Vanish: A Rizzoli & Isles Novel

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.
    As she flees into the desert, I press my hands against the window.
Hurry, Anja! Go. Go!
    “Hey!” one of the men yells. “That one’s running.”
    Anja is still fleeing. She is barefoot, naked, and sharp rocks are surely cutting into her feet. But the open desert lies ahead, and she does not falter.
    Don’t look back. Keep running! Keep . . .
    The gunshot freezes my blood.
    Anja pitches forward and sprawls to the ground. But she is not yet conquered. She struggles back to her feet, staggers a few steps like a drunken woman, then falls to her knees. She is crawling now, every inch a fight, a triumph. She reaches out, as though to grab a helping hand that none of us can see.
    A second gunshot rings out.
    This time, when Anja falls, she does not rise again.
    The van driver tucks the gun in his belt and looks at the girls. They are all crying, hugging themselves as they stare across the desert toward Anja’s body.
    “That’s a waste,” says the man who raped her.
    “Too much trouble to run them down,” the driver says. “You still have six to choose from.”
    They have tried out the merchandise; now the men begin to barter. When they have finished, they divide us up like livestock. Three girls in each van. I do not hear how much they pay for us; I only know that I am the bargain, the one thrown in as part of another deal.
    As we drive away, I look back toward Anja’s body. They have not bothered to bury her; she lies exposed to the sun and wind, and already hungry birds are circling in the sky. In a few weeks, there will be nothing left of her. She will vanish, just as I am about to vanish, into a land where no one knows my name. Into America.
    We turn onto a highway. I see a sign: US 94.

TWO
    Dr. Maura Isles had not smelled fresh air all day. Since seven that morning she had been inhaling the scent of death, an aroma so familiar to her that she did not recoil as her knife sliced cold skin, as foul odors wafted up from exposed organs. The police officers who occasionally stood in the room to observe postmortems were not so stoic. Sometimes Maura caught a whiff of the Vicks ointment that they dabbed in their nostrils to mask the stench. Sometimes even Vicks was not enough, and she’d see them suddenly go wobbly and turn away, to gag over the sink. Cops were not accustomed, as she was, to the astringent bite of formalin, the sulfurous aroma of decaying membranes.
    Today, there was an incongruous note of sweetness added to that bouquet of odors: the scent of coconut oil, emanating from the skin of Mrs. Gloria Leder, who now lay on the autopsy table. She was fifty years old, a divorcee with broad hips and heavy breasts and toenails painted a brilliant pink. Deep tan lines marked the edges of the bathing suit she had been wearing when she was found dead beside her apartment swimming pool. It had been a bikini—not the most flattering choice for a body sagging with middle age. When was the last time I had the chance to put on my bathing suit? Maura thought, and she felt an absurd flash of