The Apprentice Read Online Free PDF Page A

at that moment, sitting alone and contemplating that house of horrors, she craved bright lights and human company. The windows of the Yeager home stared at her like the glassy eyes of a corpse. The shadows around her took on myriad forms, none of them benign. She took out her weapon, unlatched the safety, and set it on her lap. Only then did she feel calmer.
    Headlights beamed in her rearview mirror. Turning, she was relieved to see the crime scene unit van pull up behind her. She slipped her weapon back in her purse.
    A young man with massive shoulders stepped out of the van and walked toward her car. As he bent down to peer in her window, she saw the glint of his gold earring.
    “Hey, Rizzoli,” he said.
    “Hey, Mick. Thanks for coming out.”
    “Nice neighborhood.”
    “Wait till you see the house.”
    A new set of headlights flickered into the cul-de-sac. Korsak had arrived.
    “Gang’s all here,” she said. “Let’s get to work.”
    Korsak and Mick did not know each other. As Rizzoli introduced them by the glow of the van’s dome light, she saw that Korsak was staring at the CST’s earring and noticed his hesitation before he shook Mick’s hand. She could almost see the wheels turning in Korsak’s head.
Earring. Weight lifter. Gotta be gay
.
    Mick began unloading his equipment. “I brought the new Mini Crimescope 400,” he said. “Four-hundred-watt arc lamp. Three times brighter than the old GE three-fifty watt. Most intense light source we ever worked with. This thing’s even brighter than five-hundred-watt Xenon.” He glanced at Korsak. “You mind carrying in the camera stuff?”
    Before Korsak could respond, Mick thrust an aluminum case into the detective’s arms, then turned back to the van for more equipment. Korsak just stood there for a moment holding the camera case, wearing a look of disbelief. Then he stalked off toward the house.
    By the time Rizzoli and Mick got to the front door with their various cases containing the Crimescope, power cords, and protective goggles, Korsak had turned on the lights inside the house and the door was ajar. They pulled on shoe covers and walked in.
    As Rizzoli had done earlier that day, Mick paused in the entryway, staring up in awe at the soaring stairwell.
    “There’s stained glass at the top,” said Rizzoli. “You should see it with the sun shining through.”
    An irritated Korsak called out from the family room, “We getting down to business here, or what?”
    Mick flashed Rizzoli a
what an asshole
look, and she shrugged. They headed down the hall.
    “This is the room,” said Korsak. He was wearing a different shirt from the one he’d worn earlier that afternoon, but this shirt, too, was already blotted with sweat. He stood with his jaw jutting out, his feet planted wide apart, like an ill-tempered Captain Bligh on the deck of his ship. “We focus here, this area of the floor.”
    The blood had lost none of its emotional impact. While Mick set up his equipment, plugging in the power cord, readying the camera and tripod, Rizzoli found her gaze drawn to the wall. No amount of scrubbing would completely erase that silent testimony to violence. The biochemical traces would always remain in a ghostly imprint.
    But it was not blood they sought tonight. They were searching for something far more difficult to see, and for that, they required an alternate light source that was intense enough to reveal what was now invisible to the unaided eye.
    Rizzoli knew that light was simply electromagnetic energy that moved in waves. Visible light, which the human eye can detect, had wavelengths between 400 and 700 nanometers. Shorter wavelengths, in the ultraviolet range, were not visible. But when UV light shines on a number of different natural and man-made substances, it sometimes excites electrons within those substances, releasing visible light in a process called fluorescence. UV light could reveal body fluids, bone fragments, hairs, and fibers. That’s why