Excerpt from The Apprentice by Tess Gerritsen, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"I hear he was some kind of surgeon."

Surgeon. For her, the word had special meaning, and the sound of it pierced her like an icy needle, chilling her even on this warm day. She looked at the front door and saw that the knob was sooty with fingerprint powder. She took a deep breath, pulled on latex gloves, and slipped paper booties over her shoes.

Inside, she saw polished oak floors and a stairwell that rose to cathedral heights. A stained-glass window let in glowing lozenges of color.

She heard the whish-whish of paper shoe covers, and a bear of a man lumbered into the hallway. Though he was dressed in businesslike attire, with a neatly knotted tie, the effect was ruined by the twin continents of sweat staining his underarms. His shirtsleeves were rolled up, revealing beefy arms bristling with dark hair. "Rizzoli?" he asked.

"One and the same."

He came toward her, arm outstretched, then remembered he was wearing gloves and let his hand fall again. "Vince Korsak. Sorry I couldn't say more over the phone, but everyone's got a scanner these days. Already had one reporter worm her way in here. What a bitch."

"So I heard."

"Look, I know you're probably wondering what the hell you're doing way out here. But I followed your work last year. You know, the Surgeon killings. I thought you'd want to see this."

Her mouth had gone dry. "What've you got?"

"Vic's in the family room. Dr. Richard Yeager, age thirty-six. Orthopedic surgeon. This is his residence."

She glanced up at the stained-glass window. "You Newton boys get the upscale homicides."

"Hey, Boston P.D. can have 'em all. This isn't supposed to happen out here. Especially weird shit like this."

Korsak led the way down the hall, into the family room. Rizzoli's first view was of brilliant sunlight flooding through a two-story wall of ground-to-ceiling windows. Despite the number of crime scene techs at work here, the room felt spacious and stark, all white walls and gleaming wood floors.

And blood. No matter how many crime scenes she walked into, that first sight of blood always shocked her. A comet's tail of arterial splatter had shot across the wall and trickled down in streamers. The source of that blood, Dr. Richard Yeager, sat with his back propped up against the wall, his wrists bound behind him. He was wearing only boxer shorts, and his legs were stretched out in front of him, the ankles bound with duct tape. His head lolled forward, obscuring her view of the wound that had released the fatal hemorrhage, but she did not need to see the slash to know that it had gone deep, to the carotid and the windpipe. She was already too familiar with the aftermath of such a wound, and she could read his final moments in the pattern of blood: the artery spurting, the lungs filling up, the victim aspirating through his severed windpipe. Drowning in his own blood. Exhaled tracheal spray had dried on his bare chest. Judging by his broad shoulders and his musculature, he had been physically fit--surely capable of fighting back against an attacker. Yet he had died with head bowed, in a posture of obeisance.

The two morgue attendants had already brought in their stretcher and were standing by the body, considering how best to move a corpse that was frozen in rigor mortis.

"When the M.E. saw him at ten A.M.," said Korsak, "livor mortis was fixed, and he was in full rigor. She estimated the time of death somewhere between midnight and three A.M."

"Who found him?"

"His office nurse. When he didn't show up at the clinic this morning and he didn't answer his phone, she drove over to check on him. Found him around nine A.M. There's no sign of his wife."

Rizzoli looked at Korsak. "Wife?"

"Gail Yeager, age thirty-one. She's missing."

Excerpted from The Apprentice by Tess GerritsenCopyright 2002 by Tess Gerritsen. Excerpted by permission of Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.