Close to Home: Chapter 1: She's Gone

It was an unusually sweltering spring night in DC when Spencer Reid arrived home at his apartment. He sighed at the sight of the familiar green walls and built-in bookshelves. It was the end of a particularly long day.

It had been another long day of paperwork, catching up on the reports they had little time to complete while the cases were actually going on. Normally, he would've liked a good paper trail…he was just about the only one on the team who did. But all day he'd been restless, eager for something to happen…no…that wasn't right. It was more like some part of him, something deep within him that even he couldn't put words to, seemed to sense that something had already happened, and just wanted his conscious mind to wake up to that fact. That part of him waited, for what had seemed like an eternity, for the other shoe to drop so that there would be a name, and a description to put to this thing that had happened. It never had, but he felt…strangely on edge, like something, though he didn't know what, was somehow off, as if the universe had shifted. Something had changed in the aura of the world, if you believed in that stuff and he wasn't sure he did. Maybe he was just bored and exhausted… yeah …that had to be it. Doing paperwork for ten hours could be mind-numbing, especially when you had an IQ of 187 and had seen all this information previously. There was no intellectual stimulation in that, nothing for his overactive mind to sink its teeth into.

He shook his head, turned on the lights in the darkened living room, tossed his messenger bag on the couch and took a shower. It wasn't until he came out, having exchanged his work clothes for sweatpants and a T-shirt, that he noticed there were six new messages on his home answering machine.

He went to push the button to play them, but as he did this the phone rang again. He picked it up.

"Hello?" he said.

"Spencer…finally, I've been trying to get ahold of you all day…" said a familiar voice. It was Don, his grandmother's best friend and in many ways a surrogate for the grandfather he had never known.

"What is it? You never call just to catch up, and even if you did you wouldn't be this persistent…what's going on? Is Nana on her way here to 'surprise' me again?" He asked.

"No Spencer…" the old man replied, there was something there, a sadness…a lamenting in his voice that Reid was picking up on, and part of him understood then what had really prompted this phone call, though he wasn't prepared to face it until he heard Don say the words.

"I…I don't know that there is a good way to say this, so I'm just going to say it…she…she's gone Spencer…she's dead…."

The news hit him like a ton of bricks, and for a moment, Spencer couldn't breathe. He sunk into a chair. Nana had been the one dependable adult in his life growing up, in some ways she was more of a mother to him than her daughter was… now she was gone… He knew that Don would never lie to him about something like this…but it didn't seem possible. It wasn't quite real yet. Nana had been old, that was true, she'd been in her mid-eighties, but she hadn't ever seemed to lose any significant amount of energy or mobility. She had been the kind of person who looked, moved, and acted like someone fifteen to twenty years younger than their real age. So how had she died?

"W-when did this happen…?"

"Around seven am this morning, I went over to her place around eight-thirty to return a casserole dish and the front door was knocked halfway off its hinges. I found her inside."

"There were signs of forced entry?" he asked.

"Yes…and a struggle too… the living room and the foyer were all but destroyed. Spencer, I'm so sorry about all this, I know that this is a lot but I wanted to make sure you heard it from me before…"

"Before what?"

"You…may be getting another phone call about this…from a…different perspective… she's not the first one this has happened to. There have been others in the past couple of weeks… and Sharif Conwell has requested assistance from the Bureau. I can't say for sure whether or not it'll be your people of course but I wouldn't be surprised."

Don was right, even as they spoke, his cellphone vibrated with a text message from Garcia telling him to get back to the office ASAP. His mind raced, his heart hammered with charged and mixed emotions. He was caught between the shock and heartbreak at his grandmother's death, and the rising desire to hunt down and punish the unsub who had taken her from him.

But in all likelihood, his undeniable emotional involvement would have him taken off the case almost immediately, and if he didn't admit he knew one of the victims, it would only get him in more trouble since they were bound to look into her extended family as they worked on victimology and family notifications. It seemed the only logical option was to go back to work, explain in person and make his case for why he should be allowed on the case.

"Spencer…are you still there? Hello?"

"Don, I'll see you by morning probably, one way or another I'll be up there as soon as I can." Reid replied, then he hung up and got dressed, grabbed his go-bag, and left.

When he got to the BAU, he didn't say a word. After all, maybe the case had nothing to do with Nana and he could just tell Hotch what happened and attend her funeral. He sat down in the conference room like usual, though his hands were shaking and he was failing at trying to hide the fact that there was something wrong, he kept his head down because if he met a single one of the other six pairs of eyes, not only would they see the pain written all over his face but he was liable to break down completely.

Garcia stood up and took the remote. "Ok my family, tonight you are off to Mt. Bedford, it's a tiny outpost of a town in the middle of nowhere in upstate New York. That's because, in the last two weeks, a town which doesn't have a single murder case on record has had five homicides. All of the victims were elderly women, aged seventy-five and older and they were all longtime residents." She clicked a button and the pictures of five women, including Nana, appeared on the screen. Reid's heart sank even further. "Meet Gloria Keen, Eleanor Matthews, Beatrice Waters, Maryanne Mallworth, and our most recent victim, Penelope McGee. Each of these women were found dead in their homes by friends or neighbors between eight and eleven o'clock in the morning and were killed between one and four hours before they were found."

"It says here that the COD on all of them was heart attack…" Morgan pointed out.

"Yeah but each heart attack was induced. I spoke to Dr. Donald Mallworth, that's Maryanne's son, who also happens to be the only medical doctor in town therefore the resident ME by default. He found hypodermic needle marks in the exact same spot behind the right ear of all the victims. That combined with obvious signs of forced entry, namely the fact that all their front doors were kicked in and he and Sharif have ruled out natural causes." Garcia explained.

"Do we know what they were injected with?" Hotch asked

"No Sir, it either doesn't register on a tox screen or metabolizes too quickly. Unfortunately neither of those bits of information does much to narrow down the field of possibilities."

"What about relatives? Did all the victims live alone?" Blake asked.

"All but the fourth victim, Maryanne Mallworth lived with her son because she had late-stage Alzheimer's and apparently wouldn't trust anyone else to help her. All the other victims had oodles of extended family but they're spread out all over the country."

That was when they all noticed that Reid, who normally would've postulated at least two or three different theories by now, was silent.

"Reid…anything to add?" Hotch asked

"Guys…I have a um…a confession to make…"

"What is it?" Morgan asked.

"I know one of the victims…Penelope McGee is…was…my grandmother…"

"What?" Morgan asked in surprise.

"You're kidding…" Hotch exclaimed. Reid just shook his head in response.

"Oh my God…" Garcia exclaimed. "Reid…I'm so sorry…" she told him, looking visibly upset.

"Is this the first you're hearing about this?" Hotch asked.

"No…Don, Dr. Mallworth is an old family friend, he called me almost as soon as I got home to tell me and I didn't listen to them but there were messages on my answering machine to suggest he's been trying to get ahold of me all day…" he replied.

"Taking all this into account…Reid…you can't be on this case…you're way too emotionally involved and far too close to this…"

"Hotch I understand that… but she was one of the most important people in the world to me. I need to help figure out who's doing this…I owe her that…" he argued. At the very least. He added to himself.

Hotch could tell that even if he did take Reid off the case, that wouldn't stop him from working it, there was a mix of emotions playing across his face, grief, anger, guilt, and underpinning all of it there was sense of determination. "Alright, but if I get even a hint that you're getting tunnel vision you're done. Are we clear?" he asked.

"Yes sir…" Reid replied.

"Then let's go end this. Wheels up in thirty minutes…"