Maura was sitting behind her desk, looking over a file, when there was a knock on her office door.

She looked over the rim of her glasses, frowning a little. As far as she knew, she had no appointments scheduled for this morning and, for that reason, had instructed her receptionist not to let anyone see her so she could work in peace. "Come in," she said, eyebrows drew together when nothing happened for several seconds.

The door opened hesitantly, and Nikki poked her head into the room. "Hi, Grandma. Do you have a second for me?"

Maura's face brightened, and she removed her reading glasses from her nose, gesturing to one of the two chairs in front of her desk. "Of course. I have all the time in the world for you and your sister."

Nikki smiled wryly as she entered her grandmother's office and closed the door behind her, then slowly walked to the chair to sit across from Maura.

Maura looked at the teenager intently, waiting for Nikki to open up to her about what prompted her visit to the DA's office, but quickly realized that the girl was much more like her mother than she might have liked and opened the upcoming conversation with a simple question, "What can I do for you, Nikki?"

Nikki pressed her lips together and kneaded her hands without answering the question.

Maura took a deep breath and closed the file on the desk in front of her. "What have you been up to?"

"What?" asked Nikki in surprise, furrowing her brows like her mother. "Nothing at all. Where would you get an idea like that?"

Maura looked at her long and pulled down the corners of her mouth with a shrug. "You're hardly ever in this office, so I just assumed you were in some kind of trouble you didn't want your mother to know about for the time being."

"I --," Nikki replied, furrowing her eyebrows. "I'm not in trouble."

Maura nodded slowly and took a deep breath, leaning back in her desk chair. "So, what can I do for you?"

Nikki sat in the chair, gritting her teeth as she kneaded her hands. "I need a job," she said, rolling her eyes as Maura's eyebrows shot up. "I don't need a job, but rather some kind of ... Internship."

Maura lowered her brows and eyed her granddaughter closely. "An internship? I thought you were hell-bent on joining the Army as soon as you graduate high school."

Nikki opened her mouth and paused, then exhaled noisily. "That's Plan A. But I've concluded that it's not bad if I have a Plan B, too, in case things don't go the way I hope. So I thought ... I'll ask you if I can intern in your office."

"You realize you have to have a decent high school diploma."

Nikki sat up straight in her chair with a jerk. "I'm at the top of my class. Shit, I'm top of my year."

"And you need to go to college before starting a career here."

Nikki pulled the corners of her mouth down. "I've already applied to several colleges."

Maura nodded slowly, her expression unreadable as she clasped her hands together. "Does your mother know about this?"

"I --" Nikki began slowly, narrowing her eyes, "may have mentioned something like that to Maggie. I plan to attend law school if I decide not to join the Army."

Maura nodded slowly and ran her hands over the file in front of her, forcing herself not to smile. Of course, she'd be happier to know her granddaughter was around instead of throwing herself into a combat mission in a faraway land on orders or knowing she was risking her life every day on police business. "I have to think about it deeply. We need reliable employees here in the DA's Office, and we don't pay well, and overtime is guaranteed. On top of that, I need to talk to my supervisor about it first."

Nikki looked at her grandmother with her blue eyes and lowered her brows. "You're the boss here, Grandma."

Maura nodded slowly and took a deep breath. "True. But still, your mother has more say in this matter than I do."

Nikki's shoulders slumped. "I ... understand."

xxx

Elizabeth descended the stairs with the officers. The typical metallic smell of blood rose to her nose.

"This used to be a slaughterhouse," one of the officers said.

"Well, now it's one again."

The body lay on a dusty table in the center of the room. The dead man's head was a shattered mass of bloody flesh, brain fragments, and bone splinters. And here was more than just an arm missing: both arms and legs had been severed at the shoulder and hip joints. The socket joints glowed ghostly white in the semi-darkness.

But there was more. The entire torso of the corpse had been cut open from the collarbones to the pelvis. A vast opening gaped in the center of the chest, like a bloody Grand Canyon.

Elizabeth stepped closer and looked into the dead man's chest. The heart, liver, kidneys, and spleen had been cut out, as far as she could tell, with her rudimentary knowledge of anatomy. The lungs, on the other hand, were still present.

The officer stood motionless in front of the table. "Is that a cannibal? The one who eats the organs?"

"So far, he's only taken the heart." Elizabeth looked down. "But in this case --" She walked around the table. "He took the liver and kidneys here, too." Then she saw the symbol amid the streams of blood. The killer's mark that he had also cut into this victim's flesh. On the chest, on the right side.

It was him, she thought. But here, the modus operandi is quite different from the last murder. Intentional? Or did he go into a blood frenzy? He bashed the man's skull in and pounded his face. That speaks for the fact that it was indeed a bloodlust like with a shark ...

"Oh yeah, that homeless guy earlier said he saw a man late at night," the officer interrupted Elizabeth's thoughts. "Supposedly, he marched out of here with a box."

"What did the man look like?"

"The bum doesn't remember."

"Tall? Short?"

The officer shrugged. "That's what we asked him, and he just said a man. Or a human, anyway."

"Great. There are eight billion of those. How did this guy get here? On foot? In a car?"

"One of the witnesses talked about a monstrous Jeep."

"So, an SUV."

"Yeah, one just like that."

"That needs to go to BRIC right away. Have the folks there match up the popular makes in Boston and surrounding areas. Who has one of those?" Elizabeth's cell phone rang again; it was Katherine.

"Liz? They're coming! They're coming!"

Elizabeth furrowed her brows in confusion. "Who?" she glanced at the macabre torso on the table. "The Horsemen of the Apocalypse?" The scene did indeed look as if the four gentlemen had been here.

"God forbid. No. Williams and Brooks. Their plane lands in the afternoon."

"What did you use to convince them to come here so soon?"

"With the pictures of this rune I sent them, I saw the symbols on the spot."

"Excuse me?" Elizabeth was suddenly wide awake. "Another dead body? I thought you were at that pharmaceutical company for brunch."

"I am," the psychiatrist countered. "Even though it's a workshop of sorts, not a stupid brunch. And no, it's not a whole body, just an arm."

"An arm? Interesting."

"Why?"

"I'm missing two arms here. At a crime scene in South End."

"Um ... you'll have to explain that."

Both women caught up.

"Then I sent Williams the picture," Katherine finished. "The picture of the arm with that rune. As I said, that's why Williams and Brooks are landing in Boston this afternoon."

"Hopefully, they'll shed some light on it," Elizabeth replied. If the two men came from Quantico and New York, something big could be behind it. She thought for a moment. "I'll let Silvia know," she then said. "Tell her to look for a hotel, something near the BPD would be best."

"Okay," Katherine replied. "What does the crime scene look like where you are?"

"Horrible." The detective looked at the body again. "The head's completely crushed, and the arms and legs severed. One of the arms may be where you are right now. Where the other limbs are, we don't know. Could they also be with the pharmaceutical company?"

"Do you think this arm belongs to the body you're standing in front of now?"

"We'll know soon, hopefully, when the ME's office is done with my 'crime scene'."

"Do that. Ma's already announced herself, too."

"We'll, a real family reunion."

At that moment, a figure in a white Tyvek suit came down the stairs, holding a silver metal suitcase.

Dr. Maggie Ross.

She set the case down and stopped in front of the body for a moment. "Torso is here; extremities and organs are gone," she said, shaking her head. "Do you know, Liz, what ubiquity is?"

"Isn't that the divine gift of being able to be in multiple places at once? Zeus and the other Greek gods had that, didn't they?"

Maggie smiled briefly and nodded. "Yes. But apparently, that gift is not so divine." She pointed to the bloody torso. "This one seems to have it down, too."