The Apprentice (22 page)

“He needs a shave,” said Diane.

Such a trivial concern, yet it was the one spontaneous remark Diane had made. She had not moved a muscle but sat perfectly motionless, hands still limp, her placid expression carved in stone.

Rizzoli searched for something to say, something she thought she
should
say to comfort her, and settled on a cliche. “He’s a fighter. He won’t give up easily.”

Her words dropped like stones into a bottomless pond. No ripples, no effect. A long silence passed before Diane’s flat blue eyes at last focused on her.

“I’m afraid I’ve forgotten your name again.”

“Jane Rizzoli. Your husband and I were working a stakeout together.”

“Oh. You’re the one.”

Rizzoli paused, suddenly stricken by guilt.
Yes, I’m the one. The one who abandoned him. Who left him lying alone in the darkness because I was so frantic to salvage my fucked-up night
.

“Thank you,” said Diane.

Rizzoli frowned. “For what?”

“For whatever you did. To help him.”

Rizzoli looked into the woman’s vague blue eyes, and for the first time she noticed the tightly constricted pupils. The eyes of the anesthetized, she thought. Diane Korsak was in a narcotic daze.

Rizzoli looked at Korsak. Remembered the night she had called him to the Ghent death scene and he’d arrived intoxicated. She remembered, too, the night they had stood together in the M.E.‘s parking lot and Korsak had seemed reluctant to go home. Is this what he faced every evening? This woman with her blank stare and her robot voice?

You never told me. And I never bothered to ask.

She moved to the bed and squeezed his hand. Recalled how his moist handshake had once repelled her. Not today; today, she would have rejoiced had he squeezed back. But the hand in hers remained limp.

It was eleven A.M. when she finally walked into her apartment. She turned the two dead bolts, pressed the button lock, and fastened the chain. Once, she would have thought all these locks were a sign of paranoia; once, she’d been satisfied with a simple knob lock and a weapon in her nightstand drawer. But a year ago Warren Hoyt had changed her life, and her door had since acquired these gleaming brass accessories. She stared at her array of locks, suddenly struck by how much she had become like every other victim of violent crime, desperate to barricade her home and shut out the world.

The Surgeon had done this to her.

And now this new unsub, the Dominator, had added his voice to the chorus of monsters braying outside her door. Gabriel Dean had understood at once that the choice of the grave on which Karenna Ghent’s corpse had been deposited was no accident. Although the tenant of that grave, Anthony Rizzoli, was not her relation, their shared name was clearly a message intended for her.

The Dominator knows my name.

She did not remove her holster until she had made the complete walk-through of her apartment. It was not a large space, and it took less than a minute to glance in the kitchen and the living room, then move down the short hallway to her bedroom, where she opened the closet, peeked under the bed. Only then did she unbuckle her holster and slip the weapon into her nightstand drawer. She peeled off her clothes and went into the bathroom. She locked the door—yet another automatic reflex, and completely unnecessary, but it was the only way she could step into the shower and summon the nerve to pull the curtain shut. Moments later, her hair still slick with conditioner, she was seized by the feeling that she was not alone. She yanked open the curtain and stared at the empty bathroom, her heart hammering, the water streaming down her shoulders and onto the floor.

She turned off the faucet. Leaned back against the tiled wall, breathing deeply, waiting for her heartbeat to slow. Through the
whoosh
of her own pulse she heard the hum of the ventilation fan. The rumble of pipes in her building. Everyday sounds that she had never bothered to register until now, when their very ordinariness served as a blessed focus.

By the time her heartbeat finally slowed to normal, the water had chilled on her skin. She stepped out, toweled off, then knelt down to mop up the wet floor as well. For all her swaggering at work, her tough-cop act, she was now reduced to little more than shivering flesh. She saw, in the mirror, how fear had changed her. Staring back was a woman who had lost weight, whose already slim frame was slowly melting into gauntness. Whose face, once square and sturdy, now seemed thin as a wraith’s, the eyes large and dark in their deepening hollows.

She fled the mirror and went into the bedroom. Hair still damp, she sank onto her bed and lay with eyes open, knowing she should try to catch at least a few hours’ sleep. But daylight winked brightly through the cracks in the window blinds, and she could hear traffic in the street below. It was noon, and she had been awake for nearly thirty hours and had not eaten in nearly twelve. Yet she could summon up neither an appetite nor the will to fall asleep. The events of that early morning still buzzed like a current through her nervous system, the memories crackling in a recurrent loop. She saw the security guard’s throat gaping open, his head turned at an impossible angle from his torso. She saw Karenna Ghent, leaves scattered in her hair.

And she saw Korsak, his body bristling with tubes and wires.

The three images cycled in her head like a strobe light, and she could not shut them off. She could not silence the buzzing. Was this what insanity felt like?

Weeks ago, Dr. Zucker had urged her to seek counseling and she had angrily brushed him off. Now she wondered if he had detected something in her words, her gaze, that even she had not been aware of. The first cracks in her sanity, shearing deeper and wider, since the Surgeon had rocked her life.

The ringing phone awakened her. It seemed that she’d only just closed her eyes, and the first emotion that bubbled up as she groped for the phone was rage, that she could not be granted even a moment’s rest. She answered with a curt: “Rizzoli.”

“Uh… Detective Rizzoli, this is Yoshima at the M.E.‘s office. Dr. Isles was expecting you to come in for the Ghent postmortem.”

“I am coming in.”

“Well, she’s already started, and—”

“What time is it?”

“Nearly four. We tried to page you, but you didn’t answer.”

She sat up so abruptly the room spun. She gave her head a shake and stared at the clock by her bed: 3:52. She had slept right through her alarm, as well as the sound of her pager. “I’m sorry,” she said.“

“I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

“Hold on a minute. Dr. Isles wants to speak to you.”

She heard the clang of instruments on a metal tray; then Dr. Isles’s voice came on the phone. “Detective Rizzoli, you are coming in, right?”

“It’ll take me half an hour to get there.”

“Then we’ll wait for you.”

“I don’t mean to hold you up.”

“Dr. Tierney is coming in as well. You both need to see this.”

This was highly unusual. With all the pathologists on call to choose from, why would Dr. Isles call Dr. Tierney back from his recent retirement?

“Is there some sort of problem?” asked Rizzoli. “That wound on the victim’s abdomen,” said Dr. Isles. “It’s not just a simple slash. It’s a surgical incision.”

Dr. Tierney was already garbed and standing in the autopsy room when Rizzoli arrived. Like Dr. Isles, he normally shunned the use of a respirator, and tonight his only facial protection was a plastic shield, through which Rizzoli could read his grim expression. Everyone in the room looked equally somber, and they regarded Rizzoli with unnerving silence as she entered the room. By now, the presence of Agent Dean no longer surprised her, and she acknowledged his gaze with only a faint nod, wondering if he had managed to catch a few hours’ sleep as well. For the first time she saw fatigue in his eyes. Even Gabriel Dean was slowly being ground down by the weight of this investigation.

“What have I missed?” she asked. Not yet ready to confront the remains, she kept her gaze on Isles.

“We’ve completed the external examination. The criminalists have already taped for fibers, collected nail clippings, and combed hairs.”

“What about the vaginal swabs?”

Isles nodded. “There was motile sperm.” Rizzoli took a breath and finally focused on the body of Karenna Ghent. The foul odor nearly overwhelmed the Vicks menthol that, for the first time, she had dabbed under her nostrils. She no longer trusted her own stomach. So much had gone wrong these last few weeks, and she’d lost confidence in the very strengths that had sustained her through other investigations. When she’d stepped in this room, what she’d dreaded wasn’t the autopsy itself; rather, it was her own response to it. She could not predict, nor control, how she would react, and this, more than anything else, was what frightened her.

She’d eaten a handful of crackers at home so that she would not face this ordeal on an empty stomach, and she was relieved not to feel even a twinge of nausea despite the odors, despite the grotesque condition of the remains. She was able to maintain her composure as she regarded the liverish-green abdomen. The Y-incision had not yet been made. The single gaping wound was the one thing she could not bring herself to look at. Instead, she focused on the neck, on the discoid bruises, visible even against the underlying postmortem discoloration, under both angles of the jaw. The marks left by the killer’s fingers, pressing into flesh.

“Manual strangulation,” said Isles. “Like Gail Yeager.”

The most intimate way to kill someone
, Dr. Zucker had called it.
Skin to skin. Your hands against her flesh. Pressing her throat as you feel her life drain away
.

“And the X-rays?”

“A fracture of the left thyroid horn.”

Dr. Tierney cut in, “It’s not the neck that concerns us. It’s the wound. I suggest you put on a pair of gloves, Detective. You’ll need to examine this yourself.” He crossed to the cabinet where the gloves were stored. Took her time pulling on a pair of Smalls, using the delay to steel herself. At last she turned back to the table.

Dr. Isles already had the overhead light focused on the
lower
abdomen. The edges of the wound gaped like opened lips.

“The skin layer was opened with a single clean slice,”
said
Dr. Isles. “Made with a nonserrated blade. Once through the skin, deeper incisions followed. First the superficial fascia, then the muscle, and finally the pelvic peritoneum.”

Rizzoli stared into the maw of the wound, thinking of the hand that had held the blade, a hand so steady that it had traced the incision with a single confident slice.

She asked, softly: “Was the victim alive when this was done?”

“No. He used no suture, and there was no bleeding. This was a postmortem excision, performed after the patient’s heart stopped, after circulation ceased. The manner in which this procedure was done—the methodical sequence of incisions—indicates he has had surgical experience. He’s done this before.”

Dr. Tierney said, “Go ahead, Detective. Examine the wound.”

She hesitated, her hands chilled to ice in the latex gloves. Slowly she slipped her hand into the incision, burrowing deep into the pelvis of Karenna Ghent. She knew exactly what she would find, yet she was still shaken by the discovery. She looked at Dr. Tierney and saw confirmation in his eyes.

“The uterus was removed,” he said.

She pulled her hand from the pelvis. “It’s him,” she said softly. “Warren Hoyt did this.”

“Yet everything else is consistent with the Dominator,” said Gabriel Dean. “The abduction, the strangulation. Postmortem intercourse—”

“But not this,” she said, staring at the wound. “This is Hoyt’s fantasy. This is what turns him on. The cutting, the taking of the very organ that defines them as women and gives them a power he’ll never have.” She looked straight at Dean. “I know his work. I’ve seen it before.”

“We both have,” Dr. Tierney said to Dean. “I performed the autopsies last year, on Hoyt’s victims. This is his technique.”

Dean shook his head in disbelief. “Two different killers? Combining techniques?”

“The Dominator and the Surgeon,” said Rizzoli. “They’ve found each other.”

She sat in her car, warm air blasting from the AC vent, sweat beading on her face. Even the night’s heat could not dispel the chill she still felt from the autopsy room. I must be coming down with a virus, she thought, massaging her temples. And no wonder; she had been going full throttle for days, and now it was catching up with her. Her head ached and all she wanted to do was crawl into bed and sleep for a week.

She drove straight home. Walked into her apartment and once again performed the ritual that had become such an important part of maintaining her sanity. The turning of the dead bolts, the sliding of the chain into its groove, were performed with deliberate care, and only after she completed her security checklist and had locked every lock, peered into every closet, did she finally kick off her shoes, peel off her slacks and blouse. Stripped down to her underwear, she sank onto the bed and sat massaging her temples, wondering if she still had any aspirin in the medicine cabinet yet feeling too drained to get up and look.

Her apartment intercom buzzed. She snapped straight, pulse galloping, alarms lighting up every nerve. She was not expecting visitors, nor did she want any.

The buzzer rang again, the sound like steel wool against raw nerve endings.

She rose and went into the living room to press the intercom button. “Yes?”

“It’s Gabriel Dean. May I come up?”

Of all people, his was the last voice she’d expected to hear. She was so startled that for a moment she didn’t respond.

“Detective Rizzoli?” he said.

“What is this about, Agent Dean?”

“The autopsy. There are issues we need to talk about.”

She pressed the lock release and almost immediately wished she hadn’t. She didn’t trust Dean, yet she was about to let him into the safe haven of her apartment. With the careless press of a button, the decision had been made, and now she could not change her mind.