Tess Gerritsen - The Apprentice

“I think he understands more than you give him credit for. He feeds off women’s fears. It’s all written there, in his psychological profile. He’s attracted to damaged women. To the emotionally battered. The whiff of a woman’s pain turns him on, and he’s exquisitely sensitive to its presence. He can detect it using the most subtle of clues. A woman’s tone of voice. The way she holds her head or refuses eye contact. All the tiny physical signs that the rest of us might miss. But he picks up on them. He knows which women are wounded, and those are the ones he wants.”

“I’m no victim.”

“You are now. He made you one.” He moved closer, so close they were almost touching. She felt the sudden wild urge to lean into his arms and press herself against him. To see how he would react. But pride and common sense kept her perfectly rigid.

She forced out a laugh. “Who’s the victim here, Agent Dean? Not me. Don’t forget, I’m the one who put him away.”

“Yes,” he answered quietly. “You put the Surgeon away. But not without a great deal of damage to yourself.”

She stared back, silent. Damaged . That was exactly the word for what had been done to her. A woman with scars on her hands and a fortress of locks on her door. A woman who would never again feel August’s hot breath without remembering the heat of that summer day and the smell of her own blood.

Without a word, she turned and walked out of the kitchen, back into the living room. There she sank on the couch and sat in dazed silence. He did not immediately follow her, and for a moment she was left blessedly alone. She wished he would simply vanish, walk out of her apartment and grant her the seclusion that every suffering animal craves. She was not so lucky. She heard emerge from the kitchen, and she looked up to see himholding two glasses. He held one out to her.

“What’s this?” she said.

“Tequila. I found it in your cupboard.”

She took the glass and frowned at it. “I forgot I had it. It’s ancient.”

“Well, it hadn’t been opened.”

That’s because she did not care for the taste of tequila. The bottle was just another one of those useless boozy gifts her brother Frankie brought home from his travels, like the Kahlua liqueur from Hawaii and the sake from Japan. Frankie’s way of showing off what a man of the world he was, thanks to the U.S. Marine Corps. This was as good a time as any to sample his souvenir from sunny Mexico. She took a sip and blinked away the sting of tears. As the tequila warmed its way into her stomach, she suddenly thought of a detail from Warren Hoyt’s past. His early victims had first been incapacitated by the drug Rohypnol, slipped into their drinks. How easy it is to catch us unguarded, she thought. When a woman is distracted or has no reason to distrust the man who hands her a drink, she is just another lamb in the chute. Even she had accepted a glass of tequila without question. Even she had allowed a man she did not know well into her apartment.

She looked at Dean again. He was sitting across from her, and their gazes were now level. The drink, tossed into her empty stomach, was already asserting itself, and her limbs felt nerveless. The anesthesia of alcohol. She was detached and calm, dangerously so.

He leaned toward her, and she did not pull away with her usual defensiveness. Dean was invading her personal space, the way few men had ever tried to do, and she let him. She surrendered to him.

“We’re no longer dealing with a single killer,” he said. “We’re dealing with a partnership. And one of those two partners is a man you know better than anyone else does. Whether you want to admit it or not, you have a special link to Warren Hoyt. Which makes you a link to the Dominator as well.”

She released a deep breath and said, softly: “It’s the way Warren works best. It’s what he craves. A partner. A mentor.”

“He had one in Savannah.”

“Yes. A doctor named Andrew Capra. After Capra was killed, Warren was left on his own. That’s when he came to Boston. But he never stopped looking for a new partner. Someone who’d share his cravings. His fantasies.”

“I’m afraid he’s found him.”

They gazed at each other, both understanding the grim consequences of this new development.

“They’re twice as effective now,” he said. “Wolves work better in a pack than they do alone.”

“Cooperative hunting.”

He nodded. “It makes everything easier. The stalking. The cornering. Maintaining control of the victims…”

She sat up straight. “The teacup,” she said.

“What about it?”

“There wasn’t one at the Ghent death scene. Now we know why.”

“Because Warren Hoyt was there to help him.”

She nodded. “The Dominator had no need for a warning system. He had a partner who could alert him if the husband moved. A partner who stood by and watched the whole thing. And Warren would get off on it. He’d enjoy it. It’s part of his fantasy. To watch as the woman is assaulted.”

“And the Dominator craves an audience.”

She nodded. “That’s why he’s chosen couples. So there’d be someone to watch. To see him enjoy ultimate power over a woman’s body.”

The ordeal she described was so intimate a violation that she found it painful to look Dean in the eyes. But she held her gaze. The sexual assault of women was a crime that awakened the prurient curiosity of too many men. As the lone woman in the room at morning investigative conferences, she had watched her male colleagues discuss the details of such assaults and had heard the electric hum of interest in their voices, even as they strove to maintain the appearance of sober professionalism. They lingered over the pathologist’s reports of sexual injuries, stared too long at the crime scene photos of women with legs splayed apart. Their reactions made Rizzoli feel personally violated as well, and over the years she had developed a hair-trigger sensitivity to even a flicker of unseemly interest in a cop’s eyes whenever the subject was rape. Now, looking into Dean’s eyes, she searched for that disturbing flicker but saw none. Nor had she seen anything but grim determination in his eyes when he had stared down at the violated corpses of Gail Yeager and Karenna Ghent. Dean was not turned on by these atrocities; he was deeply appalled.

“You said that Hoyt craves a mentor,” he said.

“Yes. Someone to lead the way. To teach him.”

“Teach him what? He already knows how to kill.”

She paused to take another sip of tequila. When she looked at him again, she found he had leaned even closer, as though afraid to miss her softest utterance.

“Variations on a theme,” she said. “Women and pain. How many ways can you defile a body? How many ways can you inflict torture? Warren had a pattern he stuck to for several years. Maybe he’s ready to expand his horizons.”

“Or this unsub is ready to expand his.”

She paused. “The Dominator?”

“We may have turned it around. Maybe it’s our unknown subject who seeks a mentor. And he’s chosen Warren Hoyt as his teacher.”

She stared at him, chilled by the thought. The word teacher implied mastery. Authority. Was this the role into which Hoyt had transformed during his months behind prison walls? Had confinement nurtured his fantasies, honed his urges to razor-sharp purpose? He had been formidable enough before his arrest; she did not even want to think about a more powerful incarnation of Warren Hoyt.

Dean sank back in the chair, blue eyes regarding his glass of tequila. He had sipped only sparingly, and now he set the glass down on the coffee table. He’d always struck her as a man who never let his discipline weaken, who had learned to keep all impulses in check. But fatigue was taking its toll, and his shoulders were slumping, his eyes shot through with red. He rubbed his hand across his face. “How do two monsters manage to connect in a city the size of Boston?” he said. “How do they find each other?”