Vanish: A Rizzoli & Isles Novel

him, her eyes glowing.
    “Let’s go home,” she said.

THIRTY-EIGHT
    Mila
    The woman has been kind to me. As our car bumps along the dirt road, she takes my hand and squeezes it. I feel safe with her, even though I know she will not always be here to hold my hand; there are so many other girls to think of, other girls who are still lost in the dark corners of this country. But for now she is here with me. She is my protector, and I lean into her, hoping she will put her arm around me. But she is distracted, her gaze focused instead on the desert outside our car. A strand of her hair has fallen onto my sleeve and glitters there like a silver thread. I pluck it up and slip it into my pocket. It may be the only souvenir I will ever have to remember her by when our time together ends.
    The car rolls to a stop.
    “Mila,” she says, giving me a nudge. “Are we getting close? Does this area look right?”
    I lift my head from her shoulder and stare out the window. We have stopped beside a dry riverbed, where trees grow stunted, tormented. Beyond are brown hills studded with boulders. “I don’t know,” I tell her.
    “Does it look like the place?”
    “Yes, but . . .” I keep staring, forcing myself to remember what I have tried so hard to forget.
    One of the men in the front seat looks back at us. “That’s where they found the trail, on the other side of that riverbed,” he says. “They caught a group of girls coming through here last week. Maybe she should get out and take a look. See if she recognizes anything down there.”
    “Come, Mila.” The woman opens the door and gets out, but I do not move. She reaches into the car. “It’s the only way we can do this,” she says softly. “You need to help us find the spot.” She holds out her hand. Reluctantly, I take it.
    One of the men leads us through the tangle of scrub brush and trees, down a narrow trail and into the dry riverbed. There he stops and looks at me. He and the woman are both watching me, waiting for my reaction. I stare at the bank, at an old shoe lying dry and cracked in the heat. A memory shimmers, then snaps into focus. I turn and look at the opposite bank, which is cluttered with plastic bottles, and I see a scrap of blue tarp dangling from a branch.
    Another memory locks in place.
    This is where he hit me. This is where Anja stood, her foot bleeding in her open-toed shoe.
    Without a word, I turn and climb back up the riverbank. My heart is racing, and dread clamps its fingers around my throat, but I have no choice now. I see her ghost, flitting just ahead of me. A wisp of windblown hair. A sad, backward glance.
    “Mila?” the woman calls.
    I keep moving, pushing my way through the bushes, until I reach the dirt road. Here, I think. This is where the vans were parked. This is where the men waited for us. The memories are clicking faster now, like terrible flashes from a nightmare. The men, leering as we undress. The girl shrieking as she is shoved up against the van. And Anja. I see Anja, lying motionless on her back as the man who has just raped her zips up his pants.
    Anja stirs, staggers to her feet like a newborn calf. So pale, so thin, just a shadow of a girl.
    I follow her, the ghost of Anja. The desert is strewn with sharp rocks. Thorny weeds push up from the dirt, and Anja is running across them, stumbling on bloody feet. Sobbing, reaching toward what she thinks is freedom.
    “Mila?”
    I hear Anja’s panicked gasps, see the blond hair streaming loose around her shoulders. Empty desert stretches before her. If she can just run fast enough, far enough . . .
    The gunshot cracks.
    I see her pitch forward, the breath knocked out of her, and her blood spills onto warm sand. Yet she rises to her knees and crawls now across thorns, across stones that cut like shards of glass.
    The second gunshot thunders.
    Anja collapses, white skin against brown sand. Is this where she fell? Or was it over there? I am circling now, frantic to find the spot.
Where are you, Anja, where?
    “Mila, talk to us.”
    I suddenly halt, my gaze fixed on the ground. The woman is saying something to me; I scarcely hear her. I can only stare at what lies at my feet.
    The woman says, gently, “Come away, Mila. Don’t look.”
    But I cannot move. I stand frozen as the two men crouch down. As one of them pulls on gloves and brushes away sand to reveal leathery ribs and the brown dome of a skull.
    “It appears to be a female,” he says.
    For a moment no one