Tess Gerritsen: The Apprentice

“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.