Hello! Well, here I am, back with another multi-chaptered fic.
Warnings: Angst. Serial rapist/killer. Descriptions of a dead body.
Disclaimer: I own nothing and no one from "Criminal Minds" and no money is made from this, it is just for fun.
Summary: Reid suffered a major trauma at the hands of Tobias Hankel, and thanks to him, a long-buried secret from Reid's past has come back to haunt him.
A/N: This is a multi-chaptered fic that will focus on the aftermath of Hankel on Reid's psyche and how Morgan is part of his recovery. There will be SLASH and SMUT later, so be warned. And, it's a case fic (not my strong suit, sorry if it's lame) involving the rape/murder of teenage girls. Set about a year after "Revelations," some spoilers for that, and references to events in episodes from season 3.
FYI: I think I overdosed on fluff with the last couple of stories I did. This one is pretty grim... But, I hope you like it! ;)
Fourteen.
That was the number of years Amy Lynne Chappelle had lived before being kidnapped, raped, and murdered.
Fourteen years of being a nice, normal kid. Busy with school, music, and dance. Parents who loved her, a little sister who was still young enough to idolize her, grandparents who doted on her. A best friend, a little group of buddies that she loved to hang out with... Nothing unusual about any of them. And, nothing unusual about the day Amy Lynne disappeared.
That was the hell of it, Reid thought. No warning.
Amy had spent Saturday afternoon at a friend's house. The two girls were working on a science project, eating homemade Rice Crispy treats and talking about boys. Then Amy remembered she was supposed to be home by 5:00. She left to walk home around 4:30.
She never got there.
One minute, her whole world consisted of an iffy science grade, freshman year gossip, and whether her mom would take her to the mall that evening so she could spend her birthday money; the next-Reid didn't want to think about it. He knew what it was like to be snatched from the comfortable familiarity of one's own existence and plunged into a horror show.
There were no witnesses.
Once the unsub was done with her, he'd stashed her body in the wall of a condemned house. Two days later, it was discovered by a demolition contractor during a routine assessment of the property.
Reid stared at the small figure, crammed ignominiously into the tight crawlspace like an unwanted doll thrust into an overflowing toy box.
She was pretty. He stood slightly bent at the waist with his hands in his pockets, head cocked to the side. Morgan and Prentiss were moving through the abandoned house, along with several members of local law enforcement, looking for clues and gathering what scant evidence there was. Reid had already determined that, if the killer had left anything helpful behind, it rested with Amy Lynne.
Three... That was the number of homicides known to be the work of this same unsub, all young white females. In each case, he'd left his DNA, but there were zero hits in the database. No prints, no usable evidence. He'd killed them, then found empty houses to dump them in. That probably meant something, but Reid couldn't put his finger on what it was.
And, twenty-two. That was how many miles it was between the points of the geographic triangle in which the other bodies had been discovered. Reid would add this site to the map when he got back to the office, but he had little hope that it would help pinpoint anything. They just didn't have enough information yet.
Six was the number of months between the first and second disappearances, three between the second and third. This one had taken place a mere four weeks later. He's getting bolder. Reid idly pulled more numbers out of his head and mentally thumbed through them as they waited for the medical examiner to arrive.
There was nothing else to do.
"Hey, kid." Morgan came up behind him and put a hand on his shoulder. "Come on, there's nothing more we can do here."
"No, I want to get a look at the crawlspace after the body's been removed."
"Why? What are you thinking?"
"I want to see if there was any preparation. The other dump sites seem to have been about convenience-incidental, unplanned. But, this was a little more sophisticated, must have taken more time and effort... If he prepared the site in advance, it could indicate an increasing level of organization."
"You think the first three were just-"
"Practice."
Morgan sighed. "Ok, then. I'll wait outside. Holler if you need anything." He took one more sorrowful look at the small figure in the wall and headed out front to confer with the officers writing reports. Reid barely noticed.
He knelt down and placed his hand over the girl's. Cold, of course. Pale skin, blue-tinged nail beds. One cloudy eye half-open, her jaw hanging slackly to the side. Well past rigor. Spencer felt a prickle of tears, and quickly brushed his sleeve over his eyes. He didn't understand it-dead bodies usually didn't elicit such emotion from him. Anger, yes, sometimes even rage. Regret for what the person had been, and for what they might have become. But this... this heartbreaking sorrow. That was new.
He thought of what it had been like in the early days. Back then, he'd been unmoved in the presence of the dead. Somehow, in a classroom setting, even with the cadaver starkly laid out before him on a metal cart, there had been a disconnect. The body was a learning tool, an organic textbook of forensic information that he would someday apply in the field. On his more philosophical days, he thought of it as a casing left behind, a spent cocoon no longer needed by the moth.
Nothing more.
He'd studied the biology and the mechanics of death. He'd learned what it took to shut down the life force of a human being-how amazingly resilient, yet surprisingly fragile the body can be.
So, when he'd finally hit the field and been faced with a victim of violence, it was... exciting. He'd positively reveled in the opportunity to match his knowledge with the marks the murder weapon had left in soft tissue, on hard bone.
But... things changed after Hankel. As if a light switch had been flipped on in his head, he began to see. Then, later, when the kid died in front of him, everything seemed to coalesce, and the... the grief began. He hadn't felt it before, but now, it just seemed to get worse with every young victim. And... somehow, nowadays, whenever he saw children, teens-walking in the park, laughing, running-a vision of a bloody body, permanently frozen in youth, would puncture his thoughts.
It was too easy to make the leap between past and future. He thought of little Jack Hotchner, and he thought of JJ, with her pregnant belly just beginning to protrude. Of their normal lives, just beginning. He looked down into the half-open eye. She was someone's little girl, he thought, and fought back a catch in his throat.
The M.E. and the investigators came in; Reid stepped away. He forced himself to watch as they pulled her out. She was really jammed in there and they had to work for a while to compress and manipulate her shoulders enough to free her. Then, the M.E. checked her for signs.
"She's been dead at least forty-eight hours. There's blunt force trauma on the back of her head, but C.O.D. appears to be exsanguination-her throat was cut. We'll know more after the autopsy."
Reid pursed his lips and shook his head. He thought of the great gift Tobias Hankel had bestowed upon him, along with the curse of addiction-the ability to vividly imagine, no, to know, what sort of horrors the unsub's victims suffered before their deaths. She'd been terrified, of course, probably for a long time. Did she see death coming? Or, was she hopeful until the end?
At what point did she realize that-no one was coming to save her?
Her parents couldn't. Nor could the police; not even an elite team of BAU profilers could get to her in time. Reid knew it was not their fault. Some things just happened, and there was nothing to be done about it, except to learn and to use that knowledge to find the killer, hopefully before another child was taken. He wondered-if there was an afterlife, did Amy Lynne Chappelle take any satisfaction from knowing her death would lead them to the man who did this to her?
He doubted it.