The Apprentice

“I didn’t notice that,” said Isles.

Pepe smiled. “I’m glad there’s something left to teach you, Dr. Isles. You’re begi

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 begi

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 fu

“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 ca

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 begi

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 crosschecked 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.