Vanish: A Rizzoli & Isles Novel

display showed a Boston number. This call was three hours too late.
    “Hello?” she answered.
    Her greeting was met with silence.
    “Hello?” Jane said again.
    “Who are you?” It was a female voice, barely a whisper.
    Startled, Jane looked at Gabriel and saw that he’d registered the same detail.
The caller has an accent.
    “I’m a friend,” said Jane
    “I don’t know you.”
    “Olena told me about you.”
    “Olena is dead.”
    It’s her.
Jane glanced around the table and saw stunned faces. Even Crowe had rocked forward, his face tense with anticipation.
    “Mila,” said Jane. “Tell me where we can meet. Please, I need to talk to you. I promise, it will be perfectly safe. Anywhere you want.” She heard the click of the receiver hanging up.
“Shit.”
Jane looked at Moore. “We need her location!”
    “You got it yet?” he asked Frost.
    Frost hung up the conference room phone. “West End. It’s a pay phone.”
    “On our way,” said Crowe, already out of his chair and headed toward the door.
    “By the time you get there, she’ll be long gone,” said Gabriel.
    Moore said, “A patrol car could be there in five minutes.”
    Jane shook her head. “No uniforms. She sees one, she’ll know it’s a setup. And I’ll lose any chance of connecting with her again.”
    “So what are you saying we should do?” said Crowe, pausing in the doorway.
    “Give her a chance to think about it. She has my number. She knows how to reach me.”
    “But she doesn’t know who you are,” said Moore.
    “And that’s got to scare her. She’s just playing it safe.”
    “Look, she might never call back,” said Crowe. “This could be our one and only chance to bring her in. Let’s do it now.”
    “He’s right,” said Moore, looking at Jane. “It could be our only chance.”
    After a moment, Jane nodded. “All right. Go.”
    Frost and Crowe left the room. As the minutes passed, Jane stared at the silent phone, thinking: Maybe I should have gone with them. I should be the one out there, looking for her. She pictured Frost and Crowe navigating the warren of streets in the West End, searching for a woman whose face they didn’t know.
    Moore’s cell phone rang and he snapped it up. Just by his expression, Jane could tell that the news was not good. He hung up and shook his head.
    “She wasn’t there?” said Jane.
    “They’ve called in CSU to dust the pay phone for prints.” He saw the bitter disappointment in her face. “Look, at least we now know she’s real. She’s alive.”
    “For the moment,” said Jane.
     
    Even cops needed to shop for milk and diapers.
    Jane stood in the grocery store aisle, Regina snug against her chest in a baby sling, and wearily surveyed the cans of infant formula on the shelves, studying the nutritional contents of every brand. They all offered one hundred percent of a baby’s daily needs from A to zinc. Any one of these would be perfectly adequate, she thought, so why am I feeling guilty? Regina
likes
formula. And I need to clip on my beeper and get back to work. I need to get off the couch and stop watching those reruns of
Cops.
    I need to get out of this grocery store.
    She grabbed two six-packs of Similac, moved down another aisle for the Pampers, and headed to the cashier.
    Outside, the parking lot was so hot she broke into a sweat just loading the groceries into her trunk. The seats could sear flesh; before strapping Regina into her infant seat, Jane paused with the doors open to air out the car. Grocery carts rattled by, pushed by perspiring shoppers. A horn honked, and a man yelled: “Hey, watch where you’re going, asshole!” None of these people wanted to be in the city right now. They all wanted to be at the beach holding ice cream cones, not trapped elbow to elbow with other cranky Bostonians.
    Regina began to cry, her dark curls sweaty against her pink face. Yet another cranky Bostonian. She kept screaming as Jane leaned into the backseat and buckled her in, was still screaming blocks later as Jane inched through traffic, the AC going full blast. She hit another red light and thought: Lord, get me through this afternoon.
    Her cell phone rang.
    She could have just let it continue ringing, but she ended up fishing it out of her purse and saw on the display a local number that she did not recognize.
    “Hello?” she answered.
    Through Regina’s angry wails, she could barely hear the question: “Who are you?” The voice was soft and instantly