It was just before eight the next morning when Elizabeth got out of her unmarked car and walked toward the BPD. The thunderstorms of the past few days had done little to mitigate the early summer heatwave, so Elizabeth wore her charcoal gray blazer over her arm. She felt the first beads of sweat under her blue blouse as she walked through front doors, her ID card already hanging from a ribbon around her neck, her badge clipped to her belt, as was her 9mm Glock. Every cop knew the gun and the authority to use it were the real badge. The power to save or end a human life with it was what set them apart from any civilian. She associated many memories with this building, having had much of her childhood spent here. However, she didn't associate only good memories with this building.

Two years earlier, her wife Sarah had committed suicide in the family's old apartment with Elizabeth's service weapon. No one who knew Elizabeth or had ever worked with her believed it could have been anything other than suicide. But it had been here, in this building, that some Internal Affairs dumbass thought he could make friends at City Hall by investigating a highly decorated Boston Police Department cop.

He had leaked the suspicion to a tabloid reporter who was a friend of his. Elizabeth had in fact murdered her wife. Accusations of a cover-up arose in the press and on local stations, and the Chief of Police, who knew Elizabeth personally and knew the accusation was completely made up, had no choice but to take Elizabeth's gun away and transfer her to Central Booking until the investigation was complete.

And then one night, fate intervened. Again.

It was just a month later. She and a couple of other cops had just taken down a violent drunk when redemption showed up in the form of her former supervisor and mother, Jane Rizzoli. There had been a strange murder case in Salem, and a medical examiner remembered a very similar case a year earlier in Boston. The one Elizabeth had worked. The Chief of Detectives himself had ordered Jane to take Elizabeth to the Salem crime scene, where she was unceremoniously returned her gun and badge, making Elizabeth Rizzoli once again a homicide detective who spoke for the city's victims of violent death. This case brought Elizabeth and Katherine together professionally for the first time.

The case nearly cost Elizabeth's partner his life and ended the young man's police career. Despite everything, it had ended successfully, though not for the public. Both Elizabeth and Katherine were given the highest security clearance for it, but only so they could be thrown in jail if they ever breathed a word about what had really happened.

She joined the line of people waiting for the next elevator. She looked around thoughtfully, and what she saw was playing out similarly in all the other office buildings in Boston at this time of day. Crowds of people with coffee mugs and briefcases in their hands, facing another day in their offices or cubbyholes. The only difference here was the ID cards everyone wore around their necks, identifying them as either cops or plainclothes police employees.

As the elevator doors opened, Elizabeth decided to prove to herself and everyone else that she had it like no other. The information she had gotten from her sister last night would open a path to redemption, she was convinced.

The elevator car was already full of cops in uniform or plainclothes who were lucky enough to have a parking space in the building's underground garage. Most of them, if not all, were also entitled to a service vehicle, and many of them traveled long distances. Elizabeth knew she was lucky in that regard.

She climbed into the metal cage and was about to press number three when she saw all the buttons light up. She hoped every morning would be different, but almost never got a pleasant surprise. Today, however, Elizabeth smiled because it gave her time to think about last night. She had thought a lot about her sister over the past year. She had been thrilled as hell to finally see Katherine again. Ever since the incident with Lucas Cope and George Wilkinson, they'd had an almost inseparable bond.

Then she forced herself to think about Rosa Castillo and the task ahead.

Before Katherine had left yesterday, she had called Rosa's mother and learned that Rosa's cell phone was indeed registered in Maria's name. Maria granted permission to trace the device and said she would sign any papers Katherine needed.

But no signature would be needed for this transaction because officially it never took place. Elizabeth had no intention of leaving written records.

No sooner had Katherine left than Elizabeth had called Dave Wheeler, an analyst who worked in BRIC. Early in her career as a detective, she had saved the man's eighteen-year-old nephew from life in prison after two of the boy's criminal friends had persuaded him to drive them to a small grocery store, which they robbed and whose terrified Indian cashier they killed with a shot to the head when he refused to open the register, all of which was recorded by a surveillance camera. The boy, meanwhile, had been sitting in the car listening to heavy metal and had no idea what was going on or what his buddies had done.

Elizabeth took over the case with her mother. They had caught the two shitheads quickly. They dragged the analyst's previously blameless nephew into the matter and framed him as the driver and mastermind of the robbery.

Wheeler personally turned his nephew over to Jane.

After ten minutes in an interrogation room with the boy, Elizabeth was not only convinced of his innocence but persuaded him to testify against his two 'friends' in court. The robbery-murderers were found guilty and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of early release, while the nephew got off without a criminal record. Dave Wheeler promised Elizabeth she only had to ask if she ever needed anything.

And so last night, Elizabeth had called in her first favor from Wheeler: Locating Rosa Castillo's cell phone. Wheeler assured her that when Elizabeth got to work in the morning, she would find everything she needed, and no one would ever know.

The elevator door opened, and Elizabeth stepped out onto the third floor, then entered the bullpen with modern workstations; it was carpeted with new carpet, and each of the individual compartments was occupied by a detective in a suit. If the people in this room didn't carry guns, Elizabeth often thought, it could have been the office of any company.

When Elizabeth arrived at her desk, she discovered a sealed white envelope with her name on it. She knew it came from Wheeler, who had clearly covered his tracks by putting it in the morning internal mail distribution list so no one would know the sender. Elizabeth sat down and opened the envelope, aware that she was committing her first betrayal to her mother. It was a breach of trust that probably meant losing her job if discovered.

Especially if she, and Katherine, were wrong and Rosa had only violated the terms of her probation. She was pretty sure that wasn't the case, however. Katherine's intuition had guided her through all the craziness of the past year. She often wished her fellow police officers had her sister's instincts, and there was no reason to doubt it now. Katherine knew when something was wrong.

A minute later, Elizabeth had opened the envelope and read the contents, finding confirmation that Katherine had been right again. Elizabeth had clear proof that Rosa had been the victim of a kidnapping. She needed help. And she needed to hide it from her captain as long as possible.

The latter came into jeopardy just as Elizabeth was about to head to the staircase.

"Morning, Rizzoli," Tim Dolan's voice rang out.

"Morning, Dolan," was all she said.

The man wore a bluish plaid suit, a red paisley tie, and black Johnston & Murphys. At 6'2", Dolan was known throughout the building as the Big Man, even though his shaved skull and fancy clothes had long ago earned him the nickname 'Kojak' after the television investigator of the seventies. Dolan pointedly objected to the nickname, but secretly loved it. He was approaching sixty and had been a cop for thirty-nine years. "Where are you going?"

"To the break room to get my Gatorade from the fridge, it's just too hot for coffee," she lied without batting an eye. Quite the opposite as many assumed, she was not Jane's right-hand woman, but Dolan's.

He seemed satisfied with the answer. "How are the girls?" he asked, genuinely concerned, adjusting his tie. It wasn't that there was anything wrong with the tie. Dolan felt really bad about Elizabeth. He knew the investigation into Elizabeth's wife's suicide had been handled pathetically.

"How are the girls doing?" repeated Elizabeth with a grin. "I need a crash course in 'How to Survive Teenagers.'"

Dolan laughed heartily before heading down the hall to the elevator.

Elizabeth breathed a sigh of relief and then headed for the captain's door. It was still early. The standard metal desks were mostly empty, except for the two men Elizabeth had known she would encounter. One of them, her old friend Danny Savarese, jumped up like a balding jack-in-the-box before Elizabeth even came close to the door.

"Are you out of your mind, Liz?" he said softly. She and Savarese had known each other since the academy, and he was wearing the same blue jacket and red-and-blue striped tie he had worn then. "What the hell are you up to?"

"I need to talk to you guys and the captain," Elizabeth said

with a frown.

"You know what conditions you're working under here, right?"

Elizabeth rolled her eyes and shifted her weight from one foot to the other. "I'm not supposed to cause a fuss otherwise I'm on desk duty for the rest of my life."

Savarese opened his mouth as the office door opened.

"I thought I heard a familiar voice," Jane said with a typically grumpy expression. "But that can't really be, because it would mean someone was being very naughty here." A wry smile from ear to ear appeared on her face. "Come on in, Detectives," she said, pulling her daughter over the threshold into her office and waving Savarese right in. "And again you violate your probation and loiter outside my office?"

Elizabeth looked around the office. It was full of featureless furniture. There was an old but clean sofa against the south wall. An aged but well-preserved wooden desk stood by the windows, with a computer monitor on it in one corner. Awards and photographs adorned the wall and a half-height filing cabinet behind the desk. One of the pictures showed Elizabeth and Jane, both smiling, the bond between them more than obvious. "So why the hell are you breaking the Chief of Detective's law and seeming to want to cause a stir?"

Elizabeth took a deep breath and sat down in a chair. "I need your help," she said, recounting the story of Rosa Castillo up to the rape by the correctional officer before Jane raised her hand.

"Hold on, slow down," Jane interrupted her, "I remember the case very well. She was one of the guy's toys?"

"Yes," said Elizabeth, who was not surprised that her mother knew about Jack Storm, even though the names of sexual assault victims in the Corrections Department were never released to the media.

All alarm bells went off for Jane. "Didn't I read somewhere that these women were all released and given medical care at Mass Gen?"

"Yes," Elizabeth replied, shifting uneasily in her seat. She knew what was coming. Jane hadn't made it to this position because she was an idiot.

"So Katherine is behind this," the captain said. "And you risk coming here for this?"

"The worst that can happen is I get fired and lose my pension, right?"

"Yeah, for you, maybe," Jane replied, leaning back as if resigned to her fate. There was never any question that she would help her daughter, and they both knew it. "I'm taking a chance that I'll be running a precinct somewhere out in the sticks," Jane sighed. "I sure hope it's worth it."

"It's damn well worth it," Elizabeth said a touch too vehemently, and the other two detectives cringed. "Whoever handcuffed this woman was posing as a cop so he could grab her in broad daylight -"

"Okay, okay, Liz, take it easy," Jane placated, raising her hands as if to surrender. "We get it, so just calm down, okay?"

Elizabeth paused and took a deep breath. She hadn't expected to explode like that herself. "I'm sorry. I guess I got carried away."

"Forget it," Jane retorted. "Just tell me you're not just buying it from Kate because you've been sitting at your desk too long."

Elizabeth handed her mother and Savarese each a set of papers stapled together and kept one for herself. "You might want to put those in the shredder when we're done," she said.

"You don't have to tell me," Jane replied, her nose already deep in the papers. "Nor where you got this."

This was a set of city maps that logged the location of Rosa Castillo's cell phone over the course of the past day. There were colored printouts with dots marking her path, connected into lines; next to the dots was the time.

Elizabeth's friend Wheeler had done a great job. "It's all legal," she said.

But Jane's expression was petrified. "And even if the Chief Justice had signed the order," she retorted firmly. "You can't do this shit, Liz."

"There was no court order," the young woman said. "We're looking for her as a victim, not a perpetrator."

Jane remained unfazed. "She's out on parole and absconding. That makes her the perpetrator, and it makes her guilty until proven innocent. And that means we'd need a warrant," she explained practically in one breath as she realized the full extent of the mess Elizabeth was leading her into.

"Looking kind of suspicious, though, Captain, don't you think?" said Savarese, flipping through his papers. "This guy arrests this woman, and then he goes on a city tour of all the boroughs with her?"

Jane looked up from her papers. "I never said she wasn't right, Savarese." She turned to her daughter. "Please tell me you didn't have the provider ping her cell phone?"

Jane asked for good reason. Pinging would have meant that Rosa's network provider had actively sent a signal to her device to request its GPS coordinates, a routine procedure police use to track fugitives and others, usually after considerable resistance from phone companies that don't want to be hauled into court for invasion of privacy.

"That wouldn't have been possible because her cell phone was turned off," Elizabeth replied with a slight frown. "The maps were all created by triangulation."

Triangulation uses calls to or from a cell phone to determine its locations based on the strength of the signal radiating from cell towers within its range; most cell phones can ping at least three cell towers from any given urban location. Unlike pinging, triangulation can be done with data from previous calls, but the location of the device is less accurate to determine.

Whereas, surprisingly, the location of Rosa's cell phone appeared to be in the middle of the Concord River.

Jane's features softened as she tried to find order in the chaos, a reason for the seeming randomness of Rosa's movements. "Okay, so at 10:14 am, they're going to cross the Charlestown High Bridge, and then head north." Suddenly, something caught Jane's eye. "Hey, the calls on Rosa's cell phone all came from the same number."

Elizabeth took a deep breath. "Yes, Kate's. She had been trying to reach Rosa every couple of hours."

"So your sister's next call wasn't until 1:20 pm," Savarese noted. "Rosa's cell phone was in South Boston."

Jane shook her head. "Then in Cambridge and in Somerset at 2:42 pm and in Fall River at 3:56 pm ... What the hell -" she barely caught herself as she turned to the last page.

"That doesn't make sense," Savarese said, glancing at the last location, in the middle of a park. "At the Arnold Arboretum, 6:33 pm. Why there?"

Elizabeth saw the concern on Jane's face and knew she had convinced her. "Looks like desperation to me," she said a little more confidently. "Man kidnaps girl, man looks for a place to rape or kill her, man drives crisscross the Commonwealth until he finds the right place."

"He'd have to be a complete idiot to think he could hide a body in Arnold Arboretum," Jane muttered thoughtfully, without looking up from the map.

"Unless he thought he could leave the state unnoticed, he'd be an even bigger fool, or he's from out of state," Elizabeth replied.

Jane jabbed a finger at the last page of the printout. "Do you think he dumped her there?"

"It would probably be worth sending a patrol car out to check, Captain," Savarese suggested.

"Patrol cars, my ass," Jane grumbled. "What I really need is for the Chief of Detectives to ask me why I'm sending a patrol car out to the park to look for a phantom and, better yet, where I got the tip from. No, Savarese, you and I are going to have to do this. You and me alone." She stood up and shook her head, then looked at her daughter. "Not a peep to anyone about this, you got it? No calls to me or Savarese or anyone else in the department, nothing. I'll send you a text from my private cell phone when we've determined if there's anything there, and not a moment sooner. Got it?" Elizabeth pursed her lips and nodded, but Jane wasn't finished. "And one more thing. I don't want you to say a word to your sister. You don't call Kate, you don't take her calls until I say you can."

"Understood," Elizabeth said grudgingly, but glad Jane didn't kick her out of the office. She would have agreed to anything that helped find out what had happened to Rosa.

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Maura was sitting at her desk when someone knocked on the closed door. She briefly glanced at the clock on the wall and knew it couldn't be the upcoming appointment that noon. She took a deep breath and continued typing on her laptop. "Come in," she said without taking her eyes off the monitor. She knew it would either be one of her subordinates who just needed some legal advice or just her wife, with whom she had a lunch date before she would be caught up again by the tough daily routine in her office. She had never wanted to believe that being a senior prosecutor really involved even more bureaucracy and politics. Little did she know that she would be proven wrong.

Maura looked up briefly to make sure it really was one of her co-workers, then looked again at the monitor, but then in amazement at her eldest daughter's face. "Elizabeth?"

"Hey, Mom," the detective said, raising her hand in greeting, smiling almost bashfully.

Maura immediately flipped the laptop shut and eyed the young woman with a slight frown, narrowing her eyes. "Let me guess, you're here to tell me as gently as possible that your mother won't be having lunch with me today."

Elizabeth smiled apologetically and sat down in one of the two chairs that stood in front of the desk. The office was as spartanly furnished as the previous one her mother had worked in. It didn't reveal very much about Maura's private life, in this respect, the lawyer had remained true to herself.

Maura exhaled slowly and leaned back in her chair, licking her lips. "What have you done now?"

The young woman looked around thoughtfully, then furrowed her brows. "I may not have followed the Chief of Detectives' instructions exactly, and may have stimulated an investigation."

"Liz," Maura sighed, looking at her daughter admonishingly. "You're really going out of your way to lose your job, aren't you?"

Elizabeth sighed herself and slumped her shoulders, rubbing her eyes with her hand. "My job is to protect the people of this city and speak up for them when they have lost their voices because they got killed, not to sit at my desk and do nothing. In the last few months, I've had shackles put on me."

"You put them on yourself," Maura replied a little too curtly, and her daughter sat up a little. "It was your own decision to punch Detective Chapman in the chin at BPD."

Elizabeth rolled her eyes and slumped her shoulders again. "He deserved it, and I would do it again without hesitation."

Maura nodded slowly and kept a stoic face, even though she had been secretly proud of Elizabeth that she had been the one who had dared to stand up to Larry Chapman. A highly decorated detective in the drug squad, who never missed an opportunity to make an inappropriate remark about women and display a demeanor to match. He was still a detective of the old guard, for whom women were worthless, even if they accompanied the same rank as he. As far as she could gather, Chapman had made several inappropriate remarks about Jane and her in Elizabeth's presence and had not missed the opportunity to bring her late daughter-in-law Sarah into the mix as well when Elizabeth confronted him. Had hinted that he would have put a bullet in his head, too, if he were married to someone like Elizabeth. At that moment, Elizabeth had lost all control and almost put the man in hospital. Because of this, her daughter was currently on some sort of probation and was more active at her desk than in the field. "I know," Maura breathed, taking a long look at her daughter. She pressed her lips together, then licked them again. "Your sister called you about her patient, didn't she?"

This time it was Elizabeth who leaned back in her chair, sighing. "She showed up at our house a lot more. What was I supposed to do? Send her away again in front of Nikki after my daughter told her about her grandmother's death?"

Maura frowned deeply now when she heard about it, and would have liked to slap herself for not thinking to inform Katherine about Leonor's death, or to have her wife do it, but so much had happened in the past months, in the past years, that she could hardly keep up with it all herself. "Of course not. How are the girls?"

Elizabeth gritted her teeth as she hesitated, clearing her throat as she slid in her seat. "Um," she said, knowing full well that there was no way she could avoid the question here. "Um, they're fine, they're strong."

"Yes," Maura replied with a weak smile. "Yes, they certainly are." She looked at her daughter for a long moment and swallowed hard. She had hoped that her granddaughters wouldn't have to go through the same thing that her own children had gone through when she hadn't been herself and had disappeared for weeks without even remembering that she had a wife and two wonderful daughters. She cleared her throat when she reminded herself that what Elizabeth and Katherine had gone through in their childhoods was nothing like what Nikki and Ashlyn had to go through, after all, Katherine and Elizabeth still had both parents. She took a deep breath and licked her lips again. "What did you find out about Kate's patient? Please tell me she wasn't wrong and the woman isn't on the run for violating her parole."

Elizabeth slid back in her seat and furrowed her brows. "She called you about Rosa, too?"

"Yes," Maura replied with raised brows, nodding slowly. "She did."

"Of course she did," the detective replied with a slight smile and Maura smiled as well, but then Elizabeth became serious again. "Kate was right, Rosa Castillo is in trouble. In real trouble."

The lawyer looked closely at her daughter, knowing that she was holding something back or that she had already said more than was good for everyone involved. "Jane's looking into it, isn't she?"

Elizabeth took a deep breath and nodded slowly without answering the question with words. She knew Maura would come up with even more questions if she used her vocal cords, and she didn't want to risk putting more family members at risk of losing their jobs.

Maura could see what her daughter was thinking and looked at her watch. "What do you think about you and the girls coming home for dinner tonight?"

Elizabeth nodded slowly, but in agreement, then smiled. "Sounds pretty damn good."

"Then we have a date."

"Yes," Elizabeth sighed, getting out of the chair. "Yes, we have a date. Make sure Ma and Kate are there, too."

Maura gave a short laugh. "It's hard to imagine it any other way."

Elizabeth laughed before heading for the door. "Love you."

"Love you too, baby", Maura replied, shaking her head when her daughter disappeared out the door.