1
I knew it would be you who came to the cabin to check on me. You must be frightened. I apologize for that. I never meant to cause you any pain.
God knows you've had enough for one lifetime.
He looked different.
The predator didn't know what he should have expected. The purely physical changes weren't very radical at all; about as drastic as they were wont to be in anyone after a little over three years. So young, not even thirty, he had not aged at all in that time. His hair was longer, almost to his shoulders, and wilder, more untidy, the extra length leaving more room for curls that had been easier to tame in a shorter state. His sense of dress had shifted towards something more … professional. More black, less brown. The predator chalked it up to his time in the Bureau; when last they met he had only been a couple of years in, more than enough to gain practical experience but not to wedge him firmly into the pack-mentality of the workplace – to subtly change the way he put together his wardrobe, for example, until he looked more like the people he surrounded himself with every day. In another few years he would probably have discarded the elbow patches and the messenger bag, too.
A sad thought, somehow.
It was the deeper, more elusive changes that affected him. For reasons frustratingly unknown, he walked with a cane – the end of it was carved like a bird's head – but the predator didn't think it was this that made him seem somehow older. Though his face was still as smooth, still as devoid of all but the vaguest suggestion of facial hair, he seemed to have far more years behind him than just the three the predator had marked within the miles of concrete that separated him from the world. Far more years in the way he surveyed his surroundings, taking in the number of security cameras and guards and guns; far more years in the set of his features, the now almost complete lack of that ever-present absent-mindedness the predator had found so endearing. Overall there was more confidence pouring out of his every step, every shift of his ebony gaze, every word the predator could read on his lips through the barred glass doors. He seemed to personify the saying. What hadn't killed him …
It might be that it was a façade, a front. But even so it was impressive. The self-mastery it would take to maintain such a perfect mask was not something he had possessed three years ago. No, he had not possessed it even before he had belonged to the predator. Perhaps, in the distant days before Tobias Henkel had trapped him in the nightmare of his fractured mind, he had been well on his way to becoming this straight-backed creature who now waited with perfect patience to be admitted into the fortified interview room where the predator was shackled to a chair. A succession of doors and gates were already behind him; as soon as he had appeared at the end of the corridor the predator had seen it.
So very, very different.
The initial shock had abated by the time the doctor stepped into the anteroom. With only one set of doors now between them, he began instead to feel profoundly happy. The nervous, giddy light-headedness he'd been wrestling with ever since he'd been informed that this day was finally coming exploded and bled into his limbs; the tips of his fingers and toes numbing in pace with his nervous heart.
He would not call his life these past years a miserable one, but compared to the utter bliss now gathering strength inside him it all melted into a shapeless, colorless blur. All those days, all those identical, uneventful days in the grey solitude of his cell, all of them without discernable purpose.
He hadn't been allowed anything to remember him by. The closest he had gotten to hearing his voice again was the occasional article or essay he had managed to bribe one of the guards for, and even those he had been forced to get rid of lest he was discovered with them.
At times he had ached, unable to transcend the vacant space in his heart. He had missed the doctor, and he had missed the man he himself had once been. The predator.
Some of the guards called him Mike, like his friends and colleagues had done in his past life. The warden, on the rare occasions that he came to deliver information regarding his hearings and whatnot – it was he who had let him know that the doctor was coming – called him simply Jones. In his first year here, when boredom had driven him to try his luck at prison employment, the other inmates had called him a wide range of things.
He wondered how the doctor would address him.
He had been surprised, perhaps foolishly, to find that he had earned a not inconsiderable amount of respect within these walls before even setting foot in his cell. Most of it was due to his success at abducting and nearly killing a federal agent, but the widely known fact that his arrest had been more or less of his own orchestration had managed to make him a legend long before he had expected to become one.
It irked him, how the population he was now part of considered his crimes a defiance, a slap in the face of the government that had incarcerated them. They had stories about him, stories that circulated back to his little nook on death row with an alarming frequency. He had hoped that he would be dead before his name was ever mentioned in the same breath as Gacy, Dahmer and Bundy. He had hoped he would be dead before anyone had time to write a book about him. In three years, six had already been published. Two of them by people who had been part of the original investigations, but the rest were little more than dime store trash. He had read them all, of course, and he couldn't help but wonder if the doctor would ever write one of his own.
At least he was confident that, should such a thing ever come to pass, he would be long gone.
Evan Trudhomme is five weeks and six days shy of his twenty-third birthday when a man pulls up in a white van next to where he's counting out the fifties and twenties that tonight's business has yielded. He's still high from the cocaine he enjoyed before a recent appointment, and consequently doesn't think it very odd that a car has found its way out here, to the deserted stretch of dockland where he likes to take his tricks.
Not even the gangbangers come out here. Or so he tells the johns if the hulking shapes of the warehouses and the murmurs of the water make them nervous.
When he becomes aware that the van has stopped just short of where he's standing under a flickering streetlamp, he turns around, thinking it must be a potential client. A regular, perhaps; someone who knows this place. He has time to see the masked figure before it's upon him, and then there are strong arms, too strong for his stick figure frame. The bills tumble from his hands and sail to black, slick asphalt, where they scatter like feathers.
Something cold is pressed over his mouth. Every breath he takes through the soaked cloth brings him closer to oblivion. He's held in what looks like a warehouse for three days and four nights. He listens to the sound of dripping water somewhere above him, and wonders if he'll see his parents when he dies. Infection sets in a flesh wound across his chest. He develops a fever which, when it becomes delirium, prompts the man who took him to put him out of his misery.
He weeps over Evan's body for a full hour before he manages to drive it out to a vacant lot and bury him deep in the ground. They are tears of frustration.
He needs to make them last longer.
It was a little sleeker, a little brighter and a little more efficient than he remembered. More like an office than a research centre. The bullpen was crowded and cluttered, agents of varyingly official appearance dotting the grid of desks and low dividing walls. The amount of files and filing cabinets was impressive in this digital age, and he didn't feel as much like a fossil as he'd thought he would.
Keeping one pace behind Chief Strauss, he tried not to let it bother him how very young they all were. One of them, a rangy kid in dire need of a haircut, didn't look a day over eighteen. As Rossi passed him he pulled a Halloween mask from his head and flattened his lips into a grin. There was a hangman's noose around his neck, and Rossi found himself returning the smile. It was far more satisfying than the dark, tense glances he received from the other agents.
Strauss took him up a short flight of stairs, and there, in a spacious office of his very own, was Hotch. He looked the same as the last time he'd seen him, with the exception of something unmistakably strained both across his shoulders and deep in his eyes. The job, Rossi presumed – that, or his personal life had taken its inevitable toll.
"I'll let the two of you catch up," Chief Strauss said, and left at a brisk trot. Off to roast and eat a small child for lunch, no doubt.
After she had gone not thirty seconds passed before they were interrupted, by another young thing, nonetheless. Her eyes were violently blue and as lovely as the rest of her. She welcomed him with a certain softened efficiency, and everything from her subtle make-up to her spare and controlled movements screamed public relations. Sure enough, she introduced herself as such.
"We didn't have that ten years ago," he murmured after she had breezed back out into the bullpen, leaving a lingering scent of discreet perfume.
"What do you mean?" Hotch smiled. Rossi arranged his face.
"Communications Coordinator," he replied, adding swiftly, "and has she been on TV? I feel like I've seen her before."
"It's part of her job," Hotch confirmed. "To hold press conferences and the like."
"Right. Of course." Looking through the blinds into the mess of desks below, he recalled the recent cases the BAU had played a part in, cases he had been unable to resist keeping an eye on.
"You've had a few media circuses these past years, haven't you? It's not like the old days."
Looking back at Hotch, he saw tension in his eyes again. His smile had all but faded, and his gaze had followed Rossi's through the window. It now rested on the nearest group of agents, where the boy with the noose around his neck was still on his feet, looking like he had wandered in by accident.
Just as Rossi was about to enquire if something was wrong, Hotch took a determined breath. "There are some things you need to know about this team," he said. "You'll be working very closely with them, and I want you to be informed before you start hearing rumors."
Meeting Rossi's eyes again, his face tightened.
"There are always rumors," Rossi said carefully. Hotch gave a small shake of the head.
"Not like these."
Rossi waited for him to continue, but he simply released another quiet breath through his nose and hinged the measured smile back onto his face.
"It can wait." He took Rossi gently by the arm. "You should meet them first."
The sentence had fallen in under a year. Some kind of record, he'd been told. There had been no trial. His public defender had been formality in a cheap suit.
His death would be pushed through a needle, right into his bloodstream. Just as Michael had planned, long ago, when he chose what state to live in. Just in case. In the minutes before his life was neatly terminated, he would look into the faces of those who had survived his actions, and at times he wondered if this would be when he finally came to feel something like remorse. Something more than the fleeting melancholy of this – this empty existence of fenced-in patches of grass and odd angles of light over walls.
At the top of the corridor, their eyes had met for the first time since that last embrace in the basement. Dr. Spencer Reid looked serious and tense, something Michael could relate to. Even if he hadn't been secured to a bolted-down chair under heavy chains, he would have been frozen stiff. The only time he could recall being this nervous was in the endless moments before he had snatched the very first boy, an eternity ago. Stumbling out of his van onto damp asphalt; arms around a rail-thin body that fought him with infinitely more strength than he had expected. It had taken almost a minute for the chloroform to do its job, a minute in which he had been certain someone would hear the grunts and scuffles and come to the prize's aid.
He had been a rakish thing, too damaged and cynical for Michael's tastes. But his hair had been a halo of silken yellow gold, his eyes large and almond-shaped and bluer than the robin's eggs in the song.
Spencer Reid came to a halt in the anteroom. He stood with his weight resting on the bird's head, his free hand clutching a manila folder. Michael watched both hands through the faded glass. He thought there might be some whitening of the knuckles around the cane's curved beak, but he couldn't be sure. It was mesmerizing. Surely there must be some form of turmoil taking place in that awesome mind. Surely there must be something more than just the tension, the stillness seeming to span his frame. He couldn't see it. If it was there he couldn't see it.
The warden was present, as was Michael's attorney. Another man in a black suit he recognized as a local FBI agent who had conducted a set of what he had called supplementary interviews with him a couple of years ago. A bearded, middle-aged man in casual clothes; he had arrived with Dr. Reid and appeared to be a superior, and lastly a third profiler, big, black and remarkably handsome, whom he recalled well from three years ago.
The conversation was difficult to decipher through the glass. The older agent kept drooping black eyes on Michael throughout, and they all knew he was watching. In all honesty he wasn't half as interested in what they might be saying as he was in taking in the sight of the doctor. He was just as appealing as he remembered him, if not more so. This new confidence, these far more than three years he seemed to have lived since last they met, effectively heightened, tweaked and defined the quiet inner strength that Michael had seen so clearly in him the very first time he got out of that car all those years ago. The subtle, intrinsic strength he had done his best, and failed, to break.
He noted how those in the room who didn't know him, the local agent in particular, cast curious glances his way without ever actually looking at him. Michael imagined they had been given access to certain photographs in which he looked quite, quite different.
He was so close. So very close. Faint irritation as they kept talking, seeming in no hurry. He could not help but count the seconds. Soon they would breathe the same air again.
Toby Hollander is nineteen when Evan Trudhomme's murderer spots him at a truck stop. He's just used the last of the money he stole from his father to buy himself a cheeseburger and a vanilla coke. One of the waitresses, having discerned he's not, as they say, 'all there', sits with him in the hopes of coaxing him into surrendering his parents' phone number. She is unsuccessful.
When she returns to her work, a man in a nearby booth gets up to ask Toby if he needs a ride. He does. He's going to Hollywood.
He wakes up in the room where Evan died a few months earlier. He lasts only four days, and the man who has raped him eleven times and severed his left earlobe smashes a window in frustration. He does not cry this time. This time it was his fault alone. After Evan he knew to clean the wounds, but there is no cleaning a bleed on the inside.
He's still seething when he buries the body at the edge of a field an hour's drive north.
He'd been too rough. He needs to control himself.
He had known this day would come.
He had known during the two months he had been exiled in his apartment, and he had known during that first on-location case after he came back. It had involved the Russian mafia, quite removed from the type of case he had been dreading and waiting for and, in perfect pessimism, assumed would come his way sooner than he could possibly be prepared for it.
And now it was here. In a tangled wood in Texas, on a trampled path under his feet, it had come his way. It was waiting for him in a forest creek.
And he was not the slightest bit prepared.
It seemed bizarre, now, to think that he had been looking forward to something as mundane as Halloween. That he'd taken the time to pass a store where he could get the masks and paraphernalia that were, in his opinion, vital to the season, and that he'd found himself practically skipping into work, all aflutter both over the holiday and the fact that the legendary David Rossi was joining the team.
He had seen the masked joy in his colleagues' faces when he arrived in his silly cloud of excitement. He had been secretly pleased with himself for managing such comparatively well-adjusted behavior. It hadn't occurred to him even in passing that today might just be the day when they had to take a case like this.
The sound of his name rang sharply through his thoughts. The act of keeping his eyes on his feet, unaccustomed to the irregular terrain, and his attention on the agent on the path ahead of him proved difficult, and he stumbled a little as David Rossi said, "Do we still keep all the old files in the fourth-floor storeroom?"
Failing to summon at least a fleeting glee that Rossi had just asked him a question he could answer, he cleared his throat. His voice came out dull and sluggish.
"I – I think some are up there. Most of our information's on computer now."
"Right," Rossi said, and if he hadn't been busy trying to rein in the panic Reid would've seized the opportunity to strike up a conversation. That he was to be working on the same team as David Rossi, that he was to be profiling with David Rossi, was a fact that should have reduced him to a babbling fool – that morning it had, with a positive swooning fit over psycholinguistics. Now there was only the panic, a tall opaque wall of it, hurtling up from the creek that waited ahead.
They came to a halt by the water.
"Michelle's body was found right here," Detective Yarbrough said. "I really thought it was a prank."
Reid took a steadying breath, tore his gaze from the still surface below. The detective's weathered face was stiff and drawn with what could only be described as sorrow.
I really don't understand the world anymore.
"You can't really blame yourself for that," Reid said quietly.
"She made herself dinner," the detective muttered, eyes on the murky water.
"Excuse me?"
"She had time to make herself dinner. That means she was home for a while before he…"
Something moved on Reid's left. He froze, turned his head just in time to see Rossi picking his way along the riverside.
Hyper-vigilance. As if to make sure he got the message, it stayed with him for a moment, receding only once he'd reminded himself that the paperwork hade gone through months ago. He was cleared for field work; he was fine. He was well.
It was an effort not to look at Rossi, certain he had noticed. Beside him, Detective Yarbrough had eyes only for the creek, his hollow stare resting where the dead woman had been found.
"There was time to help her," he finished tightly.
Rossi was pacing the muddy shore. "Water," he said pensively, a stare as hard as Yarbrough's but quite devoid of similar emotions fixed below. "Obliterates a body, destroys evidence."
Reid didn't watch as he stepped up onto a tree trunk to get a better look; eyes on the very same water he tried not to see what Rossi was trying to see. Tried not to hear what Rossi was trying to hear.
It didn't work. White limbs swam before him, broken and used, helpless against a stronger opponent. She was screaming, pleading. He had left her here, discarded her where no trace of her murderer could survive. Completely in his power even after death had ended her pain.
It must be all over his face, it must be obvious. His breaths didn't sound right coming out of his throat. He had to dart a glance at Rossi. Intent on the scene before him, the older agent appeared to have little to no attention to spare, and Reid wondered if he knew at all.
Hotch must have informed him of the various scandals the team had seen in the past years. Especially since his predecessor had been involved in the most recent of them. But the Texas case had come in that same morning; perhaps there had been no time to debrief him. Perhaps he had no idea.
If he'd known, Reid suspected that even the legendary David Rossi would have given himself away.
It occurred to him that Hotch might have been acting deliberately in sending the two of them out here alone. He had clearly decided Reid was ready to visit a site like this, where a victim like this had been dumped –
Returned.
– which in and of itself was a testament to the progress he had made over the past few months. It meant he had been observant enough to realize that Reid would not want him or any of the others hanging over him, waiting for him to put his wrist to his forehead and faint. It was the sort of thing Hotch would do, even if he'd sooner swallow a chainsaw than admit to having done it.
"But you weren't in the water that long, were you, Michelle?" Rossi was saying, and Reid snapped back to the present. Steered his focus where it was needed. The victim –
Michelle.
– deserved at least that.
"She had rocks tied to her to weigh her down," Yarbrough said.
Reid heard his own voice as if from a vast distance, and it was almost as detached and professional as he wanted it to be. "She floated to the surface before there was any other damage."
"But just what was done to her already…" Yarbrough insisted.
I just don't understand any of it anymore.
"The salient…point is," Reid forced himself to say, and though the cool was now gone from his voice he knew it could be interpreted as sympathy, "It was the first thing the UnSub wasn't good at."
"Green River dumped most of the bodies in water," Rossi said slowly. "But they weren't weighed down."
"Well, yeah," Reid muttered, "We know now it's because he didn't care if they were found. He had no connection to them."
It was with the meaning of his words that the abyss came tearing up. It was all in there, a snarled mess that he had ignorantly thought untangled, and as he stared into the dark, wet grave where Michelle Colucci had been found raped, murdered and mutilated, he knew that it was staring back into him. It was laughing at him.
Survival was a tricky business. There were no instructions to follow, no rights and wrongs in its successful execution. It would change its shape and seem impossible more often than not, it would come at you like a sledgehammer one moment and like a gentle fall of snow the next. After having faced the process twice, Reid couldn't say that he had even the vaguest grasp on it.
Like last time, he knew, probably better than most, that the aftermath could be just as much of a bitch as the war itself.
When they at long last began to break up their little huddle it was the local suit and the bearded man who entered first.
Michael's stomach churned with frustration. He kept his face neutral as a guard opened the heavy door and let it fall shut with a bang behind the agents. The guard who was posted inside the interview room, a squat woman with her hair in a bun, positioned herself in front of the door as though it might be assaulted at any given moment.
"Mr. Jones," the agent in the suit greeted him unsmilingly. "I don't know if you remember me. Special Agent Freeman, we met about two years ago."
"Supplementary interviews," Michael murmured, his attention on the other side of the glass. Dr. Reid was in conversation with the three who remained and appeared dead set on ignoring Michael; the way he stood, stock still and facing away, seemed calculated. As though he knew it would hurt.
Michael had no intention of asking the agents why Dr. Reid wasn't joining them. He had seen this coming, even if he hadn't allowed it to sink in until just now.
The game had begun.
Pulling up chairs, the agents sat down across from him. The beard placed a plastic mug of coffee on the table while Agent Freeman dropped a single folder; for one wild moment, Michael thought it would contain photographs of his prizes – living, at best – but there were only documents covered in text. Reports.
Michael reluctantly shifted his focus to the bearded man. He had an unmistakable air of experience and the shrewd senses it sharpened, and Michael was instantly wary, knowing a worthy opponent when he saw one. He did not doubt that, to him, Michael was just one of many.
He didn't introduce himself. Rested his left shin lightly on his right knee and took an idle sip of coffee. Settled in, it seemed, as if just to observe.
Jason Gideon should have been in that chair. Jason Gideon should have been removing his glasses and thoughtfully lacing his fingers, should have been fixing Michael with a look that could scorch and soothe and seduce all at once.
All the better that those hawk eyes weren't here to see through him.
"Right then," Freeman said, placing his hands on the open folder. "We're here to make an exchange of information. You stated in a federal hearing in March of 2008 –"
"Hang on," Michael cut him off. "I don't have any information for you."
Freeman traded a glance with the bearded agent. Blank-faced, he blinked twice and said, "I'm afraid I don't follow. You have repeatedly stated that you –"
"Stop talking," Michael said quietly. "Just stop."
As Agent Freeman raised his eyebrows in confusion, the beard shifted on his chair, put both feet on the floor. Michael looked into his eyes, dark and no less watchful Gideon's, and licked his lips impatiently.
"I have information for Dr. Reid," he muttered, now addressing the older agent. "No one else."
"We know," the agent said, the first words he'd spoken since entering the room. "I'm Dr. Reid's colleague. David Rossi."
"I know that name," Michael drawled. "You're a profiler."
"I am," David Rossi nodded. "Though we don't call it that."
"Behavioral analyst, then."
A slow nod. Fleeting half-smile. Michael could smell expensive aftershave, just a hint of it.
"I gather you know a lot about my job," David Rossi said, quite pleasantly. He had a smooth, semi-nasal voice, and where Gideon had possessed a near hypnotic talent for putting his victims at ease, this man seemed more prone to lure out whatever reason they possessed. Coax them into thinking.
Michael needed no encouragement.
"Of course I do," he replied, as his eyes drifted to the window. The doctor had lowered his head and was staring into the concrete floor. He would later know every scar, every pockmark on its surface. He would be able to sketch a perfect likeness of that patch of floor for years to come.
David Rossi tilted his head to the side, attempting to catch his eye. A half-smile played around his mouth; glinted in his near-black irises.
"Michael?" David Rossi idly spun his mug of coffee around and around on the table. "May I call you Michael?"
"I really don't care what you call me."
Rossi nodded pensively. "Okay, then." He twisted around on his chair, faced the window. All four men on the other side noticed the sudden movement and looked through the glass, and for one heart-stopping, dazzling moment, Michael was allowed to see a look of perfect frailty on his prize's face before the mask – of course it had been a mask – was slammed back up.
Rossi sketched a gesture on the air. Michael held his breath, not daring to hope –
Sure enough, one of the guards moved to open a door on the left, the only other passage out of the anteroom. The doctor led the way through.
Michael felt his heart break. A hot stab of anger ascended through his chest.
The door closed behind them, leaving only the public defender and the warden on the other side of the glass.
When he met Rossi's eyes again, there was no trace of a smile there.
"Send in my nine o'clock, would you, Jenny?"
Her nine o'clock was not the high point of her week. Jenny's furtive "right away, Dr. Wilkes" across the intercom did not help – the fact that her secretary had a crush on the very same person who put a weight of irrational tension in the pit of her stomach was not only ironic but thoroughly irritating. Served her right for hiring her idiot niece.
Using the adjoining door, Eleanor crossed from her office into the treatment room just as Jenny was letting him in. She had estimated that there would only be four to six more sessions, and knew how wrong she was to be grateful for this. It wasn't she who had to face the pain.
"Dr. Wilkes," her nine o'clock greeted her with customary awkwardness, glancing nervously over his shoulder as Jenny retreated and closed the door – proof, no doubt, of the girl's complete lack of subtlety in her romantic advances. Eleanor didn't share her niece's taste in men in any way. She couldn't have begun to guess what Jenny saw in the wild-haired, sharp-boned scarecrow that now stepped into the room. She presumed it was either to do with some manifestation of dormant maternal instincts or, more disturbingly and far more likely, a predatory nature she shared with both her parents. If Jenny was the, albeit clumsily, stalking lioness, her nine o'clock certainly fit the image of the fleeing gazelle. All legs and no teeth.
She had not yet found a level where he could be comfortably approached. It was as if his personal space was considerably larger than that of most people. Thus their appointments, which were long and arduous, would range from tense to downright unpleasant. She had to glue the small, professional smile onto her face as she went to greet him.
"Dr. Reid," she mimicked and shook the hand he proffered. It was a bony as ever under her fingers, and unless her eyes deceived her he had lost at least another pound since their last session. Clearly, her advice to eat more food and drink less coffee hadn't registered. Perhaps his own degrees, none of which were in the relevant field, had been enough reason for him to ignore it.
Without voicing her disapproval, she reminded herself that he was young. Young enough to heal regardless.
"Let's get started, shall we?" She gestured to the bed, shrouded in fresh white surgical cloth. "How would you say it's coming along? Any concerns?"
"No, I – I have confidence in this particular method," he said in that speedy, breathless way of his. "I've read everything there is to read on the different techniques, and even if this approach takes time to show results I know it will prove the most effective. Eventually."
As he spoke, he dropped the ancient leather bag he always carried onto a chair and begun shedding his jacket, tie and shirt. In their first sessions, months ago, he had undressed behind the screen that was supposed to serve the purpose, but at some point this modesty had yielded. Eleanor hoped it was a sign of her success in the endeavor to be as professional and calm a presence as possible. It had, at times, proven difficult.
Initially it had been just the tension. The stretching lengths of silence as he exposed the marks of unquestionable violence that marred his otherwise clear complexion. The very first session had by far been the most uncomfortable, when she took meticulous inventory of the scars and determined which ones could be treated and how aggressively.
She had seen many scars in her career. Almost as many as she had seen moles and birthmarks and ill-advised tattoos. But she could say without a shred of doubt that she had never seen anything quite like this. The closest to it that she could recall was a patient who had for undisclosed reasons walked through a window; winding ropes of white had danced like flames up his forearms and legs.
When she had first examined the scars, Eleanor hadn't been able to disregard the fact that the young doctor's pulse was so swift and thin it was almost palpitating. She had seen many patients grow nervous under her touch, but this had been something else. He'd probably thought that the breathing exercises he started going through were too subtle for her to notice, but she had seen his lips move around the counted seconds. Like a parent watching over a sleeping infant, she had waited for each interval to give way to another intake of air. She had caught herself wondering who had made the scars and for what reason, something she never had any interest in contemplating. She hadn't asked.
To this day, after eighteen sessions, she had a distinct sense that any such inquiries would only discomfit her patient even further.
So now, as her nine o'clock settled on his stomach under the ruthlessly exposing light of the surgical lamp, Dr. Eleanor Wilkes arranged her face in perfect clinical detachment.
Donning her goggles and her latex gloves, she set to work undoing the damage that had been done by someone far less attuned to the fragile nature of human flesh.
Charlie Russell has recently turned thirty-one when his wife throws him out of the house. He doesn't mind. He sets out on his motorcycle with a duffel bag and a roll of money.
His bike, which is uninsured, is stolen at the same truck stop where Toby Hollander hitched a ride with a stranger. He starts walking to the nearest town, and is swiftly picked up by a man in a white van.
What happens to him where two before him have met their ends is not entirely unfamiliar, as some ten years earlier he served a sentence in a state penitentiary for stealing an expensive car. His unblemished skin, strawberry blond hair and large green eyes were precious commodities in there.
After barely five days, he goes into a towering fury as his senses divorce him completely. He can't stop screaming. He screams at his wife and at his mother and father, at the men he belonged to in prison. He screams until the man he belongs to now grows weary and slits his throat.
The killer is calm when he drives Charlie's body to a construction site and puts him in the ground. He knows where the concrete will be poured.
Five days. Five days is good.
He can do better.
It was probably a keepsake. Something someone had brought from somewhere cold and beautiful. Europe, maybe. He couldn't identify the exact origin of it; it was that generic. A little person, perhaps a child, he couldn't tell, striding through snow that fell only if you turned the little glass sphere that imprisoned it.
He turned it, and turned it again, trying not to listen to the conversation Hotch was conducting with JJ behind him. He could hear him stepping on the spot as he spoke tersely to her, could hear the words "personal matter", and gathered without much effort that his wife had been trying to reach him.
Still peering into the snow globe as if it might tell him something, he waited for him to hang up the phone before asking absently if everything was all right.
"Yeah, fine," Hotch replied, and though it was obvious he had no wish to spend another word on the subject, Reid had to say it. Whether he was saying it for Hotch's benefit or his own wasn't entirely clear.
"We can do this interview another time."
Hotch paced a few steps across the modest little office where they'd been asked to wait for the assistant warden. "He's scheduled to be executed next week."
The words stirred an irrational mix of emotions in Reid, and when he replied it was half-hearted. "I can take the lead if you need –"
"Reid," Hotch cut him off, raising a hand. The look he slanted across at him was partly harassed and partly long-suffering, and if he'd been expecting something like sympathy he'd been mistaken.
It was probably something to do with the fact that they were in a prison. Waiting to seek an audience with a murderer as if he were royalty. Suffice it to say, Reid felt … weird. Since assigned this interview, he'd been tempted to bring it up on several occasions, even though suitable opportunities had been scarce. On Thursday morning, Hotch had lingered by the round table, only to bolt at the sound of Reid's chair scraping the floor. On Monday he had tried JJ, who had claimed she had no say in the matter. She'd used the word "clout".
Ruthlessly, he figured that now, with domestic problems on his mind, Hotch might be coaxed into dropping his defenses regarding the purely professional matters he either could or would not discuss.
He cleared his throat. "Have you gotten anywhere with the directors regarding my request to see Michael Jones?"
There it was, the sympathy. The lines around Hotch's tight mouth softened as if blurred by a sweeping fingertip, and his flint chip eyes found Reid's face. As aware as Reid of where they were and what they were here for, he released a slow sigh through his nose.
It was probably the closest Reid had ever come to catching him off guard.
"Reid," he repeated, and this time it was low, soft. "You know I can't discuss that with you."
"I know that, and it's stupid," Reid shot back, putting the snow globe back on the warden's desk with a little more force than he'd intended. "The conviction is already two months old, Hotch. It's a visit I'm talking about, not an interview. I should be able to visit an inmate at any federal prison in the country without having my own superiors stonewall me every time I try."
"You're a federal agent," Hotch said, like it was new information. "If you were a civilian, you'd have every right to do exactly that."
"Yeah, and it's stupid," Reid repeated. Hotch just stared from under his brow. "Right?" Reid added, voice climbing with indignation.
Hotch looked like he was about to answer when the office door opened, revealing a mousey little man in glasses.
He seemed oblivious to the tension in the room, and it took him a moment to figure out who they must be. He introduced himself as Abner Merriman, assistant warden. He then proceeded to inform Reid that he'd read some of his studies. Serial killers were, in his own words, a kind of hobby of his.
"I bet you've met quite a few," he said admiringly.
You have no idea, Reid almost replied. He purposefully did not look at Hotch, who was no doubt confident in the knowledge he wouldn't muster the balls to bring up Michael Jones again for at least six months.
According to Merriman, there were no interrogation facilities in the prison. As he was getting ready to show them to the room they could use instead, he paused at the door. Turned a puzzled smile their way. "I have to say, when I heard that he contacted you, I was surprised."
"Why?"
"Chester Hardwick?"
Judging by his tone and the play of his features, Merriman's expressed surprise was not unfounded. Reid wasn't sure why, but it unnerved him. "He doesn't really talk much," Merriman concluded. "To anyone."
Reid gave a slow nod, his thoughts circling in a pattern he couldn't quite follow. Jones didn't talk much, either. Not to just anyone.
"Well," Hotch said. "That usually changes when someone's about to die."
The room they would be using turned out to be a bunker-like space. There were windows, but barring this it might have been underground. Concrete, nothing but concrete.
Reid swiftly began preparing his spot by the little table they'd plunked down in the centre of the room. Hotch's presence, which was usually such an unflinching solidity, was not as calming as he'd hoped it would be.
There had been bouts of claustrophobia, most memorably in a malfunctioning elevator with Morgan, those first months after he was let back out into the field. It should be interesting to see whether he would relapse once they put Hardwick in here with him.
When Merriman saw the crime scene photos Reid fanned out on the table, the childish fascination with serial killers that he's displayed in his office all but evaporated.
"I knew what he did, of course," he stammered. "But I…you know, n-never saw…" Merriman stared at the irrefutable images of Hardwick's work. "Twenty-three victims like this."
"Sometimes in these interviews they talk about crimes they were never charged with," Reid said, "so it might even be more."
Merriman, still transfixed by the photographs, breathed, "Is it ever less?"
Reid thought about that for a second. Wondered fleetingly how he would react to such a scenario.
"No," he replied.
Hotch seemed keen on getting the warden out of their way. As politely as only he could, he took the photos from Merriman.
"Paying attention to these items projects a kind of importance on them – when he comes in, I'd like to give him the opportunity to show us which parts of the crimes he thinks are important."
"Sorry, of course," Merriman said, cowering under both the documents of inhumanity he'd seen and the apparent detachment with which Hotch seemed to view the same.
Moments later, the unmistakable sound of the door roused them. Reid's insides went peculiarly still.
He knew exactly what Hardwick's mug shot looked like. It was as sharp as anything he had stored in his memory. Still he was absolutely convinced, if only for a single throb of his heart, that it was Michael Jones who entered the room. The grizzled moustache, the thick square glasses, the pitted clay-lump features, only registered once the man had taken a full step into the concrete chamber.
Hardwick's attention instantly came to rest on Hotch. Reid might have been part of the décor.
A memory came over him like a bucket of ice water; sitting by a table not unlike this one, a load of files in his arms, Gideon by his side instead of Hotch, and a witness who spared him a single glance. He said he'd been walking his dog.
"Chains left on, right?" one of the escorting guards asked. Reid shook off the memory to the abrupt realization that he was scared.
Really scared.
"That's probably a good idea," he heard himself say, breathless like a little girl.
"No," Hotch cut in. He spoke calmly and fearlessly, almost softly; "That won't be necessary."
"It won't?" Reeling from the stab of unfiltered fear at Hardwick's entrance, Reid couldn't determine Hotch's intentions with this approach. Had this taken place a year ago, he would've picked it up as soon as his supervisor had opened his mouth.
The guard was as skeptical as Reid. "You're sure?"
Still acting like he was at a parent-teacher conference, Hotch assured him that he was.
"We're just going to talk," he said lightly. "Right, Chester?"
As the guards set to work freeing Hardwick from the heavy chains and locks that kept him relatively harmless, Reid sank onto a chair and rationed his breaths. He thought about his mother's shoulder and his mother's books, the attic smell of fragile leather bindings.
He hadn't gone to his safe place in over six months. The department shrink would be melting with pride.
"Sit down," Hotch told Hardwick, not unkindly. Hardwick, in turn, declined to obey, but crossed instead to one of the barred windows. He moved sparingly, calmly, and it was the same calm. The same efficient, strategic and endlessly patient calm Reid remembered from the basement. No ounce of energy wasted. As if it was all hoarded and reserved for an unspoken promise of sudden and irreversible violence.
"I'd like this window opened," Hardwick said, and like his looks his voice wasn't remotely similar to Jones'. It was rough and thick like unrefined oil, with the flatness of indifference shaping each syllable. "I'll answer any question you have, but only if this window is open."
Hotch wasn't thrilled. Shooting a glance at him, Reid saw a frown fold his brow.
"Go ahead," he said, after a brief pause. "Reid?"
That was his cue.
The process of the interview was firmly lodged in his motor cortex, and he could feel his heart rate slowing as he traced the familiar shape of it by stating the introductory facts he had filed away for this occasion.
"Does my birth date really matter?" Hardwick said, his thick face tilted towards the open window. In only a slight stammer, Reid informed him of what should have been obvious; that they wanted to know as much as they could about his childhood.
"There's nothing to know," Hardwick said. "It was average." And he launched into a string of falsehoods, describing in a toneless drone the average childhood they knew never to have happened, the nice house on a quiet street, school and cereal and cartoons. Hotch cut him off in the middle of it, displaying a certain lack of patience that Reid had rarely had the privilege to see first-hand. It was sort of bizarre. A dog playing poker.
"I don't have time for this," he snapped. "You didn't live in a nice house on a quiet street; you grew up in a series of projects in East Bridgeport, each one worse than the last. You spent your teenage years peeping into your female neighbors' windows and burglarizing their underwear drawers when you got the chance. And you set a hundred small fires for which you spent two years in juvenile detention."
"We've done extensive research, Mr. Hardwick," Reid added, and the sound of his own bland tone was distantly surreal. Like he and Hotch had switched skins.
Flashes again. Pinpoint-focused images of the hundreds of transcripts he'd studied over the past year, ink and paper versions of interviews he himself had not been allowed to conduct. Research he had not been allowed to conduct. Witnesses, relatives, victims. All the lives Michael Jones had passed through, most without leaving a mark. "We've talked to almost everyone you've ever known. Including your mother."
At this, Hardwick turned from the window. "Good old Jean?" A smile almost touched his lips. "I'll bet she was a real treat."
"Good old Jean's down the street in a state hospital," Hotch retorted, and Hardwick, smile slipping from his rough-hewn face, stared at him. Nothing else was worth his attention. He was focusing on the only threat in the room, something Reid couldn't see the need for. It was just an interview.
"At this point," Reid spoke up, "lying to us isn't really possible. Or helpful."
"Well, then you're wrong," Hardwick said, eyes cold on Hotch. Looking up at the murderer from his lowered position at the table, Reid felt like a bug. A mite. A speck of dust drifting on sunlight. He could see the basement in there. In the abyss, in the perfect absence of empathy. It wasn't quite as flooring, as incapacitating as he recalled Jones' staring eyes to be, but it was still deeply unnerving. Even if it wasn't he who was the object of it this time.
"About what?" Hotch asked, with the air of a man who had countless better places to be.
Slowly shifting his dead gaze, Hardwick turned back to the window. Angling his head into the slanting light, he muttered, "I started a lot more than a hundred fires."
Releasing a quiet sigh only Reid could hear, Hotch shot a dark glance his way. It echoed his thoughts perfectly – they were getting nowhere. Only minutes in, so far, but this stumbling start was not encouraging.
Turning again from the window, from the clear light he seemed so keen to bathe his face in, Hardwick settled himself against the wall.
"What do you want to hear? How Papa kicked me and Jean's ass every single day? That the kind of thing you wanna hear?"
"If it's true," Reid chirped. He already knew that it was. He already knew that it almost always was.
"Nobody gives a damn about the truth," Hardwick said, almost smiling again. It was the distantly amazed, half-there smile of someone who couldn't understand why he was surrounded by idiots.
He faced the window again, faced the fresh air. Reid was suddenly aware of the walls, the ceiling. The silence of unyielding concrete. The naked glare of the lamp above his head. For a brief moment, he could feel it burning his eyes like it was the sun.
The shadows beckoned from the corners, safe and warm.
"Temperature's dropping," Hardwick drawled. His full attention was now outside the room altogether, outside the prison where he would soon die. "It's that time of year. Warm days, cold nights."
"It'll be summer soon," Reid murmured.
"But not for you," Hotch added.
"No," Hardwick agreed, quite pleasantly, and turned to face them. Again he fixed his attention on Hotch. "Not for me."
Looking between Hardwick and his supervisor, Reid felt like a zoologist skulking in the bushes, watching the lions circle each other. He did grasp the concept of alpha males and all that it entailed, but he didn't have enough insight to know how worried he should be when one of them was a serial killer.
He looked down into his papers. "Let's, uh…let's talk about the specifics of the case," he muttered. "Why did you choose Sheila O'Neill?"
"You gotta show me a picture. I don't know the names."
"Is that what this is all about?" Hotch snarled. "Some chance to relive all of this?"
"I have an excellent memory," Hardwick countered. "I thought you wanted to hear the truth?"
There was a brief but pregnant pause. Hotch cocked his head gently to the side, and Reid, too, was beginning to wonder exactly what they were likely to get out of this.
"The truth is, they meant nothing to me," Hardwick explained. "They were toys, a diversion, and from the moment I decided to kill them they were dead. They begged, they cried, they bargained, and it didn't matter, because they didn't matter."
The light was so bright. What kind of watts were in this thing?
"Sometimes I wish I was normal," Hardwick said, and it almost sounded like he meant it. "That I'd had a regular life. But I didn't."
"Why did you ask us here?" Hotch was looking at the floor, as though Hardwick was no longer worthy of interest. Hardwick, too, looked away, his steel wool eyebrows going up a fraction.
"I wanted to smell the air."
It wasn't the answer either of them had expected.
"What?"
"They've got me on death watch," Hardwick went on. "24-hour-a-day isolation. And I will be until they take me to the death chamber." He was nearly smiling again. "So I wanted to smell the air one last time before I die. Thank you for giving me that."
Tired glare lingering another second on Hardwick, Hotch turned to Reid.
"Let's pack it up."
Reid blinked. "Shouldn't we at least –"
"No – now."
Striding to the door, Hotch spoke to Hardwick without turning as he rang for the guards.
"Have a nice trip, Chester. You're going where you belong."
Dazedly, Reid began to gather up the files and papers and photographs. It was with less than half an ear that he listened to Hardwick's grating, toneless voice as he drawled, "It's 5:17. Evening yard started at five o'clock."
It was only when Hotch went very still, turning from the door with a strange gleam in his eyes, that the words acquired any meaning.
"The guard's staff's outside with population," Hardwick evaluated. "There won't be anyone to open that door for … at least thirteen minutes."
He reached for the crime scene photographs that still littered the table, and as he picked one at random from the sheaf Reid could feel something snap. Unstring. The old face of panic loomed out of the shadows, slithering into his thoughts with the speed and accuracy of a sudden blow to the head. He couldn't die here. He wouldn't. Not like this.
Not at hands like these.
He watched, his head brimming with an odd whistling sound, as Hardwick raised the photo.
"And it took me less than five to do this," he finished, eyes on Hotch as a full smile lit his face. His teeth were the color of old bones.
He dropped the photo back on the table. "While you were doing your research, maybe a question or two about security tones would have been a good idea."
"I heard the tones," Hotch said, oh so calmly. Reid, backing slowly away from the light with no notion of where he was going, thought wildly that he'd heard them too. Without reflecting. Why the hell should he?
Hardwick was still talking, talking and moving lazily about the room.
"So you planned to be locked inside with me? With no guns or weapons?"
"I won't need a gun." Hotch replied, with something horrifyingly Zen to his words, something so far beyond Reid's grasp that it was like a foreign language.
Leaning idly against the wall, Hardwick rubbed the knuckles of one hand into the palm of the other. The universal code for impending violence.
"There's no way they're gonna execute me next week," he said gleefully. His voice had some life, now, some animation. Even his face looked more mobile. "Not after I kill two FBI agents. You saved my life by coming here."
Hotch answered him, stated something in a smooth sneer that Reid was only barely able to register. He had reached the shadows, their cool caressing him like a lover, and his mind was working more furiously than he could ever recall it doing over the past year.
Across the room he could see the inmate, the murderer, who in his yellow jumpsuit was just one of many. Chester Hardwick was not special. His preferred victims were small, female and physically weak, and what he liked to do to them was a messy, haphazard business. He'd been caught because of his own lack of organization. His own lack of control.
How many of him had Reid met? How many of him had he studied, analyzed and then forgotten? There was only a select few that actually stood out in his memory. He knew these people. He knew why they did what they did. There was nothing mysterious about them. They were hardly worth anything resembling introspection, let alone the wildfire of hatred. The Chester Hardwicks of this world were skilled at nothing, not even the unrefined acts of evil they continued to inflict upon easy targets. Ignorant, talentless slaves to their own perversions.
As he withdrew into the ink-grey shadows, Reid saw Hotch slide off his jacket. His face revealed nothing, but his eyes were alive with the same promise of blood and broken bones that seemed contained in that simple shedding of clothing. He was speaking, permitting no ominous silences, taunting Hardwick with a choice of words that, in their utter truth, were certain to strike home. It was as if he was eager to get to it, eager to see the psychopath make good on his threats.
"All your life, you've gone after victims who couldn't fight back. The rest of the time you spent looking over your shoulder. Worried about the knock on the door, scared that somebody like me would be on the other side waiting to put you away. At you're core, you're a coward."
Reid's gaze bounced between him and Hardwick. His heart on a spring in his chest, ready to shoot through his ribs. He knew now – and it was so obvious – why Hardwick had kept all his focus on Hotch. It wasn't for this little game, this sticky end he was aiming for. It was all about what his limited intellect could digest. What the radar of his instincts told him to watch for. Hotch had been prickly and impatient since they walked in, frustration that had nothing to do with this interview shining through even his practiced mask of detachment, and this in combination with the fact that he was the only other person in the room who actually spoke the cryptic language of alpha males had encouraged Hardwick to single him out. Ignoring Reid in the process.
Making any weapon of Reid's all the more potent.
He spoke up just as Hardwick's thick body tautened and began to swell with aggression, and though his voice came out loud and high-pitched it was quite steady.
"Chester, do you want to know why you killed those women?"
Bristling with the same unschooled fury that had steered him through his crimes, Hardwick was distracted. Halting in his tracks, he darted a quick glance between Hotch and Reid. It was the first time he really looked at the latter. "What?"
Reid felt a wild kind of calm. The harnessed tempest of being in one's element. Compared to an even remotely worthy chess opponent, Hardwick was a raging imbecile.
"Earlier you said you wished that you were different. I can tell you how you killed them. Why you are what you are."
Hardwick, who had once again – and stupidly – fixed his attention on Hotch, turned to face him at last. Slowly but surely, the animal drained and dripped from his bulky frame. The human being climbed back in.
"You can tell me why I did the things I did?" he said, incredulous and almost embarrassingly curious. It was a mystery Reid knew he wanted solved, and one that he could easily pretend to know the answer to.
So he fed it to him, every piece of fact he possessed laced with the theories that had cropped up in various fields of expertise over the decades. His parents' mental instabilities, the abuse they had inflicted upon him and each other, the percentages of such instabilities in the many breeds of serial offender. The early indoctrination of violence as a natural expression of love.
And, knowing how convincing a hypothesis it could be, the hypothalamus and all its primal glory. How a loving mother could kiss away its perils and keep you on the straight and narrow.
"Your records indicate that you display the symptoms of satyriasis, you're – you're obsessed with sex." Reid's voice was now not only steady but quite cool. "Sex and love are cross-wired with pain in your mind. Additionally, your hypothalamus won't allow you to stop seeking the – the desires that it wants. So you became a sexual sadist. No sexual partner will ever willingly submit to the painful desires that you have, and the only way you can serve them is by making a partner compliant. Making sure that they do exactly what you want them to do. And you ensure that by killing them."
Hardwick, leaning over the table as if the act of listening was a physical effort, no longer made a particularly frightening figure. The bloodthirst Hotch had so expertly lured out was gone, and even when he looked into Reid's eyes, hitting him with the full force of that bottomless emptiness, that absence, Reid couldn't seem to muster up any trace of the fear that had ambushed him before.
"Earlier, you said your victims never had a chance," he continued, and the words anchored a dark pull somewhere inside him. "But I think you know deep down…"
He didn't want to say it, didn't want to give it even that single breath –
"It was you who never really had a chance."
Silence. Just a second of it, punching a hole through the tension. Then, and it was music to his ears, the guards' keys in the lock. Hardwick's brutal face was thoughtful and resigned as he turned to the guards that came spilling through the door.
"Everything all right in here?"
"Fine," Hotch said. "We're done."
He picked up his jacket and headed for the corridor without a backward glance. Reid positively sprinted to follow.
"Is that true?" Hardwick said suddenly. "I never had a chance?"
Mid-stride, Reid glanced back at him. Saw nothing but a dead man. A moot point.
As he turned his back to go through the door, he mumbled, quite truthfully, "I don't know. Maybe."
Then he turned from the shadows and left.
José Ruiz joins a gang at thirteen. At twenty-one manages to get out. He runs, far away, where none of his old friends will find him. He's recently started work at a gas station when a customer who has begun to show up almost every night for a cup of terrible coffee comes crashing into the store, shouting about a hit-and run. José hurries after him into the night, hoping he won't have to see blood again, when he's tackled to the ground and something cold is pressed over his mouth.
He wakes up dizzy and nauseous, concrete and dirty brick walls all around him, and dies six days later from an epileptic seizure. His killer tries to revive him, and then sits with him several minutes after his heart has stopped.
He waits only three weeks this time, before taking another.
"You'll see him as soon as I get what I came for," said David Rossi.
Michael wasn't surprised. He'd known they wouldn't keep up their end unless all other options were exhausted. He'd done nothing to earn their trust.
It was only natural that they should share a righteous hatred towards him, just as the inmates shared their warped admiration. He saw it in the attempt at indifference in which Agent Freeman had arranged his features, saw it in the embers glowing faintly at the bottom of David Rossi's bloodhound gaze. They looked out for their own.
While it warmed his heart to know they must have seen his prize through the aftermath of his actions skillfully enough to let him be here today, it pained him that they could never truly understand the nature of their relationship. They could never know the fever dreams he had suffered since coming here, could never know how he had ached for death just to be freed from this yearning, this merciless thirst he could never slake. How he saw his former self, the self that had died in that basement so that the doctor could live, in each and every one of the animals he had come across in his encounters with the prison's general population. How he envied them.
A steady breath. Thin and silent stream of air through his nose. He listened to his heart for a moment.
"You'll get what you came for – from him," he said levelly. "After I give it – to him. Either we leave it here, or you let him do his job. I'm sure he's less disinclined towards this arrangement than you are."
David Rossi was motionless in his chair. Agent Freeman, who had watched this exchange vigilantly, had begun drumming his thumb soundlessly against the sheaves of paper on the table.
"You feel like you know him," Rossi said. It wasn't a question. He hadn't even been there, Michael reminded himself. He was involved after the fact. Sending him in here was a thinly veiled insult.
"I know he would have been in here retrieving this information years ago," Michael replied, "if you would have let him. Do you disagree?"
There it was again, the little suggestion of a smile. Briefly, he let himself imagine what it would be like to slice it from his face.
"No," Rossi admitted. "No, I quite agree. He's been waiting for this day, too, as I know you have."
Michael took a breath. Such calculated phrasing, equating him to the doctor. He had learned to decipher the rhetoric a long time ago, when these interviews had been frequent. If the interviewer lacked experience, it sounded like they were reading from a script. The more seasoned ones did it almost unnoticeably.
David Rossi sounded as if he had been there when they wrote the script.
"So what are we waiting for?" Michael asked him. "I'm not going to tell you anything."
"I know that," Rossi said and took another sip of coffee. He looked at Michael's hands, resting loosely in his lap to avoid chafing. "That's uncomfortable," he said.
Michael raised his eyebrows, and he offered his first full smile. "I've never worn any myself, but I've met a lot of people who have. They tend to concur on that."
Michael glanced down at his shackles. "It's not so bad if you remember not to move. That's the point, after all."
Still grinning, Rossi turned to the guard at the door, and Michael knew what he would ask before he opened his mouth.
"I'm not sure that's a good idea," Agent Freeman protested.
Rossi didn't answer him, and the guard seemed to decide he had seniority. Pulling a set of keys from her belt she crossed to Michael and proceeded to unlock the cuffs from his wrists and ankles. He had to stand up to give her access.
"Thank you," he said once seated again, with a slight inclination of his head. David Rossi lifted one shoulder.
"I know you have no interest in escaping."
"I sure don't," Michael agreed. "There's only one thing I want before they kill me. The sooner, the better. Food stinks in this place."
Another smile; another lazy sip of coffee. Beside him, Agent Freeman was positively squirming – or the FBI equivalence of squirming, which was usually a kind of petrified stillness. Even the drumming finger had frozen. Whatever lead Rossi was giving him in that secret language of theirs, he was following it like he was on a leash. He reminded Michael of the dog he'd had, his trusted Lab. Last he'd heard, a police officer who had worked on the investigation three years ago had taken him in. Nuñez, he believed her name was. He couldn't recall what she had decided to call the dog; Michael himself had never named him.
The impatience was worse now that his hands were free. He could perceive the scope of it – the need, the flaring, all-encompassing need from three years ago, when the doctor had been his.
It was like falling through time, except on the other side of the wormhole he was nothing but a ghost. There was nothing there except the burning weight of the need. Nothing except the memories.
At least he had the memories.
He sees James Peake in a pub. It is the second time, preceded only by José, that he doesn't act on impulse. He follows him first, studies him. Makes plans.
James is twenty-nine. He's landed a job on a trawler, and is expected to turn up at the docks in a week. He's trying to get settled in, get coordinated, and he's already met a girl with legs that never stop. The man who will be the death of him goes to the bars he visits, and to his gym.
One morning he's approached by a man with an unlit cigarette. When he stops to take out his lighter he's locked in a half nelson, and the chloroform is in his lungs before he can so much as call out in surprise.
On the sixth eve of his imprisonment, he suddenly stops breathing, and the man who has raped him seven times and flayed the skin off his left shoulder is unable to revive him. Several after him will perish similarly, from what the coroner will call "sudden respitory distress". If the predator had to choose a way to see them go, it would be thus; in their sleep. As though he had nothing to do with it.
He has placed José in the dirt floor of a shed in an old cemetery, not a mile from where Evan sleeps beneath roses no one has tended in decades. James he hides under earth and rocks in a stretch of forest, so deep in the ground no animal will dig him out. The predator memorizes the coordinates of the graves, all five of them, for the sake of prudence.
To protect himself.
