Author's note: Much thanks for the lovely reviews! Nice to see that some people are interested. Here's the first full chapter… I'd love to hear what you think.
Face
Chapter One
…
Be fond of the man who jests at his scars, but never believe he is being on the level with you.
– American author Pamela Hansford Johnson
…
"I need you to let me do this."
Reid looked hopefully at Gideon, who only looked confused.
"For what purpose? The woman has been interviewed."
"But not by us! The local police probably didn't know what to look for."
"She wasn't a witness. The only purpose she served was to help us get to know her daughter. Victimology. That's it."
Gideon tossed his right hand, dismissing the point, and turned to continue down the hall. They were in a field office in Michigan, working a serial kidnap and murder case.
Reid followed him.
The truth was that he didn't have a good reason to want to fly back to New York to interview the mother of the first of the kidnapped teenage girls.
But for reasons of his own, he wanted to find one.
"What if we didn't take the victimology far enough? She might be able to help us."
Gideon kept walking, but uttered a short little indulgent sigh.
"Reid, if you've got a theory, let's hear it. Quickly. I'm on my way to conduct local witness interviews."
Reid thought fast. Trying to force a mental connection between case facts. As much because he needed justification for this trip as because the case needed a break.
His mind scanned through a mental log of potentially relevant information… bit by bit, lightning fast.
Thinking… thinking… searching… walking faster and faster, forced to pick up his pace as Gideon did…
And then he stumbled onto something.
"The first girl was held by the ocean," he blurted out, the idea taking form in his head. It was a long shot, but it would have to do. "She could hear the water. She could see it out the window. It always seemed odd that he put her in a room with a view. A window, it's an unnecessary risk. Even a reinforced one, even facing nothing but water." Reid gulped in a breath, and kept talking. "Angela Johnston was a swimmer. She loved the water. And this guy kept it in view, but out of reach."
Gideon finally slowed down.
"You're suggesting the location is chosen for the individual girl, based on her personal interests?"
"Maybe!"
"What about the second girl? She was a student, an amateur gymnast. She was found in an abandoned warehouse." Gideon spoke in a contemplative tone. Not rejecting the idea. Simply challenging Reid to take it further.
"I don't have the connection," Reid admitted. "But if I could talk to her mother, find out more about her --"
"Now you want to talk to the second victim's mother?" Gideon asked, cutting him off.
"Yes. I do."
"So now you want to fly to Florida?"
"Me and JJ, actually."
Gideon's eyes narrowed, looking vaguely suspicious.
"Why JJ?"
Reid swallowed hard. That had probably been too abrupt.
He rarely, if ever, requested a specific partner, and they both knew it.
He briefly considered telling Gideon the truth – that he needed a chance to talk to JJ alone, to try to get a sense of what was going on with her, because she mattered to him, and her demeanor of late was scaring him.
But sticking with the case seemed like a safer bet.
"This woman lost her daughter. She's going through hell. JJ knows how to talk to people who are going through hell."
Gideon looked Reid over. Sensing something personal in the vaguely pleading look in his eyes. Wondering if he had something to do with the reason that JJ wasn't on her game lately.
But Reid had a good working theory, a reasonable request.
"I'll run it by Hotch," he promised.
…
Reid found Morgan, JJ and Prentiss in a small conference room, halfway through their takeout lunch.
Morgan tossed a wrapped submarine sandwich at him as soon as he came through the door.
"Chicken and lettuce, light on the mayo, no cheese," Morgan recited as Reid fumbled to catch the sandwich.
"Thanks," Reid mumbled, checking that the sandwich was fully wrapped as he picked it up from the ground. "Nice of you to remember."
"Don't go taking that too personal," Morgan told him. "Too many dinners in a surveillance car together, is all. And I do mean too many." He leaned back in his chair, and smiled so Reid would know he was teasing.
Reid took the empty seat next to JJ, across from Morgan and Prentiss.
They all ate silently for a moment or two, until Morgan couldn't take the silence and tense looks surrounding him.
"What's goin' on up there?" he asked Prentiss, tossing a finger in the general direction of her head.
"Just thinking about the case. Worrying about the case, actually, might be more accurate."
"Worrying? You think we're not going to get this one?"
"I'm thinking we might not get him in time," Prentiss clarified. "If the pattern holds steady, we've got less than two days before this girl dies, and this bastard has been five steps ahead of us at every turn."
"Maybe she'd be better off," JJ said softly, as much to herself as to the others, and then she looked up when she realized they were all gaping at her. "I'm not saying I don't want to get to her in time," she said emphatically, quickly backtracking. "I've, uh… just… been doing some reading lately…" She stumbled through an explanation, throwing together justification for the impulsive thought she wished she hadn't said out loud. "I always… keep up with recent psychological literature… on communicating with trauma victims. Not that it's recent, any of this, but it's been on my mind because I've been… doing the reading…" She took a deep breath, pushed a strand of her hair back behind her ear. "What these girls are going through… their lives as they know them are gone. Even if we get there, and they survive… some of them will wish they hadn't." She looked around warily, and found them all still stunned silent.
Reid watched JJ turn her eyes back to her salad, uncomfortable under Morgan's and Prentiss' critical gaze.
So he jumped in to help her out.
"Actually, she's not wrong at all. Anyone with post traumatic stress disorder is at an increased risk of suicide. With these girls… Almost thirty-five percent of rape victims consider suicide, and almost half of those actually make the attempt. Given that these girls are being held for days, assaulted over and over again…"
"So, what, then? What's that mean for us?" Morgan asked. "You trying to say these girls would rather we let him kill them?"
"No --"
"You think we're wasting our time?" Morgan challenged, clearly bothered by the notion.
"No, not at all, that's not what we're saying. It's not that they all want to die, or that they should be allowed to even make that choice in that state, and the sooner we catch the guy the fewer victims he has, anyway. I'm just saying, and I think we're just saying… As agents, we solve the case… and then we move on. The victims don't really get to."
Morgan looked from Reid to JJ. She refused to meet his eyes.
There was a sudden knock on the door, and they all looked up to find Hotch poking his head into the room.
"Reid, I talked to Gideon, I like your idea, it's you and JJ, wheels up in thirty."
Hotch disappeared as suddenly as he'd appeared, rushing off to deal with some problem or other.
JJ turned to Reid.
"What idea?"
"You and me," Reid told her. "Taking victimology a step further." He spoke pointedly, and she noticed, but chose to ignore it.
"Where are we going?" she asked.
"Florida. To talk to Caroline Montgomery's mother."
"Why?"
"Let's just get going. I'll tell you on the way."
Reid dropped the remains of his sandwich in the garbage on his way out the door. JJ followed him.
Morgan turned to Prentiss. Still stuck on the conversation he'd been having with the two younger agents.
"We're supposed to be thinking like the unsub. Not the victim." He spoke quietly, neutrally.
"Maybe they can't anymore."
Morgan looked back at the door, where they'd both just disappeared.
"I get that, for him. What the hell happened to her?"
"I'd guess being mauled by wild dogs is --"
"No, come on, Girl, don't give me that. That was months ago. She was okay. She was helping Reid get closer to 'okay'. Come on, straight up, you've noticed too, am I right? JJ's been off for days."
Hotch reappeared at the door, before Prentiss had a chance to respond.
"I need you," he told them simply.
And for the moment, JJ and Reid were forgotten.
…
Reid had talked JJ into playing a game of cards.
It seemed like a good idea. Something to put them both at ease.
Now that they were in the middle of it, though – and also in the middle of their flight, with half of the alone time he'd fought for already gone – he wasn't sure how to make the transition from 'game' to 'serious discussion'.
She reached out to draw a card from the deck, and her sleeve slipped back. He glanced at the flawless skin of her forearm.
Maybe that was the way to enter into this.
"Your arm looks good," he said, breaking the silence.
"What?" She shot him a confused look.
"Your, um, your arm, it looks good," he repeated, hoping she hadn't taken that as some kind of bizarre attempt at flirting. The look on her face told him she hadn't made the mental connection, so he clarified. "I just meant, um, the barn. The dogs. You don't have any scars."
She just looked at him for a moment, a bit thrown, and then nodded, and glanced down at her own arm. Hesitating as she figured out what to say.
"Lucky me."
She discarded, putting the ball back into his court in the card game, as well as in the conversation.
He searched through his handful of cards, not really looking at them, trying to figure out how to continue the conversation.
And then she surprised him, by speaking up on her own.
"Can I ask you something?" she said quietly.
He looked up at her. Encouraged.
"Yeah, yeah, of course you can."
"Does… um… I've been thinking… you've got this amazing memory… does that make it harder? I mean, that's really what trauma is. Remembering things… that you don't want to remember. And I keep thinking… I don't know how you do it."
Reid sat back against his chair. Thinking.
"I don't really know if it makes me different or not. I mean, it does, of course it does, in general, but as far as this… and the Hankel case… The eidetic memory is really about what I read. And also, there were the drugs. The drugs made my memory of all the time in the cabin pretty hazy."
He looked over at her. Finding her eyes sympathetic. Focused on him.
"I have it on pretty good authority that hazy memories can be hard to take," she told him, and he wasn't sure if she was trying to tell him something with that or not.
"You're not talking about what happened during the Hankel case, are you?" He asked quietly. Gently. Trying to talk to her the way he'd heard her talk to the victims in their cases.
He thought for a moment that she was going to open up to him. She seemed about to say something that mattered.
But then she shut down. She looked away and threw a random card on the pile.
"Sure I am."
"JJ --"
"It's your turn."
She refused to look at him.
He wanted to press her further. But it seemed to him that in that one moment that she had been about to say something, she'd also been about to cry.
And he wasn't sure how well he'd be able to handle that.
He wasn't giving up, though.
It would be just the two of them again on the way back to Michigan, after the interview with Mrs. Montgomery.
He made a promise to himself that he'd talk to her then.
…
By the time they returned to the private plane late that night, Reid was focused on the case.
His ulterior motives for this interview had actually yielded a significant lead, and he needed to let his mind work the details while it was in its excited state.
The second victim had dreamed of being a musician. It was something she kept from most of her family and friends, something she never pursued. But something she posted about in an online blog almost daily. Her mother hadn't found out about the blog until she found and read her daughter's diary, and it hadn't seemed to her to be relevant to the investigation.
But it was relevant. The abandoned building she'd been found in had once been a recording studio – it still had the company logo displayed prominently on the wall.
Reid had gotten them that much closer to finding the third victim – almost without even trying.
"If he's finding his victims over the internet, that explains why he's moving around the country," Reid babbled, as much to himself as to JJ, when she hung up her phone and came to sit across from him.
"What are you writing?" she asked curiously.
"I'm brainstorming! Locations. Shawna Degrassi has about a day left to live unless I can figure out what is it about her personality that would give this guy some kind of place to use to taunt her."
"Can't you just get Garcia to go through her online history?"
"I already called her. The computer's being sent. But we can't be sure yet that he's finding them over the Internet."
Reid scribbled furiously for several minutes, jotting down stream-of-consciousness notes and ideas.
Nothing came to him, and he ended up standing up to pace back and forth.
"I can't figure it out," he all but mumbled.
"You will," JJ told him. "Step away. Clear your head."
She was staring out the window as she spoke, not looking at him. She sounded exhausted.
And it reminded Reid that it was late, and also getting to be late in the flight, and he was supposed to be talking to his distracted and apparently endlessly sleep-deprived friend.
And he wasn't getting anywhere with the case right now, anyway.
He tossed the notebook he'd been writing in onto the table and sat down across from her again.
He said nothing for a moment, and her gaze remained locked on the darkness outside the window.
Her eyes looked troubled, which was the norm for her lately, and it spurred him on.
He decided to come right out with it.
"You don't seem okay lately," he said simply, sounding a bit tentative.
She turned her head toward him. Her expression guarded.
"I'm okay."
"You don't seem okay," he repeated, looking down at the table and then back up at her, a bit uncomfortable, but determined.
"I think, earlier, just… talking about the Hankel case, about what happened to you, and then about the barn… put me in a mood."
She tried to smile and shrug.
But he wasn't buying it.
"This isn't about the Hankel case. This is… it's recent."
"Reid, I'm fine."
"I don't believe you."
He was simple and straightforward with her, and he waited several seconds for her to say something else.
And then, suddenly, she smiled as if something was funny.
"It's just silly. It is. I just let a case get to me."
"What case?" he asked, willing to let her tell a tale, but immediately thinking that it didn't seem like the answer.
"Do you remember North Mammon?"
"Yeah. How could I forget?"
"I liked those girls. I cared about those girls… I really identified with those girls."
He nodded. Waiting for her to continue.
"Look, two weeks ago," she told him, and he mentally checked off the time period in his head, as a fact that supported her story. "My aunt turned sixty, and my family threw this big party, and I went, and… Judy Homefeldt, Polly's mom, she's a friend of my aunt's, remember?"
He nodded his acknowledgement. And she continued.
"She was there. And I talked to her for a long while. I always knew those girls were going to have trouble moving on. I mean, who wouldn't? The kind of guilt they'd have to feel, even though it wasn't really their fault…"
JJ seemed lost in thought at that, and Reid found himself wondering if all of this was truly what had been weighing on her mind.
She continued.
"Mrs. Homefeldt told me that Brooke killed herself. Cut her wrists." She paused, and looked up to meet his eyes. "Polly tried to do the same. Only with pills. Not long after Brooke's suicide. If her mom hadn't found her…" JJ let her voice trail off. "I guess I've… just been thinking about the victims since then. Thinking like a victim since then." She laughed a hollow, short little laugh. "Guess that's why I'm not a profiler. But really, it's just these cases. I care too much. But I'm fine."
She gave him a forced little smile, and he nodded as if he understood.
It didn't explain everything. It didn't give her any reason to be jumpy and defensive. And it didn't explain the look of fear he so often saw in her eyes.
But she certainly seemed sincere. And she had seemed particularly emotionally invested in that specific case.
At least she'd given him something he could check out.
…
"Garcia, it's Reid," he whispered into the phone.
"Why the cloak-and-dagger voice?" Garcia asked curiously.
Reid glanced at JJ, asleep on the couch on the other side of the plane.
"JJ's asleep," he told her. "We're on the plane."
"You're coming back?"
"Not to Virginia. We were interviewing one of the mothers. In Florida. We're headed back to Michigan now."
"You going to give me a challenge?" she asked eagerly.
"Not really. I need you to tell me if you have any record of the death of a Brooke Chambers."
It took Garcia only a few seconds.
"Suicide. Almost three months ago. Isn't she the girl from your case in --"
"Yeah, she is." Reid cut her off. "How about a Polly Homefeldt?"
A few more seconds passed.
"Nothing in the papers."
"Okay, one more thing." He hesitated for just a second. "I need you to look up JJ's family."
"What?"
"It's a personal favor. I need to know how many aunts she has, and when their birthdays are."
"Okay, I know you're the brains of the operation around here, but would it not be easier and also less sneaky to wait for JJ to wake up and ask her for this information?"
"No. And JJ can't know that I asked you for this."
A beat of silence told him Garcia wasn't thrilled with this.
"Explain," she demanded.
Reid looked to be sure JJ was still out, and dropped his voice to an even lower volume.
"Have you noticed anything weird about JJ lately?" he asked her.
"Um, if by 'weird' you mean that the Sunshine moniker has become completely and totally inappropriate --"
"Okay, yes. Yes. Something's wrong. And I'm trying to help. And you're supposed to be her friend. And it's not like I'm asking for sensitive information here. I would ask JJ myself, except she'd know why I was asking."
"Why are you asking?"
"Garcia, please…"
She sighed audibly.
"Okay, two aunts," She said, when she came back on the line a minute later. "Far as I can tell from what I've got here, anyway."
"And how old are they?"
"Forty-six and sixty."
Reid shifted the phone, listening intently.
"When did the sixty-year-old turn sixty?"
"December tenth of last year."
"Thanks, Garcia." Reid hung up the phone and exhaled a slow breath.
December of last year was months ago.
The story she'd told about Brooke and Polly appeared to be true, and it could explain her intensified focus on the victims in their cases.
But she'd lied about the time frame.
There was no denying that whatever had happened to change her had happened within the last few weeks. It had to be something else. Something she felt the need to lie about.
He got up and walked over closer to her, taking note of the look on her face.
Even in sleep, she didn't look peaceful. Her brow was creased, her hand curled into a fist.
He wondered if she was dreaming.
Given the content of his own dreams in recent months, he hoped not.
He resolved to talk to her again soon. Even if she fought him on it.
They'd already lost Elle, indirectly thanks to her own trauma.
And this was JJ.
He couldn't let history repeat itself.
Not with her.
…
