'This is it..' I think to myself as I leave the SUV, and stop in front of the jet on the tarmac. 'I'm finally here.' I'm so stuck inside my thoughts that I don't notice the older man standing next to me.
"First day?" He asks and I snap out of my thoughts and turn to him. I nod.
"Y-yeah. I'm the new team member. You're Jason Gideon. I've been to a few of your lectures." I tell him.
"Nice to meet you. These are Agents Aaron Hotchner, Derek Morgan, and Doctor Spencer Reid." He introduces the men in order. I smile and nod my head at them, lingering on Doctor Reid a moment longer than the others.
"I'm Agent Lucinda Reynolds, but I go by Lucy. I'm 23, in case you were wondering. People always ask about my age." I say tucking my hair behind my ear. Morgan chuckles.
"Another kid genius, huh?" He elbows Reid. I twist my ring on my finger.
"I have an IQ of 184 and an eidetic memory and can read 20,000 words per minute." I blurt out and they all stare at me, except Dr. Reid.
"I'm technically a genius, yes." I say suddenly interested in staring at my red converse high tops.
"Call me Hotch. Have you ever been in the field before?" Hotchner asked me. I look up at him.
"Yes sir, I was with Major Crimes division for a little over a year." I tell him and he smiles slightly.
"Alright. Welcome Agent Reynolds. We'll debrief you on the plane." He says heading to the jet. I pick up my duffel bag and my black messenger bag and get on the plane. I find a seat and take in my surroundings. It's a nice plane for the FBI. Agent Morgan sits across from me and gives me a reassuring smile. Once we take off, Reid starts going over the case file.
"His first victim 26 year old Melissa Kirsh. Stab wounds, strangulation-"
"Wait, wait back up. He stabbed her, then strangled her to finish her off?" Morgan interrupted.
"Other way around. Why do you think he started using the belt with the second murder?" Gideon said.
"Strangulation with your bare hands is not as easy as one would believe." I inform them. Reid nodded.
"He tried, probably found that it took too long.." Reid adds.
"So he stabbed her instead." Morgan finishes. I smile.
"And realized it would be hours of cleaning up the blood." Hotch says.
"Next time our boy's got a method- the belt." Morgan says.
"He's learning. Perfecting his scenario. Becoming a better killer." Gideon finishes the debrief.
Morgan is talking to Reid, once we enter the FBI field office, about Gideon. I'm behind them.
"He never stands with his back to a window. When I was between him and a doorway, he asked me to move." Morgan says.
"That's Hyper Vigilance. It's not uncommon in Post Traumatic Stress Disorder." Reid explains.
"Just how much disorder are we talking about?" Morgan asks and Hotch catches up.
"Morgan, it's been 6 months. Everything's ok." Hotch tells him and walks ahead to introduce us. Gideon corrects him when he calls Reid 'agent' and not 'doctor'. I stand to the side, watching them.
"He's willing to travel with the body." Gideon says, looking at the map on the bulletin board.
"Then he drives a vehicle capable of concealing one." Hotch adds.
"1 in 7.4 drivers in Seattle owns an SUV." Reid comments.
"Explorer with tinted windows." Morgan says.
"Explorers rate higher with women." Reid says.
"But how do we know it's his car? Ted Bundy drove a VW bug." Morgan asks.
"What about a Jeep Cherokee?" Hotch suggests.
"Jeeps are more masculine." Reid says, glancing at me before looking away.
"We all know how an unsub feels about asserting his masculinity." Gideon says.
"When did the bureau become involved in the case?" Hotch asks.
"After the fourth body. He dumped that one out of state." An agent said.
"On purpose." Hotch adds.
"If so, knowledge of law enforcement does suggest a criminal record." Reid says, eyeing me again.
"Or that he watches television. May I?" Morgan asks, being handed a file.
"So you want to see our suspect list?" The agent asks.
"No we won't look at a suspect list until after we come up with a profile. It keeps our perspective unbiased." Hotch tells him.
"When do we sit down with your task force?" Gideon asks.
"4:00." An agent responds.
"An accurate profile by 4:00, today?" Morgan asks, skeptically.
"That's not a problem." Gideon says, walking to a board.
"Agent Gideon where would you like to start?" Hotch asks.
"At the site of the last murder." He responds pointing to a crime scene photo.
I tag along with Hotch and Reid to talk to the missing woman, Heather Woodland's brother. The dog, Sandy, starts barking at Reid almost immediately.
"No, it's okay. It's what we call the Reid effect. Happens with children too. I'm Agent Hotchner. This is Special Agent Reynolds and Special Agent Dr. Reid." He says introducing us.
"You look too young to have gone to medical school." David Woodland says.
"They're PhD's. 3 of them." Reid says.
"Are you a genius or something?" Woodland asks. I smirk. 'Duh, we both are..'
"I don't believe that intelligence can be accurately quantified- but I do have an IQ of 187, an eidetic memory and can read 20,000 words per minute. Yes, I' a genius." He says, and I smile a bit. Hotch pets the dog and the brother mentions that Sandy hasn't been eating.
"Not sense, smell. Our apocrine sweat glands releases secretions in response to emotional stress." I inform him and Reid follows me to my place in front of a dresser with a car magazine on it.
"Sandy's worried because you are." Hotch translates.
"David, does your sister drive a Datsun Z?" Reid asks after I show him the magazine.
"No, but she's in the market for one. How did you know?" Woodland asks.
I hold up the Datsun catalog and Woodland takes Sandy outside.
"There's an immediate relationship established between a buyer and a seller, a level of trust. If I want to coax a young woman into my car.." Reid states.
"Offer her a test drive." I finish and he smiles at me, and I tuck my hair behind my ear.
We're in the conference room, forming the profile, I'm looking over the files, while Morgan's pacing tossing a ball in the air, Reid is spinning in his chair,
"Okay, then how bout the fact that on one hand we have paranoid psychosis but the autopsy profile says what?" He asks looking for help.
"Adhesive residue shows he put layer after layer of duct tape over his victim's eyes." I say.
"He knows he wants to kill them, but he still covers their eyes. He doesn't want them looking at him apparently. Ok, but then he takes the body and dumps it right out in the open, murder weapon nearby." Morgan explains.
"Not the M.O. of a paranoid unsub convinced he's being watched or surveilled." Reid adds.
"Paranoid psychosis, but behavior that's not paranoid." Morgan states.
"Maybe he's schizophrenic." Hotch guesses.
"Maybe we just don't have enough for a complete profile." Morgan throws back.
"We have to narrow our list of suspects." Hotch reasons.
"We're looking at less than 12 hours to have to find this woman." Morgan argues.
"Hotch, we don't know anything!" Morgan says.
"Alright, enough. Hotch, tell them we're ready." Gideon says, leaving the conference room.
"We're ready?" Morgan asks, confused.
"Reid, Reynolds. You're good with this? We've got a woman who's only got a few hours to live, an incomplete profile, and a unit chief on the verge of a nervous breakdown." Morgan says to us.
"They don't call them nervous breakdowns anymore." Gideon tells him, coming back in to grab the file.
"It's called a major depressive episode." I tell him.
"I know, Lucy." He says to me. I smile awkwardly at him as we walk out and stand in front of the agents, ready to deliver our profile. I stand next to Reid and play with the sleeves of my black cardigan.
Gideon delivers a complete profile from the little information we have and it was amazing to watch him work. I'd been to a few of his lectures and after watching his process I want to be as good a profiler someday. We find someone fitting the profile and set up a ruse to use me as bait. I walk up to his door and his grandmother answers.
"Hi. I'm sorry to bother you. I'm house sitting down the street, and when I got back, the door was wide open and the lights weren't working. I feel stupid asking this, but is there someone who might be able to take a look inside with me?" I ask the elderly woman and she turns and yells for the suspect, Richard Slessmen. He comes downstairs and walks me to the empty house. We walk in and I cuff him. Hotch goes upstairs and Gideon and Reid walk towards the kitchen, where his family is.
"That the mother?" Gideon asks.
"Grandmother. The mother died in a fire when he was 13." I tell him, walking into the room, wearing a brown leather jacket, white button up shirt, jeans and my favorite red converse that match my bright red hair. Reid smiles at me and I smile back.
"Probably not the only fire in his childhood." Gideon says walking around the house.
"Before his Son of Sam murders, David Berkowitz set a multitude of fires." Reid states walking around the house.
"Exactly how many is a multitude?" Morgan asks.
"According to his diary, 1,400 and..." Reid trails off thinking.
"88." I tell him and Reid nods, smiling at me. I smile back, before I notice Gideon look at me and I look away tucking my hair behind my ear.
"Luring him out was your idea, right Reynolds?" Gideon asks, and I nod.
"It's uh- Lucy. Just call me Lucy." I tell him, awkwardly. I follow Morgan and Reid upstairs into Slessmen's room.
"Relax. You were picked to join this team for a reason, Lucy. Just trust your instincts." Morgan tells me, as we reach the doorway of Slessmen's room.
"Something's not right about this. This is a boy's room, not a man's." Morgan says, after looking around the room. I open a door and find a staircase to the attic, and I head up the stairs to find Reid, Gideon and some FBI techs already up there.
"Wei-chi." I say to myself.
"Here we call it 'Go'. It'd considered to be the most difficult board game ever conceived." Reid says.
"Chairman Mao required his generals to learn it." Gideon informs us.
"It also looks like he's playing himself." Reid adds.
"This might provide an advantage, actually. 'Go' is considered to be a particularly psychologically revealing game. There are profiles for every player, the conservative point counter, the aggressor, the finesser." I tell them.
"What kind of player is Slessmen?" Hotch asks us. Reid and I lean down and look at the game a moment.
"Extreme aggressor." We both say at the same time, and we look at each other before I look away tucking my hair behind my hair and he clears his throat. We walk back into Slessmen's room and find Morgan looking at a laptop, with a login screen with a number 6 at the bottom.
"What's the number 6 at the bottom?" I ask him.
"Number of password attempts before the program wipes the hard drive. You didn't know that, Luce?" He asks me and I shrug.
"Not all that into computers. Think you can break in?" I ask him.
"In 6 tries?" He asks, scoffing.
"Try again. Fail again. Fail better." Gideon says. Morgan looks at him for a minute.
"Samuel Beckett." Reid clarifies.
"Try not. Do or do not." Morgan says, which confuses Gideon.
"Yoda." I say, looking up at them. Gideon looks at me, but he notices something. He picks up a book and flips through the pages and finds a newspaper article about Boston.
"I wanna talk to him." Gideon says walking downstairs. I walk right behind him and stand right against the wall in the kitchen. He slides the book across the table to Richard Slessmen.
"You read my paper. Learn anything?" He asks Slessmen, as he sits down.
"Heirens said a man living inside his head was the one who committed the murders. You said he was lying, that there'd never been an actual case of multiple personalities." Slessmen says.
"You have an academic interest in dis-associative identity disorder or are you just planning your defense?" Gideon asks him. Slessmen just chuckles. Gideon opens the book and pulls out the article.
"You a fan of Adrian Baal's work?" Gideon asks him, showing the article.
"No. I'm a fan of yours. You know, they never give you the real facts about CPR, that outside of a hospital, it's only effective 7% of the time. Your friend had a 93% certainty of dying, but you kept trying even after you'd broken his ribs, even after his blood was all over your hands." Slessmen tells Gideon.
"Why don't you tell us where Heather Woodland is?" Gideon asks him. Slessmen leans back.
"Woodland, isn't she the girl that went missing a couple days ago?" Slessmen asks us.
"Get him out of here." Gideon tells the uniformed officers as he leaves the kitchen. Hotch and I follow him outside.
"Hey." I tell him. Gideon turns around and looks at us.
"He said 'isn't she the girl'... If he'd already killed her, he would've said-" Gideon started to say.
"Wasn't she the girl." Hotch finishes.
"She's alive. We don't know for how long." Gideon tells us.
"Is it true what he said about CPR? I mean, I didn't know." Hotch says
"You want statistics about CPR, ask Lucy." Gideon replies.
"I want to know if you're okay." Hotch says.
"I'm fine." Gideon tells him.
"Are you?" Hotch asks him.
"Think I can't do the job?" Gideon asks Hotch.
"I think you can't be two different people at once." Hotch tells him and Gideon smiles.
"What is it?" Hotch asks him.
"Conflicts in the profile." Gideon says to us.
"2 different behaviors." Hotch says.
"2 different people. There's a second killer." Gideon finishes for him. We head back to the field office.
"A second unsub?" I ask him.
"It's not unusual. Remember Lawrence Bittaker and Roy Norris?" Gideon asks me.
"1979. They outfitted a van to rape and murder girls in California." I respond.
"Are we looking for someone who fits a similar relationship?" Hotch asks Gideon.
"They're not equals. Slessmen's smart, but he is a submissive personality." Gideon tells us.
"So number 2 is the dominant." I say.
"Authoritative. Arrogant." Gideon supplies.
"Probably not as smart as Slessmen." Hotch tells us.
"He's like the schoolyard bully recruiting a good underling, he'll be protective of Richard. He'll make him feel like he owes him." Gideon explains as we reach the bottom of a staircase.
"If Richard's been up in the attic fantasizing about being an extreme aggressor, this guy showed him how to do it." Hotch says.
"He helped him take the first step." Gideon says. We decide to have Hotch talk to Richard's grandmother and find us a name. He gets the name of Slessmen's cellmate, Charlie Linder. We went to the prison where Slessmen and Linder served their time and talked to the warden. When we walked in some of the inmates whistled and shouted remarks to me, but that was expected.
"Anyone who can tell us more about Slessmen?" Gideon asked the warden.
"Tim Vogel was the security guard covering Slessmen's block. That's him over there. I'll go get him for you." The warden tells us. I finish up my phone call with Hotch.
"That was Hotch. Linder's name came up on a police report." I tell him.
"And?" Gideon asks me.
"He's dead. Car accident 2 months ago. Linder is dead." I tell him. Vogel comes up to us and we walk with him.
"Too bad you guys came here for nothing. I mean, talk about scum. I can't remember how many times I put Linder in solitary for causing trouble with us." He stops to open a gate.
"You'd think the inmates would try to stay on our good side, right? Especially since half our job is protecting them from each other." Vogel tells us.
"You protect them?" Gideon asks him.
"If you're a little white guy? Especially in a prison like this." Vogel comments.
"Linder's 6'4. You talking about Slessmen?" I ask him.
"Oh yeah." Vogel says, nodding.
"Thanks for your help." Gideon tells him. Gideon and I are leaving the prison and wait until the parking lot before talking.
"He befriended Richard, protected him, made him feel like he owed him." He tells me.
"He fits the profile. And did you see them?" I ask him.
"The keys." Gideon answers me. We stake out the parking lot, waiting for Vogel to get off his shift. We see his orange Datzun and call Hotch.
"Hotch, I just found your leverage. His name is Timothy Vogel." Gideon says as I pull out of the parking lot and begin to tail Vogel. It turns out to be a decoy and not Vogel. Hotch calls us and tells us that the suspect's boat is at Allied Shipyard, so we head over there. We apporach the boat with Gideon in the lead and me trailing behind, and suddenly my phone buzzes.
"Listen to me. You need to wait for backup." Morgan says into the phone.
"If we wait, the girl is dead." I tell him, as I keep walking to the boat.
"And if we had waited in Boston-" Morgan starts to say but I cut him off.
"I can't. You told me to trust my instincts." I tell him hanging up. I walk up and crouch behind a crate to see Gideon with his gun pointed at Vogel, who has a gun to Heather's head. I draw my gun and cover Gideon.
"Come on. What, are you a lousy shot?" Gideon asks and then points his gun away and spreads himself, giving Vogel a clear shot.
"50 feet away. You got a perfect shot. Shoot me." Gideon says to him.
"You think I'm stupid?" Vogel asks him.
"I think you're an absolute moron. I know all about ya, Tim. You're at the gym 5 times a week. You drive a flashy car, you stink of cologne and you can't get it up. Not even Viagra's working for you. You know what that tells me? That tells me that you are hopelessly compensating, and it's not just in your head. It is physical. What did the girls call you in high school? What'd they come up with when you fumbled your way into some girl's pants, and she started laughing when she got a good look at what little you had to offer?" Gideon asks him, antagonizing him.
"Shut up!" Vogel yells at him.
"Short stack? Very little Vogel? I got it. Tiny Tim." Gideon says and Vogel pushes Heather and I shoot him in the chest, but he still gets a shot off and it hits Gideon. I run to him.
"Gideon are you okay?" I ask him and he nods.
"Go look after the girl." He tells me and I walks over to Heather and pull her to me and hold her.
Hotch and Morgan were sitting off to the corner and I'm walking with Reid, and talking with him. 'It's nice to meet someone who's brain works the way mine does. He understands me.. and he's cute..'
"You know, Haley and I were looking at baby names. Guess what Gideon means in Hebrew?" Hotch asks Morgan.
"Mighty Warrior." Reid and I both say at the same time and I blush tucking my hair behind my ear.
"Appropriate." Reid says as he intertwines his fingers in mine and we keep walking, and he makes a joke and I start giggling.
Later we're on the jet heading back to Quantico, and I'm curled up on the couch with Reid, and we bot fall asleep almost immediately. After we land, I'm unpacking my stuff at an empty desk right next to Reid's.
As I unpack my things, I start to think about my first case with the BAU and we got the suspect, although I did have to shoot him, and we saved the girl. All in all, I would count this as a good first case. I'm really interested in evolving as a profiler and becoming more social with my team, and a certain cute genius. I hope that soon something might come to happen between us, but for now, I'm happy with how my life is, for the first time in 6 years I'm happy.