- Chapter 6 -

Downstairs, Maura sat in her office with her legs crossed underneath her walnut desk. Her head bobbed with a slow rhythm, eyes closing in response to the rapid-fire complaints coming across her cell. The nanny, Mrs. Cibowitz, had decided to inform Maura that Bart was still a terror that made all of the other children she had been a nanny for look tame in comparison. Jane never got to receive Mrs. Cibowitz's bi-hourly rant sessions given her supposed inability to tolerate bullshit. As a result, Maura had to endure the pain of Mrs. Cibowitz and her complaints regarding Bart. God knows she had other things she could have been doing regarding Jane's case but telling the nanny to stop whining and do her job wasn't conducive to creating and maintaining a civil working environment.

"Mrs. Cibowitz," Maura began, closing her eyes in exasperation, "you can't really think Bart needs to undergo an exorcism. He's not a devil, just spirited, is all."

In the background, a loud crash followed by an insane bout of baby babbling. Mrs. Cibowitz immediately released a heavy sigh in response to Bart's actions. Maura smiled in amusement as her mind painted a picture of the kind of havoc Bart was invoking on his nanny. Just like Jane, their son demanded attention from everyone who happened to be around him. With his attractive features and intelligence, the little guy usually managed to get it…unless one of his mothers reminded him that he wasn't the self-appointed king of the universe.

"A child without boundaries is a child bound to failure. The boy needs discipline and soon."

Maura frowned. "And he gets discipline. This is just Bart's way of having fun."

"Children shouldn't be having fun. They should be learning. This is why the Japanese beat us in all of the critical areas, because children are immersed in learning completely and absolutely, from day one."

"Educational attainment is difficult to quantify, Mrs. Cibowitz," Maura said, raising her eyes to notice Jane pounding down the hallway to her office. With the look on her wife's face, she could tell that the woman was this close to doing something she absolutely hated beyond belief: showing her inner feelings at work. Compartmentalizing was so important to Jane that she had even created a rule to deal with the potential risk of personal and professional mixing: keep Jane, the woman, at home; keep Jane, the detective, at work. Maura thought the rule was dangerously problematic, forcing the woman to split identity into two distinct parts even though personality was anything but. There was no way Jane could maintain the dual identities, but, according to her, she was doing fine until she started dating Maura. Then everything went to hell in an eggbasket.

As Jane walked into her office, Maura rolled her eyes before mouthing the word "nanny" as she closed the door. Jane made a gun with her hands before shooting herself in the head, collapsing on the couch as if she was really dead. As much as she wanted to laugh at her wife's display, Maura returned her focus to the endless complaints regarding Bart still coming ad nauseaum.

"Mrs. Cibowitz, I'd love to continue to conversation but my wife just came in and she's got a gun to her head. Do you mind calling me back in another hour, per our usual arrangement? Tell Bart that his Mommy Jane and Mommy Maura can't wait to see him when we get off work."

"A gun to her head… What is wrong with this family?"

Maura giggled, turning her attention to Jane. "What do I owe this pleasure, darling of my eye?"

Jane groaned, lacing her hands over her eyes.

"Aww I love you too, Jane. But I really need you to use English. I'm just no good at Groanese," Maura said, jokingly. "Does this have something to do with Capt. Day showing up at the crime scene today?"

Jane frowned, remaining still on the couch. Maura wasn't surprised at the detective's reaction. They had been together for too long; she knew her wife like the back of her hand. Any time things got tough for Jane at work was a sure sign that something had managed to touch a nerve. Since she kept her emotions close to her chest at work, something managing to work itself past her defenses was a rare occurrence. When the rare moments did happen Maura did her best to help her deal with it. Rushing Jane to talk never worked unless the goal was to get her furious. The only proven tactic was to slowly bring out the problem into the light, forcing her to deal with the issue instead of hiding it underneath layers of responsibility, expectation, and police protocol.

"You know," Maura began after a brief bout of silence, "we don't have to talk about it here. If you want, we can take a working lunch."

"We all know what a 'working lunch' means for the two of us, Maura. We start to eat, you say something ridiculously scientific, I get turned on, and then we work on having sex," Jane said, lifting her body from the couch with a smile. "As much fun as that always sounds to me, I need to get hot on figuring out where things are with that body and the interviews upstairs."

"So you don't want to talk about the captain?"

"I don't know. I need to talk about it, but I just don't feel like navel gazing is gonna deal with everything that's going through my head regarding…the captain."

"It might not, but there's always the chance that it will. Why not give it a try?"

"Maybe," was all Jane answered after another heavy silence. "Tell me about the case first. Did you find anything after you got the corpse back to the lab?"

Maura stood up with a small folder in hand to sit beside Jane. "I have good and bad news about our John Doe. Good news, he was already in the system."

"Really?" Jane snatched the folder out of Maura's hands, aggressively perusing its contents like the information was going to disappear in ten seconds. "How did you find that out?"

"Every morgue that has completed an autopsy on a body marks it so as to prevent body-snatching or potential confusion. Usually, the process is done on the skin but it used to be common practice to place the identifier on the bones. That's how I found out who are friend is here. All I had to do was run the number through the database and there he was: Danny Jacobs, born 1965 and died 1990."

Jane frowned. "If he was already dead then technically this isn't even a homicide."

"Wait a minute, Jane. Let me finish. His death was left unsolved."

"It says on his autopsy report that he died of cardiac arrest."

"The average twenty-five year old man doesn't just drop dead of cardiac arrest unless they have prior, unmanaged health concerns. Danny did not have prior, unmanaged health concerns. So, technically, Danny should still be in the ground and not burnt beyond all recognition in a mausoleum."

Jane looked up at Maura with tired eyes, clearly wanting to pawn this case off on any other unit except Homicide. Maura refused to back down, refusing to let her wife off the hook.

"You really want me to investigate an open case from twenty plus years ago to solve the mystery of why a burnt, dead guy is found at a mausoleum?" Jane asked, slowly. "I've got enough on my case, as is."

"Like how you feel about Capt. Ashley Day, you mean?"

"I don't know how I feel about him."

"And why is that?"

"Because…because it's complicated," Jane said, squirreling away from Maura's obvious attempts to get her to open up. "I'll see what my guys upstairs have gotten out of those wannabee burglars. Maybe something will click with this information about Danny Jacobs. I'll do some work finding out more about Danny in the meantime."

"Jane…"

Maura reached out to Jane as she stood up. "Later, honey. I promise we'll talk later, at home."

"You think you'll last that long? You look like you're going to pistol whip the next person who asks you how your day is going."

"I'll be fine," Jane said, heading toward the door. "Bart's still giving Mrs. Ciboshitz hell, I suppose."

Maura beamed. "Of course. The little devil enjoys terrorizing her for some reason."

"I know. I tell him every morning to keep doing it because it makes me happy. The boy is wicked smart."