Part of the Family
(Criminal Minds, K, Roxy, the BAU team)
She kept running, pushing the scrub and brush aside as her long legs carried her through the woods. Agent Luke Alvez ran along behind, following her lead as she took them through the dew slicked forest floor, twigs snapping in her wake, and tiny water droplets flying off tufts of grass as she passed. They were following a rustic path, one overgrown with thistles and developing saplings, and Luke struggled to keep up with her as they ran. She was much better at sudden twists and turns through the underbrush and more than once he was slapped in the face by a low branch, but he never lost sight of her. He pulled up short when he realised she'd come to an abrupt stop just ahead of him and panting, he asked,
"What is it?"
Roxy grunted and huffed a deep breath. Luke's eyes followed her line of sight and he bent to pick up an item lying in the grass, about five feet short of the creek to their left. Sighing, he pulled out his cellphone and made a call.
"I found an iPhone, Garcia," he told her. He pulled a latex glove from his pocket, put it on and picked up the phone. As he'd expected, the battery was dead. Pushing the home button elicited no response from the device. "It's dead. I'll charge it up when I get back to the car, but I'm pretty sure it's his." He dropped the phone into a clear plastic bag and pocketed it, then checked his GPS location against the one Garcia had given him earlier. The two locations matched. Reaching forward, he ran his hand along Roxy's back as he surveyed the area.
"Good girl," he praised the dog. Returning his attention to his own cellphone he addressed Garcia, "Found it right where that last bounce came from. There's no sign of him though. No sign of a struggle here. No brush matted down or anything. We're just gonna do a circle around the site," he spoke in between pants of breath as he and Roxy carefully searched the immediate area. After a few minutes, Luke and Roxy made their way up hill away from the location site. About fifty feet away, at the top of the ravine, they found themselves standing on a set of tire tracks that Luke thought was probably a former service road now being used by runners, bikers and walkers. As he looked around he realised exactly where they were and let out a sigh. Again he punched up a number on his cell phone.
"Garcia? Patch me in through to JJ and Rossi too will you?"
After hearing acknowledgement from the others, he told them, "Yeah, I'm about five hundred feet behind the library, on a path that overlooks the bottom of the park. And Rossi?" he paused for a moment, "I can see his apartment building from here."
"Library's about half a block from his apartment," Rossi told them. "At the edge of the park."
"Would he be walking through that park to get to the metro stop?" Garcia asked, as she checked the map of the area.
"I guess he could be if he was wanting to go to the library on the way," Rossi surmised.
"Or to see the fall colours," JJ realised and voiced her thoughts aloud. She looked around at all the gold and orange foliage. "He was just explaining why the leaves change colour to Henry the other night, and we all know he loves the fall."
"Would he go down to the ravine though?"
Luke looked around and replied, "I don't think so. You can see the colours from up here, I don't think joggers or even walkers would be going through the bush me and Roxy just went through, it's too overgrown.
Garcia's face contorted. What the hell was Alvez thinking? Why did he have his girlfriend at work with him? While they were on a case no less! Anger mounted in her and she looked to Emily Prentiss who stood behind her, deep in thought.
"Emily!" Garcia said loudly. "Emily?"
Prentiss blinked and refocused giving Garcia her attention.
"Why does Alvez have his girlfriend on the case?!"
Prentiss chuckled, bent down and punched a key on Garcia's phone, and then spoke,
"Hey, Alvez. You wanna let Garcia off the hook now please?"
Again the tech analyst's brow furrowed as she looked from Prentiss to the phone to her computer screen.
The sound of Alvez chuckling came over the computer speaker, and a moment later, the screen refreshed and an image of Roxy filled the monitor.
"This," Alvez said, "Is Roxy. She's a trained search and rescue dog, Garcia. Retired now. And while she does live with me, I wouldn't exactly call her my girlfriend."
"Oh," Garcia made a face and thought for a moment, then retorted, "But after you asked about my weekend. In the elevator that day. You said-"
"I said I was kickin' it with Roxy." He deliberately didn't follow through that he had also commented 'she's my girl.'
Rossi broke in, "Can we get back to the search?"
"Hey, Rossi?" Alvez asked, "Are you at his apartment?"
"Yeah, why?"
"Can you get a piece of his clothing and meet us at the library?"
Fifteen minutes later, agents David Rossi and Jennifer Jareau met up with Alvez and Roxy on the path behind the library. Roxy was drinking water from a collapsible bowl, which Alvez had filled from the water fountain behind the library building. It was a warm autumn day; the sky was clear. Several people reading books sat on benches beside the path that wound from the library parking lot behind the library itself and along the edge of the park that spanned an entire city block to the northwest. At the end of the block stood the apartment building in which resided Dr. Spencer Reid.
JJ handed Alvez a familiar looking purple scarf. Luke bent down and presented it to Roxy. She sniffed and sniffed and sat down, waiting for her next command. Alvez dug through his pocket and handed Rossi the iPhone he'd found in the woods. JJ noticed Roxy's stance and asked,
"Why's she sitting?"
"I'll take this back to Garcia," Rossi said, indicating the phone, and turned to walk back to his car.
Alvez acknowledged Rossi with a nod and replied to JJ, "She's not picking up his scent here." He turned and gave Roxy's leash a slight tug, and told the dog "Let's go," before turning back to JJ and saying, "We should go back over to the path."
The two agents and the dog made their way back to the crest of the hill Luke and Roxy had originally climbed. Again Roxy sniffed and sniffed then sat down. Luke presented the scarf to the dog again. Roxy sniffed it and looked up to Alvez. Thinking for a moment, he tugged at Roxy's lead and slowly started walking along the path in the direction of Reid's apartment. Every twenty feet or so, he stopped and gave Roxy the scarf again. And every time, Roxy would sniff the scarf and then sit. It wasn't until they reached the apartment building parking lot that Roxy sniffed and found a trail. She stopped at the building's front door then, after getting the go ahead from Alvez, retraced her steps back to the parking lot where she sat down beside the driver's side door of Reid's vehicle.
JJ sighed.
"This is Reid's car, isn't it?" Alvez asked. JJ nodded.
"Dammit," Alvez commented in a disappointed tone. They returned to the building's front door to contemplate their next course of action, and Roxy made the decision for them. Alvez realised she wasn't sitting down at the door. He gave her lead some slack and both Luke and JJ smiled when Roxy started down the sidewalk, pulling at her leash. The dog paced along the sidewalk for the better part of a block and JJ and Alvez both smiled as they passed the library. Roxy negotiated the way through the oncoming mass of human legs, sidestepping a skateboarder and several people whose attention was trained on their smartphones. She trotted along determinedly, Alvez and JJ right behind her.
They were right; Reid had come this way, just not through the park as first thought. A few minutes later, they arrived at the metro station. It was evident from Roxy's tracking, that Reid had entered the concourse and taken the southbound train.
"Now what?" JJ asked, as she transferred Reid's scarf from one hand to the other. Alvez praised the dog for her good work and told JJ,
"Let's go back to my car." As they walked back towards Alvez' vehicle, he continued, "Obviously, Reid came down here and took the subway somewhere."
"Yellow line southbound from here. Probably headed to work then, Luke," JJ surmised and Alvez agreed with her.
Back at the BAU offices in Quantico, Rossi handed Garcia the Ziploc bag with the iPhone inside and pulled up a chair beside her.
"Where's Prentiss?" he asked.
"Her office, she had a call," Garcia informed him.
Garcia pulled on a glove and then removed the iPhone from the bag, plugging it into her own iPhone's charger. While they waited for it to charge enough to turn it on, Rossi called JJ.
After getting JJ's update about the subway, Rossi told her, "Talked to the Super of Reid's building after I left you guys. Said he saw Spencer last night when he dropped off a package he'd signed for from the post office. Mail that didn't fit in the mailbox, apparently. And he hasn't been missing long, guys. I listened to the answering machine while I was there and the only call there was Garcia this morning, looking for him." Rossi paused for a moment then continued, "Of course, that's assuming no one else has called him at home since last night. Garcia?"
"On it," she said, tapping into the DC phone company's system and extracting the necessary information. "Last call to 187's home number was my call at 9 18 this morning. Last one before that was the library calling, that was yesterday morning at 10 12."
"He was here at 10 12 yesterday so he must've heard and deleted any message from them because your call was the only one on the machine."
"Other than that, I have calls from his number," she paused to cross reference the numbers that had come up in the first search, "Thai takeout at 6 35 pm last night, and a long distance call to," again she paused to do a secondary search. "Country code 33, our genius is calling Paris, France at midnight. Which is 6 am in Paris. And," her eyebrows rose in surprise, "whoever he called, they talked for an hour."
Both Rossi and Garcia looked up in surprise when Emily Prentiss came into Garcia's office, just in time to hear Garcia's last sentence.
"What's that number?" Prentiss asked.
" 01 11 37 37 91" Garcia told her. "With the 33 in front of it that's necessary to call France. Why?"
Prentiss pursed her lips and shook her head slightly, "It's nothing. It's okay. Garcia, did you check to see if Reid had perhaps taken a cab?"
Immediately, Garcia set about looking into this possibility, using his address as the search parameter and Prentiss made eye contact with Rossi and nodded her head slightly, to indicate she wanted him to go with her.
"Do not let Garcia trace that number," she hissed in a low tone as Rossi joined her outside Garcia's door. She stopped Rossi's question with "I'll explain later!" before stalking off to the elevator and leaving.