The Apprentice

“Then why the FBI interest?”

Korsak thought it over. “Maybe the Yeagers had friends in high places. Someone who’s now screaming for justice.”

“Wouldn’t Dean just come out and tell us that?”

“Fibbies never like to tell you anything,” said Korsak.

She looked back at the building. It was nearly midnight, and they had not yet seen Maura Isles leave. When Rizzoli had walked out of the autopsy suite, Isles had been dictating her report and had scarcely even waved good night. The Queen of the Dead paid scant attention to the living.

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 go

“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 di

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 go

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 E

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 if 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.