The Apprentice (11 page)

“Dean’s the one who asked for that test on the sperm,” said Korsak. “Whatever he called it—”

“The wet prep.”

“Yeah, the wet prep thing. Isles wasn’t even gonna look at it fresh. She was gonna let it dry out first. So here’s this fibbie guy telling the doc what to do. Like he knows exactly what he’s looking for, exactly what we’ll find. How did he know? And what the hell’s the FBI doing on this case, anyway?”

“You did the background on the Yeagers. What’s there to attract the FBI?”

“Not a thing.”

“Were they into something they shouldn’t have been?”

“You make it sound like the Yeagers got
themselves
killed.”

“He was a doctor. Are we talking about drug deals here? A federal witness?”

“He was clean. His wife was clean.”

“That coup de grâce—like an execution. Maybe that’s the symbolism. A slice across the throat, to silence him.”

“Jesus, Rizzoli. You’ve made a hundred-eighty-degree turn here. First we’re thinking sex perp who kills for the thrill of it. Now you’re into conspiracies.”

“I’m trying to understand why Dean’s involved. The FBI never gives a shit about what we’re doing. They stay out of our way, we stay out of theirs, and that’s how everybody likes it. We didn’t ask for their help with the Surgeon. We handled it all in-house, used our own profiler. Their behavioral unit’s too busy kissing up to Hollywood to give us the time of day. So what’s different about this case? What makes the Yeagers special?”

“We didn’t find a thing on them,” said Korsak. “No debts, no financial red flags. No pending court cases. No one who’d say boo about either one of them.”

“Then why the FBI interest?”

Korsak thought it over. “Maybe the Yeagers had friends in high places. Someone who’s now screaming for justice.”

“Wouldn’t Dean just come out and tell us that?”

“Fibbies never like to tell you anything,” said Korsak.

She looked back at the building. It was nearly midnight, and they had not yet seen Maura Isles leave. When Rizzoli had walked out of the autopsy suite, Isles had been dictating her report and had scarcely even waved good night. The Queen of the Dead paid scant attention to the living.

Am I any different? When I lie in bed at night, it’s the faces of the murdered I see.

“This case is bigger than just the Yeagers,” said Korsak. “Now we’ve got that second set of remains.”

“I think this may let Joey Valentine off the hook,” said Rizzoli. “It explains how our unsub picked up that corpse hair—from an earlier victim.”

“I’m not done with Joey yet. One more twist of the screw.”

“You got anything on him?”

“I’m looking; I’m looking.”

“You’ll need more than an old charge of voyeurism.”

“But that Joey, he’s weird. You gotta be weird to enjoy putting lipstick on dead ladies.”

“Weirdness isn’t enough.” She stared at the building, thinking of Maura Isles. “In some ways, we’re all weird.”

“Yeah, but we’re
normal
weird. Joey’s got, like, no
normal
in his weirdness.”

She laughed. This conversation had meandered into the absurd, and she was too tired to make sense of it any longer.

“What the hell’d I say?” Korsak asked.

She turned to her car. “I’m getting punchy. I need to go home and get some sleep.”

“You gonna be here for the bone doctor?”

“I’ll be here.”

Tomorrow afternoon, a forensic anthropologist would be joining Isles to examine the skeletal remains of the second woman. Though she was not looking forward to another visit to this house of horrors, it was a duty Rizzoli could not avoid. She crossed to her car and unlocked the door.

“Hey, Rizzoli?” Korsak called out.

“Yeah?”

“Did you get dinner? Wanna go out for a burger or something?”

It was the sort of invitation any cop might extend to another. A hamburger, a beer, a few hours to unwind after a stressful day. Nothing unusual or untoward about it, yet it made her uncomfortable because she sensed the loneliness, the desperation, behind it. And she did not want to be entangled in this man’s sticky web of need.

“Maybe another time,” she said.

“Yeah. Okay,” he said. “Another time.” And with a quick wave, he turned and walked to his own car.

When she got home, she found a message from her brother Frankie on the answering machine. While she flipped through her mail, she listened to his voice boom out and could picture his swaggering stance, his bullying face.

“Hey, Janie? You there?” A long pause. “Aw, shit. Look, I forgot all ‘bout Mom’s birthday tomorrow. How ’bout us going in together on a present? Put my name on it, too. I’ll mail you a check. Just tell me how much I owe ya, okay? Bye. Oh, and hey, how ya doing?”

She threw her mail down on the table and muttered, “Yeah, Frankie. Like you paid me for the last gift.” It was too late, anyway. The gift had already been delivered—a box of peach bath towels, monogrammed with Angela’s initials.
This year, Janie gets full credit. For all the difference it makes
. Frankie was the man of a thousand excuses, all of them solid gold as far as Mom was concerned. He was a drill sergeant at Camp Pendleton, and Angela worried about him, obsessed over his safety, as though he faced enemy fire every day in that dangerous California scrub brush. She’d even wondered aloud if Frankie was getting enough to eat. Yeah, sure, Ma. The U.S. Marine Corps is gonna let your 220-pound baby starve to death. It was Jane who had not, in fact, eaten anything since noon. That embarrassing upchuck into the autopsy lab sink had emptied whatever was left in her stomach, and now she was ravenous.

She raided her cupboard and found the lazy woman’s treasure: Starkist Tuna, which she ate straight out of the can, along with a handful of saltine crackers. Still hungry, she returned to the cupboard for sliced peaches and polished those off as well, licking the syrup from her fork as she stared at the map of Boston tacked to her wall.

Stony Brook Reservation was a broad swath of green surrounded by suburbia—West Roxbury and Clarendon Hills to the north, Dedham and Readville to the south. On any summer day, the reservation would draw large numbers of families and joggers and picnickers. Who would notice a lone man in a car, driving along Enneking Parkway? Who would bother to watch as he pulled into one of the service parking areas and stared into the woods? A suburban park is irresistible to those weary of concrete and asphalt, jackhammers and blaring horns. Along with those seeking refuge in the coolness of woods and grass was one who came with an entirely different purpose in mind. A predator seeking a place to discard his prey. She saw it through his eyes: the dense trees, the carpet of dead leaves. A world where insects and forest animals would happily collaborate in the act of disposal.

She set down her fork, and its clatter against the table was startlingly loud.

From the bookshelf she picked up the packet of color-coded pushpins. She pressed a red one on the street where Gail Yeager had lived in Newton and pressed another red one in Stony Brook Reservation where Gail’s body was found. She added a second pin in Stony Brook—this one blue—to represent the remains of the unknown woman. Then she sat
down and considered
the geography of the unsub’s world.

During the Surgeon killings, she had learned to study a city map the way a predator studies his hunting grounds. She was, after all, a hunter as well, and to catch her prey she had to understand the universe in which he lived, the streets he walked, the neighborhoods he roamed. She knew that human predators most often hunted in areas that were familiar to them. Like everyone else, they had their comfort zones, their daily routines. So when she looked at the pins on the map, she knew that she was seeing more than just the location of crime scenes and body dumps; she was seeing his sphere of activity.

The town of Newton was upscale and expensive, a suburb of professionals. Stony Brook Reservation was three miles southeast, in a neighborhood not nearly as tony as Newton. Was the unsub a resident of one of these neighborhoods, stalking prey that crossed his path as he moved between home and work? He would have to be someone who fit in, someone who did not rouse suspicion as an outsider. If he lived in Newton, he’d have to be a white-collar man with white-collar tastes.

And white-collar victims.

The grid of Boston streets blurred before her tired eyes, yet she did not give up and go to bed; she sat in a daze beyond exhaustion, a hundred details swimming in her head. She thought of fresh sperm in a decomposing corpse. She thought of skeletal remains with no name. Navy-blue carpet fibers. A killer who sheds the hair of his past victims. A stun gun, a hunter’s knife, and folded nightclothes.

And Gabriel Dean. What was the FBI’s role in all this? She dropped her head in her hands, feeling as though if would explode with so much information. She had wanted to be lead detective, had even demanded it, and now the weight of this investigation was crushing her. She was too tired to think and too wound up to sleep. She wondered if this was what a breakdown felt like and ruthlessly suppressed the thought. Jane Rizzoli would never allow herself to be so spineless as to suffer a nervous breakdown. In the course of her career she had chased a perp across a rooftop, had kicked down doors, had confronted her own death in a dark cellar. She had killed a man.

But until this moment, she had never felt so close to crumbling.

The prison nurse is not gentle as she ties the tourniquet around my right arm, snapping the latex like a rubber band. It pinches my skin and tears at my hairs, but she does not care; to her, I am just another malingerer who has roused her from her cot and interrupted her normally uneventful shift in the prison clinic. She is middle-aged, or at least she looks it, with puffy eyes and overplucked brows, and her breath smells like sleep and cigarettes. But she is a woman, and I stare at her neck, loose and wattled, as she bends over my arm to locate a good vein. I think of what lies beneath her crepey white skin. The carotid artery, pulsing with bright blood, and beside it, the jugular vein, swollen with its darker river of venous blood. I am intimately familiar with the anatomy of a woman’s neck, and I study hers, unattractive as it is.

My antecubital vein has plumped up, and she grunts in satisfaction. She opens an alcohol swab and wipes it across my skin. It is a careless and slovenly gesture, not what one expects from a medical professional, done out of habit and nothing more.

“You’ll feel a poke,” she announces.

I register the prick of the needle without flinching. She has hit the vein cleanly, and blood streams into the red-topped Vacutainer tube. I have worked with the blood of countless others, but never my own, so I stare at it with interest, noting that it is rich and dark, the color of black cherries.

The tube is nearly full. She pulls it from the Vacutainer needle and pops a second tube onto the needle. This tube is a purple-top, for a complete blood count. When this one, too, is filled, she pulls the needle from my vein, snaps the tourniquet loose, and jams a wad of cotton against the puncture site.

“Hold it,” she commands.

Helplessly I rattle the handcuff on my left wrist, which is fastened to the frame of the clinic cot. “I can’t,” I say in a defeated voice.

“Oh, for God’s sake,” she sighs. No sympathy, just irritation. There are some who despise the weak, and she is one of them. Given absolute power, and a vulnerable subject, she could easily transform into the same sort of monsters who tortured jews in concentration camps. Cruelty is there beneath the surface, disguised by the white uniform and the name tag with R.N.

She glances at the guard. “Hold it,” she says.

He hesitates, then clamps his fingers against the cotton, pressing it to my skin. His reluctance to touch me is not because he’s afraid of any violence on my part; I have always been well behaved and polite, a model prisoner, and none of the guards fear me. No, it is my blood that makes him nervous. He sees red oozing into the cotton and imagines all sorts of microbial horrors swarming toward his fingers. He looks relieved when the nurse tears open a bandage and tapes the cotton wad in place. At once he goes to the sink and washes his hands with soap and water. I want to laugh at his terror of something as elemental as blood. Instead I lie motionless on the cot, my knees drawn up, my eyes closed, as I release an occasional whimper of distress.

The nurse leaves the room with the tubes of my blood, and the guard, his hands thoroughly washed, sits down in a chair to wait.

And wait.

What feels like hours goes by in that cold and sterile room. We hear nothing from the nurse; it’s as if she has abandoned us, forgotten us. The guard shifts in his chair, wondering what could be taking her so long.

I already know.

By now, the machine has completed its analysis of my blood, and she holds the results in her hand. The numbers alarm her. All concerns about a prisoner’s malingering have fled; she sees the evidence, there in the printout, that a dangerous infection rages in my body. That my complaint of abdominal pain is surely genuine. Although she has examined my belly, felt my muscles flinch, and heard me groan at her touch, she did not quite believe my symptoms. She has been a prison nurse too long, and experience has made her skeptical of inmates’ physical complaints. In her eyes we are all manipulators and con men, and our every symptom is just another pitch for drugs.

But a lab test is objective. The blood goes into the machine and a number comes out. She cannot ignore an alarming white blood cell count. And so she is surely on the telephone, consulting with the medical officer: “I have a prisoner here with severe abdominal pain. He does have bowel sounds, but his belly’s tender in the right lower quadrant. What really worries me is his white count
…”

The door opens, and I hear the squeak of the nurse’s shoes on the linoleum. When she addresses me, there is none of that sneering tone she’d used earlier. Now she is civil, even respectful. She knows she is dealing with a seriously ill man and if anything should happen to me she will be held responsible. Suddenly I am not an object of contempt but a time bomb that could destroy her career. And she has already delayed too long.