The Rizzoli & Isles 8-Book Bundle

by Tess Gerritsen

  “It’s up to your wife.”

  “It’s okay, it’s okay,” he insisted. “Just take the picture.” He leaned in close to Mattie and extended the bouquet of roses to her. “How about this? Me handing her the flowers. It’ll look great.” He smiled, teeth gleaming, the loving husband sheltering his wife.

  Rizzoli looked at Mattie. She saw no protest in her gaze, just a strange, volcanic gleam that she could not interpret. She raised the camera, centered the couple in the viewfinder, and pressed the shutter release.

  The flash went off, just in time to capture the image of Mattie Purvis whacking her husband across the face with the bouquet of roses.

  THIRTY-THREE

  Four weeks later

  THERE WAS NO PLAYACTING this time, no pretense of madness. Amalthea Lank walked into the private interview room and sat down at the table, and the look she aimed at Maura was clear-eyed and perfectly sane. Her previously disheveled hair was now pulled back in a tidy ponytail, thrusting her features into stark prominence. Staring at Amalthea’s high cheekbones, her direct gaze, Maura wondered: Why did I refuse to see it before? It’s so obvious. I am looking at my own face twenty-five years from now.

  “I knew you’d come back,” said Amalthea. “And here you are.”

  “Do you know why I’m here?”

  “You’ve gotten back the test results, haven’t you? Now you know I was telling the truth. Even if you didn’t want to believe me.”

  “I needed proof. People lie all the time, but DNA doesn’t.”

  “Still, you must have known the answer. Even before your precious lab test came back.” Amalthea leaned forward in the chair and regarded her with an almost intimate smile. “You have your father’s mouth, Maura. Do you know that? And you have my eyes, my cheekbones. I see Elijah and me right there, on your face. We’re family. We have the same blood. You, me, Elijah. And your brother.” She paused. “You do know that’s who he was?”

  Maura swallowed. “Yes.” The one baby you kept. You sold my sister and me, but you kept your son.

  “You never told me how Samuel died,” said Amalthea. “How that woman killed him.”

  “It was self-defense. That’s all you need to know. She had no choice but to fight back.”

  “And who is this woman, Matilda Purvis? I’d like to know more about her.”

  Maura said nothing.

  “I saw her picture on TV. She didn’t look so special to me. I don’t see how she could have done it.”

  “People do anything to survive.”

  “Where does she live? What street? They said on TV that she’s from Natick.”

  Maura stared into her mother’s dark eyes and suddenly felt a chill. Not for herself, but for Mattie Purvis. “Why do you want to know?”

  “I have a right to know. As a mother.”

  “A mother?” Maura almost laughed. “Do you really think you deserve that title?”

  “But I am his mother. And you’re Samuel’s sister.” Amalthea leaned closer. “It’s our right to know. We’re his family, Maura. There’s nothing in this life that’s thicker than blood.”

  Maura stared into eyes so eerily like her own, and she recognized the matching intelligence there, even the gleam of brilliance. But it was a light that had gone askew, a twisted reflection in a shattered mirror.

  “Blood means nothing,” said Maura.

  “Then why are you here?”

  “I came because I wanted to get one last look at you. And then I’m going to walk away. Because I’ve decided that, no matter what the DNA may say, you’re not my mother.”

  “Then who is?”

  “The woman who loved me. You don’t know how to love.”

  “I loved your brother. I could love you.” Amalthea reached across the table and caressed Maura’s cheek. Such a gentle touch, as warm as a real mother’s hand. “Give me the chance,” she whispered.

  “Good-bye, Amalthea.” Maura stood up and pressed the button to call the guard. “I’m finished here,” she said into the intercom. “I’m ready to leave.”

  “You’ll come back,” said Amalthea.

  Maura did not look at her, did not even glance over her shoulder as she walked out of the room. As she heard Amalthea call out behind her: “Maura! You will come back.”

  In the visitors’ locker room, Maura stopped to reclaim her purse, her driver’s license, her credit cards. All the proof of her identity. But I already know who I am, she thought.

  And I know who I am not.

  Outside, in the heat of a summer afternoon, Maura paused and took a deep breath. She felt the day’s warmth cleanse the taint of prison from her lungs. Felt, too, the poison of Amalthea Lank wash out of her life.

  In her face, her eyes, Maura wore the proof of her parentage. In her veins flowed the blood of murderers. But evil was not hereditary. Though she might carry its potential in her genes, so too did every child ever born. In this, I am no different. We are all descended from monsters.

  She walked away from that building of captive souls. Ahead was her car, and the road home. She did not look back.

  Vanish is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events,

  locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2005 by Tess Gerritsen

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  BALLANTINE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Gerritsen, Tess.

  Vanish: a novel / Tess Gerritsen.

  p. cm.

  1. Rizzoli, Jane, Detective (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Police—

  Massachusetts—Boston—Fiction. 3. Boston (Mass.)—Fiction.

  4. Conspiracies—Fiction. 5. Policewomen—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3557.E687V36 2005

  813′.54—dc22 2005048073

  www.ballantinebooks.com

  eISBN: 978-0-345-48475-8

  v3.0_r1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Once again, to Jacob.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  My deepest thanks to my guiding light and literary agent Meg Ruley, to Jane Berkey and Don Cleary of the Jane Rotrosen Agency, to Linda Marrow and Gina Centrello at Ballantine Books, and to Selina Walker at Transworld. You all made it happen.

  ONE

  My name is Mila, and this is my journey.

  There are so
many places where I could begin the story. I could start in the town where I grew up, in Kryvicy, on the banks of the Servac River, in the district of Miadziel. I could begin when I was eight years old, on the day my mother died, or when I was twelve, and my father fell beneath the wheels of the neighbor’s truck. But I think I should begin my story here, in the Mexican desert, so far from my home in Belarus. This is where I lost my innocence. This is where my dreams died.

  It is a November day without clouds, and large black birds soar in a sky that is bluer than I have ever seen. I am sitting in a white van driven by two men who do not know my real name, nor do they seem to care. They just laugh and call me Red Sonja, the name they have used since they saw me step off the plane in Mexico City. Anja says it’s because of my hair. Red Sonja is the name of a movie which I have never seen, but Anja has seen it. She whispers to me that it’s about a beautiful warrior woman who cuts down her enemies with a sword. Now I think the men are mocking me with this name because I am not beautiful; I am not a warrior. I am only seventeen, and I am scared because I do not know what happens next.

  We are holding hands, Anja and me, as the van carries us, and five other girls, through a barren land of desert and scrub brush. The “Mexican Package Tour” is what the woman in Minsk promised us, but we knew what it really meant: an escape. A chance. You take a plane to Mexico City, she told us, and there will be people to meet you at the airport, to help you across the border to a new life. “What good is your life here?” she told us. “There are no good jobs for girls, no apartments, no decent men. You have no parents to support you. And you, Mila—you speak English so well,” she told me. “In America, you will fit in, just like that.” She snapped her fingers. “Be brave! Take a chance. The employers will pay your way, so what are you both waiting for?”

  Not for this, I think, as endless desert rolls past our windows. As Anja huddles close against me, all the girls on the van are quiet. We are all beginning to wonder the same thing. What have I done?

  All morning, we have been driving. The two men in the front say nothing to us, but the man on the passenger side keeps turning to give us looks. His eyes always seek out Anja, and I do not like the way he stares at her. She doesn’t notice it because she is dozing against my shoulder. The mouse, we always called her in school, because she is so shy. One glance from a boy will make her blush. We are the same age, but when I look at Anja’s sleeping face, I see a child. And I think: I should not have let her come with me. I should have told her to stay in Kryvicy.

  At last our van leaves the highway and bumps onto a dirt road. The other girls stir awake and stare out the windows at brown hills, where boulders lie scattered like old bones. In my home-town, the first snow has already fallen, but here, in this winterless land, there is only dust and blue sky and parched shrubs. We roll to a stop, and the two men look back at us.

  The driver says in Russian: “It’s time to get out and walk. It’s the only way across the border.”

  They slide open the door and we climb out one by one, seven girls, blinking and stretching after the long ride. Despite the brilliant sunshine, it is chilly here, far cooler than I expected. Anja slips her hand into mine, and she is shivering.

  “This way,” the driver orders, and he leads us off the dirt road, onto a trail that takes us up into the hills. We climb past boulders and thorny bushes that claw at our legs. Anja wears open-toed shoes and she has to pause often, to shake out the sharp stones. We are all thirsty, but the men allow us to stop only once to drink water. Then we keep moving, scrambling up the gravelly path like ungainly goats. We reach the crest and start sliding downward, toward a clump of trees. Only when we reach the bottom do we see there is a dry riverbed. Scattered on the bank are the discards of those who have crossed before us: plastic water bottles and a soiled diaper and an old shoe, the vinyl cracked from the sunlight. A remnant of blue tarp flutters from a branch. This way have so many dreamers come, and we are seven more, following in their footsteps to America. Suddenly my fears evaporate, because here, in this debris, is the evidence we are close.

  The men wave us forward, and we start climbing up the opposite bank.

  Anja tugs on my hand. “Mila, I can’t walk anymore,” she whispers.

  “You have to.”

  “But my foot is bleeding.”

  I look down at her bruised toes, at the blood oozing from tender skin, and I call out to the men: “My friend has cut her foot!”

  The driver says, “I don’t care. Keep walking.”

  “We can’t go on. She needs a bandage.”

  “Either you keep walking or we’ll just leave you two behind.”

  “At least give her time to change her shoes!”

  The man turns. In that instant, he has transformed. The look on his face makes Anja shrink backward. The other girls stand frozen and wide-eyed, like scared sheep huddling together as he stalks toward me.

  The blow is so swift I do not see it coming. All at once, I am on my knees, and for a few seconds, everything is dark. Anja’s screams seem far away. Then I register the pain, the throbbing in my jaw. I taste blood. I see it drip in bright spatters on the river stones.

  “Get up. Come on, get up! We’ve wasted enough time.”

  I stagger to my feet. Anja is staring at me with stricken eyes. “Mila, just be good!” she whispers. “We have to do what they tell us! My feet don’t hurt anymore, really. I can walk.”

  “You get the picture now?” the man says to me. He turns and glares at the other girls. “You see what happens if you piss me off? If you talk back? Now walk!”

  Suddenly the girls are scrambling across the riverbed. Anja grabs my hand and pulls me along. I am too dazed to resist, so I stumble after her, swallowing blood, scarcely seeing the trail ahead of me.

  It is only a short distance farther. We climb up the opposite bank, wind our way through a stand of trees, and suddenly we are standing on a dirt road.

  Two vans are parked there, waiting for us.

  “Stand in a line,” our driver says. “Come on, hurry up. They want to take a look at you.”

  Though befuddled by this command, we form a line, seven tired girls with aching feet and dusty clothes.

  Four men climb out of the vans and they greet our driver in English. They are Americans. A heavyset man walks slowly up the row, eyeing us. He wears a baseball cap and he looks like a sunburned farmer inspecting his cows. He stops in front of me and frowns at my face. “What happened to this one?”

  “Oh, she talked back,” says our driver. “It’s just a bruise.”

  “She’s too scrawny, anyway. Who’d want her?”

  Does he know I can understand English? Does he even care? I may be scrawny, I think, but you have a pig face.

  His gaze has already moved on, to the other girls. “Okay,” he says, and he breaks out in a grin. “Let’s see what they’ve got.”

  Our driver looks at us. “Take off your clothes,” he orders in Russian.

  We stare back in shock. Until this moment, I have held on to a wisp of hope that the woman in Minsk told us the truth, that she has arranged jobs for us in America. That Anja will babysit three little girls, that I will sell dresses in a wedding shop. Even after the driver took our passports, even as we’d stumbled along that trail, I had thought: It can still turn out all right. It can still be true.

  None of us moves. We still don’t believe what he has asked us to do.

  “Do you hear me?” our driver says. “Do you all want to look like her?” He points to my swollen face, which still throbs from the blow. “Do it.”

  One of the girls shakes her head and begins to cry. This enrages him. His slap makes her head whip around and she staggers sideways. He hauls her up by the arm, grabs her blouse, and rips it open. Screaming, she tries to push him away. The second blow sends her sprawling. For good measure, he walks over and gives her a vicious kick in the ribs.

  “Now,” he says, turning to look at the rest of us. “Who wants to be next?
”

  One of the girls quickly fumbles at the buttons of her blouse. Now we are all complying, peeling off shirts, unzipping skirts and pants. Even Anja, shy little Anja, is obediently pulling off her top.

  “Everything,” our driver orders. “Take it all off. Why are you bitches so slow? You’ll learn to be quick about it, soon enough.” He moves to a girl who stands with her arms crossed over her breasts. She has not removed her underwear. He grabs the waistband and she flinches as he tears it away.

  The four Americans begin to circle us like wolves, their gazes roving across our bodies. Anja is shaking so hard I can hear her teeth chatter.

  “I’ll give this one a test drive.” One of the girls utters a sob as she is dragged from the line. The man does not even bother to hide the assault. He shoves the girl’s face against one of the vans, unzips his pants, and thrusts himself into her. She shrieks.

  The other men move in and make their choices. Suddenly Anja is wrenched away from me. I try to hold on to her, but the driver twists my hand from hers.

  “No one wants you,” he says. He shoves me into the van and locks me inside.

  Through the window, I see it all, hear it all. The men’s laughter, the girls’ struggles, their cries. I cannot bear to watch; neither can I turn away.

  “Mila!” Anja screams. “Mila, help me!”

  I pound on the locked door, desperate to reach her. The man has shoved her to the ground and forced apart her thighs. She lies with her wrists pinned to the dirt, her eyes closed tight against the pain. I am screaming, too, my fists battering the window, but I cannot break through.

  When the man finishes with her, he is streaked with her blood. He zips up his pants and declares loudly: “Nice. Very nice.”

  I stare at Anja. At first I think that she must be dead, because she does not move. The man doesn’t even glance back at her, but reaches into a backpack for a water bottle. He takes a long drink. He does not see Anja come back to life.

  Suddenly she rises to her feet. She begins to run.