The Rizzoli & Isles Series 10-Book Bundle

by Tess Gerritsen

  It was his future that lay unclaimed.

  I don’t know what will happen next. But I do know what would make me happy. And I think I could make her happy as well. At this time in our lives, could we ask for any greater blessing?

  With each mile he drove, he shed another layer of uncertainty. When at last he stepped out of his car at Pilgrim Hospital, he could walk with the sure step of a man who knows he has made the right decision.

  He rode the elevator to the fifth floor, checked in at the nursing station, and walked down the long hall to Room 523. He knocked softly and stepped inside.

  Peter Falco was sitting at Catherine’s bedside.

  This room, like Rizzoli’s, smelled of flowers. The morning light flooded Catherine’s window, bathing the bed and its occupant in a golden glow. She was asleep. An IV bottle hung over her bed, and the saline glistened like liquid diamonds as it dripped into the line.

  Moore stood across from Falco, and for a long time the two men did not speak.

  Falco leaned over to kiss Catherine’s forehead. Then he stood up, and his gaze met Moore’s. “Take care of her.”

  “I will.”

  “And I’ll hold you to it,” Falco said, and walked out of the room.

  Moore took his place in the chair at Catherine’s side and reached for her hand. Reverently he pressed it to his lips. Said again, softly: “I will.”

  Thomas Moore was a man who kept his promises; he would keep this one as well.

  Epilogue

  It is cold in my cell. Outside, the harsh winds of February are blowing and I am told it has once again begun to snow. I sit on my cot, a blanket draped over my shoulders, and remember how the delicious heat had enveloped us like a cloak on the day we walked the streets of Livadia. To the north of that Greek town, there are two springs which were known in ancient times as Lethe and Mnemosyne. Forgetfulness and Memory. We drank from both springs, you and I, and then we fell asleep in the dappled shade of an olive grove.

  I think of this now, because I do not like this cold. It makes my skin dry and cracked, and I cannot slather on enough cream to counter winter’s effects. It is only the lovely memory of heat, of you and me walking in Livadia, the sunbaked stones warming our sandals, that comforts me now.

  The days go slowly here. I am alone in my cell, shielded from the other inmates by my notoriety. Only the psychiatrists talk to me, but they are losing interest, because I can offer them no thrilling glimpse of pathology. As a child I tortured no animals, set no fires, and I never wet my bed. I attended church. I was polite to my elders.

  I wore sunscreen.

  I am as sane as they are, and they know this.

  It is only my fantasies that set me apart, my fantasies that have led me to this cold cell, in this cold city, where the wind blows white with snow.

  As I hug the blanket to my shoulders, it’s hard to believe there are places in the world where golden bodies lie glistening with sweat on warm sand, and beach umbrellas flutter in the breeze. But that is just the sort of place where she has gone.

  I reach under the mattress and take out the scrap which I have torn from today’s cast-off newspaper, which the guard so kindly slipped me for a price.

  It is a wedding announcement. At 3:00 P.M. on February 15, Dr. Catherine Cordell was married to Thomas Moore.

  The bride was given away by her father, Col. Robert Cordell. She wore an ivory beaded gown with an Empire waist. The groom wore black.

  A reception followed at the Copley Plaza Hotel in the Back Bay. After a lengthy honeymoon in the Caribbean, the couple will reside in Boston.

  I fold up the scrap of newspaper and slip it under my mattress, where it will be safe.

  A lengthy honeymoon in the Caribbean.

  She is there now.

  I see her, lying with eyes closed on the beach, bits of sand sparkling on her skin. Her hair is like red silk splayed across the towel. She drowses in the heat, her arms boneless and relaxed.

  And then, in the next instant, she jerks awake. Her eyes snap wide open, and her heart is pounding. Fear bathes her in cold sweat.

  She is thinking of me. Just as I am thinking of her.

  We are forever linked, as intimately as two lovers. She feels the tendrils of my fantasies, winding around her. She can never break the bindings.

  In my cell, the lights go out; the long night begins, with its echoes of men asleep in cages. Their snores and coughs and breathing. Their mumblings as they dream. But as the night falls quiet, it is not Catherine Cordell I think of, but you. You, who are the source of my deepest pain.

  For this, I would drink deeply from the spring of Lethe, the spring of forgetfulness, just to wipe clean the memory of our last night in Savannah. The last night I saw you alive.

  The images float before me now, forcing themselves before my retinas, as I stare into the darkness of my cell.

  I am looking down at your shoulders, and admiring how your skin gleams so much darker against hers, how the muscles of your back contract as you thrust into her again and again. I watch you take her that night, the way you took the others before her. And when you are done, and have spilled your seed inside her, you look at me and smile.

  And you say: “There, now. She’s ready for you.”

  But the drug has not yet worn off, and when I press the blade to her belly, she barely flinches.

  No pain, no pleasure.

  “We have all night,” you say. “Just wait.”

  My throat is dry, so we go into the kitchen, where I fill a glass of water. The night has just begun, and my hands shake with excitement. The thought of what comes next has engorged me, and as I sip the water, I remind myself to prolong the pleasure. We have all night, and we want to make it last.

  See one, do one, teach one, you tell me. Tonight, you’ve promised, the scalpel is mine.

  But I am thirsty, and so I lag behind in the kitchen, while you return to see if she is awake yet. I am still standing by the sink when the gun goes off.

  Here time freezes. I remember the silence that followed. The ticking of the kitchen clock. The sound of my own heart pounding in my ears. I am listening, straining to hear your footsteps. To hear you tell me it is time to leave, and quickly. I am afraid to move.

  At last I force myself to walk down the hall, into her bedroom. I stop in the doorway.

  It takes a moment for me to comprehend the horror.

  She lies with her body draped over the side of the bed, struggling to pull herself back onto the mattress. A gun has fallen from her hand. I cross to the bed, grasp a surgical retractor from the nightstand, and slam it against her temple. She falls still.

  I turn and focus on you.

  Your eyes are open, and you lie on your back, staring up at me. A pool of blood spreads around you. Your lips move, but I can’t hear any words. You do not move your legs, and I realize the bullet has damaged your spinal cord. Again you try to speak, and this time I understand what you are telling me:

  Do it. Finish it.

  You are not talking about her, but about yourself.

  I shake my head, appalled by what you ask me to do. I cannot. Please don’t expect me to do this! I stand trapped between your desperate request and my panic to flee.

  Do it now, your eyes plead with me. Before they come.

  I look at your legs, splayed out and useless. I consider the horrors that lie ahead for you, should you live. I could spare you all of this.

  Please.

  I look at the woman. She doesn’t move, doesn’t register my presence. I would like to wrench her hair back, to bare her neck and sink the blade deep in her throat, for what she has done to you. But they must find her alive. Only if she is alive will I be able to walk away, unpursued.

  My hands are sweating inside the latex gloves, and when I pick up the gun it feels clumsy, foreign in my grasp.

  I stand at the edge of the pool of blood, looking down at you. I think of that magical evening, when we wandered the Temple of Artemis. It was mist
y, and in the gathering dusk I caught fleeting glimpses of you, walking among the trees. Suddenly you stopped, and smiled at me through the twilight. And our gazes seemed to meet across the great divide that stretches between the world of the living and the world of the dead.

  I am looking across that divide now, and I feel your gaze on mine.

  This is all for you, Andrew, I think. I do this for you.

  I see gratitude in your eyes. It is there even as I raise the gun in my shaking hands. Even as I pull the trigger.

  Your blood flicks against my face, warm as tears.

  I turn to the woman who still sprawls senseless over the side of the bed. I place the gun by her hand. I grasp her hair, and with the scalpel, I slice off a lock near the nape of her neck, where its absence will not be noticed. With this lock, I will remember her. By its scent will I remember her fear, as heady as the smell of blood. It will tide me over until I meet her again.

  I walk out the back door, into the night.

  I no longer possess that precious lock of hair. But I do not need it now, because I know her scent as well as I know my own. I know the taste of her blood. I know the silken glaze of sweat on her skin. All this do I carry in my dreams, where pleasure shrieks like a woman and walks with bloody footprints. Not all souvenirs can be held in one’s hand, or fondled with a touch. Some we can only store in that deepest part of our brains, our reptilian core, from which we have all sprung.

  That part inside us all which so many of us would deny.

  I have never denied it. I acknowledge my essential nature; I embrace it. I am as God created me, as God created us all.

  As the lamb is blessed, so is the lion.

  So is the hunter.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I owe a very special thanks to:

  Bruce Blake and Detective Wayne R. Rock of the Boston Police Department, and to Chris Michalakes, M.D., for their technical assistance.

  Jane Berkey, Don Cleary, and Andrea Cirillo for their helpful comments on the first draft.

  My editor, Linda Marrow, for gently pointing the way.

  My guardian angel, Meg Ruley. (Every writer needs a Meg Ruley!)

  And to my husband, Jacob. Always, to Jacob.

  The Apprentice is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  2008 Ballantine Books Mass Market Edition

  Copyright © 2002 by Tess Gerritsen

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  BALLANTINE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., in 2002.

  www.ballantinebooks.com

  eISBN: 978-0-345-50943-7

  v3.0_r1

  Contents

  Master - Table of Contents

  The Apprentice

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  prologue

  Today I watched a man die.

  It was an unexpected event, and I still marvel at the fact that this drama unfolded at my very feet. So much of what passes for excitement in our lives cannot be anticipated, and we must learn to savor the spectacles as they come, and appreciate the rare thrills that punctuate the otherwise monotonous passage of time. And my days do pass slowly here, in this world behind walls, where men are merely numbers, distinguished not by our names, nor by our god-given talents, but by the nature of our trespasses. We dress alike, eat the same meals, read the same worn books from the same prison cart. Every day is like another. And then some startling incident reminds us that life can turn on a dime.

  So it happened today, August second, which ripened gloriously hot and sunny, just the way I like it. While the other men sweat and shuffle about like lethargic cattle, I stand in the center of the exercise yard, my face turned to the sun like a lizard soaking up warmth. My eyes are closed, so I do not see the knife’s thrust, nor do I see the man stumble backward and fall. But I hear the rumble of agitated voices, and I open my eyes.

  In a corner of the yard, a man lies bleeding. Everyone else backs away and assumes their usual see-nothing, know-nothing masks of indifference.

  I alone walk toward the fallen man.

  For a moment I stand looking down at him. His eyes are open and sentient; to him, I must be merely a black cutout against the glaring sky. He is young, with white-blond hair, his beard scarcely thicker than down. He opens his mouth and pink froth bubbles out. A red stain is spreading across his chest.

  I kneel beside him and tear open his shirt, baring the wound, which is just to the left of the sternum. The blade has slid in neatly between ribs, and has certainly punctured the lung, and perhaps nicked the pericardium. It is a mortal wound, and he knows it. He tries to speak to me, his lips moving without sound, his eyes struggling to focus. He wants me to bend closer, perhaps to hear some deathbed confession, but I am not the least bit interested in anything he has to say.

  I focus, instead, on his wound. On his blood.

  I am well acquainted with blood. I know it down to its elements. I have handled countless tubes of it, admired its many different shades of red. I have spun it in centrifuges into bicolored columns of packed cells and straw-colored serum. I know its gloss, its silken texture. I have seen it flow in satiny streams out of freshly incised skin.

  The blood pours from his chest like holy water from a sacred spring. I press my palm to the wound, bathing my skin in that liquid warmth, and blood coats my hand like a scarlet glove. He believes I am trying to help him, and a brief spark of gratitude lights his eyes. Most likely this man has not received much charity in his short life; how ironic that I should be mistaken as the face of mercy.

  Behind me, boots shuffle and voices bark commands: “Back! Everyone get back!”

  Someone grasps my shirt and hauls me to my feet. I am shoved backward, away from the dying man. Dust swirls and the air is thick with shouts and curses as we are herded into a corner. The instrument of death, the shiv, lies abandoned on the ground. The guards demand answers, but no one saw anything, no one knows anything.

  No one ever does.

  In the chaos of that yard, I stand slightly apart from the other prisoners, who have always shunned me. I raise my hand, still dripping with the dead man’s blood, and inhale its smooth and metallic fragrance. Just by its scent, I know it is young blood, drawn from young flesh.

  The other prisoners stare at me, and edge even farther away. They know I am different; they have always sensed it. As brutal as these men are, they are leery of me, because they understand who—and what—I am. I search their faces, seeking my blood brother among them. One of my kind. I do not see him, not here, even in this house of monstrous men.

  But he does exist. I know I am not the only one of my kind who
walks this earth.

  Somewhere, there is another. And he waits for me.

  one

  Already the flies were swarming. Four hours on the hot pavement of South Boston had baked the pulverized flesh, releasing the chemical equivalent of a dinner bell, and the air was alive with buzzing flies. Though what remained of the torso was now covered with a sheet, there was still much exposed tissue for scavengers to feast on. Bits of gray matter and other unidentifiable parts were dispersed in a radius of thirty feet along the street. A skull fragment had landed in a second-story flower box, and clumps of tissue adhered to parked cars.

  Detective Jane Rizzoli had always possessed a strong stomach, but even she had to pause, eyes closed, fists clenched, angry at herself for this moment of weakness. Don’t lose it. Don’t lose it. She was the only female detective in the Boston P.D. homicide unit, and she knew that the pitiless spotlight was always trained on her. Every mistake, every triumph, would be noted by all. Her partner, Barry Frost, had already tossed up his breakfast in humiliatingly public view, and he was now sitting with his head on his knees in their air-conditioned vehicle, waiting for his stomach to settle. She could not afford to fall victim to nausea. She was the most visible law enforcement officer on the scene, and from the other side of the police tape the public stood watching, registering every move she made, every detail of her appearance. She knew she looked younger than her age of thirty-four, and she was self-conscious about maintaining an air of authority. What she lacked in height she compensated for with her direct gaze, her squared shoulders. She had learned the art of dominating a scene, if only through sheer intensity.