"Knock knock," Leonard said from the doorway to Jim's office.

She smiled, "Who's there?"

"Do ya?"

"'Do ya' who?" Jim asked.

"Do ya like pizza?" he smiled.

"I love pizza."

"Good. Pepperoni okay?" Leonard asked as he walked into the room.

"It's always okay. What's all this for?"

"I believe I owe you payment for services rendered."

"You remember that?"

"Yes. Parts of the other day are fuzzy but I remember some things... and that conversation we had is very clear. This is my way of saying thank you," Leonard told her.

"For what?" Jim raised an eyebrow and looked up from her computer.

"Seriously?" he chuckled. "I'm usually the one who takes care of people when they get sick and I can't tell you the last time somebody did that for me. And your grandmother's soup is almost worth getting sick for. So, thank you."

"You are welcome. You know, you're really sweet when you wanna be," she smiled.

"Don't tell anybody that. I gotta reputation to protect," Leonard said as they both grabbed a slice.

"Of course, Doctor Grumpy," Jim chuckled as he looked around her office.

"They do not call me that," his gaze returning to her. She just nodded with a smirk on her face. "Well, maybe they'll think twice before doing dumb stuff. I had a guy that burned off his eyebrows and, instead of going to the ER, he scheduled an appointment with me two days later."

"They were just singed. Besides, Scotty's always been an interesting fella," she smiled.

"Of course you know him."

"I know everybody, including Montgomery Scott," Jim smiled. "He was an engineering professor who burned down part of a lab a few years ago and got canned. Nobody would hire him, so he opened a garage. Considering that this town needed one that wasn't gouging the hell outta us, it was a good thing. He fixes all kinds of stuff for whatever you can pay him and does experiments in his spare time. One time, he got paid in chickens. He still has 'em, made a coop and everything. How that man finds original parts for my car is some kind of magic I've never seen before."

"He's crazy."

"A little bit but he's good people so…" she said, letting the sentence drop. "I'm guessing you don't have a ton of patients today."

"None. I had one scheduled but they cancelled so Boyce let us have the day off. Halloween is tomorrow so I bet every sick kid in the county is pretending not to be sick just to enjoy the festivities. I can't wait until Friday. I'm gonna be elbows deep in it."

"Thankfully, I have Friday off," Jim smiled. "Maybe I'll bring you lunch. Maybe."

"Well, maybe I have something to look forward to," Leonard chuckled just as there was a knock on the door frame.

"Yea, Rand?" Jim asked.

"We just got a call about a body out by the junction," the other blonde said. "I think it's Doctor Wallace."

"Text me the details," Jim said before she looked at him.

"Doctor Wallace?"

"Janet. She's not... wasn't a medical doctor. She was a scientist," she told him with a sigh. A look that he couldn't place crossed her features. "She's too young and healthy for it to be natural."

"We don't have a murderer on our hands, do we?"

"Might. Won't know until I get there. Wanna come?" she asked.

"Am I allowed?"

"I'm inviting you, so yea," Jim smiled. "You know you want to, Doctor McCoy."

"I got nothing better to do," he shrugged.

"That's the spirit."

"Who found her?" Jim asked Deputy Hendorff when they got to a house out in the middle of nowhere.

"Her son, Theo junior," Hendorff said, motioning towards a guy, who was little more than a teenager, sitting on the stairs. "She calls him every day like clockwork but she missed the last two days, so he came out here to check on her. He lives up at Mount Mercy."

"Mount Mercy?" Leonard looked at Jim.

"It's a Catholic liberal arts university in Cedar Rapids," Jim answered.

"I gotta warn ya, it ain't pretty," Hendorff told them. Leonard looked at the big guy and noticed that he was a little green around the gills. "Seeing Misses W like that..."

"You should stay out here with Theo, Greg," Jim said. "Sheriff in there?"

"Yea. Mitchell too," Hendorff told her.

"This day just keeps getting better and better," she sighed.

"Friend of yours?" Leonard asked.

"He's Gaila's ex. We don't like him very much. With only four of us on duty at a time, I can't actually avoid him but I try," Jim said. "The only reason he has a job with the department is because he's annoyingly good at what he does."

"I knew you loved me, Jim," a tall, handsome man with light brown hair said with a smile when Jim and Leonard walked into the small house.

"I tolerate you, Gary. There's a difference," she said as she scanned the room with her eyes and pulled on a pair of gloves. "Has she been moved?"

"Yea. The son said he rolled her over," Deputy Mitchell said. "Saw all the stab wounds."

Leonard looked at the body, "Why stab her?"

"Uh, to kill her, duh," Mitchell scoffed. "You're supposed to be a doctor."

"If he stabbed her to death, where's all the blood?" Leonard asked the other man. "This isn't even a quart. Which means…

"Her heart wasn't beating. Stab wounds are post mortem," Jim nodded.

"Correct as usual, Miss Kirk," Leonard said to his friend as they knelt over the body of a blonde woman with striking similarities to Jim. Even their eye color was the same. It was almost uncanny. While he was on the subject of her eyes, there were a bunch of tiny red dots on her eyeballs and eyelids. "She's got petechiae."

"What's that mean?" Mitchell asked.

"Means that pressure caused her blood vessels to burst in her face. He strangled her to death," Jim answered. "There's a ligature mark around her neck. I bet my next paycheck that the pattern matches the ropes on the porch."

"Don't take that bet, Doc," Gary said. "She has a sixth sense about this stuff."

"Can I…?" Leonard reached over for Jim's arm, he wasn't wearing gloves and he doubted they'd want him to touch anything. Jim let him use her hand to move the woman's arm. "He tied her up after she tried to fight him off. Look at her hands." The women had bruised knuckles and broken fingernails, her wrists were raw.

"She put up one hell of a fight," Sheriff Pike sighed. "That's not the worst of it. The son covered her with the blanket."

"Jesus," Jim muttered as she looked under the blanket. "He mutilated her." There were cuts all over Misses Wallace's thighs and pelvic area. Leonard watched as Jim took in the myriad of cuts and bruises all over this woman's body. "This is overkill… unless he got off on it. Junior said he hasn't talked to her in two days, right?"

"Yea, why?" Mitchell asked.

"She hasn't started to decay yet," Leonard said. "She's still in rigor mortis."

"Meaning she's only been dead a day, tops," Jim added. "He had her here for a while before he killed her."

Leonard raised an eyebrow, "Okay, I gotta ask. How'd you know that?"

"One of the first things I did when I became sheriff was send Jim to advanced forensics courses with FLETC," Pike answered. "Figured if I only have one investigator, I might as well make sure she has all the training I can get her."

"FLETC?" Leonard looked at Jim.

"Federal Law Enforcement Training Centers. It's where a good chunk of federal agents get their federal agent training. It's also like cop college for the rest of us. I even got credits," she sighed before looking up at Pike. "We should have the M.E. run a rape kit but this guy was careful, I doubt there will be any usable DNA."

"So, don't get my hopes up. Got it," Pike said. "Mitchell, bag everything. Get prints and DNA from the son so we can rule him out. Jim…"

"I'll start digging into their background to put together victimology," Jim sighed. "I don't know, Chris. This was made to look personal but I don't think it was. At least… I don't think it's her. Janet's always been a loner, even before Theo died. This… feels like it might be a message to someone else. I doubt she knew the person who did this to her. We need to figure out why he picked her before he goes after someone else. I'll see if I can find anyone who's passed through the area in the last two weeks or so and work my way out."

"That's my girl," Pike nodded. "Let's get to work."

"You knew her, didn't you?" Leonard said when he stopped by Jim's house two days after Janet Wallace's body was found. Jim was sitting on her floor with a laptop, surrounded by paperwork. Leonard spotted a picture of the deceased woman and, if he thought they looked similar before, he was almost certain that they could actually be related now.

"Wallace is her married name, Janet was a Kirk, one of my father's younger cousins. She was only eleven years older than me. The science teacher at the high school in Washington, near the station, for a while. When her husband died last year, she kinda shut everyone out. Only a handful of people have seen her in the last twelve months but she was still family," Jim said.

"It that hard?" he asked. Leonard couldn't imagine having to figure out what happened to a dead relative. He's treated his fair share of family members but it was never anything this bad.

"Can be," she sighed. "I've pulled over family members. Broke up fights between brothers. Identified the bodies of people I've known my whole life but this... I can admit that this is different. Made harder by the fact that I got nothing I didn't already know. Nobody with a problem or a grudge against Jan. Everyone we talked to was understandably shocked."

"So, you were right, it wasn't personal as far as she was concerned," Leonard sighed.

"Doesn't look like it. Which means he picked her for another reason. I just have to figure out what that reason is before he kills someone else. Yay me."

"You're sure it's a man?"

"Like ninety-five percent sure," she sighed, "I'm assuming it's a man based on the condition we found her body in. I'm not ruling out the possibility that it might actually be a woman. You're getting a kick out of this."

"I am not," Leonard muttered. Jim raised an eyebrow. "Granted, I don't like dead bodies because it's my job to prevent people from dying. I do, however, like puzzles and this is a big puzzle."

"This one is missing too many pieces," Jim groaned as she closed the computer and sat it on the table. "It's like someone dumped out half the box and asked me to solve the rest."

"You'll figure it out."

"That's debatable. I'm at a dead end," she sighed.

"It's only been two days and you need to take a break," he told her.

"Probably."

"Not probably. It's your day off and I bet you spent it buried in this all day. You're still in your pajamas," Leonard said. Jim opened her mouth to argue but she must've thought better of it, because she didn't say anything. "That's what I thought. I'm gonna go grab Jo from your brother, you are gonna take a quick shower, get dressed and meet me at my house."

"Am I?"

"Yes. You gotta eat and I have it on good authority that you like spaghetti and meatballs, which is what's for dinner."

"Who told you that? Gaila."

"I'm not revealing my sources. If you're not at my house in half an hour, I'll have the sheriff drag you over there."

"What makes you think he would?" Jim asked, defiant as ever.

"Because I'm gonna tell him that you didn't eat today."

"But I did eat."

"Pretzels and coffee don't count."

"I hate you," she smiled.

"No you don't. Thirty minutes, Jim," he told her.

"You're lucky I think your hotness trumps how annoying you are."