Katherine had heard the bang.

Saw Todd Quimby's gun. The recoil that jerked his hand back. The shell casing popped out of the breech. She looked down at herself. Nothing had happened to her. Then she heard the sound. She looked around.

Saw where her sister had just been - nothing!

Elizabeth had sunk to her knees. Her hand was cramped in her abdomen. Blood seeped from between her fingers.

He shot Liz, Katherine thought. In the stomach ... If we don't do something now, she'll bleed to death.

Todd Quimby smiled at her, just like that cursed day when she had first met him in the psychiatric ward of the prison to evaluate him.

The day she had made a decision that would prove disastrous years later.

First, he had beaten Maggie into the hospital, kicked her in the abdomen, and left her bleeding in the alley.

Now, it was Elizabeth who had got it. And a lot of blood. A lot of blood.

"We're on our own now, Doc," Quimby said as Elizabeth went even lower to the ground, panting, one hand still pressed to her stomach and the other clawed into the muddy cemetery. While Katherine stared at both Todd Quimby and then her sister, her eyes wide. She wanted to help Elizabeth. But then Quimby could shoot again. She had to do something. Now. Right now.

"You weren't wrong on your sleazy TV show, Dr. Isles. Because I killed the whores because they were guilty. And I threw their bodies in the trash. Where they belong. And the young girls --" He ran his tongue over his lips. It looked like a chameleon waiting for the next fly to eat. "... I kept them. In all the apartments I've been in. You've seen how I do it. In boiler rooms. With cat litter. They don't decompose; they dry up. In all the apartments that sometimes have to be cleaned so much after tourists have been there that you can do anything there." At the word everything, he looked next to Katherine. Elizabeth, who was crouched on her knees, her bloody hand pressed to her stomach, trying to formulate words but unable to get anything out.

Katherine's head was racing. She saw Elizabeth's Glock next to her sister.

She could shoot her former patient. Right now. Just like she'd done to Wesley Phelps, the Anagramist, after he'd overpowered her at her parents' house and stabbed Nick, she had to shoot him to save her sister. But something was holding her back. Something paralyzed her like a curse of evil that froze her in immobility.

Todd looked at Elizabeth with contempt. "I will eat your world, Elizabeth Rizzoli," he spat out as Elizabeth stared in front of her, trying to squeeze off the gunshot wound. "First your child, then you. And finally, your filthy bitch of a wife. And then I'll hit it." He pressed his gun to the top of Elizabeth's skull. Then a grin crossed his face again as if he had thought of something else he had to give the detective on her last journey. He reached into his coat pocket while Elizabeth stammered out words silently.

"Please," Katherine said in a trembling voice. "Todd --"

Elizabeth's lips were still moving without saying a word, almost as if she were praying as she stared ahead of her.

It was an old-fashioned mason jar.

The jar the detective had already seen out of the corner of her eye in one of the bulging pockets. There was something in the jar. Something organic.

He threw it on the floor in front of the detective. It shattered into a thousand pieces.

And apparently, whatever was in the jar. Organic. Red. Human.

"Maybe I'll spare the redhead and the doc, too, Elizabeth Rizzoli," he said. "Because it's always worse when loved ones die. I've seen you and your whore of a wife, Dr. Maggie Ross."

Her wife and her sister, Elizabeth thought, finally lifting her eyes, even if it took an infinite amount of strength.

Katherine wanted to step forward and help her sister, who was grunting in pain but couldn't.

"Maybe I should tell Maggie that at least you met your baby in your last moment!" He pressed the gun harder against the top of Elizabeth's skull.

Elizabeth's lips stopped moving abruptly as she looked down at the floor. She saw what was in the jar. She saw it. But she couldn't believe it yet.

She was supposed to be stunned in her last moments of life. Full of sadness. And despair. But she wasn't. Not anymore.

Todd Quimby had awakened something in her. And a hatred rose in Elizabeth that she had never felt before.

She remembered what her instructor had told her during her shooting training at the academy. Back then, they had also practiced with sniper rifles. And also with the M4 Sabre Defense. The snipers often shot while lying down. She had also had to lie down back then. With the rifle. Hugging the rifle. There was something intimate about it. And that's how it should be.

"The rifle is my lover," her instructor had said back then. "Hug your rifle just like the man you love. When you shoot, think of everyone you love. Remember that this person is watching. You hug the rifle like them. You shoot for them. You kill for them..."

Elizabeth's gaze darkened, and she felt for her Glock in the muddy ground of the cemetery.

She finally looked at Todd Quimby and raised her service weapon.

She aimed within a fraction of a second.

You hug the gun like a lover.

You shoot for them. You kill for them.

Then she saw what lay in the shattered glass on the rain-soaked floor of the grave.

An embryo.

The embryo of a child.

The child that Todd Quimby had cut from Vanessa's body. Pink flesh, blood, and mucus amidst broken glass and muddy cemetery soil. The dead child at the place of death.

A thought.

Death.

He had killed it, just like Maggie and her baby.

One look.

Todd Quimby had not killed Maggie.

One shot.

But a part of her.

She pulled the trigger with the last of her strength and fired.

The force of the shot hit Todd Quimby in the chest and threw him back as if hit by a hammer.

She fired again and again. And again.

Todd Quimby stood upright for a few more seconds, his eyes downcast, as if he wanted to follow the bullet that had drilled into his torso. Then he staggered. Tipped backwards. He took two steps to break his fall. Stumbled. Fell to the ground. His head crashed against the gravestone, and his neck snapped with a nasty crack. He remained lying next to the gravestone with his eyes and mouth open.

Then Elizabeth slumped to the ground, too.

Katherine shook without thinking. Her sister lay pale and almost unconscious in a pool of blood mixed with the mud of the ground and the rain. She pressed, with her finger, into the wound.

It wasn't a pretty way to stop blood flow in a case like this, but here, it was the only way that worked.

Katherine felt the blood. Her sister's life. The blood that pulsed against her fingertip was no longer leaking out. The blood that had been seeping out of the bullet wound and staining the muddy ground red until a moment ago was gradually drying up. She kept her finger in the wound. Then she looked at Elizabeth's face.

Elizabeth looked up as her eyes scanned the sky for something.

"Stay with me, Liz," she said tearfully. "Please ... You have to hang in there."

Elizabeth closed her eyes for a split second before looking at the psychiatrist. "Tell Maggie and the girls that I'm sorry --" she managed to get out in a weak voice. "That I'm sorry for everything and that I'll always love them."

Katherine pushed her finger deeper into the wound, and her body began to shake. "You tell them that yourself," Katherine replied with tears and a quivering voice. "Do you understand me, Elizabeth?"

Elizabeth nodded frantically as a tear ran down her cheek. She gripped Katherine's wrist. "Kate --"

"You're going to be okay," Katherine said through tears.

"Kate, I'm scared!"

Katherine sobbed and looked up. Todd Quimby lay dead on the grave. His head leaned in a contorted pose against the mossy headstone that had just broken his neck.

Katherine didn't know what had killed him. The shots. Or the stone.

She was drenched in sweat, even though the temperature outside had reached freezing point.

And then, out of her eye, she saw a figure. And another one.

It was Jane. Next to her, Nick. And then the RRT officers.

"An ambulance," she managed to get out. "We need an ambulance --"

Jane was with her immediately. Recognizing the situation, she knelt beside her and Elizabeth. "God, Liz," she whispered.

Elizabeth looked at her mother, and her chin began to tremble. "Ma --"

Nick watched the scene with wide eyes and a pounding heart and gritted his teeth. "The ambulance will be here any minute." His gaze flitted over the body of Todd Quimby. Over the broken jar. Over the embryo lay red and gray on the stone outline of the grave on the rain-soaked concrete border, surrounded by the smell of the alcohol in which the little dead creature had lain. He looked at the gravestone. A little blood stuck to one corner where Todd Quimby's head had crashed against the stone with brutal force. Then he looked at the stone again while his wife continued to hold her finger in Elizabeth's wound.

The gravestone was wet. But not just from the rain. It was as if something had been poured onto the headstone from above.

Now, he recognized what it was.

It wasn't just the smell of alcohol. There was something else.

Urine.

Todd Quimby, the murderer ... He had urinated on the gravestone.

They heard the sirens of the ambulance. The quick steps of the paramedics.

"We'll take it from here," said one of the men. Then they heaved Elizabeth onto a stretcher.

Katherine sank back onto her knees. Into the mud and the rain. She forced herself to stay upright.

Only now did she see the name on the headstone.

Peter Quimby.

Katherine began to breathe again. She breathed the cold air of the cemetery deep into her lungs as paramedics finally attended to her dying sister. She looked down at her bloody hands and only now realized that they were shaking.

She winced as she felt a hand on her shoulder and looked up into the warm but worried eyes of her husband.

Nick frowned deeply and helped Katherine to her feet, pulling her into his arms and closing her eyes as she buried herself in his embrace and began to tremble.

Jane pressed her lips tightly together and followed the paramedics and Elizabeth to the ambulance after placing a hand on Katherine's shoulder and squeezing it very tightly.