The Apprentice: A Novel Read online

  “So what was done?” she asked.

  “In a word? Nothing. There were no arrests, because no suspect was ever identified.”

  “Of course, there was an inquiry,” said Conway. “But consider the situation, Detective. Thousands of war dead buried in over one hundred fifty mass graves. Foreign peacekeeping troops struggling to keep order. Armed outlaws roaming bombed-out villages, just looking for reasons to kill. And the civilians themselves, nursing old rages. It was the Wild West over there, with gun battles erupting over drugs or family feuds or personal vendettas. And almost always, the killing was blamed on ethnic tensions. How could you distinguish one murder from another? There were so many.”

  “For a serial killer,” said Dean, “it was paradise on earth.”

  twenty-two

  She looked at Dean. She had not been surprised to hear of his military service. She’d already seen it in his bearing, his air of command. He would know about war zones, and he’d be familiar with the scenario that military conquerors had always played out. The humiliation of the enemy. The taking of spoils.

  “Our unsub was in Kosovo,” she said.

  “It’s the sort of place he would thrive on,” said Conway. “Where violent death’s a part of everyday life. A killer could walk into such a place, commit atrocities, and walk out again without anyone noticing the difference. There’s no way of knowing how many murders are written off as mere acts of war.”

  “So we may be dealing with a recent immigrant,” said Rizzoli. “A refugee from Kosovo.”

  “That’s one possibility,” said Dean.

  “A possibility you’ve known all along.”

  “Yes.” His answer came without hesitation.

  “You withheld vital information. You sat back and watched while the dumb cops ran around in circles.”

  “I allowed you to reach your own conclusions.”

  “Yes, but without full knowledge of the facts.” She pointed to the photos. “This could have made the difference.”

  Dean and Conway looked at each other. Then Conway said, “I’m afraid there’s even more we haven’t told you.”

  “More?”

  Dean reached into the accordion folder and took out yet another crime scene photo. Though Rizzoli thought she was prepared to confront this fourth image, the impact of the photograph struck her with visceral force. She saw a young and fair-haired man with a wisp of mustache. He was more sinew than muscle, his chest a bony vault of ribs, his thin shoulders jutting forward like white knobs. She could clearly see the man’s dying expression, the muscles of his face frozen into a rictus of horror.

  “This victim was found October twenty-ninth of last year,” said Dean. “The wife’s body was never found.”

  She swallowed and averted her gaze from the victim’s face. “Kosovo again?”

  “No. Fayetteville, North Carolina.”

  Startled, she looked up at him. Held his gaze as the heat of anger flooded her face. “How many more haven’t you told me about? How many goddamn cases are there?”

  “These are all we know about.”

  “Meaning there could be others?”

  “There may be. But we don’t have access to that information.”

  She gave him a look of disbelief. “The FBI doesn’t?”

  “What Agent Dean means,” interjected Conway, “is that there may be cases outside our jurisdiction. Countries that lack accessible crime data. Remember, we’re talking about war zones. Areas of political upheaval. Precisely the places our unsub would be attracted to. Places where he’d feel right at home.”

  A killer who moves freely across oceans. Whose hunting area knows no national borders. She thought of everything she’d learned about the Dominator. The speed with which he’d subdued his victims. His craving for contact with the dead. His use of a Rambo-type knife. And the parachute fibers—drab green. She felt both men watching her as she processed what Conway had just said. They were testing her, waiting to see if she would measure up to their expectations.

  She looked at the last photograph on the coffee table. “You said this attack was in Fayetteville.”

  “Yes,” said Dean.

  “There’s a military base in the area. Isn’t there?”

  “Fort Bragg. It’s about ten miles northwest of Fayetteville.”

  “How many are stationed at that base?”

  “Around forty-one thousand active-duty. It’s home to the Eighteenth Airborne Corps, Eighty-second Airborne Division, and Army Special Operations Command.” The fact that Dean answered her without hesitation told her this was information he considered relevant. Information he already had at the tip of his tongue.

  “That’s why you’ve kept me in the dark, isn’t it? We’re dealing with someone who has combat skills. Someone who’s paid to kill.”

  “We’ve been kept in the dark, just as you have.” Dean leaned forward, his face so close to hers that all she could focus on was him. Conway and everything else in the room receded from view. “When I read the VICAP report filed by the Fayetteville police, I thought I was seeing Kosovo again. The killer might as well have signed his name, the crime scene was so distinctive. The position of the male victim’s body. The type of blade used in the coup de grâce. The china or glassware placed on the victim’s lap. The abduction of the wife. I immediately flew down to Fayetteville and spent two weeks with the local authorities, assisting their investigation. No suspect was ever identified.”

  “Why couldn’t you tell me this before?” she said.

  “Because of who our unsub might be.”

  “I don’t care if he’s a four-star general. I had a right to know about the Fayetteville case.”

  “If this had been critical to your identifying a Boston suspect, I would have told you.”

  “You said forty-one thousand active-duty soldiers are stationed at Fort Bragg.”

  “Yes.”

  “How many of those men served in Kosovo? I assume you asked that question.”

  Dean nodded. “I requested a list from the Pentagon of all soldiers whose service records coincide with the places and dates of the slayings. The Dominator is not on that list. Only a few of those men now reside in New England, and none of them have panned out as our man.”

  “I’m supposed to trust you on that?”

  “Yes.”

  She laughed. “That requires a pretty big leap of faith.”

  “We’re both making a leap of faith here, Jane. I’m betting that I can trust you.”

  “Trust me with what? So far, you haven’t told me anything that justifies secrecy.”

  In the silence that followed, Dean glanced at Conway, who gave an almost imperceptible nod. With that wordless exchange, they agreed to hand her the vital piece of the puzzle.

  Conway said, “Have you ever heard of ‘sheep-dipping,’ Detective?”

  “I take it that term has nothing to do with real sheep.”

  He smiled. “No, it doesn’t. It’s military slang. It refers to the CIA’s practice of occasionally borrowing the military’s special operations soldiers for certain missions. It happened in Nicaragua and Afghanistan, when the CIA’s own special operations group—their SOG—needed additional manpower. In Nicaragua, navy SEALs were sheep-dipped to mine the harbors. In Afghanistan, the Green Berets were sheep-dipped to train the mujahideen. While working for the CIA, these soldiers become, essentially, CIA case officers. They go off the Pentagon’s books. The military has no record of their activities.”

  She looked at Dean. “Then that list the Pentagon gave you. The names of the Fayetteville soldiers who served in Kosovo—”

  “The list was incomplete,” he said.

  “How incomplete? How many names were left off?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Did you ask the CIA?”

  “That’s where I hit walls.”

  “They won’t name names?”

  “They don’t have to,” said Conway. “If your unsub was involved in black op
s abroad, it will never be acknowledged.”

  “Even if their boy’s now killing on home turf?”

  “Especially if he’s killing on home turf,” said Dean. “It would be a public relations disaster. What if he chose to testify? What sensitive information might he leak to the press? You think the Agency wants us to know their boy’s breaking into homes and slaughtering law-abiding citizens? Abusing women’s corpses? There’s no way to keep that off the front pages.”

  “So what did the Agency tell you?”

  “That they had no information that was relevant to the Fayetteville homicide.”

  “It sounds like a standard brush-off.”

  “It was far more than that,” said Conway. “Within a day of Agent Dean’s query to the CIA, he was pulled off the Fayetteville investigation and told to return to Washington. That order came straight from the office of the FBI’s deputy director.”

  She stared at him, stunned by how deeply the Dominator’s identity was buried in secrecy.

  “That’s when Agent Dean came to me,” said Conway.

  “Because you’re on the Armed Services Committee?”

  “Because we’ve known each other for years. Marines have a way of finding each other. And trusting each other. He asked me to make inquiries on his behalf. But I’m afraid I couldn’t make any headway.”

  “Even a senator can’t?”

  Conway gave her an ironic smile. “A Democratic senator from a liberal state, I should add. I may have served my country as a soldier. But certain elements within Defense will never entirely accept me. Or trust me.”

  Her gaze dropped to the photos on the coffee table. To the gallery of dead men, chosen for slaughter not because of their politics or ethnicity or beliefs but because they had been married to beautiful wives. “You could have told me this weeks ago,” she said.

  “Police investigations leak like sieves,” said Dean.

  “Not mine.”

  “Any police investigation. If this information was shared with your team, it would eventually leak to the media. And that would bring your work straight to the attention of the wrong people. People who’ll try to prevent you from making an arrest.”

  “You really think they’d protect him? After what he’s done?”

  “No, I think they want to put him away just as much as we do. But they want it done quietly, out of the public eye. Clearly they’ve lost track of him. He’s out of their control, killing civilians. He’s become a walking time bomb, and they can’t afford to ignore the problem.”

  “And if they catch him before we do?”

  “We’ll never know about it, will we? The killings will just stop. And we’ll always wonder.”

  “That’s not what I call satisfying closure,” she said.

  “No, you want justice. An arrest, a trial, a conviction. The whole nine yards.”

  “You make it sound like I’m asking for the moon.”

  “In this case, you may be.”

  “Is that why you brought me here? To tell me I’ll never catch him?”

  He leaned toward her with a look of sudden intensity. “We want exactly what you want, Jane. The whole nine yards. I’ve been tracking this man since Kosovo. You think I’d settle for anything less?”

  Conway said, quietly: “You understand now, Detective, why we brought you here? The need for secrecy?”

  “It seems to me there’s already too much of it.”

  “But for now, it’s the only way to achieve eventual and complete disclosure. Which is, I assume, what we all want.”

  She gazed for a moment at Senator Conway. “You paid for my trip, didn’t you? The plane tickets, the limos, the nice hotel. This isn’t on the FBI’s dime.”

  Conway gave a nod. A wry smile. “Things that really matter,” he said, “are best kept off the record.”

  twenty-three

  The sky had opened up and rain pounded like a thousand hammers on the roof of Dean’s Volvo. The windshield wipers thrashed across a watery view of stalled traffic and flooded streets.

  “A good thing you’re not flying back tonight,” he said. “The airport’s probably a mess.”

  “In this weather, I’ll keep my feet on the ground, thank you.”

  He shot her an amused look. “And I thought you were fearless.”

  “What gave you that impression?”

  “You did. You work hard at it, too. The armor always stays on.”

  “You’re trying to crawl inside my head again. You’re always doing that.”

  “It’s just a matter of habit. It’s what I did in the Gulf War. Psychological ops.”

  “Well, I’m not the enemy, okay?”

  “I never thought you were, Jane.”

  She looked at him and could not help admiring, as she always did, the clean, sharp lines of his profile. “But you didn’t trust me.”

  “I didn’t know you then.”

  “So have you changed your mind?”

  “Why do you think I asked you to come to Washington?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” she said, and gave a reckless laugh. “Because you missed me and couldn’t wait to see me again?”

  His silence made her flush. Suddenly she felt stupid and desperate, precisely the traits she despised in other women. She stared out the window, avoiding his gaze, the sound of her own voice, her own foolish words, still ringing in her ears.

  In the road ahead, cars were finally starting to move again, tires churning through deep puddles.

  “Actually,” he said, “I did want to see you.”

  “Oh?” The word tossed off carelessly. She had already embarrassed herself; she wouldn’t repeat the mistake.

  “I wanted to apologize. For telling Marquette you weren’t up to the job. I was wrong.”

  “When did you decide that?”

  “There wasn’t a specific moment. It was just . . . watching you work, day after day. Seeing how focused you are. How driven you are to get everything right.” He added, quietly: “And then I found out what you’ve been dealing with since last summer. Issues I hadn’t been aware of.”

  “Wow. ‘And she manages to do her job anyway.’ ”

  “You think I feel sorry for you,” he said.

  “It’s not particularly flattering to hear: ‘Look how much she’s accomplished, considering what she has to deal with.’ So give me a medal in the Special Olympics. The one for emotionally screwed-up cops.”

  He gave a sigh of exasperation. “Do you always look for the hidden motive behind every compliment, every word of praise? Sometimes, people mean exactly what they say, Jane.”

  “You can understand why I’d be more than a little skeptical about anything you tell me.”

  “You think I still have a secret agenda.”

  “I don’t know anymore.”

  “But I must have one, right? Because you certainly don’t deserve a genuine compliment from me.”

  “I get your point.”

  “You may get it. But you don’t really believe it.” He braked at a red light and looked at her. “Where does all the skepticism come from? Has it been that tough for you, being Jane Rizzoli?”

  She gave a weary laugh. “Let’s not go there, Dean.”

  “Is it the part about being a woman cop?”

  “You can probably fill in the blanks.”

  “Your colleagues seem to respect you.”

  “There are some notable exceptions.”

  “There always are.”

  The light turned green, and his gaze went back to the road.

  “It’s the nature of police work,” she said. “All that testosterone.”

  “Then why did you choose it?”

  “Because I flunked home ec.”

  At that, they both laughed. The first honest laugh they’d shared.

  “The truth is,” she said, “I’ve wanted to be a cop since I was twelve years old.”

  “Why?”

  “Everyone respects cops. At least, that’s how it seems to
a kid. I wanted the badge, the gun. The things that’d make people stand up and take notice of me. I didn’t want to end up in some office where I’d just disappear. Where I’d turn into the invisible woman. That’d be like getting buried alive, to be someone no one listens to. No one notices.” She leaned an elbow against the door and rested her head in her hand. “Now, anonymity’s starting to look pretty good.” At least the Surgeon wouldn’t know my name.

  “You sound sorry you chose police work.”

  She thought of the long nights on her feet, fueled by caffeine and adrenaline. The horrors of confronting the worst that human beings can do to each other. And she thought of Airplane Man, whose file remained on her desk, the perpetual symbol of futility. His own, as well as hers. We dream our dreams, she thought, and sometimes they take us places we never anticipate. A farmhouse basement with the stench of blood in the air. Or a free fall through blue sky, limbs flailing against the pull of gravity. But they are our dreams, and we go where they lead.

  She said, at last: “No, I’m not sorry. It’s what I do. It’s what I care about. It’s what I get angry about. I have to admit, a lot of the job’s about anger. I can’t just stand back and look at a victim’s body without being pissed off. That’s when I become their advocate—when I let their deaths get to me. Maybe when I don’t get angry is when I’ll know it’s time to quit.”

  “Not everyone has your fire in the belly.” He looked at her. “I think you’re the most intense person I’ve ever met.”

  “That’s not such a good thing.”

  “No, intensity is a good thing.”

  “If it means you’re always on the verge of flaming out?”

  “Are you?”

  “Sometimes it feels that way.” She stared at the rain lashing the windshield. “I should try to be more like you.”

  He didn’t respond, and she wondered if she’d offended him by her last statement. By her implication that he was cold and passionless. Yet that’s how he had always struck her: the man in the gray suit. For weeks, he had baffled her, and now, in her frustration, she wanted to provoke him, to make him display any emotion, however unpleasant, if only to prove she could do it. The challenge of the impregnable.