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Outside his window, the city's landscape had changed to darker colours, outlined by the orange glow of the setting sun.

Mac's office's glass wall bared the fruits of the whole team's afternoon labours. Written in neat handwrite from top to bottom were all the findings that they had so far on all of their victims, which, he was forced to admit, were not much. Arrows and circles connected the victims in every point that he could found in common, but too many areas were still blanks.

In his hand was a printed map of NY City divided in to its five boroughs. Only Staten Island was free of coloured crosses.

He checked his facts once more.

No links could be found in the victims professional lives. Ramirez worked at a hospital as medical aid; Xavier Stuton was a financial consultant; his wife was a dentist; both Emmettons were teachers and Mills was a lawyer.

Their age group was somewhat close, but crossing their school records had come out empty; perhaps they had some hobbies in common? Frequented the same places? That played out for the Stutons, the Emmertons and even Mills, but Ramirez was of a different social status, which left her out of the same circuits.

Geographically was where Mac could see more connections, faint as they were.

Two of the victims, the Emmertons, lived in the Bronx; three other victims, the Stutons and Ramirez, lived in Queens, near each other; Mills lived in Brooklyn, but his office was in Queens. So, other than the Emmertons, all victims had a connection to Queens.

He grabbed a red marker and used a free space to write 'go back to the Stutons' murder scene in Jackson's Heights, Queens'. It was a pale connection, but still worthy of checking out more carefully.

According to Sheldon and his team, who had finally succeeded in finishing all six autopsies, Mills had died first.

He had a history of drug abuse, but was currently clean. His heart, however, had resented his years of cocaine use and had not resisted the strain of being kidnapped and beaten. His blood was the only one without traces of diazepam, which told Mac that the killer had learned to sedate his victims after what had happened to Mills. He wanted to kill them himself, not have them die of fear.

Ramirez had died second, on the same night that Mills, five hours apart, four nights ago. Did the killer had the sedative with him all along and only decided to use it after Mills, or did he stop between killings to arrange it? Valium is prescription only drug. Did he take it from Ramirez's hospital?

The Stutons and the Emmerttons had died on the same night, three nights after Mills and Ramirez. The Stutons were the last to die but their autopsies are the only ones with evidence of dehydration and starvation, indicating prolonged captivity, which leads to believe that they were captured first, perhaps even before the first two deaths.

There was, of course, the phone conversation with Sylvia Norton, their neighbour, on the night that they died, but that proved only that they were alive at that point, not that they were free from harm.

Then, there were the disposal sites. All of the victims, except Ramirez, had been left in various spots of the Bronx area. Comfort zone? Perhaps the area that the killer knows best, having lived or worked there before?

Mac rubbed his head. This case wasn't making much sense to him, and he was sure that his team was having the same problem. From his office he could see most of the working stations, but none of his team was in view. He knew that they were all working in one or another of the different labs scattered around the CSI's headquarters, but he doubt that they were getting anywhere. This guy knew what he was doing. This wasn't the first time he killed.

Not a single print had been found in all of the crime scenes, the killer most certainly had been wearing gloves, but that much Mac had already expected. These days it was very rare to find a usable print on murder cases like these, premeditate, pondered and thought through. Only with passion crimes and really dumb perps did they get lucky with print finding and, he sadly admitted, dumb perps were thinning in numbers.

What he was finding frustrating and less expected was the absence of any other trace. Not a shoe print, fibber, hair, nothing had been found in all three crime scenes, and the place where Mills had been tossed in to the water hadn't even been found.

No epithelials on the ropes found around the Stutons necks either. The ropes used to tie all the victims, as well as the stiletto weapon used to kill the Emmerttons and the blunt object used to kill Ramirez, were yet to be found.

What they needed was to find the primary crime scene, he knew. The Emmertons had been killed in their car, but the bruising had been made somewhere else. Same thing with Ramirez. She had died from a single blow, which wouldn't have bled too much, meaning she could've been killed in that ally or somewhere else. But the bruising? That kind of precise pattern required some time to do; time the killer did not had in a public place. Mac could bet that the place they were looking for was somewhere between Queens and the Bronx.

He looked at his own handwriting, telling himself that he needed to go back to the Stutons' house. His eyes refocused from near to far as he saw the FBI agent making his way towards his office.

He knew he shouldn't have, that it might come out as lack of trust from the NYPD in the bureau, but Mac hopped that his friend at the bureau's HQ in Washington would be as discrete as Mac had asked him to be. Donauh seemed genuinely interested in helping them and as far as Mac could tell, there was nothing wrong with the man. Still, it didn't hurt if his friend could come up with some information on the FBI's agent. Just in case.

"Officer Donauh," he greeted formally as the man stepped in to his office. "Something I can do to help you?"

"The right question is, is there something I have that can help you," the man said with a smile, a smile that betrayed his satisfaction for knowing something that the CSI headman apparently, did not. "The answer is yes."

"What do you have?" Mac asked, not in mood for games.

The other man took his time before answering, carefully reading Mac's writings on the glass wall. "Impressive."

"It's what my team here does," Mac said, reciting the sentence for the nth time. Some people had a hard time understanding the concept of team work. What was on that wall was the sum of the conclusions all of them had been working hard to find.

"Well, my team has arrived at some interesting conclusions themselves," Donauh said, taking a folded sheet of paper from his jacket pocket. "I knew that your team would be focusing on the forensic part of the scenario, so I asked them to work something else."

Mac sat behind his desk, waiting until the man decided to divulge whatever information that had brought him there. If the man's delay in telling it was any indication, it was something big.

"One of your officer's was involved in a shoot out less than a week ago, am I right?"

Mac blinked. The question had caught him completely off guard.

"What does that have to do with this case?"

"Apparently, everything," the man said mysteriously, taking a seat in front of Mac's desk. "A cop was killed in the shooting, right?"

Mac's eyes hardened to the consistence of steel.

"It's obvious you already have your facts, my confirmation is not needed. So, I ask again, what does this have to do with the case?"

The FBI agent sighed, looking almost sorry for what he was about to say. He looked at the written wall again before answering Mac.

"I see that your team found little connection points between the victims, but that you did notice the proximity in age in them. We have a team whose single function is to find patterns and hidden messages in things just like these. They analysed the victims' information and organized them in various forms. One particular organization led to an interesting discovery," he said, handing the printed paper to Mac.

Mac unfolded the white paper and read. In it were two rows of names, the six victims. In the first row they were listed in full name, organized by ages, going from Mills, the youngest, to Ramirez, the oldest. The reason why Donauh's team had found that order interesting was made brutally apparent when Mac read the second list, where only the last names were listed.

The pattern was burned in his retina. There was no denying it.

Mills, 45 years

Emmertton, 46 years

Stuton, 47 years

Stuton, 48 years

Emmertton, 49

Ramirez, 50 years

"If you look only at the initials, it spells,…" Donauh started to say when Mac took too long to react.

"Messer," the CSI finished automatically, his mind already racing with all the possibilities and ramifications of this finding.

"Yes," Donauh said, leaning back on his chair. "And, no matter how innocent he is on the matter, he did kill a cop."

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