Maura came rushing into Jane's office, with Nick behind her, carrying an open laptop. Her face was more than tense. "The trail is heating up," the lawyer said.

Jane took a deep breath, furrowing her brows. "Let's do this. The sooner we know, the better. Because we've lost contact with Detective Rizzoli."

Maura tucked her chin in at this news, and her eyes grew wide for a split second. "What?"

Jane gritted her teeth before licking her lips. "Probably her phone's battery died. So what's up?"

"The social worker just called me back. Michael Hebert has been adopted and seemed to be doing well for a long time."

Jane shook her head as she began pacing back and forth in her office. "Well, I don't understand that. Either I get revenge on everyone who betrayed me right now, or I forget the whole thing. Why is he only taking action now, when his mother was killed over a decade ago?"

"We had to dig deeper into Maura's records to find out," Nick said, placing the laptop on Jane's desk. "There was another court case --"

" ... in the course of which there had been further trauma to Michael Hebert." Maura finished the interrupted sentence and took a deep breath as she caught her wife's deadly gaze.

Jane bent over the laptop with a tense face. "Has the case against Hebert's mother's killer been reopened?" she asked, growling.

Maura took a few seconds to answer the question. "No, it was about a Sophia Slater, apparently Hebert's girlfriend."

"Was she killed, too?"

Nick sighed loudly and crossed his arms in front of his chest. "Not exactly," he said, looking at his other mother-in-law. "She'd been raped. Anyway, that was the charge."

"By who?"

"By a guy named Tom Jankowski."

Jane's gaze bored into Maura as she asked. "Is he alive, at least?"

Nick looked at Maura now, too. "We ran the name through our computers, and Jankowski's been missing for three weeks."

Jane's face twitched briefly. "Oh, come on. Did he rape Sophia?"

Maura licked her lips and nodded. "According to the indictment, yes. Hebert filed charges on behalf of his girlfriend." She raised her hand in warning as the chief opened her mouth. "However, they were with the cops eighty hours after the crime. By that time, there were no more rape marks, no more semen, and no more DNA detectable in Sophia Slater's vagina. And roofies were no longer detectable either."

Jane sat down behind her desk with a bitter smile. "So that means in dubio pro reo?"

Maura exhaled loudly with a nod. "When in doubt, give the defendant the benefit of the doubt; that's how it is."

Jane sat behind her desk, running her hand over her lips with a deep frown. "So Hebert was wronged twice by our legal system? First, his mother's killer was acquitted, then this Tom Jankowski?"

Nick jumped back into the conversation. "Right. But it wasn't just the trial that did him in; it was his girlfriend herself."

Jane looked at him questioningly. "Why? What did she do?"

"She hanged herself. And Hebert was the one who found her."

Jane gazed fixedly out the window for a moment. The chirping of birds that filtered through the open window was so out of keeping with the oppressive, tense atmosphere. Finally, she turned and looked at her wife and son-in-law. "And that was the re-traumatization? When he found the girl? From then on, he carried out his revenge plan?"

Nick nodded slowly. "He's old enough now, too. Still pretty young at twenty-something, but a lot more capable of acting than he was back then, that's for sure. Burns was one of the victims he killed outright. Jankowski, too, perhaps. And the others in that indirect way."

"Burns definitely," Jane said, leaning back in her chair. "Do we know any details on this Jankowski guy?"

"I'm going to run a search on Jankowski," Nick said with a frown. "Maybe that lead will lead to our killer."

"And this killer's name is Michael Hebert?" asked Jane as she rose from her chair again, a clear sign that the chief was getting restless. "He's got to be reported somewhere for crying out loud!"

The lawyer and the detective shook their heads.

"It's not that simple, Jane," Maura said, taking a step toward the desk. "According to the social worker at Child Protective Services, he may have changed his name. Anyway, he's not registered anywhere with the old name."

The chief closed her eyes briefly. "And no one knows the new name?"

"The social worker should be calling me back any minute. Hopefully, he can tell me by whom Hebert was adopted, and maybe he took this family's name."

Jane put her hands on her hips and put on a grim face. "Get this social worker on his feet, Maura! Now! We're in a fucking investigation here. Tell him we want names, and we want them in five fucking minutes. Otherwise, I'm gonna show up at their house in person, and it's gonna get ugly!"

Maura knew immediately that her wife hadn't issued an empty threat and disappeared from the chief's office with her cell phone to her ear.

xxx

She was stepping over the threshold into another world.

As Elizabeth stepped through the gate, impenetrable darkness enveloped her. It was as if she were traveling inside a gigantic Leviathan, a colossal monster inside of which she had to wander until stomach acid would dissolve her.

She tasted dust on her tongue and perceived the smell of damp wallpaper and old leather. Like a tomb, she thought. Or like the inside of a rotting body.

She thought of the saying Jane had told her at the beginning of her training, "Grass grows over graves. And then trees. And eventually, there will be a city there. And no one knows that that city stands on a grave."

The crack, she thought. She felt as if the crack she had just seen on the structure's wall, leading through the ground to the pond, continued here. And as if it were again two worlds that separated this space: the summer-sweltering atmosphere outside and the night-cold tomb in here, this cavern that was stomach, crypt, and guts all at once.

A different world, had run through Elizabeth's mind earlier when she entered the building. A world where you can feel the darkness.

Now she had the impression that she could smell and taste the darkness on top of that.

What does the darkness taste like? she still thought.

Then the twitching electrical energy of a taser hurled her to the floor.