Jane gets two weeks of desk duty and a mandatory gun safety class as punishment for McKenzie's theft of her gun.
Sofia and Levi protested this as "the unfairest thing" they'd ever heard, but Jane told them to be quiet and didn't comment on it again. She told no one that she thinks Korsak is being light on her. She doesn't tell anyone, not Maura or Frost or Frankie, that she blames herself for what happened to McKenzie.
The dreams do not abate. Some nights Hoyt is murdering Isabelle, her skin turning cold in Jane's arms.
Other nights, her father resurrects himself from the graveyard of her memory to beat Sofia, or a house in Revere burns to the ground, trapping two little boys inside its molten depths, while Jane watches from the sidewalk with concrete shoes.
Maura studies Jane's face over breakfast, she can feel the doctor's eyes following her hand as she lifts cereal to her mouth. It is the last day of her desk assignment, and Frost has sent home the file on the latest case, complete with a post-it carrying an elated smiley face and the words Crowe can eat shit. Get back here.
Jane chuckles at the note before flipping the case file open, avoiding her wife's careful gaze.
"Well, at least someone wants me back," she mutters, scanning the initial information. Arson. Two dead.
"Everyone is very glad to have you back in the field," Maura says quietly, and she might be speaking to herself. She was at the arson crime scene just yesterday, although Jane wouldn't know it from talking to her. Maura had been the model of confidentiality, silencing Jane's prying with a well-placed withering glare.
Jane doesn't answer her. She flips the case closed as Levi and Noah straggle into the kitchen. Neither of them seems very interested in her work, however. Noah is making a beeline for the cereal that Maura has put out, and Levi has eyes only for his phone. He sits down absently next to his mother, and when Jane glances at his phone she distinctly sees the words, you…my whole world…too.
She looks away, trying to give him the privacy she would have wanted, but Maura, on a train of thought running parallel to hers, comes to put her hand on their son's shoulders.
"So," she says, ruffling his hair in the way she knows he hates. "When do we get to meet this girl?"
"Moom!" Levi says, hand going to his head. "I just got it per…what?"
Maura grins at Jane conspiratorially. "When do we get to meet the girl who has you glued to your phone like it's an extra appendage?"
Levi's neck turns pink. Jane chuckles.
"How do you know it's a girl?" He asks defensively.
"Sorry," Maura says, taking the deflection at face value. "When do we get to meet the person who has you glued-"
"Ew! No!" Levi sputters. "No, that's not what I meant. Gross."
"Excuse me?" Jane says, raising an eyebrow. "Ew? Gross?"
Levi shakes his head, knowing enough to look guilty. "No, I didn't mean…I didn't mean gross for you…or for anyone. I meant gross for me. I'm not into guys."
"So then, when do we get to meet the girl?" Jane repeats Maura's question, and Levi rolls his eyes and doesn't answer.
It is Noah who pipes up, through a mouthful of cereal. "She's afraid to come here," he says, cheerful as ever.
"Noah!" Levi yells, and his brother turns wide innocent eyes towards him.
"What? She is!" he turns to Maura. "I heard them on the phone last night. She's got a record. She thinks you'll hate her, Mama."
Silence. Maura looks shocked, the hand that has been stirring a pan of eggs is frozen in midair. Levi looks like he wants to either disappear or be struck by lightning.
Jane is torn between several different emotions, the strongest of which is to scold her eldest son for being such a poor judge of character.
"Noah," she says, going with her third strongest emotion, deeming it to be the safest. "Don't eavesdrop on your brother. What did we tell you when he moved up to the attic, hmm? He's almost a man now, and he needs his own room to do his own thing."
Noah hangs his head a little. "Sorry," he mumbles.
"And you," Maura says, pointing at Levi, once again picking up where Jane cannot, "you tell this girl that we don't care about her past. She's welcome here. We'd like to meet her."
Levi snorts, shoving his phone into his sweatshirt pocket. "Yeah right," he mutters, and Jane is about to call him on this, when the twins enter the kitchen, neither looking really awake.
"Morning," Sofia mumbles, sliding into a seat at the breakfast bar. "How old I gotta be to drink coffee?"
Maura smiles and puts a plate of eggs down in front of her. "When you leave for college, you will no longer be under my roof, and you can do what you wish," she says. "Though, I hope by then I will have impressed upon you the negative effects of caffeine on a growing body."
"Mama drinks it like it's juice!" Sofia complains, picking up her fork as though it weighs several pounds.
"Mama's grown," Jane says, punctuating each word with a sip of coffee. "And so Mama can do what she likes."
"Yeah, unless Mommy tells you you can't," Noah giggles, and all of the children join in when Jane pretends to look scandalized. Even Levi cracks a smile.
Isabelle, meanwhile is studying her older brother, and she is not deterred by his momentary smile. "What's wrong with you?" she asks, shaking her head as Maura offers her eggs, grabbing a banana from the fruit bowl on the table.
"Nothing," Levi grumbles.
"Nadia dump you?" Sofia asks casually. She balks at the glare he throws her. "What?"
"Nadia," Jane says. "Is that her name?"
"Oh, my God!" Levi stands, the chair he was sitting in scooting backwards several feet. "Will all of you just get out of my business?" He stomps out of the kitchen, and the rest of the family listens as he bangs out the front door, slamming it hard behind him.
"Well," Maura says, looking with wide amused eyes at Jane.
Jane nods. "Well well," she says, smiling.
Sofia turns back to her eggs. "That," she says, "was not my fault."
….
….
Jane sees her children off to school and kisses her wife good-bye and heads uptown to the crime scene. She'd wanted Frost to meet her there despite the fact that he'd worked it with Crowe two days earlier. She wants to start her first case off of desk duty from the beginning. Not only does she want to see the burned-out building that claimed the life of two people, she also cannot help but feel that Crowe would have missed something, would have deliberately left things out of a report he knew she would be inheriting.
So she meets Frost at the house, a tall, once handsome, one family in the center of the South End. Her partner's face lights up when he turns and sees her approaching.
"Hey!" he says, "Hey!"
She laughs, "Hey yourself. If your smile gets any wider your face'll bust open." She looks around. "Nice neighborhood."
"Second only to yours," he says, still smiling. "God, it's good to have you out here, Jane."
"Listen, I'm taken," she laughs, "you're taken. And you've seen me every day in the bullpen for the past twenty years."
"Yeah," he says, "but I forgot what a shit detective Crowe is, not to mention a little racist." He holds up his hands as Jane opens her mouth, already furious on his behalf. "Not overtly," he says quickly. "I doubt he even noticed it himself. If you asked him, he'd say he's the model person, sensitive to all people. He doesn't see color."
"Yeah! And he even had a partner who was black that one time. Just last week as a matter of fact. Come to think of it. It was you! How dare you!" Jane says, faking outrage, and Frost laughs. She has the idea that he would hug her, if he knew that would be welcome.
"Fuck, it's good to have you back. Sixteen days is way too long."
They turn and head up the front steps to the condemned house, the front door just a frame, black and charred with smoke.
"It's nothing," she says, taking the mask he hands her. "They could have had my badge."
"Korsak wouldn't have done that to you. Plus you followed all the protocol. You locked it up, you kept it out of sight."
"Everyone knew where it was," Jane says, taking a tentative step into the house. "Shit. Hell of a fire in here."
Frost changes hats nearly as fast as she does. "Yeah," he says. "We had to send what was left of the bodies to a Forensic Anthropologist, There wasn't even much Maura could do with them, besides tells us genders, and possible ages."
Jane stares around at the shell of a living room. The wallpaper was blue, she knows from the pictures in the case file, but there is no way she would have deduced this from the walls she's looking at. They are black, charred and crumbling. The floor feels weak under her feet, and when she touches it, pieces of the load bearing wall that separates the living room from the dining room fall off into her hands. "Damn," she says, hearing Frost picking his way carefully after her. "What is left of the bodies?"
"Bone," Frost says. "And not a lot of that."
"So, we're thinking arson was a forensic countermeasure?"
Frost nods. "It must have been. Maura says that the fire must have reached temperatures of 1100 degrees. That's not a regular house fire."
"Okay…" Jane looks into the gutted kitchen, dank and raincloud grey, before gesturing they should head back out. "Okay. From the preliminary that Maura did before sending the bones away, I saw that the victims were most likely the family that lived here…a…um" she tries to think back at the file she'd skimmed that morning.
Frost fills in for her. "Mother and son. Shura Kohut and her son, Martyn, aged eight. She's divorced, ex is deceased about three years. And she has a college age daughter away at…uh…God, I want to say, Berkeley? California, anyway."
The fresh air on the front porch step is like a shot of caffeine. Jane's eyes water at all the freshness.
"And she's been notified?"
Frost pulls his mask off, taking a deep breath. "Yeah, CAPD went out two days ago. She's due back in Boston tomorrow morning. We're going to send a car."
Jane nods. "Kohut…that's, what, Russian?"
"Your wife says Ukrainian," Frost smiles. "Well, she said a lot more than that, but I didn't retain it all."
Jane chuckles and heads down the stairs, "After all these years, Barold. Tsk tsk."
Frost throws his hands to the sky, like he's about to pray.
"Seriously. Thank God you're back, Jane. It just wasn't the same without you."
…
She doesn't see Maura all day. There is not much for her to do on a case that doesn't require an autopsy, and so Frost and Jane work at their desks nearly all day, pulling what they can from social media, making a list of possible foes, trying to locate next of kin for the seventeen year old Liliya.
"Maybe they're in Ukraine?" Frost says tiredly, leaning back in his chair and rubbing his neck. "I mean, as far as internet presence goes, Shura Kohut was well below average." He leans forward to tilt his screen towards her. "She has a facebook, but she only has 44 friends, and thirteen of those are in her home town of Mykolaiv." He chuckles as Jane looks her confusion. "That's a city in Ukraine, and I doubt," he checks the screen, "seventy seven year old Vitaliya Pasternak is really going to spend the airfare to come to Boston and murder her family."
Jane is not having much more luck with Crowe's canvass of the neighbors. They all say the same thing. The mother and son were close. The son was well behaved and very quiet. They came and went without much noise. They kept to themselves.
Jane's phone buzzes and she pulls it out.
I'm finishing up here and heading home to be there when the kids get home.
And then, directly after that one.
T.J. is coming with Noah.
Jane groans, shaking her head at the questioning look she knows Frost is giving her. "One second," she says pulling up her brother's name in her contacts and presses send before she can really think about it.
Tommy picks up on the fourth ring, sounding out of it.
"What?" He barks, "I've got work in three hours, Lydia, do we really have to rehash this shit out now?"
For a moment, Jane is too stunned to say anything. Tommy sounds exactly like her father.
"Hello?" He asks after a moment and Jane clears her throat.
"Tommy," she says. "You're working a night shift somewhere?"
"Jane?" Tommy clears his throat. "Sorry. Shit, I thought you were Lydia. Yeah...the Warehouse pays time and a half if you're willing to work extended hours. I've been picking up a couple shifts. "
Jane nods. "Is that why you can't be bothered to feed and care for your son anymore?" She asks sarcastically.
"Aww. Jane…"
"Look, Tommy, I don't wanna hear the sob story, okay? That's your little boy. And he's only that little for so long. Remember what it would do to you every time Pop said he would be there and he wasn't? Remember what kind of anger that put into you?"
"I'm not Pop, Jane," Tommy growls, and she literally has to bite her tongue to keep from telling him exactly who he sounds like at that moment.
She sighs. "Look, T, I know there's more than one good way to raise a kid-"
"Yeah. There is. And even when a kid's raised by the patron saints of truth and justice like yours are, they still make mistakes and fuck up, okay? Because they're kids."
Jane doesn't respond to this directly. She is too stung to trust herself. "What is up with you, Tommy?" She asks. "I called to see if you knew that T.J. was going to be with us for the fourth time in the last six days. Why can't Lydia take him while you work?" Something occurs to Jane. "Are you and Lydia separated? Do you not trust her?"
"Is he a bother?" Tommy asks roughly.
"You know he's not," Jane answers immediately. "You know that's not the issue."
"Then can you please just...butt out?"
It is the way he asks her, the way he sounds pleading, rather than indignant, that makes Jane relent.
"Okay," she says. "Alright. Well, he's got us as much as he needs, okay?"
There is a pause, and then, "Thanks Jane."
She hands up, and rubs her hands over her face, trying not to let anxiety get the better of her.
"Hey Jane?" Frost, pulling her back to reality.
"Hit me," she says.
"We got Liliya's information in," he says, and she looks up to see a school ID photo on his screen. A thin face with wide blue eyes and white blonde hair.
"We're sending a car for her tomorrow, right?" She asks, and she nods when Frost does. "Good," she says, because right now she's the only one who can tell us anything about who may have wanted to hurt her family."
….
….
Jane is into the precinct early the next morning, thinking of getting some preparatory work done before the arrival of Liliya Kohut, but she's met by a uniform, waiting nervously by her desk. He jumps when he sees her, though he's ostensibly been waiting there for her, and when she simply looks her expectancy at him, he fumbles with his words, nervous.
"Um...there's a...lady looking for you."
Jane thinks immediately of Maura, but it's impossible that her wife had the opportunity to corral five children and then beat her into the office. "A lady?" She asks shortly. "Expand, please."
"She's really tall, hot. I mean, attractive. Red head," he says, and then coloring under her continued incredulous stare,"she says she has to do with your case. She's refusing to leave. She's angry."
"Great," Jane says under her breath. She turns away and heads down the hall, and indeed, she can hear a female voice yelling her name repeatedly as she nears the civilian entrance at the front of the precinct.
The woman demanding to speak with her is tall, with sharp features and deep auburn hair. She looks vaguely familiar to Jane, though she can't immediately place her. She is accompanied by a little, dark haired boy, and a tall, teenage girl who looks enough like her that she has to be her daughter.
"Detective Rizzoli," she is saying to the uniform blocking her way. "That is the woman I want to speak with, and I want to do so this instant." Her voice is high, shrill, inflected with an accent that is just detectable underneath the surface.
Jane waves aside a rookie who steps forward like he wants to help, and steps right up to the woman, noticing that they are nearly the same height.
"I'm Jane Rizzoli," she says, looking the woman in the eye. "What can I help you with?"
"Ah," the woman says, moving forward so that she is closer than decorum would recommend. "Ah, here you are. Here is the genius woman cop who has my daughter fly across the country on a hoax."
Jane stares at her, trying to fit this woman into a narrative that includes her. "I'm sorry," she begins. "I'm not sure what-"
"Tell me, 'detective,'" the woman makes sharp air quotes with her fingers. Behind her, the little boy that has followed her in flinches a bit at the gesture. "Tell me…what would possess you to tell my child that I am dead?"
Jane gapes at her. "I'm sorry," she says again, and then seeing no way around the question. "Who are you?"
The woman draws herself up to her fullest height. "I am Shura Kohut," she says angrily. "This is my son Martyn, and this…." she points at the pale teenager on her other side, "is my daughter Liliya. You told her I was dead. She flew here, tears on her cheeks the whole way. Crying. Mourning the loss of her mother and brother. Only to get here," Shura takes a deep, accusatory breath, "to find I have not died. Martyn has not died. She has been lied to! Now, Detective Rizzoli. We would like some answers."
Jane stares at the woman for a long moment. She can think of absolutely nothing to say except, "You're Shura Kohut?"
"Are you deaf?" the woman responds immediately. "What do you need proof?" she plunges a hand into her massive purse and pulls out a large blue wallet, leather. "You need driver's license or something?"
Jane shakes her head, reaching out towards the woman, Shura, in an automatic gesture of reassurance. "No," she says. "No, I'm sorry…I-" She looks behind Ms. Kohut to the teenage girl standing there. This child at least, she recognizes from the photos sent this morning. It is Liliya Kohut, wide blue eyes and platinum blonde hair. "This is your mother?" She can't help the question. Everything is surreal.
The teen nods, still pale, looking shaken. Jane can't blame her.
"Okay," she says, and she beckons them forward, glancing at the little boy as he scurries forward to hold his mother's hand. "Okay," she says again. "I…please, let me just apologize for any distress we've caused, Ms. Kohut. I assure you that we meant no harm when we alerted your daughter of your…of the fire that occurred in your house three days ago. If you come with me, we can get everything squared away, I'm sure."
Shura Kohut gives Jane a deep, disapproving look, before tugging her son forward in the direction that Jane has pointed.
"I certainly hope so," she says. In her anger, her accent has thickened. Martyn's hand tightens in his mother's.
Jane lets all three of them move in front of her, down the one hall that will lead to the bullpen and the interrogation rooms beyond, and then she turns to the rookie, still watching from the sidelines with a look of undisguised curiosity.
"Stop gaping," she says, making sure to bark the way she usually does at the rookies who get in her way. "Get Dr. Isles. And detective Frost. And Lieutenant Korsak."
He stares at her as though she's spoken greek, and it is her turn to hurl the same insult that Shura has just thrown at her.
"Are you deaf?" She hisses. "Isles, Frost, Korsak. In any order. Send them to I.R. 4…No!" She calls him back as he turns to run off, changing her mind. "The lounge. Send them to the lounge."
He nods mutely and runs in the opposite direction, toward the elevator to the Morgue, and Jane turns and follows the Kohuts.
She watches Ms. Kohut's stilettos click imperiously ahead of her, and wonders what the hell is going on.
If Shura and Martyn weren't in the house when the fire was set, where were they? How did they find out that Liliya was coming back to Boston? Why did it take them three full days to come forward.
Jane nearly stumbles as the most important fact of the case comes back to her. If the mother and son are alive and well, whose bones did they ship to the Forensic Anthropologist.
The sound of running feet brings Jane back to herself, and she turns to see Frost, wide eyed, running towards her.
"What the hell is going on?" He asks, voicing her earlier internal question.
"I have no idea," she says, indicating the family several paces in front of her. "But I'm not Crowe, so let's go fucking find out."
...
...
Well hot god damn. It's back.
I know what you guys are thinking. Fool me 7 times, tiny pincushion. shame on the both of us.
but I have a clearer view of this now. So it should be coming on some sort of...i mean, it won't take me...like...it should come a little faster than once a year, is what I'm saying.
Jobee24 should be rewarded with...like...gold and chocolate. She has listened to me bitch about this story for the last...six months? longer. I literally said to her every day. I'm just gonna scrap it. It's done. forget it. She has remained patient and kind throughout it all. This chapter is here because of her.
And a thank you, thank you thank you to Sideadde. she Beta'd. it was grammatical shit before she did so. that was amazing of her.
okay. so. several new places to go. let's hit it.
happy reading.
tc