The incision went from the forehead in a crescent shape over the back of the head to the ear. Then the surgeons pulled the skin and scalp down. The red, bloody tissue gleamed against the light-colored skull bone.

"Subdural hemorrhage," Galloway said as they looked together through the glass into the OR. "The patient has finally been placed in an induced coma."

"Brain probe?" asked Katherine in the terse jargon only medical professionals could manage.

"Yep. Skull drilled out. ICP probe inserted. Intracranial pressure is dangerously elevated. Now we'll lift off the side of his skull bone."

The ICP probe stood for Intra Cranial Pressure and measured the pressure on the brain. When the pressure got too high, the brain stem was squeezed downward at some point. The brain stem was where all the essential control functions of the body were gathered. And if the brain stem went bad, life was over.

"We tried everything before," Galloway said with a furrowed brow. "Put him on cooling mats to get the intracranial pressure down. Then rapid ventilation with lots of oxygen gets him to exhale more CO2. That brings down the swelling. And diuretics to get the kidneys to flush out more water. The whole nine yards."

Katherine nodded slowly. "Mannitol, too?"

Galloway looked at her former student for a long moment. "Of course."

Katherine saw the puzzled look on her sister's face. "It's a sugar-alcohol mixture that causes water to be drawn out of the brain."

Galloway took a deep breath. "We need to release pressure." As if for background, the saw howled. "Otherwise, his skull will burst."

Elizabeth and Katherine heard the screech of the oscillating saw even through the glass. They could see some bone dust trickling to the floor if they looked closely.

"Reminds me of SAW III," Katherine said. Elizabeth snorted in annoyance. But Katherine continued to speak. "That's also where the Jigsaw Killer gets his skull sawed open to take the pressure off his brain."

"I don't know the movie," Galloway said with the corners of her mouth pulled down.

"It doesn't matter," Elizabeth replied. "If anywhere needs its skull sawed open, it's idiots who watch that kind of stuff." She looked at her sister punitively.

"That means I'm an idiot?" Katherine looked at the detective in wonder.

Elizabeth smiled a little. "No. But blessed with idiotic taste."

Katherine passed over the insult. She couldn't be mad at her sister anyway, and the detective knew it. "They're fit here, your boys, aren't they?" She pointed to the surgeons.

"They are." Galloway nodded slowly, proudly. "Look for yourself," she pointed to the surgical area. "Now they're taking off the bone flap. Protecting the sinus, the middle part at the top, is important. Underneath that runs the cerebral artery, which drains blood from the brain. We shouldn't be able to get that, or he'll be in paradise right away."

"This one in paradise?" The assumption was too oblique even for Katherine.

"Wherever. Then we sew the scalp back up and wait for the intracranial pressure to subside. We'll freeze the skull plate for that long. When everything's swollen, and okay, we'll cut the skin again, put the bone in, and then he'll live happily ever after."

Katherine pressed her lips together. "Happy is relative."

Galloway nodded slowly. "It sure is. Here anyway. The other day we had saved another one of those maniacs who was also an extreme alcoholic. The liver then no longer transports blood, the veins have to look for other ways to transport the blood back to the heart, and that can only be done via the veins in the esophagus. People have varicose veins in the esophagus. When those veins eventually burst, they vomit up gushes of blood."

"...And when the blood flows back into the stomach," Katherine added, "it mixes with the hydrochloric acid in the stomach to form black and red lumps. Coffee grounds-like vomiting is another name for it."

Galloway raised her eyebrows appreciatively. "You've retained quite a bit from your medical studies."

Katherine smiled a little. "The weird stuff, yes."

Elizabeth looked back and forth between the two of them, confused. Didn't they know this was a matter of life and death? The junkie, what had he said? How he was staking women, that more would die. And then he'd had brain matter under his boots and cut-off feet in a cardboard box.

"Listen, Dr. Galloway, your concern for the patient is commendable, but we need to talk to this man as soon as the surgery ends." She looked piercingly at Galloway.

Galloway narrowed her eyes. "I understand what you're saying, but there's a good chance he'll have to be in an induced coma for at least another week."

"A week!" That's what the doctor had said earlier, but Elizabeth still thought she hadn't heard correctly. "What if we bring him out of the coma?"

"He could die."

"Then suddenly the life of a psychopathic junkie is worth more than the lives of innocent people who could still die? Damn, there's a time bomb ticking here!" Elizabeth looked through the glass at the operating table, at the open skull the doctors were about to insert a tube into. Somewhere inside that head was the truth. Only that head was far away, anesthetized, fogged up, sawed open, and in a coma.

"I hear you," Galloway replied. "But he'll probably die before you can ask him anything. And then, as I said, you'll need a necromancer."

"Or Dr. Ross," Katherine said.

"If she can talk to the dead, yes." Galloway looked toward the exit. "In any case, there's nothing we can do for now but wait. Medicine doesn't take deadlines into account now." She crossed her arms and took a deep breath. "I'll escort you outside and tell you a story on the way."

The three women walked down the whitish-green corridor lined with cells to the left and right. Galloway had to unlock each door at the end of the hall and then let crash into the lock. "We have an inmate here who killed thirteen women. He took them to his basement then. He tied them up. And he poisoned them. In the cellar, he had a hammock. That's where he lay down and watched calmly as the women died in convulsions." Galloway unlocked another door. Screams from somewhere. "Then, when he was with us, he caught a sparrow through his window one day. I don't know how he did it. He fed the bird. He tamed it. At one point, the bird was so tame he could even hold it. What a picture." She turned to Elizabeth and Katherine. "The little tame sparrow in the hand of that monster." Again she unlocked a door. Behind a bull's-eye glass panel of the cell door, a face with empty eyes. Threads of saliva at the mouth.

"He wasn't allowed to keep the bird. Animals aren't allowed." Galloway frowned. One more door, and they were in the courtyard. A cold October wind whistled around their noses. "Are you serious? he asked the keeper. I can't keep him? The guards affirmed that they were serious. When he heard that, he just said all or nothing."

Elizabeth's eyebrows drew together. "And then?"

"Then the inmate crushed the bird. And threw the bloody carcass into the ventilator."

All three women were silent for a few seconds.

Elizabeth took a deep breath. "That means we have to wait? Even if it's a long time before the patient wakes up?"

Galloway nodded slowly. "We have to. Sometimes there's no other way. Sometimes we can't take the bird away if we want the bird to stay alive." She shook hands with Katherine and Elizabeth. "First lesson in psychiatry: when we decide to get everything, we often get nothing." With those words, she nodded again, as if in affirmation, and walked back to her realm of madness with exhausted steps, a little lost.

xxx

On the ride back to BPD, Elizabeth and Katherine were very silent.

Elizabeth was still thinking about what Galloway had said. That they would probably have to wait another week for it before they might get a chance to question the junkie. And also thought about the story of the inmate and the sparrow that had been crushed by the psychopath just because the maniac wouldn't be allowed to keep the animal.

She took a deep breath and looked at her sister.

Katherine stared out the passenger window with a deep frown. The detective doubted that the psychiatrist was thinking about the same things she was. Several weeks ago, Elizabeth had already noticed that Katherine had retreated into herself from now on, throwing herself at each new case, even if it didn't merit the attention of the special team.

Elizabeth licked her lips and frowned a little. "Are you okay?"

Katherine blinked a few times before slowly looking at the detective. "Hmm?"

"Is everything okay?"

The psychiatrist nodded slowly. "Yes, everything's fine. I was expecting that we wouldn't be able to talk to our junkie yet, as bad as his health was already at the accident scene."

Elizabeth blinked a few times and looked at her sister briefly. That's different from what she was getting at, and she certainly didn't want to hear that doctor's assessment. "That ... that's not really what I meant, Kate. Is everything okay with you? I've noticed that over the last few weeks, you've ... How should I put it?"

Katherine rolled her eyes. "Just say it, Liz."

"Okay," the detective said, raising her eyebrows briefly. "Okay, have it your way. You've been throwing yourself into work for weeks, even when the cases aren't for us. You also avoid going home with Nick and come to BPD in your own car. You've never done that in years past."

"I just don't want to let my car collect dust," Katherine replied, looking out the window again. "And ... it's also nice to be able to drive around and clear my head."

Elizabeth's brows drew together, and she looked again at her younger sister as she tried to get the meaning of the words right. "Is there any reason for me to give Nick a good beating?"

Katherine gave a short laugh and turned her head toward the detective. She understood that her sister was under the assumption that her husband had cheated on her, and that was why she had retreated into herself to use her analytical mind to understand the situation for herself first before turning the problem over to her family. "No," she chuckled, "no, Nick didn't do anything wrong, Liz."

"Good, good," Elizabeth said with a slow nod, but then she furrowed her brows and looked at her sister again. "Is there a reason I need to beat the crap out of you?"

Katherine laughed another time. "Liz, Nick didn't cheat on me, nor did I cheat on him."

The detective took a deep breath of relief. She knew what it was like to have one parent cheat on the other and what a messy story it could end up in. Permanent distrust, followed by quarrels that amused the entire neighborhood. Accusations that had a hand and a foot decades ago. Parents tried to pull the two children on their side, even if only subconsciously, which then gave rise to accusations that had hand and foot at the time. A serial killer who tried to kill the mother because she had gotten too close to him. The mother thought she was losing her mind because she was beginning to forget things due to several dramatic events. The fear during that time was that said mother might have a brain tumor and die from it. Shootings in the family home led to a gunshot wound in the leg and the mother disappearing into the night to disappear for months and even being presumed dead.

Elizabeth cleared her throat to lock the memories back into the box they had crawled out of. She took a deep breath and licked her lips. "Okay," she said, gritting her teeth. "Okay, then, what's going on, Kate?"

"I don't know myself," Katherine replied, tying her hair into a loose bun. It was a habit she had when she was unclear about a situation. She frowned deeply. "For some time now, I've just had this urge to pull up all the stops in Boston and ... How should I put it?"

"To move on? Somewhere where they don't know you, your name, your family, and your job? To leave everything behind and start over, not giving a shit what it costs or who you hurt, as long as you have nothing to do with the law enforcement anymore?"

Katherine's eyebrows drew together, and she looked closely at her sister. "How --"

"How do I know?" asked Elizabeth, gritting her teeth. "You can't imagine how many times I've asked myself what my life would have been like had I never become a cop." She pulled the corners of her mouth down and raised her shoulders. "Or whether I would be a professional basketball player today if it hadn't been for the incident with Cope. How many times I wondered then if Sarah would have killed herself if I'd had a normal office job and I hadn't been at the Bureau all night. And then I realized that if I hadn't been an officer and she had been an investigative journalist, I probably never would have met Sarah. Then I realized, no matter how dramatically our lives had unfolded, that if I weren't a cop, neither Nicki nor Ash would exist today. If I wasn't a cop today, Mags and I would never have crossed paths, and she wouldn't have been able to force herself on me until I asked her out."

Katherine chuckled. "Very romantic."

Elizabeth grinned widely. "I know."

"Does your wife know she's forced herself on you?"

"I tell her every day."

The psychiatrist laughed heartily. "And yet she married you."

The detective pulled the corners of his mouth down. "That's my irresistible charm."

The two laughed heartily, but then Katherine became serious again. "It's just --" She paused and took a deep breath. "In the last few weeks and months, I've come to realize that I've never lived outside of law enforcement, never had a chance to meet a man who wasn't a cop. I mean --" She paused and took a deep breath. "I don't know what it's like to be with a man who goes out and comes home unscathed and has a job without putting his life on the line."

Elizabeth drew her eyebrows together and pressed her lips together. "What about Peter Johnson?"

Katherine screwed up her face, not understanding what her sister was getting at. "What about him?"

"You've been with Peter Johnson!"

Katherine made another face. "That was the first year at BCU. What's more, we weren't together for six months. How am I supposed to know what happened with him?"

Elizabeth took a deep breath. "I know what happened to Peter. He's in jail today in Florida for beating up his now ex-wife so badly that she was in a coma for a year and a half. And also, she talked one too many times to her nice, handsome neighbor while Pete was picking up his welfare check. That was just one of his federal offenses."

Katherine looked at her sister long and hard. "Have you checked out all my ex-boyfriends?"

"Pete is your only ex-boyfriend who still --" The detective paused and pressed his lips together.

"Who's still alive," Katherine completed the sentence, taking a deep breath.

Elizabeth pulled into the BPD parking garage, turned off the unmarked car's engine, unbuckled her seat belt, and turned to face her sister in the driver's seat. She looked hauntingly at the other woman. "Nick's a good guy, Kate. You might as well have ended up with a son of a bitch like Pete Johnson, who'd beat the crap out of you just for looking at another man."

Katherine took a deep breath and closed her eyes. "I know he's a good guy; it's just --" She paused and closed her eyes while taking a deep breath. "Lately, again, I feel like we've skipped many steps. We've jumped from colleagues who had been at each other's throats to lovers."

Elizabeth made a face and waved her hand in front of her face. "Too much information, Kate, too much information."

Katherine took a long look at her sister and smiled in amusement. "Do you think Jalen fell out of the sky?"

"Way too much information."

Katherine laughed heartily.

Elizabeth grinned broadly but then became more serious again, looking briefly at her sister. "You'll give me a heads up if you decide to leave Boston in the middle of the night, right?"

Katherine took a deep breath and frowned slightly, but then a smile curled her lips. "Of course, Liz."