"That's out of question," Elizabeth said loudly and emphatically. "I don't care how brilliant your students are. We can't have them involved in an ongoing investigation."
"Nor will they," Katherine replied, following her big sister into her parents' kitchen. "Not knowingly, anyway."
Jane, who was sitting on the living room floor with Nikki helping the girl with her homework, looked up at Maura, who was sitting on the couch with Ashlyn reading a book, and wordlessly asked the lawyer if she should intervene in this argument while Katherine grabbed a wine glass and filled it with white wine.
Maura shook her head with her eyes closed to answer the silent question before raising her brows as she realized that her youngest daughter was very much feeling at home again.
Jane pressed her lips together and swallowed hard so she wouldn't start laughing.
Katherine ran her hand wearily through her hair and sighed loudly. As tired as she was, being at her parents' house and discussing with her sister seemed a better alternative than returning to her sterile apartment where she would be alone and eventually go to bed while thoughts of Rosa and memories of her childhood and the past two years wouldn't let her fall asleep anyway.
"It's too risky," Elizabeth replied categorically before opening the fridge door and taking out a beer.
Jane heard the sound of the fridge door opening and raised her head with her eyebrows drawn together, opening her mouth to protest but immediately closing it again while Maura placed her hand over her mouth with a grin.
"What choice do we have?" asked Katherine. It was a rhetorical question. "We haven't had any luck identifying the victim in South Boston. We don't even know where to start." In fact, she understated her dilemma. All the occupants of the burned-out South Boston building where they had found the latest skeleton had been identified.
Maura sighed loudly and then stroked the hair of her youngest granddaughter, who, like her sister, pretended to be oblivious to the other two women's argument.
"We don't know where the victim lived, where she was abducted, how old she was, nothing," Katherine reminded. "What do we have to lose?"
Jane saw her wife's questioning look and rolled her eyes before nodding silently.
Elizabeth took a sip of beer in silence, she had already clearly drawn her line.
Katherine ran her index finger over the tiny, almost inconspicuous craters on the surface of the kitchen island, thinking about how many meals she and her family had eaten together there when they had all lived under one roof.
"So, as usual, it's my turn again," Elizabeth replied.
"A categorical no is not an option. We need to get off the beaten path."
The detective smiled. Each of them knew the other's tricks. "Sticking it to me is the well-trodden path," Elizabeth remarked. "That's the way it always goes."
That sentence automatically made both girls look up.
"Okay," Jane sighed and closed Nikki's textbook, looking at her granddaughter seriously with furrowed brows. "What do you say we call it a night and you go upstairs with your sister?"
Nikki nodded slowly and slowly stood up, waiting for Ashlyn. "Come on, sis."
"Stubbornness isn't exactly a new behavior either," the doctor growled with a petrified expression. She snorted then shook her head. "Maybe you're right. Maybe it is too risky."
Elizabeth eyed her little sister for a long time with a hard expression. "Don't do that."
"What?"
"Manipulating me with the guilt trip. You don't think you're wrong. So stick with it," the other woman growled, glaring at Jane as she also went to the fridge to grab a beer, too. "What do you think of that?"
"I think you two sound like an old married couple," Jane replied before handing a bottle to Maura as well, who sat down at the kitchen island with a grin.
"I wasn't trying to manipulate Liz," Katherine tried to defend herself.
"Yeah, well, sure you did," Elizabeth retorted, annoyed. "Like I'm supposed to believe that."
"I think you should try Kate's students," Maura said before taking a sip from her beer bottle.
"You do realize that the only way they're going to get a real idea, if at all, is by accident?" retorted Jane, who now realized that she and the lawyer were involuntarily involved in the discussion.
Maura pursed her lips and nodded slowly. "Does it matter, as long as it leads to the goal?"
Elizabeth's facial muscles twitched as her sister crossed her arms in front of her chest with a triumphant grin, then turned to the captain. "Your call, Ma."
Jane felt the eyes of the three women rest on her and dropped her shoulders with a sigh. "I'm pretty sure I'm going to regret this. Let's try the students."
„Perfect", grumbled Elizabeth and inhaled deeply.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
"Good morning," boomed Walt Bates' voice as he stood before his six graduate students in the seminar on profiling. It was early the next morning, and the students were just settling down at the conference table, pulling out their laptops, drinking coffee, and noshing on muffins from the two boxes Bates brought in each week.
Bates was fifty-five, medium height and slim, his straight brown hair showing the first traces of gray at the temples. Horn-rimmed glasses and a brown corduroy suit gave him the ultimate professorial flair. In truth, he was anything but that. He had earned master's and doctorate degrees while rising to the rank of captain with the Philadelphia Police Department. He had taken the death of his wife from cancer several years ago as an opportunity to take his leave from the police department and move closer to his three grown children, all of whom had somehow made their way to Boston. After several years of building a solid reputation and a sizable bank account as a management consultant, Bates had grown tired of the constant travel, so it was more than convenient when BCU offered him a tenured professor position. Even more so when he found that he found more fulfillment as a teacher than he ever had as a cop.
To Bates' left sat Katherine in her work clothes, a burgundy costume, and Elizabeth, who wore a charcoal gray pantsuit and a blue-and-white striped blouse.
"I saw you in the paper, Detective," Miguel said immediately, resting his head in his hands, which stretched the dagger on his right bicep into a kind of sword. "Like a year and a half ago?"
"Yes, probably," Elizabeth replied, trying hard not to make a face, even though it was difficult. The newspaper article to which the young man referred had nothing to do with the case she and her sister had solved during that time. "That was immediately after my wife committed suicide with my service weapon. The forensic report didn't allow any clear conclusions, so someone overzealous concluded I must have murdered her. For half a year they investigated, but of course, nothing came of it."
"Can I ask if you did it?" asked Cory, who looked as if he had come straight from bed to class.
While his fellow students giggled and groaned, Elizabeth looked him straight in the eye. "My answer is no, but beyond that, I invoke my right to remain silent and will no longer answer any questions without my attorney present." She said it so seriously that the whole class, including Bates and Katherine burst out laughing, and even Elizabeth had to smile. That had been her intention, to break the ice with these students as quickly as possible.
Justine, unadorned in jeans and a sweatshirt, sat next to Cory and wrinkled her nose. "You just screwed someone, didn't you?" she stated more than asked.
Wes laughed derisively. "How would you know?"
"She's more than familiar with the smell," Miguel quipped, and everyone knew, he was alluding to Justine's sexual preference for women.
For his part, Cory turned redder than the pimples on his face and said nothing while Bates raised his hand.
"Enough of that, and as Cory's attorney, I'm pointing out that he doesn't have to say anything that he's going to incriminate himself with." His gaze traveled over the students, some of whom were still grinning. When he was sure everyone had gotten the message and would behave, he continued. "Dr. Isles has already described to you how she and Detective Rizzoli solved the case of those murdered women last year. Today, she brought the detective in for a different reason."
"Right," Katherine said. "And even if he didn't know it when he tried to get Detective Rizzoli to confess, Cory's question goes right to the heart of the issue we're going to call 'Theory of the Crime.' Anyone care to guess what is meant by that?"
"That's not a trick question, is it?" asked Kara uncertainly.
Katherine shook her head slowly. "No."
"Then, of course, it's what the investigators think happened."
"For the purpose of today's class, that's only partially correct," Elizabeth said. "Because it's not that simple."
To Katherine's surprise, her sister now stood up, walked to a plastic board at the front of the room, and picked up a black felt-tip pen. "I've been working on solving murders for a long time," she said, writing 'Theory of Crime' in block letters at the top of the board and underlining it sweepingly before turning back to the students. "When you come to a crime scene, you usually recognize right away what we call 'cause of death.'" She put the phrase with a flourish under her heading. "Shooting, stabbing, blunt force trauma, and so forth, you know. Then," she continued, "next we need 'mode of death.'" She wrote the term on the board.
"Isn't that the same thing?" asked Leslie, whose long dreadlocks were now tucked under a wool cap. Elizabeth turned back to them.
"She wouldn't ask if it were the same," Wes said, annoyed.
"Well, of course, this time it might have been a trick question," Elizabeth quipped. "But you're right. The 'mode of death' is more of a legal term and can only be determined by a medical examiner. For example, let's say we're called because a person washed up on the beach. What is the mode of death?" She looked at the students, who returned her gaze. For the first time, no one said anything. Katherine couldn't help but grin, and when Elizabeth noticed, she grinned, too. "How about it, Dr. Isles? Do you want to tell them, or should I?"
Katherine glanced around the room and raised her brows a little. "The answer is, 'It depends.' Because this time, Detective Rizzoli actually asked you a trick question." The students didn't seem quite so stupid anymore for not being able to answer the question.
"Why does it depend? Because it's not yet automatically murder if we find a person shot, stabbed, beaten to death, or drowned. Let's say someone washes up on the beach. If he has water in his lungs, what do we know?"
"That's easy," Kara said. "He drowned."
"Then what's the mode of death?" wanted Elizabeth to know.
"Is 'accident' a possibility?"
"Yep."
"Then I'd say the cause of death is accident."
Miguel shook his head.
Elizabeth tilted her head a little. "The fellow with the dagger on his bicep doesn't think so?"
"No," Miguel replied, and the others looked at him briefly. "Because we don't know why he drowned."
"Go on," Elizabeth demanded, making a circular motion with the left hand in which she held the felt-tip pen while slipping the right into her pants pocket.
"Let's say the man was in a boat. If he fell out, it was an accident, on the other hand, if someone pushed him out, it may be murder, but it would look the same."
Elizabeth pointed to the young man. "Exactly. Here's another case from the sixties, it's legendary. A woman is driving on the Belt Parkway in New York. As luck would have it, a detective is right behind her on his way to work. Suddenly, the woman pulls from the far left lane all the way over to the right and onto the grassy shoulder until she hits a tree. The detective pulls over. It's a young woman, in her twenties, dead. Any tips as to the mode of death?"
Again, the students were speechless. Then Justine, who had said nothing so far, cautiously raised her hand. "It had to be murder, right?"
Elizabeth pursed her lips as she closed the pen shut and placed it on the shelf. "Explain your 'Theory of the Crime' to me."
"Someone knew she drove that route every day, waited at a convenient spot, and shot," Justine said confidently.
"What a crock of shit," Cory muttered, obviously wanting to get back at her for embarrassing him like that earlier.
"You can say it more politely," Elizabeth chided, "but tell me why you think that?"
"Because you can't possibly take such a perfectly aimed shot at a moving car," Cory replied.
"Lee Harvey Oswald did it," Justine returned. "Twice. One directly in the head."
"If you want to believe it," Cory replied, waving his hand dismissively. "And suppose it's true: Kennedy's car was going pretty damn slow, and Oswald learned to shoot in the Marines, didn't he? That young woman was on the Belt Parkway, so unless she was in stopped traffic, the shooter would have had to be in a car going exactly the same speed, or that shot wouldn't have been physically possible." His friends looked at him as if he had lost his mind.
Not Elizabeth. She clapped her hands five or six times very slowly and emphatically, which elicited a smile from Cory and shock on the faces of his fellow students.
"He's right?" asked Justine, perplexed.
"Even that detective who watched the thing thought like you," said Elizabeth. "But your friend here is right, yes -"
"But wait a minute," Justine interrupted, not wanting to give up yet. "There must have been a hole from the bullet in one of the car windows, right?"
Elizabeth smiled again as she sat down, clearly enjoying the whole thing very much. "You'd think so. But it wasn't. Anyone wants to guess why?"
"The windows were open?" asked Wes.
"Not the windows," Elizabeth replied, crossing her legs. "The window. The right rear one. That's the only one the bullet could have entered through."
Miguel turned to Cory with renewed respect. "You hit the bull's-eye, Holmes," he said, before looking at Elizabeth again. "So it was a purely random shot, one in a million?"
"Yes," the detective replied. "So what was the mode of death?"
"Accidental," Miguel stated.
"In layman's terms, you're right," Elizabeth said, nodding. "But legally speaking, even then it was basically illegal to fire guns in the city. The guy they finally investigated had fired the shot from a boat nearly a mile from where the young woman was hit. He had been testing an old forgotten shotgun he found on board, and just wanted to see if it still worked."
"And with that shot, he killed the girl?" marveled Leslie.
"If the right rear window of her car had been closed, she might have grandchildren by now, because the shot would have ricocheted."
"The way kids somehow always manage to get in the way of stray bullets, even when they're inside and the shot is fired outside," Miguel said glumly.
"Yeah," Elizabeth sighed, stepping back up to the board. "I've had more than enough cases like that. But I don't want to digress. What it comes down to, and I'm using murder again as an example, is that the 'Theory of the Crime' has to do with the mode of death, but it's still not the same thing. It's just that, a theory. The why, if you will. Why is a question, and the answer almost always begins with because." She wrote the two words on the board. "My job as a homicide detective is to get behind the why. Because it always leads one to the who." She set the felt-tip pen aside. "In the case we just discussed, the answer to why the young woman died is because some asshole on a boat fired his rifle in the wrong direction. And look how long it took us to get to that because. The theory of the crime, in this case, changed several times as evidence steered investigators in a new direction almost daily. Is everything clear so far?"
The students typed furiously into their laptops as if their futures depended on it.
"I'll take that as. Yes," Elizabeth said with a faint smile.
Katherine didn't miss her sister's skill as a teacher at all. Whether she knew it or not, Elizabeth was a natural. She hadn't expected that in the least, and Katherine had even fought tooth and nail to give the lecture herself. But she had lost that battle. It had happened when they had said goodbye outside her parents' house the night before. Elizabeth had finally agreed to present the case to the students and do it the way Katherine had suggested. But Elizabeth's final condition had been that she, and not her sister, would be the one doing the talking. He was a condition, and in the interest of the cause, Katherine had given in.
At home, she had fretted about it. But Elizabeth's introduction here had dissipated her anger like the sun dissipates a summer morning mist.
"Let's try something not so long ago," said Elizabeth, still standing in front of the blackboard, where she now picked up a red felt-tip pen from the shelf. "Did anyone watch the news yesterday or today?"
Katherine's heart skipped a beat. Like the skilled interrogator that was her sister, Elizabeth had gotten the students to think it was all about an exercise. Katherine knew it was segueing into the case at hand.
"Do you mean local news or worldwide?" asked Wes.
"Local," replied the detective," over in South Boston, yesterday morning."
"The fire where this body was found?" guessed Leslie.
"Exactly that," Elizabeth agreed. "We're doing this in real-time, so let's see how we can use what we've learned." A general clatter on the laptops indicated that students were pulling up what they could find on the matter. "So what do we know about this so far?"
"Doesn't look like much," Justine remarked, reading from an article, "Police are calling the fire that destroyed an apartment building in South Boston yesterday arson; after a body was found in the basement of the burned-out building, murder may be added."
"Okay, what's the mode of death so far?" asked Elizabeth with a furrowed brows.
"How can we tell from this little bit of information?" replied Justine. "All it says here is that none of the occupants of the house are missing -" She paused suddenly. "So that means the dead person didn't live in the building," she realized.
"Excellent," praised the detective. "So what is the mode of death?"
"Still impossible to determine," Wes said. "What was the victim doing in the building in the first place if they didn't live there?"
"You're on the right track," Elizabeth encouraged. "Now you have to take the next step. If you were in my shoes and working the case, what options would you consider?"
"Well, either the victim somehow walked into the basement, or was killed beforehand and then dumped there," Wes replied.
"That's a start. Anyone else?"
Kara slowly looked at her fellow students, then frowned. "Wouldn't we need to know the extent to which the victim was burned?"
"Yes, and let's assume for the sake of argument that the body is completely burned. No usable DNA for identification unless the coroners find usable cells in the bones."
"I would perhaps first investigate whether there have been similar arsons in the area or even throughout the city," Kara now speculated.
"Yes, and that's a basic step we would take immediately in an investigation," Elizabeth confirmed, writing, 'similar arsons' on the board. "In fact, BPD and BFD arson investigators would be on the scene, and they would immediately know if they've encountered this type of approach before. But remember, we're talking about the Why here. Why would this victim have gone into the basement if that's the way it would have been."
"I don't think it was," Miguel replied categorically.
Elizabeth set aside her pen. "Why not?"
"Because it's out of the question that someone would happen to sneak into the basement of a building on the very night that an arsonist is burning the place down," the young man opined. "Just like it's out of the question for a young woman to get shot in the head while she's driving down the Belt Parkway at high speed because some asshole in a boat -" She saw that Miguel had understood and was shaking his head, presumably at himself. "Okay, that was bullshit," he admitted.
"No need to flagellate yourself," the detective said. "Here's the thing, guys: this work is not like you see on TV. Sometimes we find the culprit in a day, sometimes after forty years. And sometimes, as has happened, although fortunately not to me, we arrest the wrong person with the right evidence. And then we have to eat shit years later, pardon my language when it comes out that we screwed up and locked up an innocent person. Do you know when that's most likely to happen?" It was a rhetorical question. She looked tensely around the room, but none of the students would venture an answer. "It's most likely to happen when you focus too much on the who instead of the why. And neglecting, for example, the question, 'Why would this person, who I would like to be the perpetrator, have killed my victim?' Or the other way around: 'Why might it be, despite all the evidence, that the person I suspect is not the killer?'"
"So it's what you call reasonable doubt," posed Wes, the wanna-be prosecutor.
"That's right," the detective confirmed. "And reasonable doubt should start with you as cops, not with the jury, because by then it may be too late. But in cases like this, you can't possibly figure out the why unless you know who the victim is. So let's say the remains go to the coroner's office, where they find some usable cells for a DNA determination, but not a complete sequence. What's the next step?"
"I would still run it through the database," Leslie now replied.
Elizabeth nodded slowly but pursed her lips. "Why? You're not going to get a result."
"Unless I run the match with a lower percentage of matches," the young woman replied. "Maybe I'd get lucky and find a relative whose DNA is in the database, and that person could lead me to the victim. Just like they caught that 'Grim Sleeper' back in LA."
"Excellent idea," Elizabeth said, writing, 'DNA from relatives' on the board. "But what if we've done that and still can't identify the victim?"
"Wait a minute," Cory said, looking at the board with his eyebrows drawn together. "If we have DNA, we have to know the gender of the victim, right?"
"Yes," Elizabeth said, trying to move things along with gentle force, "and let's assume it's male. How does that help us?"
"Not very," Kara now replied, "unless someone in the neighborhood mysteriously disappeared overnight."
Katherine blurted, wanting to join the discussion, but she kept her mouth shut.
Elizabeth saw it, and she became even more frustrated than she already was. "Okay," she said, deciding to go out on a limb a little more, which she hoped wouldn't be held against her later. "We can't identify the victim, so just for fun, let's assume the body was dumped by the same person who then set the fire."
"Wow," Cory breathed, "some total nut job who burns down a building full of innocent people to cover up a murder?"
"It's all been done," the detective assured him. "The Jamaican drug gangs in South Boston back in the eighties would whack anything that breathed to protect their businesses or to get the message out that they weren't to be trifled with."
"But we're talking about seventy or so people living in the house," Cory persisted. "To me, that boils down to a straight-up psychopath."
"Okay," Elizabeth admitted, "I guess that's what I would say." She wrote 'psychopath' on the board while Cory, in his newfound confidence, took a sip of coffee as if it were an elixir that sustained his superpowers.
"Speaking of psychopaths, where would you turn next?"
"Seriously?" asked Wes with an incredulous smile. "I'd call in the FBI."
"You wouldn't want to close the case yourself?
"Yes, of course, I would," the young man explained. "But the FBI has people who specialize in this kind of thing, profilers and such. And if you've already exhausted your local resources, for example, if you can't find anything in your database that will help you, then you take the next step, right?"
Elizabeth turned to the board, nodded affirmatively, and wrote 'FBI. "It might not be our first choice, since the relationship between the FBI and BPD is not the best, but your friend is right," she said. "Not pooling resources is the kind of thinking that led to 9/11. If you have the information and you hit a dead end, you share the information. It's a lot like life as such, folks. Everything you give comes back to you, often in ways you never expected." She noted as she signaled to Professor Bates that it was time to finish.
"Detective Rizzoli will be back next week with Dr. Isles," he told his class. Then he turned to the two of them. "Is there anything you want our friends here to do to prepare?"
"Yes," said Katherine, who was now standing up. "Cory, you asked who would put more than seventy lives in danger to cover up the murder of one person. I want you all to start from that scenario and write down what kind of person would do that, as a kind of profile. As if you were the FBI specialists at Quantico. Let your minds wander and write down everything you can think of. Remember, there are no stupid or wrong ideas."
"So, now a big thank you to Detective Rizzoli for waking us up," Bates said, and the class broke into enthusiastic and sincere applause.
While the students stood up and packed up, Katherine looked out the window. The rain had stopped, and the sky was clear.
Bates stepped up to her and her sister. "You're a natural up there at the blackboard," he told the detective. "And there's always a need for adjunct instructors with your experience. Have you ever considered teaching part-time?"
Katherine was eager to hear her sister's answer.
"I've given a few seminars at the police academy on homicide investigations," Elizabeth replied with a slight frown, "but I'm nowhere near ready to submit my resignation to the BPD. When I am, however, the BCU will be the first place I report to."
"Thanks for a great class." Bates shook her hand and reached for his soft leather briefcase. "See you next week, same place, same time," he said goodbye and walked out of the seminar room.
"You did a great job," Katherine said with a hint of a smile. But her sister's expression spoke a completely different language. "What's the matter?"
"It was a waste of time," the detective replied with a heavy sigh.
Katherine couldn't quite understand what her sister was getting at. "You've been a great sport about it, haven't you?"
"But aside from a half-hearted part-time job offer, nothing has come of it. And we don't have time to wait for next week."
Katherine wasn't so sure and rolled her eyes. "Maybe this Wes guy is right. We should go to the FBI."
"We already did," Elizabeth barked at the younger woman.
Katherine crossed her arms in surprise. "Really?" she retorted, a hint of annoyance in her voice.
"It's one of the first things we do in these matters."
The doctor averted her gaze so Elizabeth wouldn't see her annoyance.
Elizabeth knew what had triggered it and gritted her teeth. "No, I'm not telling you everything," she confirmed, "but Ma called a friend at the FBI and had him look into it. There's not much the gang of behavioral science at Quantico doesn't know about regarding serial killers. The one guy, they nailed for something like this is doing life in Leavenworth. And just for the record, I don't have to tell you everything, and you're just going to have to accept that."
Katherine looked at the other woman again. "I'm sorry," she said, "If I'm like I was a minute ago, it's not directed at you. I'm just thinking about Rosa."
Her words soothed Elizabeth, who had been braced for a prolonged argument. "No problem. And maybe that Wes guy actually wasn't all wrong."
The doctor raised her brows in surprise. "What do you mean?"
"We shouldn't have stopped at the FBI."
"But who else is there?"
"Us," Elizabeth replied, looking her little sister long and earnestly in the eyes. "Us and a really big world."