Tess Gerritsen - The Apprentice

Four hundred fifty pairs of eyes, thought Rizzoli, all of them focused on the stage, where a couple in love were wreathed in light. What emotions did the Ghents inspire in their audience? The pleasure of music, well played? The joy of watching two young people in love? Or had other, darker emotions stirred in the heart of someone seated in this very hall? Hunger. Envy. The bitterness of wanting what another man possesses.

She looked down again, at the photo of the Ghents.

Was it her beauty that caught your eye? Or was it the fact they were in love?

She drank black coffee and stared at the dead piling up on her desk. Richard and Gail Yeager. Rickets Lady. Alexander Ghent. And Airplane Man, who, although no longer considered a homicide victim, still weighed on her mind. The dead always did. A never-ending supply of corpses, each one demanding her attention, each one with his or her own tale of horror to tell, if Rizzoli would just dig deep enough to lay bare the bones of their stories. She’d been digging so long that all the dead she’d ever known were beginning to blend together like skeletons tangled in a mass grave.

When the DNA lab paged her at noon, she was relieved to escape, at least for the moment, that accusing stack of files. She left her desk and headed down the hall to the south wing.

The DNA lab was in S253, and the criminalist who’d paged her was Walter De Groot, a blond Dutchman with a pale man-in-the-moon face. Usually he winced when he saw her, since her visits were almost always for the purpose of prodding or cajoling him, anything to hurry along a DNA profile. Today, though, he gave her a broad grin.

“I’ve developed the autorad,” he said. “It’s hanging there now.”

An autorad, or autoradiogram, was an X-ray film that captured the pattern of DNA fragments. De Groot took down the film from the drying line and clipped it onto a light box. Parallel rows of dark blots tracked from top to bottom.

“What you see here is the VNTR profile,” he said. “That’s short for ‘variable numbers of tandem repeats.’ I’ve extracted the DNA from the different sources you’ve provided, and isolated the fragments with the particular loci we’re comparing. These aren’t really genes, but sections of the DNA strand that repeat with no clear purpose. They make good identification markers.”

“So what are these various tracks? What do they correspond to?”

“The first two lanes, starting at the left, are the controls. Number one is a standard DNA ladder, to help us estimate the relative positions for the various samples. Lane two is a standard cell line, again used as a control. Lanes three, four, and five are evidentiary lines, taken from known origins.”

“Which origins?”

“Lane three is suspect Joey Valentine’s. Lane four is Dr. Yeager’s. Lane five is Mrs. Yeager’s.”

Rizzoli’s gaze lingered on lane five. She tried to wrap her mind around the concept that this was part of the blueprint that had created Gail Yeager. That a unique human being, from the precise shade of her blond hair to the sound of her laughter, could be distilled down to this chain of dark blots. She saw no humanity in this autorad, nothing of the woman who had loved a husband and mourned a mother. Is this all we are? A necklace of chemicals? Where, in the double helix, does the soul lie ?

Her gaze shifted to the final two lanes. “And what are these last ones?” she asked.

“These are the unidentifieds. Lane six is from that semen stain on the Yeagers’ rug. Lane seven is the fresh semen collected from Gail Yeager’s vaginal vault.”

“These last two look like a match.”

“That’s correct. Both unidentified DNA samples are from the same man. And, you’ll notice, it’s not Dr. Yeager or Mr. Valentine. This effectively eliminates Mr. Valentine as the semen source.”

She stared at the two unidentified lanes. The genetic fingerprint of a monster.

“There’s your unsub,” said De Groot.

“Have you called CODIS? Any chance we could talk them into moving a little faster on a data search?”

CODIS was a national DNA data bank. It stored the genetic profiles of thousands of convicted offenders, as well as unidentified profiles from crime scenes across the country.

“Actually, that’s the reason I paged you. I sent them the rug stain DNA last week.”

She sighed. “Meaning we’ll hear back from them in a year.”

“No, Agent Dean just called me. Your unsub’s DNA isn’t in CODIS.”

She looked at him in surprise. “Agent Dean gave you the news?”

“He must have cracked the whip at them or something. In all my time here, I’ve never seen a CODIS request expedited this fast.”

“Did you confirm that directly with CODIS?”

De Groot frowned. “Well, no. I assumed that Agent Dean would know-”

“Please call them. I want it confirmed.”

“Is there some, uh, question about Dean’s reliability?”

“Let’s just play it safe, okay?” She looked, once again, at the light box. “If it’s true our boy’s not in CODIS…”

“Then you’ve got yourself a new player, Detective. Or someone who’s managed to stay invisible to the system.”

She stared in frustration at the chain of blots. We have his DNA, she thought. We have his genetic profile. But we still don’t know his name.

Rizzoli slipped a disk into her CD player and sank onto the couch as she toweled off her wet hair. The rich strains of a solo cello poured from the speaker like melted chocolate. Though she was not a fan of classical music, she had bought a CD of Alex Ghent’s early recordings in the Symphony Hall gift shop. If she was to familiarize herself with every aspect of his death, so, too, should she know about his life. And much of his life was music.

Ghent’s bow glided over the cello strings, the melody of Bach’s Suite no. 1 in G Major rising and falling like the swells of an ocean. It had been recorded when he was only eighteen. When he’d sat in a studio, his fingers warm flesh as they’d pressed the strings, steadied the bow. Those same fingers now lay white and chilled in the morgue refrigerator, their music silenced. She had watched his autopsy that morning and had noted the fine, long fingers, had imagined them flying up and down the cello’s neck. That human hands could unite with mere wood and strings to produce such rich sounds seemed a miracle.

She picked up the CD cover and studied his photograph, taken when he was still only a boy. His eyes gazed downward, and his left arm was draped around the instrument, embracing its curves, as he would one day embrace his wife, Karenna. Though Rizzoli had searched for a CD featuring both of them, all their joint recordings were sold out in the gift shop. Only Alexander’s was in stock. The lonely cello, calling to its mate. And where was that mate now? Alive and in torment, facing the ultimate terror of death? Or was she beyond pain and already in the early stages of decomposition?

The phone rang. She turned down the CD player and picked up the receiver.

“You’re there,” said Korsak.

“I came home to take a shower.”

“I called just a few minutes ago. You didn’t answer.”

“Then I guess I didn’t hear it. What’s up?”

“That’s what I want to know.”

“If anything turns up, you’ll be the first one I call.”

“Yeah. Like you called me even once today? I had to hear about Joey Valentine’s DNA from the lab guy.”

“I didn’t get the chance to tell you. I’ve been running around like crazy.”

“Remember, I’m the one who first brought you in on this.”

“I haven’t forgotten.”

“You know,” said Korsak, “it’s going on fifty hours since he took her.”