A/N: Thank you all very much for all the reviews and for those who've added this story to alerts or favourites! Please do continue, I always enjoy hearing your thoughts, and will reply. And will try to update faster!

Thank you to lily moonlight for the read-through.

The black SUV pushed slowly through the even slower-moving stream of traffic. Danny was driving, which meant that they were managing to travel faster than they would have otherwise; somehow he was managing to manoeuvre the unwieldy vehicle into gaps which looked far too small for it, instinctively judging which lane of traffic was about to start moving faster and squeezing in to join it.

Stella had just got off the phone with Mac, and now sat silently in the passenger seat. She gazed absently into store fronts as they fought their way past, and at the pedestrians, and at the other cars. The knowledge of the camera they were carrying in the trunk was pervading her thoughts, the knowledge that someone could have been watching them. It made her uneasy, that in a city of millions of people she had no idea who might have been receiving video feed of them, and for what purpose. There were people everywhere, who so often didn't notice those needing help, but to be specifically noticed was a different thing altogether.

In the wing mirror she watched the traffic behind them and in adjacent lanes; yellow taxis all alike, a black car with a massive gash in its paintwork, a green car with a pair of bicycles strapped to the roof struggling to remain ahead of its follower, a red motorbike behind them, effortlessly slipping through the larger, ungainly cars, its engine revving loudly to taunt those it overtook.

She watched for it to pass them too, but it seemed to have grown bored of the game, content for now to dawdle. A gap opened up in the neighbouring lane, but it didn't leave its position, remaining directly behind them.

Any other day, she might have ignored it, told herself that she was being paranoid. But today, right now, the thought of being watched was preying on her mind. And she'd rather know than not.

"Danny," she said. "Turn left please, just up ahead."

He caught the edge to her voice and turned the indicator on, heading off the street they should have kept on following.

"What's going on?" he asked. "We're taking the long way back?"

Stella glanced at the mirror again. "Now go right."

"Why?" He looked at her, confused, but indicated again anyway.

She glanced again in her mirror. The motorbike was still there. "I think we're being followed."

She saw him look into the rear-view mirror as they turned, sizing the situation up. "The motorbike, yeah?"

"Yeah."

"How long?"

"A few minutes, maybe more. I only just started noticing it."

"Nice bike."

Danny turned again. So did the bike. Wondering why she hadn't thought of it before, Stella took out her cell phone, snapped a photo of its reflection. The biker was wearing leathers, a blacked-out visor on his helmet. Nothing to distinguish him.

"Do you know what model the bike is?" she asked. "When you've finished admiring it."

He looked in his mirror again. "Honda make. I don't know what model, but I'll recognise it if I see it again."

She texted the photo to Adam, attaching an explanation.

"He's not being exactly subtle," Danny commented. "Right behind us, immediately making the same turns." He switched on his left indicator. Behind them, so did the motorbike. He turned the indicator off, and the bike's light also flicked out. "Playing copycat."

Stella didn't take her eyes from the mirror. With the black helmet, the biker was completely anonymous. She watched him uneasily. "He wants us to know we're being followed."

"Should I keep on, or should we stop?"

She looked at Danny's face, eager for action, and made a quick decision. "Stop."

He jammed down on the brake, the SUV screeching to an emergency halt. The two of them flung open their doors, jumped out, weapons already in their hands as they ran towards him, aiming at him, shouting for him to stop, but in a road full of civilians the words and the guns were only empty threats. The biker flung the bike around on a tight turn, foot scraping the tarmac as a pivot, roaring off amidst a cacophony of furious car horns as they reached the spot where he had been, marked now by the swirl of tyre treads.

They could only watch as it disappeared.

- - - - -

"Where's Mac?" Stella asked, walking into the AV lab. After reporting the incident, the remainder of the drive to the labs had been silent. Danny had been seething about not stopping their tailer, and she had been trying fervently to make sense of what was going on, churning everything she knew in her mind, but still unable to come up with answers.

Adam thought, and then shrugged. "Autopsy… I think. He said something about that." He swivelled his chair to gesture to one of the computer screens. "I've been working on the picture you sent me of the biker guy, nothing to distinguish him. I think the model is a CB900F Hornet." The picture on the screen was identical to the one which had followed them, and she nodded for him to carry on. "I'm working on finding it. It's quite a new model, so there probably aren't too many of them around, but without the plate number it's going to be hard to trace."

She had expected that, really, but it was still a disappointment. "Ok, thanks. Here, have a present in the meantime."

Adam accepted the cardboard box, weighing it in his hands. "Security tapes?"

"Yep. And a camcorder."

"What's on the camcorder?"

She grinned. "Work your magic on it, and then tell me."

"Is it the one from the roof?" he asked, slightly hesitantly.

She nodded, becoming serious again. "Mac tell you?"

"Yeah, when he was dropping off security tapes from the subway station." He looked uncomfortably apologetic. "He said I had to show him first what I find on them, sorry."

"Don't worry," she reassured him. "When you get to the camcorder, can you find out if the video feed was being uploaded anywhere, and if so, trace it?"

"Ok… and what am I looking for on the security tapes?"

"They're of Grace Ellison's apartment building, the front and side entrances. We think that some of her stuff might have been removed."

"Might have been?"

"Yep."

"So you want me to look for someone who might not be there? You sound like Mac."

She smiled again. "Well, whoever went through her place would have had to have been spotted by the cameras."

"But… if they aren't obviously carrying anything, I might not realise who they are."

"Yeah, it's a long shot, sorry."

"I'll work on it. I suppose you'll want to know when Grace left the building, too?"

"Thanks, Adam, that'll be great. I'll catch up with you later." She headed out, and turned in the corridor, to see the grin on his face morph instantly into a frown of complete concentration as he began to lift tapes out of the box, already unaware of his surroundings and that he was being watched. She smiled and headed for the elevator, as Mac appeared around a corner, walking towards her.

"Hey," she greeted him, stopping and waiting in front of the elevator doors for him to arrive. "I was just looking for you. Adam said you've already been to autopsy?"

He reached around her and pressed the call button. "Not yet, Sid hadn't finished. I'm headed there now, are you coming?"

"Yeah, sure."

The metal doors slid open; they stepped inside and began the journey down.

"This case is already getting weird," Stella said. "I mean, someone's method of murder is to get a crowd to push someone in front of a train, the victim's place is sterilised, and Danny and I are followed in a way that shouts out 'look at me, I'm tailing you'? What does that say to you?"

Mac shrugged slightly. "I don't draw conclusions this early. We haven't got all the evidence in yet, so only a few ideas so far."

"Feel like sharing?" she asked.

"Well, the obvious. Someone wanted to leave no trace of her life, or maybe no trace of something or someone else in that apartment."

"Yeah, that makes sense. What's your theory on the tail, though? That's what I can't work out."

He shrugged his shoulders again. "Perhaps trying to get you and Danny to reveal if you'd managed to find anything?"

"By following us on a motorbike?" She shook her head. "No, there has to be more to it than that."

"Of course, if we actually did know what someone was trying to cover-up, everything might make more sense."

She sighed, pushing her hair back from her face. "Let's hope that Sid can give us something, then. We're just running in circles here."

The doors opened, and they walked into the steel surfaces of the morgue. Sid was standing next to the table, the autopsy clearly only just finished, as he was carefully arranging instruments on their tray with absolute precision. He waved them over, and Stella's eyes were drawn to Grace's body as she approached. A thought began to tease at the back of her mind, a thought to do with Grace, and the train, refusing to fully form as she chased it.

"You're just in time," Sid told them, abandoning his organising. "I'm sorry I had to turn you away earlier, Mac, but there's no sense knowing half the story, and then having to come back later for the rest. Much better to hear everything at once."

"Do you have anything for us?" Mac asked.

Sid considered for a second. "By 'anything', I take it you want me to tell you something unusual about her? Aside from 'she was hit by a train'?"

"Yeah, that'd be useful."

"Well, official COD is a broken neck, but if that didn't kill her, the massive internal bleeding would have. Punctured lungs, ruptured spleen, nearly every bone in her body broken." He paused, maybe for dramatic effect. "She was hit by a train."

Mac sighed, very slightly. "Is there anything you found which we didn't already know?"

"Well, that depends on what you already know, of course." Sid glanced at Mac's raised eyebrows, and hastened on. "She was actually in very good health. One thing I did find, though, during the examination. Ms Ellison had an abortion, sometime between a month and two months ago, although I'd suggest closer to a month." He paused for a second. "Also, she may have been in a hurry when she left, as she hadn't eaten anything this morning. I did send her stomach contents up for analysis, but she barely had any food in her. Of course, that could also mean that she just wasn't a breakfast person."

Mac opened his mouth out of habit to ask Stella whether there had been any evidence of a boyfriend, or of her having left in a hurry, and then remembered that no, of course there hadn't been. "Anything else?" he asked.

Sid shook his head. "I'm afraid that's all. The only really unusual thing about this poor woman, physically, seems to have been her manner of demise."

Mac sighed, rubbing his hand across his eyes. "Alright, thanks Sid." He turned to Stella, realising that she had been silent throughout the discussion, unusually for her. "Stell?"

"Yeah," she replied, absently. Still staring at Grace's closed eyelids, forehead slightly creased in a frown of concentration. "I was just… trying to remember. If she said anything else." She shook her head, her expression clearing. "I don't know, it'll probably come back. Thanks, Sid."

"You're welcome."

Stella's thoughts were still slightly absent as she followed Mac out through the doors. More and more a feeling was nagging at her, that there had been something which could be important, only she had forgotten it. She stored it in the back of her mind, to keep ticking over until she could pull it out and examine it later.

"Where's Danny?" Mac asked, once they were back in the elevator.

She smiled, wryly. "Sifting through ashes, and that's where I'm about to go too. Do you want to join the party?"

"It's tempting, but I have to pass on that one. I've still got her clothes to process, I've just been through her purse."

"What was in it?" Stella asked. "Anything useful?"

"Six items." He counted off on his fingers. "Wallet, with driving license, three credit cards, and sixty-seven dollars exactly in bills and coins. Apartment key, a dry-cleaning ticket, unused check book, half empty pack of chewing gum, red lipstick. If I've forgotten anything, I'll tell you later. Everything was covered with fingerprints, and nearly all of them came straight back to Grace, but there're some which are unknown; they're running through AFIS right now."

She nodded. "Which items were the other prints on?"

"All from the check book. Someone could have used it to get her address from, or they could have been hoping to get a copy of her signature. Of course, since it's new, they could just as easily be from whoever put it in the envelope at her bank to send to her." He glanced at his watch. "AFIS might have finished by now, I'll go and check while you look through a pile of soot."

"Must be nice, being the boss and getting the clean jobs. Do you want to swap?"

He half-smiled. "You'd abuse your power. You've already put Danny on the soot while you got to go down to autopsy."

They stepped out into the corridor, and his cell rang before she could retort. He checked the screen, and then stepped away from her without a word to answer it. She left him pushing open his office door, and went to find Danny.

She was still thinking hard, thoughts focused on those last few seconds, as the train had roared in. Suddenly, she realised what it was that she had noticed, and then forgotten in the chaos. Grace had still been talking, but the sound had been completely overpowered by the engine. Her lips had moved. Unknowingly, Stella's steps slowed to a stop as the moment replayed in her mind, as if she herself was a camera, zooming in, rewinding, playing. She closed her eyes. Focus. Focus. Think. She could see Grace's lips, shaping lost sounds, words that were eluding her, but she replayed, again, and was nearly there to understanding. Nearly there. Think…

"Stella?"

The voice snapped her concentration, the fragment of the thought that had been spinning together immediately unravelling and spiralling away. In a rush of irritation her eyes flew open to see Danny staring at her, his expression somewhere between confusion and concern. Without noticing, she had reached the layout room and had been standing in the doorway, a few steps from where two tables had been shoved together and black soot and ashes spread out across most of the surface.

"What?"

"Never mind."

She felt the momentary annoyance and frustration ebb away within her. "Sorry. I was just trying to work out… It'll come back." She crossed the room, where a lab coat hung from a hook next to one of the windows, and looked down absently at the street as she pulled it on.

Her eyes were caught, and held. She didn't turn towards him as she spoke. "Danny."

Her voice was commanding, and he came towards her immediately. "See something?"

"Do you?"

He looked down at the traffic, moving and unmoving. At the red motorbike, stationary on the opposite kerb while the rider sat astride it, stock-still, helmeted head tilted up, towards their window, although the two of them would be invisible from street level. He was certain, as was she. "That's the same one."

Stella grabbed her cell to call security downstairs, but, as if it had been waiting for them to look out, the rider suddenly kick-started the bike into life and tore away, joining the flow of cars, speeding through gaps between them. And was gone.