"Would you prefer water or crisps?" asked Nikki as she carefully stepped into the narrow room that Rupert Mardas had hastily converted into a makeshift office.
"You're buying?" he asked as he pushed his chair back to a new position from which he hoped to glimpse the narrow and much too high window.
"The round is on Mike," joked Nikki, soberly adding, "You've got it cozy here!"
The detective's meager office was a storage room. With just a few square meters, it offered just enough space to accommodate one of the narrow tables from the BPD canteen, on which a computer was standing that could only be connected to the Wi-Fi from one of the adjoining rooms with difficulty. There was no room for a visitor's chair, so Mardas stood up to offer Nikki his squeaky armchair, which the caretaker had found in the basement.
"Wouldn't it be better to go to the conference room?" the young woman suggested.
Mardas waved it off. "Don't you like it here with me? It's not exactly a palace, but at least I returned to the BPD a few months before I retired! My wife would return to me if she could see me here."
Nikki was surprised that Mardas had taken her mother's remark so openly. "So my mother was right with her comment?" she dared to ask cautiously.
Mardas tilted his head thoughtfully before answering in a fatherly tone: "Was she ever wrong?"
"Honestly, that's exactly what I wanted to talk to you about."
The door opened with a surprising bang, and a cleaning lady stood in the room, looking shocked. "Oh, I didn't know," she apologized in broken English. "This isn't where the cleaning supplies are?"
Nikki looked at Mardas, who was grinning, and he had to look down at the floor to keep from laughing out loud.
"Normally, yes," the sergeant reassured the cleaning lady after he had regained his composure. "But at the moment, we're just cleaning the streets of bad guys."
The woman in question left the room, where she usually found her cleaning materials, looking visibly overwhelmed. Nikki and Mardas waited a short while before bursting out laughing. The utterly innocent cleaner should not feel mocked.
"That was the fourth time today!" Mardas exclaimed after the two had calmed down again. Then he became serious again. "So, what did you want to talk to me about?"
"About my mother. And about back then. I mean, how can it be that someone murders that she can't solve? We both know her."
"Please don't forget that the rest of the team couldn't solve the murder either. But we weren't exactly stupid back then either!"
"You know what I mean. Elizabeth doesn't make many mistakes, and with a perpetrator who reveals so much about himself just by the way he arranges the crime scene, she should be able to handle it."
They were still standing in the small, stuffy room, looking lost.
"What do you say we discuss this over a little sightseeing tour?" Mardas suggested without further ado.
Nikki looked at him questioningly.
"I have to go back to my hotel to get some documents. Why don't you come with me to talk in the car?"
"Your hotel is two miles from here," Nikki thought aloud. "That means that at this time of day, we'll need about thirty minutes in Boston traffic."
Mardas smiled and reached for his jacket. "Don't get your hopes up," he warned. "All the traffic jams in Boston wouldn't be enough to explain Elizabeth's past!"
xxx
Elizabeth entered her house and smiled a little when she saw Maggie standing behind the kitchen island. As always, she was dressed in an old sweatshirt and sweatpants when she was off duty or had come home from a long night shift. She took a deep breath and carelessly threw her expensive coat over the back of the couch, walked wordlessly to the kitchen island, and sat down in her favorite chair.
Maggie looked at her wife closely and frowned a little. She didn't need to ask the captain if she had had a long, hard day; she could tell by how Elizabeth was walking and looking.
The redhead dropped her shoulders and took a deep breath before walking around the kitchen island. She wrapped her arms around Elizabeth's neck from behind, pressing her cheek against the captain's.
Elizabeth's smile grew, but she still had to take a deep breath. The events of the past few days weighed heavily on her.
"I think I know something that will help us both relax," Maggie whispered, kissing her wife below the ear.
Elizabeth's eyebrows shot up, and she licked her lips. "I hope you're not talking about taking Ben to Five Guys," she replied, almost annoyed.
Maggie had to grin and whisper, "Ben is at basketball practice, and then he's spending the night at Rick's. We have the house to ourselves all afternoon and all night."
Elizabeth turned her head and looked into her wife's blue eyes with a mischievous smile. "Is that true?"
"Mm," Maggie replied with an equally mischievous smile. She took Elizabeth's hand and led her up the stairs to the first floor without saying anything.
xxx
Elizabeth had her left arm tucked under her head and was staring at the ceiling while the fingertips of her right hand stroked the bare back of her wife, who had her head resting on Elizabeth's shoulder as she dozed off.
Before they entered the bedroom, the two women had switched off their cell phones. Now, immersed only in Maggie's scent and steady breathing, the captain freed her thoughts.
1DUPERFA. What else did you do back then to keep your mind occupied? 1 DU PERF A. Memorize PI to the hundred thousandth decimal place. 2SGOPTA. 2 SG OPT A.
The scent of the redhead seemed to waft over to Elizabeth from afar, and as soon as her sense of smell mingled with Maggie's breathing, the insights that had previously made no sense to Elizabeth's inner eye were linked.
1SGIMPA. Hiding a banal anagram from me would be beneath Ishmael's dignity. 1 SG IMP A.
"Not bad," Elizabeth whispered, barely audible, while the room seemed utterly immersed in her wife's breathing.
3SGINDIMPFA. So if we want to deal with the bottoms of our guests, pure boredom or surprisingly found casts, we should do that in our free time. 3 SG IND IMPF A. I'm supposed to put his message together, and that's not just a childish additional hurdle - it's an essential part of the puzzle!
"As sharp as ever, I'll give you that," Elizabeth realized as Maggie buried her face in the captain's neck and mumbled something incomprehensible.
After about twenty minutes, the redhead looked at her wife with tired eyes, and Elizabeth rose without any fuss to go over to a bookshelf mounted above a sideboard. She concentrated on leafing through the pages of one of her reference books until, after a few minutes, she had found everything she needed in it. Then she quickly went to the walk-in closet, put on a sweatshirt and jeans, put on her phone and only now switched it back on, dialed a number and looked at Maggie, who had her head resting on her hand, with a furrowed brow while she put the call on speaker.
"What's up, Liz?" Mike asked.
"Mike, please check Dr. Praetorius' patient records immediately. And his private contacts!"
"Okay, and what exactly am I looking for?"
Maggie raised her eyebrows questioningly.
Elizabeth didn't take her eyes off her wife. "A name." She reached for her badge and gun, which she had, for once, left on her bedside table. We're looking for someone called Matthai. M-a-t-t-h-a-i!" She ended the call and looked at the redhead, kissing her. 'I love you.'
Maggie smiled broadly. "I know," she replied, watching Elizabeth leave the bedroom. She took a deep breath, heaved herself out of bed with a sigh, and went towards the bathroom. "I'm always happy to help," she said with a smile.
xxx
"It wasn't as if we were just waiting for Elizabeth to submit. We were investigating like crazy, and the files on the case were filling entire cabinets. The problem was something else."
Fortunately, the notorious Boston traffic was less grueling that day than it usually is at this time of day. However, the countless construction sites, roadblocks, and lane closures regularly made it impossible for traffic to flow in the city due to destructively timed traffic lights having been dismantled.
It would take another day or two before they started preparing for the next obstacle. Despite Nikki's presence, Rupert Mardas had programmed the navigation system in his company car so that he could talk to his colleague without asking her for directions.
"Dr. McMillan wasn't just a surgeon; he also practiced as a general practitioner," he continued. "Almost everyone in the area was his patient, so we found DNA from half of Allston and the surrounding area. Even from Elizabeth, me, and most of the other colleagues. We checked almost every patient, alibis, phone records, bank transactions, surveillance cameras, and whatnot. None of it has led to a single real lead."
Someone honked their horn somewhere in the line of cars, pushing their way from one red light to the next. While Mardas involuntarily looked in the rearview mirror, Nikki didn't even notice the noise anymore.
"Let's leave that out of it," she said instead. "What was it that Elizabeth entered? What conclusions did she come to? I mean the conclusions that only she came to."
They crossed a bridge and would reach Mardas' hotel in a few minutes.
"She always talked about a circle."
"What did she mean by that?"
"Everything she could recognize carried her conclusion just so far until she came up against a contradiction. When she started thinking again from that point on, she came back to her original idea. She almost despaired over it."
Nikki was unsure how to approach her actual concern. Mardas had worked with her mother for many years, and no one she knew at the BPD knew more about her mother and her past than he did. However, she still couldn't be sure how much she could trust her conversation partner. "Elizabeth was with this woman Leonore back then," she began carefully.
"A wonderful woman, very mysterious. And she loved Elizabeth just the way she was."
"But at some point, she left my mother."
Mardas chose his words more carefully now. "Elizabeth became moody," he reported. "We all slowly came to terms with the fact that we would not find the culprit, but Elizabeth could not. I had the feeling even then that it was never about the murdered doctor for her but always about her ego. She was hardly ever at home, let herself go, and became increasingly unkempt."
"Hard to imagine," replied Nikki, looking down at the road. She could only vaguely remember that time. "It probably just wouldn't let go of her. Like a pain that never wants to end. Why did she never tell us how she knew Leonore?"
"Maybe it was awkward for Elizabeth. She could have been her therapist. Or something else she didn't want to talk about. I heard that Leonore's family was not at all happy with the relationship. Leonore must have moved to Boston for Elizabeth, head over heels, unless she had no other friends. She was timid and hardly ever went out alone. My wife once met her in a shop and invited her for coffee. But Leonore talked her way out of it. She never sought real contact with anyone other than Elizabeth."
"Anyone who can love and understand Elizabeth may not understand normal people," Nikki thought aloud. "Leonore seemed to be quite dependent on my mother. A lonely soul?"
"Quite possibly. But as it is with lonely souls, they can no longer be freed from their loneliness. Leonore was afraid that Elizabeth's case was more important than her. The two of them were together for almost a year. But the relationship only survived the murder of McMillan for a few weeks."
"Do you know what exactly led to the break-up?" Nikki asked with a frown. "Was there a decisive event?"
"Elizabeth never really talked about it. Not even today. And to be honest, this was also the reason why Elizabeth and I fell out. She treated this wonderful woman very unkindly and unfairly in the end. Elizabeth showed her true character in this situation. And I didn't want anything more to do with such a person. And that hasn't changed to this day."
Nikki thought she was slowly beginning to understand. "What happened to Leonore?" she finally asked, glancing at Mardas. "My mother doesn't talk about it."
Mardas was so demonstratively silent that it almost amounted to an answer. "It ended very sadly," he finally said. "And I'm not saying any more about it. Your mother will have to do that herself."
Nikki looked at him again. There was an evident tension in Mardas' face, and she realized she should not press him any further. Instead, she waited silently for a few seconds before approaching her original concern. "Can you imagine something other than the unsolved case could have triggered the separation?"
Mardas looked at Nikki in surprise. "Elizabeth knew exactly four things at the time," he explained. "Leonore, her family, her work and herself. I couldn't imagine what else could have played a role. Why do you want to know?"
"Just a thought. So the only case that Elizabeth couldn't solve took away one of the most important things she had in life."
They had finally reached the hotel.
"If the murder of McMillan hadn't happened back then, she would probably be happily married to Leonore today," speculated Mardas as he parked his rental car in a side street.
"I know only too well what it feels like to lose the only person you loved," Nikki admitted with a clear throat, staring absent-mindedly at the dashboard of the car. "You never accept it."
"If Elizabeth can't solve this case this time, I don't know what she'll do. But my concern is quite different."
Nikki could imagine what Mardas was getting at. "You're afraid of what she'll do if she solves it? If she gets her hands on the man who cost her her wife?"
Mardas nodded slowly. His voice had a genuine concern for the first time as he added, "Whoever this Ishmael is, he's managed to turn Elizabeth's life upside down. I don't want to imagine what she's capable of when alone with this guy."