Vanish

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, scanning the latest news of celebrities and bad girls, but she couldn’t quite see it. Could he really have cared what the crazies out in Hollywood were up to? Maybe a glance at their screwed-up, coked-up lives made Joe’s own life seem tolerable. The Weekly Confidential was harmless distraction for anxious times.

She set aside the Boston PD file and reached for the folder on the Ashburn slayings. Once again, she confronted the crime scene photos of slaughtered women. Once again, she paused over the photo of Jane Doe number five. Suddenly she could not bear to look at blood, at death, any longer. Chilled to the bone, she closed the file.

Regina was asleep.

She carried the baby back to the crib, then slipped into her own bed, but she could not stop shivering, even though the heat of Gabriel’s body warmed the sheets. She needed so badly to sleep, but could not quiet the chaos in her head. Too many images were spinning through her brain. This was the first time she understood what the phrase too tired to sleep meant. She’d heard that people could go psychotic from lack of sleep; maybe she had already passed that threshold, pushed across the edge by nightmares, by her demanding newborn. I need to make these dreams go away.

Gabriel’s arm came around her. “Jane?”

“Hey,” she murmured.

“You’re shaking. Are you cold?”

“A little.”

He wrapped her closer, pulling her into his warmth. “Did Regina wake up?”

“A while ago. I’ve already fed her.”

“It was my turn to do it.”

“I was awake anyway.”

“Why?”

She didn’t answer.

“It’s the dream again. Isn’t it?” he asked.

“It’s like she’s haunting me. She won’t leave me alone. Every damn night, she keeps me from sleeping.”

“Olena’s dead, Jane.”

“Then it’s her ghost.”

“You don’t really believe in ghosts.”

“I didn’t. But now…”

“You’ve changed your mind?”

She turned on her side to look at him, and saw the faint glow of city lights in his eyes. Her beautiful Gabriel. How did she get so lucky? What did she do to deserve him? She touched his face, fingers brushing across stubble. Even after six months of marriage, it still astonished her that she shared her bed with this man.

“I just want things to go back to the way they were,” she said. “Before any of this happened.”

He pulled her against him, and she smelled soap and warm skin. Her husband’s smells. “Give it more time,” he said. “Maybe you need to have these dreams. You’re still processing what