Jane walked through the house to the patio door that led out into the garden. Behind the pool, under the fan palm in a corner of the garden, stood a white shed with a small window. It seemed less like a shed than a nice little cottage, its roof even covered with shingles. The black curtains in front of the window were drawn. She met Jim Fulton at the door.
"So, how did Special Agent in Charge Gracker take not being needed?"
"Not well at all. He's standing on the lawn, sulking." Jane imagined a dark red Mark Gracker spitting curses at Stevens and Carmedy as they chugged away in their air-conditioned FBI mobile, and she had to grin. Gracker had probably already called Cavanaugh and demanded Jane's badge on a silver platter. Along with the warrant he needed to get into the house. And he'd get neither. "Jim, this is going to have bad consequences," she sighed. "On the other hand, as Clemenza said so well to Al Pacino in the Godfather, these things happen every five years. That's how the bad blood gets purged. Cavanaugh is behind us, anyway. He just told me not to tell Gracker what I think of him in his face."
"I guess he wants to take care of that himself."
"What a day." Jane ran a hand through her hair. "What's up in the shed?"
"They're taking some more pictures, let's leave them alone for a minute. I'll tell you what we've got while we're waiting. Did you know that Bantling's hobby was stuffing animals? The shed is full of taxidermied owls and birds hanging from the ceiling. Claws extended and all. When I went in, I thought, dear me, they're real. But then I got my glasses out and saw they were stuffed. And he's got a metal cot in there too, like in the hospital. It's clean as a whistle, no fingerprints, freshly wiped. So we thought, there's probably nothing there."
At that moment, the forensics photographers came out. "Yours again, Detective Fulton," one called out, "we're done."
"Great. Thanks." Jim nodded to them. He turned to the forensic scientist from BPD who was waiting at the door with his black doctor's bag. "Hold on a second before you examine the blood, Bobby. I want to show it to Detective Rizzoli first."
They entered the neat little house. Above them, two owls dangled from the ceiling beams on invisible nylon cords, their glass eyes wide, their wings spread in flight. Right between them hung a single lamp with a black round metal shade. It was an amazingly large room, with screed floors and quarry stone walls. Everything was spotlessly clean, especially for a garden shed. The white floor seemed spotless. The metal bed stood flush against the longer wall. A row of formica cabinets hung above it. In the corner stood a magnificent great egret with slightly spread wings, looking as if it was about to take to the skies, its long curved neck and yellow beak pointing upward, its black glass eyes fixed rigidly on the steel table.
"Take a look at this." Jim knelt beside the cot. On the floor behind the cot, a chalk circle was drawn around three very small reddish-brown spots. Jim shone the flashlight on them. They shone slightly.
"Still wet?"
"No. But pretty fresh. Bobby thinks the pattern of the splatters and the height of the cot indicate that the body was on the cot and the blood dripped down from there." He shone his light on the wall about eleven inches above the floor. Tiny reddish-brown specks dotted the wall. "And here, this is where the blood from the floor probably splattered back against the wall. That would again fit the theory that blood dripped off the table. We're pretty sure it's blood."
"All right, Jim, but is it human blood?" Jane couldn't help but think of the stare from the majestic heron.
"We'll know soon enough. The lab will let us know as soon as they figure it out. But take a look at this -" He pointed to another chalk mark on the screed, just below one end of the table. This spot was much larger.
Jane held the flashlight on the spot and saw pale brown circles and dark streaks. „Looks like someone tried to wipe something off there."
"Exactly. The guys are going to take a look at it with luminol as soon as Forensics is done. Maybe we'll find out how big the mess was before wiping."
"You'll also need to examine the rollers on the table." Jane leaned down and shined a light on the rubber wheels on the underside of the cot. "Maybe it rolled through something."
"Yeah, we'll take those wheels too."
"What about the potential murder weapon?"
"Oh yeah, I forgot the best part. Look at this." Jim Fulton opened the middle hanging locker.
In the lowest compartment was a large rectangular metal tray. On it, in neat rows, were various scalpels and scissors of all sizes. "The idiot should save us all the time and just make a confession. The trial will be a breeze."
Jane's radio squawked again. It was Korsak, and Jane let him stew for a while before answering. Jim and Bobby grinned. Then it dawned on Korsak that there might be others listening. "Hey, Jane, you there?"
"Yes, Korsak. I'm out back with Jim Fulton. How about you? Are you packing up the closet?"
"Yeah, I am. And I have to state again for the record, in my next damn life I want to be a furniture designer."
"He's a buyer, Korsak." Eddie Bowman's voice from the background. "You want to be a furniture buyer when you grow up."
"Shut up, Bowman. You better keep an eye on your wife on the boob tube. " Then he spoke on the radio again. "That pervert's got the fanciest clothes. Hey, if he's locked up forever, you think I might be able to get them?"
"If you lose eighty pounds, maybe, Vince: no more Pastelitos and Donuts!" Jane knelt down and watched Bobby, the BPD forensic scientist, take three samples of the brown substance on the floor and preserve them in three long, sterile cylindrical tubes.
"But I could wear the ties. What a waste. How did it go with the Blues Brothers? I'll bet the flat-fuckers had a fit."
"They weren't happy, Korsak, not happy at all. Need I say anything else?"
"Well, anyway, I'm about done here in the closet, it's about as big as my bedroom, by the way. And so damn neat. Too neat, if you ask me. You know he's got all his stuff sorted? And I mean really all of it! He's got this black garment bag that says SMOKINGS, plural, you hear me? And then he has a box that says WINTER SWEATERS and another one that says WINTER SHOES. And get this, I found Halloween costumes in a box, neatly folded, of course. He seems to like dressing up because he's got a whole bunch of stuff there: a nasty alien mask, a Batman mask, one of those Frankenstein masks, a cowboy hat, and those flaps you put over your jeans."
"They're called chaps, not flaps," Jane replied with a roll of her eyes, and the two men present chuckled.
"Chaps it is then, I don't care. He's even got a clown mask. Imagine that pig at your kids' birthday party!"
Jane looked at the stripes on the floor, half a yard away at the webbed feet of the stuffed heron. The luminol the technicians were about to spray here would glow wherever blood had been. Over her years as a homicide detective, Jane had repeatedly seen entire rooms that glowed an eerie yellow in the dark, including the fully sprayed ceiling. What would this garden cottage, so cute from the outside, look like then? What gruesome painting would the darkness here reveal? "All right, bag everything, Korsak. We don't know what else is important in this case and what isn't."
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Although there wasn't really much to read, it took Maura over two hours to go through all the police reports, hospital records, and lab reports. Halfway through, she had to take a break. She walked around the house, put on fresh coffee, folded laundry, dusted, anything to help her bear the enormous weight of memories that washed over her. It was amazing: how seldom she remembered in the evening what she had eaten at noon, but every second, every sound, every smell of that night more than a decade ago she remembered clearly. When she read the statement from her former neighbor, Marvin Wigford, she had to go to the bathroom in between throwing up for the second time that day. Marvin stated that Maura was "provoking" the men in the building with the way she dressed and was "strutting around the courtyard in skirts that were not appropriate for a female student at a university." He concluded that it was "no wonder that something like this happened to her at some point because she was intentionally making men hot." The guilt and self-recrimination she had fought down for so many years came flooding back. Although reason told Maura that Marvin was just a deranged creep, after all, she still felt dirty and humiliated. Buried deep inside, a part of her had always blamed herself for what had happened. For years, her mind had been haunted by what she should have done, or not done, or done differently to prevent the atrocity, and what turns her life would have taken.
That was the hardest part of therapy, learning not to blame herself.
After the trip to the bathroom, she was back on the patio, looked up at the sky once more, and drank about her tenth cup of coffee that day. Her cell phone had snapped her out of the past a few times, and conscientiously she called everyone back. The calls briefly distracted her from the police reports and witness statements, from the well-known cold fear, panic, and guilt, especially the phone calls to the overwhelmed Cara. Later, Maura took Lucy for a walk before it got too dark for that.
When she returned home, she spent another hour with the accounts, including her own testimony, describing every gruesome detail, every conscious moment of June 30th, twelve years ago. It began with the argument with Michael in the car, which had continued in the courtyard; then, how she had awakened to the taste of latex on her lips and the suffocating weight on her chest, the pain as he climbed on top of her, his penis penetrating her as she tried in vain to fight him off. The account ended with her last conscious memory as the cold knife cut furiously into the tender skin of her breasts, her last glimpse of the sheets turning red. Now, back on the patio, back in the present, she had placed one hand protectively on her chest, with the other she clutched her neck as if to free herself from the invisible stranglehold of fear.
At that moment, the cell phone rang. On the display was Queen's DA. Maura wiped away her tears and cleared her throat. "Hello?"
"Is there a Miss -" The man on the other end faltered, apparently trying to decipher an illegible message. "- I ... I... I -"
"This is Maura Isles. Can I help you?"
"Sorry. My secretary left me a garbled name that looks like Iceland. Excuse me. This is Bob Schurr from the Queens District Attorney's Office, you called. What can I do for you?"
Maura tried to collect herself. "Yes, Mr. Schurr, thank you very much for calling me back. So, it's about the extradition proceedings of a felon back to New York. I would need to know what the protocol is with you." She was very much the prosecutor now as if this were about a complete stranger.
A long silence ensued. "You're from the DA's office?"
"Yes. Sorry. With the one in Massachusetts."
"Oh, I see. All right, then. Who are we talking about, and what is he wanted for in New York?"
"Well, there's no warrant out for his arrest in New York yet. It's an unsolved crime, and we believe we have a suspect here."
"An unsolved case? You mean there's no indictment yet? No arrest warrant?"
"No. Not yet. Authorities here have just identified the person as a possible suspect." Maura knew she was being more than vague.
"So have you talked to the investigating officers in New York? Are you going to apply for a warrant?"
"Not yet. I think the case has ended up with the cold cases. We're in conversation with investigators there right now about the warrant and everything else that's necessary under New York law to arrest a suspect in Massachusetts."
"Well, first of all, charges have to be filed. Then you can apply for a warrant, and with that, your investigators can make the arrest and hold him in Massachusetts until we get all the extradition paperwork ready. But maybe I'm getting a little ahead of myself. How old is the case?"
Maura swallowed. Boiling hot, she remembered something she shouldn't have forgotten as a prosecutor. "I think the crime happened over ten years ago, but I'd have to talk to the detectives working on this again."
Bob Schurr whistled through his teeth. "Ten years? Uh oh, tell me it's murder and we can get started."
"No, no murder." Her hands were clammy. She didn't even want to hear the answer to her next question. "Why the 'uh-oh'?"
"What do you have this guy on the hook for? Assuming, of course, it's a guy. You haven't said that yet."
She cleared her throat, hoping her voice sounded reasonably normal. "It's a sex crime. Aggravated rape. And attempted murder."
"Well, that's why the 'uh-oh.' You're out of luck, sorry. In New York, there's a five-year statute of limitations on such crimes. Except, of course, murder. There's no statute of limitations on murder. If no charges have been filed within five years of the crime, you can't touch the guy. Over and done -" She was silent, so he continued. "I'm sorry. This misery happens all the time, especially with sex crimes. It's only recently that they've started bringing charges against the DNA strands themselves, in those cases where there's no concrete suspect yet and where time is running out. Maybe that's what happened with your case, have you asked the cold case people?"
"No, but I will. Maybe they set something like this up. I hope so!" she said, knowing full well that nothing had been found that would have sufficed for a DNA sample, which in turn could have served for such a charge. She noticed that her voice was getting quieter. "Thank you for your help. I'll call you again when I have more."
Maura hung up. This couldn't be true. The statute of limitations. An arbitrary period of time that some stupid lawmakers had set in stone to define what was a fair period of time within which to try someone. How long should someone have to toil over the question of when his crimes might catch up with him? What could the defendant be expected to do? Forget the victim, the main thing was to protect the perpetrator!
Slowly, the implications of the information began to dawn on her. Bantling wouldn't be held accountable for what he had done to her. Never. He could stand on top of the Empire State Building and shout out his guilt, with all the disgusting, gruesome details, and still, he would never come to justice. He would take the elevator down and walk away with impunity. Maura should have thought about the statute of limitations, but it hadn't occurred to her at all. She had been so busy sending Bantling to New York by the book, and facing her own demons in the process without going berserk, that she had completely forgotten the question of whether he could even be prosecuted for it. She had worn the victim's blinders and just taken it for granted.
Again, she felt like everything was falling apart and she desperately needed to hold it together. Fighting her way through the fog of fear that seemed to smother her.
She paced up and down the house. The sun had sunk behind the horizon, and the air was cooling quickly. Maura dumped out the cold coffee and got a bottle of Chardonnay from the fridge instead. She poured herself a glass, took a long sip, and reached for her cell phone again. It rang four times, then Dr. Chambers answered.
"Hello?" The sound of his voice had an immediate comforting effect.
"I was hoping you'd still be there. Even at this hour. Hello, Dr. Chambers. How are you? This is Maura Isles." She chewed on her thumbnail as she puttered around her living room barefoot, wine glass in hand.
"Hello, Maura." He sounded surprised to hear her voice. "The usual bout with office stuff. You caught me just in time. What can I do for you?"
Maura looked out the picture window that faced her backyard and frowned deeply. "Something's happened, and I'm afraid I need to see you."
Gregory Chambers sat up in his leather chair. He clearly heard the distress and despair in Maura Isles' voice and was immediately fully there. "No problem, Maura, no problem. What about tomorrow?"
"Tomorrow would be good ... very good." Paper rustled; he was probably flipping through his appointment book.
"Can you be here at ten? I'll just rearrange my schedule a bit."
Maura heaved a sigh of relief. "Thank you so much. Yes. Ten o'clock works just fine."
Dr. Chambers leaned back in the chair and furrowed his brows. Her voice sounded worried, agitated, and completely spent. "Do you want to talk now, Maura? I have time."
"No, no. I want to sort out my thoughts first. Think everything through. But tomorrow, definitely. Thank you so much for squeezing me in."
"Anytime. Call anytime. I'll see you tomorrow." He paused. "And you know, anytime, you can call me before that, too."
She paused the conversation and looked restlessly around the living room and it was silent again, except for the wind rustling in the trees. Tibby II rubbed her leg and meowed loudly. The day had passed and it was already time to eat again.
Suddenly the cell phone rang in her hand. Startled, she dropped it. Not now. But it rang again. Jane's name appeared on the display. Hesitantly, she picked it up. "Hello?"
„Hi. It's me, Jane. I have the AutoTrackback."
Maura had forgotten all about that one. The day was just a blurry mist now.
"Oh, yeah," the lawyer stammered. "I'll, uh, I'll come by the BPD tomorrow morning and pick it up. What time will you be there?" She reached for the wine glass and began pacing the living room again. Maura sounded agitated, exhausted, not at the moment.
"No. You don't understand. I have the AutoTrackback here, now, I'm at your door. Let me in."
No. Not tonight. She just couldn't face the detective. Couldn't talk to anyone.
"You know, Jane, it's not a good time right now. It really isn't. I'd better come by tomorrow and pick it up." She took a big gulp from the glass. "Or put it in my mailbox." Maura knew that sounded completely silly, but she couldn't help it. No matter what Jane thought of her. The main thing was that she was leaving again.
A long pause ensued.
Then Jane broke the silence. "No. No way, let me in." Not a minute later, she knocked on the front door.