I was processed at the hospital by a nurse who swabbed my head wound, and Flack photographed it before it was stitched closed. Just doing my job, making sure that evidence is collected. Does it matter that I'm announcing to the world that once again that I've been marked as a victim, having to bear the unbearable worry of my friends? As I undress in a shower cubicle I fold my clothes into evidence bags which I seal. I step into the pounding jet of scorching hot water and close my eyes, leaning against the tiled wall, letting the blood and the dust and the dirt wash off me.

I'm running everything that's happened through my mind, trying to make sense of it. Everything is connected, Mac says, but the only connection I can find is the man whose face could be trapped in the camera which Danny and Lindsay will be bringing back to the lab soon with the rest of the evidence they find. His actions seem to make no sense. Drugging Mac. The theft of an unremarkable file. The execution of a nameless man forced to swallow those same sheets of paper. The roses, covered with blood of as-yet-unknown origin. The ambush in the darkness. There's no pattern here that I can follow, nothing which can tell me who he is and what he wants. Why he's targeting us.

Eventually I have to give up, despite how much I hate to. I feel that I'm being mocked by a man standing in the shadows. Watching us. Laughing at our futile, pathetic efforts to find him. I turn the water off, dress in my spare set of clothes and head upstairs, carrying the evidence bags with me.

"There you are," Mac greets me as I push my way through his office door. "I thought you must have drowned."

I laugh slightly, pulling myself back to the here and now. "Not quite. But I've been thinking it all through, Mac, and I still can't make sense of what's going on. Everything that's happened seems so… random when put together. As if he's throwing a die to choose what to do next."

He sighs. "I know. And we still don't know whose blood was on the roses, since we've found no body yet. I don't suppose it could be from your John Doe?"

"Sorry Mac, not a chance."

"Well, the samples we took are being analysed at the moment. Flack had one of the officers from the scene at the shop bring our evidence here. We should have results on it in a couple of hours."

"Did you get any prints from the door in the end?"

"No, nothing. It'd been completely wiped down. We might have better luck with the dress or the bunch of roses though. Hawkes took them to process."

"What about the petal trail?"

"Danny and Lindsay are handling that, along with the subway itself. I talked to Danny a few minutes ago; he says they should be back here well within the hour."

"Did they find anything?" I ask hopefully.

"We don't know yet if there's anything relevant. Angell took a couple of uniforms through the door that was open; it's where the lighting controls were. It also led onto a tunnel down to the tracks, so I'm assuming after he left us he walked along the line and exited from the next station. I called the station managers in both directions. No one remembers seeing anyone coming from the tracks onto the platform, but they both sent up their CCTV recordings of the platform from this morning, and Adam's going through the tapes right now."

"Is there a chance he might have waited for us to pull the tapes before he left the tracks?"

"No. Luckily for us there's a problem with people getting down to the line from the station. There was fencing but some public-spirited person removed it, presumably in the service of freedom to cause a nuisance and possibly an accident. Because of that a couple of subway workers walk along the tracks between the two working stations at six each morning to turf out junkies and homeless people who've decided to sleep there before the trains start running at high frequency. I spoke to the men who took the patrol today, and they told me he was definitely gone by then, and that there's no other way of getting to the surface. Chances are we'll have him on the videos."

"Ok, I'll go with the optimism for a bit. I'll go drop these in the trace labs, maybe swap with Hawkes since I can't process them myself."

"I'll come with you."

As we walk past, Danny leaves the elevator carrying a closed box, Flack behind him, and nearly collides with us. "Whoh. Hey Mac, Stell."

"You left Lindsay behind?" I ask.

"Nah, she's parking the car."

"Quite the gentleman, Messer," Flack says.

"Yeah, yeah, she offered. You're just jealous."

The elevator dings again and Lindsay joins us with another box of evidence bags. "Hi. You ok, Stella?"

"I think I'll stick a sign to my forehead saying, 'Yes, I'm fine,' if anyone else asks me that," I say. Lindsay laughs. "Be careful," I warn her. "I'm not joking here. Everyone's been asking me that all day." Actually, a sign might be too subtle, thinking about it. I wish now that I'd been slightly more forgiving to Mac. Having people worrying about me is a horrible feeling.

We head down the hallway to an empty layout room, and Danny tips the contents of his neatly stacked box of evidence packets out across the table with rather too much enthusiasm. I pick up the three envelopes which slide to the floor. "Whatcha got?"

"A loada junk, mostly," he admits. "We couldn't tell which stuff was evidence and which wasn't, so we had to bag pretty much anything that looked like it might be."

"You got my camera in that pile?"

"Here." Lindsay pulls it from her box. "I put it in the plastic bag so the bits of it wouldn't get lost, I don't think it's technically evidence. Don't you want us to process it with the rest of the stuff?"

"Nah, I'll take it. Most of the photos on it are of my scene. Well, Hawkes's now, I suppose."

"Sure."

"You going to get the card out of that?" Flack asks.

"Not in here, I think it'll be better to completely disassemble this thing rather than risk breaking the card pulling it out."

"Ok, I'll come and watch."

"Sure. You coming too, Mac?"

"No, I think I'll go and help Hawkes with the evidence from the shop."

"I'll bring you the photos from that scene when I manage to extract them," I tell him. I pause. "If."

"I have complete confidence that you can dismantle anything extremely effectively," Mac says. "I'll see you in a bit."

A/N: Yeah, I know not much happened in this chapter. Think of it as the deep breath before I send in the finale (and the couple of chapters leading up to it). And I'm so glad that you all seem to have been enjoying this so far, it really makes it worth writing! Blue x