Vanish: A Rizzoli & Isles Novel

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 happened. Working through the trauma.”
    “Or maybe I need to do something about it.”
    “Do what?”
    “What Olena wanted me to do.”
    He sighed. “You’re talking about the ghost again.”
    “She did speak to me. I didn’t imagine that part. It’s not a dream, it’s a memory, something that really happened.” She rolled onto her back and stared up at the shadows. “ ‘Mila knows.’ That’s what she said. That’s what I remember.”
    “Mila knows what?”
    She looked at Gabriel. “I think she was talking about Ashburn.”

TWENTY-SIX
    By the time they boarded the plane to Washington-Reagan, her breasts were aching and swollen, her body yearning for the relief that only a suckling infant could provide. But Regina was not within reach; her daughter was spending the day in Angela’s capable hands, and at that moment was probably being cooed at and fussed over by someone who actually knew what she was doing. Gazing out the plane’s window, Jane thought: My baby’s only two weeks old, and already I’m abandoning her. I’m such a bad mom. But as the city of Boston dropped away beneath their climbing aircraft, it wasn’t guilt she felt, but a sudden lightness, as though she’d shed the weight of motherhood, of sleepless nights and hours of pacing back and forth. What is wrong with me, she wondered, that I’m so relieved to be away from my own child?
    Bad mom.
    Gabriel’s hand settled on hers. “Everything okay?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Don’t worry about it. Your mother’s so good with her.”
    She nodded, and kept her gaze out the window. How did she tell her own husband that his child had a lousy mother who was thrilled to be out of the house and back in the chase? That she missed her job so much that it hurt just to watch a cop show on TV?
    A few rows behind them, a baby started to cry,