The Apprentice: A Rizzoli & Isles Novel

the eyes large and dark in their deepening hollows.
    She fled the mirror and went into the bedroom. Hair still damp, she sank onto her bed and lay with eyes open, knowing she should try to catch at least a few hours’ sleep. But daylight winked brightly through the cracks in the window blinds, and she could hear traffic in the street below. It was noon, and she had been awake for nearly thirty hours and had not eaten in nearly twelve. Yet she could summon up neither an appetite nor the will to fall asleep. The events of that early morning still buzzed like a current through her nervous system, the memories crackling in a recurrent loop. She saw the security guard’s throat gaping open, his head turned at an impossible angle from his torso. She saw Karenna Ghent, leaves scattered in her hair.
    And she saw Korsak, his body bristling with tubes and wires.
    The three images cycled in her head like a strobe light, and she could not shut them off. She could not silence the buzzing. Was this what insanity felt like?
    Weeks ago, Dr. Zucker had urged her to seek counseling and she had angrily brushed him off. Now she wondered if he had detected something in her words, her gaze, that even she had not been aware of. The first cracks in her sanity, shearing deeper and wider, since the Surgeon had rocked her life.

    The ringing phone awakened her. It seemed that she’d only just closed her eyes, and the first emotion that bubbled up as she groped for the phone was rage, that she could not be granted even a moment’s rest. She answered with a curt: “Rizzoli.”
    “Uh . . . Detective Rizzoli, this is Yoshima at the M.E.’s office. Dr. Isles was expecting you to come in for the Ghent postmortem.”
    “I am coming in.”
    “Well, she’s already started, and—”
    “What time is it?”
    “Nearly four. We tried to page you, but you didn’t answer.”
    She sat up so abruptly the room spun. She gave her head a shake and stared at the clock by her bed: 3:52.
    She had slept right through her alarm, as well as the sound of her pager. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
    “Hold on a minute. Dr. Isles wants to speak to you.”
    She heard the clang of instruments on a metal tray; then Dr. Isles’s voice came on the phone. “Detective Rizzoli, you are coming in, right?”
    “It’ll take me half an hour to get there.”
    “Then we’ll wait for you.”
    “I don’t mean to hold you up.”
    “Dr. Tierney is coming in as well. You both need to see this.”
    This was highly unusual. With all the pathologists on staff to choose from, why would Dr. Isles call Dr. Tierney back from his recent retirement?
    “Is there some sort of problem?” asked Rizzoli.
    “That wound on the victim’s abdomen,” said Dr. Isles. “It’s not just a simple slash. It’s a surgical incision.”

    Dr. Tierney was already garbed and standing in the autopsy room when Rizzoli arrived. Like Dr. Isles, he normally shunned the use of a respirator, and tonight his only facial protection was a plastic shield, through which Rizzoli could read his grim expression. Everyone in the room looked equally somber, and they regarded Rizzoli with unnerving silence as she entered the room. By now, the presence of Agent Dean no longer surprised her, and she acknowledged his gaze with only a faint nod, wondering if he had managed to catch a few hours’ sleep as well. For the first time she saw fatigue in his eyes. Even Gabriel Dean was slowly being ground down by the weight of this investigation.
    “What have I missed?” she asked. Not yet ready to confront the remains, she kept her gaze on Isles.
    “We’ve completed the external examination. The criminalists have already taped for fibers, collected nail clippings, and combed hairs.”
    “What about the vaginal swabs?”
    Isles nodded. “There was motile sperm.”
    Rizzoli took a breath and finally focused on the body of Karenna Ghent. The foul odor nearly overwhelmed the Vicks menthol that, for the first time, she had dabbed under her nostrils. She no longer trusted her own stomach. So much had gone wrong these last few weeks, and she’d lost confidence in the very strengths that had sustained her through other investigations. When she’d stepped in this room, what she’d dreaded wasn’t the autopsy itself; rather, it was her own response to it. She could not predict, nor control, how she would react, and this, more than anything else, was what frightened her.
    She’d