DISCLAIMER: I do not own this show, the books, or these characters. I only borrow them.

AN: If you get squeamish you might want to jump to Maura in her office...but if you watch CSI or others like it you should be ok...I need the details to make what happens more realistic but I tried not to be too over the top.

Btw thanks so much for those who reviewed during my very long break to keep me wanting to get back to this story. You guys are awesome!

Chapter 31

Beat cops were sent to the home of Beverly Leary by a worried daughter who hadn't heard from her mother in over a week which was far from normal. These house calls could lead to anything from learning that the 'victim' had been staying at her new beau's house to being chased off the premises by a feeble parent or grandparent wielding a purse. But they weren't expecting what they found, and the beat cop of over 20 years lost his dinner in the bushes outside the side door. That was when homicide was called in; Frost and Korsak especially after the brief details were relayed to the operator.

It was very late on Wednesday when Korsak and Frost got a call about a fourth murder victim. Frost knew from the get go that he was going to have issues with this scene. One cop already lost his dinner, and no one was joking about it as they usually did when Frost was ill which must mean that it was a nasty one.

The pair walked into the dark house and followed the light of their flashlights and the horrible smell through the house. The first room they walked through was a kitchen. Scanning the room briefly, Korsak noticed something that pointed toward what they knew they were going to find, "One of the knives seems to be missing," he said as he quickly shined his light on the block holding the set of kitchen knives sans the butcher knife. He didn't pause long over the fact knowing he would come back to it.

Frost was about five feet from the doors to the next rooms when he tripped over a couple small bowls and they went skidding across the floor.

"Here kitty, kitty," Korsak softly called.

"Don't go there. From what I hear, I hope the cat is long gone." Frost's hope was dashed when they followed the hallway and entered the master bedroom however.

In the middle of the bed lay Beverly, or who was assumed to be Beverly Leary. The elderly women was laying in her bed, the mattress under her was saturated with fluids including blood and those from decomp, and the smell was already getting to Barry. One difference came from the fact that her body had been decomposing longer than the others, and so bugs had started to feast on her as they got in the house in a rip in the open window screen. The few flies flying around the detectives faces let them know there would be more bugs around. But the bugs were not the only thing to have feasted on the victim's open wounds, thereby causing lots of damage to the face.

And there the cat sat by it's mistress. The flashlights caused the gruesome scene to take on an even more horror filled sensation. The cat's eyes seemed to glow green back at the two men, and the once pristine white cat was licking its front paws trying to get clean. The hair on its head and face stood up in brown spikes of dried blood. Beside the bed lay a pile of thrown up, half-masticated brain tissue.

Korsak mumbled to himself, "Guess kitty didn't like dinner," as Frost bolted for the bushes. While Frost was outside, Korsak looked closely at the light switch and noticed a blood smear. He signaled for a CSRU tech to come over and record it with luminol so that he could turn on the overhead lights and see what the murder scene really looked like.

Within an hour the scene looked a little different. The cat was gone as one CSRU tech had crated up the animal in order to take it back to the lab to get pictures and evidence off of the creature. The blood on the light switch had been recorded and so the room was now bathed in bright artificial light. With the light on, Korsak was able to see the evidence in the room which pointed at her murder being a serial like the other bodies the BPD had seen the previous week. There was a small pool of blood on the bed where the right hand might have rested at one time, before it was bound together with the left hand with a generic strip of duct tape. The ankles were similarly bound. On closer inspection of the hands, Korsak noticed that the right pinky finger of this victim was gone. There was a pillow on the side of the bed with a hole through it and blood splatter on one side and gun shot residue on the other. Korsak understood that the murderer had used the pillow as a way to silence the gun a bit and not to see the victim's face as the trigger was pulled. This idea was justified when he saw the victim's face closer up as he was able to see a few small feathers in the wound on her face. He was also able to see the teeth marks of the cat which made the wound much larger than would had been seen from just the gunshot wound.

Korsak noticed the missing butcher knife on the bedside table and he flagged down the CSRU tech who was taking pictures of the body, "Hey, Mike, can you take some pics and dust the knife for prints? Hopefully we can get lucky on something with this case finally."

"Sure thing, I'll be there in a sec." Mike finished up the angle he was on before he came over.

With the tech out of the way of the body, the on-call ME came over in order to take a liver temp reading as there was damage around the eyes so he thought it would be a better way to get an accurate reading over a vitreous potassium sample.

Granted, Korsak knew that Dr. Pike did like the more old school techniques, and the detective wondered if Maura would get annoyed with the doctor as she often did. He didn't say anything to the annoying Doc but just quickly finished up his work in silence.

Dr. Isles arrived at the morgue slightly before 8 am on Thursday morning. She was just about to sit down at her desk when her phone rang. "Isles."

"Hey Doc," the gruff and tired sounding voice of Detective Korsak came over the line, "I was wondering if you could look at a body for us that Dr. Pike brought in earlier."

Maura tried not to groan at the request as she knew the touchy doctor would get annoyed with someone encroaching on 'his' case. "Why do you want me to look at this body? What's the issue with Dr. Pike's staying on the case?"

"The victim has a gunshot wound to the head and is missing her right pinky finger..." Korsak didn't say more, he didn't need to as he knew the Doc would understand the need for the same pathologist to be on the case so that no piece of evidence tying this case to the others would be over looked.

"Understood. I'll let you know what I find out." She didn't wait to find out if Korsak wanted to say anything else before she hung up the phone and placed it in the pocket of the black dress pants she had chosen to wear that morning. She didn't want any superfluous information to influence her take on the case. She placed her purse in the bottom desk drawer, sighed as she dragged her fingers through her long curling hair, and resolved herself for another long grueling day. She took off the red blazer that she had on over a comfortable white silk shirt and placed it over the back of her office chair before she headed out of the door and down the hall.

She got ready for performing an autopsy as she usually did. Donning the paper garments to protect her clothing and shoes as her assistant went into the freezer in order to pull out the gurney needed. As the body was wheeled closer, Maura could smell the strong odor of decomp that wafted up around the body. She noticed Yoshima place a small folder on the edge of the nearby metal table, but again Dr. Isles ignored the notes that were taken at the scene of the crime as she wanted the body solely to tell the story about what happened to her. She got the external exam forms ready to start taking notes and then peeled back the sheet covering the woman's face. She paused seeing the damage to the face due to the bullet, and it took her a moment to see the teeth marks around the wound, and her brain quickly processed the face that some animal had feasted on the open wound of the dead woman. Maura blanched as the facts and the smells overwhelmed her like never before and before she knew it she dropped the wooden clipboard with the forms and bolted to the nearest sink. She heard the sound of the clipboard hitting the floor right as she started to empty her stomach into the metal sink.

She turned on the water and watched as the mess was rinsed down the sink. Her mind was wandering from various thought from wondering why this case caused her to be ill, to thinking that her stomach content weren't the worse things to be washed down the sink: blood, bits of tissues on the instruments, and stomach contents...well of dead people, and very frequently Frost. She had not been feeling the best the last few weeks actually, and for a brief moment she wondered if she had come down with some sickness. Her mind took in all of the facts in her case, and she was sent reeling as she realized what was probably going on. She was used to the sights and smells of the autopsy room and decomposing bodies. So getting sick now told her more then peeing on any stick could that something was not normal She gripped the side of the sink harder to keep herself from falling to the floor as the truth pounded down on her. She tried to think on what had happened...okay she knew HOW it happened but that wasn't helping her mood any. She hadn't been eating well, and when she did she often felt ill lately. She had attributed that fact at first to her grief over losing Frankie, and then to the fact that food tasted odd after she had the case in the burned out apartment. She had been tired recently, but she attributed that fact to the issue of not sleeping well, and pushing herself harder at times to fill the weekends and quiet times because of Frankie being gone. Her emotions had been all out of whack because of the hostage situation and then losing Frankie, so she didn't think anything wrong about her fluctuating emotions. She had even written off the tenderness in her breasts as due to the air turning colder with the changing seasons. She tried to think back to when she had her last period, and she realized it had been well over two months. She never thought anything odd about this as her period was never 'normal,' and with her age, she often rationalized the weeks between her periods that she might be going through early menopause.

She whirled around quickly and came face-to-face with her worried assistant. She didn't want to face the truth, or people, and so she hurried to the woman's restroom down the hall and locked herself in a stall just in case her stomach still decided to revolt on her. She lowered herself to the tiled floor as she pondered how this could have happened. She was on the pill, and even though she knew that they weren't fool proof, they had a pretty good probability of making sure that this unplanned moment never occurred. As she was thinking about birth-control pill efficiency, she had an oh-shit realization. She remembered when she had bronchitis after the Fourth of July celebrations, and the fact that she wrote out a prescription for antibiotics. She mentally beat herself up as being a doctor she should have remembered that antibiotics effected the ability of birth-control pills to work as they should in a small percentage of women, and so another form of protection should be used after the fact. Once again she was finding herself regretting the fact that she often was in the small percentage of people in various situations. Having a time frame in mind she started to try and piece together when exactly it might have occurred, but before she could get too far in remembering the past, she heard someone entering the restroom.

"Dr. Isles, are you okay? Yoshima mentioned that you weren't feeling well." The voice of the ME department's secretary, Louise, filtered through the closed stall.

Maura forced herself to stand up and smoothed down the imaginary wrinkles on the paper clothing she was still wearing over her outfit. Yoshima must have informed their secretary to come in and check on the doctor. They took away any shred of privacy that the dead had on a regular basis, but he would not intrude on her privacy or any other female that might be in this room. "I'm better, thank you for checking on me." She held her breath as she heard the secretary breathe out a worried sigh before exiting the small room. Maura stepped out of the stall and glanced at her reflection in the mirror over the two porcelain sinks. She removed the paper gowns and shoe covers and placed them in the restroom trashcan as they were not bloodied as she hadn't had time to start the autopsy before she was sent reeling toward the sink. She splashed water on her pale face and placed her poised mask back on her face before she squared her shoulders and exited the room, hoping that if she ran into anyone in the hallway that they wouldn't notice anything out of ordinary.

She walked down the hall and stopped into the luckily empty autopsy suite in order to grab what she needed before quickly walking down the rest of the way into her office. She locked the door behind her and went and all but collapsed in the chair behind her desk as she placed the needle, blood collection vial with a reddish top, label, and a rubber tourniquet on the desk. She knew that it would take longer to get the test results back over a urine test, but she could cover up what she was looking for better by asking for various results: CBC, tox, and the other usual test performed on those on her table...and the added test for the hormone level of human chorionic gonadotropin, the quantitative blood test that measured the concentration of hCG hormone in the blood. The amount of the hormone could help pinpoint more accurately than her memory might about how far along she might be. Sadly it wasn't all that uncommon of checking for pregnancy at an autopsy in order to see if the homicide count was one or more.

She rolled up her left sleeve and worked on tying the tourniquet around her upper arm in order to let the median cubital vein stand out. She had to use her right hand and teeth to get the tourniquet tied tightly. She readied the needle and quickly pushed it through her skin and into the correct vein. She watched as the blood started to slowly trickle into the vial. She wiggled her fingers in order to let the blood flow a little quicker as she couldn't figure out how to get the tourniquet off of her arm as her right hand was busy holding the needle in place. Finally she collected enough blood in the vial, and so she removed the needle and tourniquet from her arm.

Maura filled out the label on the vial with the name 'Jane Doe' and a fictitious case number with a fine point black permanent marker that was in her desk drawer. She left her office and walked down the hallway to the toxicology lab. She handed the vial over to newer lab tech. The girl in the white coat seemed a bit worried seeing Dr. Isles standing over her as most of the samples were brought in by the assistants. "I need the listed blood work as soon as possible, Ms. Copper."

"Yes, Dr. Isles," the girl swallowed as she took the vial.

Maura was hoping that the newer intern would be quick, efficient, and quiet about the results as she was still in the 'get the job done' faze rather than the 'question why protocols are not being performed to the letter' stage. Plus Maura hoped that still being new she wouldn't yet be into the gossiping that went on in the office. She groaned thinking about the rumor mill though as she left the lab. She wondered if the story of her being ill in the morgue had traveled the building yet. She was sure it would be big news to learn that the Chief Medical Examiner for the BPD threw up after seeing a dead body.

She wandered back down the hall and got a washcloth from the pile of towels that she kept in her office closet in order to clean up after a messy autopsy. She got it wet from the nearby restroom and then went back into her office and lowered herself onto her couch. She placed the wet rag over her face in order to try and hide from the world and the truth of the day with that small bit of cloth.

Was she really so bad with the living that she couldn't even diagnose herself. It took a dead body to show her the truth...she always did know how to listen and talk for them much more than for the living. She thought to herself 'What do I know about babies and kids?' Well okay, she knew a lot of stuff...like when the scalp sutures or the ends of the long bones fused. She was able to predict about how formed the fetus already was inside of her. She even knew all the changes that would happen to a body during puberty. But she didn't know anything that wasn't in her textbooks. She also didn't know what Frankie would have thought about this new development. Would he have been shocked, scared, or pleased with the idea of a child?

Jane arrived to work around 9:30 in the morning. The one good thing about still being on restrictive duty was that she could sleep in a bit in the morning if she felt like it. This morning she was happy to just lie in bed stroking her dog's head while she watched her legs run as she slept. They finally got up and went for a slow, and, in Jane's case, a bit painful, walk.

Jane walked into the cafeteria in the precinct in order to order a coffee as she didn't feel like making a pot this morning just to get one or two cups out of it before she came into work. As she was in line, she heard a couple of men from a nearby table talking.

"Hey, Harold, did you hear the news from the morgue?"

Jane perked up wondering what she might have missed this morning.

Before Harold could reply the other man went on, "The Queen of the Dead totally lost it when she saw a dead body today and threw up."

"No way."

"Honest. I heard it from a guy who heard it from the medical intern who was in the morgue."

Jane's attention was pulled back to the line when a gruff voice asked her, "Whacha want?"

"Ah, never mind." She was pissed off at the man for using the annoying moniker for her friend, and she was ticked off at the intern for spreading gossip at work, but, more than anything, she was worried about her friend. She stepped out of line and hurried over to the elevator in order to go downstairs and check on Maura.

She rode the elevator down to the floor with the morgue, walked down the hall to Dr. Isles' office, knocked lightly at the same time as she opened the door to stick her head in and look for her friend. Seeing Maura laying down on her couch with a washcloth over her face in the darkened room, Jane realized that Maura must really be feeling poorly.

Jane stepped toward couch and looked around the room. Nothing seemed out of place or new right off the bat. She saw the jacket on the back of Maura's desk chair, and, while she was looking toward the desk, she noticed a few odd objects on the edge of the desk and walked closer to check them out. She was shocked with what she saw: a tourniquet and needle. For a moment Jane wondered if Maura might have started taking something. She couldn't really see it as her friend on a daily basis saw what drugs and alcohol abuse did to the body. But in her profession, Jane knew that people would do some stupid stuff after being in horrible situations or when dealing with death...and they were both dealing with a lot lately. Heck, Jane hid in bed for a week before her Ma forced her up. She took a deep breath and promised to keep an eye on Maura to see if she needed a swift kick in the ass too.

Maura heard the knock on the door, and that someone came in. Not seeing who it was, she assumed that it was her secretary. "Can you mark me down as taking the rest of the day for a sick day...I'm just waiting to feel a little better before I drive myself home." She was expecting to hear an 'Okay,' and hear the person leaving her office. She was not expecting someone to pull the cloth away from her face.

Jane heard the quiet voice of her friend and could tell from the tone that she really wasn't feeling so great. Her words about leaving for the day just solidified that idea as the last time Dr. Isles was sick and at the office, Jane had to all but drag her sorry ass home. She pulled the wet cloth off of her friend's pale face, "I can take you." Just one more benefit of not having set hours at the office this week.

It took Maura a moment for her thoughts to catch up with the face and words that she sensed. 'Oh, God,' she thought seeing Jane in front of her. What the heck was she supposed to do with her best friend...and soon to be aunt.