Jane liked to think.
She knew if she ever was crazy enough to actually say that out loud, the entire precinct would crack up laughing.
After all, Maura was the one who used words with more syllables than Jane had fingers.
Or sometimes toes.
Maura was the one who could actually understand and, sweet mercy, explain out the techno babble on the Star Trek reruns in the staff break room late at night—Jane was the one who took the remote away and channel hopped to a football game. Maura was the one who had known that Rousseau was a philosopher and Locke was a political theorist—Jane had thought they were a crazy French woman and a seriously messed up bald dude on Lost. And Maura was the one who could translate ancient Latin texts—Jane had trouble with figuring out office chair assembly instructions in English.
Ask anyone in Boston who the brains of the two were and even the drunks, hookers, and perps could tell you it was Maura.
It was that obvious.
But that didn't mean that Jane wasn't smart.
Ironically, it was Maura who pointed that out first.
Jane remembered it still. They had been in the morgue again. Maura had just got done with her autopsy and had practically buried Jane alive with a brain numbing avalanche of chemical compounds and percentiles and mathematical probabilities. Frustrated that she hadn't understood anything beyond the conjunction words like 'and', 'or', and 'but'—and more than a little humiliated actually—Jane had made some self-mocking smart assed flippant remark about needing a Maura For Dummies book.
And Maura's eyes had suddenly lit outraged fire and she had leaned over the stainless table with its now dissembled corpse and smacked Jane in the arm with one expensively manicured bloody gloved hand. Hard.
Then she'd spent the next two hours lecturing Jane furiously on the nine types of intelligence in the multiple intelligences theory by ASCD.
Truthfully, Jane hadn't understood most of that either. But it hadn't stopped her from smiling happily as she rubbed her arm on the way out of the morgue. Because what she had understood quite clearly is that Maura thought she was smart.
Maybe not the same kind of smart as Maura was, but her own Jane smart.
Something about Interpersonal Intelligence instead of Logical-Mathematical Intelligence.
Jane had gone back to her desk, carefully typed into Google and spent her lunch break reading the psychology behind Maura's outraged lecture.
And realized that while she couldn't match Maura's eidetic memory or her grasp of, well, practically everything, she could match Maura's desire to think.
Jane just liked to think of different things.
She liked to think of how to outwit a non-talking, lawyered up, smug faced perp in the interrogation room.
She liked to think of how all the tiny bits of sometimes utterly bizarre evidence at a crime scene fit together like a grim puzzle to prove what the hell happened.
She like to think of how to get some kind of real justice for the victims left on those stainless tables in the morgue or the families who stood weeping behind the glass after identifying their bodies.
But most of all-in the quiet moments between hectic cases or during those few minutes riding alone down the elevator with two cups of coffee, or while she lay awake staring up at her stained bedroom ceiling in that pondering dark stillness between two and four in the morning-Jane found she liked to think about something entirely new now.
Jane liked to think of what Maura thought about her.