Vanish: A Rizzoli & Isles Novel

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