The Apprentice: A Novel

by Tess Gerritsen

  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 it 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.

  “We’re going to transfer you to the hospital,” she says, and looks at the guard. “He needs to be moved immediately.”

  “Shattuck?” he asks, referring to the Lemuel Shattuck Hospital Correctional Unit in Boston.

  “No, that’s too far away. He can’t wait that long. I’ve arranged a transfer to Fitchburg Hospital.” There is urgency in her voice, and the guard now glances at me with concern.

  “So what’s wrong with him?” he asks.

  “It could be a ruptured appendix. I’ve got the paperwork all ready, and I’ve called the Fitchburg E.R. He’ll have to go by ambulance.”

  “Aw, shit. Then I gotta ride with him. How long’s this gonna take?”

  “He’ll probably be admitted. I think he needs surgery.”

  The guard glances at his watch. He is thinking about the end of his shift and whether someone will show up in time to relieve him at the hospital. He is not thinking about me but about the details of his own schedule, his own life. I am merely a complication.

  The nurse folds a bundle of papers and slips them into an envelope. She hands this to the guard. “This is for the Fitchburg E.R. Be sure the doctor gets it.”

  “It’s gotta be by ambulance?”

  “Yes.”

  “Makes security a problem.”

  She glances at me. My wrist is still handcuffed to the cot. I lie perfectly still, with my knees bent—the classic position of a patient suffering from excruciating peritonitis. “I wouldn’t worry too much about security. This one’s way too sick to put up a fight.”

  seven

  “Necrophilia,” said Dr. Lawrence Zucker, “or ‘love of the dead,’ has always been one of mankind’s dark secrets. The word comes from the Greek, but as far back as the days of the pharaohs there was evidence of its practice. A beautiful or high-ranking woman who died at that time was always kept from the embalmers until at least three days after her death. This was to ensure that her body wasn’t sexually abused by the men charged with preparing her for burial. Sexual abuse of the dead has been recorded throughout history. Even King Herod was said to have had sex with his wife for seven years after her death.”

  Rizzoli looked around the conference room and was struck by the eerie familiarity of this scene: a gathering of tired detectives, files and crime scene photos scattered on the table. The whispery voice of psychologist Lawrence Zucker, luring them into the nightmarish mind of a predator. And the chill—most of all, she remembered the chill of this room, and how it had seeped into her bones and numbed her hands. Many of the faces were the same as well: Detectives Jerry Sleeper and Darren Crowe and her partner, Barry Frost. The cops with whom she had worked on the Surgeon investigation a year ago.

  Another summer, another monster.

  But this time, one face was absent from the team. Detective Thomas Moore was not among them, and she missed his presence, missed his quiet assurance, his steadfastness. Though they’d had a falling-out during the Surgeon investigation, they had since mended their friendship, and now his absence was like a gaping hole in their team.

  In Moore’s place, sitting in the very chair Moore usually occupied, was a man she did not trust: Gabriel Dean. Anyone walking into this meeting would notice immediately that Dean was the outsider in this gathering of cops. From his well-tailored suit to his military posture, he stood out from the others, and they were all aware of the divide. No one spoke to Dean; he was the silent observer, the Bureau man whose role remained a mystery to them all.

  Dr. Zucker continued. “Sex with a corpse is an activity most of us don’t care to think about. But it’s mentioned repeatedly in literature, in history, and in a number of criminal cases. Nine percent of serial killer victims are sexually violated postmortem. Jeffrey Dahmer, Henry Lee Lucas, and Ted Bundy all admitted to it.” His gaze dropped to the autopsy photo of Gail Yeager. “So the presence of fresh ejaculate in this victim is not all that surprising.”

  Darren Crowe said, “They used to say this was something only the wackos did. That’s what an FBI profiler once told me. That these are th
e nuts who wander around jabbering to themselves.”

  “Yes, it was once thought of as a sign of a severely disordered killer,” said Zucker. “Someone who shuffles around in a psychotic daze. It’s true, a number of these perps are psychotics who fall into the category of disorganized killers—neither sane nor intelligent. They have so little control over their own impulses that they’ll leave all sorts of evidence behind. Hairs, semen, fingerprints. They’re the easy ones to catch, because they don’t know, or they don’t care, about forensics.”

  “So what about this guy?”

  “This unsub is not psychotic. He’s an entirely different creature.” Zucker opened the folder of photos from the Yeager house and arranged them on the table. Then he looked at Rizzoli. “Detective, you walked through the crime scene.”

  She nodded. “This unsub was methodical. He came with a murder kit. He was neat and efficient. He left almost no trace evidence behind.”

  “There was semen,” Crowe pointed out.

  “But not in a place we’d be likely to search for it. We might easily have missed it. In fact, we almost did.”

  “And your overall impression?” asked Zucker.

  “He’s organized. Intelligent.” She paused. And added, “Exactly like the Surgeon.”

  Zucker’s gaze locked on hers. Zucker had always made her uneasy, and she felt invaded by his speculative look. But Warren Hoyt had to be on all their minds. She could not be the only one who felt this was a replay of an old nightmare.

  “I agree with you,” said Zucker. “This is an organized killer. He follows what some profilers would call a cognitive-object theme. His behavior isn’t just to achieve immediate gratification. His actions have a specific goal, and that goal is to be in complete control of a woman’s body—in this case, the victim, Gail Yeager. This unsub wants to possess her, use her even after her death. By assaulting her in front of the husband, he establishes this right of possession. He becomes the dominator, over both of them.”