Vanish

“Who’d call a girl Ignatia?”

“It was good enough for my mom.”

Jane looked across the room at Gabriel, and saw that his gaze had strayed back to the window. He’s still thinking about Joseph Roke. Still wondering about his death.

There was a knock on the door, and yet another familiar head popped into the room. “Hey, Rizzoli!” said Vince Korsak. “You ski

“Detective Korsak,” said Angela. “Are you hungry? I brought Jane’s favorite spaghetti. And we have paper plates here.”

“Well, I’m sort of on a diet, ma’am.”

“It’s lamb spaghetti.”

“Ooh. You’re a naughty woman, tempting a man off his diet.” Korsak wagged one fat finger at her and Angela gave a high, girlish laugh.

My god, thought Jane. Korsak is flirting with my mom. I don’t think I want to watch this.

“Frank, can you take out those paper plates? They’re in the sack.”

“It’s only ten A.M. It’s not even lunchtime.”

“Detective Korsak is hungry.”

“He just told you he’s on a diet. Why don’t you listen to him?”

There was yet another knock on the door. This time a nurse walked in, wheeling a bassinet. Rolling it over to Jane’s bed, she a

Angela swooped in like a bird of prey. “Ooh, look at her, Frank! Oh god, she’s so precious! Look at that little face!”

“How can I get a look? You’re all over her.”

“She’s got my mother’s mouth-”

“Well, that’s something to brag about.”

“Janie, you should try feeding her now. You need to get practice before your milk comes in.”

Jane looked around the room at the audience crowded around her bed. “Ma, I’m not really comfortable with-” She paused, glancing down at the baby as it suddenly gave a howl. Now what do I do?

“Maybe she’s got gas,” said Frank. “Babies always get gas.”

“Or she’s hungry,” Korsak suggested. He would.

The baby only cried harder.

“Let me take her,” said Angela.

“Who’s the mommy here?” Frank said. “She needs the practice.”

“You don’t want a baby to keep crying.”

“Maybe if you put your finger in her mouth,” said Frank. “That’s what we used to do with you, Janie. Like this-”

“Wait!” said Angela. “Did you wash your hands, Frank?”

The sound of Gabriel’s ringing cell phone was almost lost in the bedlam. Jane glanced at her husband as he answered it and saw him frown at his watch. She heard him say: “I don’t think I can make it right now. Why don’t you go ahead without me?”

“Gabriel?” Jane asked. “Who’s calling?”

“Maura’s starting the autopsy on Olena.”

“You should go in.”

“I hate to leave you.”

“No, you need to be there.” The baby was screaming even louder now, squirming as though desperate to escape its mother’s arms. “One of us should see it.”

“Are you sure you don’t mind?”

“Look at all the company I’ve got here. Go.”

Gabriel bent down to kiss her. “I’ll see you later,” he murmured. “Love you.”

“Imagine that,” said Angela, shaking her head in disapproval after Gabriel had walked out of the room. “I can’t believe it.”

“What, Mom?”

“He leaves his wife and new baby and runs off to watch some dead person get cut open?”

Jane looked down at her daughter, still howling and red-faced in her arms, and she sighed. I only wish I could go with him.

By the time Gabriel do

“You made it after all,” she said.

“Have I missed anything important?”

“No surprises so far.” She gazed down at Olena. “Same room, same corpse. Strange to think this is the second time I’ve seen this woman dead.”

This time, thought Gabriel, she’ll stay dead.

“So how is Jane doing?”

“She’s fine. A little overwhelmed by visitors right now, I think.”

“And the baby?” She dropped pink lungs into a basin. Lungs that would never again fill with air or oxygenate blood.

“Beautiful. Eight pounds two ounces, ten fingers and ten toes. She looks just like Jane.”

For the first time, a smile tugged at Maura’s eyes. “What’s her name?”

“For the moment, she’s still ‘Baby Girl Rizzoli-Dean.’ ”

“I hope that changes soon.”

“I don’t know. I’m starting to like the sound of it.” It felt disrespectful, talking about such happy details while a dead woman lay between them. He thought of his new daughter taking her first breath, catching her first blurry look at the world, even as Olena’s body was starting to cool.

“I’ll drop by the hospital to see her this afternoon,” said Maura. “Or is she already overdosed on visitors?”

“Believe me, you would be one of the truly welcome ones.”

“Detective Korsak been by yet?”

He sighed. “Balloons and all. Good old Uncle Vince.”

“Don’t knock him. Maybe he’ll volunteer to babysit.”

“That’s just what a baby needs. Someone to teach her the fine art of loud burping.”

Maura laughed. “Korsak’s a good man. Really, he is.”

“Except for the fact he’s in love with my wife.”

Maura set down her knife and looked at him. “Then he’d want her to be happy. And he can see that you both are.” Reaching once again for her scalpel, she added: “You and Jane give the rest of us hope.”

The rest of us. Meaning all the lonely people in the world, he thought. Not so long ago, he was one of them.

He watched as Maura dissected the coronary arteries. How calmly she held a dead woman’s heart in her hands. Her scalpel sliced open cardiac chambers, laying them bare to inspection. She probed and measured and weighed. Yet Maura Isles seemed to keep her own heart safely locked away.

His gaze dropped to the face of the woman they knew only as Olena. Hours ago, I was talking to her, he thought, and these eyes looked back at me, saw me. Now they were dull, the corneas clouded and glazed over. The blood had been washed away, and the bullet wound was a raw pink hole punched into the left temple.

“This looks like an execution,” he said.

“There are other wounds in the left flank.” She pointed to the light box. “You can see two bullets on X-ray, up against the spine.”

“But this wound here.” He stared down at her face. “This was a kill shot.”

“The assault team clearly wasn’t taking any chances. Joseph Roke was shot in the head as well.”

“You’ve done his postmortem?”

“Dr. Bristol finished it an hour ago.”

“Why execute them? They were already down. We were all down.”

Maura looked up from the mass of lungs dripping on the cutting board. “They could have wired themselves to detonate.”

“There were no explosives. These people weren’t terrorists.”

“The rescue team wouldn’t know that. Plus, there may have been a concern about the fentanyl gas they used. You know that a fentanyl derivative was also used to end the Moscow theater siege?”

“Yes.”

“In Moscow, it caused a number of fatalities. And here they were, using something similar on a pregnant hostage. They couldn’t expose a fetus to its effects for too long. The takedown had to be fast and clean. That was how they justified it.”

“So they’re claiming these kill shots were necessary.”

“That’s what Lieutenant Stillman was told. Boston PD had no part in the pla