The Apprentice: A Rizzoli & Isles Novel

too short of breath to keep up. He would have pushed himself anyway, driven by male vanity, by pride. Did he clutch his chest before he went down? Did he try to call for help?
    I would not have heard him anyway. I was too busy trying to run down shadows. Trying to salvage my own pride.
    “Detective Rizzoli?” said Officer Doud. He’d approached so quietly, she had not even realized he was standing beside her.
    “Yes?”
    “I’m afraid we’ve found another one.”
    “What?”
    “Another body.”
    Stunned, she could say nothing as she followed Doud across the damp grass, his flashlight lighting the way through the blackness. A flicker of more lights far ahead marked their destination. By the time she finally detected the first whiff of decay, they were several hundred yards from where the security guard had fallen.
    “Who found it?” she asked.
    “Agent Dean.”
    “Why was he searching all the way out here?”
    “I guess he was doing a general sweep.”
    Dean turned to face her as she approached. “I think we’ve found Karenna Ghent,” he said.
    The woman lay atop a grave site, her black hair splayed around her, clusters of leaves arranged among the dark strands in mock decoration of mortified flesh. She had been dead long enough for her belly to bloat, for purge fluid to trickle from her nostrils. But the impact of all these details faded in the greater horror of what had been done to the lower abdomen. Rizzoli stared at the gaping wound. A single transverse slice.
    The ground seemed to give way beneath her feet and she stumbled backward, blindly reaching for support and finding only air.
    It was Dean who caught her, grasping her firmly by the elbow. “It’s not a coincidence,” he said.
    She was silent, her gaze still fixed on that terrible wound. She remembered similar wounds on other women. Remembered a summer even hotter than this one.
    “He’s been following the news,” said Dean. “He knows you’re the lead investigator. He knows how to turn the tables, how to make a game of cat and mouse go both ways. That’s what it is to him, now. A game.”
    Although she registered his words, she didn’t understand what he was trying to tell her. “What game?”
    “Didn’t you see the name?” He aimed his flashlight at the words carved into the granite headstone:
    Beloved husband and father
Anthony Rizzoli
1901–1962
    “It’s a taunt,” said Dean. “And it’s aimed straight at you.”

thirteen
    T he woman sitting at Korsak’s bedside had lank brown hair that looked as if it had been neither washed nor combed in days. She did not touch him but simply gazed at the bed with vacant eyes, her hands resting in her lap, lifeless as a mannequin’s. Rizzoli stood outside the ICU cubicle, debating whether to intrude. Finally the woman looked up and met her gaze through the window, and Rizzoli could not simply walk away.
    She stepped into the cubicle. “Mrs. Korsak?” she asked.
    “Yes?”
    “I’m Detective Rizzoli. Jane. Please call me Jane.”
    The woman’s expression remained blank; clearly she did not recognize the name.
    “I’m afraid I don’t know your first name,” said Rizzoli.
    “Diane.” The woman was silent for a moment; then she frowned. “I’m sorry. Who are you again?”
    “Jane Rizzoli. I’m with Boston P.D. I’ve been working with your husband on a case. He may have mentioned it.”
    Diane gave a vague shrug and looked back at her husband. Her face revealed neither grief nor fear. Only the numb passivity of exhaustion.
    For a moment Rizzoli simply stood in silent vigil over the bed. So many tubes, she thought. So many machines. And at their center was Korsak, reduced to senseless flesh. The doctors had confirmed a heart attack, and although his cardiac rhythm was now stable, he remained stuporous. His mouth hung agape, an endotracheal tube protruding like a plastic snake. A reservoir hanging at the side of the bed collected a slow trickle of urine. Though the bedsheet concealed his genitals, his chest and abdomen were bare, and one hairy leg protruded from beneath the sheet, revealing a foot with yellow unclipped toenails. Even as she took in these details, she felt ashamed of invading his privacy, of seeing him at his most vulnerable. Yet she could not look away. She felt compelled to stare, eyes drawn to all the intimate details, the very things that, were he awake, he would not want her to see.
    “He needs a shave,” said Diane.
    Such a trivial concern, yet