The Apprentice: A Novel

by Tess Gerritsen

  Pepe reached for the cranium and shot Isles a mischievous look. “So let’s play pimp time, Dr. Isles. What’s your call on this?”

  “Pimp time?” asked Korsak.

  “It’s a term from medical school,” said Isles. “Pimping someone means to test their knowledge. To put them on the spot.”

  “Something I’m sure you used to do to your pathology students at U.C.,” said Pepe.

  “Ruthlessly,” Isles admitted. “They’d cringe whenever I looked their way. They knew a tough question was coming.”

  “Now I get to pimp you,” he said, with a touch of glee. “Tell us about this individual.”

  She focused on the remains. “The incisors, palate shape, and skull length are consistent with the Caucasoid race. The skull is on the small side, with minimal supraorbital ridges. Then there’s the pelvis. The shape of the inlet, the suprapubic angle. It’s a Caucasian female.”

  “And the age?”

  “There’s incomplete epiphyseal fusion of the iliac crest. No arthritic changes on the spine. A young adult.”

  “I concur.” Dr. Pepe picked up the mandible. “Three gold crowns,” he noted. “And there’s been extensive amalgam restoration. Have you done X rays?”

  “Yoshima did them this morning. They’re on the light box,” said Isles.

  Pepe crossed to look at them. “She’s had two root canals.” He pointed to the film of the mandible. “Looks like gutta percha canal fillings. And look at this. See how the roots of seven through ten and twenty-two through twenty-seven are short and blunt? There’s been orthodontic movement.”

  “I didn’t notice that,” said Isles.

  Pepe smiled. “I’m glad there’s something left to teach you, Dr. Isles. You’re beginning to make me feel quite superfluous.”

  Agent Dean said, “So we’re talking about someone with the means to pay for dental work.”

  “Quite expensive dental work,” added Pepe.

  Rizzoli thought of Gail Yeager and her perfectly straight teeth. Long after the heart ceased to beat, long after the flesh decayed, it was the condition of the teeth that distinguished the rich from the poor. Those who struggled to pay the rent would neglect the aching molar, the unsightly overbite. The characteristics of this victim were beginning to sound hauntingly familiar.

  Young female. White. Well-to-do.

  Pepe set down the mandible and shifted his attention to the torso. For a moment he studied the collapsed cage of ribs and sternum. He picked up a disarticulated rib, arched it toward the breastbone, and studied the angle made by the two bones.

  “Pectus excavatum,” he said.

  For the first time, Isles looked dismayed. “I didn’t notice that.”

  “What about the tibias?”

  Immediately she moved to the foot of the table and reached for one of the long bones. She stared at it, her frown deepening. Then she picked up the matching bone from the other limb and placed them side by side.

  “Bilateral genu varum,” she said, by now sounding quite disturbed. “Maybe fifteen degrees. I don’t know how I missed it.”

  “You were focused on the fracture. That surgical pin’s staring you in the face. And this isn’t a condition one sees much anymore. It takes an old guy like me to recognize it.”

  “That’s no excuse. I should have noticed it immediately.” Isles was silent a moment, her vexed gaze flitting from the leg bones to the chest. “This does not make sense. It’s not consistent with the dental work. It’s as if we’re dealing with two different individuals here.”

  Korsak cut in, “You mind telling us what you’re talking about? What doesn’t make sense?”

  “This individual has a condition known as genu varum,” said Dr. Pepe. “Commonly known as bowed legs. Her shinbones were curved about fifteen degrees from straight. That’s twice the normal degree of curvature for a tibia.”

  “So why’re you getting all excited? Lotta folks have bow legs.”

  “It’s not just the bow legs,” said Isles. “It’s also the chest. Look at the angle the ribs make with the sternum. She has pectus excavatum, or funnel chest. Abnormal bone and cartilage formation caused the sternum—the breast bone—to be sunken in. If it’s severe, it can cause shortness of breath, cardiac problems. In this case, it was mild, and probably gave her no symptoms. The condition would have been primarily cosmetic.”

  “And this is due to abnormal bone formation?” said Rizzoli.

  “Yes. A defect in bone metabolism.”

  “What kind of illness are we talking about?”

  Isles hesitated and looked at Dr. Pepe. “Her stature is short.”

  “What’s the Trotter-Gleiser estimate?”

  Isles took out a measuring tape, whisked it over the femur and tibia. “I’d guess about sixty-one inches. Plus or minus three.”

  “So we’ve got pectus excavatum. Bilateral genu varus. Short stature.” He nodded. “It’s strongly suggestive.”

  Isles looked at Rizzoli. “She had rickets as a child.”

  It was almost a quaint word, rickets. For Rizzoli, it conjured up visions of barefoot children in tumbledown shacks, crying babies, and the grime of poverty. A different era, colored in sepia. Rickets was not a word that matched a woman with three gold crowns and orthodontically straightened teeth.

  Gabriel Dean had also taken note of this contradiction. “I thought rickets is caused by malnutrition,” he said.

  “Yes,” Isles answered. “A lack of vitamin D. Most children get an adequate supply of D from either milk or sunlight. But if the child is malnourished, and kept indoors, she’ll be deficient in the vitamin. And that affects calcium metabolism and bone development.” She paused. “I’ve actually never seen a case before.”

  “Come out on a dig with me someday,” said Dr. Pepe. “I’ll show you plenty of cases from the last century. Scandinavia, northern Russia—”

  “But today? In the U.S.?” asked Dean.

  Pepe shook his head. “Quite unusual. Judging by the bony deformities, as well as her small stature, I would guess this individual lived in impoverished circumstances. At least through her adolescence.”

  “That isn’t consistent with the dental work.”

  “No. That’s why Dr. Isles said we seem to be dealing with two different individuals here.”

  The child and the adult, thought Rizzoli. She remembered her own childhood in Revere, their family crammed into a hot little rental house, a place so small that for her to enjoy any privacy she had to crawl into her secret space beneath the front porch. She remembered the brief period after her father was laid off, the frightened whispers in her parents’ bedroom, the suppers of canned corn and Potato Buds. The bad times had not lasted; within a year, her father was back at work and meat was once again on the table. But a brush with poverty leaves its mark, on the mind if not the body, and the three Rizzoli siblings had all chosen careers with steady, if not spectacular, incomes—Jane in law enforcement, Frankie in the Marines, and Mikey in the U.S. Postal Service, all of them striving to escape the insecurity of childhood.

  She looked at the skeleton on the table and said, “Rags to riches. It does happen.”

  “Like something out of Dickens,” said Dean.

  “Oh yeah,” said Korsak. “That Tiny Tim kid.”

  Dr. Isles nodded. “Tiny Tim suffered from rickets.”

  “And then he lived happily ever after, ’cause old Scrooge probably left him a ton of money,” said Korsak.

  But you didn’t live happily ever after, thought Rizzoli, gazing at the remains. No longer were these just a sad collection of bones, but a woman whose life was now beginning to take shape in Rizzoli’s mind. She saw a child with crooked legs and a hollow chest, growing stunted in the mean soil of poverty. Saw that child passing into adolescence, wearing blouses with mismatched buttons, the fabric worn to frayed transparency. Even then, was there something different, something special about this girl? A look of determination in her eyes, an upward tilt to the jaw that ann
ounced she was destined for a better life than the one into which she’d been born?

  Because the woman she grew into lived in a different world, where money bought straight teeth and gold crowns. Good luck or hard work or perhaps the attention of the right man had lifted her to far more comfortable circumstances. But the poverty of her childhood was still carved in her bones, in the bowing of her legs, and in the trough in her chest.

  There was evidence of pain as well, a catastrophic event that had shattered her left leg and spine, leaving her with two fused vertebrae and a steel rod permanently embedded in her thighbone.

  “Judging by her extensive dental work, and by her probable socioeconomic status, this is a woman whose absence would be noted,” said Dr. Isles. “She’s been dead at least two months. Chances are, she’s in the NCIC database.”

  “Yeah, her and about a hundred thousand others,” said Korsak.

  The FBI’s National Crime Information Center maintained a missing persons file, which could be cross-checked against unidentified remains to produce a list of possible matches.

  “We have nothing local?” asked Pepe. “No open missing persons cases that might be a match?”

  Rizzoli shook her head. “Not in the state of Massachusetts.”

  Exhausted as she was that night, she could not sleep. She got out of bed once to recheck the locks on her door and the latch on the window leading to the fire escape. Then, an hour later, she heard a noise and imagined Warren Hoyt walking up the hallway toward her bedroom, a scalpel in his hand. She grabbed her weapon from the nightstand and dropped to a crouch in the darkness. Drenched in sweat, she waited, gun poised, for the shadow to materialize in her doorway.

  She saw nothing, heard nothing, except the drumming of her own heart and the throb of music from a car passing on the street below.

  At last she eased into the hallway and switched on the lights.

  No intruder.

  She moved into the living room, flipped on another light. In one quick glance she saw the door chain was in place, the fire escape window latched tight. She stood gazing at a room that was exactly as she’d left it and thought: I’m losing my mind.

  She sank onto the couch, put down her gun, and dropped her head in her hands, wishing she could squeeze all thoughts of Warren Hoyt from her brain. But he was always there, like a tumor that could not be excised, metastasizing into every waking moment of her life. In bed, she had not been thinking of Gail Yeager or the unnamed woman whose bones she had just examined. Nor had she been thinking of Airplane Man, whose file remained on her desk at work, staring at her in silent reproach for her neglect. So many names and reports demanded her attention, but when she lay down at night and stared into the darkness, only Warren Hoyt’s face came to mind.

  The phone rang. She snapped straight, her heart battering against her chest. It took her a few breaths to calm down enough to pick up the receiver.

  “Rizzoli?” said Thomas Moore. It was not a voice she’d expected to hear, and she was caught off guard by a sudden sense of longing. Only a year ago, she and Moore had worked together as partners during the Surgeon investigation. Though their relationship had never gone beyond that of two colleagues, they had trusted each other with their lives, and in some ways that was a level of intimacy as deep as any marriage could be. Hearing his voice now reminded her how much she missed him. And how much his marriage to Catherine still stung her.

  “Hey, Moore,” she said, her casual reply revealing none of these emotions. “What time is it over there?”

  “It’s nearly five. I’m sorry for calling you at this hour. I didn’t want Catherine to hear this.”

  “It’s okay. I’m still awake.”

  A pause. “You’re having trouble sleeping, too.” Not a question but a statement. He knew the same ghost was haunting them both.

  “Marquette called you?” she said.

  “Yes. I was hoping that by now—”

  “There’s nothing. It’s been nearly twenty-four hours, and there hasn’t been a single goddamn sighting.”

  “So the trail’s gone cold.”

  “The trail was never there to begin with. He kills three people in the O.R., turns into the invisible man, and walks out of the hospital. Fitchburg and State Police canvassed the whole neighborhood, set up roadblocks. His face is all over the evening news. Nothing.”

  “There’s one place he’ll be drawn to. One person . . .”

  “Your building’s already staked out. Hoyt goes anywhere near it, we’ve got him.”

  There was a long silence. Then Moore said, quietly: “I can’t bring her home. I’m keeping her right here, where I know she’s safe.”

  Rizzoli heard fear in his voice, not for himself but for his wife, and she wondered, with a twinge of envy: What would it be like to be loved so deeply?

  “Does Catherine know he’s out?” she asked.

  “Yes. I had to tell her.”

  “How’s she taking it?”

  “Better than I am. If anything, she’s trying to calm me down.”

  “She’s already faced the worst, Moore. She’s beaten him twice. Proven she’s stronger than he is.”

  “She thinks she’s stronger. That’s when things get dangerous.”

  “Well, she has you now.” And I have only myself. The way it had always been and probably always would be.

  He must have heard the note of weariness in her voice, for he said: “This has got to be hell on you, too.”

  “I’m okay.”

  “Then you’re handling it better than I am.”

  She laughed, a sharp and startling sound that was all bluster. “Like I’ve got time to worry about Hoyt. I’m riding herd on a new task force. We found a body dump over at Stony Brook Reservation.”

  “How many victims?”

  “Two women, plus a man he killed during the abduction. It’s another bad one, Moore. You know it’s bad when Zucker gives him a nickname. We’re calling this unsub the Dominator.”

  “Why the Dominator?”

  “It’s what he seems to get off on. The power trip. The absolute control over the husband. Monsters and their sick rituals.”

  “It sounds like a replay of last summer.”

  Only this time you’re not here to watch my back. You’ve got other priorities.

  “Any progress?” he asked.

  “Slow. We’ve got multiple jurisdictions involved, multiple players. Newton P.D.’s on it, and—get this—the friggin’ Bureau’s stepped in.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah. Some fibbie named Gabriel Dean. Says he’s an adviser, but his hands are all over this case. You ever had that happen before?”

  “Never.” A pause. “Something’s not right, Rizzoli.”

  “I know.”

  “What does Marquette say?”

  “He’s rolled over and playing dead, ’cause OPC’s ordered us to cooperate.”

  “What’s Dean’s story?”

  “We’re talking tight-lipped here. You know, the if-I-tell-you-then-I’ll-have-to-kill-you kind of guy.” She paused, remembering Dean’s gaze, his eyes as piercing as shards of blue glass. Yes, she could imagine him pulling a trigger without even flinching. “Anyway,” she said, “Warren Hoyt’s not my number one concern right now.”

  “But he’s mine,” said Moore.

  “If there’s any news, you’ll be the first one I call.”

  She hung up, and in the silence the bravado she’d felt, talking to Moore, instantly collapsed. Once again she was alone with her fears, sitting in an apartment with the door barred and the windows latched and only a gun to keep her company.

  Maybe you’re the best friend I have, she thought. And she picked up the weapon and carried it back to her bedroom.

  nine

  “Agent Dean came to see me this morning,” said Lieutenant Marquette. “He has doubts about you.”

  “The feelings are mutual,” Rizzoli said.

  “He’s not questioning your skills. He thinks yo
u’re a fine cop.”

  “But?”

  “He wonders if you’re the right detective to be lead on this one.”

  She said nothing for a moment, just sat calmly facing Marquette’s desk. When he’d called her into his office this morning, she had already guessed what the meeting was about. She had walked in determined to maintain ironclad control over her emotions, to offer him no glimpse of what he was waiting for: a sign that she was already over the edge, in need of being replaced.

  When she spoke, it was in a quiet and reasonable voice. “What are his concerns?”

  “That you’re distracted. That you have unresolved issues having to do with Warren Hoyt. That you’re not fully recovered from the Surgeon investigation.”

  “What did he mean by not recovered?” she asked. Already knowing exactly what he’d meant.

  Marquette hesitated. “Jesus, Rizzoli. This isn’t easy to say. You know it isn’t.”

  “I’d just like you to come out and say it.”

  “He thinks you’re unstable, okay?”

  “What do you think, Lieutenant?”

  “I think you’ve got a lot on your plate. I think Hoyt’s escape knocked the wind out of you.”

  “Do you think I’m unstable?”

  “Dr. Zucker has also expressed some concerns. You never went for counseling last fall.”

  “I was never ordered to.”

  “Is that the only way it works with you? You have to be ordered?”

  “I didn’t feel I needed it.”

  “Zucker thinks you haven’t let go of the Surgeon yet. That you see Warren Hoyt under every rock. How can you lead this investigation if you’re still reliving the last one?”

  “I guess I’d like to hear it from you, Lieutenant. Do you think I’m unstable?”

  Marquette sighed. “I don’t know. But when Agent Dean comes in here and lays out his concerns, I’ve got to take notice.”

  “I don’t believe Agent Dean is an entirely reliable source.”

  Marquette paused. Leaned forward with a frown. “That’s a serious charge.”

  “No more serious than the charge he’s leveling at me.”

  “You have anything to back it up?”

  “I called the FBI’s Boston office this morning.”