Things moved quickly after that.
First, they returned to the community garden, where crime scene technicians found, underneath the faucet handle of one of the water spouts, a partial print created in a small smear of blood.
Just after lunch, Maura called with the DNA results. It was Arthur Hill's blood on the garden shears, and she was comfortable saying with a significant degree of certainty that it was the murder weapon. They brought the crime lab the entire faucet from the community garden.
No judge in their right mind was going to give them a search warrant on the basis of two unknown fingerprints and some grainy stills from a video, so Frost and Frankie tailed the suspect all afternoon, and Frankie climbed inside of a garbage can to retrieve a coffee cup.
Maura called again just before dinner time. The prints were a match. They had their signed search warrant before first pitch of the Red Sox game, which Jane and Korsak listened to on their way.
What Jane had seen in the two videos was a vehicle. To be more accurate, she saw it in just the one. In the video where Arthur Hill was stabbed, in the distant background, the very edge of the bed of a truck was visible. In the video from an hour later, in which Amy stole flowers and then the camera, the truck was gone.
Bex's truck.
Bex had set off Jane's gut in the garden that day with her sour behaviour around the detective, but she'd mistakenly believed Amy when she said it was because Jane was hot. Jane was hot, but it turned out the cold reception was about something else entirely.
Jane hadn't made a very good first impression with Bex, and she made an even worse second one, when she arrested her on suspicion of murder and impounded her truck as evidence.
Maura called one last time around midnight. They'd found blood on the driver's side car mat, as well as organic matter consistent with the compost recovered from the garden, and the DNA results would be available the next day. As usual, the medical examiner refused to speculate, but she did tell Jane she wouldn't really blame her if she assumed it was Arthur Hill's.
Jane slept like a baby that night.
Bex had rich parents and had lawyered up immediately, and once the blood in the truck was a match to Hill, a manslaughter plea deal was on the table.
Korsak refused to let Jane participate in the interrogation, which was a good call, both because Frost had gotten pretty good at them, and because who knew what might have happened if Jane had been in the room when Bex admitted to mixing the shears in with Amy's gardening supplies the day the body had been discovered. Everyone in the room heard the detective slap the one way glass.
When it was all done, Jane texted Maura a series of emojis: lady cop, smiling face with sunglasses, flexing bicep, first place trophy, face with steam from nose.
Maura had texted back just one: two hearts revolving around each other, and it made Jane's real heart race. She didn't respond, because she had one last thing to take care of.
Jane called Amy, and once again asked her to meet her at the shithole bar they used to hang out at. Amy agreed to stop by for five minutes on her way somewhere else, and she eyed Jane very, very warily when she arrived.
"It's over," Jane announced right away, and Amy relaxed just a bit, as she settled herself in the booth across from Jane.
"Like over over?" Amy asked, as she reached for and took a sip from the beer that Jane had waiting for her.
Jane nodded. "Plea bargain, signed confession, whole shebang. The DA just wrapped it up, and uh, I wanted you to hear it from me right away, because you told me to never doubt the speed of the lesbian grapevine: it was Bex."
Amy choked, and Jane waited patiently for her to get her coughing under control.
"Yeah, so… It's a trip," Jane said with a wry look. "The night he was killed, he was there to try and catch you, and Bex was there to try and catch him. She didn't even care about the shit he was doing in the garden so much but when he'd been a bigot to you two, she decided she was going to catch him stealing and finally get him out of the garden. They got into it and she says he threatened her, and she uh… She stabbed him. Stabbed him right in the neck."
Amy was completely pale, and stared at Jane wordlessly.
"So on the basis of his well-documented colourful and threatening behaviour, the DA agreed to involuntary manslaughter charges." Jane shrugged, visibly a little unsatisfied with the charges. "Which is a little light considering she buried the body, disposed of evidence, and tried to frame you, but I suppose it saves taxpayer dollars."
Amy now had her face in her hands, and she dragged them down a little so that she could open her eyes at Jane. Her words were muffled. "Sorry what?"
Jane took a sip of her own beer. "She mixed the shears in with your stuff on purpose. That's how they got in there. She did it when she went to go pack up the truck, when uh, you and I were talking at the garden."
"A woman that I was dating killed a man, and then tried to frame me for it," Amy said slowly and without inflection.
"Correct." Jane nodded.
"We had a really nice day that day!" Amy was devastated. "I helped her build a trellis! We had sex after! And she tried to frame me for murder?"
"Yes. Maybe you should have had sex first, might have changed things. Also, you're missing the silver lining," Jane said seriously.
Amy scoffed. "What's that?"
Jane leaned back in the booth and took a long swig from her beer. "It means I'm not the worst person you dated this summer." She flashed a grin, hoping that the humour would land. A long silence followed as Amy just stared at her in shock.
Finally, she laughed, albeit mostly in disbelief, and rolled her eyes. "You're right, that's super great news. Really happy for you."
"There's good news for you too," Jane continued with a grin. "As a favour to me, and because this isn't going to trial, the whole you-stealing-flowers thing is going to get swept under the rug with all of this. It's not even much of a crime, technically. So absolutely no one has to know. But could you…not do that again? Next year? Merely a suggestion, but probably wouldn't be good for business if you got caught."
"Ugh, yeah." Amy sighed. "Not my finest moment, I just…I couldn't lose the customers. Not in the first year." She looked ashamed. "How did you figure it out? You knew before you had the camera."
"It wasn't me, actually. Maura figured it out. With Frankie, if you can believe that." Jane's face made clear her displeasure that her beat cop little brother had been a part of figuring out something she hadn't.
"Mmm, and how is Maura?" Amy raised an eyebrow quite suggestively.
"Uh, good. She's good. Wow, I don't know why my voice is suddenly so much higher, but, yeah, she's good. Anyway, I know you gotta go, and I should too." Jane started sliding out of the booth. "I just wanted to let you know you were in the clear."
Amy captured Jane's wrist before she could bolt and looked up at her with serious eyes. "Thank you. I know this could have gone a lot differently for me," she said.
Jane shrugged like it was nothing. "It was honestly the least I could do for you."
"I don't know about that, but I will tell you one more thing, Jane Rizzoli." Amy let go of Jane and got up from the booth as well. "I really hope it works out for you with your little doctor," she said with a smile, but there was a gleam in her eye. "Because I swear, I'm going to warn every single woman in Boston about you."
Maura was surprised when the phone rang so late, but not surprised at all when the caller ID indicated it was Jane. She and dispatch were really the only two options at this time, and Maura wasn't on call. She answered on the second ring.
"Hello, Jane," Maura said. "I wasn't expecting to hear from you tonight. I assumed you'd be at the Dirty Robber celebrating."
"No Robber tonight. You would have been invited." Jane said it casually, like it hadn't been the case that, for the past six months, Maura had been conspicuously absent from the post-arrest shenanigans. No surprise there. Jane acting like it would be unusual for Maura not to be invited after half a year where it would have been unusual for Maura to be invited was just another entry on the long list of times Jane decided something was resolved and it didn't need to be discussed.
"I see."
"What're you up to?"
"I'm in bed." Maura left it there intentionally for a moment, and listened to the uncertain silence on the other end. She glanced down at the file folder open on her lap, closed it, and elaborated. "Just reviewing autopsy reports from other municipalities. Not a lot of time for the supervisory aspects of my job this past week."
"I apologize. I didn't realize you had a hot date with oversight tonight."
Maura could hear it in Jane's voice. She'd called for something concrete, but she was losing her nerve, was about to end the call, and planned to write it off as a favour to Maura. Maura was tempted to let her. She was a little annoyed that she never heard from Jane after the text messages. Two days ago there had been kissing, and a promise of discussing things when this case was over, and a small part of Maura wanted to leave Jane twisting in the wind if she couldn't even be the one to bring it up. But a much, much larger part of her needed clarity.
"Why did you call, Jane?"
Another weighty silence, then a long exhalation of breath.
"You said there were a lot of reasons why you didn't tell me."
"I did, and then I clarified that it was usually just one reason, but that reason changed over time."
Jane made an irritated little noise. "What was the first reason?"
"Well," Maura mused, as she settled back against her headboard. "First I need to ascertain what we're talking about. Is it my attraction to you, or my attraction to women?"
"Let's start with the first one."
"I suppose the very first reason why I didn't tell you was that I don't tend to immediately announce my attraction to people the moment I meet them, particularly in a professional setting."
"It was when I came down to introduce myself when I made Homicide?"
"Yes."
"So Tiffany meant nothing to you?" Jane made her voice wounded. Maura smiled.
"It was night and day," Maura said, recalling the moment the detective had first stepped into the morgue. Wild hair everywhere, blazer sleeves pushed up her arms, rugged and handsome and beautiful. But it had been the way she'd responded to Maura's social ineptitude with an easy, familiar grin that had really done her in. "I recognized you, of course, but you felt like an entirely different person when I met you while comfortable in your own skin."
"Alright, so that's one reason," Jane said absently, and Maura tried to figure out what else she was hearing over the phone.
"Are you writing these down?"
"Maybe. What was the next reason?"
Maura took a gamble, and asked her own question rather than answering. "Why aren't you here, Jane? Why are we having this conversation over the phone?"
There was the slightest hesitation, and Maura briefly resented that Jane had the ability to lie to her if she wanted to.
"You know that way I get when we close a case?"
"Mm, I know it very well." Maura slid down the headboard a little, sinking more comfortably into her pillows. "You're quite…pleased with yourself. Brash, arrogant, gregarious. It's very attractive on you." Maura's allowed herself the indulgence of imagining Jane's particular brand of post-collar swagger, her eyes drifting shut.
"Yeah," Jane said, and Maura could tell she was fond of the description, as her voice had dropped even lower than usual. "So If I came over…we wouldn't do much talking." Maura's eyes flew back open at the implication, and she drew in a shaky breath. "So what was the next reason?" Jane continued casually, before Maura could formulate a response, and Maura could hear the smug pleasure in Jane's voice at her reaction.
"Well it's a lot less exciting than what you just said," Maura said dryly, partially recovered. "As far as I could tell, there was no reason to believe you were interested in women. Whether you were closeted at work, repressed, or actually straight, I wasn't sure, but whichever way, expressing my attraction to you didn't make any sense." Maura took a deep breath. "Jane?"
"Yes?"
"I'll go through every reason if you want, but can I just skip to the one that matters?"
"…Yes."
Maura closed her eyes, and was suddenly very grateful this conversation hadn't happened in person. "The reason I didn't tell you when we became friends, when we were best friends, is that I had tamped down my attraction to you very effectively by then, because your friendship meant everything to me. I never told you I'd been attracted because I couldn't stand the thought that it might change something. We had such an easy intimacy, Jane. I'd never…" Maura sighed. "No other friends, of which there weren't many, and not even any romantic partners, had ever meant so much to me. I was worried that I would tell you, and things would change. The sleepovers would become weird, the physical affection… I'm not sure if you realize just how tactile we are with each other.
"So I had too much to lose, Jane. That's why I couldn't tell you. And I couldn't tell you I was attracted to women because I can't lie, and you would have had follow up questions, and so it's the same reason again. I couldn't risk it. I was certain you wouldn't reciprocate and the possibility that it would also change our dynamic was terrifying. And so I put it out of my mind entirely."
"You should have trusted me, Maur," Jane said softly, and Maura could feel tears spring to her eyes.
"I'd watched you push away a lot of people who expressed interest in you romantically."
"It would have been different," Jane insisted.
"How can you be so sure, Jane? You were so adamant you were straight. What would have happened? Would it have been the catalyst for you coming out? You would have just opened your eyes and realized—" Maura voice broke, caught against her unexpected anger. She tried to calm herself. "Perhaps I should have told you. I could have trusted you more. But you can't tell me I had no reason to worry."
"You're right," Jane said, without hesitation, and it caught Maura off guard. She wasn't sure what she was expecting, but it wasn't for Jane to concede so quickly. "You're right," she repeated. "Who knows what I would have done. It might have been too much for me." She sighed. "Maybe it still is. I think I just need some time."
Maura felt stung by the words, and nearly laughed. It had been years of friendship and months of fighting and weeks of varying kinds of tension, so sure, what was a few more days? "Whatever you need," she said ruefully. "It's late, I should turn in."
A silence followed, then Jane broke Maura's heart a little and took the easy out that Maura had offered.
"Yeah, I shouldn't keep you. Night, Maur."
"Goodnight, Jane."
