The Apprentice: A Rizzoli & Isles Novel

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