He moved methodically round the body, his instincts taking over. How often had he done this? More times than he could count. Too many. How many corpses does a man have to see before he can examine them on autopilot?

None, he reminded himself sharply. You should never examine a corpse on autopilot, it was a dereliction of the duty you owed the dead. There were no visible marks that he could see on Elahi's body, and he could not scent anything on the corpse, no signs that he had been drugged or had struggled in any way. Every indication was that he had invited his killer into his apartment, and that he had been killed with a single blow to the abdomen, almost certainly rupturing the abdominal aorta and causing death by massive blood loss.

Very quick and neat, a professional killing, he thought gloomily. It took some skill and strength to kill with one stab, particularly with the victim looking you in the eye and pleading for their life... have to wait to see what the ME turned up at autopsy to confirm that theory.

Just what are we supposed to do here? he wondered. They'd do their job, but why this couldn't have been given straight to Homicide, he had no idea.

His thoughts were interrupted as Baines leaned in through the door, careful not to disturb the scene. "Detectives?"

"Yeah?" Eames looked up from her examination of the kitchen - no knives disturbed, so the killer probably brought his own. Again, suggestive of a professional killer.

"We got another shout. Stabbing, two blocks away, outside a grocery store. Young Asian woman, matches the description of this guy's wife." He jerked a thumb at a picture on the wall; the dead man, an older man who strongly resembled him, and a young woman with the dead man's arm round her shoulders.

"Elahi." Eames was holding up the dead man's passport in one gloved hand. "His name was Ranjit Elahi."

Goren bent over the corpse and retrieved the man's wallet - untouched, despite containing a large sum of cash. He checked quickly for a photograph, and found, as he'd expected a snapshot of Elahi and a young Asian woman, again with his arm around her shoulders. They looked relaxed, happy and content together, and he was struck by the familiar sensation of waste. Another human life lost. Two lives, he reminded himself, and hustled out after Eames and Baines, leaving the CSUs to finish processing the scene.

Ten minutes after, he and Eames were at the scene, whilst Baines and several other uniformed officers tried to hold back the gawking crowd. The features of the woman at his feet matched the photograph. In life, she had been pretty. In death, what they could see of her face had an expression of horrified surprise. She was sprawled, face-down, on the sidewalk, a milk carton abandoned near her right hand, and a knife handle buried in her back.

"Great. Double homicide, no witnesses," Eames remarked bitterly.

"Some of them will have seen something," he replied, absently. The killer left the knife; why did he do that? Because he was in a crowd and wanted to get away unobserved, he thought, answering his own question. The pain of pulling the knife out would have caused the woman to scream. Instead, a quick stab from behind, rupturing the right kidney (again, a professional killer's technique), and the killer could slip away into the crowd, unobserved.

"Yeah. And every one of them will have seen something different."

He had to agree. Once, he thought, this might have been an interesting case. Now? Now, for the first time in several years, he wished he could take a vacation from his work. But no. Right now he needed the distraction, and would do for the next few weeks. Just until the anniversary was over, anyway. Two years ago, and the memory was still painful. Get through that, keep his mind busy until he could be sure that the old memories wouldn't come back and haunt him… and then, maybe then, he'd take a break. Leave Logan and Barek to mind the office.

"You coming?" Eames was looking at him with an expression of faint concern.

"Yeah… yeah, let's get this over with." They began the long process of taking statements, picking out the witnesses they particularly wanted to question. All through the next few hours, he was aware of Eames occasionally glancing at him. Just leave it, Eames, he thought snappishly, and then inwardly sighed. When you reached the stage where even your partner, and closest friend's, well-meant concern couldn't help, it was time to take a vacation.

Except he couldn't.

Sitting at her desk in One Police Plaza, late in the afternoon of the following day, Alex Eames sighed, and stretched, clicking the joints in her shoulders and causing Goren to look up with an expression of faint concern. "Been sitting in one place too long," she replied. He nodded, and returned to the witness statements. "You want a coffee?"

"I'll get them."

"Nah. My treat; you volunteered to go through the statements. Anything useful?"

"Like you said… dozens of witnesses, dozens of versions of the same event. So far… a few people saw a man in a dark jacket with flowing white trousers, but no-one can describe his face."

"Jacket's probably in the trash by now. Shame about that grocery store owner."

He shrugged. "Our bad luck."

"Yeah. What are the odds?" She was referring to the owner of the grocery store where the late Miya Elahi had bought a carton of milk and exchanged pleasantries. Five minutes later, she was dead, and the grocery store owner was three blocks away, and heading fast in the opposite direction, having left his son to take over the rest of the store's opening hours whilst he left early to catch a flight to visit his family out of town. By the time they'd gotten the report of the killing, found the right grocery store and questioned the owner's son, the man was already on his flight and couldn't be reached.

Even more annoying, the CCTV in the store showed Miya Elahi entering the store, with a man matching the vague description of her killer entering a few seconds after her, lurking, and then leaving shortly afterwards. If he was the suspect, though, he'd either been to the store before or was used to hiding from CCTV; the store's cameras showed only a few glimpses of him, none of which showed his face or anything that could realistically be used to ID him.

They didn't suspect the store owner of being involved in the killing, as there was nothing to suggest his absence was anything other than unfortunate timing, but both of them hoped he might have something useful to say. Neither had said anything out loud, but she knew Bobby was thinking the same thing she was. This looked like being the one case where Goren-and-Eames drew a complete blank and the killer got away.

He grunted and returned to the witness statements. She headed out towards in search of coffee, wanting a walk and a break from the work as much as a drink, and bumped into Mike Logan on the way.

"How's it going?" she asked. Logan fell into step beside her, sighing gustily, then grinned.

"Good… real good. It's been a bitch of a case, but we should have it wrapped up by tomorrow."

"Glad to hear it."

"You and Goren not getting anywhere?"

"Nowhere fast."

"Thought you were gonna question the people at that mosque the dead guy went to?"

She shrugged, and refilled the coffee machine with water, whilst Logan retrieved a couple of clean mugs. She smiled a thank-you. "Yeah, we did. No joy."

"They're not co-operating?"

"Oh, they're co-operating all right. They just don't know much." She spread her hands, frustratedly. "They all saw the killer attach himself to Elahi after the Friday prayer meeting he attended there, managed to guilt-trip him into inviting him home. He calls himself Ahmed Nissar; false name, no prints in the system. Apparently this guy's also new in town, he'd only been there a couple of times himself. No-one really took any notice of him, then Elahi shows up, attends for prayers on the Friday, Nissar comes over to him, falls into conversation, spins him a sob-story about how he's a new guy in town, down on his luck in the big bad city, guilt-trips Elahi into inviting him home for a meal… One hour later, Elahi and his wife are both dead, and Nissar's vanished off the face of the earth."

"You have any luck getting a picture of him?"

"Everyone seems to describe him differently. Always something apart from his face they focussed on – one time he showed up dressed in jeans and a long T-shirt, claiming he'd been trying to do outreach work on university campuses, the next he was in long flowing robes. Guy was a real pro at hiding in plain sight."

Logan tipped his head on one side. "Sounds like he was ex-army, something like that."

"Yeah, could be. Unfortunately, we have no fingerprints, almost no trace left behind in the apartment, and I wouldn't trust the picture the artist put together from the witness statements for a positive ID. If he is a pro, he'll have shaved his beard, cut his hair and probably dyed it, maybe gotten contact lenses. Nothing to go on."

"Sounds like you're screwed."

She glared, then forced herself to laugh. "Yes, it does."

"Lemme know if we can help."

"Thanks." He wandered off to rejoin Barek, who had her nose buried in paperwork. The joys of modern policing, Eames thought, and retrieved two decaffs from the machine. As she strolled back to her desk, she mused that occasionally it was tempting to switch the decaff and espresso button labels over, watch the caffeine freaks fall asleep at their desks and the virtuous decaff slurpers go bouncing round the room.

Once upon a time, she thought as she plonked the cup in front of him and returned to reviewing Elahi's personal effects, it wouldn't have taken coffee to get Bobby Goren bouncing round the room. Not that long ago, either, but now… he seemed permanently tired. Tired, worn down and putting on weight, she reflected. Not good signs.

But then, they were coming up to the two-year anniversary of Sienna Tovitz's departure for London. She remembered the previous year with a groan. About the one good thing about Nicole Wallace's reappearance back then was that it had distracted Bobby from reliving the awful time the previous year, when his lover had suddenly decided she was taking up a post with Interpol in London as liaison officer with the Metropolitan Police and left him with barely a few weeks' warning.

She cursed both women for making her friend unhappy, although, being fair, Bobby probably hadn't been the easiest person in the world to live with. She still wondered just what had prompted Sienna's swift departure, but had long since resigned herself to never knowing.

As her mind wandered briefly, she found herself idly staring at the computer screen, where Ranjit Elahi's electronic journal was displayed. He'd liked to write a daily journal, but, being a modern man, did so on his computer rather than on paper. The journal of a dead man should ideally contain some kind of clues to the identity of his killer, she thought morosely. Instead, whilst it wasn't quite "Went to work, bought milk, paid papers, Miya had a headache" – Elahi had been quite a skilled and entertaining writer, even in his private journal – it mainly consisted of a series of amusing sketches, focussing heavily on his career in a construction firm. Suddenly, her eye was caught by an odd phrase from one of his first journal entries.

It's a shame they couldn't keep the twin towers.

Suddenly fascinated, she caught Goren's eye. "Bobby? Take a look at this."

He unfolded his long frame from the chair, and leaned over her shoulder, his breath tickling her neck. "Hunh."

"Yeah. What the hell did he mean by that?"

"Hold on." He vanished back behind his own computer, tapped at the keys for a few minutes, then looked up again, grinning.

"Come here." It was her turn to peer over his shoulder, and she read from the website he'd found: "Wembley Stadium's twin towers are to be replaced by four sky-scraping steel masts, under a £475m redevelopment of the home of English football…" Where on earth had Bobby picked up that obscure reference? Same place he found out sharks don't have scales, she thought, and grinned. He never ceased to amaze her.

"What was he working on?" Bobby's brown eyes met hers, looking alert and interested for the first time in some hours.

"Give me a minute." She'd begun with the most recent journal entries (hoping vaguely for something along the lines of "I wish I'd never slept with my best friend's wife, rumour has it he has a nasty temper" – no such luck). Starting from the beginning, she began to read through in more detail, skimming through details such as Elahi's getting his job with Towells construction and moving to London with his wife, his first projects, a long description of how the first big project he'd been involved with, a stadium for a minor English soccer team, had been broken into and vandalised, setting the job back a few days.

She read that one a little more carefully than the others, but it seemed to be one of those minor pointless crimes that took up so much police time for no results. She returned to skimming through the journal from start to finish, and eventually found what she was after. Elahi's latest project had been the "City of London" stadium, an entirely new build stadium which had acquired particular prominence due to the delays to the completion of the rebuilding of Wembley stadium.

Most of Elahi's earlier journal entries referred to it, in fact, one of the latest ones consisted of Elahi having a quiet gloat about an England soccer friendly against Germany having been transferred to the new stadium at short notice due to the Wembley job taking longer than expected: "It might be a rush job to get it done on time, but we'll do it. Why on earth it has taken so long to finish Wembley when the Japanese and Koreans managed to build so many new stadiums for the 2002 World Cup in about two years is beyond me".

A later journal reference indicated that he'd been moved from one part of the project to another at short notice: "Got moved from designing seating to temporary roof project today – one of the senior guys on that team is badly ill. Hope I'm up to it, the last time I looked at roofing techniques was when I was doing my final exams. Shouldn't be too difficult, all the designing work's been done – just have to answer any queries the builders have about it."

She was in the middle of sharing this with Goren, when the phone on his desk rang, making them both jump. He took the call, spoke briefly for a few seconds, and hung up, then turned to her, smiling. "Good news. The grocery store owner's back from vacation."

He was already half out towards the door as she retrieved her coat, then lengthened her stride to keep up, and hurriedly fished for the car keys. Perhaps now they'd catch a break.