The Apprentice: A Novel

by Tess Gerritsen

  “What does?”

  “Everything. Guy like me goes through life, doing what he’s supposed to do. Brings in the paycheck. Gives the kid whatever she wants. Never takes a bribe, not once. Then suddenly I’m fifty-four and wham, my own ticker turns against me. And I’m lying flat on my back, thinking: What the hell was it all for? I follow the rules, and I end up with a loser daughter who still calls Daddy whenever she needs money. And a wife who’s zonked out of her head on whatever crap she can get from the pharmacy. I can’t compete with Prince Valium. I’m just the guy who puts a roof over her head and pays for all the friggin’ prescriptions.” He gave a laugh, resigned and bitter.

  “Why are you still married?”

  “What’s the alternative?”

  “Being single.”

  “Being alone, you mean.” He said the word alone as if that was the worst option of all. Some people make choices hoping for the best; Korsak had made a choice simply to avoid the worst. He gazed up at his cardiac tracing, the twitching green symbol of his mortality. Bad choices or good, it had all led to this moment, in this hospital room, where fear kept company with regret.

  And where will I be at his age? she wondered. Flat on my back in a hospital, regretting the choices I made, yearning for the road I never took? She thought of her silent apartment with its blank walls, its lonely bed. How was her life any better than Korsak’s?

  “I keep worrying it’s gonna stop,” he said. “You know, just go flat-line. That’d scare the shit out of me.”

  “Stop watching it.”

  “If I stop watching, who the hell’s gonna keep an eye on it?”

  “The nurses are watching out at the desk. They’ve got monitors out there, too, you know.”

  “But are they really watching it? Or are they just goofing off, talking about shopping and boyfriends and shit? I mean, that’s my frigging heart up there.”

  “They’ve got alarm systems, too. Anything the least bit irregular, their machine starts squealing.”

  He looked at her. “No shit?”

  “What, you don’t trust me?”

  “I dunno.”

  They regarded each other for a moment, and she was pricked by shame. She had no right to expect his trust, not after what had happened in the cemetery. The vision still haunted her, of a stricken Korsak, lying alone and abandoned in the darkness. And she—so single-minded, so oblivious to everything but the chase. She could not look him in the eye, and her gaze dropped, settling instead on his beefy arm, crisscrossed with tape and I.V. tubing.

  “I am so sorry,” she said. “God, I’m sorry.”

  “For what?”

  “Not looking out for you.”

  “What’re you talking about?”

  “Don’t you remember?”

  He shook his head.

  She paused, suddenly realizing that he truly did not remember. That she could stop talking right now and he would never know how she’d failed him. Silence might be the easy way out, but she knew she couldn’t live with the burden.

  “What do you remember, about the night in the cemetery?” she asked. “The last thing?”

  “The last thing? I was running. I guess we were running, weren’t we? Chasing the perp.”

  “What else?”

  “I remember feeling really pissed off.”

  “Why?”

  He snorted. “’Cause I couldn’t keep up with a friggin’ girl.”

  “And then?”

  He shrugged. “That’s it. That’s the last I remember. Till those nurses here started shoving that goddamn tube up my . . .” He stopped. “I woke up all right. You better believe I let ’em know it, too.”

  A silence passed, Korsak with his jaw squared, his gaze fixed stubbornly on the EKG monitor. Then he said, with quiet disgust: “I guess I screwed up the chase.”

  This took her by surprise. “Korsak—”

  “Look at this.” He waved at his bulging belly. “Like I swallowed a goddamn basketball. That’s what it looks like. Or I’m fifteen months knocked up. Can’t even run a race with a girl. I used to be fast, you know. Used to be built like a racehorse. Not like I am now. You shoulda seen me back then, Rizzoli. Wouldn’t recognize me. Bet you don’t believe any of it, do you? ’Cause you just see me like I am now. Broken-down piece of shit. Smoke too much, eat too much.”

  Drink too much, she added silently.

  “. . . just an ugly tub of lard.” He gave his belly an angry slap.

  “Korsak, listen to me. I’m the one who screwed up, not you.”

  He looked at her, clearly confused.

  “In the cemetery. We were both running. Chasing what we thought was the perp. You were right behind me. I heard you breathing, trying to keep up.”

  “Like you gotta rub it in.”

  “Then you weren’t there. You just weren’t there. But I kept running, and it was all a waste of time. It wasn’t the perp. It was Agent Dean, walking the perimeter. The perp was long gone. We were chasing after nothing, Korsak. A few shadows. That’s all.”

  He was silent, waiting for the rest of the story.

  She forced herself to continue. “That’s when I should’ve gone looking for you. I should’ve realized you weren’t around. But things got crazy. And I just didn’t think. I didn’t stop to wonder where you were. . . .” She sighed. “I don’t know how long it took me to remember. Maybe it was only a few minutes. But I think—I’m afraid—it was a lot longer. And all that time, you were lying there, behind one of the gravestones. It took me so long to start searching for you. To remember.”

  A silence passed. She wondered if he’d even registered what she’d said, because he began to fuss with his I.V. line, rearranging the loops of tubing. It was as if he didn’t want to look at her and was trying to focus instead on anything else.

  “Korsak?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Don’t you have anything to say?”

  “Yeah. Forget it. That’s what I have to say.”

  “I feel like such a jerk.”

  “Why? ’Cause you were doing your job?”

  “Because I should’ve been watching out for my partner.”

  “Like I’m your partner?”

  “That night you were.”

  He laughed. “That night I was a friggin’ liability. A two-ton ball and chain, holding you back. You been getting all worked up about not looking out for me. Me, I’ve been lying here getting pissed off for falling down on the job. I mean, literally. Kerplunk. I been thinking about all the dumb-ass lies I keep telling myself. You see this gut?” Again he slapped his belly. “It was gonna disappear. Yeah, I believed that, too. That one of these days I was gonna go on a diet and get rid of the tire. Instead, I just keep buying bigger and bigger pants. Telling myself those clothing manufacturers are screwing around with the sizes, that’s all. Coupla years from now, maybe I’d end up wearing clown pants. Bozo pants. And a ton of Ex-Lax and water pills wouldn’t help me pass my physical.”

  “You actually did that? Took pills to pass the physical?”

  “I’m not saying one way or the other. I’m just telling you that this thing with my heart, it was a long time coming. It’s not like I didn’t know it could happen. But now that it has happened, it pisses me off.” He let out an angry snort. Looked up at the monitor again, where his heartbeat was blipping faster across the screen. “Now I got the ticker all stirred up.”

  They sat for a moment, watching the EKG, waiting for his heart to slow down. She had never paid much attention to the heart beating in her own chest. As she watched the pattern traced by Korsak’s, she became aware of her own pulse. She had always taken her heartbeat for granted, and she wondered what it would be like, to hang on every beat, fearful that the next might not come. That the throb of life in her chest would suddenly go still.

  She looked at Korsak, who lay with gaze still glued to the monitor, and she thought: He’s more than angry; he’s terrified.

  Suddenly he sat up straight, his hand f
lying to his chest, his eyes wide in panic. “Call the nurse! Call the nurse!”

  “What? What is it?”

  “Don’t you hear that alarm? It’s my heart—”

  “Korsak, it’s just my pager.”

  “What?”

  She unclipped the pager from her belt and turned off the beeping. Held it up for him to see the digital readout of the phone number. “See? It’s not your heart.”

  He sank back on the pillows. “Jesus. Get that thing outta here. Could’ve given me a coronary.”

  “Can I use this phone?”

  He was lying with his hand still pressed to his chest, his whole body flaccid with relief. “Yeah, yeah. I don’t care.”

  She picked up the receiver and dialed.

  A familiar smoky voice answered: “Medical examiner’s office, Dr. Isles.”

  “Rizzoli.”

  “Detective Frost and I are sitting here looking at a set of dental X rays on my computer. We’ve been going down that list that NCIC sent us of missing women in the New England area. This file was e-mailed to me from the Maine State Police.”

  “What was the case?”

  “It’s a murder-abduction from June second of this year. The murder victim was Kenneth Waite, age thirty-six. The abductee was his wife Marla Jean, age thirty-four. It’s Marla Jean’s X rays I’m looking at.”

  “We’ve found Rickets Lady?”

  “It’s a match,” Isles answered. “Your girl’s now got a name: Marla Jean Waite. They’re faxing the records to us now.”

  “Wait. Did you say this murder-abduction was in Maine?”

  “A town called Blue Hill. Frost says he’s been there. It’s about a five-hour drive.”

  “Our unsub’s got a bigger hunting territory than we thought.”

  “Here, Frost wants to talk to you.”

  Frost’s cheery voice came on the line. “Hey, you ever had a lobster roll?”

  “What?”

  “We can get lobster rolls on the way. There’s this great lunch shack up on Lincolnville Beach. We leave here by eight tomorrow, we can get there in time for lunch. My car or yours?”

  “We can take mine.” She paused. And couldn’t stop herself from adding: “Dean will probably want to ride with us.”

  There was a pause. “Okay,” Frost finally said, without enthusiasm. “If you think so.”

  “I’ll give him a call.”

  As she disconnected, she could feel Korsak’s gaze on her.

  “So Mr. FBI’s part of the team now,” he said.

  She ignored him and punched in Dean’s cell phone number.

  “When did that happen?”

  “He’s just another resource.”

  “That’s not what you thought about him before.”

  “We’ve had a chance to work together since then.”

  “Don’t tell me. You’ve seen another side to him.”

  She waved Korsak into silence as the call went through. But Dean did not answer. Instead, a recorded message came on the line: “Subscriber is not available at this time.”

  She hung up and looked at Korsak. “Is there a problem?”

  “You’re the one looks like she has a problem. You get a fresh lead, and you can’t wait to call your new fibbie pal. What’s going on?”

  “Nothing’s going on.”

  “Doesn’t look that way to me.”

  Heat flooded her face. She was not being honest with him, and they both knew it. Even as she’d dialed Dean’s cell phone number, she’d felt her pulse quicken, and she knew exactly what it meant. She felt like a junkie craving her fix, unable to stop herself from calling his hotel. Turning her back on Korsak’s baleful gaze, she faced out the window as the phone rang.

  “Colonnade.”

  “Could you connect me to one of your guests? His name’s Gabriel Dean.”

  “One minute please.”

  As she waited, she hunted about for the right words to say to him, the right tone of voice. Measured. Businesslike. A cop. You’re a cop.

  The hotel operator came back on the line. “I’m sorry, but Mr. Dean is no longer a guest here.”

  Rizzoli frowned, her grip tightening on the phone. “Did he leave a forwarding number?”

  “There’s none listed.”

  Rizzoli stared out the window, her eyes suddenly dazed by the setting sun. “When did he check out?” she asked.

  “An hour ago.”

  twenty

  Rizzoli closed the file containing the pages faxed from the Maine State Police and focused out the window at the passing woods, at the occasional glimpse of a white farmhouse through the trees. Reading in the car always made her queasy, and the details of Marla Jean Waite’s disappearance only intensified her discomfort. The lunch they’d eaten on the way did not help matters. Frost had been eager to try the lobster rolls from one of the roadside shacks, and although she’d enjoyed the meal at the time, the mayonnaise was now churning in her stomach. She stared at the road ahead, waiting for the nausea to pass. It helped that Frost was a calm and deliberate driver who made no unexpected moves, whose foot was steady on the gas pedal. She’d always appreciated his utter predictability but never more than now, when she herself was feeling so unsettled.

  As she felt better, she began to take note of the natural beauty outside her car window. She’d never ventured this far into Maine before. The farthest north she’d ever made it was as a ten-year-old, when her family had driven to Old Orchard Beach in the summertime. She remembered the boardwalk and the carny rides, blue cotton candy and corn on the cob. And she remembered walking into the sea and how the water was so cold, it pierced straight to her bones like icicles. Yet she had kept wading in, precisely because her mother had warned her not to. “It’s too cold for you, Janie,” Angela had called out. “Stay on the nice warm sand.” And then Jane’s brothers had chimed in: “Yeah, don’t go in, Janie; you’ll freeze off your ugly chicken legs!” So of course she had gone in, striding grim-faced across the sand to where the sea lapped and foamed, and stepping into water that made her gasp. But it was not the water’s cold sting she remembered all these years later; rather, it was the heat of her brothers’ gazes as they watched her from the beach, taunting her, daring her to wade even deeper into that breath-stealing cold. And so she had marched in, the water rising to her thighs, her waist, her shoulders, moving without hesitation, without even a pause to brace herself. She’d pushed on because it was not pain she feared most; it was humiliation.

  Now Old Orchard Beach was a hundred miles behind them and the view she saw from the car looked nothing like the Maine she remembered from her childhood. This far up the coast, there were no boardwalks or carny rides. Instead she saw trees and green fields and the occasional village, each anchored around a white church spire.

  “Alice and I drive up this way every July,” said Frost.

  “I’ve never been up here.”

  “Never?” He glanced at her with a look of surprise she found annoying. A look that said, Where have you been?

  “Never saw any reason to,” she said.

  “Alice’s folks have a camp out on Little Deer Isle. We stay there.”

  “Funny. I never saw Alice as the camping type.”

  “Oh, they just call it a camp. It’s really like a regular house. Real bathrooms and hot water.” Frost laughed. “Alice’d freak out if she had to pee in the woods.”

  “Only animals should have to pee in the woods.”

  “I like the woods. I’d live up here, if I could.”

  “And miss all the excitement of the big city?”

  Frost shook his head. “I tell you what I wouldn’t miss. The bad stuff. Stuff that makes you wonder what the hell’s wrong with people.”

  “You think it’s any better up here?”

  He fell silent, his gaze on the road, a continuous tapestry of trees scrolling past the windows.

  “No,” he finally said. “Since that’s why we’re here.”

  She looked out at t
he trees and thought: The unsub came this way, too. The Dominator, in search of prey. He might have driven this very road, perhaps gazed at these same trees or stopped to eat at that lobster shack at the side of the highway. Not all predators are found in cities. Some wander the back roads or cruise through small towns, the land of trusting neighbors and unlocked doors. Had he been here on vacation and merely spotted an opportunity he could not pass up? Predators go on vacations, too. They take drives in the country and enjoy the smell of the sea, just like everyone else. They are perfectly human.

  Outside, through the trees, she began to catch glimpses of the sea and granite headlands, a rugged view she would have appreciated more were it not for the knowledge that the unsub had been here as well.

  Frost slowed down and his neck craned forward as he scanned the road. “Did we miss the turn?”

  “Which turn?”

  “We were supposed to go right on Cranberry Ridge Road.”

  “I didn’t see it.”

  “We’ve been driving way too long. It should’ve come up by now.”

  “We’re already late.”

  “I know; I know.”

  “We’d better page Gorman. Tell him the dumb city slickers are lost in the woods.” She opened her cell phone and frowned at the weak signal. “You think his beeper’ll work this far out?”

  “Wait,” said Frost. “I think we just got lucky.”

  Up ahead, a vehicle with an official State of Maine license plate was parked at the side of the road. Frost pulled up beside it, and Rizzoli rolled down her window to talk to the driver. Before she could even introduce herself, the man called out to them:

  “You the folks from Boston P.D.?”

  “How’d you guess?” she said.

  “Massachusetts plates. I figured you’d get lost. I’m Detective Gorman.”

  “Rizzoli and Frost. We were just about to page you for directions.”

  “Cell phone’s no good down here at the bottom of the hill. Dead zone. Whyn’t you follow me up the mountain?” He started his car.

  Without Gorman to lead the way, they would have missed Cranberry Ridge entirely. It was merely a dirt road carved through the woods, marked only by a sign tacked to a post: FIRE ROAD 24. They bounced along ruts, through a dense tunnel of trees that hid all views as they climbed, the road winding in switchbacks. Then the woods gave way to a burst of sunlight, and they saw terraced gardens and a green field rolling up to a sprawling house at the top of the hill. The view so startled Frost that he abruptly slowed down as they both stared.