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.

TWO

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.