The doors opened on the third floor of the precinct, and Jane and Maura stepped out.

They had taken separate cars. Jane had almost ushered Maura into her unmarked, before they both realized that would have committed her to driving Maura home. Awkwardly, Maura had gotten into her Prius instead.

When they'd arrived at the precinct, Maura had attempted to divert to the crime lab right away, in order to examine the garden shears, but Jane had wordlessly grabbed her by the wrist and pulled her into the elevator going up. Jane had said nothing, staring straight ahead, but she didn't release Maura's wrist until just before the doors were going to open. She wasn't sure why she was so resistant to separating. Perhaps she wanted to be sure she had at least one ally in the room, wanted that big brain available to weigh in. Or maybe it was the very recent memory of the best kiss of Jane's life, or the world-reorienting revelation that Maura had wanted Jane on sight.

Lots of options to choose from.

Jane strode through the entrance of the bullpen, Maura in tow, and found Korsak and Frost by the digital equipment. Both men seemed surprised to see the two women arrive together and Jane was certain she saw Frost gulp nervously when he looked at her specifically. Clearly, he knew Jane wasn't going to like what he had to show her, but he also didn't have his super somber face like he was going to deliver some awful news, either. No smoking gun, Jane was certain.

Maura sank down into a chair at the desk behind Korsak, and Jane made her way over to the computer at which Frost was seated.

"What have we got?" Jane looked up at the screen at a folder of hundreds of photo and video files. Frost cleared his throat.

"Yeah, so she had a trail camera with her things in the toolshed." He clicked open one of the images, which showed a night vision view of the garden. "We compared this with crime scene photographs, and we can tell based on the view that this camera was definitely set up in Arthur Hill's plot. It's the same make and model that he purchased from the surplus store, so we're comfortable saying it's his camera." Frost paused for a moment, then continued a little more hesitantly. "It looks like she might have smashed it—or someone definitely did. But whoever broke it didn't really understand how it works. The camera records to a micro SD card and we recovered that from the device undamaged. The rest of the camera is downstairs in the crime lab, along with the shears."

Jane could see Maura stir from the corner of her eye, as if that was her signal to head downstairs, and Jane looked the doctor back into her seat. Not yet.

"I feel like you're burying the lede, Frost." Jane spoke to him without taking her eyes of Maura, but after a moment she looked back to the screen. "Do we have the murder?"

"Yes."

"View of the killer?"

"No."

Jane grimaced. "What? How? Pull it up."

"Whenever the sensor is activated on the camera, it takes 30 seconds of video. Looks like he had it set up every Thursday night, and we definitely have Arthur Hill being stabbed, but the assailant is impossible to make out." Frost clicked through to a folder of dozens of files, scrolled down, and selected one. "Fair warning if you're squeamish."

Jane scoffed. "Fair warning to who? Yourself?"

"Whom," Maura corrected automatically, and then clapped a hand over her mouth. Jane stared in utter disbelief, before looking back to Frost.

"Play the video."

Frost hit play, and a silent clip played. Arthur Frost was standing in the direct line of the camera and speaking emphatically with someone out of view. After several seconds of arguing, Hill turns away, and there's the flash of an arm as a pair of garden sheers get driven directly into the side of Hill's neck, and him collapsing to the ground.

Jane heard Maura gasp, and she knew it wasn't because of the violence. They had noticed the same thing at the same time.

"Right-handed," the two women said in unison.

Jane exhaled a sigh of relief. "Amy's a leftie. It's not her."

"Well that's good news." Korsak nodded, before clearing his throat a little nervously. "But you know that's not enough to exclude her, Janie. Not after we found her with the weapon and the camera. It's a start, but we've had cases where lefties have killed right-handed, right, doc?" He looked to Maura for back up, who blanched. Jane watched her struggle not to answer before she reluctantly conceded.

"…Yes. There have been a few cases where a left-handed killer has committed the murder with their non-dominant hand. It almost never happens in the reverse, but living in a society designed primarily for right-handed people means that most left-handed people, while not ambidextrous, do typically have greater strength in their non-dominant hand than right-handed people."

Jane groaned loudly. "Seriously? You guys are gonna tell me that she's, what, a switch stabber? Cutting guys down from both sides of the plate? Sure, yeah. She's the Mickey fucking Mantle of stabbing guys with garden shears. Come on."

Korsak and Frost exchanged glances, before the younger man spoke up. "We want to believe you when you say she didn't do it, Jane. This just isn't enough to prove it." Frost clicked to another video. "Now this one is from 15 minutes later." The video offered one clear shot of the garden and then suddenly everything was blurry. It took several seconds for Jane to realize what was happening. The camera lens was wet. A figure was moving in the shot, but it was impossible to make out any detail.

"They're hosing down the crime scene," Jane muttered. "That explains why there wasn't a massive trail of blood the next day."

And I got something else to show you," Frost said.

Jane already knew what it was. "Yeah, alright. Let's see it."

Over the next few minutes, Frost played several videos. The same angle that had prevented the view of whoever had stabbed Hill also provided an excellent vantage point for most of the rest of the garden. And each video showed a slender figure in jeans and a hoodie moving from plot to plot, collecting flowers. In two of the videos, the figure approached the camera close enough that they were immediately identifiable.

Amy.

Jane sighed. She glanced over at Maura, who had been watching the screen with a frown, but was now turning her face towards Jane. The doctor had been right, of course. Jane knew she was going to be. Maura, for her part, was looking something less than thrilled to be proven correct.

"One more," Frost said, and clicked on the very last file. "This is from an hour after the murder."

The clip showed Amy near Arthur Hill's garden plot, trimming flowers in the plot directly across from his. Left-handed, Jane noted. At the thirteen second mark of the video, Jane watched as she looked up and directly into the camera. Even in night vision, the moment of recognition and panic was clear. The video then showed her disappear off screen. Moments later, the screen is covered and the video ends.

Jane let out a sharp laugh. "So you're telling me she kills a guy in cold blood, drags his body to the compost pile, buries it, and then instead of leaving, she's just walking around stealing flowers?"

Korsak shrugged. "It puts her at the scene, Jane. I'm not saying it passes the smell test but she's caught on camera in the garden that soon after the murder? It's not great. And now that we've got a time stamp for the murder, we know she's not accounted for during that time."

"Unbelievable," Jane groaned in exhaustion and scrubbed her hands down her face. She checked her watch and found it was already past midnight. Jane groused, then looked back up at the screen of files, eyes jumping all over the screen. She frowned. "There's a video file every morning around 7:15am. What's that?"

"That's the number 8 bus. It's a pretty high end trail cam, really good range, so the bus is big enough to trigger the motion sensor all the way from the street. So we've got the first trip of the number 8 on all these Thursdays. A couple times we get the bus's next trip, too, but for the most part it looks like Hill would get to the garden early and take the camera down so no one would see it during the daytime." To demonstrate, Frost played one of the videos, and indeed, it showed the bus passing by in the background.

"Oh," Maura said from behind them. "So the time stamp is wrong."

Everyone turned to look at the doctor. She looked back at them.

"It's wrong? How can you say for sure?" Jane looked from the screen to Maura.

"The 8 has its first outbound trip at 5:30am. If this is in fact the first outbound 8 bus, there's no way it's 7:15am."

Jane gawked. "You just…know when the 8 bus departs?"

"I know when every bus departs." Maura stated it so plainly, like why wouldn't she just have the entire transit system schedule memorized.

In the back of Jane's mind, she was distantly aware that she just fell further in love. She chose to express this as she always did, with razzing.

"Have you ever taken a bus?"

"I don't see what that has to do with—"

"5:49am!" Frost interjected, and now everyone was looking at him. He'd pulled the MBTA website up on the screen, and was checking what time the 8 bus was due at the nearest stop to the community garden. Maura immediately pulled out her phone, tapped it a few times, and began scrolling. Jane watched her curiously for a moment, before turning back to the Korsak and Frost.

"Okay, so that changes our time of death. If the time stamp on the videos is off by an hour and twenty-five or so, that means time of death is…" Jane trailed off as she did the mental math.

"Approximately 4:10am," Maura chimed in cheerfully, without looking up from her phone.

Jane shot her a look that Maura didn't see. This was getting to be a lot of thunder-stealing for someone accustomed to doing the thundering on this particular floor of the precinct. She turned back to her colleagues. "So now we can re-evaluate hers and everyone else's alibis, maybe we can exclude her now."

At that, Maura made a triumphant noise, and leaped up to walk over and thrust her phone right in Jane's face. Jane blinked, drawing her head backwards to be able to focus on what was in front of her. It was Amy's personal Candidgram account, and it was a photo of her at Dunkin' Donuts. It was from the day of the murder. There was a clock on the wall in the background, and Jane's eyes widened as she read the time. She grabbed the phone out of Maura's hands and stared.

"This is the one near her apartment." The ability to immediately identify a Dunkin' Donuts on sight was clearly a familial trait. "It's at least 20 minutes away from the garden. We can confirm with security footage from the store that she was there that day." Jane whirled around to face Korsak and Frost triumphantly, holding out the phone. "4:17am, gentlemen! There's no WAY she could have gotten to this Dunkin' if she killed him."

Frost grinned and Korsak sighed in relief, then spoke. "That's good. Hopefully they store their security footage long enough. If we can prove she was there, we know she didn't kill him. It still doesn't explain why she's got the murder weapon in her things, though, Jane. She could be an accomplice still. But no one's gonna charge her tonight."

"We don't know that it's the murder weapon yet," Jane pointed out.

"I think that's my cue," Maura said. "I'm going to go downstairs to evaluate the shears and make sure the DNA testing gets sent out first thing in the morning. I'll expedite the results and make sure we get them back by EOD."

"Yeah. And I need to talk to Amy," Jane stated. Korsak looked a bit skeptical, but she cut him off before he could object. "Just give me that five minutes you said I could have. I won't step out of line. I will respect that she's a person of interest in this. Then I'm going to watch every single fucking video that thing took. Figuring out the actual murderer is on there somewhere."

Korsak eyed Jane wearily. "Two minutes. She's in Interview One. You know you're going to have to disclose your relationship with her first thing tomorrow to Cavanaugh, right? Until we clear her he's not going to let you work it."

Jane nodded begrudgingly. "Which is why I'll be here all night. Which you, of course, knew nothing about." She looked at her sergeant imploringly, and the older man heaved a huge sigh.

"Yeah, yeah. I had no idea you stuck around. I wouldn't have allowed it if I knew."

Jane flashed a brief, grateful smile, then looked to Maura more seriously. "Can I talk to you out in the hallway real quick first?"

"Really quickly. Ugh, sorry," Maura sighed. "Yes, of course."

Maura made her way out into the hallway, with Jane right behind her. She turned to face Jane, but Jane was breezing right past her, grabbing Maura by her elbow and dragging her into the unisex washroom on the other side from the bullpen.

Jane locked the door behind them, pressed Maura up against it, and kissed her for the second time.

It surprised Maura. She let out a little gasp as Jane whisked her abruptly into the bathroom, and was startled again when she was pressed up against the door. But she melted immediately into Jane's insistent kiss, returned it hungrily, her arms coming up to wind themselves languidly around Jane's neck.

Jane's heart felt like it would burst out of her chest, but it ached too. Something about the fact that Maura had never told her about her feelings or her sexuality felt duplicitous, and it was holding her back. Jane broke off the kiss, pressed her forehead against Maura's, and kept her eyes closed as she spoke quietly.

"I can't deal with this right now." She heard Maura's sharp intake of breath, and immediately rushed to clarify. "I want to. I want to deal with it. But I have to—I need to solve this case, first. I gotta make sure she's okay. And I needed to tell you that, so you didn't think I was just ignoring what happened earlier."

Jane could feel Maura's forehead twitch against her own, and knew that she had opened her eyes. Jane did as well, and the two women stared at each other quietly. Jane kissed Maura for a third time, wondered just how long she would keep count, and pulled her gently away from the door.

"I'll talk to you tomorrow."

Jane watched Amy through the one way glass of interrogation room, and sighed. Jane steeled herself for what was sure to be among the least pleasant conversations she'd had in a while, and came around to the door. She announced herself with a knock before she opened the door.

The moment Amy saw Jane, there was the briefest flash of relief, but her features quickly turned furious.

"You've got some fucking nerve," she spat out.

"They're releasing you. You aren't getting charged right now."

"Right now? I did not kill that guy, Jane," Amy fumed. "And who is 'they'? Isn't this your case?"

Jane held up her hands, weakly trying to broker peace with a gesture. "Not as long as you're a suspect it isn't. But I know you didn't do it. I'm gonna prove it, I promise." She took the seat across from Amy, who did not look at all pacified. "I only have a few minutes, and I need to ask you some questions."

Jane could easily read Amy's temptation to be obstinate with Jane, even if it would be to her own detriment. It was something they had in common. But better judgement won out, and Amy's posture relaxed slightly. "Fine, go," she said.

"Did anyone besides Arthur Hill suspect that you were stealing the flowers?" Jane asked. Amy shifted with embarrassment, even though she had bigger problems than being outed as the flower thief. Jane worried for a second that she was going to waste time and burn trust by denying it, so she quickly followed up. "We recovered all the video from the camera."

Amy sighed. "A few people from the garden saw him confront me and Bex about it. He'd seen me in the garden really early one morning and he was starting to put it together. But he mostly just yelled homophobic shit at us, no one believed him, and then everyone got mad at him. But what does that have to do with anything?"

Jane shrugged. "If someone else was trying to catch you, that could have put them at the scene the day he got murdered. Did you ever see anyone else there early in the morning?"

"I did almost get caught by that older woman who runs the place, Lorraine? She was there putting up those look don't touch signs, and I made a break for it out the other side of the garden. I'm pretty certain she didn't see me. She never said anything to me, anyway."

Jane watched Amy carefully as she asked the next question. "You were there the day he was murdered. You missed it by an hour"." Amy drew in a sharp breath. Jane continued. "It was the morning you stole the camera. Do you remember anything—anything—unusual about that day?"

Jane watched as Amy's eyes got wide with panic, then wet with frustration. Her brow creased in desperation before her features released into a look of resignation. "No," she said finally. "When I saw the camera, I freaked out. I grabbed it and I left right away. I don't remember anything but that." Then she suddenly looked up. "Wait, it was wet. But I knew it hadn't rained. I remember being surprised that someone had watered overnight."

Jane reached out to take Amy's hand gently, a little surprised when the other woman let her. She gave it a squeeze. "Cooperate with the investigation as much as you can. Go home, don't talk to anyone about this. I'm gonna clear you."

Korsak opened the door of the interview room and looked at Jane, wordlessly communicating that her time was up. Jane gave one more squeeze and dropped Amy's hand.

"I promise."

"Jane?"

Jane's eyes opened to bright lights and the disorienting sight of Maura towering above her. Immediately, she shot up from the ground, her gangly limbs suddenly ramrod straight, like one of those thumb push puppet toys, when the button is released and the tension in the elastic is restored. She blinked blearily at Maura, then looked at her watch, then looked at the mess of pillows and cushions that she'd pulled off of Maura's office furniture to construct a makeshift bed.

"I didn't think you'd be here so early," Jane croaked. She cleared her throat, trying to banish the sleep first from her voice, and then from her eyes, rubbing them with the palms of her hands before looking at Maura again. Maura, who looked disturbingly presentable, in a silk blouse and pressed slacks, her hair with those easy, wavy curls and not even looking very tired at all. Jane frowned.

"You are a cyborg. You couldn't have been home more than five hours and you look…like you do." Jane was trying to tease, but she couldn't keep the awe entirely out of her voice.

Maura blushed lightly at the subtle praise, but spoke clinically. "I have a very exact understanding of my sleep patterns. I make sure to wake up between REM cycles." She bent down to pick up one of the pillows, and Jane immediately snatched it up before she could.

"No! No, I'll do it. It's my mess. I'm sorry about it, I just couldn't go home and I don't think my neck would have recovered if I fell asleep at my desk again." She quickly returned all the cushions and pillows to where she was certain she found them, and watched in slight dismay as Maura followed after her, correcting the placement of every item.

"And you wanted to know what I found right away," Maura said evenly, looking over at Jane, who nodded.

"The reddish brown stain on the shears is in fact blood, and they are one of the models we identified as a match for the size and shape of the neck wound. I tossed my weight around to make sure we have results ASAP." "Threw," Jane corrected.

"How does that make a difference? I think that one still counts for me"

"Nope, it doesn't."

Maura huffed quietly, and took a seat in her chair before looking up at Jane. A small smile broke through her features, and Jane realized that Maura was sitting on good news.

"She voluntarily consented to being fingerprinted last night, and I found her prints all over the camera, which is no surprise," Maura said. "The only other prints on it were Hill's. The shears, meanwhile, were wiped down, but not very well. I recovered a partial print that belongs to Amy, but I also found a second partial that is definitely not hers, and doesn't match anyone in AFIS."

Jane's brows shot up and her eyes widened. Oh, she could smell it now. They were going to solve this fucking case. "Oh shit, that's fantastic. If we can exclude Amy with CCTV footage, it won't matter if her prints are on it." Jane checked her watch again. "Frost couldn't get the footage last night because the manager of the Dunkin' wasn't in until 7am. Cavanaugh is in at 9am. I'm gonna go look at the videos again while I still can."

Despite announcing that she was leaving, Jane stood in place, and watched Maura a little awkwardly. She suddenly felt like she needed to be dismissed. Maura offered a knowing smile and inclined her head just slightly at the door to her office. "I'll call you as soon as I get the results, Detective."

Jane grinned, and was gone.

She'd been too tired to see it last night, but in the light of day, after the world's most mediocre two hour nap, it was suddenly so apparent. Jane clicked between the two videos to be sure, and felt herself growing warm. She wished she didn't always get so sweaty when she cracked a case. She took screen caps of the relevant frames, and sent them to the precinct printer.

It was at the moment that Frost burst triumphantly into the bullpen, a flash drive in hand.

"Three months!" Frost crowed. "They keep three months of security footage. She's on it, Jane. She couldn't have been at the garden."

The relief was enormous, and now she could smell blood in the water, too. Jane stood up from her desk, grabbed her jacket, and turned to her partner.

"And I think I know who was."