A/N: Thank you so much for the support for the last chapter! I'm feeling a lot better but I'm still not eating much, but this will hopefully change soon after to go to the doctor again and see about better pain meds and such.
I'm going away from October 3-12 for dancing, so this is a slightly shorter chapter since I'm packing and practicing non-stop.
Also, does anyone here read Shadow Unit? Because I finally finished it yesterday, and now I need someone to cry to.
Warnings: mentions of abuse, infidelity, genital mutilation, drugs, anxiety and death of a child.
o o o
red herring [ noun ]
a clue or piece of information which is or is intended to be misleading or distracting.
o o o
He waits for ten seconds. Nothing.
He gets out of bed, turns on the flashlight attachment of his gun, and walks slowly to the door.
Crouches down.
Takes a deep breath and shines the light down at the carpet.
A needle and a vial of Dilaudid lie there, the surface of the glass cracked like a spider web.
[remember me?]
Reid stares at the needle and vial in utter incomprehension, too shocked and confused to even begin to theorize how or why someone knows about his history with Dilaudid. Or, Reid realises with a sickening feeling, how they know what hotel room he's staying in. At first he tries to play it off as pure coincidence; maybe the guy's a dealer, delivering his product to the wrong person. Maybe it's just a harmless prank, concocted by some stoned teenager hoping to scare someone. Maybe it's an attempt to frame someone for possession of an illegal substance - a really bad one, but an attempt nonetheless. His theories are shattered when he snatches the Dilaudid from the carpet and feels his fingertips brush against thin, wrinkled paper. Reid frowns, shining his flashlight on the vial to reveal a battered note taped to its surface. The handwriting is spindly but neat, with narrow, long letters and small ink stains dotted along its surface.
A knock at the door jolts Reid out of his thoughts. He takes his focus off the note and points his gun shakily at the door, on the verge of succumbing to panic entirely. "Who is it?" he says with the little confidence he can muster.
"Reid? It's Hotch," a voice says from outside.
Shit. Reid grabs the needle and the vial and moves over to the other side of the room, away from the door. "What is it?" he calls out, when he's not holding illegal drugs just a few centimeters away from his boss.
"There's another body," Hotch says, beginning to sound impatient.
"Just...uh, give me a sec." Frantically, Reid opens a drawer and shoves the Dilaudid inside of it, hurriedly straightening his clothes up and opening the door as he holds the crumpled note in his palm. "Another body? As in, a fresh body?"
"Dead for less than an hour," Hotch nods gravely. "Even more strangely, the body was found right outside the entrance to this hotel."
Reid chokes back a gasp - are the drugs and the new body related? Had their unsub been literally just a few inches away from him? The realization that the unsub may know more about his past than Reid would care for makes him bite his lip in worry.
Hotch notices, his scowl softening in concern. "You feel okay, Reid?"
Reid nods briskly. "Jus' tired," he replies, adding in a little slur in his speech for effect. Hotch seems to buy it, nodding in understanding and continuing.
"We're all going to the scene now, but if you're really tired, you can stay behind if you want," his boss offers.
Reid shakes his head quickly. "No, I'm good. I just need a few minutes to get myself looking like I didn't just roll out of bed."
"That's fine. We're all meeting in the hotel lobby in ten minutes, come down and meet us if you're up to it," Hotch tells him. "And I agree, please try and make yourself a little more…presentable." Hotch gives him a grim half-smile as he walks back down the hall, leaving Reid alone in the doorway of his hotel room.
As soon as he's sure that Hotch can't hear the lock on his door being turned, Reid locks the door tightly shut and retrieves the Dilaudid and needle from the drawer, unfolding the crumpled note from his palm. The handwriting is even harder to read now, but with the light now turned on, Reid can just manage to make out the message.
Spencer Reid,
Hankel was right to punish you for your sins, but I am your judge now. I know what you've done.
The message abruptly ends there, a drawing of a gun firing a bullet scribbled into the top-right corner.
o o o
Prentiss squints at the body, squatting down to get a closer look in the lack of light. "Female, appears thirty to forty years old. We got an identity for her yet?"
Hotch nods, arms folded across his chest. "Elaina Dunne, she was staying here at the hotel for a week. Tonight was meant to be her last night here before she flew back home, in Virginia."
"Ominous," Rossi comments quietly, taking an evidence bag from a passing CSI tech. "This is the bullet that killed her, I presume?" he asks the tech.
The tech nods. "Cause of death was one bullet through the skull. Went through both ends cleanly and quickly."
"Look at the hands." Reid points to Elaina's arms. "Both palms are facing upward. T-there's no signature here."
Morgan raises his eyebrows at Reid's stutter, but nods. "How do we even know this is our unsub? Before, the victims all suffered in some way. I mean, genital mutilation? Strangling? Drowning? Those are all violent behaviors. A bullet in the head is too quick and efficient for an unsub like this."
"At least one other victim has been shot," Reid suggests. "Luke Payne was found dead in an alley next to a drugstore, shot several times through the heart and other organs and posed in the same way as the other victims."
"Maybe the unsub forgot to pose the body?" Prentiss suggests. "He could have been in a hurry, or have some other motive besides killing her."
"Unsubs don't just forget their signatures," Hotch frowns. "I hate to say it, but I think this is an unrelated murder. The behavior is completely different, there's no posing, the method is too efficient and impersonal."
"Personal…" Reid mutters under his breath, brow furrowed in thought. The note he'd received had certainly been personal, but was it the unsub who had left it under his door in the first place?
Reid doesn't want to think about the implications of that being true, that an innocent person died because of a secret he'd tried to keep hidden.
Hotch glances up at him quizzically, raising his eyebrows. "You've got something?" he asks the younger agent, but Reid quickly shakes his head.
"No, just that you're right. The behavior doesn't match up at all." He bites his lip, waiting for someone to draw the obvious conclusion.
"So we all got out of bed in the middle of the night for an unrelated murder." Rossi's voice sounds deviously calm, considering the circumstance.
"It would appear so," Hotch sighs. "We still need to follow procedure. Prentiss, get the detective over here and explain. Is there anyone who thinks this is our unsub?
There's a deafening silence, and Reid wonders whether he should speak up about the note. As much as he hates to admit it, there's a strong chance that it could be their unsub, or at least the murderer of Elaina Dunne.
No. Right now, he needs to be working the case. If he tells Hotch about the drugs, then he can't work the case, and if their unsub is aware of his involvement, then he might just be the key to getting their unsub.
For now, he says nothing.
o o o
Dr. Amanda Springs is tall and willowy, with close-cropped blonde hair and warm eyes. Her office is bright and cheery, with pictures of her family and her clients lining her desk and walls. "Just call me Amanda," she says, gesturing for them to sit down. "I understand you're investigating Sally's death?"
"And Brian Millar," Morgan adds, sitting down gratefully.
Amanda blinks in surprise. "Brian Millar died in a car accident. It was ruled as non-suspicious, wasn't it?"
"It was a hit-and-run, not just a car accident," Reid explains. "We understand that Brian Millar and Sally Adams were attending private therapy sessions with you?"
"That's right," Amanda confirms. "Brian Millar stopped seeing me after three months. I thought he wasn't quite ready, but he said he thought it was for the best, and I trusted him. He'd come a long way."
"Did Sally stop the sessions before you thought it best as well?" Morgan frowns.
Amanda shakes her head and sighs heavily, turning her chair around and digging into her desk drawers for her files. "She was killed before her we made any real progress. I met with her for two months, and I still couldn't get her to fully open up. She'd been hurt, that girl." When both Morgan and Reid stay silent, she continues nervously. "She'd been having panic attacks and nightmares. Both of them were having them. They both took alprazolam for their anxiety, but it didn't really help either of them effectively."
"How had Sally been hurt, Amanda?" Reid prompts, keeping his face neutral.
Amanda bites her lip. "I don't want to speak ill of the dead, but…she cheated on her husband. Lied to the man she was having an affair with about being single, and when he found out, he started making threats to her and beat her. When her husband found out, they separated. The trauma of her affair and losing her husband in such a short span of time caused her to develop severe anxiety and PTSD." She hands Reid a stack of papers, held together precariously by one paperclip. "This is Sally Adams' file. There's not much to go on, but there are some transcripts of our conversations you may find useful."
"Do you know who the man she cheated with?" Morgan asks as Reid gratefully accepts her file with a dip of his head.
"Sorry, she never wanted to tell me. I think she loved him, to be honest. It's the only reason that I can think of why she kept going back to him even after he beat her."
"What about Brian Millar?" Reid frowns as he skims through the transcripts.
"He was having the same problems as Sally - anxiety, PTSD, even hallucinations."
Reid frowns at Amanda's vague explanation. "What kind of hallucinations? Auditory, visual, tactile?" he asks, closing the file and handing it over to Morgan. "And what was his PTSD from?"
Amanda sighs heavily, crossing her legs as her eyes harden. "What I say now stays in this room, okay? Brian wanted to take this secret with him to the grave, and frankly, I don't blame him."
"We understand," Reid nods. "What you tell us now might help save a life in the future."
Amanda purses her lips before continuing. "When Brian was seventeen, he was driving past his little sister's friend's birthday party. He was going there to pick her up early, since she had a doctor's appointment. As he was pulling into the friend's driveway, his sister's friend ran behind the car. There wasn't enough time for him to stop," she finishes grimly.
Jesus. "What happened to her?" Reid asks gently, seeing Amanda gulp heavily.
"She died on the way to the hospital. She was only six." She sighs, handing Reid Brian's file. "Brian never really recovered. Twenty years later, he was still having flashbacks and had a phobia of driving."
"Wait…" Reid frowns, turning to Morgan. "We said before that Elaina Dunne's murder was too impersonal to be our unsub, right?"
"Right," Morgan nods. "A bullet to the head is hardly consistent with any of the violent behavior expressed so far."
"Well, Sally Adams was having an affair with another man. She's killed by a mixture of stab wounds to the chest and genitals. Brian Millar killed a little girl in a car accident, and he's killed in a hit-and-run."
Morgan's eyes widen in understanding. "It's like their deaths are tailored to their wrongdoings," he says slowly, taking out his phone. "We need to get Garcia on all those other victims, go through their lives inch by inch and see if the pattern is consistent."
Reid bites his lip. "That's forty-one lives to pick apart. There's a lot of digging to do."
Morgan grimaces. "No one better than Garcia to do it, then."
o o o
When he finally wakes up, Reid expects to see Tobias hovering over him, a stick in one hand and a Bible in the other. Instead, the only thing above him is the bright light, surrounded by darkness - one all too similar to a bare bulb, slowly swinging above him as he is left to decay in the hands of a madman.
[am i back in the shed? i don't want to die]
Then he feels the thin touch of fingers wrapped around his upper arm, in what Reid supposes is meant to be comforting. The darkness around that single bright light dissolves to reveal the stark white ceiling of a hospital room, the beeping of strange machines and the tiny pricks of various tubes finally reaching him. Gideon's face suddenly appears above him; the older man's lips are moving, but Reid can't hear anything he's saying. If he's saying anything - Reid wouldn't put it past Gideon to try and use some fancy mind trick to speed up his recovery, or something. Reid knows all too well from talking to victims that nothing can really speed up the recovery process - sometimes, it's just a matter of waiting.
Gideon's voice finally reaches his ears. "Reid? How are you feeling?" the older man says with a patronizing air that is slightly nauseating under the circumstances.
Reid's throat is too sore to manage a proper response. "Tired," he finally croaks out, already feeling his eyelids beginning to droop closed. Above him, Gideon nods in understand with a sympathetic smile on his face, and Reid wishes that he'd go away to leave him in peace.
"Of course," he chuckles, and the man has the damn audacity to chuckle, Reid thinks. He wants to hold onto his anger, but the tired feeling has grown into total exhaustion, and he can't help it when he finally does fall asleep.
When he wakes up again, he is alone except for the ghost of Tobias sitting by his bedside in vigil.
o o o
A/N: Pushed for time, so not much of an author's note. Thank you for reading!