There Lived a Princess

Four Days ago

Early the following day the BAU team was once again going over the case file hoping to find some piece of evidence to help them find their Unsub. Unfortunately, the day before they had been unable to find any helpful evidence or clues at the crime scenes.

Prentiss, Reid, Morgan and JJ were sitting around the conference table at the police Station. Their conversation had degraded from talk of the case to a discussion about fairy tales.

"Why fairy tales?"Emily asked throwing her pen down on the table.

"I don't know" JJ answered "but I don't think I will ever look at fairy tales the same way again. This case has the potential to ruin a lot of Disney movies. While these are likely not the Disney movies Henry will be watching soon they still hold a special place from my childhood."

"So what was little JJ's favorite fairy tale?" Morgan said with a smirk on his face.

"My favorite fairy tale was Cinderella and this creep perverted it." She said with a glare directed at Morgan. "What about you Derek?" she asked with a smirk.

"I was into football and basketball thank you, I didn't have any interest in these fairy tales even though my sisters sure tried to make me part of their make believe. What about you Prentiss, what did little Emily dress up as?" Morgan said quickly deflecting the attention on to the raven haired profiler.

"I loved Snow White when I was little, I really think it had a lot to do with the fact that she was the princess I looked like the most I really had pale skin when I was little and she was one of the few non-blond princesses in the story. No offense" she said to JJ how nodded back in understanding. "And Yes Morgan I spent many day pretending to be her and at least one Halloween party at the Embassy dressed up as her. I wonder how long it will take this guy to get around to Snow White." At that question Reid quickly began flipping through the case files but before Emily could ask what he was looking for the face of Technical Analyst Penelope Garcia appeared on the screen of the laptop sitting on the table.

"This is just horrible I watched Sleeping Beauty like every day when I was a kid. Now thanks to this guy it will be months before I can enjoy it on my shinny new BluRay player."

"I'm sorry Garcia" Emily said "The best we can do is catch this guy."

"Come on Baby Girl give us something we can work with?" Morgan asked.

"I found plenty of victim overlap but I don't think any of it is going to help. All the women lived in the same general area, shopped in similar stores but where talking supermarkets and malls thousands of people shop at these places every day."

"We know he is taking them from public places around closing time." Morgan added.

"It doesn't look like he stalks his victims for very long," Emily observed.

"More likely he waits till he finds one with features he needs and grabs them." Reid deduced.

Before any of them could say anything more, Hotch and Rossi quickly came walking into the conference room.

"Two days ago another woman Abby Parking age 34, was abducted from the parking lot of her local grocery store. We only have two or three days at the most to find her before the Unsub kills her. What do we have so far?"

"He is a white man in his mid-thirties." Reid started.

"He could be sadist and we know that for a sexual sadist torture itself is the sex," Rossi added.

"He is an organized nonsocial offender, they are of above average intelligence, they plan their crimes quite methodically usually abducting victims, killings them in one place and disposing of them in another." Morgan stated.

"I believe based on the increased torture to each new victim that he is an anger excitation sadist" Reid theorized. "They believe women have the power and they want to take it away from them which certainly fits with his fairy tale fantasies. They are also the most dangerous serial killers, the suffering of his victims sexually stimulates him. He wants to be in a position to do what ever he pleases with his victims to make her suffer in a way that she could not possible defend herself against."

"This type of killer generally has a plan, he knows how to execute it and will do it over and over again as long as he can get away with it. He rehearses every detail and has all the equipment necessary to play out his fantasies. He is all about inflicting pain and suffering he may use physical or psychological as a tool to elicit the suffering but it is the suffering that is most important to him." Emily added finishing the profile that Reid had started.

"That defiantly sounds like our guy and it is clear he is using both physical and psychological torture to harm these women." JJ agreed.

"This guy has found a specific kind of torment turning these fairy tales into playbooks for torture and death and he is going to get worse with each new victim." Rossi said providing a glimpse of what the future could hold if they didn't catch this guy soon.

"Yet this Unsub seems to be picking and choosing which parts of the story he can use to torture these women with and everything else in the story is unimportant to him." Reid added.

"We don't know exactly what he is doing to the victims, we know it results in bruises and broken bones, usually a broken wrist and broken ribs but we can't seem to figure out what he is going them that results in these bruises and broken bones. I feel like we can't get a handle on this guy because we don't know exactly what he is doing, how much is from fairy tales and how much he is adding." Morgan said clearly getting frustrated with their lack of information.

"The books he leaves at the scenes are untraceable you can buy them in so many places, no fingerprints were found at any of the scenes, everything is paid for in cash. This guy is clearly organized and smart with access to large amounts of cash which likely means he has money, there have been no reports of large amounts of money being stolen before or during the last month." Prentiss provided checking her facts with the information Garcia had provided them with less than an hour before.

"There was likely a stresser of some kind that happened a little over a month ago that made this seemingly wealthy smart man plan and execute these abductions and murders." Hotch added.

"But why fairy tales?" Garcia asked, up until now she had been silently listening.

"Likely has to do with the stresser. Plus fairy tales have the perfect woman, beautiful, and usually in need of rescuing giving the man the feeling of being needed. But in these cases he isn't rescuing them he is killing them" Morgan said attempting to answer the question.

"A final act of torture and a pretty big one too," Rossi countered.

"It also appears that he is using these stories to explore ways of killing, poison; drowning; cutting of their heads; burning and he is evolving getting more brutal with every killing almost as though he were working up to something." Morgan added.

"I agree and I don't understand why he started with the fairy tale that he did."

"What do you mean Reid?" Hotch asked.

"Well I have been reading a bunch of fairy tales and I don't understand why he would start with Sleeping Beauty, the story offers very little in way of providing a map for torture and the killing is almost impersonal he didn't learn much about torture and killing based on this story."

"Well maybe he wanted to just get it over with and he picked the easiest one." Morgan guessed.

"But that doesn't fit with the way he acts, as Rossi said "he has this all planned out he is building but this is such a small start more like a test."

"What are you getting at Reid?" Hotch asked getting impatient.

"I realized when Emily said her favorite fairy tale was Snow White." Emily blushed a little when Spencer spoke about her, Hotch noticed but Reid didn't and continued on. "If you were going to start out poison someone why chose an injection?" Everyone stared at him blankly so he tried a different approach. "If you were going to poison someone what's the easiest way to do it?"

"Poison their food" Garcia said supplying Reid with the answer he wanted.

"And what is Snow White other than giving a girl a poison apple and watching her die. Not to mention if you read the original Grimm's tale the evil queen tires to kill her twice before the apple."

"Reid's right, if this guy was learning from each killing why not start with that story, it practically has a built in road map on how to torture and kill." Prentiss added.

"Plus if he feeds her a poison apple he can then torture her by telling her it is poisoned and watch her freak out and die." Morgan said thinking out loud.

"That's a lot more teaching then simply injecting poison into a person." Prentiss agreed.

"He must have had some reason to choose Sleeping Beauty over Snow White." Hotch said flatly.

"Maybe a personal preference, we have all been talking about our favorite stories maybe Sleeping Beauty is his favorite or he hates Snow White." Prentiss said, trying to provide him with a logical answer.

"Maybe he couldn't find a good way to poison an apple or he couldn't get the right drugs?" Garcia said "oh that gives me a idea, I will get back to you Princes and Princesses."

"Or maybe it's too important to him or could be what he is working up to, so he saved it for last or at least later." Rossi said finally understanding what Reid was getting at.

"Well when we catch him Reid you can ask him, hopefully we will get to him before he has time to get that far. If you think the Fairy Tales he is using can help figure out who he is then run with it if not lets move on to something else. We are running out of time and I for one do not want another dead body." Hotch told him ending the conversation.