Vanish

by Tess Gerritsen

  “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 donned gown and shoe covers and walked into the autopsy lab, Maura had already lifted the breastbone and was reaching into the chest cavity. She and Yoshima did not exchange a word of unnecessary chatter as her scalpel sliced through vessels and ligaments, freeing the heart and lungs. She worked with silent precision, eyes revealing no emotion above the mask. If Gabriel did not already know her, he would find her efficiency chilling.

  “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 planning or execution of the takedown.”

  Turning to the light box where X-rays were hanging, he asked: “Those are Olena’s?”

  “Yes.”

  He moved in for a closer look. Saw a bright comma against the skull, a scattering of fragments throughout the cranial cavity.

  “That’s all internal ricochet,” she said.

  “And this C-shaped opacity here?”

  “It’s a fragment caught between the scalp and the skull. Just a piece of lead that sheared off as the bullet punctured bone.”

  “Do we know which member of the entry team fired this head shot?”

  “Not even Hayder has a list of their names. By the time our Crime Scene Unit processed the scene, the entry team was probably on its way back to Washington, and beyond our reach. They swept up everything when they left. Weapons, cartridge evidence. They even took the knapsack that Joseph Roke brought into the building. They left us only the bodies.”

  “It’s how the world works now, Maura. The Pentagon’s authorized to send a commando unit into any American city.”

  “I’ll tell you something.” She set down her scalpel and looked at him. “This scares the hell out of me.”

  The intercom buzzed. Maura glanced up as her secretary said, over the speaker: “Dr. Isles, Agent Barsanti’s on the line again. He wants to talk to you.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “Not a thing.”

  “Good. Just say I’ll call him back.” She paused. “When and if I have the time.”

  “He’s getting really rude, you know.”

  “Then you don’t have to be polite to him.” Maura looked at Yoshima. “Let’s finish up before we get interrupted again.”

  She reached deep into t
he open belly and began resecting the abdominal organs. Out came stomach and liver and pancreas and endless loops of small intestine. Slitting open the stomach, Maura found it empty of food; only greenish secretions dripped out into the basin. “Liver, spleen, and pancreas within normal limits,” she noted. Gabriel watched the foul-smelling offal pile up in the basin, and it disturbed him to think that in his own belly were the same glistening organs. Looking down at Olena’s face, he thought: Once you cut beneath the skin, even the most beautiful woman looks like any other. A mass of organs encased in a hollow package of muscle and bone.

  “All right,” Maura said, her voice muffled as she probed even deeper in the cavity. “I can see where the other bullets tracked through. They’re up against the spine here, and we’ve got some retroperitoneal bleeding.” The abdomen was now gutted of most of its organs, and she was peering into an almost hollow shell. “Could you put up the abdominal and thoracic films? Let me just check the position of those other two bullets.”

  Yoshima crossed to the light box, took down the skull films, and clipped up a new set of X-rays. The ghostly shadows of heart and lungs glowed inside their bony cage of ribs. Dark pockets of gas were lined up like bumper cars inside intestinal tunnels. Against the softer haze of organs, the bullets stood out like bright chips against the column of lumbar spine.

  Gabriel stared at the films for a moment, and his gaze suddenly narrowed as he remembered what Joe had told him. “There’s no view of the arms,” he said.

  “Unless there’s obvious trauma, we don’t normally X-ray the limbs,” said Yoshima.

  “Maybe you should.”

  Maura glanced up. “Why?”

  Gabriel went back to the table and examined the left arm. “Look at this scar. What do you think of it?”

  Maura circled around to the corpse’s left side and examined the arm. “I see it, just above the elbow. It’s well healed. I don’t feel any masses.” She looked at Gabriel. “What about it?”

  “It’s something that Joe told me. I know it sounds crazy.”

  “What?”

  “He claimed she had a microchip implanted in her arm. Right here, under the skin, to track her whereabouts.”

  For a moment Maura just stared at him. Suddenly she laughed. “That’s not a very original delusion.”

  “I know, I know what it sounds like.”

  “It’s a classic. The government-implanted microchip.”

  Gabriel turned to look once again at the X-rays. “Why do you think Barsanti is so eager to transfer these bodies? What does he think you’re going to find?”

  Maura fell silent for a moment, her gaze on Olena’s arm.

  Yoshima said, “I can X-ray that arm right now. It will only take a few minutes.”

  Maura sighed and stripped off her soiled gloves. “It’s almost certainly a waste of time, but we might as well settle the question right now.”

  In the anteroom, shielded behind lead, Maura and Gabriel watched through the window as Yoshima positioned the arm on a film cassette and angled the collimator. Maura is right, thought Gabriel, this is probably a waste of time, but he needed to locate the dividing line between fear and paranoia, between truth and delusion. He saw Maura glance up at the clock on the wall, and knew she was anxious to continue cutting. The most important part of the autopsy—the head and neck dissection—had yet to be completed.

  Yoshima retrieved the film cassette and disappeared into the processing room.

  “Okay, he’s done. Let’s get back to work,” Maura said. She pulled on fresh gloves and moved back to the table. Standing at the corpse’s head, hands tunneling through the tangle of black hair, she palpated the cranium. Then, with one efficient slice, she cut through the scalp. He could scarcely stand to watch the mutilation of this beautiful woman. A face was little more than skin and muscle and cartilage, which easily yielded to the pathologist’s knife. Maura grasped the severed edge of scalp and peeled it forward, the long hair draping like a black curtain over the face.

  Yoshima re-emerged from the processing room. “Dr. Isles?”

  “X-ray’s ready?”

  “Yes. And there’s something here.”

  Maura glanced up. “What?”

  “You can see it under the skin.” He mounted the X-ray on the light box. “This thing,” he said, pointing.

  Maura crossed to the X-ray and stared in silence at the thin white strip tracing through soft tissue. Nothing natural could be that straight, that uniform.

  “It’s man-made,” said Gabriel. “Do you think—”

  “That’s not a microchip,” said Maura.

  “There is something there.”

  “It’s not metallic. It’s not dense enough.”

  “What are we looking at?”

  “Let’s find out.” Maura returned to the corpse and picked up her scalpel. Rotating the left arm, she exposed the scar. The cut she made was startlingly swift and deep, a single stroke that sliced through skin and subcutaneous fat, all the way down to muscle. This patient would never complain about an ugly incision or a severed nerve; the indignities she suffered in this room, on that table, meant nothing to senseless flesh.

  Maura reached for a pair of forceps and plunged the tips into the wound. As she rooted around in freshly incised tissue, Gabriel was repelled by the brutal exploration, but he could not turn away. He heard her give a murmur of satisfaction, and suddenly her forceps re-emerged, the tips clamped around what looked like a glistening matchstick.

  “I know what this is,” she said, setting the object on a specimen tray. “This is Silastic tubing. It’s simply migrated deeper than it should have after it was inserted. It’s been encapsulated by scar tissue. That’s why I couldn’t feel it through the skin. We needed an X-ray to know it was even there.”

  “What’s this thing for?”

  “Norplant. This tube contained a progestin that’s slowly released over time, preventing ovulation.”

  “A contraceptive.”

  “Yes. You don’t see many of these implanted anymore. The product has been discontinued in the US. Usually they’re implanted six at a time, in a fanlike pattern. Whoever removed the other five missed this one.”

  The intercom buzzed. “Dr. Isles?” It was Louise again. “You have a call.”

  “Can you take a message?”

  “I think you need to answer this one. It’s Joan Anstead, in the governor’s office.”

  Maura’s head snapped up. She looked at Gabriel, and for the first time he saw unease flicker in her eyes. She set down the scalpel, stripped off her gloves, and crossed to pick up the phone.

  “This is Dr. Isles,” she said. Though Gabriel could not hear the other half of the conversation, it was clear just by Maura’s body language that this was not a welcome phone call. “Yes, I’ve already started it. This is in our jurisdiction. Why does the FBI think they can . . .” A long pause. Maura turned to face the wall, and her spine was now rigid. “But I haven’t completed the postmortem. I’m about to open the cranium. If you’ll just give me another half hour—” Another pause. Then, coldly: “I understand. We’ll have the remains ready for transfer in an hour.” She hung up. Took a deep breath, and turned to Yoshima. “Pack her up. They want Joseph Roke’s body as well.”

  “What’s going on?” Yoshima asked.

  “They’re being shipped to the FBI lab. They want everything—all organs and tissue specimens. Agent Barsanti will be assuming custody.”

  “This has never happened before,” said Yoshima.

  She yanked off her mask and reached back to untie the gown. Whipping it off, she tossed it in the soiled linens bin. “The order comes straight from the governor’s office.”

  TWENTY-THREE

  Jane jerked awake, every muscle snapping taut. She saw darkness, heard the muted growl of a car passing on the street below, and the even rhythm of Gabriel’s breathing as he slept soundly beside her. I am home, she thought. I’m lying in my own bed, in my own apartment, and we’re all saf
e. All three of us. She took a deep breath and waited for her heart to stop pounding. The sweat-soaked nightgown slowly chilled against her skin. Eventually these nightmares will go away, she thought. These are just the fading echoes of screams.

  She turned toward her husband, seeking the warmth of his body, the familiar comfort of his scent. But just as her arm was about to drape around his waist, she heard the baby crying in the other room. Oh please, not yet, she thought. It’s only been three hours since I fed you. Give me another twenty minutes. Another ten minutes. Let me stay in my own bed just a little while longer. Let me shake off these bad dreams.

  But the crying continued, louder now, more insistent with every fresh wail.

  Jane rose and shuffled from the darkness of her bedroom, shutting the door behind her so that Gabriel would not be disturbed. She flipped on the nursery light and looked down at her red-faced and screaming daughter. Only three days old, and already you’ve worn me out, she thought. Lifting the baby from the crib, she felt that greedy little mouth rooting for her breast. As Jane settled into the rocking chair, pink gums clamped down like a vise on her nipple. But the offered breast was only temporary satisfaction; soon the baby was fussing again, and no matter how closely Jane cuddled her, rocked her, her daughter would not stop squirming. What am I doing wrong, she wondered, staring down at her frustrated infant. Why am I so clumsy at this? Seldom had Jane felt so inadequate, yet this three-day-old baby had reduced her to such helplessness that, at four in the morning, she felt the sudden, desperate urge to call her mother and plead for some maternal wisdom. The sort of wisdom that was supposed to be instinctual, but had somehow skipped Jane by. Stop crying, baby, please stop crying, she thought. I’m so tired. All I want to do is go back to bed, but you won’t let me. And I don’t know how to make you go to sleep.

  She rose from the chair and paced the room, rocking the baby as she walked. What did she want? Why was she still crying? She walked her into the kitchen and stood jiggling the baby as she stared, dazed by exhaustion, at the cluttered countertop. She thought of her life before motherhood, before Gabriel, when she would come home from work and pop open a bottle of beer and put her feet up on the couch. She loved her daughter, and she loved her husband, but she was so very tired, and she did not know when she’d be able to crawl back into bed. The night stretched ahead of her, an ordeal without end.