Chapter One
He first met the slip of a girl in 2002. She was sitting alone quietly at a table in a chain restaurant diner coloring a paper placemat and looking decidedly bored. She was probably about five feet tall, and likely in fifth grade or so.
She looked up at him then, her dark brown eyes catching his in a way that made him uneasy.
She looked incredibly sad, and skittish. But something in her eyes seemed to be telling him that she was pleading for help.
Then a man came back to the table. Middle aged, light blue eyes. A trucker, he knew, because he remembered passing the man on his phone calling about a pick up.
"You want to call your mom before we head back out?" The man asked the girl. She looked away from him, taking the large black cell phone from the man.
"Hey! Is Mommy home?" She asked. Reid stared at his menu, only looking back over the top of it when the man finally sat back down, his back facing him.
"Hi, Mommy!" The girl chirped, obviously affectionate towards her mother where she had been closed off towards the man.
"Yeah, I watched Special Victims Unit when Joe unloaded the truck in Milwaukee. I don't remember where we are headed next though."
So the girl's mother was aware that she was wih a trucker. If the girl had been kidnapped, she wouldn't be able to fake a ruse that well when it came to calling someone else. And the girl had dialed the number herself.
"Love you too Mommy. Tell everyone else I love them too." The girl hung up before the man, presumably Joe, could talk to her mother in what was likely an innocently looking act of defiance.
He wasn't even with the BAU yet and he was already practicing his behavioral analysis. And on a little girl.
"Did you eat all your taco salad or did the waitress pick it up?"
He hasn't seen the girl eating when he had been seated, just coloring with a white crayon. In fact, he was fairly certain she hadn't had anything to drink either.
"Everything but what was left of the shell. I told the waitress I was done with my pop too, but I told her to bring you a coffee to go since yours is gone." The girl answered quietly, turning back to her coloring.
"Thank you, Kyla." Joe said. He took a long drink of his coffee. Reid was forced to look away when his waitress came up.
"What will you be having today?"
He answered her, and waited for her retreat with his menu before he looked back at the table and the girl.
Joe was standing up, dropping several bills on the table on top the small black plate housing his receipt.
"Let's go, Kyla. Long night ahead of us." He said to her, touching her arm. The girl stood up quickly, following him out. Reid faintly heard her exclamation about forgetting her placemat, followed by the Joe telling her to forget about it. And then silence.
The diner was still full of people, and yet felt so empty suddenly. He shifted in his seat, feeling something crunch beneath his feet.
He looked down. A white crayon.
He thought for a moment, then looked at the placemat in front of him. White.
Reid looked around briefly before sliding out of the chair and stealing the girl's placemat, replacing it with his own. He took the black crayon as well.
Lightly scribbling on the placemat after sitting back at his own table, thin white letters started to show through.
H. I. S. N. A. M. E. I. S. J. O. S. E. P. H. B.
She had obviously been cut off her writing when the man had returned. But aside from her scrawling his name, he had no basis on which to place his uneasiness about the way she looked at him, the way the man made him uncomfortable.
He paused, looking over the rest of her drawings. Cartoonish characters with big eyes, beautiful evergreen trees. And at the bottom. Kyla Williams.
He didn't know enough, couldn't do anything about it unless it was clearly stated in the face of the placemat or she yelled it in the parking lot.
He didn't even know where she was from.
He didn't, exactly, forget about her. He couldn't, technically. But he didn't think about her actively past the first few weeks after meeting her. He'd done what he could to find her, but there were too many Kyla Williams in the country, and a lot were still children. When he had bouts of sadness, he remembered her face, the agony and fright in her eyes, the pleading for help.
He'd gone back to the diner once, but it had changed staff and owners and he didn't even ask once he'd learned that. There was no case there.
It was the only thing he'd never told his mother about. He didn't know how to explain why he'd kept the girl a secret, except perhaps that he didn't want to anyone to think him crazy.
Years later, in the midst of a dilaudid induced haze while being kept against his will by Tobias Hankel, he remembered the entire scene in startling clarity.
After his rescue, he had apparently told Garcia to find a girl named Kyla Williams. He didn't remember having done so, and remained blissfully ignorant of the fact until a few weeks after he'd gotten clean and Garcia asked him about it. He was hesitant to tell her anything, and decided against it. She looked at him funny, but didn't press the matter.
That night, he pulled the placemat out of the lockbox under his bed. He'd slid it into a plastic case intended for important documents, and locked it away for years. He looked at it for a long time that night.
And then locked it up again.
Cases picked up again. Life moved on.
It was some time later, after a particularly bad case where they were too late to save a fourteen year old girl, that Reid broke.
He had gone for drinks with the rest of them. And he sat in silence mostly. As the evening progressed, slowly his coworkers dropped out of the night, heading home. It was nearly one in the morning when Morgan left, leaving Rossi and Reid alone in the bar.
"You don't normally stay late. This case really bothered you, didn't it?"
"It's not... Not really this case." Reid admitted. Rossi looked at him in genuine surprise. If Reid discussed his life with anyone, it was usually one of the others. And never without a real prompting.
"Did you wait just to talk to me?" Rossi asked him. Reid couldn't look at the other man.
"It's just, the girl reminded me so much of her." Reid continued as if Rossi had never spoken.
"Like who?" Rossi asked sharply. Reid's head jerked up, almost as if he was just noticing Rossi was still there.
"I..." Reid tried, fighting an intense urge to, of all things, cry.
"Spencer." Rossi said it quietly, reaching for the younger man.
Reid felt his eyes spiking with tears, but fought it down.
"Have you ever had a case that wasn't really a case?" Reid finally managed to ask.
"Like a case that wasn't mine but I remember anyway? Yes."
"No. Like..." Reid trailed off, Kyla's face ghosting across him briefly like she sat there instead of Rossi.
"Before I joined the BAU, I assisted on a few cases. I stopped to eat at this diner in Wisconsin..."
"Did you witness someone die?" Rossi asked when Reid went quiet again. The younger man shook his head.
"I was sat at a table next to this girl. She was maybe twelve. She was sitting by herself, coloring with a white crayon on the placemat. And she looked up at me."
Rossi's stomach dropped, a bad feeling bouncing around his insides.
"She looked so sad. And it was like she was asking me for help with her eyes."
Reid stopped speaking, looking down at his hands. After a minute, he continued.
"An older man came and sat with her. He was a trucker. He'd been on the phone just outside when I was coming in, talking about picking up a new load."
Rossi froze. A kidnapping that Reid was unable to stop?
"She knew him. He gave her his phone and she called her mom. She was so young that she still called her mommy. And she looked up at me while she told her mom she watched that sex crimes cop show."
"You think he was raping her?"
Reid nodded, not able to meet Rossi's eyes.
"After a minute, they got up to leave. She said something about her placemat and he told her to leave it. Then they were gone."
"Did you follow them?"
Reid shook his head.
"But I took her placemat. It was a white placemat."
White placemat? What's the significance? And then Rossi remembered, "coloring with a white crayon."
"What did it say?"
"There were drawings of anime characters. And trees. And in white crayon, it said "his name is Joseph B", but I think he came back before she could finish writing. Her name was on the bottom though, Kyla Williams"
"Did you find her in the missing children's database?"
"She wasn't missing. Her mother knew she was with him. But I don't think her mother knew what he was doing to her. She was too happy when she spoke to her."
"A case that was never a case then?"
"Nothing about her was different. She was a normal looking thin girl, long and straight brown hair, brown eyes. I have no proof that he did anything to her, that he did after they left. I've never even been able to find her."
Rossi felt for Reid. He doubted the kid had told anyone about her, except perhaps his mother.
End of Chapter One
author's note:
I don't expect this is the remotely the best Criminal Minds fic. It's mostly intended as a cathartic journey for my own pain. If people like it, that's fine. If not, that's okay too. It will probably be out of character at time. And for once, that's okay with me.