Hello all! I'm indulging my newest obsession, Criminal Minds and Dr. Spencer Reid. This takes place in Season 1, for no other reason than that's where I've watched up to so far. I own nothing.
Mystery
If I were personally to define religion, I would say that it is a bandage that man has invented to protect a soul made bloody by circumstances. - Theodore Dreiser
The jet was grounded. Nothing serious, the flight crew assured them, just some aeronautical thingummy that needed to be fixed before the FBI would let their entire Behavioral Analysis Unit board the plane.
Reid opened his mouth, doubtless to explain what the thingummy was and just how fast the plane would go down in flames without it working properly. J.J. shook her head at him. Hotch, looking thunderous, was already pulling out his phone to call his wife. He didn't need it right now.
It had been a bad case, J.J. thought back in her room, clicking through one mindless late-night talk show after another. Usually, channel-surfing drove Elle up the wall, but the profiler just sat curled up in a chair, watching the banal chatter flicking past with a blank look on her face.
Bad enough spinning it to the media. J.J. could taste some of the words she'd had to say, things like "rape" and "torture." Combine that with "going back twenty years" and "the full extent is still not known," and the pictures of the bones that she'd released to the press.
The little, fragile bones.
She took another sip of tea, trying to wash the taste of those words out of her mouth.
Bad enough saying them. She was grateful it wasn't her job to understand the person who'd done them.
She slept badly. Staring at the ceiling somewhere around five-thirty, she knew she wouldn't get back to sleep. Elle was already gone, probably down to the hotel's pool. J.J. wondered how many laps it would take to wash this out of her friend's system.
Dressed in running clothes, she padded through the bland halls of the hotel, avoiding eye contact with the other early wakers. She wanted to be alone, not to think but to not think, putting the last few days in a box and setting it aside for awhile.
She'd just stepped into the lobby when she heard a distinctive voice at the front desk.
"Yes, could you direct me to the nearest house of worship?"
J.J. stopped.
"I sure can, sir. Which religion?"
"Any one will do."
Baffled silence. This often happened when Spencer Reid spoke.
To his credit, the clerk gathered himself after only a moment and said smoothly, "Certainly, sir. There's a Roman Catholic church right around the corner and I believe their early Mass starts at six o'clock. A ten-minute walk or we can offer you a lift?"
"No, thank you, I'll walk."
"Absolutely. You just turn left out of here and right at the first corner. St. Augustine's, you'll see it."
Stepping around the corner, J.J. watched the desk clerk shake his head, making the "O . . . kay then," face that Reid also prompted on a regular basis. When he saw her, he jumped.
She raised her brows, daring him to make a comment. He'd been working when they checked in, and knew she was in Reid's group.
He flushed. "Good morning, ma'am. Ah, can I direct you to a running trail?"
She looked at the door, just sliding closed. "No, I know where I'm going."
J.J. was a member of that huge, sprawling religion known as lapsed Catholic, so all the little formalities of gesture and words were still in her muscles and bones. The same familiarity made her tug at her loose t-shirt, trying to pull it down far enough to cover her rear in the skin-tight running shorts. Still, she got side-eyes from her pew-mates.
Reid, she could tell, had no such familiarity. He sat bolt upright two pews ahead of her, surrounded by the elderly types that usually populated an early-morning Mass, like frantic students cramming for the final exam. His shaggy head towered above the other worshippers like a lighthouse in a sea of shining bald heads and lace caps.
He stood, sat, and knelt a beat behind everyone else, and got the Sign of the Cross wrong twice before managing it. J.J. sat at an angle to him, and she watched his face instead of the Mass. She had expected to see that inquisitive look, the line between his brows that meant he was working out a puzzle, anything from sudoku to the most hideous depths of human possibility.
Instead, his expression stayed blank, with only the faintest of quizzical flickers crossing it when he was called upon to do something new and vaguely alarming, like sing, or hold hands during the Our Father. He stayed in his pew during Communion, forcing the octogenarians to climb over his knobby knees.
J.J. went, bracing herself for the moment he noticed her as she walked back to her pew with the host still gummy in her teeth and the wine sour on her tongue. But he didn't look up.
He sat all through the final ritual, the priest's blessing to go out into the wicked world, away from the safety of these four sacred walls, and try to remain untouched by human pettiness and viciousness and evil. The other worshippers milled arthritically, twittering to each other about great-grandchildren and where the best early-bird breakfast was to be found and the terrible state of the world. J.J. heard one say, "Did you hear they caught that murderer? I saw it on the news."
"God be praised," the other said, nodding sagely.
J.J. wondered what God had to do with it. Had He drunk bad coffee at 2 am, staring at map after map? Had He stood behind two-way glass, watching Dodd examine the smears of blood on his hands with fascination and pride? Had He seen the bones? Had He seen the children they were, before they were bones?
It reminded her why she was lapsed.
The church emptied out, eventually, but Reid still sat, looking up at the crucifix. J.J. wondered if he was enumerating the sacrificed deity's various wounds. She could almost hear the dry recital.
"Nails driven between the second and third metacarpals and the third and fourth metatarsals and then fastened to a wooden frame composed of an upright bar and a crossbeam about three-quarters of the way up. A circular ornament placed on the head, made from some manner of native plant. The thorns, which are most likely between two and three inches, were forced through the scalp to the skull. It may be an mocking representation of high status. A wound from a steel or bronze blade, driven just under the last rib, most likely puncturing the spleen, the stomach, and the pancreas. Probable cause of death, exsanguination."
When she sat down next to him, he didn't jump or stutter, but nodded. Maybe he'd been aware of her presence the entire time. Since the hotel. It was always a toss-up as to what drifted by that genius abstraction and what pierced it, like the spear piercing Christ's side.
After a minute, he said, "Did you know-"
J.J. braced herself for one of Reid's tangential did-you-knows, often related but rarely germane to the discussion.
"-the word mystery is from the Greek? Mysterion, from myein, to shut or to close." His long fingers flexed on his knee. "It referred specifically to religious rites, undertaken only by the initiated. Something that's secret. Not only secret but unknowable."
She looked at him.
"Theologically," he continued in his college-professor voice, "the word mystery doesn't refer to a mystery as we understand it in the secular sense. The New Catholic Dictionary says that a mystery is a supernatural truth, one that of its very nature lies above the finite intelligence."
In all her life, J.J. never would have expected to hear Dr. Spencer Reid, with his multiple , his 187 IQ, his eidetic memory, to refer to his own intelligence as finite.
He unfolded his long body from the pew, stepped over her, and left the church.
The thingummy fixed, they went wheels-up an hour and a half after J.J. followed Reid out of the church and back to the hotel. Reid didn't refer to the moment in the empty sanctuary by word or gesture. As they soared over the country, he played poker with Morgan and Elle, cheating outrageously as usual, all innocence when caught.
When she sat down next to Gideon, he was working on his report. J.J. averted her eyes from the pictures. He noticed, and shifted a page over the lurid colors.
She smiled at him. He nodded fractionally and went back to his notes.
"Are you religious?" she asked.
He looked over his glasses. "You trying to convert me?"
"No. Just curious. You don't have to answer."
His pen bounced on the paper. "According to Ernie Pyle, there are no atheists in foxholes."
Typical Gideon.
"Reid went to church this morning," she said.
Gideon didn't look surprised. "Which kind did he pick today?"
"Catholic. It was the closest."
"Hmm."
"He's not religious."
"Nope."
"So why would a non-religious man go to church?"
"Why do you think?"
She gritted her teeth. "I'm not the profiler here."
He leaned back. "We don't usually profile each other. It's too . . . sticky."
"Yes, but-" She looked at Reid again, crowing over yet another win. "I don't understand."
He pointed his pen at her, as if to say, You got it, and went back to his notes.
J.J.'s mouth opened, then shut again with a click. She leaned back, glaring at his balding bent head. Gideon clearly thought she could work it out herself. She wasn't sure he was right.
Gideon's pen slid across the page, leaving behind looping scrawl that explained the inner workings of a demon in human form. A demon they'd gotten to know. All of them had walked the dark, twisting corridors of Jason Dodd's mind to find what he did and why he did it. They'd come out, but part of him had come out with them, like the blood he'd brought on his hands to the station.
Blood stained, but it at least could be scrubbed off.
J.J. didn't understand either Dodd or sometimes, the profilers. She knew she was good at what she did-she wouldn't be part of the team if she wasn't-but she could never catch such a mind in her hand and examine it, the way they did. She'd picked this particular nasty Rubik's cube out of the pile, true, but then she'd handed it straight to them, grateful that she wasn't called upon to decode it, and worse, to understand.
Reid had taken it from her with enthusiasm. He always did, twisting things around to look at them from every angle in his skewed way. He knew so much, and wasn't shy about sharing. It was easy to assume that the darkness got filed somewhere in his brain, like another esoteric fact.
She was grateful she didn't have to understand, J.J. thought again.
Maybe Spencer Reid, Ph.D, expert on everything under the sun except normal human interaction, needed something that was a mystery and could remain so. Maybe it was reassuring, somehow, after having to understand a thing like Jason Dodd. Reminding himself that there was something that could not be understood by him or by anybody.
Not only secret, he'd said, but unknowable.
If you think you understand the nature of God, that which you think you know is not God. - St. Augustine
FINIS