don’t look at that,” she said. “I should have put this all away last night.” She punched the Exit key, and the morgue photo swooshed out of sight. Quickly she scooped up all the Red Phoenix files and set them on the counter. “Why don’t you help me make breakfast?”

“Why did he do it?” the boy asked. “Why would he kill people he didn’t even know?”

Maura looked into his troubled eyes. “Did you read the police report?”

“It was lying here on the table, and I couldn’t help looking at it. But it doesn’t make sense to me. Why someone would do that.”

She pulled over a chair and sat down across from him. “Sometimes, Rat, there’s no way to explain these things. I’m sorry to say that too often, I haven’t a clue why people do things like this. Why they drown their babies or strangle their wives or shoot their co-workers. I see the results of their actions, but I can’t tell you what sets them off. I just know that it happens. And people are capable of doing terrible things.”

“I know,” he murmured and looked down at the dog, who rested his enormous head in Rat’s lap as though knowing that comfort was what the boy needed at that moment. “So this is what you do?”

“Yes, it is.”

“Do you like your work?”

“I don’t think like is the right word.”

“What is the right word?”

“It’s challenging. Interesting.”

“And it doesn’t bother you, seeing things like this?”

“Someone has to speak for the dead. I know how to do it. They tell me-their bodies tell me-how they died. If it was a natural death, or if it was violent. Yes, it can be upsetting. It can make you question what it means to be human when you see what people do to each other. But this is the job I feel I was always meant to do, to be their voice.”

“Do you think I could do it?” He looked at the stack of files. “Your kind of work?”

“You mean, be a pathologist?”

“I want to learn the answers, too.” He looked at her. “I want to be just like you.”

“And that,” she said with a smile, “is the most flattering thing anyone has ever said to me.”

“At Evensong, my teachers say I’m really good at noticing things that other people miss. So I think I could do it.”

“If you want to be a pathologist,” she said, “you’ll have to make very good grades in school.”

“I know.”

“You’ll have to go to college, and then four years of medical school. After that, you’ll have to do a residency, plus a fellowship in forensic pathology. That’s a lot of years and a lot of commitment, Rat.”

“Are you saying you don’t think I can do it?”

“I’m just saying you really have to want it.” She looked into the boy’s dark eyes and thought she could glimpse the man that he would one day become. Intense and fiercely loyal. A man who would not only speak for the dead, but fight for them as well. “You’ll have to learn science, because only science will prove your case on the witness stand. A hunch isn’t good enough.”

“What if your hunch is really strong?”

“It’s never as convincing as what a drop of blood can tell you.”

“But a hunch tells you when something’s not right. Like in that picture.”

“Which picture?”

“The Chinese man who killed himself. I’ll show you.” He got up and brought the laptop and file folders back to the table. With a few mouse clicks, he reopened the digital image of Wu Weimin’s body, lying in the Red Phoenix kitchen. “The police said he shot himself once, in the head,” said Rat.

“Yes.”

“Look what’s lying on the floor next to him.”

Last night, she’d glanced at the photos only briefly. It had been late, she’d had a long day with the boy, and she’d been drowsy after two glasses of wine. Now she focused more intently on the dead cook, and on the weapon that was still clasped in his hand. Near his shoulder lay a spent bullet casing.

Rat pointed to what she’d missed, at the periphery of the photo. A second casing. “It says he had one bullet in his head,” said Rat. “But if he fired twice, where did the other bullet go?”

“It could have ended up anywhere in the kitchen. Under the circumstances, the police probably saw no reason to go searching for it.”

“And why did he shoot twice?”

“I’ve seen it before in suicides. The victim has to build up the courage to kill himself, and maybe he misses the first time. Or the gun misfires. I’ve even seen a suicide where the victim shot himself more than twice in the head. Another one who shot himself with his nondominant hand. And there was one man who…” She paused, suddenly appalled that she was having this conversation with a sixteen-year-old boy. But he was looking back at her as calmly as a fellow professional.

“It’s certainly a valid concern to bring up,” she said. “I’m sure the police considered it.”

“But it didn’t change their minds. They still say he killed those four people, even though they can’t explain why.”

“How could they? So few people really knew the cook.”

“Like no one really knew me,” he said quietly.

Now she understood what was really troubling the boy. He, too, had been called a murderer; he, too, had been judged by people who scarcely knew him. When Rat looked at Wu Weimin, what he saw was himself.

“All right,” she conceded. “Let’s assume for the moment that he didn’t kill himself. Let’s say it was staged to look like a suicide. Which means someone else must have shot those other four people, and then killed the cook.”

Rat nodded.

“Think about it. Imagine you’re the cook. You’re standing in the kitchen and someone starts shooting in the other room. The gun had no silencer, so you’d hear those gunshots.”

“Then how come no one else did? The report says there were people in the three apartments upstairs, but they heard only one bang. That’s why no one called the police right away. Then the cook’s wife went downstairs and found her husband’s body.”

“How much of this did you read?”

“Most of it.”

“That’s more than I have,” she confessed. She opened the folder to the report filed by Staines and Ingersoll. When Detective Tam had dropped off the material, she had not welcomed the extra work, and had put it off until last night, when she’d given the photos only a cursory glance. Now she read the police report from beginning to end, and confirmed what Rat had just told her. Seven different witnesses stated that they’d heard only one bang, yet a total of nine bullet casings were found in the Red Phoenix restaurant.

Her sixth sense was starting to tingle. That uneasy feeling that something was not right, just as the boy had said.

She opened Wu Weimin’s autopsy report. According to the pathologist, the cook was found lying on his side, his back wedged up against the closed cellar door. His right hand-the one still clutching the gun-was later swabbed and found positive for gunshot residue. Oblivious to the fact that Rat was watching, she clicked through the cook’s autopsy photos. The fatal bullet had been fired into the right temple, and a close-up showed it to be a hard contact wound, the edges seared and blackened in a pressure abrasion ring caused by gases rushing out of the barrel. There was no exit wound. She clicked on the skull X-ray and saw metallic fragments scattered throughout the cranium. A hollow-point bullet, she thought, designed to mushroom and disintegrate, transferring its kinetic energy directly to tissues. Maximum damage with minimum penetration.

She moved on to the other files.

The second autopsy report was for James Fang, age thirty-seven, found slumped behind the cash register counter. He had been shot once in the head. The bullet had entered above his left eyebrow.

The third report was for Joey Gilmore, age twenty-five. His body fell in front of the cash register counter, take-out cartons scattered on the floor around him. He had been shot once, in the back of the head.

The last two victims were Arthur and Dina Mallory, both found near a corner table where they had been sitting. Arthur was shot twice, once in the back of the head, once in the spine. His wife was hit three times, the bullets punching into her cheek, her mid-back, and her skull. Scanning down to the pathologist’s summary, she saw that he’d concluded the same thing she did: that Dina Mallory had been moving when she was shot the first two times, probably trying to flee her attacker. Maura was about to set the report aside when she noticed a sentence describing the dissection of the stomach and duodenum.

Based on volume of gastric contents, which appear to include spaghetti fragments with a tomato-based sauce, the postprandial period is estimated to be one to two hours.

Maura opened Arthur Mallory’s autopsy report and scanned down to the examination of his stomach, which, as was routine in an autopsy, had been slit open and the contents collected.

Gastric contents appear to include cheese and meat, with partially digested fragments of lettuce. Postprandial interval estimated at one to two hours.

This did not make sense. Why would the Mallorys, their bellies full of what appeared to be an Italian meal, be sitting in a Chinese restaurant?

The description of gastric contents, of macerated lettuce and tomato sauce, had ruined her appetite. “This is not the way to start off breakfast,” she said, closing the folder. “It’s a beautiful day and I’m going to make pancakes, how about that? Let’s not think about this anymore.”

“What about the missing bullet?” said Rat.

“Even if we could find it now, it wouldn’t change the conclusions. The bodies have been long buried or cremated, and the crime scene’s been cleaned up. To reopen a case, you need new forensic evidence. After this many years, there’d be nothing left.”

“But there’s something wrong about all this, isn’t there? You think so, too.”

“Okay.” She sighed. “Let’s assume the cook didn’t kill himself. Let’s assume someone else, a person unknown, walked in and started shooting. Why didn’t the cook just run?”

“Maybe he couldn’t get out.”

“There’s another exit from the kitchen. The report said it opens into an alley.”

“Maybe the door was locked from the outside.”

She pulled up the crime scene images on her laptop. This was completely inappropriate viewing for the boy, but he had raised good questions, and nothing he’d seen or heard so far appeared to have rattled him. “Here,” she said, pointing to the kitchen exit. “It looks like it’s ajar. So there’s no reason he couldn’t have fled. If he heard gunshots in the dining room, anyone with common sense would have run out that kitchen door.”

“What about that door?” He pointed to the cellar door, blocked by the cook’s body. “Maybe he was going to hide down there.”

“The cellar’s a dead end. It makes no sense to head that way. Look at all the evidence, Rat. He’s found holding the gun. There’s gunshot residue on his hand, which means he was in contact with the weapon when it was fired.” She paused, suddenly thinking about the extra bullet casing. The gun was fired twice in the kitchen, but only one blast was heard. And the Glock had a threaded barrel, so it could be fitted with a silencer. She tried to imagine an alternate sequence of events. An unknown killer executes Wu Weimin. Removes the silencer and places the weapon in the dead man’s hand. Fires one last time to plant gunshot residue on the victim’s skin. It would explain why only one blast was heard and why there were two bullet casings in the kitchen. But there was one detail she couldn’t explain with that scenario: why Wu Weimin, given the chance to flee out the back exit, had chosen to remain in the kitchen.

She focused on the cellar door. On the cook’s body, lying in front of it. Blocking it. Suddenly she thought: Maybe he couldn’t flee.

Because he had a very good reason to stay.