Criminal Minds
- A lifetime ago -
When the phone rang, FBI Supervising Special Agent Aaron Hotchner already knew that it would be bad news. Reluctantly he picked up to shut down the annoying ringing noise which caused him a slight nausea. This would be a bad day, he thought. Last night he had finally signed the papers that Haley had sent him 3 weeks ago. In the end, he remembered, it hadn't been that difficult putting down his signature onto the paper, what had been difficult was the thought that signing meant the final cut.
He breathed deep. "Yes?" he said with a monotone voice, his eyes tied to a crack in the wall opposite to him, then stared down on his feet, and without saying anything more, he set down the phone.
15 minutes later everyone of the team had assembled in the meeting room. This time had been sufficient for him to collect all the info that Seattle PD could send him on the case, victims and possible leads. It wasn't much, but for a start it was more than they had on many other cases.
Hotch cleared his throat, as was usual for him when he opened a meeting. "We have a case in Seattle. There have been 4 incidents so far and we couldn't establish a time frame. The first and second killing are nearly 4 months apart, the next happened within only 22 days, while the last happened after 6 months." He sighed a little. "So there is no pattern and no specific timeline and obviously the Unsub doesn't accelerate." He put up one photo after the other onto the whiteboard, some showing scenes of car accidents, others the inside of the crashed cars with blood covered bodies. "The Unsub uses traffic rush hours to locate his victims, who always are the two parents and one child, a boy. He then uses his own car, an old black Dodge Pick-up truck to cause an accident with the victim's car, after he has made that happen, he shoots them with a hand-made shotgun, he doesn't aim at a special part of the body, as you can see here." Hotch put up another photo, bigger than the others, a collection of the victims' wounds. "There were 8 killings, 2 in each incident." He continued but paused again.
Morgan stepped forward and looked intensely at the last photos. "It's erratic behaviour that the Unsub shows. Non-aimed shots into the car wreck, only driver and passenger seats, this cannot be coincidence. Always man and woman, side by side, backdoor open." He snatched a paper from the file and read through it quickly. "Right, husband and wife, always one child around the age of 16 which is missing." He looked at his team. "Can it be possible that the Unsub kills the parents and takes the child? Have there been any reports of dead teenagers in the region?"
"No." Hotch shook his head. "Before the last incident, the killings have been filed away as random car accidents with anger shootings."
Reid scratched his head. "So what's the difference with this one?"
Hotch bit his lower lip. "This time we have a witness…"
During the flight from Quantico to Seattle Hotch was quiet, which was nothing unusual but he looked absent. For most of the time he stared into the papers in front of him but never touched any of the pages, then he stared out of the window. JJ found this odd but she knew better than to ask. She knew that Aaron Hotchner was a person full of trouble on the inside but never let anything come up to the surface. But now something was troubling so much that he had to work hard to maintain his regular attitude.
Everybody was trying to find new leads and new ways to think about the case, as was normal. Prentiss tried to wrap her mind around the idea that the teenagers could still be alive while Morgan imagined a scenery where the final purpose of the attack as a whole was only to get to the teenagers to torture and kill them. This normally was the outcome and he had seen too many cases of that.
Reid sat quietly, probably thinking more rapidly as he could have spoken, thinking together facts and aspects to find a clue that they were missing.
Morgan and Prentiss reviewed, ordered and framed each incident, drew out situations and strategies to prepare a preliminary profile. The shotgun and the accidents made it obvious that a lot of hate but also inconsistency defined the killer. It were as if the killings itself were a necessary thing to be done and get over with to follow a higher aim. When Morgan mentioned his thoughts, Hotch shook of the absent-mindedness and for the rest of the flight kept his attention on the case. Until now they didn't really have a lead on anything but Morgan's theory made sense. If it had been only one incident, one could have thought that the rebellious teenager in an anger wave killed his parents after a car accident but each incident had the same handwriting. First a provoked accident and then the killing of the parents. The strange part was the missing teenagers. They had Garcia pull files on possible whereabouts, incidents from the past or cross-related incidents from other states. Until now, nothing had come back. Maybe their eyewitness could shed some light onto this case and give essential information.