"Why do you assume that these pieces of paper are from Ishmael?" Nick checked his captain's claim with a frown as he looked questioningly at the scraps of paper with the mysterious inscription.

"The cookbook is over thirty years old, completely worn and yellowed. The notes, on the other hand, are so new that you could almost get your fingers dirty with the ink."

The meeting of the special task unit had started an hour late. While the search for Ishmael had been unsuccessful so far, Elizabeth's unexpected find had possibly given the investigation a decisive boost.

"And because Praetorius liked fishing, there's no way he could have owned a cookbook on game dishes?"

Elizabeth had gotten out of the habit of rolling her eyes in situations like this. "His bookshelves were all filled to the last inch, not a single book would have fitted in there," the captain explained instead. "But there was still one on his TV table, and it was about fly fishing. This book is about the same width as the cookbook. So I suspect Ishmael took it out to create a gap for the book in which he hid his message."

Nick was temporarily satisfied with this explanation, especially as he, like the rest of the team, felt that answering a much more pressing question was much more important anyway. He looked at one of the five pieces of paper. Their contents were also projected onto the wall for all the investigators to see. Then the lieutenant looked at Estelle Bepoldin, who had joined the special task unit at short notice as an expert in deciphering coded messages.

Nick pursed his lips and looked at her closely. "3SGAORA. Do you have any idea what that could mean?"

"Not yet," Bepoldin replied with a distinctive French accent, while incessantly trying out various decryption options on her laptop.

Nick took a deep breath and looked at his sister-in-law skeptically as he asked. "And what about you?"

Elizabeth took a deep breath and licked her lips as well before answering. "Let's take this note here: 1DUPERFA. Or this one: 1SIGIMPA. I can feel that this is somehow familiar to me. And I'm sure I'll figure out what it means. But on the other hand, I also believe that no one else can do it but me."

Estelle Bepoldin smiled bittersweetly as she replied without looking up from her laptop. "We French may not build the best cars, but believe me, Captain Rizzoli, we're not so bad at deciphering."

"I'm still afraid that your programs won't work here. Because whatever Ishmael is trying to tell me here can only be understood in the context of the whole case." Now Elizabeth rose from her chair and moved past Nick to the wall where the two remaining messages could be read: 3SGINDIPFA and 2SGOPTA. 1This is not an encryption in the traditional sense. It is a private message to me. Estelle can use all the systems in the world; without a personal connection between the sender and receiver, this message will not be read."

"I can tell you understand something about my work," the graceful Frenchwoman replied with a coy smile.

Elizabeth pursed her lips and looked briefly at Nick. "It looks like it: Ishmael seems to have thought of something nice for me. A game to challenge me. But at the same time, he's excluding everyone else from the game. Because he's very proud of what he's come up with. What's more, he only wants to challenge me, so he's arranged it so that no one but me can come up with the solution. And that's important too: he wants me to solve the puzzle!" She paused for a moment and furrowed her brows. "What a disappointment it would be for him if I didn't realize how originally he constructed it all? If I didn't pat him on the back and say. You've done really well! He knows me, for whatever reason, and by sending me these notes, he's also made it clear that no one but me will be able to read what's written on them."

"Why are there even five pieces of paper?" Mike asked. "He could have written it all on one, couldn't he?"

Elizabeth threw her arms in the air as if she had just won a boxing match. "Mike has just taught us once again that it's not just a fine art to answer questions," she then began to lecture happily. "It's an equally great challenge to be able to ask questions! Because yes, dear Mike, this little hurdle of our Ishmael actually seems to me to be another message rather than an increase in the level of difficulty!"

"If you also like this question, can you please explain it in a way that even stupid lieutenants will understand?" Nick remarked so matter-of-factly that his colleagues had to stifle a laugh.

Elizabeth, on the other hand, was unmoved. While she looked at the beautiful Estelle with an intense gaze, she continued: "He's perfectly aware that I'll have no trouble recognizing the correct order of the notes as soon as I know what they mean. It won't take me two seconds - so he could have saved himself the trouble! With this in mind, it suddenly seems interesting that he still went to the trouble of hiding five pieces of paper instead of just one. I'm supposed to put his message together, and that's not just a childish extra task, it's an essential part of the puzzle."

While the rest of the team took notes, Bepoldin raised her hand before explaining without waiting for a call. "Neither the cookbook nor the guidebook on fly fishing seem to be the key. If you take the numbers in front of the respective letter combinations as page numbers and put the content of these pages in relation to the letters, it does not result in a legible text. There is also no correspondence with the common encryption systems found in our databases. What about that murder sixteen years ago? Was there a particular book or text involved that could provide us with a basis for deciphering it?"

For the first time during the meeting, Elizabeth walked over to Mardas, who was watching the proceedings wordlessly but with growing unease. "What do you think, Mardas? Do you think we still have the books from Dr. McMillan's house somewhere in the cellar, to be searched for hidden notes sixteen years later?"

Nikki bit her lower lip and rolled her eyes.

"There was nothing hidden in his books," Mardas said curtly.

"You really checked back then?" Nikki wondered with a frown.

The rest of the team also listened.

"We didn't have to," Mardas waved it off. "Elizabeth has always been like this. If there had been a message hidden in the house in her day, she would have noticed."

"What rare recognition from an authoritative source," Elizabeth replied, before adding eloquently: "Besides, the perpetrator would certainly not have put up with it without resistance if we had simply overlooked a similar message."

"SGINDIMPFA," Nick now read out one of the mysterious letter combinations. "An anagram?"

"Find gips in," replied Bepoldin, who had long since run all five letter combinations through a decoding program for anagrams. "There are a total of seventy-four possible variants, but only this one makes sense in our language. DUPERFA would be bland pure or the peacock. SGAORA can at best be turned into AG rosa, SGOPTA results in anagrams such as sag top, gas top or fast butt. And SGIMPA also results in: am Gips."

"And if you don't separate the letters according to the individual pieces of paper, but rearrange them all together?" Nikki asked.

"Then we get thousands of remarkable sentences that deal with Gaddafi's penis torso, for example," Elizabeth replied, taking a deep breath.

"Do you also have the software on your laptop?" Bepoldin inquired in astonishment.

Elizabeth furrowed her brows and tapped her temple. "My software doesn't need a laptop," she replied with a grin, leaving the astonished Frenchwoman perplexed. "So, if we want to deal with our guests' backsides, pure boredom or surprisingly found plasters, we should do it in our spare time. Hiding a banal anagram from me would be beneath Ishmael's dignity in any case." She put on a rather friendly look when she didn't add another question: "And what would an anagram be besides?"

This time it was Mike who answered first. "Too obvious!"

Elizabeth stroked her hair and looked at the detective skeptically, then asked him with a sarcastic undertone, "But?"

Mike involuntarily began to think hard.

Nikki finally relieved her boyfriend by throwing the answer Elizabeth had wanted to hear into the room. "It wouldn't be individual! Anyone can decipher an anagram, but he's giving the task to you. Exclusively."

"What insight does that give us for our work?"

This time it was Nick who answered. "That you can all get on with your previous tasks while the decoding of these notes is being handled by Captain Rizzoli."

Elizabeth applauded the lieutenant appreciatively. Then she walked over to Estelle and pointed at her. "I'd like to have Estelle by my side, though."

"I think I'm out of my depth with your riddle," the Frenchwoman flirted and winked ironically.

"I don't need you so much as an assistant," the captain said. "I see myself more as a kind of muse."

xxx

Have you found out yet? Are you still in the game? What a question, of course you are. And no matter which way you go. I have everything under control.

I follow you wherever you go, whether I'm close to you or not. Even if I can't see you or don't know what you're doing. You're too easy to see through, too predictable.

So run, my little doggie! Smell every tree, every street corner. Look for the answer!

It makes no difference whether you find it or not. You can play our game any way you like.

I've already won anyway.

xxx

"Have you spoken to your mother yet?" Mike asked bluntly when he found Nikki in the hallway in front of the vending machine shortly after the meeting.

The members of the task force had gone to their posts. Nikki would be sitting down with Rupert Mardas in a few minutes for a meeting in his hastily improvised office, and Mike was planning to draw up a list of doctors Ishmael might have seen in the course of preparing Praetorius's murder.

"I was going to, but something came up," Nikki admitted hesitantly as she slid a bill into the vending machine to treat herself to a snack.

Mike arched a brow. "Like what?"

Nikki gave him a long, penetrating look and licked her lips. "Well, I guess what. Ma got in the way."

Mike's toned torso slumped gently. It was obvious that the secret he had been keeping for some time was weighing heavily on his mind. Nikki looked sympathetically at her partner and companion before promising, "I'll try again later, Mike."

He took a deep breath and nodded indulgently. Whatever the truth behind Elizabeth's conspiratorial meeting in the shopping center, it most likely didn't bode well. Nick himself wouldn't have wanted to talk to his captain about it, so he couldn't expect anything else from his girlfriend. However, one thought did occur to him. "Have you ever tried to connect the letters on the slips of paper with this video?"

"Sure," she admitted, "I'm sure you did too. You know, I have a really bad feeling. Like I've been spying on her. But you know what bothers me about this?"

Nick looked at her for a long time and shrugged his shoulders.

"Ma acts like there's nothing at all. No secret, no skeletons in the closet. I mean, if that story in the mall really had anything to do with the case here, she'd know about it."

"And you think Liz would behave differently then? Because she would be afraid that her dark secret would be revealed?"

The young woman still hadn't received a snack from the vending machine. "I'll tell you what I want to believe, Mike: she's just not letting on because she has nothing to hide."

Mike was breathing more shallowly now and pressed his lips together tensely. "And what explanation don't you want to believe, Nikki?" he dared to ask.

She felt uncomfortable formulating the thought. But finally she took heart. She almost felt like a traitor when she answered. "She doesn't let on because she just assumes it won't come out."

"You don't really believe that, do you?" Mike replied in a tone that showed that he had already considered the possibility himself. "We're still assuming that the video is a big misunderstanding," he encouraged himself and Nikki. "But if it wasn't, then it would look like this: Before Elizabeth would let Ishmael reveal her dark secret, she'd probably rather claim that she can't solve the case."

It was only when Nikki managed a disgruntled nod that Mike's tension was released in a violent blow to the vending machine, which dispensed not only the drinks but also the chips, before Nikki's slipped out the slot. Without paying any attention, the young woman added: "And that's the second time."