"Sometimes I wonder if I even know my daughter," Maura said as she walked over to the couch where Jane was sitting with a glass of wine.
Jane furrowed her brows and took a sip from her bottle of beer. "Which of your daughters are you talking about? You have two."
Maura bit her lower lip and rolled her eyes. "Elizabeth, Jane, I'm talking about Elizabeth. Katherine is at Quantico giving seminars on all the serial killers while Elizabeth is walking around town finding body after body. Not to mention that Praetoruis was killed lie McMillan sixteen years ago, whose case couldn't be solved."
"Whose case couldn't be solved by Elizabeth," Jane added, lowering her brows when she saw the look on her wife's face.
"You had to rub my nose in it," Maura growled, standing before the couch. Then she ran her hand through her graying hair and began to pace up and down. "And today I learn from Rupert Mardas, Elizabeth's ex-partner, that fifteen years ago, she found a one-year-old girl in the apartment of a dead septuagenarian in Stamford and had spent weeks trying to trace her. And she never said a word about it to us in all those years."
"What was Liz supposed to say?" Jane replied, her eyes wide. "Hey, Mom, sorry I was in Connecticut fifteen years ago. I didn't tell you about it, but I accidentally found a one-year-old girl in an apartment where a fire had broken out."
Maura stopped for a moment and pressed her lips together.
Jane closed her eyes briefly and stood up. "We all have secrets that we don't always share with others, Maura. And we both know what Elizabeth is like. She won't discuss it with anyone except her sister until she figures out where the girl came from. And we know from Kate that she can keep quiet as the grave when Liz asks her to. It's always been like that between the two of them."
Maura gave her wife a long, hard look and licked her lips. "I just hope this girl is Elizabeth's only secret," she stated, draining the remaining contents of her glass in one gulp.
Jane looked at the prosecutor with a furrowed brow. "You're not alone in that, Maura."
xxx
Mike had arrived shortly before Elizabeth and Nikki. However, given the smell of decay in Matthai's apartment, he had preferred a café near the crime scene for the wait. He sat impatiently at a secluded table with a coffee.
"I hope we're not disturbing you by staring at you," Elizabeth greeted the young man after she had entered the café.
He looked closely at his captain and pulled out an evidence bag inside his jacket. "This was hidden in the cereal, as you said."
Elizabeth surveyed the surroundings. Most of the café's patrons were sitting in their chairs, chatting. "Shall we go back to the apartment," she suggested. "I'm sure Ishmael didn't intend us to read his message here."
xxx
"Let's go," Elizabeth started after she had entered Matthai's living room with Mike and Nikki.
The evidence at the crime scene had now been secured, but the apartment had not yet been released. It would be a few more days before the murdered teacher's surviving relatives could hire a crime scene cleaner to clean the apartment. At the moment, the bedroom was still encrusted with coagulated blood, and the table where the dead man had been fixed attracted numerous insects. Against this backdrop, Elizabeth opened the evidence bag and carefully removed the note Mike had found in the cereal box with her latex gloves.
"V000LC4BT8," she read out.
"And what is that again?" Nikki asked. "A quantum physics discussion from ancient Icelandic?"
Mike grunted and pressed his lips together.
Elizabeth rolled her eyes. "Much simpler," she replied proudly and began to look around the room again. "At this point in the game, Ishmael knows we've understood what he's about. This message will lead to his next victim. He expects me to spend less time solving his puzzles now, so he's shifting the focus of his game to something else."
While Elizabeth considered various possible solutions, she walked slowly and calmly through the room where she had found the dead man that morning. "The combination is ten digits. Numbers and letters, all capitalized," she summarized.
"A password?" Mike speculated with a furrowed brow.
"Then at least one of the letters would be lowercase," the captain assumed. "And now, back to that black box under the TV. What is that? A receiver?"
Mike didn't have to think long. "It's used to call up movies," he replied. "It's a lot more expensive than getting them from the video store, but you don't have to get your ass off the couch."
"Then I think I know what's going on here," Elizabeth replied. "If Matthai was accessing his movies through the TV cable, why did he need those?" She pointed to Matthai's bookshelf, which contained several movie DVDs, among other things.
Nikki blinked a few times and frowned. "Maybe he's only just got the box," she mused, "or maybe you can't access the movies, you can't download every movie."
"But I don't know what he would use to play them," Elizabeth added, pointing to the TV, where there was no DVD player.
Mike pulled down the corners of his mouth. "Maybe on his laptop?"
Elizabeth waved him off. "Macbook Air. It doesn't have a DVD slot."
"Okay," cut in Mike, who, like his colleagues, had had a long day at work. "What are you getting at?"
"Like every book has a number, every DVD has an identifier. They're issued by this big online retailer, which has almost every book in its range."
"Oh, then it's no wonder I don't know the abbreviation," Nikki replied, pulling down the corners of her mouth. "I only buy my books in the bookshop around the corner. I get personal advice and better service there."
"Attagirl," Elizabeth replied and pulled out her smartphone. "Nevertheless, I will check this number now to see if it might want to point us to a movie."
Without further ado, the captain entered the combination of numbers and letters into the search engine bar. It took a little while for the result to appear. " Dreams and other life lessons," she read out. "An American movie, three years old."
Nikki immediately went to the shelf where the DVDs were. She refrained from touching the DVDs so as not to leave any marks. "There it is!" she announced after a few seconds. "I've never heard of the movie."
"Doesn't seem to be a real blockbuster either," reported Elizabeth, who, in the meantime, had skimmed through the DVD's description. "It says here that a few fans revere it as a cult movie. It's supposed to be quite silly, unintentionally funny."
She stepped up to the shelf with these words and carefully pulled out the DVD. She opened the case and searched it for any further clues. When none were found, she placed the DVD and envelope in an evidence bag and handed it to Mike. "Please be so kind as to drop this off at the BPD before you go home. Let the lab do all the analysis on it first."
Mike looked at the captain in disbelief. "Don't you think the next clue has more to do with the movie?" he wanted to know. "If it does contain a clue to the next victim, then we'd better not wait until tomorrow!"
"As much as I hate to say it, whoever this leads us to, we're not saving the person," Elizabeth explained with furrowed brows. To reassure you, I will get the movie from the video store and watch it at home if I can keep myself awake. After all, what could be better than sweetening your evening with daydreams? And with their wisdom."
xxx
Elizabeth had to visit three video stores before finding a movie copy. Reveries and Other Wisdoms had been anything but a blockbuster; otherwise, well-stocked distributors only rarely had the three-year-old production in their range. Filmed on a low budget, the adaptation of a rather unoriginal novel about an unfulfilled childhood love was initially planned for the big screen. Still, it was released directly on DVD due to a lack of interest. The leading roles were all played by young actors who were not only a little too old for their roles but also overambitious in their approach. The director did not put a stop to this either. Ironically, after about twenty minutes of dubious movie enjoyment, something else seemed much more absurd to Elizabeth: As soon as a supporting role, such as that of the Spanish girl who was supposed to provide the protagonist with a distraction from his unhappy love affair, was not indisputably badly embodied, it was precisely this brief flash of talent that struck the captain as truly disturbing in the overall context.
While Elizabeth sat in front of the television, she had other things on her mind. For the first time, Caleb had used the telephone number his mother had used to forward a control call to a student assigned the role of Tobias O'Hara's mother. The young woman did not live in Boston and was instructed to impersonate her credibly in return for cash payment.
Caleb had spent a few weeks trying to convince his parents step by step of his transformation from a fan of the Buffalo Bills NFL team to the New England Patriots to justify his desire for occasional weekend trips to Boston. He had managed to do this twice before. At some point, however, his parents had begun to worry about their son's safety when he stayed in youth hotels with older football fans on his trips to Boston, especially after hearing on the news about an attack on a group of youths in one such hostel.
This unfortunate circumstance necessitated Caleb's plausible invention of private accommodation. However, this had to be established over many weeks using a convincing user profile on Facebook and chats he had written himself. Elizabeth was hardly able to help the boy with this. Their communication outside of their face-to-face meetings was limited to the bare essentials, and even that required extreme caution and adherence to strict rules.
"Longing? What is longing?" asked the protagonist of the romance movie after Elizabeth's eyes had closed again.
"You have no idea," the captain replied in a whisper before she sat up straight again to counteract her increasing tiredness.
For her life, Elizabeth couldn't figure out why Matthai's killer would have pointed this movie out to her. The set, the scenery, the vehicles - simply nothing in this work of art caught her attention. So far, no single sequence in the movie had struck her as having any message.
"That something, I know," she encouraged herself before sinking back into her couch, yawning.
Once again, her thoughts drifted to Caleb as the action on the screen continued to ripple. The boy was used to holding his meetings with Elizabeth in secrecy. Elizabeth relied utterly on the boy, who was extremely bright and remarkably reliable for his age. The Boston Dungeon seemed to the captain to be the ideal meeting place. Not only had she wanted to visit this attraction in the city with Caleb for a long time, but it also offered them a certain seclusion.
"I'm going to the sacristy now," the movie's leading actor announced just as Elizabeth realized, to her discomfort, that she had closed her eyes again without meaning to.
She ordered herself to stay awake, but the previous day's exertions had taken too much of her strength.
For a few minutes, she could still fight off her tiredness. But just before the movie's main characters entered an Irish pub, Elizabeth finally sank into a deep sleep without even realizing it.
xxx
Nikki yawned as she entered the third floor of the BPD. Without a word, she poured herself a large mug of the coffee that nobody in the BPD liked to drink but consumed in vast quantities daily. Only then did she greet her colleagues, who were already waiting for her with news.
"We checked the DVD," reported Julius Novak, who was in charge at BRIC. "It's a normal DVD you can buy in shops, and no secret data is stored on it. There's nothing on it that shouldn't be on it."
"And traces?" Nikki turned to the BRIC analyst, running a hand through her hair.
"Polished to a shine, not a single fingerprint, not a hair, not a speck of lint, nothing!"
"Then we'll have to look at the artwork now, won't we?" the detective said, pulling out the DVD tray on her computer. "Or has Elizabeth already contacted us? She wanted to watch the movie last night." She looked into perplexed faces. "All right, then," she took the initiative. "One of us has to watch it. Is there a volunteer?"
No one in the group, consisting exclusively of men apart from Nikki, wanted to agree to watch what was probably a sentimental love story.
"Okay," she announced spontaneously. Then we'll let chance decide. The next person from the team who comes in the door has to watch. Mike has to go if no one comes in within three minutes.
"Forget it; I have to go to the car rental branch," he hurriedly defended himself. "And then I'm going to visit five surgeons' surgeries. How long does the movie take?"
"Not an hour and a half," Nikki reassured her boyfriend, pulled a second chair up her desk, and looked at her watch. "Two more minutes, Mikey. Better pour yourself a cup of coffee already!"
Mike rolled his eyes. "What do you want to pay attention to anyway?"
"The plot. Whether there are parallels to our case. Or any passages in the text that stand out."
Mike smiled mildly. "According to the blurb, the movie is about unrequited love," he countered. "You shouldn't expect too much plot or important dialog."
Nikki looked again at the wall clock above the entrance to the bullpen. With a grin, she noted: "One minute to go!"
"All right," Mike capitulated. "Then just start the stupid movie --"
That was as far as he got. With a jolt of energy and drive, the door opened, and Rupert Mardas entered the bullpen.
"Mardas! It's good to see you!" Mike called out to him, beaming. He jumped up from his chair, put on his jacket, and grabbed his notepad with the addresses he wanted to visit.
"Did something special happen?" Mardas asked in astonishment.
Mike patted him on the shoulder with a wink. "Absolutely. A boy is unhappily in love with his classmate."
"Then we'd better set up a task force quickly," mocked Mardas, who had no idea what it was all about.
Mike laughed heartily. "We already have." And before he finally left the office, he turned around once more. With a grin, he repeated: "We already have!"