The Apprentice

She peered through the passenger window and saw it was Gabriel Dean behind the wheel.

The lock clicked open and she slid into the seat beside him. She had not expected to face him so soon, and she felt unprepared. Resentful that he appeared so calm and in control while she was still disoriented by the morning’s travel.

“Welcome to Washington, Jane,” he said. “How was the trip?”

“Smooth enough. I could get to like riding in limousines.”

“And the room?”

“Way better than I’m used to.”

A ghost of a smile touched his lips as he turned his attention to driving. “So it’s not all torture for you.”

“Did I say it was?”

“You don’t look particularly happy to be here.”

“I’d be a lot happier if I knew why I was here.”

“It’ll be clear once we get there.”

She glanced out at the street names and realized they were headed northwest, in the opposite direction from FBI headquarters. “We’re not going to the Hoover Building?”

“No. Georgetown. He wants to meet you at his house.”

“Who does?”

“Senator Conway.” Dean glanced at her. “You’re not carrying, are you?”

“My weapon’s still packed in my suitcase.”

“Good. Senator Conway doesn’t allow firearms into his house.”

“Security concerns?”

“Peace of mind. He served in Vietnam. He doesn’t need to see any more guns.”

The first raindrops began to patter on the windshield.

She sighed. “I wish I could say the same.”

Senator Conway’s study was furnished in dark wood and leather-a man’s room, with a man’s collection of artifacts, thought Rizzoli, noting the array of Japanese swords mounted on the wall. The silver-haired owner of that collection greeted her with a warm handshake and a quiet voice, but his coal-dark eyes were direct as lasers, and she felt him openly taking her measure. She endured his scrutiny, only because she understood that nothing could proceed unless he was satisfied by what he saw. And what he saw was a woman who stared straight back at him. A woman who cared little about the subtleties of politics but cared greatly about the truth.

“Please, have a seat, Detective,” he said. “I know you just flew in from Boston. You probably need time to decompress.”

A secretary brought in a tray of coffee and china cups. Rizzoli curbed her impatience while the coffee was poured, cream and sugar passed around. At last the secretary withdrew, closing the door behind her.

Conway set down his cup, untouched. He had not really wanted it, and now that the ceremony had been dispensed with, he focused all his attention on her. “It was good of you to come.”

“I hardly had much of a choice.” Her bluntness made him smile. Though Conway observed all the social niceties of handshakes and hospitality, she suspected that he, like most native New Englanders, valued straight talk as much as she did. “Shall we get straight to business, then?”

She set down her cup as well. “I’d prefer that.”

Dean was the one who stood and crossed to the desk. He brought a bulging accordion folder back to the sitting area and took out a photograph, which he laid on the coffee table in front of her. “June 25, 1999,” he said.

She stared at the image of a bearded man, sitting slumped, a spray of blood on the whitewashed wall behind his head. He was dressed in dark trousers and a torn white shirt. His feet were bare. On his lap was perched a china cup and saucer.

She was still reeling, struggling to process the image, when Dean laid a second photograph next to it. “July 15, 1999,” he said.

Again the victim was a man, this one clean-shaven. Again he had died sitting propped up against a blood-splattered wall.

Dean set down a third photograph of yet another man. But this one was bloated, his belly taut with the expanding gases of decomposition. “September 12,” he said. “The same year.”

She sat stu

“What about the women?” she asked. “There must have been women.”

Dean nodded. “Only one was positively identified. The wife of case number three. She was found partly buried in the woods about a week after that photo was taken.”

“Cause of death?”

“Strangulation.”

“Postmortem sexual assault?”

“There was fresh semen collected from her remains.”

Rizzoli took a deep breath. Asked, softly: “And the other two women?”

“Due to the advanced state of decomposition, their identities could not be confirmed.”

“But you had remains?”

“Yes.”

“Why couldn’t you I.D. them?”

“Because we were dealing with more than two bodies. Many, many more.”

She looked up and found herself staring directly into Dean’s eyes. Had he been watching her the whole time, awaiting her startled reaction? In answer to her silent question, he handed her three files.

She opened the first folder and found an autopsy report on one of the male victims. Automatically she flipped to the last page and read the conclusions:

Cause of death: massive hemorrhage due to single slash wound, with complete transection of left carotid artery and left jugular vein.

The Dominator, she thought. It’s his kill.

She let the pages fall back into place. Suddenly she was staring at the first page of the report. At a detail she had missed in her rush to read the conclusions.

It was in the second paragraph: Autopsy performed on 16 July 1999, 22:15, in mobile facility located Gjakove, Kosovo.

She reached for the next two pathology files and focused immediately on the locations of the autopsies.

Peje, Kosovo.

Djakovica, Kosovo.

“The autopsies were done in the field,” said Dean. “Performed, sometimes, under primitive circumstances. Tents and lantern light. No ru

“These were war crimes investigations,” she said.

He nodded. “I was with the first FBI team that arrived in June 1999. We went at the request of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. ICTY. for short. Sixty-five of us were deployed on that first mission. Our job was to locate and preserve evidence in one of the largest crime scenes in history. We collected ballistic evidence from the massacre sites. We exhumed and autopsied over a hundred Albanian victims, and probably missed hundreds more that we couldn’t find. And the whole time we were there, the killing was still going on.”

“Vengeance killings,” said Conway. “Completely predictable, given the context of that war. Or any war, for that matter. Both Agent Dean and I are ex-marines. I served in Vietnam, and Agent Dean was in Desert Storm. We’ve seen things we can’t bring ourselves to talk about, things that make us question why we human beings consider ourselves any better than animals. During the war, it was Serbs killing Albanians, and after the war, it was the Albanian KLA killing Serb civilians. There’s plenty of blood on the hands of both sides.”

“That’s what we thought these homicides were, at first,” said Dean, pointing to the crime scene photos on the coffee table. “Revenge killings in the aftermath of war. It wasn’t our mission to deal with ongoing lawlessness. We were there specifically at the Tribunal’s request, to process war crimes evidence. Not these.”

“Yet you did process them,” said Rizzoli, looking at the FBI letterhead on the autopsy report. “Why?”