The Apprentice: A Rizzoli & Isles Novel

him cut his throat?”
    “His wrists and ankles were bound,” said Isles.
    “I don’t care if he’s trussed up like Tutankhamen. Any redblooded man’s gonna squirm like hell.”
    Rizzoli said, “He’s right. Even with your wrists and ankles bound, you can still kick. You can even head-butt. But he was just sitting there, against the wall.”
    Dr. Isles straightened. For a moment, she didn’t say anything, just stood as regally as though her surgical gown were a priestess’s robe. She looked at Yoshima. “Hand me a wet towel. Direct that light over here. Let’s really wipe him down and go over his skin. Inch by inch.”
    “What’re we looking for?” asked Korsak.
    “I’ll tell you when I see it.”
    Moments later, when Isles lifted the right arm, she spotted the marks on the side of the chest. Beneath the magnifying lens, two faint red bumps stood out. Isles ran her gloved finger over the skin. “Wheals,” she said. “It’s a Lewis Triple Response.”
    “Lewis what?” asked Rizzoli.
    “Lewis Triple Response. It’s a signature effect on the skin. First you see erythema—red spots—and then a flare caused by cutaneous arteriolar dilatation. And finally, in the third stage, wheals pop up due to increased vascular permeability.”
    “It looks to me like a Taser mark,” said Rizzoli.
    Isles nodded. “Exactly. This is the classic skin response to an electrical shock from a Taser-like device. It would certainly incapacitate him. Zap, and he loses all neuromuscular control. Certainly long enough for someone to bind his wrists and ankles.”
    “How long do these wheals usually last?”
    “On a living subject, they normally fade after two hours.”
    “And on a dead subject?”
    “Death arrests the skin process. That’s why we can still see it. Although it’s very faint.”
    “So he died within two hours of receiving this shock?”
    “Correct.”
    “But a Taser only brings you down for a few minutes,” said Korsak. “Five, ten at the most. To keep him down, he’d have to be shocked again.”
    “And that’s why we’re going to keep looking for more,” said Isles. She shifted the light farther down the torso.
    The beam mercilessly spotlighted Richard Yeager’s genitals. Up till that moment, Rizzoli had avoided looking at that region of his anatomy. To stare at a corpse’s sexual organs always struck her as a cruel invasion, yet one more outrage, one more humiliation visited upon the victim’s body. Now the light was focused on the limp penis and scrotum, and the violation of Richard Yeager seemed complete.
    “There are more wheals,” said Isles, wiping away a smear of blood to reveal the skin. “Here, on the lower abdomen.”
    “And on his thigh,” Rizzoli said softly.
    Isles glanced up. “Where?”
    Rizzoli pointed to the telltale marks, just to the left of the victim’s scrotum. So these are Richard Yeager’s last terrible moments, she thought. Fully awake and alert, but he cannot move. He cannot defend himself. The bulging muscles, the hours at the gym, mean nothing in the end, because his body will not obey him. His limbs lie useless, short-circuited by the electrical storm that has sizzled through his nervous system. He is dragged from his bedroom, helpless as a stunned cow on the way to slaughter. Propped up against the wall, to witness what comes next.
    But the Taser’s effect is brief. Soon his muscles twitch; his fingers clench into fists. He watches his wife’s ordeal, and rage floods his body with adrenaline. This time, when he moves, his muscles obey. He tries to rise, but the clatter of the teacup falling from his lap betrays him.
    It takes only another burst of the Taser and he collapses, despairing, like Sisyphus tumbling back down the hill.
    She looked at Richard Yeager’s face, at the eyelids slitted open, and thought of the last images his brain must have registered. His own legs, stretched useless in front of him. His wife, lying conquered on the beige rug. And a knife, gripped in the hunter’s hand, closing in for the kill.

    It is noisy in the dayroom, where men pace like the caged beasts they are. The TV blares, and the metal stairs leading to the upper tier of cells clang with every footfall. We are never out of our watchers’ sights. Surveillance cameras are everywhere, in the shower room, even in the toilet area. From the windows of the guard station, our keepers look down on us as we mingle here in the well. They can see every move we make.