The Apprentice (20 page)

“It’s not like we’re swamped with action,” said Korsak.

“When it happens, it’ll be fast. I’m not going to let anything foul this up.”

“You know that thing we were talking about earlier? About you being obsessed?”

“Don’t start in now.”

“No, I’m not gonna go there. You’ll bite off my head.” He shoved open his door.

“Where you going?”

“Take a leak. I need permission?”

“Just asking.”

“That coffee’s going right through me.”

“No wonder. Your coffee’d burn a hole through cast iron.”

He stepped out of the car and walked into the woods, his hands already fumbling at his fly. He didn’t bother to step behind any tree but just stood there, urinating into the bushes. This she didn’t need to see, and she averted her gaze. Every class has its gross-out kid, and Korsak was it, the boy who openly picked his nose and belched with gusto and wore his lunch on the front of his shirt. The kid whose moist and pudgy hands you avoided touching at all costs, because you were sure to catch his cooties. She felt both repelled by him and sorry for him. She looked down at the coffee he’d poured for her, and she tossed what was left out the window.

Fresh chatter erupted over the radio, startling her.

“We got a vehicle moving east on Dedham Parkway. Looks like a Yellow Cab.”

Rizzoli responded, “A taxicab at three A.M.?”

“That’s what we got.”

“Where’s he going?”

“Just turned north onto Enneking.”

“Watcher Two?” said Rizzoli, calling the next unit on the route.

“Watcher Two,” said Frost. “Yeah, we see him. Just went past us…” A silence. Then, with sudden tension: “He’s slowing down…”

“Doing what?”

“Braking. Looks like he’s about to pull over—”

“Location?” snapped Rizzoli.

“The dirt parking area. He’s just pulled into the parking area!”

It’s him.

“Korsak, we’re hot!” she hissed out the window. As she slipped on her personal comm unit and adjusted the earpiece, every nerve was singing with excitement.

Korsak zipped up his fly and scrambled back into the car. “What? What?”

“Vehicle just pulled off Enneking—Watcher Two, what’s he doing?”

“Just sitting there. Lights are off.”

She hunched forward, pressing the headset to her ear in concentration. The seconds ticked by, transmissions silent, everyone waiting for the suspect’s next move.

He’s checking out the area. Confirming that it’s safe to proceed.

“It’s your call, Rizzoli,” said Frost. “We move on him?”

She hesitated, weighing their options. Afraid to spring the trap too soon.

“Wait,” said Frost. “He just turned his headlights back on. Ah, shit, he’s backing out. He’s changed his mind.”

“Did he spot you? Frost, did he spot you?”

“I don’t know! He’s pulled back onto Enneking. Proceeding north—”

“We’ve spooked him!” In that split second, the only possible decision was crystal clear to her. She barked into her comm unit: “All units, go, go, go! Box him in
now
!”

She started the car, jammed the gear into drive. Her tires spun, digging a trough through soft dirt and fallen leaves, branches whipping at the windshield. She heard her team’s rapid-fire transmissions and the far-off blare of multiple sirens.

“Watcher Three. We now have Enneking north blocked off—”

“Watcher Two. In pursuit—”

“Vehicle is approaching! He’s braking—”

“Box him in! Box him in!”

“Do not confront without backup!” Rizzoli ordered. “Wait for backup!”

“Roger that. Vehicle has halted. We are holding position.”

By the time Rizzoli screeched to a halt, Enneking Parkway was a knot of cruisers and throbbing blue lights. Rizzoli felt temporarily blinded as she stepped out of her car. The surge of adrenaline had excited them all to fever pitch and she could hear it in their voices, the crackling tension of men on the edge of violence.

Frost yanked open the suspect’s door, and half a dozen weapons were pointed at the driver’s head. The cabbie sat blinking and disoriented, blue lights pulsing on his face.

“Step out of the vehicle,” Frost ordered.

“What—what’d I do?”

“
Step out of the vehicle
.” On this adrenaline-drenched night, even Barry Frost had transformed into someone frightening.

The cabbie slowly emerged, hands held high. The instant both his feet touched the ground, he was spun around and shoved facedown against the hood of the cab.

“What’d
I
do
!” he cried as Frost patted him down.

“State your name!” said Rizzoli.

“I don’t know what this is all about—”

“Your
name
!”

“Wilensky.” He gave a sob. “Vernon Wilensky—”

“Check,” said Frost, reading the cabbie’s I.D. “Vernon Wilensky, white male, born 1955.”

“Matches the carriage permit,” said Korsak, who’d leaned into the cab to check the I.D. clipped to the visor.

Rizzoli glanced up, eyes narrowing against the glare of oncoming headlights. Even at three A.M., there was traffic moving along the parkway, and with the road now blocked by police vehicles, they’d soon have cars backing up in both directions.

She focused again on the cabbie. Grabbing his shirt, she turned him around to face her and aimed her flashlight in his eyes. She saw a middle-aged man, blond hair gone thin and scraggly, skin sallow in the harsh beam of ight. This was not the face she’d envisioned as their unsub. She had looked into the eyes of evil more times than s
he
cared to count and carried, in her memory, all the faces belonging to the monsters she had encountered in her career. This scared man did not belong in that gallery.

“What are you doing here, Mr. Wilensky?” she said.

“I was just—just picking up a fare.”

“What fare?”

“A guy, called for a cab. Said he ran outta gas on Enneking Parkway—”

“Where is he?”

“I don’t know! I stopped where he said he’d be waiting, and he wasn’t there. Please, it’s all a mistake. Call my dispatcher! She’ll back me up!”

Rizzoli said to Frost: “Pop open the trunk.”

Even as she walked to the rear of the cab, a sick feeling was building in her stomach. She lifted the trunk hood and aimed her Maglite. For a solid five seconds she stared into that empty trunk, the sick feeling now worsening to full-blown nausea. She pulled on gloves. Felt her face flushing hot and bright, her chest going hollow with despair, as she peeled back the gray carpet lining the trunk. She saw a spare tire, a jack, and a few tools. She began yanking on the carpet, peeling it back farther, all her rage focused on ripping away every square inch of it, exposing every dark nook it might conceal. She was like a madwoman, clawing desperately for the scraps of her own redemption. When she could tear away no more and the trunk was exposed down to bare metal, she just stared at the empty space, refusing to accept what was plain to see. The irrefutable evidence that she had screwed up.

A setup. This was just a setup, meant to distract us. But from what?

The answer came to her with dizzying speed. A call erupted from their radios.

“Ten fifty-four, ten fifty-four, Fairview Cemetery. All units, ten fifty-four, Fairview Cemetery.”

Frost’s gaze met hers, both of them struck in that instant by the same terrible realization. Ten fifty-four. Homicide.

“Stay with the cab!” she ordered Frost, and she sprinted to her car. In the tangle of vehicles, hers was the easiest to extract, the quickest to turn around. Even as she scrambled in behind the wheel and twisted the key, she was cursing her own stupidity.

“Hey!
Hey
!” shouted Korsak. He was running beside the car, pounding on the door.

She braked just long enough to let him scramble in and yank his door shut. Then she floored the accelerator, flinging him back against his seat.

“What the fuck, you gonna leave me back there?” he yelled.

“Buckle up.”

“I’m not just some ride-along.”

“Buckle up!”

He dragged his seat belt over his shoulder and snapped it shut. Even over the voices chattering on the radio, she could hear his labored breathing, wet with mucousy wheezes.

“Watcher One, responding to the ten fifty-four,” she said to Dispatch.

“Your ten-ten?”

“Enneking Parkway, just passed the intersection with Turtle Pond. ETA less than a minute.”

“You’ll be first on the scene.”

“Situation?”

“No further information. Assume ten fifty-eight.”

Armed and believed dangerous.

Rizzoli’s foot was lead on the pedal. The road to Fairview Cemetery came up so fast she almost missed it. They took the turn with tires screaming, Rizzoli wrestling the wheel for control.

“Whoa!” gasped Korsak as they nearly slammed into a row of roadside boulders. The wrought-iron gate hung open and she drove through. The cemetery was unlit, and beyond her headlights were rolling lawns, gravestones jutting up like white teeth.

A vehicle from a private security patrol was parked a hundred yards from the cemetery gate. The driver’s door was open and the dome light was glowing. Rizzoli braked and was already reaching for her weapon as she stepped out, the reflex so automatic she did not even register the action. Too many other details were assaulting her: The smell of freshly mown grass and damp earth. The punch of her heartbeat against her breastbone.

And the fear. As her gaze swept the darkness, she felt the icy lick of fear because she knew that if the cab was a setup, then this could be, too. A bloody game that she had not even been aware she was part of.

She froze, her eyes focusing on a puddle of shadow near the base of a memorial obelisk. Aiming her Maglite, she saw the security guard’s crumpled body.

As she stepped toward him, she smelled the blood. There was no other scent like it, and it rang primitive alarms in her brain. She knelt down on grass that was wet with it, still warm with it. Korsak was right beside her, shining his flashlight as well, and she could hear his snuffling breaths, the piggy noises he always made when he’d exerted himself.

The guard was lying facedown. She rolled him onto his back.

“Jesus!” yelped Korsak, jerking away with such violence his flashlight beam shot wildly toward the sky.

Rizzoli’s beam was trembling as well as she stared at the nearly severed neck, nubs of cartilage gleaming whitely from the butchered flesh. Man down, all right. Down, out, and barely attached to his own head.

Flashing blue lights cut through the night, a surreal kaleidoscope weaving toward them. She rose to her feet, and her slacks were sticky with blood, the fabric adhering to her knees. Eyes narrowed against the glare of approaching cruisers, she turned away, facing the black expanse of the cemetery. In that instant, as the advancing headlights cut an arc through the darkness, an image froze on her retinas: a figure, moving among the headstones. It was just a split second’s glimpse, and in the next pulse of light the figure was lost in the sea of jutting marble and granite.

“Korsak,” she said. “Someone moving—two o’clock.”

“Can’t see a damn thing.”

She stared. Saw it again, moving down the slope, toward the cover of trees. In an instant she was sprinting, weaving through the obstacle course of headstones, feet pounding across the sleeping dead. She heard Korsak close behind, wheezing like an accordion, but he couldn’t keep up. Within seconds she was on her own, legs pumping on the rocket fuel of adrenaline. She was almost to the trees, closing in on where she had last spotted the figure, but she saw no moving silhouettes, no flitting of darkness across darkness. She slowed, stopped, her gaze sweeping back and forth, seeking the slightest movement in the shadows.

Though she was now at a standstill, her pulse accelerated, driven by fear. By the skin-crawling certainty that
he
was nearby.
He
was watching her. Yet she was reluctant to turn on her flashlight, to send out a beacon announcing her location.

The snap of a twig made her whirl to her right. The trees loomed in front of her, an impenetrable black curtain. Through the roar of her own blood, the rush of air through her lungs, she heard leaves rustle and more twigs crack.

He is walking toward me.

She dropped to a crouch, weapon aimed, nerves honed to a hair trigger.

The footsteps suddenly stopped.

She snapped on the Maglite and shone it dead ahead. Saw him, then, dressed in black, standing among the trees. Caught in the beam of light, he twisted away, arm rising to shield his eyes.

“
Freeze
!” she yelled. “Police!”

The man went perfectly still, his face turned, his hand reaching toward his face. He said, quietly, “I’m going to take off my goggles.”

“No, asshole! You’re going to freeze right where you are.”

“And then what, Detective Rizzoli? Shall we exchange badges? Pat each other down?”

She stared, suddenly recognizing the voice. Slowly, deliberately, Gabriel Dean removed his goggles and turned to face her. With the light in his eyes, he could not see her, but she could see him just fine, and his expression was cool and composed. With the flashlight she made a vertical sweep of his body, saw black clothes, a weapon holstered at his hip. And in his hand, the night-vision goggles which he’d just removed. Korsak’s words shot straight to mind:
Mr. James Fucking Bond
.

Dean took a step toward her.

Instantly her weapon snapped up. “Stay right where you are.”

“Easy, Rizzoli. No reason to shoot my head off.”

“Isn’t there?”

“I’m just walking closer. So we can talk.”

“We can talk fine from this distance.”

He looked toward the flashing lights of the cruisers. “Who do you suppose radioed in the homicide call?”

She held steady, didn’t let her aim waver.

“Use your head, Detective. I assume you’ve got a good one.” He took another step.

“Just fucking
freeze
right there.”

“Okay.” He held up his hands. Said again, lightly, “Okay.”