The DHS study (Part 1)

Summary: Jane accepted Casey's proposal. This takes place four years later. Eventual fluff and Rizzles.

Pairing: Jane/Maura

A/N: Obviously, I don't own the rights to these characters. No copyright infringement intended.

xxx

CHAPTER I

Proper scientific enquiry demands rigorous hypotheses testing.

In Maura's well-ordered world there are no such things as hunches, guesses, or leaps of faith. Everything that comes to be fits within a certain probability distribution. Of course, it may not always be easy to predict ex ante the precise shape of the underlying function, or even the probabilities attached to each outcome, but Maura prides herself that she can always gather sufficient ex post evidence to get a good understanding on any phenomenon.

Well. Perhaps not any. She thinks as she stares at the results on the screen.

She has to submit her conclusions on gender differences in stress and copying styles in the work force to the Department of Health and Safety within a month, and she is starting to doubt that she can meet the deadline.

And that is simply unacceptable.

She meets her deadlines.

Always.

She frowns minutely as she glares at the computer and the latest MATLAB output. The frown alerts her to a myriad of unconscious activations in her sympathetic nervous system that are certainly not helping. She breathes in and out slowly, forcing herself to relax her posture, making a conscious effort to re-arrange her limbs, so that she sits more comfortably on the chair.

Perhaps she should amend that: She always met her deadlines before Jane.

She exhales slowly.

There is simply no understanding Jane.

And she is not sure why she is yet to reconcile herself to this idea, because it is certainly not novel.

It is irrational of her. But she is seemingly stuck. In this, and perhaps, in a number of other things in her life.

And if there was no understanding Jane then, when they had been the best of friends, and Maura had daily data on Jane's behaviour, there is certainly less of a chance now, after the years apart have driven such a wedge between them. And it is not that she cares per se because Maura understands life and all its turns. She knows that low probability events that can make someone reassess all their pre-conceived notions occur deceptively often.

Point in case: Jane's acceptance of Casey's proposal.

How is that ridiculous saying? She wonders as she lets out another long breath, regulating her breathing to a pattern that will help relax her. Liquid under the bridge? Surely that cannot be it. There is always liquid under bridges. At least, one should expect so if they have been carefully planned and are not a waste of public resources.

She shrugs her shoulders.

Whatever the saying.

She is definitely past it: The shock of Jane's acceptance, the beautiful white dress, the handsome groom and lovely bride, the too-rich chocolate cake that gave Maura a horrible indigestion, and of course, the tasteful and intimate wedding ceremony.

All of it.

Or, she acknowledges; if she is not, enough time has gone by that those events are sufficiently far removed from her present problem.

Three years, eight months and twelve days, to be precise.

Not that she is counting.

Not consciously, anyway. It is just that she knows. As if she had an internal clock with huge flashing red numbers tickling away in a little corner of her mind. And, in a way, she does not mind the permanent clock: it obviously indicates she has significant unoccupied brain power.

But it is not that what worries her today. It is simply that Jane is wrecking her dataset. She should have never been chosen for this study. If Maura had selected the sample-, but, no.

No.

She shakes her head.

No, there were very good reasons to include Jane, of course. This being a study on gender differences in the BPD, and Jane being the most successful female detective by any case closure standard, she could simply not be excluded.

She already knew the detective to be deceptively complex. But this is simply ridiculous. For the past week, whenever Maura decided that she had finally uncovered a pattern in female behaviour, the extreme standard deviation around said behaviour created by the data entries from Jane's case have indicated that her conjecture must simply be wrong.

Of course, it is not just in this that Maura finds Jane mystifying.

She could never understand how Jane could so easily flip: run hot and cold, be hard and soft, speak harshly and sweetly, punch like a kick boxer and run her fingers over someone's skin with a feather touch. Maura had spent time all those years ago puzzling over how Jane could laugh louder than anyone she had ever been around but cry softer, strut around like a runway model in her softball outfit but trip all over herself in a fine dress.

How she had used to have absolutely no patience for Maura's scientific processes, but also, all the time in the world for her.

How she had gazed at Maura like she was an incomprehensible puzzle, and also, like she knew precisely how all the pieces fit together.

And, of course, therein always lay the problem, Maura knows.

Jane had seen Maura.

And Maura had never been seen before. Not like Jane saw her. Not with that intense, pure clarity that reached all the corners where she had tried to hide. Not with hints of amusement, and admiration, and friendship, and she had thought, perhaps more.

It had made Maura aware of just how desperately she had wanted to be seen.

And then, of course, there had been Maura's own reactions to Jane. They had been equally perplexing. She had simply been unable to catalogue the emptiness and pain she had felt when Jane had decided to marry Casey and take a leave of absence, follow him to Afghanistan.

She had not understood why, suddenly, her own job as ME at the BPD had felt significantly less rewarding.

She could not explain it to herself without examining something she had forbidden herself to think about. Self-preservation, of course, being the one thing that could acceptably come before scientific inquiry where Maura Isles was concerned.

When Jane had married Casey and left Boston, Maura had closed off a part of herself. Perhaps, permanently. It was her training as a doctor. Sometimes, she knew, to save a life, a limb must be lost. A part of the body must be shut off, to prevent the death of precious body organs. If she were inclined to analyse what had happened in those weeks after Jane's departure, she would had probably described it as her body shutting down on itself, to guarantee survival, even if what survived was slightly less than what had previously existed.

Yes. Survival and self-preservation were among the strongest forces in nature.

Survival in moving.

In moving through whatever live throws her way.

When she cares to think about it, Maura wonders if she learnt that in medical school or from Constance. Her unflappable, always composed mother, who could move through any situation without as much as batting one of her long eyelashes. Like that one time she had found Maura in bed with her room mate and asked her at what time she was meeting Garrett in the evening, whilst at the same time offering to have John drive Mandy back home.

Yes. Maybe she learned that particular skill from Constance.

And Maura had moved forward, eventually: to Quantico, where she could offer her expertise, immerse herself in challenging work without the reminder of the reprieve those years in Boston, with Jane by her side, had offered in an otherwise lonely life.

She only came back to Boston six weeks ago.

She is not sure if she knows why precisely she came back. Just that one day she woke up, filled in the transfer request form she had kept on the top drawer of her office for months, and packed all of her belongings.

She had not kept in touch with Jane or any of the others very well over the years. That was her fault more than Jane's. Jane had tried her best to keep in touch. She had e-mailed Maura regularly, sent her text messages, tried to phone her, or skype with her. She had even visited. But Maura had just been terribly busy and time had simply flown by. They had only seen each other three times since Jane came back from Afghanistan.

Every time, it had been Jane visiting.

Every time, Maura had struggled to find a way out of her shuttered self.

A way to meet Jane halfway.

She had failed every time: the problem with Maura had always been that she was incapable of doing anything in half measures.

Of course, she had known that Jane's marriage had not even made it past its second anniversary, and that Jane had gone back to Boston almost immediately, but it had taken Maura almost two more years to find her way out of Quantico and back to the BPD.

She could have transferred back sooner.

They all knew it.

Still, they had received her with open arms: Korsak, Susie, Angela, Frankie, Tommy.

Jane.

Jane had hugged her with a strength that nearly made her faint from the lack of air.

Maura had not known where to put her hands on Jane's back.

She had awkwardly patted Jane's shoulders and pushed away.

She was outwardly the same, Maura. A bit older, a few more lines around her eyes and mouth, but she was still polite, and kind, and beautiful, and fashionable, and too intelligent for her own good.

She was an entirely different person.

She was cold, and distant, and detached.

Police officers that had not known her from her previous time at BPD had immediately started to refer to her offices down in the morgue as Siberia.

Maura frowns again. It is entirely inaccurate to refer to the morgue as such. The temperature in the morgue is always kept at precisely 17.6 degrees Celsius, which could in no way be considered that cold.

She shakes her head.

She will never finish this study if she keeps daydreaming like this.

She dismisses the past and focuses back on the data, on the screen, on the need for rigorous hypotheses testing.

The need to understand Jane, and maybe, in understanding Jane, understanding herself.

xxx

"Maura!"

Maura looks up, surprised. Jane is standing behind her laptop, on the other side of the high table, frowning slightly. The look on her face also reflects that hint of amusement that was never uncommon in years past.

There is also concern, or perhaps sadness. Whatever it is, it is new. Maura is not so good at reading Jane any more.

But now, she regards her carefully. Jane has aged more than Maura in their years apart. She is too thin, white hairs mixing with her dark locks. Her beauty is undiminished however. If Maura and Jane were still the friends they used to be, Maura would insist Jane let her help cover those white hairs. Not that Jane would had ever let Maura play around with her hair, but Maura would had insisted and maybe, she would had convinced her. She would had also insisted that Jane eat better, that she sleep longer.

"Are you ok, Maura?" Jane asks; her voice soft, almost timid.

"Yes." She thinks it over for a moment and nods, "yes, I am fine. Did you want something?"

"No." Jane shakes her head slowly, her left shoulder lifting, hands moving as she speaks. "I was just worried. I've been calling your mobile for the last thirty minutes or so, and you weren't answering, so I decided to come downstairs to see if everything was fine." She tries to catch Maura's eye, but the other woman still looks a bit spaced out.

"You sure you're ok?" Jane insists.

"Yes, I was just pondering whether I am using the correct paradigm in setting up my hypotheses." She explains, pointing with a well-manicured finger at a number in her computer screen.

"What?" Jane asks, confused. "Is this about a case?"

Maura finally looks her in the eye. "Not a case. It is just- well. I have been unable to obtain irrefutable proof when testing a set of hypotheses I have developed, and I am now wondering whether I should be using a different theoretical background." She nods to herself, again lost in thought. "Yes, perhaps that is the issue. I might have used incorrect assumptions in setting up my model and that is why I keep obtaining irreconcilable data."

Jane is silent for a moment. "I understood data out of all that." An eye roll and a quick smile are followed by a low, "maybe."

"Well, when I try to test a hypothesis, I must fix a certain number of things. If I allow for everything to co-vary, I could never draw any conclusions." Maura says, like that explains anything.

Jane regards her in silence for a moment, her head tilting to the side. Long dark curls falling over her shoulder. "Ok." She gives Maura a soft smile, "Ok. I see you are deep in thought in that big brain of yours."

The smile turns almost tremulous as she regards Maura.

Jane simply loves how smart Maura is. How, sometimes, she cannot follow what she is saying at all.

It is just one of the many things that had always made her feel fortunate that someone like Maura would decide to spend time with someone like her, a blue-collar hot-headed American-Italian that never even went to University. Some days, it had made her feel like she was ten feet tall, to have such a smart woman listen to what she had to say.

She misses those days with an intensity that is almost paralyzing.

Jane walks back towards the door. "I only wanted to know if we're still up to review the notes on the Martin case tomorrow. We're done upstairs, so I thought I'd go home early. Get some chow, you know. Maybe clean up my apartment a bit," She winces. "The place's a pigsty, Maura."

That makes Maura look up. "Oh. We can meet at my place if you'd prefer?"

It is the first time that Maura has agreed to go to Jane's place in all these weeks and Jane is teenage-like, over-the-top excited about it. She is trying to act nonchalantly, to play it cool. Like this is no big deal, but she knows she is failing miserably. She wants everything to be perfect.

She wants Maura back in her life.

And she does not want to go to Maura's place. She wants Maura to have an out, if she needs to leave. She knows that Maura is not yet herself around her. If they meet at Maura's, she would not have an easy way out, and she never wants Maura to feel trapped.

She had been to Maura's place when they helped her move back in.

Jane had always been attuned to all of Maura's moods. She may have possibly misinterpreted them at times, but she always noticed them.

Sadly, there was no mistaking how uncomfortable they had made Maura.

She had detected Maura's timidity around them. How rigidly she had held herself, how much energy it had obviously taken her to be around them.

On the wall, easily visible from the entrance, Jane had seen a framed picture, one that had not been there the last time she was at Maura's. It was from the day of Jane's wedding. Maura must had placed it there at some point during the months that she stayed in Boston before transferring to Quantico. It was of all of them: Jane, Casey, Angela, Korsack, Frost, Frankie, Tommy, Susie, and of course, Maura. Maura was at the end of the picture, standing next to Angela. Smiling, but staring off into space, holding herself a bit apart. Angela was looking at Maura, a slight frown on her face. All the others were smiling at the camera.

It had made Jane uncomfortable that Maura would place a picture from her wedding in such a prominent place, that she would choose that particular one. She had not dared to ask, but she had made Angela ask. When she reported back on her findings, Angela could only tell her what Maura said. "It helps me to have it there. I find it easier to be when I remember there are times and places in life."

Jane could not figure out what she may have meant by that.

Probably Angela misunderstood her.

Yes, tomorrow she'd rather meet Maura at her apartment, so she thinks quickly, trying to find a reason to avoid going to Maura's place.

"I really need to clean up, Maura, and having you visit is an incentive to do it," Jane smiles as she opens the door to the morgue, ready to leave, before Maura can change her mind and cancel on her.

"Well. I guess I should be grateful that you are considerate enough to clean up for me." Maura says primly. "Although I must say that I never noticed that you had such concerns in any prior visits."

Jane just laughs at that, happy that Maura is engaging a bit with her. That she is acknowledging they have a past together.

She raises her hands up defensively. "Ok, so that was a lie. I just ran out of clean stuff to wear and need to do a lot of laundry. So, my place?" She asks, smile big, dimples showing.

"Your place. I will bring the files." Maura agrees.

"Great," Jane smiles at her for a moment longer, lingering by the door before departing with a small wave and a quick, "see you tomorrow, then."

Maura stares at the closed door for a few seconds before she turns back to her data. Her eyes scan over the screen again. She opens the original file and runs a few descriptive statistics, examining the distributions yet again. There must be something she is missing at the very beginning, and that is why she cannot follow through, but she cannot pin it down.

It is an unpleasant idea, but she might have to remove Jane from the study, isolate her case as an outlier and exclude her from her conclusions.

Her eyes narrow as she notices something. The biggest anomaly in Jane's behaviour is under unwanted advances. One common type of stress related problems link to such issues. Unexpected or unwanted attraction is not uncommon in the work place. Maura had not analysed that subsection of the data in detail as she had gathered sufficient evidence on that issue from the other subjects. But now that she is looking, she notices that Jane had shown absolutely no reaction to those tests. She scored a zero in all five dimensions.

"How can that be," she mumbles as she reaches for the phone.

She only has to wait a moment. "Hello, it's Dr. Isles. Could you please bring Detective Jane Rizzoli's file from the gender differences study?" She listens for a moment to the woman on the other end before thanking her and hanging up.

Throughout the three months that the data gathering part of the study had lasted, Jane had to be measured across five dimensions related to this issue. This part of the study was directly sent to them by the Department of Health and Safety, and as she had not been back to Boston until nearly two months after the start of the study, she had not really followed up on this, beyond a customary look at the instrument submitted to her office by the DHS. It covered five constructs (two non-verbal dimensions, two verbal and one physical), and each of the constructs a number of variables.

For some reason, and according to this data, Jane had flat lined in those tests.

"Dr. Isles?" Susie walks in with a folder in her hand.

"Hi, Susie, I am looking at the raw data from the study and I cannot understand how Detective Rizzoli scored a zero across all of these dimensions." She points with her finger at the data, as Susie leans in closer to the computer.

Maura reaches for the folder and shifts through the documents it contains; quickly finding the one she is looking for.

"She signed her consent to being tested on these five dimensions, but all I see are zeros. How is that possible?" She asks.

Susie eyes widen for a moment as she looks at the page Maura is holding. Then, she turns it around to show Maura what is written there.

On being informed that testing would be carried out by Senior Criminalist Chang, subject refuses to participate in this part of the study. All answers are thus set to zero, given that MATLAB does not permit missing observations. The original scale was from 1 to 7. A zero score helps to identify these values as missing.

"She refused?" Maura asks, worried.

Susie only nods.

"But, why would she refuse?" she asks, brows drawing closer.

Susie is silent for a moment. "Dr. Isles, have you read the instructions on how this part of the study should be conducted?"

Maura stops for a moment. "Well, I looked through the instrument briefly when I took over the study five weeks ago. It appeared to be a fairly blunt assessment tool. Indeed, very subjective if I must be entirely truthful. But I do not recall anything that would explain why she would refuse to take part."

"It is really unfortunate that we have such limited resources at BPD. We should not be involved in this study. Human resources should have taken care of it." She adds.

Susie is silent for a very long time after that. Her mouth opens and closes a few times before she finally comes up with an answer.

"Maybe you should ask Detective Rizzoli?" She says.

Maura nods absently. If she must remove Jane from the study at the very least she should provide full data on her case. Perhaps the DHS, when putting together all the data across administrations, can make sense of her case, in a bigger sample.

She must complete at least this part of the study, regardless of whether she thinks it is a waste of resources.

She looks through the instructions. She goes through the list of items. It all seems fairly straight forward.

According to the instructions, the researcher must apply a number of cues in succession and repetitively over a period of six to eight weeks, and then, ask the subject to grade her discomfort on a Likert scale of 1 to 7. The researcher must also grade her or his perception of the subject's level of discomfort to each of the items on a scale of 1 to 7.

"Yes. I recall now why I thought this was a rather blunt instrument." She says to Susie, a clear note of criticism in her voice. "But we must of course endeavour to provide a full dataset to DHS." She adds.

Susie lifts an eyebrow. "It is unlikely that she'll allow me to test her."

"Yes, I can see that. I will take care of this, Susie. Do not worry. We will report to DHS that, for this subject, there was a different researcher applying the instrument. They can decide what to do with the data and I will remove Detective Rizzoli from our final conclusions. At this late stage it is the only viable solution, I fear."

"Are you sure it's a good idea for you to run the tests?" Susie asks.

Maura considers the question for a moment. "Yes. I do not see why this should be a problem. I will of course inform Detective Rizzoli that we will be carrying out the tests before conducting the examination. Do you hold any concerns about the validity of the data gathering process?" Maura respects Susie's input. Susie has a sharp mind and has always been an asset to her team here.

This is not a conversation Susie wants to have with Maura Isles, but she feels, as a researcher, she must point out that Maura is likely to be unable to remain unbiased, or what is worse, that her presence may affect the results. "Well, you are good friends with Detective Rizzoli…" she says, hoping Maura will understand without need for her to explain in detail.

"You are concerned about my objectivity. Certainly this could be an issue, but I am confident that our personal history shall not interfere with the collection of data. We have an almost exclusively professional relationship these days, but I can understand your concern that our previous familiarity could pose a problem in terms of my grading Detective Rizzoli's reactions, but I am an expert in reading body language. That should compensate any bias that I may subconsciously have."

"Well, but that is, huh. I-," Susie tries to say that the whole point is for the subject to experience unwanted advances, and that she is not sure if that would be the case here. She has seen the painfully hopeful look on Jane Rizzoli's face whenever Dr. Isles is around.

She looks at Maura for a long time in silence.

She cannot say it. Much as she wants.

If the data is indeed corrupt it will be easily identifiable by the DHS by adding a dummy variable to indicate that a different researcher applied the instrument. Perhaps, she thinks, on a completely unscientific way, this may be good for them both.

She misses the old Maura too.

"You are right, Dr. Isles. I'm sure it will be fine." She finally says.

"Of course it will." Maura concludes with finality.

xxx