The Apprentice: A Rizzoli & Isles Novel

other two women?”
    “Due to the advanced state of decomposition, their identities could not be confirmed.”
    “But you had remains?”
    “Yes.”
    “Why couldn’t you I.D. them?”
    “Because we were dealing with more than two bodies. Many, many more.”
    She looked up and found herself staring directly into Dean’s eyes. Had he been watching her the whole time, awaiting her startled reaction? In answer to her silent question, he handed her three files.
    She opened the first folder and found an autopsy report on one of the male victims. Automatically she flipped to the last page and read the conclusions:

    Cause of death: massive hemorrhage due to single slash wound, with complete transection of left carotid artery and left jugular vein.

    The Dominator, she thought. It’s his kill.
    She let the pages fall back into place. Suddenly she was staring at the first page of the report. At a detail she had missed in her rush to read the conclusions.
    It was in the second paragraph:
Autopsy performed on 16 July 1999, 22:15, in mobile facility located Gjakove, Kosovo.
    She reached for the next two pathology files and focused immediately on the locations of the autopsies.
    Peje, Kosovo.
    Djakovica, Kosovo.
    “The autopsies were done in the field,” said Dean. “Performed, sometimes, under primitive circumstances. Tents and lantern light. No running water. And so many remains to process that we were overwhelmed.”
    “These were war crimes investigations,” she said.
    He nodded. “I was with the first FBI team that arrived in June 1999. We went at the request of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. ICTY, for short. Sixty-five of us were deployed on that first mission. Our job was to locate and preserve evidence in one of the largest crime scenes in history. We collected ballistic evidence from the massacre sites. We exhumed and autopsied over a hundred Albanian victims, and probably missed hundreds more that we couldn’t find. And the whole time we were there, the killing was
still going on.
”
    “Vengeance killings,” said Conway. “Completely predictable, given the context of that war. Or any war, for that matter. Both Agent Dean and I are ex-marines. I served in Vietnam, and Agent Dean was in Desert Storm. We’ve seen things we can’t bring ourselves to talk about, things that make us question why we human beings consider ourselves any better than animals. During the war, it was Serbs killing Albanians, and after the war, it was the Albanian KLA killing Serb civilians. There’s plenty of blood on the hands of both sides.”
    “That’s what we thought these homicides were, at first,” said Dean, pointing to the crime scene photos on the coffee table. “Revenge killings in the aftermath of war. It wasn’t our mission to deal with ongoing lawlessness. We were there specifically at the Tribunal’s request, to process war crimes evidence. Not these.”
    “Yet you did process them,” said Rizzoli, looking at the FBI letterhead on the autopsy report. “Why?”
    “Because I recognized them for what they were,” said Dean. “These murders weren’t based on ethnicity. Two of the men were Albanian; one was a Serb. But they all had something in common. They were married to young wives. Attractive wives, who were abducted from their homes. By the third attack, I knew this killer’s signature. I knew what we were dealing with. But these cases fell under the jurisdiction of the local justice system, not the ICTY, which brought us there.”
    “So what was done?” she asked.
    “In a word? Nothing. There were no arrests, because no suspect was ever identified.”
    “Of course, there was an inquiry,” said Conway. “But consider the situation, Detective. Thousands of war dead buried in over one hundred fifty mass graves. Foreign peacekeeping troops struggling to keep order. Armed outlaws roaming bombed-out villages, just looking for reasons to kill. And the civilians themselves, nursing old rages. It was the Wild West over there, with gun battles erupting over drugs or family feuds or personal vendettas. And almost always, the killing was blamed on ethnic tensions. How could you distinguish one murder from another? There were so many.”
    “For a serial killer,” said Dean, “it was paradise on earth.”

twenty-two
    S he looked at Dean. She had not been surprised to hear of his military service. She’d already seen it in his bearing, his air of command. He would know