Vanish: A Rizzoli & Isles Novel

sometimes, they’ll just walk her across. She thinks she’s coming to live the life of
Pretty Woman.
Instead, she’s bought and sold like a side of beef.” Glasser turned and looked at Jane. “Do you know what a nice-looking girl can earn for a pimp?”
    Jane shook her head.
    “Thirty thousand dollars a week. A
week.
” Glasser’s gaze turned back to the window. “There aren’t any mansions with Richard Gere waiting to marry you. You end up locked in a house or apartment, supervised by the real monsters in the business. The people who train you, enforce discipline, crush your spirit. Other women.”
    “Jane Doe number five,” said Gabriel.
    Glasser nodded. “The house mother. So to speak.”
    “Killed by the same people she worked for?” said Jane.
    “When you swim with sharks, you’re bound to get bitten.”
    Or, in this case, have your hands crushed, the bones pulverized, thought Jane. Punishment for some trespass, some betrayal.
    “Five women died in that house,” said Glasser. “But there are fifty thousand other lost souls out there, trapped in the land of the free. Abused by men who just want sex and don’t give a damn if the whore is sobbing. Men who never spare a thought for the human being they just used. Maybe the man goes home to the wife and kids, plays the good husband. But days or weeks later, he’s back at the brothel, to fuck some girl who may be his daughter’s age. And it never occurs to him, every morning when he looks in the mirror, that he’s staring at a monster.” Glasser’s voice had dropped to a tight whisper. She took a deep breath, and rubbed the back of her neck, as though massaging away the rage.
    “Who was Olena?” Jane asked.
    “Her full name? We’ll probably never know it.”
    Jane looked at Barsanti. “You followed her all the way to Boston, and you never even knew her name?”
    “But we knew something else about her,” said Barsanti. “We knew she was a witness. She was in that house, in Ashburn.”
    This is it, thought Jane. The link between Ashburn and Boston. “How do you know?” she asked.
    “Fingerprints. The crime scene unit collected literally dozens of unidentified prints in that house. Prints that didn’t match any of the victims. Some of them may have been left by male clients. But one set of unidentifieds matched Olena’s.”
    “Wait a minute,” said Gabriel. “Boston PD immediately requested an AFIS search on Olena’s prints. They got back absolutely no matches. Yet you’re telling me her prints were found at a crime scene in January? Why didn’t AFIS gives us that information?”
    Glasser and Barsanti glanced at each other. An uneasy look that only too clearly answered Gabriel’s question.
    “You kept her prints out of AFIS,” said Gabriel. “That was information Boston PD could have used.”
    “Other parties could have used it as well,” said Barsanti.
    “Who the hell are these
others
you talk about?” cut in Jane. “I was the one trapped in the hospital with that woman. I was the one with a gun to my head. Did you ever give a damn about the hostages?”
    “Of course we did,” said Glasser. “But we wanted
everyone
out of there alive. Including Olena.”
    “Especially Olena,” said Jane. “Since she was your witness.”
    Glasser nodded. “She saw what happened in Ashburn. That’s why those two men showed up in her hospital room.”
    “Who sent them?”
    “We don’t know.”
    “You have the fingerprints on the man she shot. Who was he?”
    “We don’t know that, either. If he was ex-military, the Pentagon isn’t telling us.”
    “You’re with Justice. And
you
can’t get access to that information?”
    Glasser crossed toward Jane and sat down in a chair, looking at her. “Now you understand the hurdles we’re facing. Agent Barsanti and I have had to handle this quietly and discreetly. We’ve stayed under the radar, because
they
were looking for her, too. We were hoping to find her first. And we came so close. From Baltimore to Connecticut to Boston, Agent Barsanti has been just one step behind her.”
    “How were you able to track her?” asked Gabriel.
    “For a while it was easy. We just followed the trail left by Joseph Roke’s credit card. His ATM withdrawals.”
    Barsanti said, “I kept reaching out to him. Voice mails on his cell phone. I even left a message with an old aunt of his in Pennsylvania. Finally Roke called me back, and I tried to talk him into coming in. But he wouldn’t trust