Chapter Six - In Vino Veritas

That night (or rather, early Sunday morning) found Jane and Maura at Jane's apartment, cleaning out the last of her things. There were three piles for keep, charity, and garbage. The furniture would stay here for Angela, so she wouldn't have to replace all that her husband had lost or sold out from under her. "That's that," Maura said as she put the last of the things into the charity pile, dusting her hands symbolically of the labor. "We're finished except for the actual hauling, and the moving van will be here at one tomorrow. How do you feel?"

"Little bit better," Jane said. She knew Maura had referred to the sensation and emotion related to leaving her home of so many years, but that really wasn't even a part of her thoughts at the moment, so she went with what was actually on her mind. "I mean, it could've gone better with Frankie, but either he'll come around or he won't. I don't know what I'm going to say to Cavanaugh, though."

"Do you have to say anything?" Maura wondered. "Human Resources will need to put a note in your file concerning your new address and whom to call if you get hurt on the job, but technically Cavanaugh has no legal right to your personal information unless it becomes relevant to a case, and I can't imagine that it would."

Jane sat down atop one of the sturdier boxes. It had been her mother's hope chest, and hers, and for the last several years she'd made it a home for her extra pillows. "I don't have to tell him legally, but I owe him." She too dusted her hands, but for less symbolic and more practical reasons. They were filthy. "Cavanaugh went to the wall for me. Twice. After that first time around with Hoyt, Marquette retired. Or, I guess, he was encouraged to retire, and Cavanaugh took over."

She accepted the glass of water that Maura had brought her, and scooted over to make room for a second backside on that chest. "He's the one that pushed me to go for my gold badge when everybody else thought I was too hot-headed. Nobody else stood up for me, but he said he wanted me on his team. Then he let me go after Hoyt again. And again. And that apprentice in between, remember that case? And then he kept me on even after Bobby Marino." Jane sighed and leaned against Maura's arm just a little. "Cavanaugh trusts me. He respects me and he sticks up for me, and I need to show him I trust him, too."

"I see what you mean," Maura replied. "You'll be telling not your boss, but your... friend? Mentor?"

"Somewhere in there," Jane agreed. "Hey, did you say you brought home something from Hector's? I'm starving." She inhaled. "But I'm also disgusting. How about we get a shower and then eat whatever you brought home?"

Three hours later, Maura startled, distracted from what she was doing. "Did you hear that?"

"Damn it," Jane hissed, "no, I didn't hear anything." That shower had been a pleasant one, followed by more pleasantness. The idea of eating dinner had been all but forgotten. "Don't stop what you're doing. That was really good." Maura renewed her attentions, to Jane's immediate delight.

A few seconds after that, Jane startled. "Aw, crap, that time I heard it. It's the door."

Maura sighed, picking up the nearest shirt and slipping it on. "I'll go see who it is, and you can look for some clothes in case it's your mother."

"Probably Marissa from downstairs, actually," Jane said. "Somebody got a little bit loud for a while there."

Maura chuckled, entirely unabashed. "Maybe if somebody else wasn't so good at that..." She sauntered into the living room and opened the door, already apologizing. "Marissa, I'm sorry about the noise... Um." The woman at the door was decidedly not Jane's downstairs neighbor.

As tall as Jane, with dark hair in desperate need of a trim, the woman was hunched in a leather jacket not quite warm enough for the weather. She too appeared a little surprised at the woman who greeted her at the door, and the words, "Jane, I'm sorry..." died roughly the same time Maura's incorrect noise apology for Marissa tumbled out.

"Can I help you?" asked Maura when she recovered from the initial surprise of the not-Marissa standing there, as the woman gave her an appreciative once over. Maura, dressed only in Jane's shirt, managed not to blush.

"Uh, you're not Jane." Her eyes flickered past Maura to the boxes. "Crap... I'm sorry. She must have moved." She looked contrite and stepped away, as if to leave.

"Oh, no, no, Jane's here. Um. Just a second." The woman and Maura looked at each other with equal levels of awkwardness. Maura couldn't quite place where she'd seen the tall woman before, but she knew that they had met once. Or perhaps only seen each other once. Her voice raised a bit in volume. "Uh, Jane, someone's here to see you."

"What? Now?" called Jane. "Really?"

The exasperated tone caused both Maura and the woman in the doorway to smile. "She's always so touchy," smirked the stranger.

A moment later, Jane came out of the bedroom, in hastily donned sweats. "If Frankie thinks now's a good time to apologize, I'm gonna hit him in the - Kate!"

"Hey," drawled Kate Talucci.

Maura stiffened as she realized exactly who was at the door. Unlike at the hospital, she now had a good, clear, view of the boyfriend stealer. While Maura could read Jane's body language, and Angela's, this stranger was more difficult. There were layers of history in the slightly hunched posture that spoke of uncertainty. Maura's head snapped back to look at Jane, and surprisingly saw the detective grab Kate's arm and haul her in.

Jane hissed as she kicked the door closed, "What the hell are you doing here?" But she didn't sound angry. She sounded concerned for Kate. Like a friend.

"Uh, not to be that way, Rizzoli, but maybe not with your friend here?" Kate's eyebrows lifted at Jane, as if this was a new and pleasant surprise.

"Oh for... Kate, this is Maura Isles. Chief Medical Examiner? Ring a bell?" As Kate's eyes widened, Jane went on, "Maura, this is Kate Talucci. She's been undercover for years. I'm her blind drop."

Both Kate and Maura expressed their displeasure in this information in different ways.

"Jane! Why would you tell me something that I might later have to try to hide?"

"Jesus, Rizzoli, undercover! I'm supposed to be Peter Parker, not freaking Spiderman!"

Jane ignored both complaints. "You already probably blew your cover coming here, Kate. And if this is about the Brophy shooting, she needs to hear it." Kate looked at Maura for a long moment and then, with a resigned sigh, took a manila envelope out of her jacket and handed it over.

Frankie took a healthy swig from his beer. It wasn't his first. It wasn't his second, either. Beyond that, he'd been too irritated to count, and he still was. "Can you believe that?" he said to Darren Crowe, who simply sat listening. He loved to make digs at Rizzoli. If he'd ever wanted ammunition, well, here it was. "Gay as a three dollar bull."

"Bill," said Darren Crowe, Frankie's shadow for the day. Or, rather, Frankie had been his shadow, up until lunch time. Now he was Frankie's babysitter. "Queer as a three dollar bill."

"Yeah," Frankie agreed, thought about it for a minute, and agreed again. "Yeah. Jane and Maura. Behind everybody's back. Behind my back. Tommy's back. Ma's back. Casey's back. She was supposed to date Casey, right? They were always on Skate."

"Skype."

"Right, and then they weren't," Frankie said with an idle, vague wave of his free hand towards... well, Crowe couldn't make out what the gesture was indicating, actually, but Frankie seemed to feel it was important, so Crowe let it go. "But they could've been. They went out in high school, before he went off to be G.I. Casey."

"Joe." Crowe was generally an ass, at least outwardly, but he knew how to be a decent guy at times. Rare times, but this was one of them. They weren't really friends, but if Frankie was going to be a detective, he was going to need people looking out for him. Apparently Crowe had been nominated by the universe for the job.

"Who's Joe?"

"Never mind," Crowe replied. "Go ahead, talk."

Frankie needed no further encouragement. "They've been going around behind everybody's back. Probably laughing at dumb old Frankie. Dumb kid brother with the hots for his sister's best friend. Best friend, they said!" He gave Crowe a significant look and shook his head meaningfully. "I tell you what, best friends don't move in together. Maybe right out of high school, but not when they're thirty or thirty-five or... How old is the Doc? That old, however old that is. Not when they're that old."

"They've moved in?" This was news to Crowe.

"'Bout to." Frankie finished off this beer and, like the others, the bartender cleared it away and replaced it with another. "She didn't even have the balls to tell me herself. I had to hear it from Ma."

Having heard a version of the story himself in the day since the news had broken with Frost and Korsak (he'd heard them in the men's room), Crowe knew differently. "I thought she couldn't tell you because you left the table." Stormed out like a little prick was the way Frost put it; he'd had that news from Jane, who had no doubt spiced up the recollections she'd had from Maura.

Frankie wasn't even listening. He was beer-deaf by now. "Didn't have the balls to tell me herself," he repeated. "And do you know why?" He leaned towards Crowe, gesturing with the forefinger of the hand holding his beer. "Because she's a girl. Girls don't have balls. So what the hell is she using to violate my sister, anyway?" Wisely, Crowe elected not to answer with his immediate thought. "What's she got that I don't got? Huh?"

"Wait, you want to know what Doc Isles has, or what your sister has?" Crowe couldn't quite keep it together in his mind, which she was being discussed from moment to moment. It was only fair, though; Frankie couldn't seem to keep it straight, either.

"I don't want to know what either of them got!" Frankie bellowed, then quieted down from anger to sadness. "I just want to know what Jane's got that I don't got. Maura likes guys, you know? She's always dated a bunch of guys. Loves 'em. So does Janie. So why each other? They're screwin' over two other good guys who could be with them. Like me and Tommy."

"You and Tommy?" This time, Crowe couldn't quite resist. "Which one of you gets Jane?"

"No, Maura," Frankie corrected, just barely aware enough. "We both want to get with Maura. But she's busy with Jane, and Jane should be with Casey or Dean or Joe or just somebody besides the Doc. It's not right. And," he concluded as if summing up an argument before a jury or some other kind of rapt audience, and as if he hadn't said it several times before, "they've been running around behin' all our backs, right unner our noses! Little secrets and whispers and sleepovers. For a year."

Crow reached for his own drink, an O'Doul's. Frankie hadn't wanted to drink alone. Crowe hated non-alcoholic beer, but one of them had to be safe to drive later. "Only a year?" Now he was surprised. "I thought they'd been dating off and on for the last five years. Pretty much since the Doc got to the precinct."

Frankie shook his head. "Ma says they've been at it for a whole year," he mourned, clutching at his beer again like it held a letter from his one true love. "A year."

Crowe considered his options. There were a lot of questions he could ask, a lot of things he could say. In the end he went with something that wouldn't come back to bite Frankie in the career. "Which part is getting to you? The part about your sister being into Maura, or the part about the Doc being into her?"

Frankie's jaw worked for a moment. "Neither," he grunted, and reached for the beer nuts. "It's the damn sneaking around. I mean, I'm her brother for crying out loud, and ever since Janie got shot, she's been cutting me out more and more." Rolling the beer bottle between his hands, Frankie continued. "I mean... Look, I don't give a rat's ass if Janie wants to be a flannel wearing, carpet munching, Indigo Girls ticket holding, flannel wearing, lesbian hippie in Birkeystocks."

"You said flannel twice."

"She's my sister, and I love her." Frankie felt the need to point it out. "And Maura's probably going to be like my sister too, before it's all done. But I don't know if she loves me like a brother. Like family she can trust. Our own Ma knew first, and Janie knows how Ma felt about the gay thing!"

Crowe nodded. "Well, okay. You're mad about the right thing, I guess. But look, did Jane know all along that she was into Maura, or is this something new? Maybe it's not about her trusting you. Maybe it's about her trusting herself."

Through his drunken haze, Frankie focused on Crowe for a long minute. "Come on, Janie's not scared of nothing."

"Anything," sighed Crowe, wearily. Frankie was well past the stage where a drunk is amusing to his sober friends. Hell, at this point, Frankie wasn't even entertaining the other drunks. "And you know that's not true. Jane's brave, but she's not stupid." Frankie grunted acknowledgement. "Come on, Frankie. If Jane was going to move in with Casey or Dean, you'd want him to come talk to you, tell you he was in love with your sister, right?"

"Yeah," agreed Frankie, warily, as if he was sure he was being suckered into something.

"Yeah, so having Maura come up and tell you, that's the same thing, isn't it?"

Frankie stared at Crowe, almost dumbfounded. "Oh, crap. I should Apollo - Apple - I gotta say sorry!"

As Frankie lurched to his feet, Crowe caught his arm, "Not tonight, big guy. Come on, I got a couch where you can sleep this off."

The photos were spread out over the kitchen counter, while Kate devoured the leftover ribs as if she hadn't had a decent meal in weeks. "So I was at this bar down in Southie, trying to pick up a lead like I said I would. I was thinking I could get hired, if this was a group thing. I played up the hurt Catholic card and got a lead on a disaffected nutcase."

Both Jane and Maura had taken quick showers (and opened the bedroom window, though that was more for Angela than anyone else), and were now studying covert pictures of a tall man with close cropped, greying hair. "He's like... an evil Father Brophy," remarked Jane.

"They don't look anything alike," protested Maura. "Their facial structures are completely-"

"Yeah, yeah," said both Jane and Kate, and Kate added, "They both have grey hair."

Maura's lips pursed. "That's not enough in common to suggest that they at all physically resemble one another."

The two tall Italians rolled their eyes, and Maura was struck by how similar they were. Jane had explained by now that the fight in the hospital had actually been an act. She hadn't expected to run into Kate there, and they'd faked a fight in order to pass information. Normally Kate worked lesbian cases. "You play what you know," Kate told Maura as they jointly related the story of their public estrangement.

Many things became clear. For example, Kate had indeed slept with Jane's boyfriend, but only after Jane had dumped him. When they were in the academy, Kate was pegged as being talented at undercover work, and her seemingly antagonistic relationship with Jane made her a perfect blind drop. Kate worked her way into a drug smuggling ring, a human trafficking ring, a prostitution ring, and so on and so forth, for the last ten years.

Every once in a while, between cases, she'd come home, work as a regular cop, fake a mistake, and get suspended to go back under cover. It had been stressful, she admitted, and difficult to keep a relationship.

While Jane was in the shower, Kate took a good look at Maura. "Listen, me and Rizzoli, we're not... Jane's always been good by me, even when she had a lot of reasons to hate me. When I came out to my Ma, she flipped out and kicked me out. Rizzoli was the only one who stuck by me."

Maura wasn't used to such flagrant explanations of personal history, and shifted, uncomfortably. "You don't have to tell me anything, Detective." She was quite confused about how Kate was secretly undercover, but when Maura had pressed Jane about the information Frankie had supplied, Jane simply said Frankie didn't know what he was talking about.

"Kate. Or Talucci. Jane said it was okay. I mean, you're her best friend. I'm kind of glad to finally get to meet you." The cocky grin on Kate's face was easy-going and welcoming. "It's important to me that you know the whole fighting thing's just a big act. Jane's the only person from growing up I get to talk to. Got to... I'm like The Spy Who Came In from the Cold."

This was something that Maura could talk about. "John le Carré?"

"The book was way better. But I liked 'Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy' better. The book. I haven't seen the movie, didn't fit with my persona at the time."

Maura brightened, "Jane wouldn't go see the movie, but Gary Oldman was fascinating. They managed to keep that deep seated paranoia intact, while still making you wonder how the story would end."

By the time Jane came back from her shower, the two were deep into a comparison of Cold War spy novels. "Spy novels? Really?" sighed Jane, leaning against the counter.

"You don't know all of my vices yet, Jane," remarked Maura, but she leaned forward to kiss Jane's nose.

Kate mimed gagging and Jane pushed her arm the same way she used to shove Maura's. Before they were dating.

They were, clearly, friends. Maura had never met one of Jane's female friends who was still a friend, and found the dynamic fascinating. While they went through Kate's pictures and notes, their conversation was interspersed with catching up. Kate was surprised to learn that Angela was not only all right with Jane being gay, but supported it, unlike Kate's mother. That went a long way to explain why Angela had stopped bringing Carla around.

"It was like I told you, Rizzoli. As I'm playing the poor, hurt, Catholic, I make friends with this idiot, who tells me about his friend, sounds like your guy. Dan Gerard, he's totally off the grid, but his buddy was bragging about how he knew a guy with an M40A3 rifle. That's a Marine sniper, civilians don't have that kind of power, and I tell my idiot I don't buy the story, trying to make it seem like guns get me all hot."

Jane snorted, "Well that's not a stretch."

"Shut up." Kate dug into her pocket and put a bullet on the table, sealed in a ziplock bag. It was a .308, just as Dr Knudsen has suggested. "M118LR. Marines brag they can drop a man at a thousand meters with one of these."

Picking up the bag, Maura eyed it carefully. "Did you touch it?"

Kate shook her head, "Nope, said I was scared of something that big." Behind Maura, Jane snorted again and Kate flipped her off. "When he wasn't looking, I swept it into a napkin and put it in my pocket. Figured you could check it for Gerard's prints."

"What do you know about this Gerard guy?"

"Not a lot, but you've got all the fancy computers, right? I know he's divorced, his wife left him, and he lives somewhere in the area, but he's totally off the grid. No one's ever seen him use a credit card. My guy said he was all cash all the time."

Jane frowned, "If he's so smart, how come he slips up with a twerp like your guy?"

"Everyone's got that idiot friend who blabs," Kate shrugged. "He's in with this group of guys, and Gerard's one of them. When I met Gerard, man, the guy totally fits your profile. He's a loner, he's got a thing against the Catholic Church, and he's an ex-Marine."

Both Jane and Maura looked up. "A thing against the Church?"

"Oh yeah, you should see his website."

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