I'm really sorry this has taken so long to update. I'd like to say a huge thanks to anyone coming back to read it after such a long wait.

Disclaimer: Not mine if you've seen them on CSI: NY

Chapter 13

Two months later

Ged was watching the woman from the fire escape as she walked around her unnecessarily neat apartment. This was clearly a woman who didn't have children and could afford the best of everything. All the furniture looked like it cost a fortune. The huge plasma TV fixed to the wall and the state of the range music system that sat in the corner of the room showed that the bitch had money to spend.

She may have been a bitch in his eyes but with her dark hair and her dark eyes….she looked just like her, just like Jo. He'd been thinking about her since he had read in the paper that she had been rescued. He wasn't sure if he hated her or Mac the most. He'd wanted her to die in that grave and he wanted Mac to be the one to find her cold rotting body.

As his anger swelled inside him he moved across the fire escape and over to the bedroom window and silently pulled it open. He'd practised this before tonight and he'd even practised creeping across her bedroom and out into the hall so he knew to step over the creaky floorboard just in front of the bedroom door.

As he silently made his way down the dimply lit hallway he could hear the bitch talking on the phone. She had such a sweet voice, it was almost musical. God, he couldn't wait to silence her for good. He got to the end of the hallway and could now see her sitting on the couch running her slim and delicate fingers through her hair. She had her back to him so had no idea he was watching her.

She was too busy chatting away into her brand new iPhone to hear him coming up behind her, but it would have been hard anyway because he moved so gently that he barely made any sound at all. He was close enough to pounce when he heard her say her goodbyes to whoever was on the other end of the phone. She leant forward and placed the phone down on the gleaming glass coffee table and picked up the latest issue of Vogue from off it. She sat back against the couch and pulled the magazine open and began flicking through it.

He struck too quick for her to be able to move away from him. She could only try to scream as his gloved hand came down over her mouth. His other arm was wrapped tight around her torso, crushing her. She tried to pull away from him but she was only petite and had no strength so couldn't stop herself from being pulled over the back of the couch by Ged.

He pulled her away from the couch and swung her hard into the wall beside them, letting her head hit it with a satisfying crunch. He let go of her and watched her crumple to the floor. He tipped his head back and stretched his arms out to the side and stood there as if he were looking up at the heavens feeling the full satisfaction of what he had just done….what else he was about to do.

~0~0~0~0~

3 days later

Jo walked through the lab, clutching her iPad close to her chest. She was trying to find Hawkes but for the life of her she couldn't track him down. She saw Adam in his lab so decided to ask the young tech if he had seen Hawkes.

She walked in to find him with headphones on, his head swaying from side to side in beat with whatever he was listening to. He never heard her call his name so she stepped behind him and pulled out his headphones.

She couldn't help but smile as he near jumped half a mile out of his skin. "Sorry, Adam." she said instead of laughing at him.

"Jo! I never heard you." he said.

Like she hadn't noticed. "Relax, Adam. Did you get those reports back?" she asked.

"Sure did boss." Adam said as he pushed himself across his lab in his chair, too lazy to stand up.

Jo watched as he grabbed a file and then stood up and stepped over to her. He opened the file and began to explain the findings but she quickly snatched the file from him with a playful smile. "I can read, Adam." she said with a smile and then walked towards the door.

"I know…" he muttered, "Hey, err, Jo!" he called after her.

She stopped and turned to face him, "Yeah?" she said after he failed to continue to finish whatever it was he wanted to say.

"I….errr… How are you doing?" he asked a little nervously.

"I'm fine." she told him, forcing a smile.

"It's just, I'm here… you know if you need to talk."

"Adam, I'm fine!" she said a little snappily.

"Yeah, I know you are." he replied, not sounding like he was convinced. "I'm sorry." he said and quickly returned to his seat which he pushed back in front of his computer screen.

Jo wanted to apologise to him for snapping but the young tech had already put his headphones back in. Inwardly kicking herself she pushed away from the doorway of his lab and was moving across the hall when the elevator doors opened up.

A young woman, clearly a bike messenger stepped out. She saw Jo and called out to her, stopping Jo in her tracks. "Hey, lady, I got a package!"

Jo watched as the young woman walked over to her, reading the name off the package, "It's for a Jo Danville."

"That's me." Jo said, a little surprised as she wasn't actually expecting anything.

The woman smiled and thrust the package into Jo's hand. "Sign here please and then my work here is done!" she smiled before returning to chewing a wad of gum loudly.

Jo took a clipboard from her and signed her name as the woman glanced around the lab. She handed it back to the woman who smiled, popped her gum and then turned back towards the elevator, shouting back "Have a good day!"

Jo never replied and never bothered to watch her slip into the elevator she just turned on her heels and headed towards her office to find out what the package was. It was no bigger than an A4 size of paper and it wasn't very thick or heavy, but she could feel something sliding about inside it.

She stepped into her office and moved to sit behind her desk. She reached for her cup of tea and took a long swig. She quickly pulled a sickened face at the disgustingly cold cup of tea. She was going to have to get another one, she was running on fumes. She pushed herself up and figured she would just come back to the package later.

~0~0~

Jo, now with a hot fresh cup of tea in her hands, was walking back towards her office. She was stirring some sugar into her tea when she heard Mac calling her name. She stopped and turned to watch him walk up behind her.

"I've been looking for you everywhere!" he said to her.

She noticed how he stopped and stood observing her, he did this a lot lately. At first she knew it was because his eyes would lock onto the bruises and cuts on her face, now she felt it was just because he was looking for cracks in her of some kind. Why would no one believe her that she was fine? Well more or less fine.

"What's up, Mac?" she asked, desperate to get him to stop staring at her.

"Are you ready?" he asked her.

Her confusion must have shown on her face because he looked back at her in shock, "For what?" she had to ask.

"The team meeting, about the progress, or rather lack of, on the Midnight strangler." Mac reminded her. He was shocked she had forgotten about it, she never forgot things like that.

"Oh, geez! Mac, I totally forgot about that. Just give me a minute to get the lab report off my desk!" she said.

She all but ran towards her office and Mac followed after her. He stood in the doorway and watched as she bean rummaging around her desk for the report she had not long ago thrown down onto it, the one Adam had given her.

Mac noticed how her desk was more of a mess than usual. He watched as she put her cup of tea down and began going through more piles of papers and files.

"You really should let Lindsay sort that desk out for you sometime, I know she's offered in the past." Mac said.

"She used to offer to do it at least every day, Mac. What can I say, I can't help it, it just always goes back to this!" she said as she balled her fists up and growled in frustration. "Oh where the hell is it?" she snapped.

Mac moved closer to her desk and began looking with her as she looked on the sideboard behind her desk. He noticed the package lying among the chaos that was her desk. "What's this?" he asked.

Jo quickly glanced at what he was looking at and then remembered the report was under that. She turned and stepped beside him and reached over to grab the report, as she did her arm knocked the pile of papers off the top of her computer. They all came crashing down and knocked her cup of tea over. Luckily it spilled off the table and not over everything on it.

"Shit!" Jo yelled, becoming more frustrated by the minute.

She grabbed the report and passed it to Mac. She then began looking for something to mop her spilled tea up with.

"Jo, come on, just leave it. I'll ask a tech to come in and clean it. We have to get to this meeting." Mac said.

Jo just looked at him and sighed. Mac was sure he could see tears staring to build up in her eyes, but she suddenly laughed and raked her fingers through her hair. "I think I should get a secretary." she said with a false smile.

Mac smiled back at her and nodded but he couldn't help but feel worried about her. She just wasn't herself. She hadn't been since the day she had woken up in the hospital.

"Come on then, we'll be late." Jo said as she noticed him staring at her again.

She stepped around him and stepped out of her office. Mac could only follow after her.

~0~0~0~0~

The meeting was about the team's latest case and a serial killer they had dubbed The Midnight Strangler, due to the fact all his victims times of death were put at midnight and all had died from strangulation. Another woman had been found dead in her home the day before and the team were still nowhere near solving the case. Despite the women being raped they had no DNA, no fibres of any kind, no prints, pretty much they had nothing but a mounting pile of victims.

"The Killer always rapes and then strangles all his victims. He always uses white rope to tie his victims up and always uses a red scarf to strangle them." Danny said from the end of the table as he flicked through multiple pictures of the victims that were being displayed up on the screen they were all looking up at. The picture's all contained evidence of the white ropes and the red scarfs.

If Jo had been paying more attention, or even looking at the screen, the colours might have been of more importance to her but as it was she was still hanging on the last thing Danny had said 'the killer always rapes…'

She was thinking back to the first of these killings, one of the first cases she had worked on since coming back. She could see the bedroom of the first vic in her head clear as day. She could still remember the metallic smell of blood from where their killer had cut the woman with some sort of sharp instrument. Blood had been everywhere, all over the woman's bedroom. The killer had spread it on the walls like paint. It was obvious from the first glance at the naked woman's body that she had been brutally raped and it had been something that had caused Jo to have flashbacks of her own sexual assault, something she had tried hard to forget about.

She pulled herself out of her thoughts and spent the rest of the meeting forcing herself to pay attention.

~0~0~0~0~

Over an hour later Jo walked back into her office and had to smile upon seeing that a tech had in fact cleaned up her spilt tea for her. She was thankful because she really could not be bothered doing it now. She wanted to get home, open a bottle of wine, have a hot bubble bath and chill out on the couch. Ellie was staying over at her friends for the night so she could enjoy a nice peaceful apartment to herself.

She rummaged through the mess on her desk and grabbed a few things she would need. She then noticed the package, she'd totally forgotten about it. She grabbed it and stuffed it into her bag along with the other things she was taking home.

She looked up when Lindsay walked in, and she had to smile when she saw the young woman trying not to laugh. "Spill, Lindsay. What is it?" she asked.

Lindsay laughed and then looked at her and just smiled. "When…well when you were missing and your desk was cleared out it felt so odd. The mess drives me mad, don't get me wrong, but at least I know that you're here when there's a mess on your desk. When you were gone it was tidy, too tidy." she said and smiled as she remembered herself and Mac having made it seem more Jo-like.

Jo just looked at her with a small smile, wondering where she was going with this. Lindsay saw this so concluded, "I guess I like the mess."

Jo pulled her bag up onto her shoulder and switched her desk lamp off. "Thanks, Lindsay." she said as she walked past her, gently squeezing her shoulder. "G'night."

"Night, Jo." Lindsay replied before she turned to face Jo's desk again and the mess on it. She turned to her own desk and hesitantly reached down and ruffled up a neat pile of papers that stood there. She looked at the mess she had made for a second and then scooped them all together and sorted them into a neat pile again, "One messy desk in here is enough." she told herself.

~0~0~0~0~

Jo had a huge fluffy towel wrapped around her body and her fluffy bathrobe on over it. She pulled open the fridge and pulled out a bottle of red wine. She'd had her bath and now wanted a calming drink. She uncorked the bottle and pulled out a wine glass from the cupboard. She poured herself a large glass and took a long swig.

From behind the glass she noticed her bag sitting on the worktop and the package that was sticking out of it. She brought the glass away from her lips and stepped over to her bag. She pulled the package out and tucked it under her arm. She then scooped up her bottle of wine and carried it all through to the living room.

She took another long swig of wine and then put the glass and the bottle down on the coffee table. She sat down and studied the package. She suddenly noticed some scribbling in the corner of the envelope and it was only when she really focused on the tiny writing that she could make out what it said:

'Alabama'

Her hands began to shake as she thought about that word; that name, the person who had dubbed her Alabama. With some difficulty - due to her shaking hands - she tore the envelope open and tipped it upside down. A small DVD case fell out onto the coffee table, the only thing it said on it was, 'For Alabama, enjoy, Ged'.

She brought her hand up to her mouth, she was sure she was going to be sick. She took a deep breath and grabbed the DVD and stood up. She walked over to her TV and turned it on. It took her just a few seconds to load the DVD player and she stood there in silence watching the screen, waiting. Finally the screen burst to life.

She felt dizzy and sick as she watched it. It seemed to go on forever but finally it ended. She tried to get her breathing under control, hoping it would help her to stop feeling so dizzy, so nauseous. She noticed the envelope of on the coffee table and snatched it up. She reached in and pulled out a stack of A4 size pictures.

She began to quickly skim through them, but with each one she knew what would follow with the next. All of them were pictures of her and she clearly had no idea that any of them were begin taken at the time. She finally got to the bottom of the stack. This picture was a real close up of her and wrote over it in red permanent marker was "see you soon!"

Jo just about made it into the kitchen where she threw up into the sink, still clutching the picture and the warning note in her hand.

TBC

Thanks for reading. Please review even if it's just to yell at me for taking so long to update.