Caleb had woken up in his hotel bed shortly after 7 am. His sleep pattern was that of a schoolboy, and even at weekends, he rarely slept in. He had stayed in bed for a while and then gone to the bathroom to go to the restaurant.
Caleb had gotten into the habit of starting his breakfast with something sweet. That morning, he had put together a crepe with fresh fruit and strawberry curd at the buffet. After looking around the room lined with hotel guests for a while, he reached for his smartphone and looked at its display.
"You don't usually sleep this late," he said to Elizabeth as if she could hear him.
A waitress asked the boy if he wanted a coffee. He ordered a hot chocolate, reached for his cell phone again, and called a number he had saved in his favorites.
"Caleb, how are you?" his mother answered.
"Great, Tarek and I saw the dungeon yesterday; it's cool! We have to go there together sometime. You have to come with us; Boston is awesome!"
"As if you want your mother there --" Gabriele Haynes rebutted. "What time does the football game start today?"
"At 3.30 pm. It will be awesome; we're all in a winning mood here! We're going to crush the Jets today!"
Caleb's eyes lit up as if he believed what he was telling his mother. He briefly remembered the conversation he'd had with Elizabeth that evening. For a moment, he felt a twinge of guilt, which was immediately wiped away by the anticipation of the day with Elizabeth.
"Well, I must go now; we want to go to the Patriots fan store first. Tarek doesn't have the new jersey yet; that's not even possible in the VIP lounge --"
"Then you guys go and have fun," Haynes replied before Caleb ended the conversation with a greeting to his father.
The student then looked at his cell phone display again. Elizabeth still needed to text him. If not, I'll text her in ten minutes.
Elizabeth and Caleb had strict rules for contacting each other. Neither of them could save the other's number on their cell phones or even write it down on paper. In these days of digital address books, Elizabeth's number was the only one Caleb knew by heart. Neither of them were allowed to make a phone call to each other from their cell phones. The respective mobile phone provider would have recorded the connection. The only permitted communication via their cell phones was sending texts, which had to be deleted immediately after being sent or received.
The waitress now appeared at the table and served Caleb his cocoa.
"So, traveling alone in Boston?" she asked the student.
"With my mother," he replied and added shortly afterward: "Child of divorce --"
After receiving a sympathetic look, he poured himself a cup of cocoa and reached for his cell phone again. Once again, he hesitated. Then, he finally entered Elizabeth's number and began to compose a text to her.
"Did you hear about the cop who killed the people?" a man at one of the neighboring tables asked his companions at that moment. "It was on the news. Here in Boston. They picked her up tonight."
Caleb left his text for the moment. He listened with interest to the man at the following table.
"She killed three people and pretended to be looking for the murderer. Clever."
"Well, not that clever," a sprightly pensioner, one of the other people at the table, countered. "The woman is supposed to be such a genius; they said something about her."
Caleb was disturbed. Whatever these strangers at the following table thought they had seen on the news, he had to find out what it was all about. He would access the internet on his smartphone and get to the bottom of the story. But first, he wanted to send the text to Elizabeth. Just as he was about to type the last sentence, he was interrupted by an incoming phone call. He needed to find out the caller's number.
"Hello?" the teenager answered cautiously.
"Are you Caleb Hayes?" inquired a voice the student had never heard before.
"What's this about?"
"I have a message for you from Captain Elizabeth Rizzoli. I'm her lawyer."
All at once, everything around the teenager seemed to fade out. The babble of voices, the music, the hustle and bustle at the breakfast buffet. The boy's heart seemed to swell up in his chest and choke him off.
"What's going on?" he asked, his throat suddenly dry.
"She says you mustn't contact her in any way. Under no circumstances! You are to leave Boston immediately and only contact her once you hear from her. She seems to be very serious, so please follow this advice."
"Is she ... so ... what was on the news?" Caleb stuttered.
"Please," Vaughn insisted. "Captain Rizzoli is telling you that even one digital contact would cause a catastrophe - sorry, I'm just relaying what she said! - would threaten your life. Mr. Hayes, please follow my client's advice!"
Caleb thought the ground was spinning beneath his feet as he replied, breathing heavily and as if in shock. "Oh, man. That didn't come a second too soon --"
xxx
"It's it then. When are you leaving?"
Like all the other members of the task force, Nikki had completed her paperwork for the handover. Because of the suspicion against her mother, Nick's team was immediately withdrawn from the investigation, and the case was transferred to another team.
Nikki was now standing in the storeroom converted into Rupert Mardas' office, where the detective was packing up his things.
"I'm going to the airport this afternoon," he replied. "I need to be back at my station now; the Molloy case is being reopened."
Nikki's hair was shaggy, and her face was without makeup. She was wearing the same clothes as the day before, but her movements were calmer and more deliberate than usual.
"What do you think?" she asked the sergeant as he stowed his belongings in a leather bag. "Can this be true? Do you trust my mother where?"
"What do you want to hear from me now? She gave up the love of her life over a murder case. And yet, she never solved the case. That's strange, isn't it?"
"But what motive would she have had?"
"Molloy was Elizabeth's doctor. He knew things about her that no one else knew. Maybe Molloy discovered something that Elizabeth didn't want Leonore to know?"
Nikki didn't want to agree. "As a doctor, he shouldn't have told her."
"You're good," Mardas laughed. "You were there once. We got cozy after two bottles of wine. Sure, even our doctors were bound to secrecy, but how could you be sure you had something to hide? Everyone knew everyone back then."
"All right, let's assume that Molloy found out something about my mother that Leonore wasn't allowed to know under any circumstances. What could that have been?"
Mardas pushed his chair under the canteen table and then sat down casually on the tabletop while he closed his leather bag. He had now tidied up his makeshift office and was ready to hand it back to the cleaning staff. "A hereditary disease, perhaps?" he mused aloud. "She and Leonore had thought about getting married; they wanted to start a family together. What if Elizabeth had passed on something bad to their children?"
Nikki blinked a few times and frowned deeply. "My mother would have spoken to Sarah and Leonore about it! And she would never have passed on a disease to her children lightly. That means I wouldn't be sitting here with you today."
"We're talking about a different time, sixteen years ago," he paused and pointed at the detective. "And even longer."
"If they were as in love as you say, it would only have brought them closer together," Nikki objected. "I wouldn't even leave Mike if he had all the illnesses in the world."
"Maybe Leonore wouldn't have left her either," Mardas conceded. "But who's to say Elizabeth was aware of that? Perhaps she wasn't able to empathize with her feelings to that extent. Or Elizabeth didn't want to risk it; it could have come to a fight between Elizabeth and Molloy. And then she struck him down in anger. And when she saw that Molloy was dead, she might have thought about how she had to do it so that she wouldn't be convicted. Her DNA was at the crime scene, but it didn't matter because half the region's DNA was in the office. And because she's damn clever, she created this scene and put us all in checkmate. Then all she had to do was play the desperate detective who couldn't solve the case - and the perfect crime was solved."
Nikki resisted the idea that Mardas could possibly be right with his theory with every fiber of her. She knew that from now on, she would no longer be authorized to inspect the case file. Just as she was aware that Nick would soon assign her to another case. She had thought over and over again about the unbelievable accusation after her mother's arrest; she hadn't slept a wink in the night that lay behind her. But no matter how hard she tried, she couldn't conclusively refute the accusations.
"Now, let's just assume that Elizabeth did murder her doctor back then. That was sixteen years ago, and she couldn't be proven guilty of anything other than manslaughter. After all that time, she might get another five years, two of them on probation. Sure, she would lose her job and her reputation. But she has enough money to move somewhere where nobody knows her after prison. Under these circumstances, why would she suddenly commit three premeditated murders so long afterward? Because if she's found guilty now, she'll never get out of prison again."
Mardas stood up from the table, shouldered his bag, and gestured that he wanted to leave the chamber. He replied: "Please don't be angry with me, but I've been wondering for a long time whether Elizabeth even knows what she's doing."
xxx
"If only it could be like this at every police station," Elizabeth observed as she was led to her lineup. "Impeccably dressed officers as far as the eye can see!"
Five completely uninvolved women were placed alongside the captain as suspects for her lineup. They had to resemble her in the features described by the eyewitnesses. For convenience, they had been chosen from among the officers of the BPD, where the confrontation would now take place. Elizabeth couldn't help but boast as the other five ladies were dressed in pantsuits that were similar to Elizabeth's.
"You should save the jokes for the judge," replied an officer monitoring the proceedings.
Although the injury to Elizabeth's forehead was minor, her lawyer had insisted that the other women in the room also had to have plasters applied to their foreheads.
Elizabeth herself was now much more relaxed than before in her holding cell. Her defense attorney had informed her that she had stopped Caleb from texting Elizabeth just in time.
"What a wonderful band-aid," Andrew Kline from the DA's office noted as he looked at the captain's injury. "That was very clever of your client to change her appearance before the lineup quickly."
The prosecutor had taken the opportunity to attend the confrontation in person. Together with Rosalyn Vaughn and two officers, he stood in the next room behind the one-way mirror and waited for the witnesses to be brought in one by one.
"My client was in an exceptional emotional situation last night," Vaughn replied. "Her self-harm was a result of the shock she suffered from the arrest."
"That's Fine by me," Kline waved it off. "I'm not looking for a scapegoat here; I'm looking for the perpetrator."
With that, he nodded to one of the officers, who led Florence Cantrell into the room. She had rented out the phaeton where Elizabeth had been brought to the crime scene.
"Please take a good look at the women and then tell us if you recognize any of them," the prosecutor asked the witness.
Florence let her eyes roam calmly and attentively over the six women standing behind the one-way mirror with numbered slips of paper in their hands. "Well, they all look quite similar," she explained after a few seconds. "But it was number three."
Vaughn and Kline looked at each other in silence. The person was named Elizabeth Rizzoli.
"Are you sure?" Kline asked.
"Absolutely," Cantrell confirmed with a nod. "That style of dress. You know, the other women wear their pantsuits. But the woman with the number three - she wears it too. I'm sure that was the woman on TV!"
Rosalyn Vaughn listened up. "From the television?" she repeated emphatically.
"Yes, the news has been reporting it all the time today."
Now that they were among themselves again, Andrew Kline explained: "You know, I wondered why Captain Rizzoli put on that show in her cell last night. But I must hand it to her; she's just a genius! How do you think that's going to look to the judge? A suspect who puts her story in the media just before the witness interview so that all the interviewees who might have identified her look like they've been influenced by TV."
Rosalyn Vaughn had already had similar thoughts. Even if she would never have admitted it, of course. "As I said, my client did not control her senses when she made the call. She had suffered a severe blow to the head shortly beforehand. She is innocent and therefore had no reason to influence any witnesses."
"Don't tell me that," Kline waved it off. Then he stepped very close to the window, behind which Elizabeth was still looking into the room's emptiness with a relaxed expression. He whispered: "What else are you keeping from us? And why are you telling stories that aren't true? There has never been a girl found --"
xxx
Caleb had been sitting in front of the TV in his hotel room for two hours. John Michaels from the crosshairs had done a great job. The news of the exalted captain under suspicion of murder had spread like wildfire and was a topic on all channels. The news channel, which, like the newspaper Crosshair, belonged to the Boston-based Adler publishing group, had been reporting on the case continuously for more than an hour, with more and more details coming to the media.
"At this time, all we can say is that our investigation has turned up evidence that suggests Captain Rizzoli's involvement in the crime is possible," the BPD spokesman told journalists who made statements to the bureau.
"Is it true that Captain Rizzoli led the investigation into the case herself?" one reporter wanted to know.
"Captain Rizzoli was in charge of the investigation because of her high qualifications, that's true."
Another reporter asked, "Do you think it's possible that other cops are involved in this case?"
"Right now, we don't even know if Captain Rizzoli is involved in the case. It's completely exaggerated and inappropriate to question the investigative apparatus. The BPD works flawlessly and reliably."
Caleb reached for the remote and turned off the sound. The conversation with the press officer had already been broadcast for the third time, and the teenager could have heard the answer.
"Fuck, what are they trying to pin on you?" he exclaimed angrily, hitting his pillow hard. "You can't even kill a mosquito without feeling guilty."
Caleb was highly concentrated. He tried to think as rationally as he could about what he could do in his situation. Of course, Elizabeth's lawyer had told him to leave Boston and stay out of contact until Elizabeth approached him on her initiative. Caleb understood that this would be the safest thing for him. But would it also be the best thing for Elizabeth? The hotel room was still paid for the following day, and his mother would ask uncomfortable questions if he returned early from his trip to Tarek.
I must be able to help you somehow.
When the boy realized that new material on the case was finally being broadcast after numerous reruns, he hurriedly turned the sound back on. The news channel's presenter had just explained matter-of-factly: "We understand that Captain Elizabeth Rizzoli will be brought before the magistrate in about an hour. After that, it will be decided how urgent the suspicions against her are. I am now joined on the phone by the investigating prosecutor. I want to welcome Andrew Kline."
In the lower corner of the screen, a slightly older picture of the prosecutor was shown, whose voice was now played tinnily into the studio.
"Counselor, what exactly will the charges be?"
"First of all, it still needs to be determined whether the DA's office will press charges. Based on the available evidence, we have initially applied for an arrest warrant, and we will decide on how to proceed in cooperation with the investigation team now responsible."
"How long has Elizabeth Rizzoli been able to work on the case in which she is now a suspect? Or, to put it another way: how much time would she have had to destroy leads and evidence?"
Kline paused demonstratively before answering: "The first two murders were committed in the morning hours of last Wednesday, the third in the afternoon hours of the same day. So Elizabeth Rizzoli spent three days investigating the case until --"
Caleb paused.
Wednesday morning?
The student jumped up from his bed with a jerk.
Okay, stay calm. What are you doing now? Exactly! I've got her lawyer's phone number!
Caleb immediately reached for his smartphone and called up the call history. The number for the defense attorney was displayed at the top. Without giving it a second thought, he dialed the number. Only after a while did Rosalyn Vaughn answer the call.
"Elizabeth isn't with me," she explained to Caleb, who had asked to speak to the captain. "She's being taken to the detention center right now, and I'll meet her there. They're about to decide on the warrant. Have you left Boston yet?"
"No, and I don't intend to!" the boy replied excitedly. "So the judge hasn't decided anything yet?"
"No, the date is --"
"I have important information!" Caleb interrupted, entirely beside himself.
"What's happened?"
The student first had to collect himself to organize his thoughts. He replied, "You're lucky I haven't left yet!"