Vanish

Mila. Who is Mila?

She glanced over her shoulder at Moore ’s envelope, which she’d tossed on the backseat. She did not look forward to examining those crime scene photos again. But I need to get beyond the horror, she thought. I need to know what happened in Ashburn.

TWENTY-FIVE

Maura Isles was up to her elbows in blood. Pausing in the anteroom, Gabriel watched through the glass partition as Maura reached into the abdomen, lifted out loops of intestine, and plopped them into a basin. He saw no distaste in her face as she dug through the mound, just the quiet concentration of a scientist probing for some detail out of the ordinary. At last she handed Yoshima the basin, and was reaching once again for her knife when she noticed Gabriel.

“I’ll be another twenty minutes,” she said. “You can come in, if you want.”

He pulled on shoe covers and a gown to protect his clothes and stepped into the lab. Though he tried to avoid looking at the body on the table, it was there between them, impossible to ignore. A woman with skeletal limbs and skin hanging like loose crepe over the jutting bones of her pelvis.

“History of anorexia nervosa. Found dead in her apartment,” said Maura, answering his unspoken question.

“She’s so young.”

“Twenty-seven. EMTs said all she had in her refrigerator was a head of lettuce and Diet Pepsi. Starvation in the land of plenty.” Maura reached into the abdomen to dissect the retroperitoneal space. Yoshima, in the meantime, had moved to the head, to incise the scalp. As always, they worked with a minimum of conversation, knowing each other’s needs so well that words did not seem necessary.

“You wanted to tell me something?” said Gabriel.

Maura paused. In her hand she cupped a single kidney, like a lump of black gelatin. She and Yoshima exchanged a nervous glance. At once, Yoshima started up the Stryker saw, and the noisy whine almost covered Maura’s answer.

“Not here,” she said quietly. “Not yet.”

Yoshima pried off the skullcap.

As Maura leaned in to free the brain, she asked, in a cheerfully normal voice: “So how is it, being a daddy?”

“Exceeds all my expectations.”

“You’ve settled on Regina?”

“Mama Rizzoli talked us into it.”

“Well, I think it’s a nice name.” Maura lowered the brain into a bucket of formalin. “A dignified name.”

“Jane’s already shortened it to Reggie.”

“Not quite so dignified.”

Maura pulled off her gloves and looked at Yoshima. He gave a nod. “I need some fresh air,” she said. “Let’s take a break.”

They stripped off their gowns, and she led the way out of the room, to the loading bay. Only when they’d stepped out of the building, and were standing in the parking lot, did she speak again.

“I’m sorry about the conversational runaround,” she said. “We had a security breach. I’m not comfortable talking inside right now.”

“What happened?”

“Last night, around three A.M., Medford Fire and Rescue brought in a body from an accident scene. Normally we keep the exterior bay doors locked, and they have to call a night operator for the key code to get in. They discovered that the doors were already unlocked, and when they stepped inside, they saw that the lights were on in the autopsy lab. They mentioned it to the operator, and security came to check the building. Whoever broke in must have left in a hurry, because a desk drawer in my office was still open.”

“Your office?”

Maura nodded. “And Dr. Bristol’s computer was on. He always turns it off when he leaves at night.” She paused. “It was open to the file on Joseph Roke’s autopsy.”

“Was anything taken from the offices?”

“Not that we’ve determined. But we’re all a little leery now of discussing anything sensitive inside the building. Someone’s been in our offices. And in our lab. And we don’t know what they were after.”

No wonder Maura had refused to discuss this over the phone. Even the levelheaded Dr. Isles was now spooked.

“I’m not a conspiracy theorist,” said Maura. “But look at everything that’s happened. Both bodies whisked out of our legal custody. Ballistics evidence confiscated by Washington. Who is calling the shots here?”

He stared at the parking lot, where heat shimmered like water on blacktop. “It goes high,” he said. “It has to.”

“Which means we can’t touch them.”

He looked at her. “It doesn’t mean we won’t try.”

Jane came awake in darkness, the last whispers of the dream still in her ear. Olena’s voice again, murmuring to her from across the mortal divide. Why do you keep tormenting me? Tell me what you want, Olena. Tell me who Mila is.

But the whisper had fallen silent, and she heard only the sound of Gabriel’s breathing. And then, a moment later, the indignant wail of her daughter. She climbed out of bed and let her husband continue sleeping. She was wide awake now anyway, and still haunted by the echoes of the dream.

The baby had punched her way out of the swaddling blanket and was waving pink fists, as though challenging her mother to a fight. “ Regina, Regina,” sighed Jane as she lifted her daughter out of the crib, and she suddenly realized how natural the name now felt on her lips. This girl was indeed born a Regina; it had just taken time for Jane to realize it, to stop stubbornly resisting what Angela had known all along. Much as she hated to admit it, Angela was right about a lot of things. Baby names and formula-as-savior and asking for help when you needed it. It was that last part Jane had so much trouble with: admitting that she needed help, that she didn’t know what she was doing. She could work a homicide, could track a monster, but asking her to soothe this screaming bundle in her arms was like asking her to disarm a nuclear bomb. She glanced around the nursery, vainly hoping that some fairy godmother was lurking in the corner, ready to wave a wand and make Regina stop crying.

No fairy godmothers here. Just me.

Regina lasted only five minutes on the right breast, another five minutes on the left, and then it was time for the bottle. Okay, so your mom’s a failure as a milk cow, Jane thought as she carried Regina into the kitchen. So pull me from the herd and shoot me. With Regina happily suckling from the bottle, Jane settled into the kitchen chair, savoring this moment of silence, however brief. She gazed down at her daughter’s dark hair. Curly, just like mine, she thought. Angela had once told her, in a fit of frustration, “Someday you’ll get the daughter you deserve.” And here I am, she thought, with this noisy, insatiable little girl.

The kitchen clock flipped to three A.M.

Jane reached for the stack of folders that Detective Moore had dropped off last night. She had finished reading all the Ashburn files; now she opened a new folder, and saw that this one was not about the Ashburn slayings; it was a Boston PD file on Joseph Roke’s car, the vehicle he had abandoned a few blocks from the hospital. She saw pages of Moore ’s notes, photos of the vehicle’s interior, an AFIS report on the fingerprints, and various witness statements. While she’d been trapped in that hospital, her colleagues from the homicide unit hadn’t been sitting idle. They’d been chasing down every scrap of information about the hostage takers. I was never on my own, she thought; my friends were out there, fighting for me, and here is the proof.

She glanced at the detective’s signature on one of the witness reports and gave a surprised laugh. Hell, even her old nemesis Darren Crowe had been working hard to save her, and why wouldn’t he? Without her in the unit, he’d have no one else to insult.

She flipped to the photographs of the vehicle’s interior. Saw crumpled-up Butterfinger wrappers and empty cans of Red Bull soda pop on the floor. Lots of sugar and caffeine, just what every psychotic needed to calm down. On the backseat was a wadded-up blanket and a stained pillow and an issue of the tabloid newspaper, the Weekly Confidential. Melanie Griffith was on the cover. She tried to imagine Joe lying on that backseat, leafing through the tabloid, sca