The Apprentice: A Novel

by Tess Gerritsen

  You claimed her, here on this rug. Took her in full view of her husband, who could do nothing to save her, who could not even save himself. And when it was done, when you had taken your spoils, one small drop of semen was left on these fibers, drying to an invisible film.

  Was killing the husband part of the pleasure? Did the unsub pause, his hand gripping the knife, to savor the moment? Or was it merely a practical conclusion to the events that preceded it? Did he feel anything at all as he grasped Richard Yeager by the hair and pressed the blade to his throat?

  The room lights went off. Mick’s camera shutter clacked again and again, capturing the dark smear, surrounded by the fluorescent glow of the rug.

  And when the task is done, and Dr. Yeager sits with head bowed, his blood dripping on the wall behind him, you perform a ritual borrowed from another killer’s bag of tricks. You fold Mrs. Yeager’s spattered nightgown and place it on display in the bedroom, just as Warren Hoyt used to do.

  But you are not finished yet. This was just the first act. More pleasures, terrible pleasures, lie ahead.

  For that, you take the woman.

  The room lights came back on, and the glare was like a stab to her eyes. She was stunned and shaking, rocked by terrors that she had not felt in months. And humiliated that these two men must surely see it in her white face, her unsteady hands. Suddenly she could not breathe.

  She walked out of the room, out of the house. Stood in the front yard, drawing in desperate breaths of air. Footsteps followed her out, but she did not turn to see who it was. Only when he spoke did she know it was Korsak.

  “You okay, Rizzoli?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “You didn’t look fine.”

  “I was just feeling a little dizzy.”

  “It’s a flashback to the Hoyt case, isn’t it? Seeing this, it’s gotta shake you up.”

  “How would you know?”

  A pause. Then, with a snort: “Yeah, you’re right. How the hell would I know?” He started back to the house.

  She turned and called out: “Korsak?”

  “What?”

  They stared at each other for a moment. The night air was not unpleasant, and the grass smelled cool and sweet. But dread was thick as nausea in her stomach.

  “I know what she’s feeling,” she said softly. “I know what she’s going through.”

  “Mrs. Yeager?”

  “You have to find her. You have to pull out all the stops.”

  “Her face is all over the news. We’re following up every phone tip, every sighting.” Korsak shook his head and sighed. “But you know, at this point, I gotta wonder if he’s kept her alive.”

  “He has. I know he has.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  She hugged herself to quell the trembling and looked at the house. “It’s what Warren Hoyt would have done.”

  three

  Of all her duties as a detective in Boston’s homicide unit, it was the visits to the unobtrusive brick building on Albany Street that Rizzoli disliked most. Though she suspected she was no more squeamish than her male colleagues, she in particular could not afford to reveal any vulnerability. Men were too good at spotting weaknesses, and they would inevitably aim for those tender places with their barbs and their practical jokes. She had learned to maintain a stoic front, to gaze without flinching upon the worst the autopsy table had to offer. No one suspected how much sheer nerve it took for her to walk so matter-of-factly into that building. She knew the men thought of her as the fearless Jane Rizzoli, the bitch with the brass balls. But sitting in her car in the parking lot behind the M.E.’s office, she felt neither fearless nor brassy.

  Last night, she had not slept well. For the first time in weeks, Warren Hoyt had crept back into her dreams, and she had awakened drenched in sweat, her hands aching from the old wounds.

  She looked down at her scarred palms and suddenly wanted to start the car and drive away, anything to avoid the ordeal that awaited her inside the building. She did not have to be here; this was, after all, a Newton homicide—not her responsibility. But Jane Rizzoli had never been a coward, and she was too proud to back down now.

  She stepped out of the car, slammed the door shut with a fierce bang, and walked into the building.

  She was the last to arrive in the autopsy lab, and the other three people in the room gave her quick nods of greeting. Korsak was draped in an extra-large O.R. gown and wearing a bouffant paper cap. He looked like an overweight housewife in a hairnet.

  “What have I missed?” she asked as she, too, pulled on a gown to protect her clothes from unexpected splatter.

  “Not much. We’re just talking about the duct tape.”

  Dr. Maura Isles was performing the autopsy. The Queen of the Dead was what the homicide unit had dubbed her a year ago, when she’d first joined the Commonwealth of Massachusetts medical examiner’s office. Dr. Tierney himself had lured her to Boston from her plum faculty position at the U.C. San Francisco Medical School. It did not take long for the local press to start calling her by her Queen of the Dead nickname as well. At her first Boston court appearance, testifying for the M.E.’s office, she had arrived dressed in Goth black. The TV cameras had followed her regal figure as she strode up the courthouse steps, a strikingly pale woman with a slash of red lipstick, shoulder-length raven hair with blunt bangs, and an attitude of cool imperviousness. On the stand, nothing had rattled her. As the defense attorney flirted, cajoled, and finally resorted in desperation to outright bullying, Dr. Isles had answered his questions with unfailing logic, all the while maintaining her Mona Lisa smile. The press loved her. Defense attorneys dreaded her. And homicide cops were both spooked and fascinated by this woman who’d chosen to spend her days in communion with the dead.

  Dr. Isles presided over the autopsy with her usual dispassion. Her assistant, Yoshima, was equally matter-of-fact as he quietly set up instruments and angled lights. They both regarded the body of Richard Yeager with the cool gaze of scientists.

  Rigor mortis had faded since Rizzoli had seen the body yesterday, and Dr. Yeager now lay flaccid. The duct tape had been cut away, the boxer shorts removed, and most of the blood rinsed from his skin. He lay with arms limp at his sides, both hands swollen and purplish, like bruise-colored gloves, from the combination of tight bindings and livor mortis. But it was the slash wound across his neck that everyone now focused on.

  “Coup de grâce,” said Isles. With a ruler she measured the dimensions of the wound. “Fourteen centimeters.”

  “Weird, how it doesn’t seem all that deep,” said Korsak.

  “That’s because the cut was made along Langer’s Lines. Skin tension pulls the edges back together so it hardly gapes. It’s deeper than it looks.”

  “Tongue depressor?” said Yoshima.

  “Thanks.” Isles took it from him and gently slipped the rounded wooden edge into the wound, murmuring under her breath: “Say ah. . . .”

  “What the hell?” said Korsak.

  “I’m measuring wound depth. Nearly five centimeters.”

  Now Isles pulled a magnifier over the wound and peered into the meat-red slash. “The left carotid artery and the left jugular have both been transected. The trachea has also been incised. The level of tracheal penetration, just below the thyroid cartilage, suggests to me that the neck was extended first, before the slash was made.” She glanced up at the two detectives. “Your unknown subject pulled the victim’s head back, and then made a very deliberate incision.”

  “An execution,” said Korsak.

  Rizzoli remembered how the Crimescope had picked up the glow of hairs adhering to the blood-spattered wall. Dr. Yeager’s hairs, torn from his scalp as the blade cut into his skin.

  “What kind of blade?” she asked.

  Isles did not immediately respond to the question. Instead, she turned to Yoshima and said, “Sticky tape.”

  “I’ve already got the strips laid out here.”

  “I’ll approxima
te the margins. You apply the tape.”

  Korsak gave a startled laugh as he realized what they were doing. “You’re taping him back together?”

  Isles shot him a glance of dry amusement. “You prefer Super Glue?”

  “That supposed to hold his head on, or what?”

  “Come on, Detective. Sticky tape wouldn’t hold even your head on.” She looked down through the magnifier and nodded. “That’s fine, Yoshima. I can see it now.”

  “See what?” said Korsak.

  “The wonders of Scotch tape. Detective Rizzoli, you asked me what kind of blade he used.”

  “Please tell me it’s not a scalpel.”

  “No, it’s not a scalpel. Take a look.”

  Rizzoli stepped toward the magnifier and peered at the wound. The incised edges had been pulled together by the transparent tape, and what she now saw was a clearer approximation of the weapon’s cross-sectional shape. There were parallel striations along one edge of the incision.

  “A serrated blade,” she said.

  “At first glance, it does appear that way.”

  Rizzoli looked up and met Isles’s quietly challenging gaze. “But it’s not?”

  “The cutting edge itself is not serrated, because the other edge of the incision is absolutely smooth. And notice how these parallel scratches appear along only one-third of the incision? Not the entire length. Those scratch marks were made as the blade was being withdrawn. The killer started his incision under the left jaw, and sliced toward the front of the throat, ending the incision just on the far side of the tracheal ring. The scratch marks appear as he’s ending his cut, and slightly twisting the blade as he withdraws.”

  “So what made those scratches?”

  “It’s not from the cutting edge. This weapon has serrations on the back edge, and they made the parallel scratches as the weapon was pulled out.” Isles looked at Rizzoli. “This is typical of a Rambo or survival-type knife. Something a hunter might use.”

  A hunter. Rizzoli looked at the thickly muscled shoulders of Richard Yeager and thought: This was not a man who’d meekly assume the role of prey.

  “Okay, so let me get this straight,” said Korsak. “This vic, Dr. Weight Lifter here, watches our perp pull out a big friggin’ Rambo knife. And he just sits there and lets him cut his throat?”

  “His wrists and ankles were bound,” said Isles.

  “I don’t care if he’s trussed up like Tutankhamen. Any redblooded man’s gonna squirm like hell.”

  Rizzoli said, “He’s right. Even with your wrists and ankles bound, you can still kick. You can even head-butt. But he was just sitting there, against the wall.”

  Dr. Isles straightened. For a moment, she didn’t say anything, just stood as regally as though her surgical gown were a priestess’s robe. She looked at Yoshima. “Hand me a wet towel. Direct that light over here. Let’s really wipe him down and go over his skin. Inch by inch.”

  “What’re we looking for?” asked Korsak.

  “I’ll tell you when I see it.”

  Moments later, when Isles lifted the right arm, she spotted the marks on the side of the chest. Beneath the magnifying lens, two faint red bumps stood out. Isles ran her gloved finger over the skin. “Wheals,” she said. “It’s a Lewis Triple Response.”

  “Lewis what?” asked Rizzoli.

  “Lewis Triple Response. It’s a signature effect on the skin. First you see erythema—red spots—and then a flare caused by cutaneous arteriolar dilatation. And finally, in the third stage, wheals pop up due to increased vascular permeability.”

  “It looks to me like a Taser mark,” said Rizzoli.

  Isles nodded. “Exactly. This is the classic skin response to an electrical shock from a Taser-like device. It would certainly incapacitate him. Zap, and he loses all neuromuscular control. Certainly long enough for someone to bind his wrists and ankles.”

  “How long do these wheals usually last?”

  “On a living subject, they normally fade after two hours.”

  “And on a dead subject?”

  “Death arrests the skin process. That’s why we can still see it. Although it’s very faint.”

  “So he died within two hours of receiving this shock?”

  “Correct.”

  “But a Taser only brings you down for a few minutes,” said Korsak. “Five, ten at the most. To keep him down, he’d have to be shocked again.”

  “And that’s why we’re going to keep looking for more,” said Isles. She shifted the light farther down the torso.

  The beam mercilessly spotlighted Richard Yeager’s genitals. Up till that moment, Rizzoli had avoided looking at that region of his anatomy. To stare at a corpse’s sexual organs always struck her as a cruel invasion, yet one more outrage, one more humiliation visited upon the victim’s body. Now the light was focused on the limp penis and scrotum, and the violation of Richard Yeager seemed complete.

  “There are more wheals,” said Isles, wiping away a smear of blood to reveal the skin. “Here, on the lower abdomen.”

  “And on his thigh,” Rizzoli said softly.

  Isles glanced up. “Where?”

  Rizzoli pointed to the telltale marks, just to the left of the victim’s scrotum. So these are Richard Yeager’s last terrible moments, she thought. Fully awake and alert, but he cannot move. He cannot defend himself. The bulging muscles, the hours at the gym, mean nothing in the end, because his body will not obey him. His limbs lie useless, short-circuited by the electrical storm that has sizzled through his nervous system. He is dragged from his bedroom, helpless as a stunned cow on the way to slaughter. Propped up against the wall, to witness what comes next.

  But the Taser’s effect is brief. Soon his muscles twitch; his fingers clench into fists. He watches his wife’s ordeal, and rage floods his body with adrenaline. This time, when he moves, his muscles obey. He tries to rise, but the clatter of the teacup falling from his lap betrays him.

  It takes only another burst of the Taser and he collapses, despairing, like Sisyphus tumbling back down the hill.

  She looked at Richard Yeager’s face, at the eyelids slitted open, and thought of the last images his brain must have registered. His own legs, stretched useless in front of him. His wife, lying conquered on the beige rug. And a knife, gripped in the hunter’s hand, closing in for the kill.

  It is noisy in the dayroom, where men pace like the caged beasts they are. The TV blares, and the metal stairs leading to the upper tier of cells clang with every footfall. We are never out of our watchers’ sights. Surveillance cameras are everywhere, in the shower room, even in the toilet area. From the windows of the guard station, our keepers look down on us as we mingle here in the well. They can see every move we make. Souza-Baranowski Correctional Center is a level-six facility, the newest in the Massachusetts Correctional Institute system, and it is a technical marvel. The locks are keyless, operated by computer terminals in the guard tower. Commands are issued to us by bodiless voices over intercoms. The doors to every cell in this pod can be opened or closed by remote access, without a human being ever appearing. There are days when I wonder if any of our guards are flesh and blood or if the silhouettes we see, standing behind glass, are merely animatronic robots, torsos swiveling, heads nodding. Whether by man or by machine, I am being watched, yet it does not bother me, as they cannot see into my mind; they cannot enter the dark landscape of my fantasies. That place belongs only to me.

  As I sit in the dayroom, watching the six o’clock news on the TV, I am wandering that very landscape. It is the woman newscaster, smiling from the screen, who makes the journey with me. I imagine her dark hair as a splash of black upon the pillow. I see sweat glistening on her skin. And in my world, she is not smiling; oh no, her eyes are wide, the dilated pupils like bottomless pools, the lips drawn back in a rictus of terror. All this I imagine as I gaze at the pretty newscaster in her jade-green suit. I see her smile, hear her well-modulated voice, and I wonder what her screams would sound like.


  Then a new image comes on the TV, and all thoughts of the newscaster vanish. A male reporter stands in front of the Newton home of Dr. Richard Yeager. In a somber voice, he reveals that, two days after the doctor’s murder and the abduction of his wife, no arrests have been made. I am already acquainted with the case of Dr. Yeager and his wife. Now I lean forward, staring intently at the screen, waiting for a glimpse.

  I finally see her.

  The camera has swung toward the house, and it catches her in close-up as she walks out the front door. A heavyset man emerges right behind her. They stand talking in the front yard, unaware that at that moment the TV cameraman has zoomed in on them. The man looks coarse and piggish with his sagging jowls and sparse strands of hair combed over a bare scalp. Beside him, she looks small and insubstantial. It has been a long time since I last saw her, and much about her seems changed. Oh, her hair is still an unruly mane of black curls, and she wears yet another one of her navy-blue pantsuits, the jacket hanging too loose on her shoulders, the cut unflattering to her petite frame. But her face is different. Once it was square-jawed and confident, not particularly beautiful, but arresting nonetheless, because of the fierce intelligence of her eyes. Now she looks worn and troubled. She has lost weight. I see new shadows in her face, in the hollows of her cheeks.

  Suddenly she spots the TV camera and she stares, looking straight at me, her eyes seeming to see me, even as I see her, as though she stands before me in the flesh. We have a history together, she and I, a shared experience so intimate we are as forever bonded as lovers.

  I rise from the couch and walk to the TV. Press my hand to the screen. I am not listening to the reporter’s voice-over; I am focused only on her face. My little Janie. Do your hands still trouble you? Do you still rub your palms, the way you did in the courtroom, as though worrying at a splinter trapped in your flesh? Do you think of the scars the way I do, as love tokens? Little reminders of my high regard for you?

  “Get the fuck away from the TV! We can’t see!” someone yells.