A/N: Sorry, life got in the way, and I didn't mean to leave you hanging.. or maybe I did? *chuckle*
The next morning, at 8 a.m. sharp, Jane entered the Division One Café in search for her mother and a large cup of coffee. Not necessarily in that order. After several hours of uninterrupted sleep, she felt surprisingly refreshed and eager to put an end to the mysterious killer's scheme. Her long overdue conversation with Maura and the medical examiner's soothing words had certainly gone a long way towards revitalizing her spirits. She was even ready to deal with her mother's ongoing fling with Lieutenant Cavanaugh, but as she was now heading towards the coffee counter and looking around in the café, there was no sign of the older Rizzoli woman. Instead, the counter was manned by Stanley, dressed in his stained green apron and a grumpy pout.
"Hey, Rizzoli," the bald head yelled across the café. "Does your mother have a new job?"
"What?" the detective asked and turned around in confusion.
"She's late again," Stanley complained while carelessly sticking a bagel on a napkin and handing it to the next customer in line. "And I know she doesn't like her job here."
"Gee, what's not to like about it? With such a charming boss…," Jane deadpanned.
Before the café's ill-humored owner could respond, Lieutenant Cavanaugh rushed to the counter, politely apologizing to the other customers for cutting the line, and hurriedly pointed at one of the bagels on display. "Morning, Stanley. Gimme that one, I'm running late."
"Listen to that!" Stanley exclaimed in overstated indignation and scowled at Jane. "He's late, too! If I didn't know better, I'd say there's something going on here."
The brunette almost choked and discreetly coughed into a napkin, whereas the lieutenant ignored her quizzical side glance and kept his cool. He waited for Stanley to hand him his bagel and a coffee, then nodded to Jane. "Come to my office later and update me on your case, Rizzoli."
"Yes, sir," the detective dutifully agreed as her boss hurried away.
When Stanley noticed Jane coughing into her napkin again, he grimaced in disgust. "Hey, don't spread your germs all over my bagels!"
For a moment, Jane seriously considered punching Stanley's face into the plate of bagels in front of him, but before she could fully play through the scenario in her head, Senior Criminalist Susie Chang entered the café and made a beeline for Jane. "Good morning!" the crime lab technician blurted out rather exuberantly and instantly cursed herself for having approached the often grumpy detective without a proper mood check. Consequently, when she was faced with the piercing stare that Stanley had brought to Jane's face, the young criminalist instinctively flinched and searched for the right words.
"I… uh… I was wondering," she opted for polite stuttering. "Have you seen Dr. Isles?"
"Me? No. I thought you had a meeting this morning?" Jane wondered.
"We did," Susie confirmed. "But Dr. Isles didn't show up."
"Ha!" Stanley growled from behind the counter, clearly not as disinterested in their conversation as he had pretended to be. "Is anybody working at all today?"
"I don't see you working either," the detective grunted at the old coot, then turned back to Susie. "Hold on, I'll call her," Jane said and whipped out her cell phone. She speed-dialed Maura's number and let it ring a few times until she was forwarded to the medical examiner's voice-mail. "Hey, it's me. Call me when you get this, okay?"
Without any immediate resolution to the issue at hand, the detective and the criminalist shared an awkward pause. "Well, I'll have a word with Dr. Isles for missing your meeting," Jane finally promised. When she saw Frost emerge from around the corner, she gladly seized her chance to end the uncomfortable get-together with Susie. "I gotta go." Jane grabbed her coffee and signaled her partner to wait.
As the two detectives strolled to the elevator, Frost curiously peeked at her from the side. "You feeling better?" he asked sincerely.
"Yeah," Jane affirmed. "At least I was until I found out that both my mother and Lieutenant Cavanaugh are late this morning. You know what that means…"
"Eww!" Both detectives grimaced at the thought of their boss canoodling with Jane's mother. When the elevator finally arrived and they stepped in, Frost teasingly glanced at the brunette. "Is your family trying to take over BPD?"
"Maybe," Jane chuckled. Her partner had a point. As the elevator slowly made its way up to their floor, Jane remembered that she still didn't know why the medical examiner hadn't showed up for her meeting. "Have you seen Maura this morning?"
"No, but I just came in," Frost said. "She wasn't with you?"
"Nope."
"Well, that's new," her partner joked.
Jane gave him a friendly punch to his side as they left the elevator. "Shut up."
When the two of them entered the homicide squad room, they found Korsak already behind his desk and going through several folders with case files.
"Hey, you got the CSRU report from last night?" Jane asked her former partner.
The sergeant picked one of the folders but then playfully hesitated. "Are you planning on throwing it all over the floor?"
"Funny," Jane said and snatched at the folder. "Gimme that!"
With a fatherly smile, Korsak gave in and handed her the documents. "You look better today."
"Yeah, I'm feeling better, too," the brunette admitted and walked over to her desk. "Let's find that freak, alright?!" She sat down and skimmed through the report with details on the crime scene where Katherine Oliver's body had been found. Even though the photos of the pale, lifeless woman were as harrowing as the previous ones, Jane routinely studied all details without batting an eye. Her confidence was back, her shields were up again. She was ready to step back into the ring and knock the killer out.
As if on cue, the e-mail alert on her computer went off and Jane, Frost, and Korsak looked at one another in determination.
"Bring it on," Jane muttered to herself as she opened her e-mail client.
But when the new message from the killer and the three attached photos appeared on screen, the horrible sight instantly froze the blood in her veins and shattered her newly found confidence. Blank despair wiped all color from her cheeks and turned her as pale as the blonde woman in the photos.
"What is it?" Korsak asked with concern.
Oblivious to her colleagues and everything else around her, Jane jumped to her feet and dashed to the BRIC.
Worried about the sudden mood swing of his partner, Frost frowned and hurried over to Jane's desk. When he saw what filled her screen, he gasped in shock and looked at Korsak in exasperation. "It's Dr. Isles," he whispered and headed straight to the intelligence center.
Korsak instantly dropped his folders and scurried to Jane's desk. Despite his over thirty years of experience, the three photos sent shivers down his spine and made his heart skip a beat.
Just like the previous three victims, Maura was crouched on the floor in that dimly lit corner, her hands zip-cuffed and her blouse stained in blood. She looked tired and pale. Fragile and alone.
Korsak sighed at the familiar SAVE ME captioning the pictures and scrolled down to reveal the killer's new message: THOUGHT YOU COULD USE A LITTLE INCENTIVE, DETECTIVE RIZZOLI. DON'T DISAPPOINT ME AGAIN!
With his head hanging low, the sergeant followed his two colleagues to the BRIC.
Inside the intelligence center, Jane was bent over one of the desks frantically typing away on the keyboard and repeatedly looking up at the screens on the wall, which were filled with various maps and surveillance videos from different Boston neighborhoods.
"Jane, what do you need us to do?" Frost asked as calmly as possible.
"I… I don't know," Jane admitted in a cracking voice and slouched her shoulders. "I don't even know what I'm doing…"
Korsak stepped closer and reassuringly put his hand on her shoulder. "Take a deep breath and let's think this through, Jane."
The brunette straightened up and tilted her head back. Okay, there's still time. I can do this, I can do this. She rubbed her eyes and focused on the digital maps in front of her again. "Well, last night, we tried to find a pattern in the killer's choice of locations. He's moving closer to the city when he picks up his victims, and he's moving away from the city when he dumps their bodies." She zoomed in on Chestnut Hill and its surrounding neighborhoods.
"Dr. Isles was with you last night?" Frost asked?
"Yeah, she left around midnight," Jane nodded and her thoughts drifted back to the night before. 'You're a good detective,' she remembered Maura's words. 'People need you. I need you.' As she became painfully aware of the sudden gravity of these words and realized that she might be Maura's only chance now, Jane felt a certain calmness dispel her current woes. The fog in her mind lifted and her detective genes kicked in.
With steady hands, she reached for the keyboard, opened her e-mail inbox, and retrieved the killer's latest message again. Swallowing hard, she opened the gruesome photos of Maura and found her hunch confirmed. "She's still wearing the same clothes as last night, so he must have gotten to her somewhere on her way home. Probably not while she was driving, so, either at a red light or at her house…"
"And since we know her car…," Frost continued her thought and sat down in front of one of the computers.
Jane gratefully patted her partner's back and headed towards the door. "Check all surveillance cameras along the way. And I'll drive to her house to see if she got home at all."
"I'll get a BOLO out on her car," Korsak announced and encouragingly nodded to the brunette. "We'll find her, Jane."
As she darted out of the BRIC and ran towards the elevators, Jane suppressed the images of Maura crouched in her own blood in that dusky corner and instead tried to recall the medical examiner's soothing words again. 'You're a good detective. You're not going to give up.' As soon as the elevator arrived, she anxiously slid inside and checked her watch. I won't give up. I promise.
When a sharp twinge shot through her abdomen and sent all her pain receptors over the edge, Maura was pulled from the darkness of her semi-conscious sleep and thrust back into the equally frightening darkness of the man's living room. As she instinctively pressed her hands against the source of the pain and felt her own warm blood trickle through her fingers, her mind slowly tried to make sense of her surroundings. With her eyes still adjusting to the dimly lit room, her olfactory sense kicked in first, and the smell of moldy wood and abrasive cleaners in the cracks on the floor triggered random flashes of memories — the coldness of the man's knife pressing against her skin in the car, his alcoholic breath in her neck, the tight grip of his arm around her throat. She remembered how he had given her directions and how he had choked her when she had tried to steer her car down a different road that would have led them past several surveillance cameras. Since it had been a weeknight without much traffic, the man had easily managed to guide her through quiet side streets without running into police patrols or getting stuck amidst other cars. After what had felt like an eternity, they had reached his house, which had turned out to be located exactly within the area that she and Jane had narrowed down just a few hours before. The man had told her to drive her Prius into the garage and muttered something about how the media frenzy had forced him to change cars. The last thing Maura recalled of the night was how he had dragged her out of the car. He must have knocked me out just like he did with the other women, she thought when her mind refused to remember how she had gotten into the house. She reached for her head and subconsciously realized the zip cuffs around her wrists before flinching at the touch of her own fingers on her bruised right temple. Severe contusion spanning the os zygomaticum and the os sphenoidale, possible mild traumatic brain injury, the medical examiner habitually diagnosed herself before another sharp pain in her stomach served as a reminder that her bruised temple was the least of her problems.
As she had finally adjusted to the dim candle light, Maura squinted and looked up towards the wooden table a few feet away from her — right into the bloodshot eyes of her kidnapper. Though the man had pulled his baseball cap deep into his face and the darkness made it difficult to see his features, the glow from his laptop's screen in front of his face eerily highlighted his eyes as he was thoroughly studying the blonde's every move.
The sudden sight of his piercing stare and the rush of adrenaline surging through her veins heightened Maura's senses and brought back her missing memories. Of how he had hovered above her just an hour ago with the same lunatic look in his eyes. Of how he had pinned her down and let his knife slide through her flesh. Of how he had taken those three pictures of her just before she had blacked out. And of how she had tried to send a secret message to Jane in those photos.
Would Jane even notice it? The thought of her best friend and of her reaction to these new developments filled Maura's heart with sadness. Just when the detective seemed to have recovered from her personal crisis, this latest twist of events might send her spiraling right back down into the abyss. I have to help Jane. I can't let him break her.
"Whom did you lose?" she asked weakly. It was a guess, something she would avoid at all cost under normal circumstances. But these weren't normal circumstances, and given his teary eyes and his obsession with getting his victims saved, it was the only shot she had. "Someone you loved?"
Despite the darkness, Maura noticed the man wince at her last words. She was on to something. "Is this how she died?" she tried again. "Did she bleed out?"
"Stop it!" the man commanded and agitatedly jumped to his feet. "You don't know anything about her."
"Then why don't you tell me about her?" the medical examiner suggested as discreetly as possible.
"Because that's not why you're here. I don't need someone to talk," he declared while pacing back and forth.
"And what exactly do you need?" the blonde tried to engage him. "You have to tell us what—"
"No!" the man exclaimed and squatted down in front of Maura. "You already have all the information you need!"
Barely able to suppress her tears and the pain, Maura tried to grasp the meaning behind her kidnapper's obscure words. "You killed three women to—"
"I did not!" he yelled as his rage grew stronger inside. "I did not kill these women! You let them die! And that's exactly the problem — you just don't listen! You don't pay enough attention!"
"Is this what happened?" Maura dug deeper. "She died because someone didn't pay attention?"
"See? Now you're listening," the man explained with a frightening tranquility filling his voice while his eyes were still blazing with madness. "But your detective friend is not."
"Because you're not giving her a fair chance," the medical examiner begged and tried to get a closer look at the bearded man in front of her.
"I'm giving her a fair reason here to pay more attention," he snorted and pulled Maura's hands away from her bleeding wound. When the blonde quietly moaned and instinctively attempted again to stop the bleeding, he held her hands back with his own tattooed arms and watched the blood stain on her blouse grow larger. "And you'd better hope she starts to listen."
With that, he pushed her away and marched to the other end of the living room. He reached for a bottle of beer on the window frame and leaned back, his mind consumed by his thoughts of Darlene and oblivious to the woman in the opposite corner.
Feeling her strength seep away with every drop of blood leaving her body, Maura desperately tried to apply pressure to her wound to slow down the bleeding, but she knew it was only a matter of time. She was already shivering from the lack of blood flow to her skin and her heart was racing as a result of her neural reflexes' response to the acute loss of circulating volume in her body. She could afford to lose about one fifth of her normal amount of blood before her body would enter into a state of hypovolemic shock and slowly begin to shut down. I must stay awake until he takes his next pictures, she reminded herself. Just a few more hours. I have to stay awake. Without the second set of photos, her message to Jane would be lost and her best friend would never find her in time. I can't do this to Jane. I have to stay awake… I have to… stay awake… And as Maura tried to cling on to her thoughts, her eyes slowly fell shut.
