It was night as Elizabeth stood on her porch looking out into the night. 3 a.m. Already morning, but still deepest night.
They had been searching with dogs. But they had found nothing.
She looked into her whiskey glass. Was it wise to drink at this moment? The baby was dead, but Ashlyn and Nikki weren't, and neither was Maggie. But the baby that Ashlyn, Maggie, and Nikki had been looking forward to, just like her ... It was dead. It would never come into the world. It had appeared briefly, only to be swept right away. So had Alexis Beasley. She had trusted them. And they had betrayed her. When people suddenly disappeared and weren't found within hours, she knew those people remained missing. Because they had been kidnapped. Or were dead. Usually, first one, then the other.
Her baby was dead. Alexis Beasley was dead. So she might as well drink whiskey.
A man who doesn't drink isn't alive. Ernest Hemingway had said that. I wonder if that was true of women, too. In any case, Hemingway had overdone it with his drinking. At some point, he shot himself in the head with a rifle. Hemingway also wrote the shortest and saddest short story, which also fit Elizabeth and Maggie's situation.
Baby shoes for sale. Never worn.
Elizabeth herself had yet to buy any clothes for the baby. Nor had she begun to furnish the nursery. All this she planned to do with her family after the case was closed and she and Maggie had quite officially informed the family of the addition. She had the childish notion that all these things could be tackled together with Maggie, Katherine, Jane, and Maura. Only this time with Nikki, Ashlyn, Nick, and Jalen. Each of them could bring their style to the clothing and room design for the baby. Just like it had been when Sarah had been pregnant the first and second time, the family had been a part of it.
It could be as well that Elizabeth hadn't thought of all that yet because she and Maggie didn't need it now. Or should they give it another try? Someday. But sometime soon.
What was important was that she and Maggie had the child. Their child. The baby was on ice and fixed in formalin. Elizabeth had approached Katherine with Maggie's wish. Katherine had talked to the young resident in pathology, telling her something about the importance of the funeral to the parents' grieving process until the young woman had wordlessly placed the jar containing the embryo in the psychiatrist's hand. Just in time, before it would have gone into the biohazard barrels and onto the incinerator. Katherine had intercepted the baby and placed it in an ice container. And now that container was in the BPD morgue.
Elizabeth stood in front of the refrigerator in that morgue, looking at that little creature. But at the last moment, she hadn't. Something inside her had stopped her. Some inner voice that meant well to her. Because some things should not be seen, the Nameless One, a killer similar to the BodyCounter, had revealed to Elizabeth that her late wife Sarah had not been in her grave for years because her killer had dug her up to have another go at her. The man who had been Sarah's babysitter's boyfriend and had abused her and who had driven her to suicide decades later. He had also abused Nameless as a child. And Nameless had been severe. He had found his tormentor, Jason, and killed him. He was horribly butchered. And Jason had deserved nothing less.
But the Nameless One had told Elizabeth that he had taken revenge instead of Elizabeth. And that Jason had also desecrated Sarah's body. And Elizabeth had wept silently for years, mourning and praying - in front of an empty grave. Because all this time, she hadn't known the grave was empty. Now she knew it was. And it wasn't very good. Knowing something like that never helped. It only hurt. Because one thing Elizabeth had learned was that it didn't always help to know everything. Sometimes, she just deserved to have her faith and hope rewarded. Whether it was true or not.
No, she, Elizabeth Rizzoli, would not look at that baby. Not for the world. She would take it, sight unseen, from the refrigerator in the morgue and bury it with Maggie when this, this case, this horror, was over. If they ever caught this phantom who called himself BodyCounter. Suppose it wasn't as faceless and invisible as the crime itself. Everywhere. And yet nowhere.
She drank from the whiskey that ran burning down her throat. She should have been freezing, but she wasn't.
Power failure.
The officers had found a tampered distribution box. The fact that an entire neighborhood could be paralyzed with so little effort did not precisely increase Elizabeth's confidence in the infrastructure, a belief that needed to be higher anyway. At the same time, this was likely even worse in other countries. But it also showed that the killer knew about such things.
Which didn't make him any less dangerous.
The power outage had caused the cell towers to go down, and with them, the cell phones. That the colleagues no longer saw Alexis Beasley. And then the killer had to have struck. However, he had done it exactly. And then he had found the GPS trackers. The receiver was gone. They had found Alexis Beasley's cell phone. Crushed. It was already in forensics. There were DNA traces of Alexis Beasley on it. Nothing else.
The receiver that went with the GPS trackers was completely gone.