Woo! Finally finished the next chapter :) turned out to be rather longer than I anticipated, so I hope it all works and makes sense. Read, enjoy, and please review! :)

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Chapter 4

Neither Mac nor Aiden said anything on the drive over to the crime scene. Mac sat in the passenger seat of the unmarked NYPD car that Aiden drove, and stared fixedly out the front window at the snow that swirled around their headlights as the last vague vestiges of daylight disappeared. It was night again, and Mac almost welcomed the lonely dark which, while torturing him with its solitude and emptiness, empathized with such feelings.

The falling snow seemed to zoom towards the beams of their headlights, and the single-speaker siren sounded muffled as it became increasingly smothered. Aiden glanced over at Mac and noted the sharp change in him since they had worked last. He'd always been rather quiet, but that was just his personality. He had a wicked quick sense of sneaky humour with a spark and glint in his eye and smile that let on there was far more behind that quiet exterior than was immediately transparent. Aiden remembered with a bit of a vindictive grin, the occasional cocky or tough guy who stupidly mistook his calm, controlled approach as weakness. They rather quickly and thoroughly changed their minds.

Now, she glanced back over at him, his jaw set rigid and eyes as hard as steel, his whole body both tense and worn down at the same time. His silence wasn't just a preliminary assessment of who he was with and his surroundings anymore. And god have mercy on the poor sod who managed to anger him.

She recognized the look. Her kid brother had been hit by a car and killed right outside their apartment when he was 14 and she was 19, just after she started at the academy.

"Radio?" she asked, returning her gaze out the front windshield.

"What?"

"The radio," Aiden replied matter-of-factly, glancing back over at Mac. "Do you mind if I turn it on?"

"Yeah, sure," Mac answered somewhat distractedly.

Aiden flipped to one of her more preferred rock stations, and soon Linkin Park was blasting out the car speakers.

Mac's brooding reverie came to an abrupt end. He looked sideways at Aiden.

"Linkin Park?" he asked skeptically with a raised eyebrow.

"Yeah," Aiden replied belligerently. "You got a problem with that, Mac? You got a problem with my taste in music?"

He just looked at her, deadpan.

"Well tough!" Aiden replied. "I'm driving. Deal with it."

He continued to look at her, silent and unmoving.

Aiden shook her head emphatically, "I'm not changing it, Mac."

The barest glimmer of a tight smile tugged at the corners of his mouth briefly as he turned back to the front. The snow continued to zoom towards them, and his thoughts once again flew out into the infinite darkness.

Xxxxxxx

They parked just outside the taped-off crime scene, and stepped out into the bitter cold. The wind had died off and the snow now fell gently, as if reverencing the tragedy that awaited them. Mac looked up at the overhead train trellis. Although the majority of New York's train system was underground, there was not an insignificant portion of it shaking its way through the neighborhoods outside the glitz of downtown Manhattan. He liked it, the crosshatched iron and steel support structure which framed narrow road lanes underneath and pockmarked with rust, reminded him of Chicago. He heard the familiar pre-rumblings that were the warnings of an approaching train. He and all his friends had grown up in a neighborhood with the L rattling and shaking its way past their windows, and a night or day didn't pass without the noise and racket of the train. He hadn't realized how accustomed he'd been to it until he moved to college and realized he kept waiting for the familiar, brain-rattling reverberations that never came.

He also never thought he'd miss it.

Shaking himself out of his brief reverie and the firmly closing off the further recollections that always came when he started thinking about his home city, Mac turned his attention to the crime scene ahead.

A young, dark-haired, almost cheery looking detective scuffed over to him with an easy swagger. He stuffed his pen into his left hand that was already holding his notebook, and stuck out his right towards Mac.

"Detective Flack," he introduced himself. He continued apologetically, "Sorry you had to get dragged out here in this weather on your day off."

Mac shook the younger man's hand firmly. "Detective Taylor," he answered, "And don't worry about, I wasn't exactly doing anything anyway."

Flack grinned, "Detective Taylor, eh? I hear you're the best."

Mac raised one eyebrow in skeptical disbelief. "Where'd you hear that?"

Flack nodded with a wink in Aiden's direction.

Aiden shoved Flack in the shoulder. "Shut up!" she hissed at him.

Mac turned to her, raising an eyebrow and resuming the grim, deadpan look he had given her in the car.

Aiden opened and closed her mouth trying to come up with a response. "Mac…I…look…" she said, blushing furiously.

Mac just shook his head slightly and looked back towards Flack who was bubbling barely contained humour, glanced sideways at Aiden one last time, and turned his full attention towards the scene at hand and the vast array of police presence milling around. Despite the weather, the fact that Maroth was one of their own meant that there was a far larger contingent of everybody, from uniformed cops to plain clothes officers to crime scene techs and soon, Mac surmised, all their respective bosses. He raised his voice so it cut through the barely contained energy that crackled through the scene, "Everybody, I understand this is one of our own and we all want to do something and get this solved, but we also all know what needs to be done and we won't treat this differently than any other crime scene. I appreciate you showing up and helping, but we need to start processing. So if you're not part of the assigned homicide squad or part of CSI, I'm going to have to ask you to get back to your other assignments. Thank you."

He watched as people slowly filtered away. He turned. "What do we got?" he asked Flack.

The young detective immediately became serious. "Patrick Maroth," he said, glancing at his notebook. "A passerby saw him lying under the bridge here and called it in. EMS got it as an 'unknown man down', and given the fact that he turned out to have been shot and then some, and not some poor homeless guy who froze to death, they called us."

The distant intermittent sound of the approaching train grew louder and became a roar as it finally shook its way overhead. Mac turned away and covered the side of his face with his arm as a sudden blast of air and snow buffeted down. The train rattled its way into the distance. Mac shivered as the residual icy wind ate through his coat and stabbed its way down his neck.

Flack led Mac and Aiden over to where Maroth was lying. The name Patrick Maroth sounded familiar, like he should know who it was, but he couldn't quite place it. The last faint rumbling of the train died into the distance.

Mac gazed down at their victim. He was laying on his back, head tipped slightly up, arms spread out. His feet were bent underneath him as if he'd fallen backwards from a kneeling position, and one glance at the bullet hole in his forehead an inch above his nose indicated that that's exactly what had happened. And Mac also knew why the name sounded so familiar. They'd worked the same shift at the same precinct back when they were both beat cops. Their lockers were next to each other, and Mac had been sympathetically amused more than once with Moroth's groanings about his partner, who was close to retiring, fat and quite lazy. Mac had even met his wife a few times. But their paths had never crossed once Patrick transferred to the organized crime division and Mac made detective, moving over to the crime lab.

Mac's heart sank. It was bad enough when any cop was killed, but it was especially hard when he actually knew who it was, and on top of it, he'd always rather liked Patrick. His wife's name was Julia, he remembered.

Mac knelt down quietly and balanced his camera on his knee. The snow still fell in big flakes that gently accumulated on Patrick's still body in a sort of burial. He and Julia had had their first baby just before he transferred. Emily. He would take any excuse at the precinct to pull out her picture with a huge grin and show everybody, to the point where they'd groan good-naturedly with a "Yes, Pat! We've seen your kid, she's adorable!"

Mac closed his eyes briefly at the thought of Patrick's wife receiving the news that her husband was dead. His chest ached with a stabbing, acute empathy.

"Mac, you ok?" Aiden said quietly behind him.

Mac took a deep breath. "Yeah," he said, "I just knew him, that's all."

"Ah geez, Mac. I'm sorry," Aiden said.

"Yeah," Mac said simply. "Me too."

He brought his camera up and started the methodical process that was about the only thing anymore that brought him any sort of peace and temporary escape from his racing thoughts.

Xxxxxxxxx

As he took pictures of Moroth's body and took stock of his other injuries besides the shot to the head, Mac's blood began to boil. Maroth had not had an easy death. Whoever it was that had killed him had made sure he had suffered. His face was covered with bruises and cuts, and one eye had swollen shut. He'd also been forced in his final moments to kneel with his right knee obliterated from a close-range gunshot. There was also a frustrating lack of any sort of actual evidence at the scene. Any footprints or tire tracks been either obscured by the snow or obliterated by the hoard of police presence that had shown up. He propped his camera on his knee again and looked around. They were only about thirty yards off from the road and the train trestle. But the distance was wrong in both that it was too far and close.

He stood up and walked back up to the road. He turned around and looked towards where Maroth lay in snow. Sure he was wearing a black coat that stood out against the snow, but it was still a pretty good distance to see from a car while driving past, in a snowstorm. He was genuinely surprised anyone had noticed Moroth. But by the same token, for how long the beating would have taken, there was no way that the event wouldn't have been seen by someone had it taken place there, particularly since it wasn't even that late yet and only recently gotten completely dark. Which brought him back full circle in his line of thought - how the hell had Moroth been both seen and/or unseen all at the same time?

Mac caught Flack's eye and motioned him over. The detective joined Mac by the road.

"When did the initial call come in?"

Flack referenced his notebook again. "EMS reported they got the call at 5pm, and then the crew contacted us immediately after they got on scene, which was…" Flack glanced at the page, "…5:07pm."

Mac nodded. So before it was completely dark but after sunset. He tightened his jaw and shook his head in frustrated bewilderment.

"What?" Flack asked.

Mac gestured back to the crime scene. "It doesn't make any sense," he said. "It would have been next to impossible for anyone to see him this far from the road at that time of day simply "down" like what EMS got called for. But I also find it equally impossible for the entire event to have taken place this close to the road even with complete darkness, let alone without and no one have seen it.

Too close and too far. Too light and too dark. It doesn't fit."

"Maybe someone did see the whole thing take place here and was too scared to call it in as anything more than a "man down" after it was all over?"

"Maybe," Mac conceded reluctantly. "But what about the train? It goes past, what, every half hour or so? Whoever did this was obviously trying to get something out of Maroth, and I highly doubt the whole thing happened in under 30 minutes. Plus there's no way there were no cars going by that wouldn't have seen and called in a beating like the one he got."

"So if all but the execution happened elsewhere, then how did anyone see him just lying there?" Flack finished Mac's train of thought.

"Exactly," Mac said. "None of fits. And why wait to shoot him here at all? Why not just do a body dump?"

"One last chance for him to reveal what they wanted?" Flack guessed.

"Possibly," Mac mused.

He walked back to where Maroth was lying, and motioned Aiden over.

"What's up?" she asked.

"I need to know if this is our complete crime scene, or if he was just shot here, and tortured somewhere else. Start from here and head back up to the road looking for any traces of blood in the snow."

"There's been a lot of people here Mac," she said rather dubiously. "I don't know how much would be left."

"I know," Mac said. "Just see what you can find."

"On it," Aiden replied.

She collected the crime scene techs and organized them into a careful sweep and 'de-layering' of the snow around their victim and back to the road.

Mac looked back down at Moroth, slowly being covered in snow, staring sightlessly into the night sky. He beckoned the coroner techs over load the body into their van to take it to the morgue. He watched as they zipped the sturdy, black body bag over Patrick's battered face and swore that whoever did it to him and left his wife without a husband and little girl without a daddy, would pay dearly. He turned as the van lumbered off. He had blood to find in the snow of the streets of New York.

Xxxxxxxxxx

Damon watched the scene from his vantage point, through his binoculars. Although there was nearly a morass of police personnel, the one CSI detective, despite looking as though he had been off duty, clearly took command as soon as he walked on scene. Damon watched him, intrigued, as he quickly sized up the implications of the where and when the undercover cop had been discovered, wandering back to the road and pointing out his dilemma to the young homicide detective.

There was something extremely focused about how he worked and interacted with the rest of the personnel on scene, yet his initial pause when he got to the body and before he sent it off, indicated to Damon that there something more than just the fact that it was a cop. Because he would have known that fact before he ever got on scene. No, this detective would prove interesting.