The Apprentice (3 page)

“Kitchen window. Screen pried off, used a glass cutter. Size eleven shoeprints in the flower bed. Same prints tracked blood in this room.” He took out a handkerchief and wiped his moist forehead. Korsak was one of those unlucky individuals for whom no antiperspirant was powerful enough. Just in the few minutes they’d been conversing, the sweat stains in his shirt had spread.

“Okay, let’s slide him away from the wall,” one of the morgue attendants said. “Tip him onto the sheet.”

“Watch the head! It’s slipping!”

“Aw, Jesus.”

Rizzoli and Korsak fell silent as Dr. Yeager was laid sideways on a disposable sheet. Rigor mortis had stiffened the corpse into a ninety-degree angle, and the attendants debated how to arrange him on the stretcher, given his grotesque posture.

Rizzoli suddenly focused on a chip of white lying on the floor, where the body had been sitting. She crouched down to retrieve what appeared to be a tiny shard of china.

“Broken teacup,” said Korsak.

“What?”

“There was a teacup and saucer next to the victim. Looked like it fell off his lap or something. We’ve already packed it up for prints.” He saw her puzzled look and he shrugged. “Don’t ask me.”

“Symbolic artifact?”

“Yeah. Ritual tea party for the dead guy.”

She stared at the small chip of china lying in her gloved palm and considered what it meant. A knot had formed in her stomach. A terrible sense of familiarity. A
slashed throat. Duct tape bindings. Nocturnal entry through a window. The victim or victims surprised while asleep
.

And a missing woman.

“Where’s the bedroom?” she asked. Not wanting to see it. Afraid to see it.

“Okay. This is what I wanted you to look at.”

The hallway that led to the bedroom was hung with framed black-and-white photographs. Not the smiling-family poses that most houses displayed, but stark images of female nudes, the faces obscured or turned from the camera, the torsos anonymous. A woman embracing a tree, smooth skin pressed against rough bark. A seated woman bent forward, her long hair cascading down between her bare thighs. A woman reaching for the sky, torso glistening with the sweat of vigorous exercise. Rizzoli paused to study a photo that had been knocked askew.

“These are all the same woman,” she said.

“It’s her.”

“Mrs. Yeager?”

“Looks like they had a kinky thing going, huh?”

She stared at Gail Yeager’s finely toned body. “I don’t think it’s kinky at all. These are beautiful pictures.”

“Yeah, whatever. Bedroom’s in here.” He pointed through the doorway.

She stopped at the threshold. Inside was a king-size bed, its covers thrown back, as though its occupants had been abruptly roused from sleep. On the shell-pink carpet, the nylon pile had been flattened in two separate swaths leading from the bed to the doorway.

Rizzoli said, softly, “They were both dragged from the bed.”

Korsak nodded. “Our perp surprises them in bed. Somehow subdues them. Binds their wrists and ankles. Drags them across the carpet and into the hallway, where the wood floor begins.”

She was baffled by the killer’s actions. She imagined him standing where she was now, looking in at the sleeping couple. A window high over the bed, uncurtained, would have spilled enough light to see which was the man and which the woman. He would go to Dr. Yeager first. It was the logical thing to do, to control the man. Leave the woman for later. This much Rizzoli could envision. The approach, the initial attack. What she did not understand was what came next.

“Why move them?” she said. “Why not kill Dr. Yeager right here? What was the point of bringing them out of the bedroom?”

“I don’t know.” He pointed through the doorway. “It’s all been photographed. You can go in.”

Reluctantly she entered the room, avoiding the drag marks on the carpet, and crossed to the bed. She saw no blood on the sheets or the covers. On one pillow was a long blond strand—Mrs. Yeager’s side of the bed, she thought. She turned to the dresser, where a framed photograph of the couple confirmed that Gail Yeager was indeed a blonde. A pretty one, too, with light-blue eyes and a dusting of freckles on deeply tanned skin. Dr. Yeager had his arm draped around her shoulder and projected the brawny confidence of a man who knows he is physically imposing. Not a man who would one day end up dead in his underwear, his hands and feet bound.

“It’s on the chair,” said Korsak.

“What?”

“Look at the chair.”

She turned to face the corner of the room and saw an antique ladder-back chair. Lying on the seat was a folded nightgown. Moving closer, she saw bright spatters of red staining the cream satin.

The hairs on the back of her neck were suddenly bristling, and for a few seconds she forgot to breathe.

She reached down and lifted one corner of the garment. The underside of the fold was spattered as well.

“We don’t know whose blood it is,” said Korsak. “It could be Dr. Yeager’s; it could be the wife’s.”

“It was already stained before he folded it.”

“But there’s no other blood in this room. Which means it got splattered in the other room. Then he brought it into this bedroom. Folded it nice and neat. Placed it on that chair, like a little parting gift.” Korsak paused. “Does that remind you of someone?”

She swallowed. “You know it does.”

“This killer is copying your boy’s old signature.”

“No, this is different. This is all different. The Surgeon never attacked couples.”

“The folded nightclothes. The duct tape. The victims surprised in bed.”

“Warren Hoyt chose single women. Victims he could quickly subdue.”

“But look at the similarities! I’m telling you, we’ve got a copycat. Some wacko who’s been reading about the Surgeon.”

Rizzoli was still staring at the nightgown, remembering other bedrooms, other scenes of death. It had happened during a summer of unbearable heat, like this one, when women slept with their windows open and a man named Warren Hoyt crept into their homes. He brought with him his dark fantasies and his scalpels, the instruments with which he performed his bloody rituals on victims who were awake and aware of every slice of his blade. She gazed at that nightgown, and a vision of Hoyt’s utterly ordinary face sprang clearly to mind, a face that still surfaced in her nightmares.

But this is not his work. Warren Hoyt is safely locked away in a place he can’t escape. I know, because I put the bastard there myself.

“The
Boston Globe
printed every juicy detail,” said Korsak. “Your boy even made it into the
New York Times
. Now this perp is reenacting it.”

“No, your killer is doing things Hoyt never did. He drags this couple out of the bedroom, into another room. He props up the man in a sitting position, then slashes his neck. It’s more like an execution. Or part of a ritual. Then there’s the woman. He kills the husband, but what does he do with the wife?” She stopped, suddenly remembering the shard of china on the floor. The broken teacup. Its significance blew through her like an icy wind.

Without a word, she walked out of the bedroom and returned to the family room. She looked at the wall where the corpse of Dr. Yeager had been sitting. She looked down at the floor and began to pace a wider and wider circle, studying the spatters of blood on the wood.

“Rizzoli?” said Korsak.

She turned to the windows and squinted against the sunlight. “It’s too bright in here. And there’s so much glass. We can’t cover it all. We’ll have to come back tonight.”

“You thinking of using a Luma-lite?”

“We’ll need ultraviolet to see it.”

“What are you looking for?”

She turned back to the wall. “Dr. Yeager was sitting there when he died. Our unknown subject dragged him from the bedroom. Propped him up against that wall, and made him face the center of the room.”

“Okay.”

“Why was he placed there? Why go to all that trouble while the victim’s still alive? There had to be a reason.”

“What reason?”

“He was put there to watch something. To be a witness to what happened in this room.”

At last Korsak’s face registered appalled comprehension. He stared at the wall, where Dr. Yeager had sat, an audience of one in a theater of horror.

“Oh, Jesus,” he said. “Mrs. Yeager.”

Rizzoli brought home a pizza from the deli round the corner and excavated an ancient head of lettuce from the bottom of her refrigerator vegetable bin. She peeled off brown leaves until she reached the barely edible core. It was a pale and unappetizing salad, which she ate out of duty and not for pleasure. She had no time for pleasure; she ate only to refuel for the night ahead, a night that she did not look forward to.

After a few bites, she pushed her food away and stared at the vivid smears of tomato sauce on the plate. The nightmares catch up with you, she thought. You think you’re immune, that you’re strong enough, detached enough, to live with them. And you know how to play the part, how to fake them all out. But those faces stay with you. The eyes of the dead.

Was Gail Yeager among them?

She looked down at her hands, at the twin scars knotting both palms, like healed crucifixion wounds. Whenever the weather turned cold and damp, her hands ached, a punishing reminder of what Warren Hoyt had done to her a year ago, the day he had pierced her flesh with his blades. The day she had thought would be her last on earth. The old wounds were aching now, but she could not blame this on the weather. No, it was because of what she had seen today in Newton. The folded nightgown. The fantail of blood on the wall. She had walked into a room where the air itself was still charged with terror, and she had felt Warren Hoyt’s lingering presence.

Impossible, of course. Hoyt was in prison, exactly where he should be. Yet here she sat, chilled by the memory of that house in Newton, because the horror had felt so familiar.

She was tempted to call Thomas Moore, with whom she had worked the Hoyt case. He knew the details as intimately as she did, and he understood how tenacious was the fear that Warren Hoyt had spun like a web around all of them. But since Moore’s marriage, his life had diverged from Rizzoli’s. His newfound happiness was the very thing that now made them strangers. Happy people are self-contained; they breathe different air and are subject to different laws of gravity. Though Moore might not be aware of the change between them, Rizzoli had felt it, and she mourned the loss, even as she felt ashamed for envying his happiness. Ashamed, too, of her jealousy of the woman who had captured Moore’s heart. A few days ago, she had received his postcard from London, where he and Catherine were vacationing. It was a brief hello scrawled on the back of a souvenir card from the Scotland Yard Museum, just a few words to let Rizzoli know their stay was pleasant and all was right in their world. Thinking of that note now, with its cheery optimism, Rizzoli knew she could not trouble him about this case; she could not bring the shadow of Warren Hoyt back into their lives.

She sat listening to the sounds of traffic on the street below, which only seemed to emphasize the utter stillness inside her apartment. She looked around, at the starkly furnished living room, at the blank walls where she had yet to hang a single picture. The only decoration, if it could be called that, was a city map, tacked to the wall above her dining table. A year ago, the map had been studded with colored pushpins marking the Surgeon’s kills. She’d been so hungry for recognition, for her colleagues to acknowledge that, yes, she was their equal, that she had lived and breathed the hunt. Even at home, she had eaten her meals in grim view of murder’s footprints.

Now the Surgeon pushpins were gone, but the map remained, waiting for a fresh set of pins to mark another killer’s movements. She wondered what it said about her, what pitiful interpretation one could draw, that even after two years in this apartment, the only adornment hanging on her walls was this map of Boston. My beat, she thought.

My universe.

The lights were off inside the Yeager residence when Rizzoli pulled into the driveway at nine-ten P.M. She was the first to arrive, and since she did not have access to the house, she sat in her car with the windows open to let in fresh air as she waited for the others to arrive. The house stood on a quiet cul-de-sac, and both neighbors’ homes were dark. This would work to their advantage tonight, as there would be less ambient light to obscure their search. But at that moment, sitting alone and contemplating that house of horrors, she craved bright lights and human company. The windows of the Yeager home stared at her like the glassy eyes of a corpse. The shadows around her took on myriad forms, none of them benign. She took out her weapon, unlatched the safety, and set it on her lap. Only then did she feel calmer.

Headlights beamed in her rearview mirror. Turning, she was relieved to see the crime scene unit van pull up behind her. She slipped her weapon back in her purse.

A young man with massive shoulders stepped out of the van and walked toward her car. As he bent down to peer in her window, she saw the glint of his gold earring.

“Hey, Rizzoli,” he said.

“Hey, Mick. Thanks for coming out.”

“Nice neighborhood.”

“Wait till you see the house.”

A new set of headlights flickered into the cul-de-sac. Korsak had arrived.

“Gang’s all here,” she said. “Let’s get to work.”

Korsak and Mick did not know each other. As Rizzoli introduced them by the glow of the van’s dome light, she saw that Korsak was staring at the CST’s earring and noticed his hesitation before he shook Mick’s hand. She could almost see the wheels turning in Korsak’s head.
Earring. Weight lifter. Gotta be gay
.

Mick began unloading his equipment. “I brought the new Mini Crimescope 400,” he said. “Four-hundred-watt arc lamp. Three times brighter than the old GE three-fifty watt. Most intense light source we ever worked with. This thing’s even brighter than five-hundred-watt Xenon.” He glanced at Korsak. “You mind carrying in the camera stuff?”

Before Korsak could respond, Mick thrust an aluminum case into the detective’s arms, then turned back to the van for more equipment. Korsak just stood there for a moment holding the camera case, wearing a look of disbelief. Then he stalked off toward the house.