Disclaimer: I don't own these characters; I certainly do not intend to receive any profit from borrowing them. They belong to, well, we all know who they belong to… but we are secretly hoping they belonged to us. Ohhh, the things we could do.
. . . . . .
The path was smooth, perfect for an intentional strike pattern. The kicking of debris behind her shoes and the clicking of sprinklers were the harmonies to her morning run and patterned breathing. There was some sort of peace and serenity she had been seeking and here—the nature, the faint barking of dogs and hum of footsteps… Wait, what the hell am I thinking? I was dragged out of my comfortable, warm, bed to go running at the ass crack of dawn. "Maura! How much longer? I feel a leg cramp coming on soon." Jane called to her friend who was a few strides ahead.
"Endorphin kick," she exhaled deeply, "as soon as we hit that." Her voice panted as she turned to meet the red-faced and sweaty detective.
Jane keeled over and placed her hands on her squatting knees, "I don't even want one. You and your endorphins…" she mumbled.
"Jane," she jogged in place, "Jane stand up."
The taller brunette stood up on her cue and proceeded to walk over to a nearby bench to sit and catch her breath. Maura thinned her lips and pouted at the detective, joining her anyway. "No runner's high today," she eased on the bench next to her friend.
Jane wiped beads of sweat from her temples, "sorry Maur, I just didn't get a whole hell of a lot of sleep last night."
The doctor's heart dropped, she didn't like where this was going. "Are you experiencing night hallucinations again?" Her question slipped by without an answer for a few moments and she placed her friend's hands between hers. "Judging by the inflammation of your conjunctiva and pigment of you sclera it is easy to determine this is not blepharitis or—"
The detective drew one hand away from its hold to hover her friend's mouth, " I'm just not sleeping, that's why my eyes are red. I don't have an eye disease like beef-or-titus or whatever you said." She instinctually rubbed her eyes. "Just, strange dreams—they're keeping me up at night."
Maura nodded while listening to her friend, "well, what have you been dreaming of?"
Jane stared at her with her whole body pleading to not have to answer that question; it was just far too embarrassing to share. She could not tell her the truth no matter what the doctor read in the micro-expressions on her face. The Gods had spoken, on time. Both of their phones rang simultaneously.
"Rizzoli."
"Dr. Isles."
. . . . . .
They fast approached the scene with to-go coffee in their hands. It was crisp outside for an early Saturday in the late of August for Boston. Jane bid a good morning to her partner, Frost, and Korsak and quickly went into to detective mode to assess the homicide while Maura snapped on her gloves to inspect the body.
"Looks like the vic was being chased into the alley and knocked all the garbage cans down behind her to slow down the killer," Frost noted the trash cluttering about in the alley and the tipped over bins. "The owner to the bakery called it in this morning when he was about to load the truck for deliveries. He's clean."
Jane scanned over the medical examiner, closely, as she advanced toward the body lying face down on the pavement. "We get an ID?" She tried miserably to not stammer her words while nearing the ME.
"No ID, but a bunch of credit cards with all different names," Korsak informed her.
"Hm, maybe she stole the wrong wallet," she squatted down next the medical examiner and took in the scene with the strongest attention to detail anyone had seen. Picking out torn denim material attached to knocked over trash cans and small specks of blood, or 'reddish-brown stains' on the top layer of waste littering the alley.
When the scene had been assessed thoroughly by all detectives, they went back to headquarters to get started on the case while the autopsy was being completed. The ME had concluded a blunt, somewhat round-tipped instrument about the size of a half dollar stabbed into the back of neck was the cause of death. She had also picked slivers and splinters from the wound, indicating the murder weapon was made from wood. "Someone very strong must have done this; the weapon was rounded at the top and would need a great deal of muscular force to penetrate the skin. The entry and exit points do however imply the object had been sharpened unevenly due to the tear marks and inner abrasions of the tissues. The wounds on her knees and hands from falling were perhaps hours prior to being stabbed. Time of death indicates it was in the last six hours."
The detective nodded, staring at the corpse through her blood-shot eyes and trying solidly to focus instead of capturing tickles of Maura's conditioner and personal scent in her nose. "Korsak is running her fingerprints right now; I'm going to share this information with them. Coffee soon?"
"I'll need it," The ME huffed as she watched the detective turn away abruptly.
"You woke me up at 5:00 in the morning, it's your own fault that you're tired!" Jane laughed through the doors, hearing an echo from her friend behind her.
Approaching Brick, she saw the recently murdered woman's lively face on the screens across the wall.
"Lucy Chalk, 29. She was a model and actress. Pulled up this YouTube video of her ex-boyfriend, and manager, screaming and yelling at her during an infomercial shoot—I think we should give him a call. Checked out his records, has a history of violence with models."
. . . . . .
Maura sat across from the detective while Angela brought them coffee to the table. Jane's eyes and focus still hazy, the doctor was beginning to worry more. "You would tell me if you were doing drugs right?"
"Probably not," she shot sarcasm at the ME while adding sugar to her mug.
"How many beers did you have last night? Sometimes alcohol can—"
"None! Frankie drank mine the other night when he came over for dinner and a baseball game and I forgot to get more."
"Could be the presence of mold in your apartment; mold can cause eye irritation and the stench alone can keep anyone up at night and allude to suggestive and odd dreaming. Especially in someone that has a particularly fined olfactory sense like you. I'm going to come over tonight and collect some swab samples."
Jane's head began aching from all the eye rolling she did during Maura's speech. "That's not necessary, Maur."
"I'll bring beer for you while I swab."
The detective perked upright, "what time?" She smiled shamelessly at her friend.
"How about you figure out this case while I go over the body again and we'll figure something out." She winked at the brunette and gently tapped the back of her hand.
Angela came walking from behind the counter and up to the women with her hands full of cleaning supplies. "Either of you know how to unclog a sink?"
Her daughter smirked at her as she stood up to offer help before getting back just as mamma Rizzoli lost grip of the items in her arms. Jane bent down to help her retrieve them and stopped hastily. Maura saw the change in her friend and hopped off the stool to take notice of what she was staring at.
"A plunger?" The doctor squinted trying to make sense of it.
Jane turned the handle of the plunger around to face the honey blonde and, "does the match the wound on the victim?"
They immediately ran to the morgue to run a couple of tests and quickly determined the handle to a plunger was the murder weapon. The detective darted back to Brick to share this information with Frost and Korsak.
"Frost, any idea what her last gig was?"
A few clicks on the computer and he pulled up evidence of it being for an infomercial for industrial cleaning products. "Why do you ask?"
"Because I found out the murder weapon was a plunger," Jane declared with an odd expression. A plunger, really? She thought to herself.
"Haven't heard that one before," Korsak chuckled while standing from his desk with Frost.
They left immediately to retrieve warrants while Jane went over footage from the photo shoots and commercials the victim had taken part in. Maura came to help speed things along as the night was closing in and they were so close to solving the case. The ME gestured for her friend to take a look at what was on her computer. Jane promptly stood and leaned over the doctor, arms on either side of the blonde's body, and hair cascading so it formed a curtain to the glass wall beside them.
Maura eased in the chair with her friend's presence behind her and instinctively bit her lip while taking a quick inhale to capture the scent of long, dark, wavy, brunette hair falling onto her own shoulder. She cleared her throat to get back on task, "his height to weight ratio provides a very muscular physique and would have enough torque once Lucy had fallen face down to impale her."
The detective rubbed her friend's arm, "good catch, Maur." She dialed her partner's number informed him of the man they came across in photographs and asked for he and Korsak to target him first.
. . . . . .
Korsak offered to buy a round at the Dirty Robber to celebrate one of the quicker cases in the last couple of years. Unfortunately Frost was the only one to jump on board. Jane had stressed she wanted to go check on Joe Friday and Maura stated she need to do swab testing for mold in Jane's apartment. Both male detectives let this slide as the women left for the night.
"Hold on, just let me run down to my office to grab a swab kit," the doctor's face lit up like a nerdy kid in a science shop.
Jane sat back on her heels in the lobby and took another look at the names on the wall, the photographs lining the glass case, and the memories pasted floor to ceiling. She rocked back on forth on her feet, swung her arms to mimic her body, exhaled deeply between pursed lips. "You're nervous," Maura interrupted her trance.
"No I'm not," she protested quickly.
The ME cocked her head to the side as if to evaluate her from a different angle, her findings were inconclusive. "Ready?"
They each drove their own cars to Jane's place—the detective would have been lying to herself if she didn't admit she wanted to get there minutes before Maura to do a sweep of the place to make sure it was clean and to hide something extremely close to her and very crucial. Something she never wanted the medical examiner to see. She ran inside, patted Joe Friday on the head and refilled her water and food bowls, straightened up pillows, organized the mail and magazines on her coffee table, threw all the dirty dishes in the sink into the dishwasher, ran a wet rag over the counter, sprayed some freshener in the air, all without realizing she left the door open and the shorter blonde stood there watching her the whole time.
"You missed a spot," she said to the tall brunette as she entered and placed the six pack of beer in the fridge. She watched Jane's body freeze like a deer in headlights, she was two minutes shy of having a nervous breakdown. Pivoting toward her friend, the doctor placed a hand on her shoulder, "Jane? Are you all right?"
"Fine." She exhaled quickly. "You swab, I'll drink and order some food." She grabbed a warm beer and retreated to the couch, never blinking her eyes.
Maura hated to speculate, but she was afraid there was something going on with her friend. A sort of nervousness she had never seen before. "I'm going to start in the bathroom, did you want to shower first so you can relax while I work?" The detective watched her friend take her warm beer and place it in the freezer while she made way for her stand up, not taking 'no' for answer.
She began to ease, marginally, "oh, there's that science journal on the coffee table. You mentioned it in the café the other day so I tracked one down for you."
The doctor's grin grew across her face as she watched her friend's back turn to the bathroom "oh great!" She sat down on the couch and began to flip through the trashy magazines, a Vanity Fair, a TV Guide, a Tiger Beat? Really, Detective Rizzoli? She thought to herself.
When pulling the science journal loose an envelope fell from the bindings, she casually picked it up and placed it on the table. For Maura she read while tossing it back on the paper heap on the table.