The Apprentice: A Rizzoli & Isles Novel

forward, her long hair cascading down between her bare thighs. A woman reaching for the sky, torso glistening with the sweat of vigorous exercise. Rizzoli paused to study a photo that had been knocked askew.
    “These are all the same woman,” she said.
    “It’s her.”
    “Mrs. Yeager?”
    “Looks like they had a kinky thing going, huh?”
    She stared at Gail Yeager’s finely toned body. “I don’t think it’s kinky at all. These are beautiful pictures.”
    “Yeah, whatever. Bedroom’s in here.” He pointed through the doorway.
    She stopped at the threshold. Inside was a king-size bed, its covers thrown back, as though its occupants had been abruptly roused from sleep. On the shell-pink carpet, the nylon pile had been flattened in two separate swaths leading from the bed to the doorway.
    Rizzoli said, softly, “They were both dragged from the bed.”
    Korsak nodded. “Our perp surprises them in bed. Somehow subdues them. Binds their wrists and ankles. Drags them across the carpet and into the hallway, where the wood floor begins.”
    She was baffled by the killer’s actions. She imagined him standing where she was now, looking in at the sleeping couple. A window high over the bed, uncurtained, would have spilled enough light to see which was the man and which the woman. He would go to Dr. Yeager first. It was the logical thing to do, to control the man. Leave the woman for later. This much Rizzoli could envision. The approach, the initial attack. What she did not understand was what came next.
    “Why move them?” she said. “Why not kill Dr. Yeager right here? What was the point of bringing them out of the bedroom?”
    “I don’t know.” He pointed through the doorway. “It’s all been photographed. You can go in.”
    Reluctantly she entered the room, avoiding the drag marks on the carpet, and crossed to the bed. She saw no blood on the sheets or the covers. On one pillow was a long blond strand—Mrs. Yeager’s side of the bed, she thought. She turned to the dresser, where a framed photograph of the couple confirmed that Gail Yeager was indeed a blonde. A pretty one, too, with light-blue eyes and a dusting of freckles on deeply tanned skin. Dr. Yeager had his arm draped around her shoulder and projected the brawny confidence of a man who knows he is physically imposing. Not a man who would one day end up dead in his underwear, his hands and feet bound.
    “It’s on the chair,” said Korsak.
    “What?”
    “Look at the chair.”
    She turned to face the corner of the room and saw an antique ladder-back chair. Lying on the seat was a folded nightgown. Moving closer, she saw bright spatters of red staining the cream satin.
    The hairs on the back of her neck were suddenly bristling, and for a few seconds she forgot to breathe.
    She reached down and lifted one corner of the garment. The underside of the fold was spattered as well.
    “We don’t know whose blood it is,” said Korsak. “It could be Dr. Yeager’s; it could be the wife’s.”
    “It was already stained before he folded it.”
    “But there’s no other blood in this room. Which means it got splattered in the other room. Then he brought it into this bedroom. Folded it nice and neat. Placed it on that chair, like a little parting gift.” Korsak paused. “Does that remind you of someone?”
    She swallowed. “You know it does.”
    “This killer is copying your boy’s old signature.”
    “No, this is different. This is all different. The Surgeon never attacked couples.”
    “The folded nightclothes. The duct tape. The victims surprised in bed.”
    “Warren Hoyt chose single women. Victims he could quickly subdue.”
    “But look at the similarities! I’m telling you, we’ve got a copycat. Some wacko who’s been reading about the Surgeon.”
    Rizzoli was still staring at the nightgown, remembering other bedrooms, other scenes of death. It had happened during a summer of unbearable heat, like this one, when women slept with their windows open and a man named Warren Hoyt crept into their homes. He brought with him his dark fantasies and his scalpels, the instruments with which he performed his bloody rituals on victims who were awake and aware of every slice of his blade. She gazed at that nightgown, and a vision of Hoyt’s utterly ordinary face sprang clearly to mind, a face that still surfaced in her nightmares.
    But this is not his work. Warren Hoyt is safely locked away in a place he can’t escape. I know, because I