The Apprentice: A Rizzoli & Isles Novel

put the bastard there myself.
    “The
Boston Globe
printed every juicy detail,” said Korsak. “Your boy even made it into the
New York Times.
Now this perp is reenacting it.”
    “No, your killer is doing things Hoyt never did. He drags this couple out of the bedroom, into another room. He props up the man in a sitting position, then slashes his neck. It’s more like an execution. Or part of a ritual. Then there’s the woman. He kills the husband, but what does he do with the wife?” She stopped, suddenly remembering the shard of china on the floor. The broken teacup. Its significance blew through her like an icy wind.
    Without a word, she walked out of the bedroom and returned to the family room. She looked at the wall where the corpse of Dr. Yeager had been sitting. She looked down at the floor and began to pace a wider and wider circle, studying the spatters of blood on the wood.
    “Rizzoli?” said Korsak.
    She turned to the windows and squinted against the sunlight. “It’s too bright in here. And there’s so much glass. We can’t cover it all. We’ll have to come back tonight.”
    “You thinking of using a Luma-lite?”
    “We’ll need ultraviolet to see it.”
    “What are you looking for?”
    She turned back to the wall. “Dr. Yeager was sitting there when he died. Our unknown subject dragged him from the bedroom. Propped him up against that wall, and made him face the center of the room.”
    “Okay.”
    “Why was he placed there? Why go to all that trouble while the victim’s still alive? There had to be a reason.”
    “What reason?”
    “He was put there to watch something. To be a witness to what happened in this room.”
    At last Korsak’s face registered appalled comprehension. He stared at the wall, where Dr. Yeager had sat, an audience of one in a theater of horror.
    “Oh, Jesus,” he said. “Mrs. Yeager.”

two
    R izzoli brought home a pizza from the deli around the corner and excavated an ancient head of lettuce from the bottom of her refrigerator vegetable bin. She peeled off brown leaves until she reached the barely edible core. It was a pale and unappetizing salad, which she ate out of duty and not for pleasure. She had no time for pleasure; she ate only to refuel for the night ahead, a night that she did not look forward to.
    After a few bites, she pushed her food away and stared at the vivid smears of tomato sauce on the plate. The nightmares catch up with you, she thought. You think you’re immune, that you’re strong enough, detached enough, to live with them. And you know how to play the part, how to fake them all out. But those faces stay with you. The eyes of the dead.
    Was Gail Yeager among them?
    She looked down at her hands, at the twin scars knotting both palms, like healed crucifixion wounds. Whenever the weather turned cold and damp, her hands ached, a punishing reminder of what Warren Hoyt had done to her a year ago, the day he had pierced her flesh with his blades. The day she had thought would be her last on earth. The old wounds were aching now, but she could not blame this on the weather. No, it was because of what she had seen today in Newton. The folded nightgown. The fantail of blood on the wall. She had walked into a room where the air itself was still charged with terror, and she had felt Warren Hoyt’s lingering presence.
    Impossible, of course. Hoyt was in prison, exactly where he should be. Yet here she sat, chilled by the memory of that house in Newton, because the horror had felt so familiar.
    She was tempted to call Thomas Moore, with whom she had worked the Hoyt case. He knew the details as intimately as she did, and he understood how tenacious was the fear that Warren Hoyt had spun like a web around all of them. But since Moore’s marriage, his life had diverged from Rizzoli’s. His newfound happiness was the very thing that now made them strangers. Happy people are self-contained; they breathe different air and are subject to different laws of gravity. Though Moore might not be aware of the change between them, Rizzoli had felt it, and she mourned the loss, even as she felt ashamed for envying his happiness. Ashamed, too, of her jealousy of the woman who had captured Moore’s heart. A few days ago, she had received his postcard from London, where he and Catherine were vacationing. It was a brief hello scrawled on the back of a souvenir card from the Scotland Yard Museum, just a few words to let Rizzoli know their stay was pleasant and