The Apprentice

“Never saw any reason to,” she said.

“Alice’s folks have a camp out on Little Deer Isle. We stay there.”

“Fu

“Oh, they just call it a camp. It’s really like a regular house. Real bathrooms and hot water.” Frost laughed. “Alice’d freak out if she had to pee in the woods.”

“Only animals should have to pee in the woods.”

“I like the woods. I’d live up here, if I could.”

“And miss all the excitement of the big city?” Frost shook his head. “I tell you what I wouldn’t miss. The bad stuff. Stuff that makes you wonder what the hell’s wrong with people.”

“You think it’s any better up here?” He fell silent, his gaze on the road, a continuous tapestry of trees scrolling past the windows.

“No,” he finally said. “Since that’s why we’re here.” She looked out at the trees and thought: The unsub came this way, too. The Dominator, in search of prey. He might have driven this very road, perhaps gazed at these same trees or stopped to eat at that lobster shack at the side of the highway. Not all predators are found in cities. Some wander the back roads or cruise through small towns, the land of trusting neighbors and unlocked doors. Had he been here on vacation and merely spotted an opportunity he could not pass up? Predators go on vacations, too. They take drives in the country and enjoy the smell of the sea, just like everyone else. They are perfectly human.

Outside, through the trees, she began to catch glimpses of the sea and granite headlands, a rugged view she would have appreciated more were it not for the knowledge that the unsub had been here as well.

Frost slowed down and his neck craned forward as he sca

“Which turn?”

“We were supposed to go right on Cranberry Ridge Road.”

“I didn’t see it.”

“We’ve been driving way too long. It should’ve come up by now.”

“We’re already late.”

“I know; I know.”

“We’d better page Gorman. Tell him the dumb city slickers are lost in the woods.” She opened her cell phone and frowned at the weak signal. “You think his beeper’ll work this far out?”

“Wait,” said Frost. “I think we just got lucky.”

Up ahead, a vehicle with an official State of Maine license plate was parked at the side of the road. Frost pulled up beside it, and Rizzoli rolled down her window to talk to the driver. Before she could even introduce herself, the man called out to them:

“You the folks from Boston P.D.?”

“How’d you guess?” she said.

“Massachusetts plates. I figured you’d get lost. I’m Detective Gorman.”

“Rizzoli and Frost. We were just about to page you for directions.”

“Cell phone’s no good down here at the bottom of the hill. Dead zone. Whyn’t you follow me up the mountain?” He started his car.

Without Gorman to lead the way, they would have missed Cranberry Ridge entirely. It was merely a dirt road carved through the woods, marked only by a sign tacked to a post: fire road 24. They bounced along ruts, through a dense tu

“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 Maria 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 wind-blown 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 Maria 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 Ke

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 Ke

“Where did it come from?”

“Grandparents. Shipping industry, I think. Ke

“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 Maria 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?”