Maura Isles stood in the morgue, her brand new Jimmy Choo shoes biting her left ankle painfully as she stared into the chest cavity of one Justin Park. Her autopsy, however thorough, had felt like something had been missed and so she returned to his cold body to look for the missing clue.

She glanced up at the table opposite her, expecting to see Jane sat there, swinging her legs carelessly and wearing her usual cheeky grin as she teased Maura playfully. But Jane wasn’t there, she hadn’t been there for, she glanced up at the clock. “14 days, 7 hours and 43 minutes” she whispered. The truth of the matter wasn’t that she’d missed something in her autopsy, she missed something in her autopsy room and that something was Jane.

The precinct hadn’t been the same without her around, her feisty temper, her determined swagger, her no nonsense attitude. Maura loved those things about her friend, but she missed the other side of Jane, the delicate and loving way she brushed her arm when Maura was stressing herself out, the warmth that radiated from her when she spoke to victims’ families and the way that Jane would always roll her eyes whenever her mother made her bunny pancakes in the cafeteria. Everyone felt it but no one would vocalise the depth of the emotion. They were homicide detectives after all, they didn’t get emotionally involved, and if they did, they didn’t wander around the precinct crying about it. They mourned at home alone or occasionally with a husband or wife.
Maura knew this, she had spent many nights at Jane’s, called there under some flimsy pretence when she knew the truth was that the detective was struggling with a case and needed another person there to make it better, and so Maura went without question, to fill that void in Jane’s life. A void that was hers alone to fill; no lover, or family member would ever be able to do what Maura did, even though she still didn’t know exactly what that was.

She sighed as she began to close Justin’s chest. Cause of death was simple, gunshot wound directly to the heart. The powder burns on his chest and clothes told her that his killer shot from no more than two feet away.
 With the young man returned to the crypt, Maura kicked off her shoe and rubbed her ankle absently before picking up her clipboard and heading into her office to finish up the report for Korsak.
She hadn’t seen as much of him as she had grown accustomed to either. Since the Marino incident, she didn’t see anyone as often as she used to, only those who had to be in the basement were there.