A/N: We better hurry up, eh? Thanks for still following along!


Around the same time, Jane got out of her car in front of Maura's upscale Beacon Hill home and worriedly looked around in the driveway. It hadn't rained in two days, so her chances of finding fresh tracks were virtually non-existent. Nonetheless, she thoroughly checked every corner of the pathway, every blind spot, every patch of grass where someone might have left foot prints while hiding in the dark. In vain. There were no signs of any struggle, no keys dropped down in the dirt, no branches broken off the shrubs. Nothing.

Why didn't I prevent this? I should have seen this coming, Jane cursed herself as she walked to the front door. He had my name, he was losing patience, he wanted my attention. Damn it, I should have known!

Even though the detective knew there probably wouldn't be any fingerprints that could accidentally be destroyed, she put on one of her nitrile gloves before turning the knob. When she found it locked, she fished her spare key out of her pocket and entered Maura's house.

The hallway seemed untouched and looked meticulously clean as always. The great room lay quiet, all lights were off. But as Jane took in the familiar scent of her friend's home and felt a wave of tears well up inside at the thought of Maura's current turmoil, a sudden rumbling from the kitchen jolted her from her worries. Instinctively, she pulled her gun and carefully peeked around the corner only to find Bass slowly crawling about on the floor next to the kitchen counter. Jane sighed in relief and sadly knelt down to caress the giant tortoise's head.

When she noticed his empty feeding bowl, she knew for sure that Maura hadn't made it into her house the night before. Being quite familiar with the tortoise's culinary preferences, Jane headed for the fridge and retrieved some lettuce leaves and his beloved British strawberries.

"I know you don't like me, buddy, but you gotta deal with me today," she encouraged him and wiped a tear from her eye when Bass appreciatively devoured a strawberry out of her hand.

As Jane watched the tortoise nibble on the lettuce leaves, she whipped out her cell phone and called her partner at BPD.

"Frost, it's me. I'm at her house but it looks like she hasn't been inside at all. And there's nothing useful in the driveway either." She paused to let the detective at the other end of the line bring her up to speed. Moments later, she ended the conversation with a quick "I'll call you from the car" and gave Bass another soft pat on his head.

"You watch the house, alright? Maura will be back soon, I promise."

There's still time, she thought and headed towards the back door. I have to find her. I have to find her. For God's sake, why did I let this happen?

As she left the house, Jane was so consumed by her thoughts and her frantic attempts to identify the missing piece of the puzzle that she didn't even notice her mother stepping out of the guest house at the very same moment.

"Jane? What are you doing here?" Angela asked, surprised by her daughter's unscheduled presence. When the brunette absentmindedly walked on, the Rizzoli matriarch frowned and called after the detective. "Jane?!"

Her mother's nagging voice ripped her out of her thoughts and she spun around. "What?!"

Caught off-guard by Jane's unusually bad mood, Angela flinched back and worriedly studied her daughter's stern features. "What is going on?"

"Nothing," the detective grunted and marched to her car.

"Uh, could you at least give me a ride to work?" the older Rizzoli woman sheepishly asked.

"No, I can't!"

"But…"

And finally, despite her best efforts to keep her cool, Jane lost control over all the woes and unthinkable thoughts that she had been suppressing ever since she had received those harrowing photos of Maura in the morning. She needed to let off steam. She needed to yell. And so she did.

"You wanna know why I can't give you a ride? Because Maura has been kidnapped last night, and now she's bleeding to death in a goddamn house somewhere in this goddamn city, and I can't fucking find her!" Her voice cracking, Jane scowled at her mother, whose eyes widened in shock at the news. "And you know what else? If you had been home last night instead of shagging my boss, none of this would've happened! So, why don't you call your lieutenant and ask him to give you a ride?!"

"Jane…," the Rizzoli matriarch weakly whispered as tears began to well up in her eyes.

"Just leave me alone," Jane hissed and turned away. "I gotta find Maura."

Left standing all alone outside of the guest house, Angela steadied herself on the door and helplessly watched her daughter pull away.


Twenty minutes later, Jane had maneuvered her sedan through the late morning traffic along Beacon Street and stopped at the curb just a few blocks away from Fenway Park, where a public surveillance camera had captured Maura's blue Prius around 1 a.m. the night before.

Upon carefully checking the material from all the surveillance cameras along the route that Maura usually took on her way back home from Jane's apartment, Frost had spotted her car at several intersections and thus been able to establish a rough time frame for the medical examiner's abduction. He and Korsak had then begun to go through approximately thirty minutes of fast-forwarded recordings per camera from dozens of other surveillance points scattered across the neighborhoods in an attempt to locate Maura's car and trace the route she and her kidnapper had taken on their way to his still unidentified hiding place. But even though the emptiness of most streets around that time of the night allowed them to speed up the process, it didn't necessarily make it any easier to find the blue Prius. The killer obviously knew the area like the back of his hand and skillfully evaded the digital eyes trying to follow his every move.

Where the hell are you, Maura? Jane wondered as she reached for her tablet computer on the passenger seat and opened a city map of Boston with various little circles marking the different crime scenes as well as her own current location. At the sight of the dense cluster of blocks and streets forming the radius within which the killer could be hiding, Jane swallowed hard and pushed her worries back to her mind. There's gotta be a way to narrow it down. There must be a reason for his pattern. What am I missing?

With a heavy heart, the brunette speed-dialed her partner's number on her phone and anxiously checked her watch. When Frost picked up and greeted her with his ever-present optimism, she forced herself to breathe in to steady her own voice. "It's me. I'm near Kenmore. Tell me you've found something else."

The brief moment of silence at the other end of the line was as heartbreaking as any negative answer her partner could have given her. "We're still looking…," Frost reluctantly said. "But… I think we lost the car."

Now, it was Jane's turn to fall silent. Her hopes gradually fading away, she closed her eyes and cocked back her head. Please, just one clue… One tiny hint that'll lead us to her… There's gotta be something…

"Jane? You still there?" the young detective wondered.

After another deep breath and the thought of Maura telling her not to give up, Jane finally mustered enough strength to fight against her despair and for her best friend. "Yeah, I'm here," she said and glanced at the map on her tablet computer. "I'm gonna check the neighborhoods again where we found the bodies… drive around a bit. Maybe we've missed something."

"You sure you don't want to come back?" Frost asked as he worried about Jane being all by herself at the time of the next e-mail from the killer.

"I can't sit around and do nothing," the brunette lamented. "I know it's probably pointless but…"

"I would do the same, Jane," her partner admitted. "Korsak and I will finish going through the surveillance material, and the crime lab is working on the evidence from last night as we speak. I'll call you as soon as we find something."

"Okay… thanks, Frost," Jane sighed and hung up, then merged back into traffic and headed south towards the scene where their first victim had been found.

Why does he want his victims to be saved? she wondered as her car crawled through the dense traffic on this chilly day in the fall. What happened to him? Whom did he lose? What was it that triggered his obsession?

The pile of questions running through Jane's mind had grown many times over when she finally reached the site near Dorchester Park and Cedar Grove Cemetery where the body of Karen Newman had been found. She parked her sedan in a quiet lot near Neponset River, reached for her tablet computer, and checked the map of Boston once more. Where the hell is he hiding? Without any hard facts to rely on, the detective let her fingers aimlessly wander over the display and zoomed in and out of various neighborhoods, but no matter how hard she stared at the display or how frantically she switched back and forth between all the different sites, the map still refused to magically reveal the killer's location. And with every passing minute, those haunting words that she had successfully pushed to the back of her mind grew stronger and louder again. Save me. Save me. Save me. But now it wasn't just any voice filling her head — it was that of Maura.

After several minutes, Jane closed the digital map in frustration and rested her head on the steering wheel. What am I gonna do? How do I stop him? I have to stop him! She took a deep breath and leaned back again, then pensively gazed at the tablet's display. Hesitatingly, her fingers found the icon for her e-mail client, and she opened her inbox with the last message from the killer. At the sight of the gruesome pictures, the detective instinctively averted her eyes and swallowed hard, but eventually the thought of Maura counting on her gave Jane the strength to regain her composure and hit REPLY.

Even though she doubted that her e-mail would achieve anything, Jane was determined to spare no effort to save her friend. As she typed her message and rephrased it again and again, she wished she had Maura's eloquence so that she could simply talk the killer out of his insane scheme by the mere power of her words. Just like Maura sometimes managed to talk her out of her coffee addiction — at least temporarily.

When the detective had finally decided on her choice of words, she took another contemplative breath and then hit SEND.

For a few moments, Jane just sat in her sedan and pondered what to do, where to drive, whom to call. But when the lack of answers and her current inability to do anything but wait only increased her feelings of powerlessness and failure, she hastily staggered out of her car and gasped for fresh air. And as she stood all by herself in the chilly October winds and overlooked the deserted banks of the river nearby, all she could do was wonder whether she would ever see her best friend again.

Where are you, Maura?