Vanish: A Rizzoli & Isles Novel

green carpet, since removed during the cleanup. The banister leading up the stairs was handsomely carved, and the living room had ten-foot ceilings with crown molding, details that she had not noticed while watching the crime scene video. Water stains marred the ceiling, like dark clouds.
    “Whoever built this place had money,” Gabriel noted.
    She crossed to a window and looked through the bars at the trees. The afternoon was slipping toward evening; they did not have more than an hour before the light would fade. “It must have been a beautiful house when it was built,” she said. But that was a long time ago. Before shag carpets and iron bars. Before bloodstains.
    They walked through a living room empty of furniture. Floral wallpaper showed the wear of passing years—smudges and peeling corners and the yellow tinge from decades of cigarette smoke. They moved through the dining room and came to a halt in the kitchen. The table and chairs were gone; all they saw was tired linoleum, the edges nicked and curling. Afternoon sun slanted in through the barred window. Here is where the older woman died, Jane thought. Sitting in the center of this room, her body tied to a chair, tender fingers exposed to the hammer’s blows. Though Jane was staring at an empty kitchen, her mind superimposed the image she had seen on the video. An image that seemed to linger in the sunlit swirl of dust motes.
    “Let’s go upstairs,” said Gabriel.
    They left the kitchen and paused at the bottom of the staircase. Looking up toward the second-floor landing, she thought: Here is where another one died, on these steps. The woman with the brown hair. Jane gripped the banister, her hand clasping carved oak, and felt her own pulse throbbing in her fingertips. She did not want to go upstairs. But that voice was once again whispering to her.
    Mila knows.
    There’s something I’m supposed to see up there, she thought. Something the voice is guiding me toward.
    Gabriel headed up the stairs. Jane followed more slowly, her gaze focused downward on the steps, her palm clammy against the railing. She came to a halt, staring at a patch of lighter wood. Crouching down to touch a recently sanded surface, she felt the hairs lift on the back of her neck. Darken the windows, spray these stairs with luminol, and the grain of this wood would surely light up a spectral green. The cleaners had tried to sand away the worst of it, but the evidence was still there, where the victim’s blood had spilled. This was where she died, sprawled on these steps, this very spot Jane was touching.
    Gabriel was already on the second floor, walking through the rooms.
    She followed him to the upper landing. The smell of smoke was stronger here. The hallway had drab green wallpaper and a floor of dark oak. Doors hung ajar, spilling rectangles of light into the corridor. She turned into the first doorway on her right, and saw an empty room, walls marked by ghostly squares where pictures had once hung. It could be any vacant room in any vacant house, all traces of its occupants swept away. She crossed to the window, lifted the sash. The iron bars were welded in place. No escape in a fire, she thought. Even if you could climb out, it was a fifteen-foot drop onto bare gravel, with no shrubs to break the fall.
    “Jane,” she heard Gabriel call.
    She followed his voice, moving across the hall into another bedroom.
    Gabriel was gazing into an open closet. “Here,” he said quietly.
    She moved beside him and crouched down to touch sanded wood. She could not help mentally superimposing yet another image from the video. The two women, slender arms entwined like lovers. How long had they huddled here? The closet was not large, and the smell of fear must have soured the darkness.
    Abruptly she rose to her feet. The room felt too warm, too airless; she walked into the hall, her legs numb from crouching. This is a house of horrors, she thought. If I listen hard enough, I’ll hear the echoes of screams.
    At the end of the hall was one last room—the room where the contractor had touched off the fire. She hesitated on its threshold, repelled by the far stronger stench of smoke in this room. Both broken windows had been covered with plywood, blocking out the afternoon light. She took the Maglite from her purse and shone it around the dim interior. Flames had scorched walls and ceiling, devouring sections all the way down to charred timber. She swung the Maglite beam around the room,