2
"I don't know where you're going with this," Michael said. "But I'm sure it's important. I find it hard to believe it's more important than recovering those bodies, but hey. You're the professionals."
They just stared. How disappointing. They couldn't possibly believe he would be affected, let alone unsettled enough to talk, by the silent treatment. He put his hands on the table and sighed. Might as well get comfortable.
It was Agent Freeman who broke the silence. After some thirty seconds, he exchanged a glance with Rossi and started fussing with his papers.
"It says here," he began, "that you were born Michael Ray Reader in Birmingham, Alabama."
Ah. So that was the point of this. As if he hadn't already had his life story regurgitated back to him enough times to last another lifetime.
"I was," he muttered and took a breath, "in May of 1976. It was a Tuesday and it was raining. My mother was in labor seven hours and my father was passed out drunk half that time. I grew up dirt poor in a trailer where my mother took the beatings so I could have some semblance of a childhood. When the bastard finally succumbed to cirrhosis she married an accountant named Jones and I got to go to college. My younger stepbrother was also my lover, and because I was his hero he let me do anything I wanted. He was my first. He's somewhere in South America now. Insider trading or some such, I'm not sure. Should I go on or do you want to take it from here?"
Without missing a beat, David Rossi took the file from Freeman and went on, "You majored in computer science, and your college boyfriend was called Nate. He was thoroughly heartbroken when you broke it off shortly before graduation, and he recalls you as very charming and thoughtful and your sex life as profoundly normal and a little dull. He never saw any signs of violent or sadistic tendencies. Am I right so far?"
"God, yes. Though our sex life was pretty good; he was a dancer."
"It was in college that you first started leading a double life," Rossi continued as if there had been no interruption. "And the fact that Nate never noticed proves that you were very good at it. You began to frequent S & M establishments, but moved on to prostitutes when the various rules of the clubs got to be too limiting for you."
He had stopped reading from the file. Observed Michael carefully as he spoke. "After college you started your own software company and soon patented a digital surveillance program that made you a relatively wealthy man in almost no time at all. In 1999 you hired a young man named Billy Petersen, who would never report you for sexually assaulting him after a date because you paid him a considerable amount of money not to. Somewhere between then and 2002 you murdered five men and assaulted a number of others, before establishing a hunting ground in the red-light district of Riverside, where you proceeded to abduct and kill four prostitutes over the course of twenty-two weeks."
He shifted positions, leaned over the file. "And we still have no idea why you started dumping the bodies. It wasn't remorse and it wasn't boastfulness. There was nothing extravagant about the way you left them." Squinting up into Michael's eyes, he pursed his lips. "Clean and tidy where someone would find them. You didn't cover them for the simple reason that any material you used would have been another source of evidence. Dr. Reid was the only one you treated differently, and by then you had already decided to surrender. You dressed him in a pair of your own pants and wrapped him in a blanket."
A shiver ran up Michael's spine. He closed his eyes briefly. Rossi noticed.
"My money's on perfectionism," the agent said slowly. "Control. You don't have any narcissistic traits, but you put your soul into you work and need the world to know. Not because it would mythologize you; in fact you seem averse to the fame you've gained. But you couldn't let your actions go unnoticed, because then it would've been like it never happened. Those boys were your passion, your – destiny, if you will, and this was the only souvenir you ever kept of them. This mark that their suffering made in the world. The record of it."
"It would've been great to let them live. If they could have lived they would have carried the memories, like living recordings. But they had to die," Michael sighed, not without regret. "They were all so beautiful, and it just…I don't know, it really stung, having to watch them go or, even worse, kill them myself."
He didn't say it aloud, there was no need, but the doctor – the doctor was perfect in that sense as in all others. All through the end credits he was perfect. His life, right now, was the crowning jewel of his work.
David Rossi pushed the file back to Agent Freeman, who closed it and slipped it into his briefcase.
"You've told us the names of the five people you killed between 1999 and 2002," the younger agent said soberly. "We were able to find one of their bodies because of that. You've already stated that you have no interest in a stay of execution in the case of further convictions, so what confuses me is why you would tell us the names in the first place."
"For the same reasons he just gave," Michael replied with a nod to Agent Rossi. "Without names they might as well never have existed. Without names it never happened."
"And was it worth us finding one unassisted?" Freeman asked.
"Oh, I blame myself for that," Michael said dismissively. "I buried him in the wrong kind of earth. Too loose. All it took to wash him back up was a little rain."
He found himself smiling as he recalled the boy in question. "Toby," he murmured. "He was very polite. Kept asking me what time it was."
"He was developmentally challenged," Agent Freeman said, a little too sharply. It was the first visible sign of that righteous anger, and combined with the politically correct terminology it was hilariously comical.
"I know," Michael replied, holding back laughter as he looked him in the eye. "He told me."
Misja Ibramovic picks up a trick on a bleak and blustery night, and the man who will murder him has acquired a new car. It's green. Misja likes it and tells him so, and during the seven days he's held in an old bomb shelter the man who hurts him tells him all about it. He's informed of the acceleration, the sound system, the trunk space. Misja tells him in the tongue of his homeland to shove the fucking car up his ass.
Like Toby Hollander many years before, he dies from internal bleeding.
Christopher Early climbs into a van not long before he's to turn twenty-two. He's taken to a loft with band posters on the walls and has the cloth soaked in chloroform slipped over his mouth when he's standing in awe before a sizeable record collection. He lasts six days; the man who has removed his fingernails with a pair of pliers slams his head into the floor after he slips into a catatonic state.
Robert Hess will never give his killer his real name. He meets him at the age of twenty-five, on a street corner he's been working for the past two hours. He goes with him gladly, happy to oblige a young and attractive client. Police will never identify him, as after only four days he's successful in provoking his murderer into killing him quickly. His face is pummeled into a disarray of flesh, muscle and bone, and none of his teeth are recovered with his body. His killer and his colleagues alike will remember him as Rolly. Records will list him as John Doe.
Kevin Silvestri, aged nineteen, disappears from an alley where he has retired to relieve himself. The man who takes him has approached him earlier that day with two folded hundred dollar bills, and been rejected. Kevin's friends will later maintain that Kev had always had what they called a sixth sense.
He stops breathing on his fifth day in captivity. The predator tumbles his body from the backseat onto a deserted sidewalk, where it's spotted an hour later by a woman watering her plants at a window above. Christopher and Rolly are found similarly discarded, in an alley and outside a strip club respectively. Limbs gracelessly sprawled, their bodies like napkins flung from tables at the end of a meal. They're ghost white, their wounds and bruises black against the kind of pallor only significant blood loss can produce.
Their injuries speak clearly of what they survived before they died. But they're whores. Corpses like this have littered these streets before. Only at the discovery of Rolly, whose caved-in face induces shock in the bartender who finds him, do the police realize what they're dealing with.
By the time they think they know how to deal with it, the predator has gone.
If Morgan never heard Reid scream himself awake ever again, it would be too soon.
Exactly how unnerving it was to hear the sound in the living room of a kidnapped child's parents was more than he was willing to admit to himself. That raw abandon, climbing from somewhere deep in his throat, somewhere the charted regions of the mind couldn't reach. It was the sound of someone clinging to the rock face by the bleeding tips of his fingers, and it was a ruthless reminder that no matter how hard Morgan might try, no matter how fast he might run, he would never get there in time to pull him onto solid ground. All he could do was wake him up.
He didn't know how many times he'd shaken him loose from it. How many times he had found him fighting his pillow, how many times the screams had roused him and sent him blindly stumbling the path from couch to bedroom, from door to bed where Reid lay thrashing like a man possessed.
For some time after he'd moved out of Reid's apartment, he would hear them. In the dead of night, when the shadows had morphed into blackness, the screams would pull him from sleep, sometimes jerk him bolt upright. On more than one occasion he'd been on his feet and halfway out of the room before he remembered where he was, and that Reid wasn't there.
Not much later, Garcia would get shot. He would extend the same courtesy to her. His stay on her couch would be briefer, and he would catch himself making comparisons. He would look at the light, at the colors all around, and remember.
After the arrest of Michael Jones they had remained in town for all of two days. The first was spent almost exclusively at the hospital, from which Reid had been discharged late in the afternoon. In those few hours, the stream of visitors one might expect after a narrow escape from death didn't present itself. The only person apart from the team and a couple of local cops who was compelled to stop by was the rape counselor Erin Strauss, as if to apologize for her own conspicuous absence, decided to send.
Hotch gave the task of convincing Reid to see her to Morgan and Prentiss, and it was the latter who, in her best low murmur, talked him into it. Morgan had thought it a good sign that their meeting lasted a full five minutes. The counselor's pallor and taut expression when she exited the room had been less encouraging.
"It's very important that he talks about the trauma as soon as possible," she'd said, addressing Prentiss as though the men were part of the décor. Reid, she said, had claimed he was "fine".
"If he isolates himself now –"
"He's given a full account of the – trauma to us," Prentiss had cut her off, stumbling ever so slightly over the word. "His statements have been fully documented."
The woman had looked like she was about to ask to see the documents in question.
"You don't understand," she'd said, carefully, as if they did indeed not possess the intellect to grasp her meaning. "He's a man. When something like this happens to a man, the recovery process is different. In many ways, it's harder."
"I know," Prentiss had replied, with an audible tremor to her voice that Morgan couldn't recall ever hearing before. "We do this for a living, too."
It had been JJ, Gideon and Hotch who took it upon themselves to return to the house. While Morgan couldn't speak for anyone else, he had read the same guilty gratitude in the faces of Prentiss and Garcia that he himself had felt.
He would catch a whiff of the smell for several weeks to come. Olfactory hallucinations. In the office, in the street, in a Starbucks; he would take a breath and it would be there. The reek of blood like wet pennies, in sharp disharmony with the stink of vomit, courtesy of Detective Nuñez, who had made it halfway back up the basement steps before puking. Sweat; two grown men and four days' stale worth of it; unwashed skin under unwashed clothes. And underneath it all, underneath and on top like a varnish and slicing through, a cross-section of the mess of smells in its entirety, lay the unmistakable reek of sex. Not like the sheets in the morning, or your skin before you showered, but thicker, sharper, more. Mingled with the coppery sweetness of blood and a faint but distinct fecal quality, it weaved a deep, resonant stench that Morgan recognized from a plethora of other crime scenes. The smell of rape.
On the second day, Special Agents Lowndes and O'Shea were flown out from DC, and with them came a fresh communications coordinator to replace JJ. The case would be handled by the FBI in liaison with the locals, and all but a tail end of paperwork was lifted out of Hotch's – and the team's – hands. Reid slept, floating on whatever remained of the UnSub's tranquilizer and the hospital morphine, in a nest of cushions on the hotel couch (he wouldn't use the bed), while Morgan perched on a chair facing the door.
Todd Lowndes and Regan O'Shea spent a tense hour there, documenting yet again everything Reid had to say. Chief Strauss came with them, belatedly ready to grace them with her presence, but excused herself as soon as the required and very awkward pleasantries were exchanged. Morgan was surprised that no lawyers had followed like pilot fish on her belly.
"I asked him why he was doing this."
"That was the first thing you said?"
"Yes. It was so – stupid."
"To abduct you?"
"Not me. Not specifically."
A pause, one of many, as Agent O'Shea waited for Reid to continue. Agent Lowndes had retreated to a corner of the room, whether from discomfort or respect Morgan couldn't tell.
"You mean it was stupid to abduct someone involved in the investigation?" O'Shea pressed on, courageously if a little insensitively.
"Yes," Reid had said on an intake of breath. He was sprawled like so many elongated bones on the couch, gaze unfocused and evasive. While the smell of the hospital had been washed away in a series of long showers, he still looked ill. He couldn't rest his back against the couch cushions, nor sit for any length of time on surfaces harder than cotton. His face was a lurid blend of black, blue and yellow.
"And he answered you?" said Agent O'Shea. "He answered the question?"
Reid had looked up, his head bobbing on his stringy neck like it was barely attached. His eyes had swam to her face, had narrowed, had drifted away.
"Because I want to," he said in a quiet monotone. It wasn't his voice; wasn't his dry statement.
"Pardon?" said Agent O'Shea.
"He's quoting," Morgan spoke up, raising a hand into the space between Reid and O'Shea. "He's quoting Jones."
O'Shea, who would have been informed of Reid's many skills, sat very still as Reid went on.
"What did he do to you? I'm sorry? Tobias Henkel. That was his name, wasn't it? The man who took you before. , that was his name. He abducted me. He had a dissociative identity disorder, split personality. In his delusion he was the archangel Raphael and he was supposed to…"
As he spoke he switched between simply repeating, adding no particular intonation or emotion to the words, and the same near-whisper that could only be an imitation of Michael Jones' voice. Morgan felt a chill hearing it, because it wasn't how he usually did it. Usually it was just regurgitation, the way he said the lines that were, in this scenario, his own. Morgan had never heard the speaker's voice before. It raised every one of the little hairs on the back of his neck.
"He thought you were a sinner," said Jones with Reid's mouth, in the middle of Reid's blank face. There were cracks in his lips, scabs of blackened blood, while a large, wine-colored blotch disfigured his cheek at the corner of his mouth. Similar marks marred his jaw, his neck, the curve of his shoulder. Hickeys.
"Please." Reid's own words, parroted. "You don't want to do this."
"That's enough." Morgan stood. "SSA Reid has written all this down. It's in the reports we filed before we were taken off the case."
He could not keep the bitterness from his voice, which was both pointless and a little embarrassing. Not only would it pose a conflict of interest to keep them on board, it was also hardly in the interests of profilers to be involved as anything but expert witnesses in an eventual trial after an arrest had been made.
Once the agents had departed, Reid had eased himself onto his side and promptly fallen asleep. Morgan knew the time would soon come when the drugs would wear off, and left him to it.
On the jet, they'd all gone without sleep for over a week. None managed to doze off, and most stayed upright and alert in their seats as they observed Reid. Watching, as they were all apt to do on the best of days, without letting on that they were watching. Only Garcia had lacked the subtlety, having to literally be pushed into a seat to keep from approaching Reid where he sat in a windowless nook at the dark rear of the plane. He couldn't seem to keep still, shifting ceaselessly in his chair, and occasionally a terrible, quiet moan would escape him. It was a sound like a dying child, and he didn't seem aware that he was making it.
He had refused point-blank to take the Vicodin that Dr. Sofer had prescribed.
Back in Washington, he hadn't taken to his bed as one might expect. Morgan had taken three days off work to stay with him, and he would later and without embellishment think of them as the worst three days of his life.
During the daylight hours Reid was restless, unable to sit down for more than a few minutes at a time. He didn't speak unless spoken to, but Morgan didn't need words to know that he was still in a great deal of pain. He moved with particular care of the ankle he'd been shackled by, the wrist he'd sprained, and the burns on his back and thigh. Morgan quickly learned not to ask him to take any of the good stuff, but made a point to put a couple of aspirin and a glass of water in front of him every few hours.
Reid kept the curtains drawn and the blinds down, draping every room in darkness. Morgan remembered the darkness, how it cocooned the apartment. It became a vessel floating in nothing, a vacuum where time was not allowed to move. Whenever Morgan got Reid to lie down he would arise repeatedly, going from bedroom to living room to kitchen and back, and then again ten minutes later. It was like fearing for a newborn; a deafeningly silent, six-foot newborn who shunned food, rest and attention.
The first night back Reid didn't sleep at all. On the second night Morgan talked him into taking a pill, and he was out like a light until the crack of dawn – at which point he woke a passed-out Morgan by screaming at the top of his lungs.
He'd had to slap him hard across the face to rouse him. And even then, when logic scattered the wild-eyed panic, he crawled as far away from Morgan as he possibly could, pressing his injured back into the headboard and mumbling, "I'm sorry, I'm so sorry…"
"You have nothing to be sorry for," Morgan had said and, without thinking, reached for him.
"Don't," Reid had snapped, both hands coming up; and then again, as if he'd insulted Morgan, "I'm sorry, I just…I'm sorry."
"Stop with the fucking sorrys," Morgan snarled. "Okay? Don't ever say you're sorry again. You have nothing to be sorry for. Nothing."
Reid had stared, owlishly. By then the bruises on his face were beginning to fade, and for a moment, just a moment, he had looked like himself.
It struck Morgan several times in those first few days how easily it came to him – and the rest of the team, for that matter; even Reid himself – to deal with the broken, grieving shards of people who were left otherwise unharmed in the wake of a crime. Morgan knew how to assess their emotional state and how to calm or comfort them accordingly. He knew how to get information from them, and how to make them understand that they were blameless.
But it was a rare thing, as a profiler, to find yourself in the presence of living victims. It had happened a handful of times in his career at the BAU, and it was an altogether different situation.
On the third night, when Reid was down on another pill, Morgan had found his stash. It was pathetic, really; a neatly tied plastic bag stowed under a false bottom in the wardrobe. In addition to the round little bottles of Dilaudid and packaged, sterile needles, there was a small bag of marijuana and a sheaf of cigarette papers.
With a glance at Reid, curled on his side with a well-thumbed Proust on the sheet beside him, Morgan put it back where he found it. A few hours later he was awoken yet again by Reid's half-deranged shouts; stumbling from couch to bedroom door, he'd had time to think that it sounded as if someone was gutting him.
Gideon had taken over on the fourth day, staying behind to teach when the others were on-site. The relief of getting away from those murky rooms, the long ghost that was Reid haunting them, and the screaming, was almost more than Morgan could bear. He'd never loathed himself more. He was back on Reid's couch within a week.
A week later Reid came shuffling into the BAU. If not for the crazy hair, he would have been indistinguishable from an old photo of a holocaust survivor. He no longer moved as if everything hurt, but still his limbs seemed too heavy to carry. The odd grace he usually possessed was gone, the spidery lope replaced by a twitchy clumsiness. He was there for an appointment with the department psychologist, after which an inescapable schedule would be set up – a prerequisite for his eventual return to duty.
Morgan was no fool. He'd never been one. In his youth, he had been tempted to lapse into that old and tired role that was more or less expected from him, but circumstances had chased him elsewhere. He was no fool. He knew – he knew – that Reid would never fully recover.
If pressed, he might admit that Reid would never have fully recovered from what had happened in an old graveyard in Georgia, either. Just like he might admit that he, Morgan himself, would never fully recover from what had been done to him by someone he had trusted. Someone who should have kept him safe.
A month or so after Jones' arrest, when Morgan arrived at Reid's place with calories in the form of takeout and donuts, it had been Reid himself who brought this up. Startled, Morgan had sat down by him, keeping the careful distance that had by now become habit.
"How…how often do you think about it?" he'd said.
Folded in three; back, legs and shins, he'd accomplished the feat of looking small. His long hair was in sheets over his face, making him more of a woman than a man. A frightened child of a woman. "Do you think about it at all?"
"I do," Morgan had replied. "Not every day. Not even once a week. But when we get a case…"
Reid had feverishly met his eyes. "A case like yours?"
Morgan made himself nod. Made himself answer.
"A case with a kid, yeah. Boy or girl doesn't matter. I can stay professional. No problem. But I think about it all the time on those cases. All the time."
"All the time?" Blinking, Reid unfolded and sat up straight. Still small; with the ever-present shadows pooling in the planes of his face, it was glaringly obvious how thin he was. Just a parchment-thin layer of skin over bone.
He had drawn a low, tremulous breath. "How the hell am I ever going to get back to work?"
Morgan had peered at the creature before him, searched for the old Reid there, in this broken version. He knew there was no such thing as a default state, not after Georgia and not after that basement, and perhaps Reid had never possessed one in the first place. Morgan recalled a boy, not a man; a boy with tall walls erected between himself and lesser intellects. Your average genius, in other words.
He'd become a better profiler after Georgia. A weaker, but better, man.
Another month later he was back. The final result of the HIV test arrived negative, as they'd known it would, and one Monday morning he was spreading his notebooks and tomes and various geek paraphernalia over the desk that had been vacant for what felt like forever. Hotch had his great hovering wings over him from the first briefing, and the rumors that had flourished in his absence died down mysteriously.
They were made aware that his PTSD was severe, and he remained by his desk for another month. By the time he was permitted to carry a gun, Garcia was just about ready to strangle him. They all developed new habits, learned to avoid sudden movements and to keep doorways clear. At lunch they would choose food that needed no knives, sticking to forks or spoons or chopsticks.
It wasn't long after his first on-site case that the hearings started. As his supervisor, Hotch was the one who had to accompany Reid to his, while the rest of the team sat one by one through hour-long question-and-answer sessions. Hotch also had to sit through Jones' hearings; they quickly learned to keep track of when these took place.
Thinking back, Morgan reckoned Reid's progress should have plateaued during those weeks. He couldn't even begin to imagine what it must have been like, shut in a room with bone dry lawyers and a judge, listening to the furious clicking of the stenographer as every word he made himself say was etched in stone.
But if he had suffered, which he must have done, he had hidden it well. He had continued to show less and less symptoms of the PTSD, had continued to handle each case that came their way with increasing focus and diligence. At times he had even seemed obsessed, letting the work consume him, which they had chosen to think of as healthy. His regular appointments with the shrink came to an end (when he agreed to find a therapist outside the Bureau), and they had celebrated his last session at a bar, which he seemed to enjoy even though he nursed the same glass of Pinot all night. Even with throngs of merrymakers on all sides he had relaxed, and didn't stammer once when a skinny thing in a tight Superman t-shirt and artfully oversized glasses pretended to trip into his lap.
Now, in the dead silent home of an abducted little boy, it had been over a year. It had been over a year, and the night was full of his screams again.
This time, Morgan wasn't the only one who was awoken by them.
"Get him off me! Get him off! Morgan, get him off me!" rent the stillness just as he came skidding into the Bridges' living room. The sight of Reid fighting an invisible threat right there on their sofa sent his heart into his throat.
"Reid!" He switched on the nearest lamp and shook Reid by the arm, lowered his voice when he remembered the two people upstairs; "Reid, wake up – it's Morgan."
Reid's eyes fluttered open. As he blinked up at Morgan, as confused as he was scared, he made no attempt to get out from under the hand on his shoulder. Before he had time to say a single word, a sharp voice spoke behind them.
"What the hell is going on?"
Hurried footfalls, muffled on carpeted steps, and then Craig and Amy Bridges were standing halfway down the stairs. They looked remarkably unruffled for people who should have been sound asleep.
"Sir, ma'am," Morgan said, reluctantly turning from Reid to meet them at the foot of the stairs. "Everything's okay."
Craig Bridges was unconvinced. "You wake us up screaming and you think everything's okay?"
Morgan cast the briefest of glances Reid's way. He was sitting up.
"Look, I understand we startled you," he told Mr. Bridges, praying his face was as reassuring as he was trying to make it look, "and I'm sorry for that."
"You're the FBI," Bridges snarled.
"You're right." Reid, in a frail and disconnected voice. "You're right, I'm really sorry."
Spending as long a second as he dared observing his colleague's face, Morgan told the Bridges to go back upstairs. "It was just a misunderstanding. Everything is fine, I promise you that."
Shooting Reid one last incredulous glare, Craig Bridges turned and stomped back up the stairs. His wife didn't move. Her eyes, as dead and unyielding as they had been since they arrived, were pinpoints on Reid.
"Are you okay?" she asked him softly.
Reid had gotten to his feet and wouldn't quite look at her.
"It was a dream. I'm really sorry," he replied in that same flimsy voice, struggling to get the words out. He met her eyes briefly, upon which Amy Bridges' narrowed to slits.
"Was it about Michael?"
For one black, plummeting moment, Morgan didn't know which Michael she was referring to. Judging by Reid's face in the single heartbeat before he wrenched his eyes onto the floor, neither did he.
"No," he whispered after a bewildered pause.
Amy Bridges shifted on the stairs. Something distantly like panic crept into her features.
"I've been afraid to close my eyes," she said slowly. All the things she was unable to think, feel or say were there in the ice in her voice, and even in the midst of his concern for Reid, Morgan could feel her pain like a knife's edge. A mother's pain, quite unlike anything else.
"I'm scared I'll see him die," she finished, still staring at Reid. He looked back, met that stare with a numbness of his very own.
"Ma'am," Morgan said, keen to interrupt whatever was taking place between them. "I know it's hard. But I need you to go upstairs and try to get some sleep."
Amy Bridges didn't move. Something as obscure and unreachable as another person's nightmares, in the absence of her own, had been allowed to house all her fears. It was a behavior Morgan wasn't surprised to see, but the timing could not have been worse.
"Please," he insisted. "I'm sorry for the disturbance."
Finally, she looked away. Turned slowly on the step. Followed her husband up the stairs.
Morgan watched the hem of her white robe whip around the corner; waited for the upstairs light to switch off, before allowing himself a quiet breath. A creaking behind him told him Reid had sat down again, and, steeling himself, Morgan turned to face him.
"I'm making everything worse," Reid said. Morgan took the three steps across to sit on the edge of the coffee table.
"Reid," he murmured, giving himself a second to organize his thoughts before he voiced them. "These cases get to all of us, but…I mean, is there something about this that…?"
And, horrified, he realized he couldn't say it. The smell was there, again, sharp in his nose. Copper and exertion and bodily fluids.
"No," Reid said instantly, shaking his head like a wet dog. "No. There isn't. There's a basement, but…"
"You said 'get him off me'," Morgan pointed out, careful to keep his voice neutral. "You screamed it."
"I did?" Reid blinked. "No, I…I didn't. It was…leeches."
"What?"
"Leeches," Reid breathed. There was something in his eyes, now, that Morgan wasn't sure he recognized. "There were leeches all over me. I was covered in leeches. I said 'get them off me'."
And he put one hand to his chest, as if making sure there was nothing there.
Morgan studied his face. "What do you think that might mean?" he asked. "Leeches?"
Reid met his eyes, still confused, and seemed to have to search for words.
"I don't think it's that obvious," he said. "This was…it was different, Morgan. It's not Jones. It's not the same basement."
He sounded less and less confused with each word. Less and less frightened, more and more certain. "It's not the same basement. Jones wasn't there."
He raked long fingers through his hair, breathing deliberately through his nose. "He wasn't there."
"Okay," Morgan said softly. He watched him rub his hands across his face, watched him grow calmer with each breath. "Then…what the hell is scaring you, man?"
Gaze far away, Reid bit his lip. He stated the simple, awful truth that should have been obvious all along. The truth that had nothing to do with basements or nightmares or darkest water under the bridge.
"This boy's gonna die, and there's nothing I can do to stop it."
"You stated when you confessed to those five murders – and we had matched three of the names to actual missing persons – that you didn't remember where you had buried the bodies."
"That's right. I did." Michael kept his gaze on Agent Freeman. "I lied."
"In order to gain leverage."
Allowing himself a snort of laughter, Michael shook his head. "You sound as if you expect me to turn around and ask for leniency."
Freeman glanced at Rossi, who was gazing pensively into the tabletop, before answering.
"Yes. We discussed this when I first interviewed you, if you recall. You will release the locations of the bodies, but only to SSA Reid. The information may not be recorded in any way, which is why there's no such equipment in use for this interview. Only…SSA Reid may know. You won't need to lead us to the locations as you can give – him – the exact coordinates."
Michael saw no need to answer him. He shifted his gaze to David Rossi, sensing that the older agent was about to make a decision.
Another moment of oppressive silence. Freeman was once again all too still, waiting for a fresh tug on the leash.
"I suppose I should let you know," Rossi finally said, in an all too offhand sort of way, "that there are no surviving relatives to mourn for those boys."
Michael felt his eyebrows go up. Tried to deduce where this was going. Not at all comfortable with the fact that he couldn't.
"If you say so."
Rossi narrowed his bloodhound eyes.
"You wouldn't have bothered to find that out," he said. It wasn't a question. "It wouldn't have crossed your mind. Am I right?"
Michael stared. Kept his face uncommunicative. The agent knew he was right; there was no need to confirm the assumption. Rossi, it seemed, wasn't expecting him to.
"Evan Trudhomme was an orphan," he went on, "and no one in the foster homes he passed through even remembers him. It was a young prostitute by the name of Candy who reported him missing, and she killed herself not long after. Intentional overdose."
He made an idle gesture with his hand, as if to say hey. Shit happens. "And José Ruiz's older brother, who was the only family he had left, was killed in a drive-by shooting back in '04. As for Toby Hollander, well…" Another careless little gesture. "His parents were rather long in the tooth when he was born. And we already found him, didn't we?"
He put both elbows on the table and looked Michael in the eye. "And I think it's safe to assume nobody misses the other two. What was it you called them? Chester and Carl?"
"Charlie and James," Michael corrected him, startled to hear just the smallest tremor to his words.
"Well," Rossi said, exchanging a glance with Freeman. "No one cared enough to report them missing."
Taking a little breath of his own, Michael looked from agent to agent. Try as he might, he couldn't discern the scope of what Rossi was talking about, and it made him just a tad impatient. And impatience, especially in here, where time stood still, made his skin crawl.
"So?" he said, too sharply. "Is there a point to any of this?"
Rossi shrugged. Stroked his salt-and-pepper beard.
"Well," he said again, "it means that there are no families who've gone all these years without knowing."
And abruptly, it was clear. Rather than dawning slowly on him, it cracked open, and Michael went cold. All the way to the bone. Judging by David Rossi's face, the agent knew his words had struck home.
"I don't know about you," he said, turning to Freeman, "but I'd be far more concerned with finding those bodies if I'd had Candy or Fernando Ruiz calling me up every week. You know how they get, when we find something new?"
Freeman nodded solemnly.
"It's exhausting," he said, and sounded like he meant it. Both agents gazed at Michael, who scrambled for his wits. It wasn't so much the implications of what they were saying so much as it was the shock of realizing that he'd actually missed something. He didn't miss things.
It must be prison, he reasoned. Prison had made him dull. And why wouldn't it? It had been almost four years since he had last been immersed in the process, the beautiful, perfect process.
He had never missed it more than he did right now.
With the light from the street warming her face, there was no escaping how beautiful she was. A small, peaceful smile was on her lips as she paced leisurely down the length of his bookcases, keen, grey eyes tracing the backs of the volumes. She paused in front of the shelves that held his professional literature, and suddenly, irrationally, he wanted her away from the grisly, tell-tale titles. He wondered, for the hundredth time, at the way she seemed to have shrugged off her experiences with a serial killer just a few weeks ago, and he wondered at the effortless joy that seemed built into her very foundations. Like she could reach inside herself and find any number of reasons to be happy. He didn't understand it. It made him doubt whether he had any business being in the same state as her, let alone the same room – and on a date? How the hell had this happened?
"Have you read all of these?" Austin asked, gesturing at the thousand or so books that crowded the shelves. "Every single one?"
"Uh ... yeah," Reid replied inarticulately.
"Holy crap," Austin laughed, and her voice was like honey. She was impressed. She looked at him, and he was once again dumbstruck to see her there, in his living room, just a few feet away. Two measured steps could take him there.
She wore a low-cut print dress and matching red lipstick, with her dark hair in glossy tumbles around her shoulders. He'd spent half a minute studying the antique-looking clasp that gathered it at the nape of her neck while they waited for their table; the little stones set in it were almost exactly the same shade as her eyes in candlelight.
"Are you okay?" she said now, taking a step closer to where he stood frozen by the kitchen doorway. Those eyes, like jewels in the half-light, shifted to his left arm, and he followed her gaze to see that his right hand was clutching at it, his thumb rubbing the inside of his forearm through the sleeve. He let both hands drop to his sides. He'd been sure he'd stopped doing that.
It was one of two scars that he'd been informed could not be removed. The other was a pitted mess of white, knobby tissue below the base of his neck that would sometimes emerge from behind his shirt collar when he twisted his head a certain way. On cold days, that one would ache distantly, like an echo of the teeth that had made it.
Forcing a smile, Reid began instead to fidget with his cufflinks. "I'm fine. I'm great," he said breathlessly, because she was still advancing on him. He watched her hips move under the soft folds of her dress, watched her pass into the light spilling from the kitchen. There was the smallest of creases in the peach-pearly skin between her brows, and he knew that neither his voice nor his face had been very convincing.
"You sure?"
A warm hand came to rest on his left arm, his scarred arm, and he thought he could feel the old knife wounds tingle.
"Yeah," he said, too airily. "Just a little nervous, I guess."
Austin tilted her head to the side, smile widening. She gave his arm a little squeeze.
"Well," she said huskily, "you should be nervous."
Reid's mouth went dry. "I should?"
"Oh yeah. Because I came all the way from Atlanta for this date, and I have some serious expectations. A few magic tricks aren't gonna do it for me, this time."
"Really?" Reid said, and the would-be amusement came out a nervous exhalation. Her words were gentle, the threat in them a jest, yet they made his heart pound with a whisper of dusty, outdated fear. He chewed his lip, tried to let her beautiful face and light touch have the intended effect. He felt his gaze sliding, slipping sideways.
"Spencer?" she said, smile flickering, and trailed her hand down his arm to weave her fingers into his. It was a chaste gesture, unflinchingly affectionate.
"Do you…" he heard himself murmur, still without looking at her. He cleared his throat, not sure what he'd meant to say.
"Do I what?" There was a hint of concern in her voice. "Spencer, what's wrong? I thought we had a great time tonight, and now it seems like you're…I don't know, scared of me or something?"
"I did have a great time," Reid said quickly, forcing himself to meet her eyes. "It was the best day I've had in a really long time." A snicker escaped him. "A really, reallylong time."
"Then what's wrong?" she insisted. Reid found himself staring into those enormous eyes of hers, and couldn't bring himself to lie.
So he said nothing.
Austin raised his hand into what little space remained between them. Wrapped her other hand gently around it, and brushed her lips across his knuckles.
"You saved me, you know," she murmured, eyes never wavering from his. Her palms were hot around his fingers.
He recalled the sight of her kneeling under the raised flash of a knife, her broken sobs as he tore the duct tape from around her wrists. I called you, she'd said. I called you.
"My team did," Reid corrected her, but she just shook her head.
"No. It was you," she breathed. "Just you."
And suddenly one of her hands was on his neck, not far from the knotted scar, and she was pulling him down for a kiss.
It was soft, sweet, mild. It should have been lovely. Something short-circuited in Reid at the feel of it, of another person's mouth pressing his with the unmistakable pull of desire, and he broke away without really knowing what he was doing.
"I'm sorry," he stammered, slipping his hand from hers and backing away, wiping his mouth. "I'm really, really sorry, I –"
"Okay, now you're scaring me," Austin said, hurt and wide-eyed. Reid took two, three, four long and purposeful breaths. Oxygen hit his blood like a punch, and he felt dizzy, unfocused.
"How do you do it?" he blurted, eyes anywhere but on her. Austin stared.
"Do what?"
Reid tried to find the words. "How do you just – live? Someone was going to kill you, would have killed you…"
Gaping stupidly, he ran a hand over his face. Austin, in turn, looked like she was contemplating something, which was not at all what he had expected. He was, in fact, baffled that she was still there at all, and not entirely certain she hadn't already made a run for it and that he wasn't talking to a hallucination.
"Let me get this straight." She took a fearless step towards him. "You're freaking out because I'm not messed up about something that happened to me several weeks ago?"
"No," he said desperately, resisting the urge to keep retreating. "No, you don't understand."
"Damn right I don't," she replied. "Care to explain it to me? You're the genius, right?"
Yes, he was. He certainly was. But this particular explanation wasn't one he could memorize from a book. This wasn't something he wanted to place into the air on a first date, or any date, at any time.
They were whispering to him, now. Louder than they'd been in a long time. Tobias, helpless and weak, and Raphael, cold and grave and terrible. And Jones was there, too, sneering and taunting and wanting more than anyone could ever give.
You know why I chose you.
He looked at Austin, letting the ghosts walk their tired paths through his thoughts. Saw the indignation and vigilance drain from her lovely features, to be replaced by worry.
"Spencer…?"
"Don't," he said sharply, as she made to take another step towards him. "Just…don't come any closer."
"Please tell me what's wrong," she whispered, one hand raised as if to reach for him.
Why wasn't she walking away? Why wasn't she running?
He'll win in the end.
"No," he heard his own voice mumble, almost inaudibly. "No, he won't."
"What?" Austin said. "I can't hear you."
He met her eyes again, her huge, radiant eyes. There was no fear there. No judgment and no wants.
No shadows.
And he found his words, found them where they'd been hiding in plain sight.
"I have to tell you something."
Once certain his voice would come out the way he wanted, Michael dared to speak.
"But that doesn't matter, does it?" he said to Agent Rossi. "You still want to find them. Or have I missed something?" He offered a lazy smile. "You have your rules. Your policies. I can't imagine you would use the fact that there are no living relatives as leverage against me. If the press got wind of anything like that…"
"You misunderstand me," Rossi said, quite politely. "We are simply saying that the matter isn't nearly as urgent to us as you seem to think. The only reason there are three profilers here today is because one of them has been insisting to see you for the past two years. About this, about them. The lost boys."
The air thickened in Michael's chest; the doctor had wanted him. It was allowed a moment to wind through his thoughts, that old bridge of strange and glorious power that had once spanned between them.
"But if we find that you're not cooperating," Freeman said, on a subtle cue from Rossi, "there's no reason not to simply wait for a time when you're ready to. However long that might take."
"Three years is nothing in here," Rossi added, motioning at the place in general. "It'll be at least another two before you get anywhere near those needles."
Stock still in his chair, Michael willed his thoughts to stay on track. Willed them away from the formless frenzy that was looming ahead, tried to fill them instead with the doctor's face. His face and his eyes and his voice, and having it all in reach again.
"So," Rossi sighed, "it's all up to you whether today is actually going to be the day when you provide Dr. Reid with the location of those missing bodies. It would be a trip wasted if we had to go back to Quantico with nothing. But like I said – we've got time. And so do you." He smiled. Truly smiled, his face cracking in half. "Nothing but, I'd say."
Michael was no longer certain how to best respond to this man. He was good. Very good. Almost as good as Gideon. With a twinge of bitterness, he wished the doctor hadn't been foreseeing enough to bring him.
Producing a level glare that had proven very effective in the past, he looked into Freeman's eyes. Childishly pleased to see them flicker aside, he turned to Rossi.
"I told you," he said quietly, articulating each word, "that I would give him the boys. And I will. But only him."
Straightening in his seat, he placed his hands, palms down, on his knees. "So why don't you two just fuck off and tell him that?"
He didn't raise his voice, didn't even let it waver, but he could tell that the aggressive choice of words amused David Rossi. Pleased him, even. As though he'd finally gotten what he came for.
"All right, then," he said lightly, grasping his empty coffee cup. Michael watched him push back his chair and get to his feet. "As long as we're clear."
"We're clear," Michael all but snarled. Freeman practically shot out of his seat.
Michael was motionless as Rossi motioned for the guard to secure him, wrists to ankles, ankles to chair. He had expected this – anyone who was ready to leave his hands free around Dr. Reid had no business in the FBI – and the thirty-odd seconds it took provided him with a window in which to clear his head.
An endeavor which was usually successful, it was now virtually impossible to shake off the anger. This, in turn, riddled him with self-doubt, and, still seething with the fact that he hadn't even seen it coming, he was forced to admit that he'd been outplayed. The doctor would be ushered into his presence well before he'd managed any kind of hold on his emotions, and he would be lacking the one weapon that had never failed him.
His control.
Joshua Hale is twenty-five years old when he leaves the house to get groceries. His wife reports him missing after four hours of hoping that he's only gone to get a beer; sneaked an innocent breather away from her and their three month-old baby.
They are the last thing on his mind before he slips into a coma. When his body is found he has been gone a week.
Twenty-two year-old Silas O'Rourke earns his tuition money at a bookstore just off campus. At six in the morning, when he arrives at work to do inventory, there is no one around to see the man who steps from the shadows and slips a needle into his neck.
He's held for nine days.
Michael Preston, twenty-eight, disappears on his way to pick up his wife and two children at the airport. They've been to visit her mother, and during the week they've been away he's felt like somebody's been following him on more than one occasion.
When he doesn't turn up at the airport, when he isn't even waiting at home with a reasonable excuse, his wife reports him missing. When he's found eight days later, the authorities are forced to accept that the Riverside Stalker appears to have relocated to their jurisdiction.
Kyle Horowitz is still not quite used to being thirty years of age when he's taken from his home in the dead of night. He never wakes up, and when he comes to in pitch blackness he slips into a panic attack. It's this panic that finds him again on his fifth day in the basement, and when the man who has raped him fourteen times can't calm him he chooses to kill him with a single blow to the head.
Adam Morrison is twenty-one. He's heading back to the dorms from an evening lecture when, as he's cutting across a dense patch of greenery, someone creeps up behind him and sticks a syringe into the vein below his ear.
He wakes up in darkness and begins to pray, and doesn't stop until he exsanguinates seven days later.
Timothy Berg will be twenty-seven in a month. He's taken during a cigarette break behind the college library. His death and the consequential dumping of his body is the final straw for the locals, and that same day the chief of police calls up Jennifer Jareau at the Behavioral Analysis Unit of the FBI. She and a team of profilers arrive from Quantico within two hours.
Spencer Reid is twenty-six when a man enters the police station through a disused fire escape. He's held in a brightly lit basement for four days before he turns up in an alley, freezing and injured but far from dead.
The man who raped him, cut him and burned him before letting him go is arrested and sentenced to death. When he's put down like a dog in a brightly lit room in front of the parents, wives and siblings of those he murdered, he feels remorse for one thing and one thing only.
That Spencer Reid is not there to watch him die.
"Hello, Michael."
Favoring his bad leg, he limped slowly into the room. Glanced at the guard as she stepped out into the antechamber and closed the door behind her, leaving them alone in the dense silence. Another condition of this meeting. Moments later, blinds were lowered on the window facing the chamber, shutting out the watchful visages of the three agents outside.
The blinds were new, and had been fitted especially for this occasion.
"Hello, Dr. Reid," he returned, and failed to keep his voice as steady as he would've liked. It trembled, thick with the emotions David Rossi had managed to upend.
A steadying breath. "What happened to your leg? If you don't mind my asking."
Dr. Reid had halted a few feet short of the table where Michael sat. One hand tight around the bird's head of his cane, the other cradling the files he had brought.
"I got shot," he said. An awkward smile touched his lips. "First time for me."
"The only time, if statistics are to be believed," Michael replied. His voice came out more levelly if he raised it, so he chose to speak a little louder than he was strictly comfortable with. "I gather that most profilers go their whole careers without facing a gun."
Dr. Reid nodded, once and just a tad uneasily. Left it unsaid that most of them went their whole lives without being abducted by the subjects of their work.
Now that he was in the room with him, Michael was positively aflutter to see how he would conduct this meeting. How he would go about getting what he wanted. He could smell him, for the first time in grey and stagnant eons. Prison soap and the vaguest trace of sweat; coffee, strong and sweetened, on his breath. Underneath, startlingly familiar, was the unmistakable perfume that was his own. Michael took it into his lungs on a sigh, letting the memories in with it. Their melancholy was perfect. Like an immaculately preserved postcard from a long dead friend.
"I've wanted to see you for a very long time," he said.
Dr. Reid was motionless, maintaining a careful distance. Unless Michael's instincts were terribly corroded, he was debating whether he could actually make himself cross to the chair and put only a table between them.
He raised his eyes to Michael's, and they were full of fear. Exquisite, chaotic fear. That mercurial glow he hadn't seen in three years and which he dreamt of almost every night, when white limbs and red blood heated his hands again. When waking was a cruel and merciless affair.
"That wish has been mutual," Dr. Reid replied. "It's been…frustrating, not being able to conclude this investigation."
Michael stared at him. Took in every angle of his face, every sideways flicker of his eyes. The air was thin in his chest, not enough. The desire to touch him was a mad and untamed thing, a thing that had slept as if dead for too long.
"I don't care about that," he said softly.
The doctor regarded him for a moment, unnaturally still, before taking a hesitant step towards the chair Rossi had been in moments ago. With measured movements, he propped his cane against the edge of the table and folded himself into the seat. He had to shift his leg into a sufficiently comfortable position, and at one point his face twitched with pain.
"It hurts?" Michael said. "Your leg."
"A little," Dr. Reid admitted.
He placed the four files in their manila jackets on the table, and Michael watched his long pale hands before they disappeared into his lap.
"So," he said, with a subtle top note of what Michael thought was trepidation. "Where are they?"
"In a hurry, are we?" Michael smiled. "You won't even ask me how I've been?"
Dr. Reid's turn to stare. "How have you been?" he said after a long and reluctant pause. Michael wasn't sure whether to be amused or annoyed.
"Bored," he said. "Mind-numbingly bored. Fantastically bored. I've reached levels of boredom previously uncharted. Have you ever been so bored you could literally die?"
Maintaining his stare, Dr. Reid didn't answer. It was unclear whether he'd even gotten the joke. He simply watched Michael. Weighed and assessed. His mask of calm was perfect, and the only part of him Michael could read were the chinks in the amour that were his eyes. This close, the difference in him was nothing short of radical, and the years since the basement hung like a fine mist between them. Easy to see through but impossible to deny.
Michael leaned forward an inch. Studied that constructed blandness like it was complex source code. It was flawless. Unforced and effortless, so practiced it couldn't be seen unless you knew it was there.
The doctor retrieved one hand from his lap and placed it, palm down, on top of the folders. There was a sandy whisper of skin on paper.
"Where are they?" he repeated, his modulated voice clashing with the storm in his eyes.
"My, my. You are in a hurry," Michael idled. "You need to learn to pace yourself. I don't remember you being this careless."
"Careless?" Dr. Reid repeated, confused. "What makes you say that?"
"See?" Michael said. "Now I recognize you. You take your time, you devise a strategy. You don't just blunder on like most of the knuckleheads I've seen in here."
Something akin to annoyance was allowed a fleeting stay around the doctor's mouth. He turned his attention to the folders. Opening the jacket of the topmost file, he flipped yellowed pages with no apparent intent to read them. Without a word, he loosened a photograph from a paperclip and positioned it in the middle of the table, facing himself.
Upside down, Michael still recognized José. It was not a mug shot, which was the only picture of him alive that Michael had seen before, but a candid snap of a smiling young man with a heavily tattooed arm slung about his shoulders. The owner of the arm had been cut from the photo.
The doctor retrieved a picture of Evan from another file, then the two digital compositions of Charlie and James that Michael himself had helped put together. Evan was posing confidently, spreading his arms to show off the Halloween costume he was wearing, while Charlie and James were passable likenesses at best, the composed features blunt and lifeless and completely lacking the fragile beauty of the living specimens. They looked more like their corpses, when they had stared from the graves he'd dug deep for them in secret places.
"What's this for?" he asked, too curious to restrain himself. "Not for me, obviously."
"No," Dr. Reid said, adjusting the last picture so that the dead boys were evenly spaced before him. "That's right. It's for me."
Studying his face, Michael wondered if he'd been playing a game since he walked in the door. If the insistence to cut to the chase had been a simple trick to make him think no such games were on the agenda.
"I'm intrigued," he admitted. "Why do you need to see them? Do you forget their faces? I do, sometimes. Some of them look so much alike I can't recall which is which."
"I know their faces," Dr. Reid said quietly, meeting his eyes.
"Yes," Michael drawled, "I know. I heard they only needed to screen the videos once at the hearings, to establish that you remembered everything correctly. You did."
It was less than a second, a fraction of a heartbeat, but it was there; a flash of something primal and a gritting of his teeth as if to bite back a profanity. Michael smiled. So he had been forced to sit through it. Michael had suspected as much, but had never known for sure.
"I've never seen them, myself, of course," he went on. "What was it, again? Thirty-two hours of relevant material?"
"Thirty-one," Dr. Reid replied, and the swift, dry answer suggested he'd had little to no difficulties digesting the mention of his own pain and humiliation re-enacted in front of a roomful of lawyers. The experience had presumably been picked apart by a therapist, and Michael sensed that he would achieve very little in continuing on the path in question.
"So what's with the pictures?" he said instead, nodding towards the pretty display.
Dr. Reid splayed his piano hands below the boys, fingers laced. An old man squatting in his young, graceful body.
"It's to remind myself why I'm here," he said. "And that my intentions with this meeting have nothing to do with what happened to me."
"What happened to you," Michael repeated, numbly. The choice of words, and so coolly said, was disturbing. Their time together needed … more. In all his time here, in his dreams and reminiscing and reliving, his pathetic inertia, he himself had failed to find adequate expression for it.
"You mean to say that your wish to see me has nothing to do with – us?"
Dr. Reid raised his eyebrows. Vigilance slid a keen edge into his gaze; vigilance and just a gust of bewilderment. The words had thrown him.
"I'm here for them," he said, without looking at the pictures. "To find them."
"And as soon as I tell you where they are, you'll leave and I'll never see you again."
Dr. Reid was silent. Stared searchingly across the table, eager to find something, anything, that he could analyze. Did he ever stop?
Michael hadn't meant to speak so candidly. He closed his eyes, shutting out the distracting sight of the doctor. He felt that wild thing again, lifting something from the depths that had been long submerged. He was beginning to feel an inexplicable need to let it come, to let it take his control and wield it as its own. He knew what it was; it had taken him years to learn how to rein it in and channel it properly. Now, somehow, it was back to its original form, unrefined, the way it had been with Jonah, with the others he had thoughtlessly used in the early days before the process.
"There's this woman in Atlanta," Dr. Reid said. Michael opened his eyes, thinking with a twitch of irritation that the doctor was going to bring up his love life unsolicited, but he went on: "that I visit sometimes at the psychiatric facility where she's incarcerated. Like you, she knows where someone is, someone I want to find. His name is Adam."
"Is?" Michael repeated, once again uncertain where the conversation was going. There seemed to be a lot of that today. "He's alive?"
"That's the thing," Dr. Reid replied. "I don't know. I hope so."
There was a pause, in which he studied the photographs with his head bent. From left to right, José to James. Michael tried to remember them, the time he'd had with them, but there was nothing there. He couldn't recall how it had felt to be inside them, nor the sound of their screams. The smell of them, the heat – it was all gone. It was as if the doctor, being here, cancelled them out.
"It's my job, you know," Dr. Reid murmured.
"What?"
Dr. Reid did not look up. His eyes were on the photographs, unwavering on the photographs. "It's my job," he repeated, a notch louder this time. "Interviewing people like you. Studying you. It's my job to establish perimeters inside which your behavior and thought processes and speech patterns can be interpreted and assembled to construct a comprehensive analysis."
"I love it when you talk dirty," Michael said huskily. It didn't work; the doctor did not take his eyes from the photographs.
"My point is," he said slowly, as if there had been no interruption, "that I do this for a living. It wouldn't fall outside of my job description to – to see you again."
At some point during this sentence, Michael had held his breath. He wondered dizzily what verb the doctor had been about to use before he said "see".
"Do you mean that?"
The query came out breathless, pathetic. Michael didn't care. The implications of what he'd just heard were too enormous, too vast, and barreled over him like a tall, opaque wave. He was absurdly thankful, now, for the doctor's refusal to lift his attention from the photographs.
"That I can see you again?" said Dr. Reid, still staring at his lineup of lost, beautiful boys. "Of course. Do you think I'd lie about that?"
"Yes," replied Michael at once, and again it was without substance, childlike in its supplication.
"Do you?"
When he looked up at long last, not indignant or surprised or puzzled but something else, something new, Michael was certain, for one soaring second, that his heart would stop right then and there. When it kept on beating he was distantly disappointed. It would have been a good death. The only thing better would have been if he could have touched him, kissed him, felt him one last time. To have taken him ... to have died while still inside him ...
The doctor was frowning in a way that could only mean his thoughts had taken some expression on his face. He let it slacken, fall into neutrality, as he inwardly cursed David Rossi and his little suit-puppy. This would not be happening, he would not be falling apart like this if he hadn't blundered in where he wasn't welcome. He hadn't even been there. He hadn't even searched for him, hadn't been there. Hadn't been there.
"I think ..." Michael began, and had to clear his throat to go on, "I think you would say anything to get me to give you the coordinates. If you could have water boarded me I'd be soaking wet right now."
Dr. Reid's mouth twitched. "That's funny," he commented.
"Thank you."
"I'm not lying, though."
And he turned his attention back to the photographs. Michael had forgotten to control his face a quickly as he'd remembered to, and left the half-formed grimace where it was, left his hands as fists in his lap, left the thought-smothering, debilitating desperation to roam all over the face of the beast that was now clawing its way, slowly but surely, out of the abyss.
"But ... what do you mean?" he asked. It wasn't quite a plea, but something akin to it. The doctor was eerily motionless for a moment, full lips pursed as he searched the faces of James, José, Evan and Charlie. Then he looked up once again, and that strange, new thing was there again. What was it? Michael didn't know it, didn't recognize it, couldn't read it. Perhaps he was simply too upset to – yes, yes, that would be it. Had to be it.
"I mean I'm not lying," he said. "I actually assumed there would be more meetings after this one. Three more, to be exact."
The world flared and pulsed like a kaleidoscope. Michael tried to summon the old clarity, the sharpness of the basement, when he had seen everything sharpened, heightened to all it could be. But it was all warped, now, the calibrations off enough to muddle it into a tilting mess that was making him feel vaguely nauseated.
Was this what it felt like to be like? It had been so long, he couldn't remember – had it been like this? To have no control?
"Three?" was all he managed to voice, his eye drawn to the boys on the table. "So ..."
And he couldn't say it. Couldn't birth it with breath. The doctor, looking far more relaxed than he'd done just a minute ago, helped him.
"You give me one boy today. I will come back, and each time I do, you give me another."
Feeling his mouth shape the words he'd just heard, as if to help him comprehend them, Michael stared at his prize. His glorious, shining prize, one whole piece of calm, stone-faced profiler.
He knew what it was he'd seen on his face. It was new, brand new, and it was bright and clear and strong because the battle they had both prepared to fight today was over.
Michael breathed, took the scent of him inside himself. He could feel the scar on his neck tingle like it sometimes did on cold days.
It was triumph.
