In the morgue, the medical examiner took off her jacket and hung it up carefully, before putting on her scrubs, examining the latest body. According to the notes, this was another unidentified body found in the city dump. She preferred to carry out the autopsy on this body to ascertain whether it bore the same hallmarks as the other victims of the serial killer the newspapers luridly called "The Holy Joe Killer", who posed bodies of his invariably male victims in the Cruxificition Position, in the Boston city dump.
Maura found it hard to understand why people felt the need to inflict injuries on others. People... she sometimes did not understand people, period. They called her the Queen of the Dead, but she liked that as the dead were easier to deal with than the living. Indeed, she understood science. She found it comforting, and often took refuge in the evidence-based approach applied in science.
Things are rigorously tested under a variety of conditions, before it becomes inescapable fact. Emotions and feelings were a different matter entirely. How could one even begin to test hypotheses on emotions. How could one measure the level or degree of a given emotion? Pain? Fear? Anger? Sadness? Love? Happiness? There was just too much subjectivity. Even psychology is not one hundred percent verifiable. Yes, she definitely preferred working on dead bodies to dealing with live people.
Even her upbringing... the Isles family were undemonstrative at best. Her adoptive parents were good in giving her all the material opportunities she could ever wish for, but she somehow did not ask for too much. The less she asked, the more they benignly neglected her, showering her with aloof, abstract love as their adopted daughter. So she did not deal much with feelings and emotions when it came to interacting with people throughout her life.
Yes, she had her internal dialogue, and she had that, but it was a different story when it came to expressing her feelings, particularly strong feelings, regardless of the topic. She wasn't brought up to be demonstrative, and it wasn't in her personality anyway. This suited her as science was there for her, but it made it much more difficult when she met the all too demonstrative Italian-American Jane Rizzoli at the cafe, when she mistakenly took her for a 'working girl'.
And now this falling out when she thought Jane shot her father... thank goodness they worked it out and are friends again. It distressed it her so much when they were fighting, it was so uncouth, as Jane was her special friend. And yet she found herself unable to confide in Jane. These pesky feelings again. And yet she is not a machine. It probably would make it much easier, but no.
Maura shook her head, as she was so unsettled, finding her biological mother online. A Dr. Hope Martin. For some reason she found this most difficult to deal with. She does not know how to even bring up the subject to her best friend. Jane would help her, she knew, but...
Sighing, Maura returned to the corpse on the autopsy table and continued with her work, compartmentalising her emotions to another time, she had work to do, on this particular John Doe. The buzz of the Stryker saw helped her ground herself as she sawed open the sternum, as she continued with the autopsy.
