DISCLAIMER:: still not mine. damn.
A/N:: muffins make my world go round, just putting that out there. anyways, the feedback from the first chapter was AMAZING! i've never got so much feedback in just a couple days and i appreciate it. so here's a new chapter. it involves dialouge and such but if you've seen the finale, you mostly knows how this goes with the exception of a few added things from me. more to come tomorrow. enjoy and review!
-/-
So Tommy was out. That news was…less than ideal. Just as Frankie had looked up to her when they were children, she had looked up to Tommy. He could do no wrong in her eyes. He was her cooler older brother and she wanted to be just like him. And then he started drinking with his buddies. First, it was just a couple times in high school. They'd sneak out down to Ricky Franco's basement and get wasted. But once he hit his early twenties he was drunk at least two nights a week. Then it was three and eventually, it got to where Jane saw more of him drunk then she did sober. By the time he got locked up, Jane had lost her admiration for him. He was troubled; he needed help, but that didn't mean his misdeeds should go unnoticed or unpunished.
Her phone rang, breaking her thoughts. She looked at her mom momentarily, wishing there was something she could do to force the older woman to deal with the reality of the situation before reaching for the small device attached to her hip. "Rizzoli."
Losing one of your own was never good news to a cop. To lose anyone was hard, cops were the protectors of the people and if someone was lost to the evil of another it meant they weren't doing their jobs perfectly. But, to lose one of their own, that was the biggest failure. If the guardians couldn't protect themselves, then what good were they to the rest of the world?
The look in Angela Rizzoli's eyes when Jane told her that a cop had been shot broke her daughter's heart. They had talked about it several times since the beginning of her career in law enforcement. She believed it was a risk she made for the greater good. But all her mother saw were the consequences. Being married to her job for one and then there was always the possibility that one day she would get that phone call saying Jane or Frankie had been killed on the job. Every time Jane came home with stories of colleagues get wounded, or worse, when Hoyt had gone after Jane, it always brought the reality right back into both their laps.
-/-
Maura woke up at 6am on the day she died. She had always been an early riser; yoga was much more fulfilling when done at an early hour. But something about today woke her earlier than usual. She could feel it in the air, something was going to happen today, something big.
She was in the morgue, per usual, when she got the call from the scene, gsw, cop. She arrived at the scene shortly before Jane did. He was there, center of the floor, the red circular wound bright on his forehead, a halo of crimson blood surrounding his head, his eyes staring up at a ceiling he no longer saw. Silently to herself, Maura said a little prayer for the detective, one she'd never had the pleasure of meeting, but still, he was one of her team all the same. Then she got to work, listening to what this man's death could tell her about the person who robbed him of his life.
-/-
"He has a wife and two kids." She looked up to see a distraught Jane and an even more upset Korsak standing over her and the body.
"I knew his father. I knew Danny since he was this tall. It's a damn shame." Korsak stared at the body with sad, guilty eyes.
"One shot to the head." Jane looked at the body and Maura.
"It looks like a large caliber fire arm." Maura was trying to be helpful, though she was stating the obvious.
"It's a .45 caliber." Jane looked away, and then gave Korsak a pat on the back.
-/-
Jane wasn't exactly excited to be babysitting Detective Bobby Marino after his flare up at the scene of his partner's murder, but she didn't know if she was in any condition to be out on the street when the news about Tommy coming home was weighing heavily on her mind. Part of her wished she could press fast forward on the day so it could be night and Maura and her could be curled up on Maura's couch talking things out. Instead she had to settle for talking it out around the coffee machine.
The coffee was stale and she felt like spitting it back into the cup but held back, not wanting to be unladylike in front of Maura. "God, when was that made? November?" She poured some sugar in to make the flavor less depressing. "Marino wants a cup of coffee, there's none upstairs. The guy's a wreck." Setting down the sugar she'd finished pouring into her cup, she grabbed another cup and poured his.
"I've tried everything, British strawberries, fennel, bok choy." Maura distracted rambled as she grabbed the glass carafe and poured her own cup.
"Are we in the same conversation?" Jane looked at Maura in confusion.
"Sorry, I was talking about Bass."
"You're obsessing over your turtle again?"
"Tortoise." Maura was about to launch into the distinct difference between a common turtle and a tortoise, when she noticed what Jane was doing to Marino's coffee. "He likes salt in his coffee?"
Jane scrunched her face in confusion and then looked down at what her own hand was unknowingly doing.
Damn Maura. It was just like her to look at Jane with those concerned eyes and make her spill her guts. And that's exactly what she did. She told her about the DUI's and hitting the priest. She told her about how her parents walked around in denial.
"I'm really sorry." She could tell Maura meant it.
"Thank you." She grabbed the new cup of coffee she had just made for Marino, sans salt. "Don't worry about it. We got too much to do today to worry about Tommy." She turned and made a beeline for the elevators, stopping to console the officer at the front desk.
She pressed the call button for the west bank of elevators and Maura did the same for the east elevators.
Maura didn't want to leave Jane in such a tense moment. She was concerned for her. She wanted to say something consoling, something to make her feel better, but instead all that came out was "I'll call you when I get the results."
"Alright".
Maura's elevator door slid open first and she reluctantly slipped inside the metal box.
"Oh I got to log this into evidence." Jane clutched the pack of cigarettes still in the pocket of her blazer.
Maura brightened; the evidence lockers were right outside the morgue.
"I gotta take this to Marino." She looked at the cup of coffee in her hand. She warred between the two for a moment, but when her elevator doors slid open she took it as a sign to go back upstairs to Marino. The evidence lockers weren't going anywhere. "I'll see you later." She waved over her shoulder.
"Jane!"
"Yeah?" Jane whirled in the elevator and put a hand on the door to keep in open.
"If you want to talk about your brother or just, avoid the subject, I'm here."
Jane was certain she couldn't hide the love in her eyes, but Maura didn't seem to notice. So she smiled. "I know."
Maura gave a slight nod and stepped back into her own lift, knowing Jane would come to talk to her when she was ready.
-/-
Maura had found nothing to report nearly two hours later when she finally took a break. She wouldn't know if Danny was using until after the toxicology reports came back but he didn't seem to fit the profile of a junkie. He had a family and he had been dedicated to his job. He was killed for the drugs, that's what everybody assumed, but if Maura had to make an assumption, something she never did except in the privacy of her own mind, she would wager to guess that he was shot to be kept quiet.
Maura heard a faint popping noise and looked around. No one was anywhere near the morgue. And then she remembered Bass. She really had to make Bass eat something.
-/-
The witness was giving her nothing. All she'd gathered in the half hour plus they had been talking had been that the shooter was male and if they managed to find him, she could pick him out of a lineup.
A soft pop pop pop preceded the power failure but it barely registered as thought worthy in Jane's mind. Buildings made all sorts of sounds when the people in them remained quiet enough and power outages were common in the city.
"Oh my…there here, there here." The witness started to freak and Jane jumped out of her chair to calm the girl down. But even as she reassured her that it was just a power failure, she felt a tightness in the pit of her stomach that told her more was going on than the lights going out.