The Silent Girl

keep you. That is, if you want to stay with homicide.”
    “Thanks. I’d like that a lot,” he said simply. As he turned to leave,she suddenly noticed a bright streak reflecting off the back of his head. Clinging to his jet-black hair, the lone strand stood out like glitter.
A silver hair
.
    “Tam?” she said.
    He turned. “Yeah?”
    For a moment she just looked at him, wanting to read his eyes, but he was wearing sunglasses, and in those mirrored lenses all she saw was her own reflection. She remembered how he’d slipped so quickly and silently through Ingersoll’s window. Remembered how the Knapp Street surveillance camera had captured both her and Frost clumsily tumbling onto the fire escape, but not Tam.
Maybe I’m a ghost
, he had joked. Not a ghost, she thought, but someone just as elusive. Someone who’d been present at every step of the investigation, who knew what was being said and what was being planned. She could not see his expression, could not probe for secrets, but she knew they were there, waiting to be discovered. Secrets that she decided she would let him keep.
    For now.
    “Did you have a question, Rizzoli?” he asked.
    “Never mind,” she said. And she turned and walked away.
    I T WAS HAPPY HOUR at J. P. Doyle’s, and the bar was packed with so many off-duty cops that Jane had trouble spotting Korsak. Only after the waitress pointed her toward the dining room did she finally find him, sitting alone in a booth keeping company with a fried seafood platter and a pint of ale.
    “Sorry I’m late,” she said. “What’s doin’?”
    “Hope you don’t mind that I already ordered.”
    She eyed his mound of deep-fried shrimp. “Guess you’re off the diet, huh?”
    “Don’t get on my case, okay? Day’s been lousy like a bastard and I need my comfort food, I really do.” He stabbed four shrimp and stuffed them into his mouth. “You gonna order something or what?”
    She waved over the waitress, ordered a small salad, and watched Korsak polish off another half dozen shrimp.
    “That all you’re eating?” he asked when her order arrived.
    “I’m going home for supper. Haven’t spent much time there the past few days.”
    “Yeah, I hear it’s been a real circus over there in Brookline. How many bodies they dig up so far?”
    “Six, all look to be females. It’ll be months before we’re done searching the property, and they may have other burial spots we don’t know about. So we’re looking at Mark Mallory’s residence as well.”
    Korsak lifted his ale in a toast. “What is it you ladies like to say?
You go, girl!
”
    She looked at his grease-splattered shirt and thought: He has the man breasts to actually pull off that phrase. She raised her glass of water and they made an impressive clunk, splashing beer on his ever-shrinking mound of shrimp.
    “Just one fly in the ointment,” she said as she picked up her fork. “There’s no way I’ll ever close the files on either John Doe or Jane Doe. And it was her death that set off the whole thing.”
    “Never found the sword that killed her?”
    “Vanished. Probably walked off that night with whatever I saw disappear into the trees. We’re never going to get anyone to confess. But I have a pretty good idea who did it.”
    “Enough to convict?”
    “Honestly? I don’t want to convict. Sometimes, Korsak, just doing my job means I’d have to do the wrong thing.”
    Korsak laughed. “Don’t ever let Dr. Isles hear you say that.”
    “No, she wouldn’t understand,” Jane agreed. What Maura understood was facts, and those facts had led to the conviction of Officer Wayne Graff a few days ago. Yes or no, black or white, for Maura the line was always perfectly clear. But the longer that Jane was a cop, the less certain she was of where that line between right and wrong was drawn.
    She dug into her salad and took a bite. “So what’s doing with you? What’d you want to talk to me about?”
    He sighed and put down his fork. Very few things, other than an empty plate, could make Vince Korsak surrender his fork. “You know I love your mom,” he said.
    “Yeah, I think I got that part figured out.”
    “I mean, I
really
love her. She’s fun and smart and sexy.”
    “You can stop right there.” She set down her own fork. “Just tell me where this is going.”
    “All’s I want is to marry her.”
    “And she’s already said yes. So?”
    “The problem is your brother. He calls her three times a day, trying to