A deep silence.

Agent Weiss looked up at Agent Lee.

"He's dead?" Her face was pale.

Lee nodded.

Weiss dropped her head into her hand. "Jesus. Oh."

Lee sat down jerkily. He ran his hand through his hair.

"I can't believe Vic would be that careless," Lee said. "I think something's not right."

Weiss squinted at him.

"What about the Winchesters? Have they been found?"

Lee shrugged. "Maybe," he said. "ASAC says they're probably dead."

"What?!" Weiss sat bolt upright. "Probably dead? What good is that?"

Lee tapped out a beat on the surface of the desk.

"The crash has made it hard to identify the bodies. There's some difficulty, without dental records…says the ASAC." Lee's expression was hard to read.

Weiss stared at him.

"You don't think they're dead," she said. It wasn't a question.

Lee looked back at her without saying anything.

Weiss raised her eyes to the ceiling. "Has he called a press conference yet?"

"Called and held," Lee nodded. "So the Winchesters are officially dead."

They sat there in silence for a while.

"That doesn't mean to say that the case is closed, though," Weiss said slowly.

Lee tipped his head to one side. "How's that?"

Weiss chewed on her lower lip.

"Officially dead. Dean was officially dead before, and he turned out not to be. It actually made him cockier, I think. Easier to find."

Lee thought about this.

"If they think we think they're dead…they'll be less careful," he said. "Is that what you mean?"

Weiss nodded.

"I guess that's what the ASAC was thinking," she said.

Lee grinned widely. "Not just a suit, after all."

"Glory be," Weiss said, "a suit with a brain in his head." She let out a long breath.

"He's called a general briefing," Lee told her. "We'll have more of an idea then."

*******************************************************************************************

The conference room was not large, and was only designed to hold about twenty people. It was packed full of agents. Weiss and Lee had never been in here before.

"This is a bigwig room," Lee said under his breath. "What are we doing in here for a general briefing?"

"It's the ASAC with brains," Weiss replied.

"Times they are a-changing?" Lee asked.

Weiss shrugged in response.

"Have you heard anything about him?" Lee craned his neck subtly for a better look.

"He was a cop in Atlanta until last year," Weiss whispered. "He was headhunted."

Lee looked at their new ASAC. He was tall and broad, and took up a lot of space. Weiss and Lee had a good vantage point from their seats at the back of the room, and Lee could see that most of the people in the room were staring at Agent Patten, and judging from the chatter in the room, talking about him too.

"Who's the agent with him?" Lee asked quietly. "I've never seen her before."

Looking at the woman in question, Weiss shook her head. "No idea."

At the front of the room, Patten stood up. The buzz of conversation died away.

"Good morning, everyone," Patten said. "My name is Joe Patten, I am your new ASAC, and I have been transferred here to head up the investigation into the tragic events in Montana two days ago. We can now confirm that twelve people died there, and as you may or may not know, three of those people were agents with this Bureau. AD Groves and Agents Reid and Hendrickson have been positively identified."

He let this news sink in, for the benefit of those who hadn't already heard.

"We held a press conference this morning in which we confirmed these details for the media. In that press conference, we also said that we had recovered the bodies of Sam and Dean Winchester. This is not true. We are certain that the Winchesters are still alive. You are here today because you are members of a new task force, created specifically to find the Winchesters and bring them to justice."

Lee flicked a glance sideways at Weiss, without moving his head. Weiss blinked at him, not taking her eyes off Patten.

Patten continued, "These men have killed three members of our Bureau. They have killed men, women and children in seven states. They have now escalated to mass murder. They are not going to stop. We need to stop them. Let's get to it."

Most of the agents stood up and filed out of the room, pausing to talk to Patten on the way out. Weiss and Lee stayed where they were. The female agent who had been sitting next to Patten remained seated as well, reading intently from a file on the table in front of her.

"Doesn't waste words, does he?" Weiss commented quietly.

"A new breed, indeed," said Lee.

The room was clear of everyone except Lee, Weiss, Patten and the agent at the front of the room. Patten clicked the door shut and turned to the two profilers.

"Thank you for waiting," he said. "I know you have a lot to do today."

"It's not a problem," Lee told him, standing up. The two men shook hands.

"Good to meet you, Agent Lee. Agent Weiss."

Weiss stood up and shook hands. "Nice briefing," she said.

Patten smiled. "I don't like long meetings. Never have. Don't think they have a place in police work."

Lee said, "We'll try to be brief too."

The three of them walked up to the table at the top of the room. The agent who had been reading all this time finally looked up from her papers.

"Sorry," she said. "Absorbing stuff."

"Agents Weiss, Lee, this is Agent Michelle Rosen."

There was more shaking of hands and they all sat down, two to a side, Patten and Rosen opposite Weiss and Lee.

Agent Rosen spread out her papers on the table.

"I've been reading the transcripts of the interviews you had with them in Illinois."

Lee tilted his head. Weiss raised her eyebrows expectantly.

"We had them," Rosen said. "Why in God's name did the AD take them on a field trip?"

Weiss chuckled abruptly.

Lee said, "I guess he thought it was the only way to get the children back safely."

Rosen looked at him keenly. "But you all stated that you thought it was a…'situation with too many risk factors'."

"Yes."

"He disregarded your opinions."

"Yes."

Rosen paused for a few seconds. "What an ass."

"Michelle," Patten said, "we can't really make judgements about a situation we weren't involved in." He sounded serious, but winked at them as he said it.

Lee felt Weiss' eyes on him.

"Sir," Lee said, "Agent Rosen is right. We had them. We could have prevented all of this."

"You did everything that you could, Agent Lee. And you, Agent Weiss. With Agents Reidy and Hendrickson, and Chief Byrne, you saved the lives of two children. You apprehended the Winchesters. You extracted confessions from them. You gathered more information about them than anyone else ever has. You did your job. You did more than was asked of you. And you're still doing it. The mistake was the AD's. That's clear from the record. You two are exemplary agents. I would count myself lucky to have you on this team."

Lee felt himself going red.

"Uh. Thank you, sir."

Weiss nodded her agreement, also blushing.

"Don't mention it. And that's enough of the 'sir'. Joe is my name." Patten loosened his tie. "Now, Michelle. Any questions?"

Rosen looked again at the documents in front of her.

"When the brothers were put together, in one room, Sam mentioned other places…here we are…" She pointed at a highlighted section of text.

Lee and Weiss leaned in and read.

SW: You could tell them about St Louis.

DW: Nope.

SW: You could tell them about Atlanta.

DW: No.

They finished reading and looked at the man in charge.

Patten said, "I was a cop in Atlanta before I joined the Bureau."

"Oh?" Weiss said.

"We had a set of murders there, two years ago. Four women were murdered in their own homes. It was…bad." He looked down at the table. "No leads. Nothing. This mention, by Sam Winchester, of Atlanta, directly after St Louis, makes me think maybe the Winchesters were in my city. I would like to ask them about it."

There was a brief pause.

"Fair enough," Weiss said.

"So. What can we do for you, s- Joe?"

Patten smiled at the self-correction. "I would like an idea of what they might do next. Now that they're dead."

Weiss leaned back in her chair.

"We think that they'll relax," she said.

Lee chimed in, "They would have gone underground, like they did after the murders in Wisconsin, but, as you say, now that they're dead, things are different."

"They'll definitely be more casual about contact with the police. If we're lucky, they'll start feeling confident enough to venture back into bigger towns and cities, where, of course, there's more chance one of our agents will spot them." Weiss reached for one of the mug shots among the papers on the table and examined it. "They won't bother to change their appearances."

"They won't get rid of the car," Lee added. "That will help us a lot."

"What are the chances of them killing again before we can find them?" Rosen's voice was calm and steady, but she blinked nervously.

The profilers looked at each other.

"That bad, huh?" Patten's face was grave.

Lee looked directly at his new boss.

"Well, there are two ways it could go, really. It might be that the massacre has sated them, and it might be a long time before they feel the urge to kill anybody again."

"Or," Weiss said, "it might be that the mass killing has struck a chord with them. This is the first time that they've done anything like this. They might have liked it so much that they'll want to do it again pretty soon."

"And by soon, we mean, two months or so." Lee looked at Rosen, who was making notes.

"They don't have a consistent pattern. In Illinois, they did something completely new, and then in Montana, something completely new again. They could surprise us all a third time." Weiss spread her hands in an apologetic gesture.

"We've never worked on a case like this, where the suspects change their MO so rapidly. They're new."

Patten tilted his head to one side, just as Lee had done earlier.

"Can we apprehend them alive?"

Weiss blew some hair out of her eyes and said, "Maybe, if we get them on a good day. In Illinois, we got them on a good day."

"Can we apprehend them without loss of life?"

Weiss looked at Lee. She knew they were both thinking about Reid, and the way he looked when they found him in the shack in the woods.

"If we're lucky." Weiss met Patten's eyes. "If they have no idea we're coming."

"Maybe if they're asleep," Lee said.

There was a deep silence.

"I want them," Patten said, "but not at the cost of more lives."

"Well, we've made a good start. They don't know we're looking for them."

Patten looked at Lee and Weiss in turn.

"I would like your help on this full-time, but I'll understand if you don't want it."

The profilers didn't even look at each other.

"We want them," Lee said.

"We'll help," Weiss nodded.