To tell the truth, Maura didn't remember how she got there.
It had been a long night already and not even the steaming cup of tea in her car's drink carrier was helping. She had just finished another scene, had barely packed her kit away and was finally beginning to contemplate a late dinner at that new Peruvian place that was getting such high reviews when she got the call.
There had been something wrong with the relaying officer's voice, she remembered. It hadn't sounded right. Too carefully controlled. The breathing just a little too harsh. It had caught her attention and something in her chest had tightened instinctively in response. She'd stopped then, partway to her car with her phone to her ear and felt a terrible sense of . . . something.
Not dread. Not fear. Not even anxiety really.
More a . . . bracing sensation.
She had stood there a moment while her brain analyzed it, recognizing that his voice had triggered the start of her body's automatic primal flight-or-fight system and calmly began engaging one of her yoga meditation techniques to counter it.
And she asked the officer what was wrong.
"It's . . . a badge, ma'am. It's one of ours."
For one horrific heart freezing moment, Maura's mind had flashed the horror of Jane's dead face and the soft elegant hand holding the phone shook before she clenched her jaw and forced herself to still.
"Who is it, officer?" She demanded, suddenly raw throated and cold, hearing her pulse pound now too loud in her ears.
And even though it wasn't protocol, he told her anyway. She thanked him quietly and when she went to call Jane, her fingers trembled and she chose Korsak instead.
Then the next thing she knew, she was there.
The mangled wrecks still steamed hotly in the Boston night.
There had been way too many uniforms present. Ambulances and patrol cars encircled the area and shadow eyed men and women in dark uniforms that would have vanished into the night save for the neon safety vests they wore watched her silently as she approached the EMT blanketed body. Not at attention, more like . . . guarding.
It made her think inexplicably of a formal tomb.
In the middle of the glass shatter coated pavement.
She remembered that she hadn't wanted to look.
It was different seeing the faces of strangers. Better. Safer. Easier. She didn't usually have a problem with those. So many years of dead faces staring dull eyed back at her had muted her heart with constant exposure. It wasn't that she didn't care, because she did. It was just that they weren't . . . personal. They didn't mean anything to her beyond the most general human sense and while she could still feel a sense of . . . regret . . . for their demise, there wasn't usually anything more.
But Maura knew the young man whose sightless face she would find under that blanket.
She had stood there over his body in her heels, the whirling red and blue emergency lights making everything shift surreally from living three dimension to flat two and back over and over. Bloody white gauze fluttered in the night wind.
Then she had slowly, ever so slowly, crouched down and gently turned back the corner of the blanket.
Sometimes that moment still came back to her in dreams.
"I'm sorry," she'd whispered hoarsely down at Frost.
And she was.
For more than his death.
Because when the officer had said his name, for one small utterly natural human shameful moment she had just been relieved.
That it hadn't been Jane Rizzoli.
It was part of the reason why it took her so long to allow herself at last to weep for Frost.
Maura hadn't felt she had the right.
Until her lab tech Todd with his almost teenage boy face reminded her again of what she had always known but somehow still forgot in her grief driven sense of guilt.
Barry Frost really had been one of the nice guys.
And he would have understood.