The Apprentice: A Rizzoli & Isles Novel

phone number, she’d felt her pulse quicken, and she knew exactly what it meant. She felt like a junkie craving her fix, unable to stop herself from calling his hotel. Turning her back on Korsak’s baleful gaze, she faced out the window as the phone rang.
    “Colonnade.”
    “Could you connect me to one of your guests? His name’s Gabriel Dean.”
    “One minute please.”
    As she waited, she hunted about for the right words to say to him, the right tone of voice. Measured. Businesslike.
A cop. You’re a cop.
    The hotel operator came back on the line. “I’m sorry, but Mr. Dean is no longer a guest here.”
    Rizzoli frowned, her grip tightening on the phone. “Did he leave a forwarding number?”
    “There’s none listed.”
    Rizzoli stared out the window, her eyes suddenly dazed by the setting sun. “When did he check out?” she asked.
    “An hour ago.”

twenty
    R izzoli closed the file containing the pages faxed from the Maine State Police and focused out the window at the passing woods, at the occasional glimpse of a white farmhouse through the trees. Reading in the car always made her queasy, and the details of Marla Jean Waite’s disappearance only intensified her discomfort. The lunch they’d eaten on the way did not help matters. Frost had been eager to try the lobster rolls from one of the roadside shacks, and although she’d enjoyed the meal at the time, the mayonnaise was now churning in her stomach. She stared at the road ahead, waiting for the nausea to pass. It helped that Frost was a calm and deliberate driver who made no unexpected moves, whose foot was steady on the gas pedal. She’d always appreciated his utter predictability but never more than now, when she herself was feeling so unsettled.
    As she felt better, she began to take note of the natural beauty outside her car window. She’d never ventured this far into Maine before. The farthest north she’d ever made it was as a ten-year-old, when her family had driven to Old Orchard Beach in the summertime. She remembered the boardwalk and the carny rides, blue cotton candy and corn on the cob. And she remembered walking into the sea and how the water was so cold, it pierced straight to her bones like icicles. Yet she had kept wading in, precisely because her mother had warned her not to. “It’s too cold for you, Janie,” Angela had called out. “Stay on the nice warm sand.” And then Jane’s brothers had chimed in: “Yeah, don’t go in, Janie; you’ll freeze off your ugly chicken legs!” So of course she had gone in, striding grim-faced across the sand to where the sea lapped and foamed, and stepping into water that made her gasp. But it was not the water’s cold sting she remembered all these years later; rather, it was the heat of her brothers’ gazes as they watched her from the beach, taunting her, daring her to wade even deeper into that breath-stealing cold. And so she had marched in, the water rising to her thighs, her waist, her shoulders, moving without hesitation, without even a pause to brace herself. She’d pushed on because it was not pain she feared most; it was humiliation.
    Now Old Orchard Beach was a hundred miles behind them and the view she saw from the car looked nothing like the Maine she remembered from her childhood. This far up the coast, there were no boardwalks or carny rides. Instead she saw trees and green fields and the occasional village, each anchored around a white church spire.
    “Alice and I drive up this way every July,” said Frost.
    “I’ve never been up here.”
    “Never?” He glanced at her with a look of surprise she found annoying. A look that said,
Where have you been?
    “Never saw any reason to,” she said.
    “Alice’s folks have a camp out on Little Deer Isle. We stay there.”
    “Funny. I never saw Alice as the camping type.”
    “Oh, they just call it a camp. It’s really like a regular house. Real bathrooms and hot water.” Frost laughed. “Alice’d freak out if she had to pee in the woods.”
    “Only animals should have to pee in the woods.”
    “I like the woods. I’d live up here, if I could.”
    “And miss all the excitement of the big city?”
    Frost shook his head. “I tell you what I wouldn’t miss. The bad stuff. Stuff that makes you wonder what the hell’s wrong with people.”
    “You think it’s any better up here?”
    He fell silent, his gaze on the road, a continuous tapestry of trees scrolling past the windows.
    “No,” he finally