Tess Gerritsen - The Apprentice

“This victim was found October twenty-ninth of last year,” said Dean. “The wife’s body was never found.”

She swallowed and averted her gaze from the victim’s face. “Kosovo again?”

“No. Fayetteville, North Carolina.”

Startled, she looked up at him. Held his gaze as the heat of anger flooded her face. “How many more haven’t you told me about? How many goddamn cases are there?”

“These are all we know about.”

“ Meaning there could be others ?”

“There may be. But we don’t have access to that information.”

She gave him a look of disbelief. “The FBI doesn’t?”

“What Agent Dean means,” interjected Conway, “is that there may be cases outside our jurisdiction. Countries that lack accessible crime data. Remember, we’re talking about war zones. Areas of political upheaval. Precisely the places our unsub would be attracted to. Places where he’d feel right at home.”

A killer who moves freely across oceans. Whose hunting area knows no national borders . She thought of everything she’d learned about the Dominator. The speed with which he’d subdued his victims. His craving for contact with the dead. His use of a Rambo-type knife. And the parachute fibers-drab green. She felt both men watching her as she processed what Conway had just said. They were testing her, waiting to see if she would measure up to their expectations.

She looked at the last photograph on the coffee table. “You said this attack was in Fayetteville.”

“Yes,” said Dean.

“There’s a military base in the area. Isn’t there?”

“Fort Bragg. It’s about ten miles northwest of Fayetteville.”

“How many are stationed at that base?”

“Around forty-one thousand active-duty. It’s home to the Eighteenth Airborne Corps, Eighty-second Airborne Division, and Army Special Operations Command.” The fact that Dean answered her without hesitation told her this was information he considered relevant. Information he already had at the tip of his tongue.

“That’s why you’ve kept me in the dark, isn’t it? We’re dealing with someone who has combat skills. Someone who’s paid to kill .”

“We’ve been kept in the dark, just as you have.” Dean leaned forward, his face so close to hers that all she could focus on was him . Conway and everything else in the room receded from view. “When I read the VICAP report filed by the Fayetteville police, I thought I was seeing Kosovo again. The killer might as well have signed his name, the crime scene was so distinctive. The position of the male victim’s body. The type of blade used in the coup de grâce. The china or glassware placed on the victim’s lap. The abduction of the wife. I immediately flew down to Fayetteville and spent two weeks with the local authorities, assisting their investigation. No suspect was ever identified.”

“Why couldn’t you tell me this before?” she said.

“Because of who our unsub might be.”

“I don’t care if he’s a four-star general. I had a right to know about the Fayetteville case.”

“If this had been critical to your identifying a Boston suspect, I would have told you.”

“You said forty-one thousand active-duty soldiers are stationed at Fort Bragg.”

“Yes.”

“How many of those men served in Kosovo? I assume you asked that question.”

Dean nodded. “I requested a list from the Pentagon of all soldiers whose service records coincide with the places and dates of the slayings. The Dominator is not on that list. Only a few of those men now reside in New England, and none of them have panned out as our man.”

“I’m supposed to trust you on that?”

“Yes.”

She laughed. “That requires a pretty big leap of faith.”

“We’re both making a leap of faith here, Jane. I’m betting that I can trust you.”

“Trust me with what? So far, you haven’t told me anything that justifies secrecy.”

In the silence that followed, Dean glanced at Conway, who gave an almost imperceptible nod. With that wordless exchange, they agreed to hand her the vital piece of the puzzle.

Conway said, “Have you ever heard of ‘sheep-dipping,’ Detective?”

“I take it that term has nothing to do with real sheep.”

He smiled. “No, it doesn’t. It’s military slang. It refers to the CIA’s practice of occasionally borrowing the military’s special operations soldiers for certain missions. It happened in Nicaragua and Afghanistan, when the CIA’s own special operations group-their SOG-needed additional manpower. In Nicaragua, navy SEALs were sheep-dipped to mine the harbors. In Afghanistan, the Green Berets were sheep-dipped to train the mujahideen. While working for the CIA, these soldiers become, essentially, CIA case officers. They go off the Pentagon’s books. The military has no record of their activities.”

She looked at Dean. “Then that list the Pentagon gave you. The names of the Fayetteville soldiers who served in Kosovo-”

“The list was incomplete,” he said.

“How incomplete? How many names were left off?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did you ask the CIA?”

“That’s where I hit walls.”

“They won’t name names?”

“They don’t have to,” said Conway. “If your unsub was involved in black ops abroad, it will never be acknowledged.”

“Even if their boy’s now killing on home turf?”

“Especially if he’s killing on home turf,” said Dean. “It would be a public relations disaster. What if he chose to testify? What sensitive information might he leak to the press? You think the Agency wants us to know their boy’s breaking into homes and slaughtering law-abiding citizens? Abusing women’s corpses? There’s no way to keep that off the front pages.”

“So what did the Agency tell you?”

“That they had no information that was relevant to the Fayetteville homicide.”

“It sounds like a standard brush-off.”

“It was far more than that,” said Conway. “Within a day of Agent Dean’s query to the CIA, he was pulled off the Fayetteville investigation and told to return to Washington. That order came straight from the office of the FBI’s deputy director.”

She stared at him, stunned by how deeply the Dominator’s identity was buried in secrecy.

“That’s when Agent Dean came to me,” said Conway.

“Because you’re on the Armed Services Committee?”

“Because we’ve known each other for years. Marines have a way of finding each other. And trusting each other. He asked me to make inquiries on his behalf. But I’m afraid I couldn’t make any headway.”

“Even a senator can’t?”

Conway gave her an ironic smile. “A Democratic senator from a liberal state, I should add. I may have served my country as a soldier. But certain elements within Defense will never entirely accept me. Or trust me.”

Her gaze dropped to the photos on the coffee table. To the gallery of dead men, chosen for slaughter not because of their politics or ethnicity or beliefs but because they had been married to beautiful wives. “You could have told me this weeks ago,” she said.

“Police investigations leak like sieves,” said Dean.

“Not mine.”

“ Any police investigation. If this information was shared with your team, it would eventually leak to the media. And that would bring your work straight to the attention of the wrong people. People who’ll try to prevent you from making an arrest.”

“You really think they’d protect him? After what he’s done?”

“No, I think they want to put him away just as much as we do. But they want it done quietly, out of the public eye. Clearly they’ve lost track of him. He’s out of their control, killing civilians. He’s become a walking time bomb, and they can’t afford to ignore the problem.”