A Good Deal More
Criminal Minds, Season 6; Ghost Whisperer before the Final season
*gw*cm*
Empirically, Penelope Garcia had known that her dress delivery was due any day, but she was so busy with the case that she was surprised when the secretary down in receiving called up to say that her online purchase had arrived. Penelope had a deal with Lori; Lori could open the boxes first if she signed for them. Lori was supporting her mother and grandmother along with her two sons and couldn't afford to spend money on her own clothes. She like Penelope's style and considered opening Penelope's boxes as a sort of vicarious living. The arrangement worked for both of the women. Things had been crazy since JJ had been transferred. Hotch was terribly overworked and was depending on Penelope more.
It wasn't as if Penelope even dreamed of saying no when Hotch asked for help.
But it did cut into her shopping time, or her time spent outside of her office. She had created a new habit shopping online (avoiding the childish blocks the IT department had put up to discourage agents from doing just that). She could do it while three of her other computers were running searches for Hotch or her team.
It was easier to get dresses in styles that she enjoyed. Once she figured out which on-line store's styles and sizes fit her, Penelope was set. Lori warned her that something seemed wrong with this delivery. Oh, it was three dresses and at least two of them were exactly as Penelope had described but Lori hinted that the wrong size had been sent.
Penelope wasn't looking forward to calling the company to exchange the order. She loved the styles and colors of The Color Palette, but the customer service sucked. Nine times out of ten, they got the order right the first time. But the tenth… last time it had taken the shop three times to correct the order. She sighed and wondered how they had made the mistake.
The box arrived and Lori had been correct: two of the right styles and all of the wrong size. Luckily, there was an order form for a Melinda Gordon of Grandview, New York inside the box. Give Penelope fifteen minutes with a computer and an internet connection and Penelope would know anything worth knowing about the woman.
It actually took Penelope six minutes to find her. Gordon wasn't trying to hide. She was a thirty year old, antique dealer who lived in upstate New York, married to a paramedic and an upstanding member of the community. From her dress order, Penelope knew that she was short, skinny and had great taste in clothes.
Penelope called her store figuring that a working woman would still be there at four in the afternoon. A pleasant voice answered the phone. When Penelope asked for Melinda Gordon, she said, "One moment, please." Off to the side, Penelope could hear her call, "Mel? It's for you."
A slightly disgruntled voice picked up the phone. "This is Melinda Gordon."
"Hi," Penelope said as brightly as she could. "I'm Penelope Garcia and I received your order from The Color Palette."
There was a pause. "Wow. I mean I received your order too. I had just started looking for you but I don't even think that you're on the list of Garcias that I have and… wow. I was hoping to contact you directly."
"Because The Color Palette screws up returns routinely," Penelope finished.
"Yes," Gordon was emphatic. "I am so glad you found me. How did you find me? I was about to give up in disgust and call The Color Palette."
"It's what I do," Penelope told her. "I'm a tech analyst for the FBI and finding people on the internet is my job."
"You must be extremely good at it."
"I am. But I promise I always use my powers for good."
Gordon laughed. "For some reason your address was not on the billing receipt."
"I insist on that on purpose," Penelope admitted. "Ever since I saw how badly they screw up, I don't like the idea of someone else getting it."
"Huh. My husband would approve. Anyway, if you could give me your address, I'll send you your dresses. In a way, I'm glad this happened; the one dress we choose different is one that I'd like to own."
Penelope laughed. "Here too. I already ordered the dress you did and I hadn't." Penelope rattled off the receiving address for the FBI building and made sure Gordon knew to mark it to Lori Wagner's attention.
"Do you need my address?" Gordon asked.
"Nope. I'm really good at my job and everything's on the internet," Penelope reminded.
"So I'm finding out," she remarked.
Penelope signed off after promising to send Gordon her dresses first thing tomorrow. Two days later, Lori called Penelope again saying that her dresses had arrived and they looked beautiful. When the box arrived in Penelope's office, the tech was delighted to find the dresses she had ordered plus a cute, antique belt that Melinda had included with a sweet hand-written note. The belt was fun, colorful and fit perfectly.
Penelope cried. There really were good people out in the world. She called up Gordon, who would forever more be referred to as 'Melinda,' to thank her for the gift. They had a short conversation, mostly about The Color Palette's new line of clothes. It turned out that Melinda was a great online friend. They would call each other every time The Color Palette had a new clothing line. They chatted strictly non-work related items with occasional forays into the antique business. Penelope managed to get Melinda to put some of her higher priced antiques on-line to reach a larger audience, even creating an easy to upload web-site for her for free. Melinda, of course, couldn't not give Penelope something in return. So a beautiful set of earrings with a matching necklace arrived the same day a set of sisters died before the BAU could save them. Penelope cried again and called Melinda to thank her for her wonderful timing. Penelope told the kind shop owner more about the BAU and the people that they try to save. Melinda thanked Penelope for her efforts on the behalf of all those who lived normal lives and randomly would send Penelope little gifts to brighten her day.
Melinda was, by far, Penelope's best on-line friend.
And so it continued for eight months. About half of Penelope's Christmas shopping was done through Melinda. She bought antique doorknobs and matching door knocker for Morgan's newest house. For JJ and Emily, Penelope found some delicate jewelry. Rossi received a first edition of poetry of his favorite author. She didn't dare buy anything old for Reid. Hotch was just too hard to buy for and Henry and Jake got the newest, hottest toy on the market.
Penelope kept urging Melinda to put more and more of her stock on-line hoping for inspiration for Hotch. In the end, she bought an antique tin from Melinda and filled it with homemade cookies and a 'coupon' for a couple hours of IT help. She felt like she was wimping out. How likely was Hotch to take her up on the offer? Not very, even though he should. Reid received two tickets to a new art show opening. She almost chickened out of giving him the tickets because it was something he had done with Gideon.
Melinda was given a home-made 'how to' book for troubleshooting her website. She was thrilled. She sent Penelope some bright, shiny outrageous jewelry. Penelope considered it to be a fair trade.
*gw*cm*
The team was in Columbus, Ohio, tracking down a series of disappearing teenage high-risk girls, when the phone rang and Melinda's number showed up the caller ID. Penelope double-checked that all of her searches were running and answered the call, "Melinda, this a pleasant surprise."
Melinda took a deep breath and blurted out, "If I need to make an anonymous tip to the FBI, can I tell you and you not tell anyone?"
Penelope blinked. "Why would you need to make an anonymous tip?"
"I know where a couple bodies are buried and when my biological dad showed the police where a boy's body was, he was thrown into jail for a crime that he didn't commit, actually, no crime happened. The boy just fell out of a tree and broke his neck, but they blamed my dad. I can't let that happen to me. And the FBI is already working on the case, so I figure that you can get the information to them."
Penelope was stunned into silence. She could understand Melinda's reluctance to make a real tip. "Okay, do you know whose bodies you found, or just that you found bodies?"
"Christi Walker and Megan Shade and a Bekka and Cassie."
Penelope had already typed the names when the connection was made in her brain. She knew two of those names: Megan Shade and a Cassie Beck were two of the girls Penelope was searching for with her search engines, right now. They were runaways, but the type trying to improve themselves without turning tricks. Megan and Cassie could have been sisters and neither of them had shown up for work after several weeks of being early to every shift. "Melinda, what are you doing in Ohio?" Then she remembered a complaint of Morgan's, about an influx of travelers and the politics of keeping the term 'serial killer' out of the news for tourism's sake. "Are you in Columbus for the Antique Show?"
"How did you know?"
"'Cause the FBI team that is in charge, that's my team, my BAU. You don't have to worry about them accusing you of murder. Heck, I'm one of your alibis since you were talking to me on your shop phone last week when Megan Shade was thrown into the grey van in Columbus. So how did you find the bodies?"
"Their ghosts led me to them."
Penelope gaped. "Did you say 'ghosts'?"
"Yes," Melinda whispered. "I'm not nuts."
"I didn't think that. I believe that ghosts are out there, but we are not telling Rossi. You can really talk to them?"
"Yes."
"Okay. Okay. So where are the bodies?"
Melinda rattled off a disturbingly precise set of directions to a warehouse and then to the southeast corner of the warehouse that had a section of the cement floor loose. The bodies were under there. Penelope had no idea how she was going to pass on the tip to the BAU. If she said that it came from a phone call, they would want to hear it. If she lied to them (and damn, lying to a bunch of profilers was just asking for trouble) and said that the tip came from an online account, they would want to know an IP address. They wouldn't believe that Penelope wouldn't be able to find it. They would be assuming that she got the information from the Unsub and that would mess up their profile of the Unsub and then they might not catch'im.
Penelope took a deep breath.
Man, oh, man, oh, man.
She needed to talk to Hotch. Hotch would understand. Penelope loved Derrik Morgan dearly, but the man was a skeptic to the end. Rossi was downright antagonistic to anything resembling the supernatural. Emily wavered, but she was a profiler first and foremost. Reid would get too distracted. It was times like this that Penelope really, really missed JJ. JJ would have an answer and would be able to talk the others around.
Penelope dialed her boss's number.
"What do you have for me?" he asked on speakerphone.
"Uhm, yes sir. I need to discuss something with you. Privately." She twisted all of the feathers off of her pen and she loved that pen but she was nervous and…
The sounds in her ear quieted. "Garcia," Hotch spoke more seriously than ever. "Did you find some evidence of police involvement?"
"No, but I'll start looking," her fingertips gravitated to one of her keyboards.
"Why did you call me?" Hotch knew that she wouldn't waste his time with frivolities.
"I have this friend and she really, really isn't crazy or a serial killer. She's really nice and thoughtful and wasn't even in Ohio until today. You know, for the antique show."
"Garcia," Hotch warned.
"She called me just now wanting to report hidden bodies and they're your bodies, I mean the bodies of the girls that you are looking for and she wanted it to be anonymous because her father apparently tried to report the body of a dead little boy and he ended up going to prison for an accident. I looked up her father's trial and the DA was twisty and ended up marrying my friend's mother so shifty and the boy didn't have any indications of rape or molestation and her father had an alibi for the time of death but no one even looked at it and…"
"Garcia," Hotch stopped her in her tracks.
"Yes, sir?" Penelope took a deep breath as she waited.
"Your friend found the bodies of our victims?"
"Yes, sir, she did. She didn't so it, I swear."
"Where are the bodies?"
Garcia told him. It wasn't someplace someone would stumble upon by accident.
"How did she find them?"
Garcia told him that too.
*gw*cm*
Aaron Hotchner respected Garcia's abilities- all of them. But her ability to pick friends tended to be hit and miss. Garcia had raved about this friend Aaron was about to meet. She had rattled off all of the woman's alibis. She had double-checked Melinda's whereabouts and could confirm every stop of her trip from New York to Ohio. Garcia wouldn't lie about a case, even to protect her friend.
But Garcia's friend said that the ghosts of their victims had led her to their resting place. Hotch really didn't believe that. Melinda Gordon was a petite, curvy brunette twisting a wedding band. From the eclectic assortment Hotch spied in her purse, she had a toddler. She had several reasons not to be arrested.
The victims' bodies were exactly where Mrs. Gordon said they'd be. All of them. It was a bone yard that the Unsub expected to be hidden forever. Finding it so soon would stress the Unsub and the BAU needed to be ready. Every single member of the BAU asked how Hotch found the bodies and he told them all that a concerned citizen who wished to be anonymous had delivered the tip. The reactions would have been amusing in any other circumstance. Hotch hadn't earned an eyebrow that high from Rossi in a decade.
Thankfully, the high school teacher in charge of the GED program had a psychotic break and railed against the BAU for disturbing the angels' rest. They solved the case but didn't answer the question of what to do with Garcia's friend.
Could ghosts exist? Melinda certainly believed that the answer was revealed by ghosts. How else had Melinda Gordon known where the bodies were hidden? Other than her deep belief in the supernatural, the woman was incredibly stable. He hadn't committed a crime, nor would she in the future. She wouldn't be called to testify because she had wanted to give the tip anonymously. Garcia promised to provide a tape of her tip for court, one that wouldn't give her ID but help build the case. Hotch didn't know how she'd accomplish it and it concerned him how casually she had offered. Melinda was higher in Garcia's friend rating than he had previously assumed. Hotch could do nothing at this time but to warn Garcia to be careful in any further interactions with the woman.
*gw*cm*
"I think that we may safely trust a good deal more than we do. We may waive just so much care of ourselves as we honestly bestow elsewhere. Nature is as well adapted to our weakness as to our strength."
Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862); Naturalist, Author
*gw*cm*