The Apprentice

“Hey! Hey!” shouted Korsak. He was ru

She braked just long enough to let him scramble in and yank his door shut. Then she floored the accelerator, flinging him back against his seat.

“What the fuck, you go

“Buckle up.”

“I’m not just some ride-along.”

“Buckle up!”

He dragged his seat belt over his shoulder and snapped it shut. Even over the voices chattering on the radio, she could hear his labored breathing, wet with mucousy wheezes.

“Watcher One, responding to the ten fifty-four,” she said to Dispatch.

“Your ten-ten?”

“E

“You’ll be first on the scene.”

“Situation?”

“No further information. Assume ten fifty-eight.”

Armed and believed dangerous.

Rizzoli’s foot was lead on the pedal. The road to Fairview Cemetery came up so fast she almost missed it. They took the turn with tires screaming, Rizzoli wrestling the wheel for control.

“Whoa!” gasped Korsak as they nearly slammed into a row of roadside boulders. The wrought-iron gate hung open and she drove through. The cemetery was unlit, and beyond her headlights were rolling lawns, gravestones jutting up like white teeth.

A vehicle from a private security patrol was parked a hundred yards from the cemetery gate. The driver’s door was open and the dome light was glowing. Rizzoli braked and was already reaching for her weapon as she stepped out, the reflex so automatic she did not even register the action. Too many other details were assaulting her: The smell of freshly mown grass and damp earth. The punch of her heartbeat against her breastbone.

And the fear. As her gaze swept the darkness, she felt the icy lick of fear because she knew that if the cab was a setup, then this could be, too. A bloody game that she had not even been aware she was part of.

She froze, her eyes focusing on a puddle of shadow near the base of a memorial obelisk. Aiming her Maglite, she saw the security guard’s crumpled body.

As she stepped toward him, she smelled the blood. There was no other scent like it, and it rang primitive alarms in her brain. She knelt down on grass that was wet with it, still warm with it. Korsak was right beside her, shining his flashlight as well, and she could hear his snuffling breaths, the piggy noises he always made when he’d exerted himself.

The guard was lying facedown. She rolled him onto his back.

“Jesus!” yelped Korsak, jerking away with such violence his flashlight beam shot wildly toward the sky.

Rizzoli’s beam was trembling as well as she stared at the nearly severed neck, nubs of cartilage gleaming whitely from the butchered flesh. Man down, all right. Down, out, and barely attached to his own head.

Flashing blue lights cut through the night, a surreal kaleidoscope weaving toward them. She rose to her feet, and her slacks were sticky with blood, the fabric adhering to her knees. Eyes narrowed against the glare of approaching cruisers, she turned away, facing the black expanse of the cemetery. In that instant, as the advancing headlights cut an arc through the darkness, an image froze on her retinas: a figure, moving among the headstones. It was just a split second’s glimpse, and in the next pulse of light the figure was lost in the sea of jutting marble and granite.

“Korsak,” she said. “Someone moving-two o’clock.”

“Can’t see a damn thing.”

She stared. Saw it again, moving down the slope, toward the cover of trees. In an instant she was sprinting, weaving through the obstacle course of headstones, feet pounding across the sleeping dead. She heard Korsak close behind, wheezing like an accordion, but he couldn’t keep up. Within seconds she was on her own, legs pumping on the rocket fuel of adrenaline. She was almost to the trees, closing in on where she had last spotted the figure, but she saw no moving silhouettes, no flitting of darkness across darkness. She slowed, stopped, her gaze sweeping back and forth, seeking the slightest movement in the shadows.

Though she was now at a standstill, her pulse accelerated, driven by fear. By the skin-crawling certainty that he was nearby. He was watching her. Yet she was reluctant to turn on her flashlight, to send out a beacon a

The snap of a twig made her whirl to her right. The trees loomed in front of her, an impenetrable black curtain. Through the roar of her own blood, the rush of air through her lungs, she heard leaves rustle and more twigs crack.

He is walking toward me.

She dropped to a crouch, weapon aimed, nerves honed to a hair trigger.

The footsteps suddenly stopped.

She snapped on the Maglite and shone it dead ahead. Saw him, then, dressed in black, standing among the trees. Caught in the beam of light, he twisted away, arm rising to shield his eyes.

“Freeze!” she yelled. “Police!”

The man went perfectly still, his face turned, his hand reaching toward his face. He said, quietly, “I’m going to take off my goggles.”

“No, asshole! You’re going to freeze right where you are.”

“And then what, Detective Rizzoli? Shall we exchange badges? Pat each other down?”

She stared, suddenly recognizing the voice. Slowly, deliberately, Gabriel Dean removed his goggles and turned to face her. With the light in his eyes, he could not see her, but she could see him just fine, and his expression was cool and composed. With the flashlight she made a vertical sweep of his body, saw black clothes, a weapon holstered at his hip. And in his hand, the night-vision goggles which he’d just removed. Korsak’s words shot straight to mind: Mr. James Fucking Bond.

Dean took a step toward her.

Instantly her weapon snapped up. “Stay right where you are.”

“Easy, Rizzoli. No reason to shoot my head off.”

“Isn’t there?”

“I’m just walking closer. So we can talk.”

“We can talk fine from this distance.”

He looked toward the flashing lights of the cruisers. “Who do you suppose radioed in the homicide call?”

She held steady, didn’t let her aim waver.

“Use your head, Detective. I assume you’ve got a good one.” He took another step.

“Just fucking freeze right there.”

“Okay.” He held up his hands. Said again, lightly, “Okay.”

“What are you doing here?”

“Same thing you are. This is where the action is.”

“How did you know? If you’re the one who called in that ten fifty-four, how did you know the action was here?”

“I didn’t.”

“You just happened to come along and find him?”

“I heard Dispatch call for a property check of Fairview Cemetery. A possible trespasser.”

“So?”

“So I wondered if it was our unsub.”

“You wondered?”

“Yes.”

“You must have had a good reason.”

“Instinct.”

“Don’t bullshit me, Dean. You turn up fully dressed for night ops, and I’m supposed to believe you just moseyed on over to check out a trespasser?”

“My instincts are good.”

“You’d have to have ESP to be that good.”

“We’re wasting time here, Detective. Either arrest me or work with me.”

“I’m leaning toward the first choice.”

He regarded her with an unruffled expression. There was too much he wasn’t telling her, too many secrets she’d never get out of him. Not here, not tonight. At last she lowered her weapon but did not holster it. Gabriel Dean didn’t inspire that level of trust.

“Since you were first on the scene, what did you see?”

“I found the security guard already down. I used his car radio to call Dispatch. The blood was still warm. I thought there was a chance our boy’d be close by. So I went looking.”

She gave a dubious snort. “In the trees?”