The Apprentice: A Rizzoli & Isles Novel

beyond resemblance to anything human. But it wasn’t the face she focused on; it was the object of incongruous delicacy, placed on his thighs.
    “We didn’t know what to make of
that,
” said Gorman. “It looked to me like some sort of symbolic artifact. That’s how I classified it. A way of ridiculing the victim. ‘Look at me, all tied up, with this stupid teacup on my lap.’ It’s just what a wife might do to her husband, to show how much she despises him.” He sighed. “But that’s when I thought it might be Marla Jean who did it.”
    The camera turned from the corpse and was moving up the hallway now. Retracing the killer’s steps, toward the bedroom where Kenny and Marla Jean had slept.
    The image swayed like the stomach-churning view through the porthole of a rocking ship. The camera paused at each doorway to offer a glimpse inside. First a bathroom, then a guest bedroom. As it continued up the hallway, Rizzoli’s pulse quickened. Without realizing it, she had stepped closer to the TV, as though she, and not Pardee, were the one walking up that long corridor.
    Suddenly a view of the master bedroom swung onto the screen. Windows with green damask curtains. A dresser and wardrobe, both painted white, and the closet door. A four-poster bed, the covers pulled back, almost stripped off.
    “They were surprised while sleeping,” said Gorman. “Kenny’s stomach was almost empty of food. At the time he was killed, he hadn’t eaten for at least eight hours.”
    Rizzoli moved even closer to the TV, her gaze rapidly scanning the screen. Now Pardee turned back to the hallway.
    “Rewind it,” she said to Gorman.
    “Why?”
    “Just go back. To when we first see the bedroom.”
    Gorman handed her the remote. “It’s yours.”
    She hit REWIND , and the tape whined backward. Once again Pardee was in the hallway, approaching the master bedroom. Once again, the view swept toward the right, slowly panning across the dresser, the wardrobe, the closet doors, then focusing on the bed. Frost was now standing right beside her, searching for the same thing.
    She hit PAUSE . “It’s not there.”
    “What isn’t?” said Gorman.
    “The folded nightclothes.” She turned to him. “You didn’t find any?”
    “I didn’t know I was supposed to.”
    “It’s part of the Dominator’s signature. He folds the woman’s nightclothes. Displays them in the bedroom as a symbol of his control.”
    “If it’s him, he didn’t do it here.”
    “Everything else about this matches him. The duct tape, the teacup on the lap. The position of the male victim.” “What you see is what we found.”
    “You’re sure nothing was moved before the video was filmed?”
    It was not a tactful question, and Gorman stiffened. “Well, I guess it’s always
possible
the first officer on the scene walked in here and decided to move stuff around, just to make things interesting for us.”
    Frost, ever the diplomat, stepped in to smooth the chop that Rizzoli so often trailed in her wake. “It’s not like this perp keeps a checklist. Looks like this time, he varied it a little.”
    “If it’s the same guy,” Gorman said.
    Rizzoli turned from the TV and looked, once again, at the wall where Kenny had died and slowly bloated in the heat. She thought of the Yeagers and the Ghents, of duct tape and sleeping victims, of the many-stranded web of details that bound these cases so tightly to one another.
    But here, in this house, the Dominator left out a step. He did not fold the nightclothes. Because he and Hoyt were not yet a team.
    She remembered the afternoon in the Yeagers’ house, her gaze frozen on Gail Yeager’s nightgown, and she remembered the bone-chilling sense of familiarity.
    Only with the Yeagers did the Surgeon and the Dominator begin their alliance. That was the day they lured me into the game, with a folded nightgown. Even from prison, Warren Hoyt managed to send me his calling card.
    She looked at Gorman, who had settled onto one of the sheet-draped chairs and was once again wiping the sweat from his face. Already this meeting had drained him, and he was fading before their eyes.
    “You never identified any suspects?” she asked.
    “No one we could hang a hat on. That’s after four, five hundred interviews.”
    “And the Waites, as far as you know, weren’t acquainted with either the Yeagers or the Ghents?”
    “Those names never came up. Look, you’ll get copies of all our files in a day or two. You can