Elizabeth stood in front of the elevator on the third floor and stared at the display without pressing the button, too absorbed in the past events of the day.

She flinched when someone stood next to her without saying a word.

Jane took a long, hard look at her daughter and automatically knew that something had happened that the detective wasn't telling her. "Is everything okay, Liz?"

Elizabeth licked her lips and shook her head. "No, not at all, but now is not the time or the place to talk about it."

Jane frowned deeply and nodded slowly. "Okay." She decided not to press Elizabeth, as she would only close herself off even more. She knew it was better to give the detective the time she needed to confide in her or Maura.

The detective took a deep breath and noticed that her mother had no coffee with her, which meant that something extraordinary must have happened, and she was stressed. Positive stress, it seemed. "What happened?"

Jane raised her eyebrows. "We got the guy."

Elizabeth blinked a few times and looked at her mother with wide eyes. "We got ... the killer?" She couldn't quite believe what she was hearing. Would the TV show, the profiling, and everything they'd discussed be completely unnecessary? All that planning for nothing? But if they had the killer, that wouldn't be bad, of course, she thought. Then, all the work they'd done for nothing was what you'd call a luxury problem. By then, Jane was already talking.

"Anyway, we know who he is. Come on."

The two women walked together towards BRIC.

"But we haven't caught him yet?"

Jane shook her head. "Not yet, but I'm sure we will." She opened the door. Nick was sitting there at one of the computers. The contents could also be seen on the monitor wall in BRIC.

Katherine sat on the edge of one of the desks in BRIC and hung her head, clinging to the edge of the desk.

Jane looked at her son-in-law with a furrowed brow. "Nick, please!"

"Todd Quimby," he said without hesitation.

Elizabeth looked at the monitor wall and furrowed her brows. For some reason, the name sounded familiar, but she couldn't place it. "Is that the killer's name?" There was a picture of his face on the screen. Puffy. Blond, thin hair. A pair of glasses.

Nick looked over his shoulder. "Right."

Elizabeth walked towards the wall. "And that's him?"

"That's him." Nick typed something into the computer. "In all his fucking glory." At the same time, the sketches were visible. They looked different from Todd Quimby's picture. But his picture looked like the skatches.

Elizabeth nodded slowly. "Getting there. How did you find out?" She looked at Katherine and furrowed her eyebrows as she saw the psychiatrist clench her teeth repeatedly with a strained face.

"We got on top of his employer," Nick said. "Emphatically. Employer is a bit of an exaggeration. That moonlighting agent realized he was too dirty to play blind man's buff with us." He cracked his knuckles.

"That real estate company we already had on our radar?"

"Compton Investments," Nick continued. "It's run from London. They have around five thousand five hundred apartments in Boston alone. Many of it is through rental portals with vacation rentals and so on. Not entirely clean. Not all legal. A lot of illegal work. Illegal employees. All that sort of thing."

"And you let them know that? That we know how dirty they are?"

Nick pursed his lips and twitched his eyebrows. "They know we know. We've told them: either you give up the names of your employees, including those working illegally, or we'll IRS and customs on you. And then you'll spend the rest of your lives sifting through documents, paying lawyers --" He leaned back in his chair. " ... and when it's all done, you won't even have clean underwear."

"Well," Jane said, crossing her arms in front of her chest, "if we didn't have the key to Maggie's warehouse, we wouldn't have been able to do this."

The key, Elizabeth thought, gritting her teeth, which Maggie could only grab because it had fallen out of the killer's hand. Because he was wearing brass knuckles in one hand. And because he had to run away. After he had kicked her wife. Kicked Maggie and took their baby ...

"The warehouse in North End," Nick's voice snapped her out of her thoughts, "is part of this company."

Elizabeth nodded slowly and gritted her teeth. "Todd Quimby, then." It was the name of the person who had killed her baby. And she felt a cold hatred for this person rise inside her. "Where does he live?"

Nick rocked in his chair. "That's the problem. Nowhere!"

Elizabeth turned to her brother-in-law and furrowed her eyebrows. "Nowhere?"

Jane stood next to Elizabeth and stared glumly at the monitor wall. "That son of a bitch seems to take turns living in the apartments he cleans, fixing things, and so on. He seems to be some janitor. And so he's everywhere. And nowhere."

"Janitor in the Compton apartments?"

"That's right. In the five thousand five hundred apartments."

Five thousand five hundred apartments, Elizabeth thought. That wasn't exactly a small number. "And his bosses? They don't know where he's hanging out?"

"Since he's working illegally, the documentation requirements are limited," Nick replied, raising his shoulders, "and you can hardly assume that some slick real estate shark from London is constantly keeping an eye on over five thousand apartments to check what some sleazy black market worker is doing."

Elizabeth sat down at one of the free computers and googled Compton Investments. God knows the company wasn't small. The company had branches in all the capitals of Europe and major cities in the USA. They bought dilapidated apartment blocks and turned them into apartments or vacation homes. Or they rented out run-down buildings as refugee accommodation for horrendous sums to helpless communities and cities. "So this guy hasn't registered anywhere and is using these apartments to which he has the keys?"

Nick stood up briefly from his chair and stretched his back. He uses them for his evil games. As storage, as a prison cell, as a red room, as an apartment, probably also as a place to store bodies. Since not all the apartments are always occupied by tourists, he always has accessible apartments where he can hold his victims, film them, or even kill and disembowel them."

"But you can smell it!"

"When he bleeds them out, mummifies them with cat litter, hangs up scented trees --" Jane scratched her head and then ran her fingers through her hair. "Not necessarily. And from what I gather, this boy wonder is already he's also responsible for cleaning the apartments. So he's officially cleaning up his mess."

Nick looked at the chief closely. "Destroys evidence and gets paid for it," he growled.

"And considering how some vacation homes in Boston look after boozehounds have invaded them, it's no big deal when the janitor goes through the apartments with cleaning products afterward."

Elizabeth nodded tensely. "Pretty clever. He's got what every murderer dreams of. Countless rooms where he can let off steam and where it's not noticeable when he tidies up afterward."

Jane looked more closely at her investigators. "Think of the garbage man Samantha saw. Surely he just took Nada outside in the garbage can?"

"Wouldn't be the first time," Elizabeth muttered. "Has Nada been able to confirm that?"

"Not yet, because she blacked out from the shock. But it could have been like that. Anyway, his job is perfect for such actions!"

Elizabeth couldn't help but think of the janitor of death. What sounded like satire had turned out to be true in the worst possible way. "So he doesn't have a permanent address," she said, frowning deeply. "But there must be a file and something about him."

"There is," Katherine said in a hushed voice, finally looking up tensely before walking to one of the computers. She typed in her password that gave her access to her saved files and opened the digitized case file with the name Todd Quimby.

Elizabeth saw the picture of the younger version of the man they were currently hunting. The man responsible for the current horror and suffering in Boston. The younger version of the man who had overpowered Maggie and killed her baby.

Then she realized that Katherine must have had dealings with Todd Quimby before; otherwise, her sister would have no file on the man.

She turned abruptly to the psychiatrist with wide, questioning eyes and realized that this time, Katherine had been as white as a sheet.

Katherine took a deep breath and straightened up. "Todd Quimby's parents were forced to marry after his father, Peter, a showman at a traveling fair, got his mother pregnant. Peter and Susann had never really loved each other, and Peter had many affairs while traveling the country with the carnival. Susann had punished Todd for this and for the fact that he had been born a boy. Susann was a nurse and had beaten him in such a way that no one had noticed that she was beating Todd. Mostly she hit Todd on his penis with a fly swatter." She paused and gritted her teeth without glancing at the screen wall as if she knew that particular case file inside and out. "Todd's father wasn't necessarily the better choice for raising the boy. He had watched porn with him and told him about picking up women and even told him about having sex with the local women in the bumper cars, sometimes even deflowering them. In every last detail. He even called some women unclean."

Jane frowned deeply. "The best nutrient for a psychopath."

Nick looked at his wife for a long time and frowned deeply. The story seemed familiar to him too.

Katherine felt the eyes of the three cops on her and licked her lips. "One day, when Todd's father had been back in Massachusetts with the fair and the boy was with him at the time, his mother turned up unexpectedly on her way to work and made little Todd take her to Peter's trailer, where his father was busy with a woman." She licked her lips again and hesitated for a moment. "She had gone into the trailer and shot Peter and his current mistress's heads off before forcing little Todd into the trailer to look at the mess."

Nick sat back in his chair and lowered his brows. "Isn't that the guy who'd jerked off in front of a group of women in a restaurant and ended up in jail for it?"

Elizabeth's eyes moved frantically back and forth as she tried to recall the memory from her mind.

Katherine sucked the air deep into her lungs and nodded slowly. "Yes."

Elizabeth's eyes widened even more as she remembered that name and what her sister had done for the man. "Is this the son of a bitch who was deemed harmless to society by the court through your evaluation?"

The psychiatrist looked at her sister for a long time and nodded with a heavy swallow. "Yes."

Elizabeth unintentionally took a step toward her sister without blinking. "Is that the son of a bitch Mom, Nick, and you warned about?"

Katherine nodded wordlessly.

Elizabeth's eyes widened even more, and she stepped towards Katherine, her voice gaining sharpness. "The one we said from the beginning was a loose cannon and that it was inevitable until he started raping and killing women?"

Jane sensed that the situation was threatening to tip over at that moment. She had also heard about this one particular case back then and had expressed her concerns about it, but had long since pushed it into a very dark corner of her memory and so had been unable to make a connection.

She looked at Elizabeth and put a hand on the detective's arm. "Elizabeth."

Elizabeth's ears rushed, and they took another step towards her sister.

Even Nick seemed to feel the need to stand up and intervene if necessary.

Katherine avoided looking her sister in the eye and answered the question with a simple nod.

Elizabeth could barely contain her anger and lashed out at her sister. "Because you saw fit to give a goddamn rapist a fucking first, second, and third chance, people are dead!" she said at the top of her lungs.

"Hey," Nick said, frowning deeply, "Liz --"

"Todd Quimby wasn't a rapist or a murderer back then," Katherine said meekly, and at that exact moment, she knew it had been an excuse for her misjudgment when she had first met Todd Quimby and had judged him to be harmless. This evaluation had led to his early release and, in the here and now, to a feral series of murders.

"It doesn't matter today," Elizabeth screamed at the top of her lungs and closed her eyes like a whipped dog. "Today, he's a murderer. One of the worst kind. He murders teenagers and women! Raped and mutilated!" She approached the psychiatrist and clenched her hands as if it would only be seconds before she slapped her sister. "That monster named Todd Quimby beat up my wife and killed my child, my marriage, all because you made sure he got out of his goddamn cage where he belonged in the first place!" she snarled and simply marched past Katherine, slamming the door to BRIC clanging shut behind her.

Jane pressed her lips together and gave Katherine a long look, only for Elizabeth to follow wordlessly.

Katherine hung her head again, sure that the detective was right. Because, at the time, she had deemed Todd Quimby harmless if he underwent outpatient therapy and adequate medication. For some reason that she couldn't explain, she had lost sight of his case.

Nick approached his wife and gently touched her elbow to bring Katherine back to the here and now. "Kate. It's going to be okay ... After we catch this bastard. Death or alive."

Katherine looked at him and took a deep breath, blinking back the tears in her eyes as she shook her head. "Nothing's going to be okay, Nick," she said, shaking her head. "Nothing will be how it was, and that's entirely my fault."

Nick gave her a long look and took a deep breath as he shoved his hands into his pants pockets, breathing deeply. "I wish I could say you're wrong," he said, pressing his lips together. "But I can't, Kate," he said, reluctantly leaving BRIC to check on his partner.