Padraig Clintock loved Saint Patty's Day and not because he was Irish as Jameson whiskey. No, he loved it because it always meant a surge in business for his boss - Melissa MacGyver knew how to play the odds and offered discounts to people looking for love by matchmaker. Most people figured that before Valentine's Day was the biggest surge of business for Match Made in Manhattan but it was in the weeks that followed, when people realized how miserable and alone they were on February fourteenth that they figured why not give a professional a call.

Tossing his cigarette butt aside and fishing out an Ice-Breaker mint - Melissa loathed that her receptionist and assistant smoked so he tried to keep it to a minimum during work hours - Padraig fished out his keys, then stopped.

'Oh Jesus. Shit, shit shit.'

He cursed as he saw the shattered glass of the small office's front door. 'Damn drunken idiots,' he sighed. That was what you got when you put your place of business on Restaurant Row, you ran the risk of the mouth-breathing beer-swillers trashing decent people's business for fun on a weeknight. Padraig got out his cellphone, dialed Melissa's number - and froze when he heard the monophonic chorus of The B-52s' Love Shack coming from inside.

He craned his neck to see anything past the spider-web cracks and got his second, and much worse, nasty shock of the morning. 'Oh fuck me! Fuck me!'

Padraig saw the legs of his boss poking around from her cherrywood desk; putting his shoulder into it, he finished shattering the glass on the front door and raced into her office but pulled up short when he saw the state she was in, the smears of red on her face, the unmistakable copper-salt tang of blood and death thickly smeared on the air.

'Oh, no! No, no, no!' With shaking hands Padraig dialed nine-one-one. 'Yes, please, please help me. She's dead.'

'Linds? Lindsay, my sweet little sugar plum?'

Lindsay giggled as she finished brushing her teeth. Adam only called her food names when he was edgy and his official day out of uniform was definitely cause to be edgy. She spat in the sink, poked her head out the door of the bathroom and hollered across the kitchen to the bedroom, 'What do you need, pork chop?'

'Where's my lucky tie?'

'What's your lucky tie?'

Adam came to the door of the bedroom, sincerely affronted. 'How can you ask me that? It's the one I wore on our first date!'

'You may not own a lot of suits, Detective Third-Grade Brennan but you are a tie-whore.'

'A tie whore?'

'Women have shoes, men have football jerseys, you have ties. But I especially like that navy blue one with the lemon yellow teardrops on it.'

'Yeah?'

'Mm-hmm.' Lindsay wiped her mouth, then walked over to him, watching him root through his massive collection. 'You wore it with a canary yellow shirt when we went to that restaurant, The Peppermill, Victor Hammond's place. We looked at the menu and both wrinkled up our noses and decided to go to The Salt Devil on Mott Street instead.'

'You're an evil grapefruit, you know that?' Adam teased her. 'What did I have to eat at the Salt Devil?'

'You had the Cuban sandwich with pickled habaneros and I was mocking you that it was a great way to guarantee no kiss goodnight on a first date.'

'What if I did that on purpose to make you feel comfortable being on a date?'

'Did you?' Lindsay asked him, gave him a little loving swat when he shook his head. 'How did I ever fall in love with you, much less agree to marry you when you're so annoying?'

'Because I'm annoyingly handsome and charming...' Adam wrapped his arms around her, brushed his lips over hers. 'And you are the love of my life so what choice did I have but you wear you down to loving me too?'

Lindsay smiled at him and he felt a warmth bloom in his chest. It had taken Lindsay so long to be able to get to that point of casually teasing, of knowing he said things like that to her because he loved her and just loved to make her giggle in irritation at him. After everything she'd been through he knew there was no one in the world who deserved love and happiness like his bride-to-be, and Adam intended to make it his job for the rest of her life to make her happy like that.

The tender moment was broken up when Adam's cellphone rang and he picked it up. 'Brennan.'

'It's Ryan. You're rolling with me this morning, and we caught a seriously bad one. I'll meet you at your place in ten.'

Ryan wasn't quite sure if it made Adam a Boy Scout or a well-prepared officer that he barely had time to pull to the curb outside Adam and Lindsay's building before he saw the young man in his natty suit complete with his field bag on his shoulder walking out of the lobby.

'Aren't we the boy scout today,' Ryan commented when Adam climbed in the passenger side.

'Actually, I was up early with Lindsay. She starts a new rotation today as per her internship regs, so she's off trauma and on orthopedics.'

'Ah, the saw-bones. Those guys are nuts, man,' Ryan laughed, then cleared his throat as they headed east out of Greenwich Village, then north towards Lennox Hill. 'There was this doctor I remember Jenny telling me about, she was from a hospital in Seattle and she was this big beautiful Mexican woman who could relocate shoulders and jaws with her bare hands. What the hell was her name?'

'I think Lindsay's really liked the ER, though, the idea of being on the front-lines. She's so good in a crisis and thinking clear-headedly under pressure though I think that's more to do with her upbringing back in Seattle.'

'Callie! That was her name, Callie Torres. Jenny said watching her work was just mind-boggling,' Ryan said, slapping his palm against the steering wheel. 'Sorry, bro, Lindsay's good at the trauma medicine because she has a whacked-out religious papa who always made her feel stress?'

'You're good,' Adam chuckled,' and yes, that's what I was driving at.'

'Well, put it on the backburner for now, this is a bad one.'

'How come I'm riding with you this morning?'

'Esposito's still in Florida with Meredeth and the kids while they're on March break and Beckett and Newman were picked by Captain K-Pow to be in charge of organizing the troops for the inevitable freakout that comes two days from now on Saint-Patty's. Ergo, you are with me.'

Adam nodded, began to tune out what his fiancee was doing at work and focus on his own job so that by the time they reached the store-front sized office in Lennox Hill, he was all cop.

They were greeted outside the building at the edge of the yellow tape by a fresh-faced looking officer with the nameplate of Watkins; she had serious brown eyes beneath a bowl-cut fringe of chocolate brown bangs. When she spoke, her accent screamed of the Deep South but her tone was all business.

'Detective Ryan, Detective Brennan, this is one you'll need to see for yourself to believe.'

'You were the first on-scene?' Ryan asked as they followed Watkins into the office space he imagined had once been nice, prior to the signs of a violent end. He thought of the Dylan Thomas poem as his eyes landed on the body being covered in white cloth by Lanie and Shane, which had him lifting an eyebrow. 'Sir Weaver and Lanie? What do we owe the honour?'

'Lanie's here as my relief. I'm tapped on field time for the month.'

'Already?'

'My month starts on the twentieth.'

'Fair enough.'

'Tell Alexis we'll see you for dinner on Saturday night and the kids cannot wait to see her either,' Lanie told him sweetly as she patted his shoulder, sent him out. She let out a little sigh. 'I didn't want him taking this one, anyways. The name is Melissa McGyver, age forty-three, owner and proprietor of Match Made in Manhattan, a popular dating service.'

'What can you tell us,' Adam asked, pulling on latex gloves.

'She put up a hell of a fight but in the end, she was asphyxiated. There's considerable cyanosis to the lips and cheeks, and petechia in her left eye which point to that as cause of death. Other injuries appear to be from the self-defense wounds she incurred.'

'You said left-eye, Lanie,' Ryan clarified, not liking the sinking feeling in his stomach; the feeling worsened when he saw Lanie nod sadly and she drew back the white sheet covering Melissa McGyver's remains. What he saw had the Mini-Wheats he'd shared with Mallory and Dell rising in his gorge; beside him, Adam popped up from his crouched position like a jack-in-the-box, his olive skin going pasty.

'The killer took a souvenir,' Lanie said, 'in the form of Melissa McGyver's right eye.'