The Apprentice: A Novel

by Tess Gerritsen

  “You’d never guess,” he said. “You see that crummy dirt road, and you figure it leads to a shack or a trailer. Nothing like this.”

  “Maybe that’s the point of the crummy road.”

  “Keep out the riffraff?”

  “Yeah. Only it didn’t work, did it?”

  By the time they pulled up behind Gorman’s car, he was already standing in the driveway, waiting to shake their hands. Like Frost, he was dressed in a suit, but his was ill-fitting, as though he’d lost a great deal of weight since he’d bought it. His face, too, reflected the shadow of an old illness, the skin sallow and drooping.

  He handed Rizzoli a file and videotape. “Crime scene video,” he said. “We’re getting the rest of the files copied for you. Some of them are in my trunk—you can take them when you leave.”

  “Dr. Isles will be sending you the final report on the remains,” Rizzoli said.

  “Cause of death?”

  She shook her head. “Skeletonized. Can’t be determined.”

  Gorman sighed and looked toward the house. “Well, at least we know where Marla Jean is now. That’s what drove me nuts.” He gestured toward the house. “There’s not much to see inside. It’s been cleaned up. But you asked.”

  “Who’s living here now?” asked Frost.

  “No one. Not since the murder.”

  “Awfully nice house, to go empty.”

  “It’s stuck in probate. Even if they could put it on the market, it’ll be a hard sell.”

  They walked up the steps to a porch where windblown leaves had collected and pots of withered geraniums hung from the eaves. It appeared that no one had swept or watered in weeks, and already an air of neglect had settled like cobwebs over the house.

  “Haven’t been in here since July,” said Gorman as he took out a key ring and searched for the correct key. “I just got back to work last week, and I’m still trying to get back up to speed. Let me tell you, that hepatitis’ll kick the wind out of your sails but good. And I only had the mild kind, Type A. Least it won’t kill me. . . .” He glanced up at his visitors. “Piece of advice: Don’t eat shellfish in Mexico.”

  At last he found the right key and unlocked the door. Stepping inside, Rizzoli inhaled the odors of fresh paint and floor wax, the smells of a house scrubbed down and sanitized. And then abandoned, she thought, gazing at the ghostly forms of sheet-draped furniture in the living room. White oak floors gleamed like polished glass. Sunlight streamed in through floor-to-ceiling windows. Here, at the top of the mountain, they were perched above the claustrophic grip of the woods, and the views ran all the way down to Blue Hill Bay. A jet scratched a white line across blue sky, and below, a boat tore a wake in the water’s surface. She stood for a moment at the window, staring at the same vista that Marla Jean Waite had surely enjoyed.

  “Tell us about these people,” she said.

  “You read the file I faxed you?”

  “Yes. But I didn’t get a sense of who they were. What made them tick.”

  “Do we ever really know?”

  She turned to face him and was struck by the faintly yellowish cast of his eyes. The afternoon sunlight seemed to emphasize his sickly color. “Let’s start with Kenneth. It’s all his money, isn’t it?”

  Gorman nodded. “He was an asshole.”

  “That I didn’t read in the report.”

  “Some things you just can’t say in reports. But that’s the general consensus around town. You know, we have a lot of trust funders like Kenny up here. Blue Hill’s now the in place for rich refugees from Boston. Most of them get along okay. But every so often, you run into a Kenny Waite, who plays this do-you-know-who-I-am? game. Yeah, they all knew who he was. He was someone with money.”

  “Where did it come from?”

  “Grandparents. Shipping industry, I think. Kenny sure didn’t earn it himself. But he did like to spend it. Had a nice Hinckley down in the harbor. And he used to tear back and forth to Boston in this red Ferrari. Till he lost his license and had his car impounded. Too many OUIs.” Gorman grunted. “I think that pretty much sums up Kenneth Waite the Third. A lot of money, not much brains.”

  “What a waste,” said Frost.

  “You have kids?”

  Frost shook his head. “Not yet.”

  “You want to raise a bunch of useless kids,” said Gorman, “all you gotta do is leave ’em money.”

  “What about Marla Jean?” said Rizzoli. She remembered the remains of Rickets Lady laid out on the autopsy table. The bowed tibias and misshapen breastbone—skeletal evidence of an impoverished childhood. “She didn’t start out with money. Did she?”

  Gorman shook his head. “She grew up in a coal-mining town, down in West Virginia. Came up here to take a summer job as a waitress. That’s how she met Kenny. I think he married her because she was the only one who’d put up with his crap. But it didn’t sound like a happy marriage. Especially after the accident.”

  “Accident?”

  “Few years ago. Kenny was driving, boozed up as usual. Ran his car into a tree. He walked away without a scratch—just his luck, right? But Marla Jean ended up in the hospital for three months.”

  “That must be when she broke her thighbone.”

  “What?”

  “There was a surgical rod in her femur. And two fused vertebrae.”

  Gorman nodded. “I heard she had a limp. A real shame, too, ’cause she was a nice-looking woman.”

  And ugly women don’t mind limping, Rizzoli thought, but held her tongue. She crossed to a wall of built-in shelves and studied a photograph of a couple in bathing suits. They were standing on a beach, turquoise water lapping at their ankles. The woman was elfin, almost childlike, her dark-brown hair falling to her shoulders. Now corpse hair, Rizzoli couldn’t help thinking. The man was fair-haired, his waist already starting to thicken, muscle turning to flab. What might have been an attractive face was ruined by his vague expression of disdain.

  “The marriage was unhappy?” said Rizzoli.

  “That’s what the housekeeper told me. After the accident, Marla Jean didn’t want to travel much. Kenny could only drag her as far as Boston. But Kenny, he was used to heading for St. Bart’s every January, so he’d just leave her here.”

  “Alone?”

  Gorman nodded. “Nice guy, huh? She had a housekeeper who’d run errands for her. Did the cleaning. Took her shopping, since Marla Jean didn’t like to drive. Kind of a lonely place up here, but the housekeeper thought Marla Jean actually seemed happier when Kenny wasn’t around.” Gorman paused. “I have to admit, after we found Kenny, the possibility kind of crossed my mind that . . .”

  “That Marla Jean did it,” said Rizzoli.

  “It’s always the first consideration.” He reached into his jacket for a handkerchief and wiped his face. “Does it seem hot in here to you?”

  “It’s warm.”

  “I’m not too good with the heat these days. Body’s still out of whack. That’s what I get for eating clams in Mexico.”

  They crossed the living room, past the spectral forms of sheet-draped furniture, past a massive stone fireplace with a neat bundle of split logs stacked beside the hearth. Fuel to feed the flames on a chilly Maine night. Gorman led them to an area of the room where there was only bare floor and the wall was a blank white, undecorated. Rizzoli stared at the fresh coat of paint, and the hairs on the back of her neck stirred and bristled. She looked down at the floor and saw that the oak was paler here, sanded and revarnished. But blood is not so easily obliterated, and were they to darken the room and spray with luminol, the floor would still cry with blood, its chemical traces embedded too deeply into the cracks and grain of the wood to ever be completely erased.

  “Kenny was propped up here,” said Gorman, pointing to the newly painted wall. “Legs out in front of him, arms behind him. Wrists and ankles bound with duct tape. Single slash to the neck, Rambo-type knife.”

  “There were no other wounds?” asked Rizzoli.
>
  “Just the neck. Like an execution.”

  “Stun gun marks?”

  Gorman paused. “You know, he was here about two days when the housekeeper found him. Two warm days. By then, the skin wasn’t looking too good. Not to mention smelling too good. Could’ve easily missed a stun gun mark.”

  “Did you ever examine this floor under an alternate light source?”

  “It was pretty much a bloody mess in here. I’m not sure what we would have seen under a Luma-lite. But it’s all on the crime scene video.” He glanced around the room and spotted the TV and VCR. “Why don’t we take a look at it? It should answer most of your questions.”

  Rizzoli crossed to the TV, pressed the ON buttons, and inserted the tape into the slot. The Home Shopping Network blared from the TV, featuring a zirconium pendant necklace for only $99.95, its facets sparkling on the throat of a swan-necked model.

  “These things drive me crazy,” Rizzoli said, fiddling with two different remotes. “I never did learn how to program mine.” She glanced at Frost.

  “Hey, don’t ask me.”

  Gorman sighed and took the remote. The zirconium-bedecked model suddenly vanished, replaced by a view of the Waites’ driveway. Wind hissed in the microphone, distorting the cameraman’s voice as he stated his name, Detective Pardee, the time, date, and location. It was five P.M. on June 2, a blustery day, the trees swaying. Pardee turned the camera toward the house and began walking up the steps, the camera’s image jittering on the TV. Rizzoli saw geraniums blooming in pots, the same geraniums that were now dead from neglect. A voice was heard, calling to Pardee, and the screen went blank for a few seconds.

  “The front door was found unlocked,” said Gorman. “Housekeeper said that wasn’t unusual. People around here often leave their doors unlocked. She assumed someone was home, since Marla Jean never goes anywhere. She knocked first, but there was no answer.”

  A fresh image suddenly sprang into view on-screen, the camera aimed through the open doorway, straight into the living room. This was what the housekeeper must have registered as she opened the door. As the stench, and the horror, washed over her.

  “She took maybe one step into the house,” said Gorman. “Saw Kenny up against the far wall. And all that blood. Doesn’t remember seeing much of anything else. Just wanted to get the hell out of the house. Jumped in her car and hit the gas pedal so hard her tires dug tracks in the gravel.”

  The camera moved into the room, panning across furniture, closing in on the main event: Kenneth Waite III, dressed only in boxer shorts, his head lolling to his chest. Early decomposition had bloated his features. The gas-filled abdomen ballooned out, and the face was swollen beyond resemblance to anything human. But it wasn’t the face she focused on; it was the object of incongruous delicacy, placed on his thighs.

  “We didn’t know what to make of that,” said Gorman. “It looked to me like some sort of symbolic artifact. That’s how I classified it. A way of ridiculing the victim. ‘Look at me, all tied up, with this stupid teacup on my lap.’ It’s just what a wife might do to her husband, to show how much she despises him.” He sighed. “But that’s when I thought it might be Marla Jean who did it.”

  The camera turned from the corpse and was moving up the hallway now. Retracing the killer’s steps, toward the bedroom where Kenny and Marla Jean had slept. The image swayed like the stomach-churning view through the porthole of a rocking ship. The camera paused at each doorway to offer a glimpse inside. First a bathroom, then a guest bedroom. As it continued up the hallway, Rizzoli’s pulse quickened. Without realizing it, she had stepped closer to the TV, as though she, and not Pardee, were the one walking up that long corridor.

  Suddenly a view of the master bedroom swung onto the screen. Windows with green damask curtains. A dresser and wardrobe, both painted white, and the closet door. A four-poster bed, the covers pulled back, almost stripped off.

  “They were surprised while sleeping,” said Gorman. “Kenny’s stomach was almost empty of food. At the time he was killed, he hadn’t eaten for at least eight hours.”

  Rizzoli moved even closer to the TV, her gaze rapidly scanning the screen. Now Pardee turned back to the hallway.

  “Rewind it,” she said to Gorman.

  “Why?”

  “Just go back. To when we first see the bedroom.”

  Gorman handed her the remote. “It’s yours.”

  She hit REWIND, and the tape whined backward. Once again Pardee was in the hallway, approaching the master bedroom. Once again, the view swept toward the right, slowly panning across the dresser, the wardrobe, the closet doors, then focusing on the bed. Frost was now standing right beside her, searching for the same thing.

  She hit PAUSE. “It’s not there.”

  “What isn’t?” said Gorman.

  “The folded nightclothes.” She turned to him. “You didn’t find any?”

  “I didn’t know I was supposed to.”

  “It’s part of the Dominator’s signature. He folds the woman’s nightclothes. Displays them in the bedroom as a symbol of his control.”

  “If it’s him, he didn’t do it here.”

  “Everything else about this matches him. The duct tape, the teacup on the lap. The position of the male victim.”

  “What you see is what we found.”

  “You’re sure nothing was moved before the video was filmed?”

  It was not a tactful question, and Gorman stiffened. “Well, I guess it’s always possible the first officer on the scene walked in here and decided to move stuff around, just to make things interesting for us.”

  Frost, ever the diplomat, stepped in to smooth the chop that Rizzoli so often trailed in her wake. “It’s not like this perp keeps a checklist. Looks like this time, he varied it a little.”

  “If it’s the same guy,” Gorman said.

  Rizzoli turned from the TV and looked, once again, at the wall where Kenny had died and slowly bloated in the heat. She thought of the Yeagers and the Ghents, of duct tape and sleeping victims, of the many-stranded web of details that bound these cases so tightly to one another.

  But here, in this house, the Dominator left out a step. He did not fold the nightclothes. Because he and Hoyt were not yet a team.

  She remembered the afternoon in the Yeagers’ house, her gaze frozen on Gail Yeager’s nightgown, and she remembered the bone-chilling sense of familiarity.

  Only with the Yeagers did the Surgeon and the Dominator begin their alliance. That was the day they lured me into the game, with a folded nightgown. Even from prison, Warren Hoyt managed to send me his calling card.

  She looked at Gorman, who had settled onto one of the sheet-draped chairs and was once again wiping the sweat from his face. Already this meeting had drained him, and he was fading before their eyes.

  “You never identified any suspects?” she asked.

  “No one we could hang a hat on. That’s after four, five hundred interviews.”

  “And the Waites, as far as you know, weren’t acquainted with either the Yeagers or the Ghents?”

  “Those names never came up. Look, you’ll get copies of all our files in a day or two. You can cross-check everything we have.” Gorman folded up his handkerchief and slipped it back in his jacket pocket. “You might want to check the FBI as well,” he added. “See if they have anything to add.”

  Rizzoli paused. “The FBI?”

  “We sent a VICAP report way back. An agent from their behavioral unit came up. Spent a few weeks monitoring our investigation, then went back to Washington. Haven’t heard a word from him since.”

  Rizzoli and Frost looked at each other. She saw her own astonishment reflected in his eyes.

  Gorman slowly rose from the chair and took out the keys, a hint that he would like to end this meeting. Only as he was walking toward the door did Rizzoli finally summon the voice to ask the obvious question. Even though she did not want to hear the answer.

  “The FBI agent who came up here,” she
said. “Do you remember his name?”

  Gorman paused in the doorway, clothes drooping on his gaunt frame. “Yes. His name was Gabriel Dean.”

  twenty-one

  She drove straight through the afternoon and into the night, her eyes on the dark highway, her mind on Gabriel Dean. Frost had dozed off beside her, and she was alone with her own thoughts, her rage. What else had Dean withheld from her? she wondered. What other information had he hoarded while watching her scramble for answers? From the very beginning, he had been a few steps ahead of her. The first to reach the dead security guard in the cemetery. The first to spot Karenna Ghent’s body posed atop the grave. The first to suggest the wet prep during Gail Yeager’s autopsy. He had already known, before any of them, that it would reveal live sperm. Because he’s encountered the Dominator before.

  But what Dean had not anticipated was that the Dominator would take a partner. That’s when Dean showed up at my apartment. That’s the first time he took an interest in me. Because I had something he wanted, something he needed. I was his guide into the mind of Warren Hoyt.

  Beside her Frost gave a noisy snort in his sleep. She glanced at him and saw that his jaw hung slack, the picture of unguarded innocence. Not once, in all the time they’d worked together, had she seen a dark side to Barry Frost. But Dean’s deception had so thoroughly shaken her that now, looking at Frost, she wondered what he, too, concealed from her. What cruelties even he kept hidden from view.

  It was nearly nine when she finally walked into her apartment. As always, she took the time to secure the locks on her door, but this time it was not fear that possessed her as she fastened the chain and turned the dead bolts, but anger. She drove the last bolt home with a hard snap, then walked straight to the bedroom without pausing to perform her usual rituals of checking the closets and glancing into every room. Dean’s betrayal had temporarily driven out all thoughts of Warren Hoyt. She unbuckled her holster, slid the weapon into her nightstand drawer, and slammed the drawer shut. Then she turned and looked at herself in the dresser mirror, disgusted by what she saw. The medusa’s cap of unruly hair. The wounded gaze. The face of a woman who has let a man’s attractions blind her to the obvious.