Chapter 4

"Hold still," Jane said uselessly as she struggled to drag a comb through Charlotte's unruly curls. Maura thought it was wonderful that their daughter had inherited Jane's hair. Jane was not so sure.

Charlotte, of course, would not hold still. She was leaning over a violently pink toy purse (something Maura had gotten her; Jane certainly wouldn't have) and dragging out its fabric contents, not the least bit interested in the fact that her mother was trying to make her look presentable. Jane wondered how long it would be before they had two squirmy little ones to get ready in the mornings. They'd done a second embryo transfer the previous week, so there might already be a little piece of Maura growing inside of Jane. The thought was almost unbearably amazing. One day she would be brushing the honey blonde hair of a sweet little child she'd given birth to. A little Maura, perhaps.

Charlotte pulled a toy cell phone out of the purse and put to her ear, saying something that sounded vaguely like "Isles," followed by random jabbering. Jane had to laugh. Charlotte had certainly seen Maura answer her phone that way plenty of times, though it was always just Maura now. Which was good really, since it meant only one mommy had to run off and deal with murder, but Jane still missed the days when she and Maura got tandem phone calls and then left together.

"There's a headband that goes with that dress," Maura remarked, coming into the living room.

"Do you know how long it took me just to comb her hair?" said Jane. "I'm not worried about putting a bow in it."

"I'll get it." Maura went back upstairs.

"You know your Mommy," Jane said with a sigh. "She's gotta make sure you accessorize."

Charlotte picked up the little foam fencing sabre Maura had gotten her. "Mommy," she said very seriously, showing the toy to Jane.

"Yes, that's just like Mommy's," Jane agreed with a smile. She thought it was cute that Charlotte imitated so many of Maura's behaviors, but she was starting to wonder if the kid was picking up anything from her.

"Here we are," said Maura, returning with a little stretchy headband that matched Charlotte's blue and white smocked dress. She adjusted the bow on her daughter's head and then sat back with a smile. "You look so pretty!" she told Charlotte, who tilted her head and gave her mother a pleased grin.

"You know she's just going to pull it off later," said Jane.

"But she'll look very cute until then," promised Maura. "I'm going to go check the mail."

Charlotte toddled over to the living room toy chest (oh, how silly they'd been to think they only needed one for the nursery) and dragged out her cloth "sports bag," which Jane had gotten her for Christmas. She extracted a plush baseball and brought it over to Jane.

"Saw," she informed her.

"Sox! That's right!" Jane scooped her daughter up and kissed her head. "You are my baby after all!"

"Dow! Dow!" Charlotte yelled immediately, kicking her legs. Jane could hear Maura coming back in as she set Charlotte down.

"Jane!" she called, her heels clicking on hardwood floors. She burst into the living room, clutching a box. "It's here! The proof of my book! It's here!"

"All right! Open it!"

Maura began delicately pulling the tape off the box, moving at a maddeningly slow pace. She was always like this. Even when she was opening a present, she always had to carefully un-tape the wrapping paper and then slowly unfold it so it could be reused. Jane watched her in agony, but she held her tongue. It was Maura's package. She had the right to open it as slowly as she wanted.

Finally Maura had the box open and had extracted a shiny new hardcover book. The Painting, it said, by Maura Isles-Rizzoli. Maura always just used "Isles" at work and in her publications for medical journals, but she had decided to tack on the "Rizzoli" for her first novel. The cover of the book had an artist's rendition of the mysterious painting Maura had described in the book, which held clues to all the murders that took place as the story unfolded. Maura opened the book and flipped through the pages, glancing at words she herself had written, inhaling the new book smell.

"Here," she said, handing it to Jane when she was finished. "You haven't read the dedication yet."

Jane smiled. "Did you dedicate it to Korsak?"

"No."

"To Kent?"

Maura wrinkled her nose. "No."

"Wait, I know: it's dedicated to Bass."

Maura giggled. "Just look at it."

Jane flipped to the dedication page, which read: For my Jane, who supports and encourages me in everything I do. "A successful marriage requires falling in love many times, always with the same person."– Mignon McLaughlin

"Aww, Maura." Jane flipped to the back flap, which had Maura's picture. Jane smiled at how gorgeous Maura looked and read the little "About the Author" blurb, which listed Maura's experience as chief medical examiner and a writer and peer reviewer for several medical journals before concluding, "Dr. Isles-Rizzoli lives in Boston with her wife, former Boston homicide detective Jane Rizzoli, and their daughter."

"They enhanced the colors in my picture," Maura said worriedly. "They made me look better than I really look. If anyone meets me after looking at this picture, they're going to be so disappointed."

"Whoa, whoa, whoa. First of all, anyone can see this is a color-enhanced picture. Second of all, you look so much better in real life. I mean, for starters, you're three-dimensional." Maura smiled, but they were interrupted then by the arrival of Angela.

"You are not going to believe who I ran into at the bagel place!" At the sound of Angela's voice, Charlotte stopped in the middle of pulling every single toy out of the chest and ran to her grandmother, joyfully yelling "Amma!"

"Hey baby!" Angela scooped up her granddaughter and gave her a hug. "So I was buying bagels for breakfast, and you'll never believe who was there getting coffee!"

"Ted Danson," said Jane.

"No."

"Rondo?" suggested Maura.

"No. Casey Jones!"

"Ugh," said Jane. She noticed Maura was also making a face. "You didn't talk to him, did you?"

"Of course I did! I asked him how he's doing, and he said he's back in Boston now, working at that veteran place again. He looked really good. You can't even tell he was ever hurt." Charlotte started squirming, so Angela set her back down. "Why don't you want me to talk to him?"

"Oh, I don't know. Maybe because he's the homophobic creep who you once hoped I would marry?"

"I didn't know you were a lesbian! How was I supposed to know if you didn't tell me? Anyway, I'm sure he's not really that homophobic. He was just upset that you chose Maura over him."

"Ma, he was fine when I told him I found someone else. Then I said it was Maura and his whole demeanor changed."

Maura nodded vigorously. "And he wasn't very friendly to me at Jane's high school reunion, when I was pregnant. He told Jane she shouldn't bring a child into the world with me."

Angela looked down at her granddaughter in horror. "You never told me he said that! If I'd known…I always thought he was a respectful young man."

"He is, to people who think like him," Jane sighed. "Anyway, guess I'll stay away from that bagel place."

"My proof came today!" Maura told her mother-in-law excitedly, holding up the book.

"Oh, Maura! Look at that! You're a published author now!"

"Well, not quite yet. I have to review the proof for mistakes before the book can go to print."

"Well when it does, I want a signed copy. I gotta tell everyone my daughter-in-law is famous now!"

XXX

When she became a full Boston Police Academy instructor, Jane would get her own office. Nothing glamorous, of course, but it would still be hers. Right now she was just an intern, though, so all she had was a small desk in the corner of her supervisor's office. Her supervisor was Elmer Pinkerton, a retired cop who had to be at least ninety. On her first day he had chuckled at the sight of her and said, "We didn't have any girl cops when I started out." Surprisingly, she had developed a fondness for him since then. Yes, he had a tendency to tell the same stories over and over again, and he seemed twice as impressed by everything she did well because she was a "girl," but he was affable enough, and he kept bragging to people about his "bright young intern." Jane didn't really think the word "young" applied to her anymore, but she supposed she was compared to Pinkerton.

Jane's desk was pretty cramped, but she'd tried to personalize it anyway. She had three framed pictures lined up along the back of the desk: one of her and Maura at their wedding (a duplicate of the picture Hawthorne had stolen and mutilated), one of Jane and Maura with a three-month-old Charlotte at her baby blessing ceremony, and one of Charlotte covered in cake on her first birthday. She often looked at these pictures while she was in here grading papers or planning lessons, to remind herself of why she was sitting in a cramped office instead of out doing the job she loved. It might not be as exciting as chasing bad guys, but at least she went home every night to those two beautiful faces unharmed.

She was typing up notes for a lesson she wanted to teach when her phone buzzed with a call from Frankie.

"What is it?" she asked in annoyance when she answered. "I'm at work."

"Yeah, I know. Jane, you need to come in to BPD. Maura needs you."

Jane stood up. "What happened?"

"It's a body that turned up today. I told them not to call Maura, but there was a mix up and they called her anyway. So she wasn't supposed to see it, but…she saw it."

Jane charged out of her office without a word to Pinkerton. "Frankie, what was it? What wasn't she supposed to see?"

"We found another woman tied to a tree, but this one…this one's covered in tally marks."

Jane felt her heart drop down to her feet as she pushed open the door to the street. "What does she look like?" she asked, her mouth dry.

"Blonde. She…she looks a little like Maura, but younger."

Jane got into her car and peeled away from the curb. "How young?"

"College, maybe? About the same as the first one, but that one had dark hair."

"How is Maura taking it?"

"She kinda just turned pale when she saw it and didn't say anything. I had a uniform take her back to the station. She didn't argue."

"That's not a good sign. Are you still at the crime scene?"

"Yeah. I've got Kent coming out to look at the body. I just thought Maura would probably need you, after…I mean, obviously it's a copycat, but we need to figure out what it means. It's gotta be messing with her head."

"I get it. Listen, I'm almost there. Come find me when you're back at the station."

Jane parked on the street and ran inside to the elevators before realizing she couldn't operate them anymore, as she no longer had an ID. She went back to the security desk.

"Detective Rizzoli! What brings you back here?" said the officer at the desk, whose name Jane didn't remember.

"I need to see Dr. Isles. It's kind of urgent."

"I wasn't told about any expected visitors to the ME's office."

"I'm not expected, but I'm her wife. Just let me down there!"

"I'll call down to her office," he said.

Jane waited impatiently while he dialed her. After a minute, he hung up. "She's not answering. Maybe she stepped out."

"No, she should have just gotten back. Just let me go down. Something happened today, and—"

"Jane!" Nina stepped off the elevator and hurried towards her. "Frankie just called me."

"I'm trying to get down to see Maura. She's not answering her phone, and he won't let me go down there."

"She's with me," Nina said hastily, pulling Jane onto the elevator.

"What do you know about this case?" Jane asked her as the doors closed.

"Not much yet, but Frankie sent me a picture. I wasn't here when you worked that case, but I've read the reports. It's going to create waves that it's coming back up."

"Obviously it's a copycat," said Jane, stepping off the elevator. "What we need to know is if this is just someone who read about the case in the news, or someone connected to the original killer."

"We're on it. I promise, Jane, this case will be a priority."

Jane nodded gratefully and cracked open the door to Maura's office. She could see her wife sitting at her desk, apparently doing nothing, though she looked up when the door opened.

"Jane," she said softly.

"Hey sweetie." Jane stepped into the room and closed the door behind her. "Frankie called me. Are you okay?"

Maura looked at her, eyes slightly unfocused. "He's back," she said. "How can he be back? You said you killed him."

"I did," Jane promised. "He's not back. It's a copycat." She reached for Maura hesitantly, a bit surprised that Maura hadn't run straight to her arms. That was where Jane wanted her, where she knew she was safe.

"I…I got away," said Maura slowly. "Do you think…do you think he'll try to get me back? Because he wasn't done?"

Fuck, Jane thought. She's not processing what I'm saying. "No, baby." She lightly touched Maura's hair, and Maura turned at her touch as if just comprehending that Jane was there. She rose from her chair and tentatively reached for Jane, who gratefully pulled her into a hug. "You're safe," Jane promised her. "I'm here. I'm not gonna let anyone hurt you."

"I can't go back there," whispered Maura, and then the tears started coming. Jane didn't know how to get her mind back in the present, to get her to think logically about the situation.

"You're not going back. Nothing is gonna happen to you, okay?" Jane's voice broke. Something had already happened. Whoever killed that woman and marked her had also attacked Maura, whether it was intentional or not.

Maura leaned against Jane, her whole body shaking. Jane guided her to the couch so they could sit together and just silently rubbed her back, trying to surround her with a feeling of safety, until she saw Frankie out in the hallway.

"Hey sweetie, I'm going to go talk to Frankie about the case for a minute, okay?"

Maura nodded absently, but when Jane stood up, Maura grabbed her hand. "Jane, no! Don't leave me!"

Jane felt like a knife was twisting in her heart. "Maura, honey, I'll just be right outside your door. You'll still be able to see me."

Maura looked through the window at Frankie and reluctantly let Jane go.

"I'll be right back," Jane promised, giving Maura a quick kiss on the head before going out to the hall.

"Hey," said Frankie. "How's she doing?"

"Bad. What can you tell me about the case? And don't give me that 'you don't work here anymore' shit. This concerns my wife's safety."

"Yeah, I get that. Here, I'll show you a picture of the body, and you can tell me what you notice." He pulled up the picture on his phone and she studied it.

"Well, she's tied to a tree, for starters. Nielson left his victims in dumpsters."

"Yeah. She was strangled, like his victims, but the tally marks are the only other similar thing. Take a closer look at those, though."

Jane enlarged the picture. At first glance, the tally marks cut into the victim's skin all over her chest, stomach, arms, and legs looked the same as what she'd seen before, but she quickly noticed the difference.

"They're all fresh," she said.

"Exactly. The victim matches the description of a woman who went missing only two days ago, and Kent thinks she's been dead close to 24 hours. The tally marks don't mean what they meant before."

"So maybe the guy heard about the case in the news and just wanted to copy that one grisly detail?" Jane suggested hopefully.

"Maybe. Or maybe he's trying to send some kind of message. Without knowing, I can't really say if he'd be a threat to Maura or not."

"Maybe he just doesn't have a place to hold victims for months at a time like Nielson did. If he tallied her because he wanted to tell us he has a connection to or admiration for Nielson, then there's a good chance he'll eventually target Maura. She's Nielson's only survivor."

"We'll have to take precautions to make sure she's safe."

Jane looked through the window into Maura's office and saw Maura sitting with her face in her hands. The knife in Jane's heart twisted again. "I made a mistake," she said quietly. "I thought if I left the force to teach at the Academy that it would make Maura and Charlotte safer. But she'd be safer right now if I was still a cop. I'd be able to stay with her, make sure no one gets close to her. I could help with the case. But as it is, I don't even have a gun anymore."

"Jane, it's okay. I'm still here, and Nina. We're not going to let anything happen."

"Well we're damn well going to have to be smarter than we were the last time. From now on, she doesn't drive out to any crime scenes alone, okay? She probably shouldn't go anywhere alone." She paused, running her fingers through her hair. This was going to be tricky to figure out. They could not, absolutely could not, let this killer get his filthy hands on Maura. That much was certain. But there was a fine line between protecting and controlling, and Maura was going to become depressed if she felt like the very people she trusted were trying to take her independence away from her. "I hate this bastard," she muttered before turning and stomping back to Maura's office. She slowed her steps when she got inside and cautiously sat down next to Maura.

"Hey sweet girl," she said gently. "Why don't you let me take you home for the rest of the day? You've had a pretty bad scare."

Maura looked up, her eyes filled with agony. "I just…I thought it was over. It's been four years. I need it to be over."

"It is over. This is a totally different guy, and he's not even doing things the same way. We don't really know what's going on yet, but I do know that nothing is gonna happen to you. We're not gonna let anyone get a chance to hurt you, okay?"

Maura nodded miserably.

"Come on, beautiful lady. Let's go home and rest for a bit."

"But Charlotte's home. I don't want her to see me like this."

"I'll call Ma and tell her to take Charlotte to the park for a while. That'll give you some time to yourself, to do whatever you need to do to feel better. Maybe call Melanie, if you want."

Maura nodded. "I should call her. But what I really need right now is you."

"Well I'm not going anywhere."

Jane went to get Maura's purse from her desk and saw the proof of her book sitting out. Her heart seized as she remembered Maura's excitement this morning. She hoped Maura could recapture that feeling once she had time to get past the shock of what she'd seen today.

Maura clung to Jane's arm on the way out of the building. Jane asked Frankie to find a way to get Maura's car home and called Angela to ask her to get Charlotte out of the house for a while. She hoped Maura would feel better once she was in the comfort of her own home, where at least she would know she was safe.

Maura was silent in the car. Jane mulled over what she knew so far, trying to figure out what she could say to make Maura feel better. "It's not the same as before," she said finally. "She got all her tally marks at once. He only had her for a day, and he couldn't possibly have raped her that many times in one day. So the marks are meaningless."

Maura looked at her, eyes more alert and focused now. "Were they done ante or postmortem?"

"I don't know. I guess we'll find out when Kent does the autopsy."

She could see the wheels turning in Maura's head. "So why would he have cut tally marks into her skin if they didn't mean anything? Was he trying to get our attention?"

"I don't know. He might have just read about the case and wanted to imitate it."

"Would the tally marks have seemed significant to him if he didn't know what they meant?"

"Maybe, I mean it was fucking creepy, so that detail certainly would have stood out to anyone reading about the case." Jane tried to remember what the newspapers had said about Nielson's murders. "The press knew about the tally marks, but they didn't know what they meant. We never released that information, and we didn't tell them how many marks each victim had, so they had no way to figure it out. Also, they reported your kidnapping, but we were pretty tight-lipped about it, so all they really said was that you were abducted, but we got you back safely. We never told them what happened to you, and there was never a trial because I killed him."

"So who would know what the marks meant, or what happened to me?"

"No one except people who have access to the police reports, and possibly someone connected to Nielson."

"But since the tally marks were all done in a 24-hour period, and therefore are not a real tally, there's a very good chance this is just a copycat who doesn't know what he's doing."

"Yes. And if that's true, you're not very likely to become a target." Jane felt her stomach unclench a little. "I still think we should take precautions, though. You should always make sure Frankie or Nina or someone you trust is with you when you go to a crime scene. And when you go to work, park on the street, not in the garage."

Maura nodded. "If it's the same man who left the other victim tied to a tree, he's very smart. We never found even a trace of him at the crime scene."

"Smart doesn't mean he knows a lot about the case though." Jane pulled into the garage, noting that Charlotte's stroller was gone. Angela had already left with her.

"We just need to know more about him, so we can know if he's a threat to us or not."

"Us?"

"Yes, us. You and I are the last two people he kidnapped. We both got away alive."

"I'm not sure I count. I chose to let him kidnap me."

"It may not count to you, but it'll count to anyone who's trying to finish what he started. If things had gone according to his plan, we both would be dead by now. But they didn't, because you killed him. You are just as much as risk as I am."

"Maybe," agreed Jane, letting them into the house.

"I'm going to help with the case," Maura said decisively. "Regardless of what's motivating this man, I want to help catch him. I'm not going to step down just because it's hitting too close to home."

Jane turned to face her. "Are you sure? You might be forced to relive some pretty awful memories. I don't like you having to do that."

"I'm sure. I'm already reliving it anyway, thanks to what I saw this morning. I'll feel better if I can do something about it."

Jane nodded. She'd probably feel more comfortable if Maura stayed off this case, but she knew she wouldn't want to either. Every time a case related to Hoyt had come up, Jane had always been determined to solve it, even though everyone around her thought she was crazy.

"Well, you can start tomorrow," she said. "Today you rest."

Maura nodded and her eyes filled with tears again. "I'm just so tired."

"So we'll lie down." Jane took her wife's hand and led her upstairs to their bedroom. Maura got into bed and curled up amongst the silk pillows. Jane curled her body protectively around Maura's and closed her eyes. Whatever the perp was planning, Jane vowed to herself, there was no chance in hell that he was going to touch her wife.