The Apprentice: A Rizzoli & Isles Novel
there. You don’t know the situation I faced.”
“I read your statement.”
“Cordell was lying there. Bleeding—”
“So you responded the way any normal human being would. You tried to help her.”
“Yes.”
“And it got you into trouble. You forgot to think like a cop.”
Her look of outrage did not seem to disturb him in the least. He merely gazed back at her, his expression immobile, his face so composed, so assured, that it only served to magnify her own turmoil.
“I
never
forget to think like a cop,” she said.
“In that cellar, you did. You let the victim distract you.”
“My primary concern is always the victim.”
“When it endangers you both? Is that logical?”
Logical.
Yes, that was Gabriel Dean. She had never met anyone like this man, who could regard both the living and the dead with an equal absence of emotion.
“I couldn’t let her die,” she said. “That was my first—my only—thought.”
“You knew her? Cordell?”
“Yes.”
“You were friends?”
“No.” Her answer was so immediate, Dean’s eyebrow slanted up in a silent query. Rizzoli took a breath and said, “She was part of the Surgeon investigation. That’s all.”
“You didn’t like her?”
Rizzoli paused, taken aback by Dean’s penetrating insight. She said, “I didn’t warm to her. Let’s put it that way.”
I was jealous of her. Of her beauty. And her effect on Thomas Moore.
“Yet Cordell was a victim,” said Dean.
“I wasn’t sure
what
she was. Not at first. But toward the end, it became clear she was the Surgeon’s target.”
“You must have felt guilty. About doubting her.”
Rizzoli said nothing.
“Is that why you needed so badly to save her?”
She stiffened, insulted by his question. “She was in danger. I didn’t need any other reason.”
“You took risks that weren’t prudent.”
“I don’t think
risk
and
prudent
are words that go together in the same sentence.”
“The Surgeon set the trap. You took the bait.”
“Yeah, okay. It was a mistake—”
“One he knew you’d make.”
“How could he possibly know that?”
“He knows a lot about you. It’s that bond, again. That connection between you two.”
She shot to her feet. “This is bullshit,” she said, and walked out of the living room.
He followed her into the kitchen, relentlessly pursuing her with his theories, theories she didn’t want to hear. The thought of any emotional link between herself and Hoyt was too repellent to consider, and she couldn’t stand listening any longer. But here he was, crowding into her already claustrophobic kitchen, forcing her to hear what he had to say.
“Just as you have a direct channel into Warren Hoyt’s psyche,” Dean said, “he has one into yours.”
“He didn’t know me at the time.”
“Can you be sure of that? He would have been following the investigation. Would have known you were on the team.”
“And that’s all he would have known about me.”
“I think he understands more than you give him credit for. He feeds off women’s fears. It’s all written there, in his psychological profile. He’s attracted to damaged women. To the emotionally battered. The whiff of a woman’s pain turns him on, and he’s exquisitely sensitive to its presence. He can detect it using the most subtle of clues. A woman’s tone of voice. The way she holds her head or refuses eye contact. All the tiny physical signs that the rest of us might miss. But he picks up on them. He knows which women are wounded, and those are the ones he wants.”
“I’m no victim.”
“You are now. He made you one.” He moved closer, so close they were almost touching. She felt the sudden wild urge to lean into his arms and press herself against him. To see how he would react. But pride and common sense kept her perfectly rigid.
She forced out a laugh. “Who’s the victim here, Agent Dean? Not me. Don’t forget,
I’m
the one who put him away.”
“Yes,” he answered quietly. “You put the Surgeon away. But not without a great deal of damage to yourself.”
She stared back, silent.
Damaged.
That was exactly the word for what had been done to her. A woman with scars on her hands and a fortress of locks on her door. A woman who would never again feel August’s hot breath without remembering the heat of that summer day and the smell of her own blood.
Without a word, she turned and walked out of the kitchen, back into the living room. There she sank on the
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