The Apprentice (21 page)

“What are you doing here?”

“Same thing you are. This is where the action is.”

“How did you know? If you’re the one who called in that ten fifty-four, how did you know the action was here?”

“I didn’t.”

“You just
happened
to come along and find him?”

“I heard Dispatch call for a property check of Fairview Cemetery. A possible trespasser.”

“So?”

“So I wondered if it was our unsub.”

“You
wondered
?”

“Yes.”

“You must have had a good reason.”

“Instinct.”

“Don’t bullshit me, Dean. You turn up fully dressed for night ops, and I’m supposed to believe you just moseyed on over to check out a trespasser?”

“My instincts are good.”

“You’d have to have ESP to be that good.”

“We’re wasting time here, Detective. Either arrest me or work with me.”

“I’m leaning toward the first choice.”

He regarded her with an unruffled expression. There was too much he wasn’t telling her, too many secrets she’d never get out of him. Not here, not tonight. At last she lowered her weapon but did not holster it. Gabriel Dean didn’t inspire that level of trust.

“Since you were first on the scene, what did you see?”

“I found the security guard already down. I used his car radio to call Dispatch. The blood was still warm. I thought there was a chance our boy’d be close by. So I went looking.”

She gave a dubious snort. “In the trees?”

“I saw no other vehicles in the cemetery. Do you know what neighborhood surrounds us, Detective?”

She hesitated. “Dedham’s to the east. Hyde Park north and south.”

“Exactly. Residential neighborhoods on all sides, with lots of places to park a car. From there it’s just a short stroll to this cemetery.”

“Why would the unsub come here?”

“What do we know about him? Our boy is obsessed with the dead. He craves the smell of them, the touch of them. He holds on to corpses until the stench becomes impossible to disguise, to hide. Only then does he surrender the remains. This is a man who probably gets turned on just by walking through a cemetery. So here he was, in the dark, indulging in a little erotic adventure.”

“This is sick.”

“Look into
his
mind,
his
universe. We may think it’s sick, but for him, this place is a little slice of paradise. A place where the dead are laid to rest. Just the place the Dominator would come. He walks around here and probably imagines a whole harem of sleeping women right beneath his feet.

“But then he’s disturbed, surprised by the arrival of a security patrol. A guard who’s probably expecting to deal with nothing more dangerous than a few teenagers looking for a little nighttime adventure.”

“And the guard lets a lone man stroll right up and cut his throat?”

Dean was silent. For this he had no explanation. Neither did Rizzoli.

By the time they walked back up the slope, the night was pulsing with blue lights, and her team was already stringing crime scene tape between stakes. Rizzoli stared at the grim carnival of activity and suddenly she felt too weary to deal with any of it. Seldom had she questioned her own judgment, doubted her own instincts. But tonight, faced with the evidence of her failure, she wondered if Gabriel Dean wasn’t right—that she had no business leading this investigation. That the trauma inflicted on her by Warren Hoyt had so damaged her that she could no longer function as a cop. Tonight she had made the wrong choice, had refused to release anyone from her team to answer the call for a premises check.
We were only a mile away. Sitting in our cars, waiting
for
nothing, while this man was dying
.

The string of defeats had piled up so heavily on her shoulders that she felt her back sag as though under the weight of real stones. She returned to her car and flipped open her cell phone; Frost answered.

“Yellow Cab dispatcher confirms the cabbie’s story,” he told her. “They got the call at two-sixteen. Male claiming his car was out of gas on Enneking Parkway. She dispatched Mr. Wilensky. We’re trying to track down the number the call came from.”

“Our boy’s not stupid. The call’s going to lead nowhere. A pay phone. Or a stolen cell phone.
Shit
.” She slapped the dashboard.

“So what about the cabbie? He comes up clean.”

“Release him.”

“You sure?”

“It was all a game, Frost. The unsub knew we’d be waiting for him. He’s playing with us. Demonstrating he’s in control. That he’s smarter than us.”
And he just proved it
.

She hung up and sat for a moment, collecting the energy to step out of the car and face what came next. Another death investigation. All the questions that would surely follow about her decisions tonight. She thought of how fiercely she had pinned her hopes on the belief that the unsub would adhere to his pattern. Instead he had used that very pattern to taunt her. To produce the fiasco she was now staring at.

Several of the cops standing by the crime scene tape turned and looked her way—a signal that, tired as she was, she could not hide in her car much longer. She remembered Korsak’s thermos of coffee; awful as it was, she could use the shot of caffeine. She reached around to retrieve the thermos behind her seat and suddenly stopped.

She looked up at the law enforcement personnel standing among the cruisers. She saw Gabriel Dean, lean and sleek as a black cat as he walked the crime scene perimeter. She saw cops scanning the ground, flashlights sweeping back and forth. But she did not see Korsak.

She stepped out of the car and approached Officer Doud, who’d been part of the stakeout team. “Have you seen Detective Korsak?” she asked.

“No, ma’am.”

“He wasn’t here when you arrived? He wasn’t waiting by the body?”

“I haven’t seen him here at all.”

She stared toward the trees, where she had encountered Gabriel Dean.
Korsak was running right behind me. But he never caught up. And he didn’t come back here
…

She began walking toward the trees, retracing the route she had run across the cemetery. During that sprint, she’d been so focused on pursuit that she’d paid little attention to Korsak, who’d trailed behind her. She remembered her own fear, the pounding heart, the night wind rushing past her face. She remembered his heavy breathing as he’d struggled to keep up. Then he’d fallen behind, and she’d lost track of him.

She moved faster now, her flashlight sweeping left and right. Was this the route she’d taken? No, no, she’d gone down a different row of headstones. She recognized an obelisk looming to the left.

Correcting course, she headed for the obelisk and almost tripped over Korsak’s legs.

He lay crumpled beside a headstone, the shadow of his bulky torso merging with the granite. At once she was on her knees, screaming for assistance as she rolled him onto his back. One glance at his swollen, dusky face told her he was in cardiac arrest.

She felt his neck, wanting so desperately to detect a carotid pulse that she almost mistook the bounding pulse of her own fingers for his. But he had none.

She slammed her fist down on his chest. Even that violent punch did not jolt his heart awake.

She tilted his head back and tugged his sagging jaw forward to open the airway. So many things about Korsak had once repelled her. The smell of his sweat and cigarettes, his noisy sniffling, his doughy handshake. None of that registered now as she sealed her mouth against his and blew air into his lungs. She felt his chest expand, heard a noisy wheeze as his lungs expelled the air again. She planted her hands on his chest and began CPR, doing the work his heart refused to do. She kept pumping as other cops arrived to assist, as her arms began to tremble and sweat soaked into her vest. Even as she pumped, she was mentally flogging herself. How had she overlooked him, lying here? Why hadn’t she noticed his absence? Her muscles burned and her knees ached, but she did not stop. She owed that much to him and would not abandon him a second time.

An ambulance siren screamed closer.

She was still pumping as the paramedics arrived. Only when someone took her arm and firmly tugged her away did she relinquish her role. She stood back, legs trembling, as the paramedics took over, inserting an I.V. line, hanging a bag of saline. They tilted Korsak’s head back and thrust a laryngoscope blade down his throat.

“I can’t see the vocal cords!”

“Jesus, he’s got a big neck.”

“Help me reposition.”

“Okay. Try it again!”

Again the paramedic inserted the laryngoscope, straining to hold up the weight of Korsak’s jaw. With his massive neck and swollen tongue, Korsak looked like a freshly slaughtered bull.

“Tube’s in!”

They tore away the rest of Korsak’s shirt, baring a thick mat of hair, and slapped on defibrillator paddles. On the EKG monitor, a jagged line appeared.

“He’s in V-tach!”

The paddles discharged, a jolt of electrical current slicing through Korsak’s chest. The seizure jerked his heavy torso right off the grass and dropped him back in a flaccid mound. The cops’ multiple flashlight beams revealed every cruel detail, from the pale beer belly to the almost feminine breasts that are the embarrassment of so many overweight men.

“Okay! He’s got a rhythm. Sinus tach—”

“BP?”

The cuff whiffed tight around his meaty arm. “Ninety systolic. Let’s move him!”

Even after they’d transferred Korsak into the ambulance and the taillights had winked away into the night, Rizzoli did not move. Numb with exhaustion, she stared after it, imagining what would follow for him. The harsh lights of the E.R. More needles, more tubes. It occurred to her that she should call his wife, but she did not know her name. In fact, she knew almost nothing about his personal life, and it struck her as unbearably sad that she knew far more about the dead Yeagers than about the living, breathing man who’d worked beside her. The partner she’d failed.

She looked down at the grass where he’d been lying. It still bore the imprint of his weight. She imagined him running after her but too short of breath to keep up. He would have pushed himself anyway, driven by male vanity, by pride. Did he clutch his chest before he went down? Did he try to call for help?

I would not have heard him anyway. I was too busy trying to run down shadows. Trying to salvage my own pride
.

“Detective Rizzoli?” said Officer Doud. He’d approached so quietly, she had not even realized he was standing beside her.

“Yes?”

“I’m afraid we’ve found another one.”

“What?”

“Another body.”

Stunned, she could say nothing as she followed Doud across the damp grass, his flashlight lighting the way through the blackness. A flicker of more lights far ahead marked their destination. By the time she finally detected the first whiff of decay, they were several hundred yards from where the security guard had fallen.

“Who found it?” she asked.

“Agent Dean.”

“Why was he searching all the way out here?”

“I guess he was doing a general sweep.”

Dean turned to face her as she approached. “I think we’ve found Karenna Ghent,” he said.

The woman lay atop a grave site, her black hair splayed around her, clusters of leaves arranged among the dark strands in mock decoration of mortified flesh. She had been dead long enough for her belly to bloat, for purge fluid to trickle from her nostrils. But the impact of all these details faded in the greater horror of what had been done to the lower abdomen. Rizzoli stared at the gaping wound. A single transverse slice.

The ground seemed to give way beneath her feet and she stumbled backward, blindly reaching for support and finding only air.

It was Dean who caught her, grasping her firmly by the elbow. “It’s not a coincidence,” he said.

She was silent, her gaze still fixed on that terrible wound. She remembered similar wounds on other women. Remembered a summer even hotter than this one.

“He’s been following the news,” said Dean. “He knows you’re the lead investigator. He knows how to turn the tables, how to make a game of cat and mouse go both ways. That’s what it is to him, now. A game.”

Although she registered his words, she didn’t understand what he was trying to tell her. “What game?”

“Didn’t you see the name?” He aimed his flashlight at the words carved into the granite headstone:

Beloved husband and father

Anthony Rizzoli

1901-1962

“It’s a taunt,” said Dean. “And it’s aimed straight at you.”

The woman sitting at Korsak’s bedside had lank brown hair that looked as if it had been neither washed nor combed in days. She did not touch him but simply gazed at the bed with vacant eyes, her hands resting in her lap, lifeless as a mannequin’s. Rizzoli stood outside the ICU cubicle, debating whether to intrude. Finally the woman looked up and met her gaze through the window, and Rizzoli could not simply walk away.

She stepped into the cubicle. “Mrs. Korsak?” she asked.

“Yes?”

“I’m Detective Rizzoli. Jane. Please call me Jane.”

The woman’s expression remained blank; clearly she did not recognize the name.

“I’m afraid I don’t know your first name,” said Rizzoli.

“Diane.” The woman was silent for a moment; then she frowned. “I’m sorry. Who are you again?”

“Jane Rizzoli. I’m with Boston P.D. I’ve been working with your husband on a case. He may have mentioned it.”

Diane gave a vague shrug and looked back at her husband. Her face revealed neither grief nor fear. Only the numb passivity of exhaustion.

For a moment Rizzoli simply stood in silent vigil over the bed. So many tubes, she thought. So many machines. And at their center was Korsak, reduced to senseless flesh. The doctors had confirmed a heart attack, and although his cardiac rhythm was now stable, he remained stuporous. His mouth hung agape, an endotracheal tube protruding like a plastic snake. A reservoir hanging at the side of the bed collected a slow trickle of urine. Though the bedsheet concealed his genitals, his chest and abdomen were bare, and one hairy leg protruded from beneath the sheet, revealing a foot with yellow unclipped toenails. Even as she took in these details, she felt ashamed of invading his privacy, of seeing him at his most vulnerable. Yet she could not look away. She felt compelled to stare, eyes drawn to all the intimate details, the very things that, were he awake, he would not want her to see.