Tess Gerritsen: Vanish

Our driver looks at us. “Take off your clothes,” he orders in Russian.

We stare back in shock. Until this moment, I have held on to a wisp of hope that the woman in Minsk told us the truth, that she has arranged jobs for us in America. That Anja will babysit three little girls, that I will sell dresses in a wedding shop. Even after the driver took our passports, even as we’d stumbled along that trail, I had thought: It can still turn out all right. It can still be true.

None of us moves. We still don’t believe what he has asked us to do.

“Do you hear me?” our driver says. “Do you all want to look like her ?” He points to my swollen face, which still throbs from the blow. “ Do it.”

One of the girls shakes her head and begins to cry. This enrages him. His slap makes her head whip around and she staggers sideways. He hauls her up by the arm, grabs her blouse, and rips it open. Screaming, she tries to push him away. The second blow sends her sprawling. For good measure, he walks over and gives her a vicious kick in the ribs.

“Now,” he says, turning to look at the rest of us. “Who wants to be next?”

One of the girls quickly fumbles at the buttons of her blouse. Now we are all complying, peeling off shirts, unzipping skirts and pants. Even Anja, shy little Anja, is obediently pulling off her top.

“Everything,” our driver orders. “Take it all off. Why are you bitches so slow? You’ll learn to be quick about it, soon enough.” He moves to a girl who stands with her arms crossed over her breasts. She has not removed her underwear. He grabs the waistband and she flinches as he tears it away.

The four Americans begin to circle us like wolves, their gazes roving across our bodies. Anja is shaking so hard I can hear her teeth chatter.

“I’ll give this one a test drive.” One of the girls utters a sob as she is dragged from the line. The man does not even bother to hide the assault. He shoves the girl’s face against one of the vans, unzips his pants, and thrusts himself into her. She shrieks.

The other men move in and make their choices. Suddenly Anja is wrenched away from me. I try to hold on to her, but the driver twists my hand from hers.

“No one wants you, ” he says. He shoves me into the van and locks me inside.

Through the window, I see it all, hear it all. The men’s laughter, the girls’ struggles, their cries. I cannot bear to watch; neither can I turn away.

“Mila!” Anja screams. “Mila, help me!”

I pound on the locked door, desperate to reach her. The man has shoved her to the ground and forced apart her thighs. She lies with her wrists pinned to the dirt, her eyes closed tight against the pain. I am screaming, too, my fists battering the window, but I cannot break through.

When the man finishes with her, he is streaked with her blood. He zips up his pants and declares loudly: “Nice. Very nice.”

I stare at Anja. At first I think that she must be dead, because she does not move. The man doesn’t even glance back at her, but reaches into a backpack for a water bottle. He takes a long drink. He does not see Anja come back to life.

Suddenly she rises to her feet. She begins to run.

As she flees into the desert, I press my hands against the window. Hurry, Anja! Go. Go!

“Hey!” one of the men yells. “That one’s running.”

Anja is still fleeing. She is barefoot, naked, and sharp rocks are surely cutting into her feet. But the open desert lies ahead, and she does not falter.

Don’t look back. Keep running! Keep…

The gunshot freezes my blood.

Anja pitches forward and sprawls to the ground. But she is not yet conquered. She struggles back to her feet, staggers a few steps like a drunken woman, then falls to her knees. She is crawling now, every inch a fight, a triumph. She reaches out, as though to grab a helping hand that none of us can see.

A second gunshot rings out.

This time, when Anja falls, she does not rise again.

The van driver tucks the gun in his belt and looks at the girls. They are all crying, hugging themselves as they stare across the desert toward Anja’s body.

“That’s a waste,” says the man who raped her.

“Too much trouble to run them down,” the driver says. “You still have six to choose from.”

They have tried out the merchandise; now the men begin to barter. When they have finished, they divide us up like livestock. Three girls in each van. I do not hear how much they pay for us; I only know that I am the bargain, the one thrown in as part of another deal.

As we drive away, I look back toward Anja’s body. They have not bothered to bury her; she lies exposed to the sun and wind, and already hungry birds are circling in the sky. In a few weeks, there will be nothing left of her. She will vanish, just as I am about to vanish, into a land where no one knows my name. Into America.

We turn onto a highway. I see a sign: US 94.

Dr. Maura Isles had not smelled fresh air all day. Since seven that morning she had been inhaling the scent of death, an aroma so familiar to her that she did not recoil as her knife sliced cold skin, as foul odors wafted up from exposed organs. The police officers who occasionally stood in the room to observe postmortems were not so stoic. Sometimes Maura caught a whiff of the Vicks ointment that they dabbed in their nostrils to mask the stench. Sometimes even Vicks was not enough, and she’d see them suddenly go wobbly and turn away, to gag over the sink. Cops were not accustomed, as she was, to the astringent bite of formalin, the sulfurous aroma of decaying membranes.

Today, there was an incongruous note of sweetness added to that bouquet of odors: the scent of coconut oil, emanating from the skin of Mrs. Gloria Leder, who now lay on the autopsy table. She was fifty years old, a divorcee with broad hips and heavy breasts and toenails painted a brilliant pink. Deep tan lines marked the edges of the bathing suit she had been wearing when she was found dead beside her apartment swimming pool. It had been a bikini-not the most flattering choice for a body sagging with middle age. When was the last time I had the chance to put on my bathing suit? Maura thought, and she felt an absurd flash of envy for Mrs. Gloria Leder, who’d spent the last moments of her life enjoying this summer day. It was almost August, and Maura had not yet visited the beach or sat by a swimming pool or even sunbathed in her own backyard.

“Rum and Coke,” said the young cop standing at the foot of the table. “I think that’s what she had in her glass. It was sitting next to her patio chair.”

This was the first time Maura had seen Officer Buchanan in her morgue. He made her nervous, the way he kept fussing with his paper mask and shifting from foot to foot. The boy looked way too young to be a cop. They were all starting to look too young.

“Did you retain the contents of that glass?” she asked Officer Buchanan.

“Uh… no, ma’am. I took a good whiff. She was definitely drinking a rum and Coke.”

“At nine A.M.?” Maura looked across the table at her assistant, Yoshima. As usual, he was silent, but she saw one dark eyebrow tilt up, as eloquent a comment as she would get from Yoshima.

“She didn’t get down too much of it,” said Officer Buchanan. “The glass was still pretty full.”

“Okay,” said Maura. “Let’s take a look at her back.”

Together, she and Yoshima log-rolled the corpse onto its side.

“There’s a tattoo here on the hip,” noted Maura. “Little blue butterfly.”

“Geez,” said Buchanan. “A woman her age?”

Maura glanced up. “You think fifty’s ancient, do you?”

“I mean-well, that’s my mom’s age.”