The Apprentice: A Rizzoli & Isles Novel

it was the one spontaneous remark Diane had made. She had not moved a muscle but sat perfectly motionless, hands still limp, her placid expression carved in stone.
    Rizzoli searched for something to say, something she thought she
should
say to comfort her, and settled on a cliché. “He’s a fighter. He won’t give up easily.”
    Her words dropped like stones into a bottomless pond. No ripples, no effect. A long silence passed before Diane’s flat blue eyes at last focused on her.
    “I’m afraid I’ve forgotten your name again.”
    “Jane Rizzoli. Your husband and I were working a stakeout together.”
    “Oh. You’re the one.”
    Rizzoli paused, suddenly stricken by guilt.
Yes, I’m the one. The one who abandoned him. Who left him lying alone in the darkness because I was so frantic to salvage my fucked-up night.
    “Thank you,” said Diane.
    Rizzoli frowned. “For what?”
    “For whatever you did. To help him.”
    Rizzoli looked into the woman’s vague blue eyes, and for the first time she noticed the tightly constricted pupils. The eyes of the anesthetized, she thought. Diane Korsak was in a narcotic daze.
    Rizzoli looked at Korsak. Remembered the night she had called him to the Ghent death scene and he’d arrived intoxicated. She remembered, too, the night they had stood together in the M.E.’s parking lot and Korsak had seemed reluctant to go home. Is this what he faced every evening? This woman with her blank stare and her robot voice?
    You never told me. And I never bothered to ask.
    She moved to the bed and squeezed his hand. Recalled how his moist handshake had once repelled her. Not today; today, she would have rejoiced had he squeezed back. But the hand in hers remained limp.

    It was eleven A.M. when she finally walked into her apartment. She turned the two dead bolts, pressed the button lock, and fastened the chain. Once, she would have thought all these locks were a sign of paranoia; once, she’d been satisfied with a simple knob lock and a weapon in her nightstand drawer. But a year ago Warren Hoyt had changed her life, and her door had since acquired these gleaming brass accessories. She stared at her array of locks, suddenly struck by how much she had become like every other victim of violent crime, desperate to barricade her home and shut out the world.
    The Surgeon had done this to her.
    And now this new unsub, the Dominator, had added his voice to the chorus of monsters braying outside her door. Gabriel Dean had understood at once that the choice of the grave on which Karenna Ghent’s corpse had been deposited was no accident. Although the tenant of that grave, Anthony Rizzoli, was not her relation, their shared name was clearly a message intended for her.
    The Dominator knows my name.
    She did not remove her holster until she had made the complete walk-through of her apartment. It was not a large space, and it took less than a minute to glance in the kitchen and the living room, then move down the short hallway to her bedroom, where she opened the closet, peeked under the bed. Only then did she unbuckle her holster and slip the weapon into her nightstand drawer. She peeled off her clothes and went into the bathroom. She locked the door—yet another automatic reflex, and completely unnecessary, but it was the only way she could step into the shower and summon the nerve to pull the curtain shut. Moments later, her hair still slick with conditioner, she was seized by the feeling that she was not alone. She yanked open the curtain and stared at the empty bathroom, her heart hammering, the water streaming down her shoulders and onto the floor.
    She turned off the faucet. Leaned back against the tiled wall, breathing deeply, waiting for her heartbeat to slow. Through the
whoosh
of her own pulse she heard the hum of the ventilation fan. The rumble of pipes in her building. Everyday sounds that she had never bothered to register until now, when their very ordinariness served as a blessed focus.
    By the time her heartbeat finally slowed to normal, the water had chilled on her skin. She stepped out, toweled off, then knelt down to mop up the wet floor as well. For all her swaggering at work, her tough-cop act, she was now reduced to little more than shivering flesh. She saw, in the mirror, how fear had changed her. Staring back was a woman who had lost weight, whose already slim frame was slowly melting into gauntness. Whose face, once square and sturdy, now seemed thin as a wraith’s,