Essential listening: The One I Love, by R.E.M.
0o0
Dave watched the last of the officers slip through the door at the back of the room and find a place to sit among the desks and filing cabinets of the Harvest Sheriff's Station. They were all eager, all a little wired on coffee, stress and too little sleep. It was a scene he had grown used to over the years. This time with the added frisson of not knowing when or where these unsubs would strike next – only that it would be soon, and there would be multiple victims.
I'm getting too old for this, he thought.
"The unsubs we're looking for are a family," said Hotch as everyone passed the profile handouts around the room. "A father, a mother – and a son, approximately ten years old. We believe they're of Romanian descent."
"The family travels in an RV, but they also have another vehicle that they use to go back and forth between campsites and cities," said Dave. "We need you to call every RV park in the area. Alert the owners to be on the look out for a family that fits this description, as well as a campsite that might have broken glass scattered around."
"The breaking of the glass – and the 'discarding' of Kate Hale because of her epilepsy – leads us to believe that these are highly superstitious people," said Pearce. "And that they are playing out a very specific ritual."
"The focus of this ritual is the young girls," Dave added.
"Do we know why?" The question came from an unfamiliar deputy who must have been drafted in from another county.
"No, but we do know – from the location of Kate Hale's house – that they don't come across thee girls by accident," Dave replied. "They study. They hunt."
"The first murder was carefully planned out," Pearce told them. "They came prepared, bringing a murder kit and the glass they needed to complete their ritual. They aren't doing this on a whim – it holds a much deeper meaning for them that we can recognise at this time."
"Kate's father said that she liked to go to the movies at their local multiplex," Hotch added. "That's a good place to start."
"Also look at the parks, malls," said Dave. "Concentrate on those that are an easy drive from the RV parks you locate."
"This family is out there and they're looking for their next victim," Hotch added, as if they needed another reminder.
The door to the room the team had commandeered slammed open and Morgan hurried out of it. "You guys need to see this right now."
Hotch glanced into the rest of the room, but the assembled officers had already started moving away. "Excuse us."
Dave and Pearce followed Hotch and Morgan into their temporary situation room. Reid was clutching a sheaf of files and peering worriedly at the board, as though all hell had broken loose on the archive end of this business.
Dave frowned. That couldn't be good.
"What's goin' on?" Hotch asked as Pearce closed the door behind them.
"Garcia, you still there?" Morgan asked.
"Present!"
"Okay explain what you got," Morgan instructed.
"Okay. I went ahead and went further back, looking for similar cases, and I made the search national."
There was a sense of urgency to her voice now that put the entire room on edge. It wasn't often Garcia had the air of someone about to make life much, much harder. The table was covered in print-outs and it began to dawn on Dave that they were all related.
"All these are hits?" he asked, alarmed. He picked the nearest one up; it was the report of a missing girl whose parents had been murdered in 1993.
Beside him, Pearce was also scan reading the top pages. "Oh no," she breathed.
Behind them, the printer was still going, spewing out file after file.
"Oh yeah," said Garcia unhappily. "There's thirty of them. They go back as far as 1909. Rapid City, South Dakota. Taos, New Mexico. Gary, Indiana. My map is –" Her voice faltered in horror – or anger. It was hard to tell – she was a mirror for their own emotions. "Lit up like a Christmas tree."
"All these girls were abducted and had their parents killed?" Hotch asked, visibly staggered.
"This can't be a coincidence," Pearce reasoned.
"The time between the kills was long enough and the regions of the country so spread out that it never showed up as serial," said Reid, who had had more of a chance to read through them all.
Dave voiced what they were all thinking. "What the hell is this?"
"I don't know, but it looks like it's been goin' on for generations," said Morgan darkly.
"Generations," Pearce echoed. "Wait a minute – how long are the gaps? How long is the shortest gap?"
"That would be… just over fifteen years," Garcia informed her.
"Hmm…"
Dave shared a look with Hotch. There was definitely something going on behind Pearce's frown. You could almost hear the cogs turning
"Hmm," she said again. "Okay. This is going to sound completely bonkers – and quite squicky, but what if they're taking child brides?"
There was a brief, horrified silence.
"Child brides?" Hotch repeated, looking appalled.
"How'd you figure?" Morgan asked.
"There was this case in Europe a couple of years back," she explained, speaking quickly. "A Roma community in Romania itself hosted a wedding for the young daughter of the self-styled 'king of the gypsies'. It made international news because she stormed out on video and then was made to go back in. I think the father made a public u-turn afterwards, saying he regretted putting her and the boy (who was her age) through it. He's an advocate for girls' education now…"
"I guess all creeps have a silver lining," Garcia remarked.
"But after that we had a watch list for girls with Roma families travelling to and from the UK in case they were involved in child marriage," Pearce continued. "Now, if this group is perverting Roma culture –"
"Then maybe they're taking girls from outside their family as brides," Reid finished.
Garcia spluttered something about the girls only being ten years old, but it made a horrible sort of sense to Dave.
"They're keeping these girls for years – why aren't they running away?" he asked, determined to test the theory, no matter how distasteful it felt.
"That's why there's a gap – it gives a few years for the girls to be brainwashed into accepting their new reality entirely, and then they're ready to raise children of their own," Pearce explained.
Across the room, Reid sank into a chair and rubbed his hand over his face.
0o0
The call that their family of unsubs had struck again had come in not twenty minutes after their case had taken a turn for the weird and unpleasant. The news that another young family had been ripped apart had galvanised all of them.
Morgan pulled up outside another ordinary looking house in Madison, Alabama and they all slid out of their seats, grumbling about the unfairness of it all. But there was no time to dwell on that; they had another little girl to find.
"Reid, Pearce and I'll check inside," Morgan announced.
Grace nodded, following the boys along the path that led to the front door.
Sheriff Bates met the others by the SUV. "We've doubled our highway patrol shifts and we've got roadblocks at every county line," he said, as Grace passed him.
"Is her picture on the wire?" Todd asked.
"Pulled one out of her bedroom myself," Bates told her.
The little party moved on, leaving Bates, Todd and Rossi behind. Morgan peeled off before the front steps and Grace saw him stoop to examine something in the grass by the porch.
More glass.
The feeling of being somewhere she shouldn't stole over her as she followed Reid inside, pervading all her senses until its influence was complete. She braced herself against it, wary for anything deeper or darker.
The more she came into contact with the magic the family left behind, the more she was convinced they weren't dealing with someone who knew what they were doing. It was rough and raw, which only made it all the more dangerous, but unskilled; it lacked the precision or direction of someone who had learned the details of what they were doing. The intent was all too clear, however.
She would have to keep her eyes peeled on this one, she decided.
Reid had headed deeper into the house so she moved towards the back, where the unsub had come in through the back door. Behind her, she heard Morgan begin to move through the house.
Well, at least they're consistent, she thought, surveying the broken glass above the handle.
There was a forensic technician by the door, carefully teasing something from the shards of glass that remained at the door.
"Got something?" she asked him, and he held up a small evidence bag containing small strands of white thread.
"Must be whatever they wrapped their hand in to smash the glass," he said. "Might have more info when it's gone through the lab, but it's a long shot."
"Better than nothing," said Grace. "If they keep whatever they used around we could tie it to them – or if they used it to wipe the blood from the knife and discarded it, and it's one of a set of somethings, that could give us an edge."
The technician nodded. "I'll have them analyse for organic matter too. You never know."
Grace left him to it and headed towards the bedroom, trying to ignore the sense of wrongness permeating the air. Here the feeling had been displaced by another kind of wrongness. There was arterial spray everywhere; on the bed, on the walls, on the ceiling. There was so much of it she could taste its sharp metallic tang on the back of her tongue.
She joined Reid by the bed, surveying the scene sadly. There was no one lingering here this time, though she had half expected it. Some people became ghosts, some didn't.
"What a mess," she reflected quietly.
Reid 'hmm'ed his agreement.
Both of them looked up as Morgan came in.
"This is what I don't get," said Reid, frowning solidly at the bed. "In both this and the Hale's house the girls' bedrooms were closest to the exits. I mean the unsubs actually had to go outta their way to kill the parents before abducting the girls."
Grace nodded. It was bothering her too. She had initially put it down to being part of the ritual, but it couldn't just be that. No matter how weird or out of sync with reality a ritual had become there was always a grain of something tethering the original practice to logic.
"I figure it was a countermeasure," Morgan told them.
"Why?" Reid asked.
"They've been doin' this for years and never been caught," the other agent replied. "Why?"
Reid gave a sort of facial shrug. "They disappear in the dead of night, they have a head start on the cops and they don't kill again for years," he summed up.
"The girls' parents are dead," Grace said, joining the dots Morgan was laying out for them. "There's no one looking for them – and they have nowhere to run to."
Morgan nodded. "Exactly. When I was a cop I would get ten calls a day from parents with child abductions." All three of them grimaced. "Now, as sad as that is, if families didn't' stay on ya – at a certain point other cases started takin priority."
Grace nodded. "There's limited resources – if something goes cold and there's no one to remind you, with the best will in the world, old cases fall off the map."
"And if they're keeping the girls as child brides," Reid said, understanding, "there's never a body to find."
0o0
Aaron rubbed a frustrated hand over his face. Although the concept of abducting child brides had brought up the possibility, he had never really expected one of their present unsubs to have been a previous victim. It was like something out of a pulp novel you picked up at the airport.
But Garcia had had the lab run the DNA twice: the genetic material they had extracted from the hair follicles in the blanket Kate Hale had been wrapped in when she was dumped at the side of the road was as close to a one hundred percent match as they were ever going to get.
"A working theory from 1971 was that a transient family killed the parents and then abducted Kathy Gray," Garcia told them. "Then all of the leads went cold."
"How do you watch your family get murdered and then make a life with the people who did it?" Todd asked in exhausted disbelief.
"It's Stockholm Syndrome," Rossi explained. "You adapt or die."
"And now she's training her son to be a murderer," Emily observed.
Aaron glanced around the room. The entire team sounded as tired and disaffected as he felt – here was one more little girl no one had been able to save. It was unlikely, even if they caught up with her, that they would be able to undo the damage of the trauma and brainwashing at this stage. And it would be hard to redeem her, after she had willingly taken part in two double murders and the abduction of two young girls. Even if it was fairly likely that she was the reason they hadn't killed Kate Hale when they had discovered her epilepsy.
"At a certain point, once traditions are handed down generation after generation, there is no right or wrong," Hotch expanded. "You simply accept the way the world works."
"The Romani are a closed society in many ways," said Reid. "These unsubs simply twisted and distorted traditions to become entirely insular."
And entirely geared towards murder.
Morgan agreed. "Abducting the children keeps the bloodline pure and killin' the parents means we eventually stop lookin' for 'em."
"It's a sound system," Pearce reflected. "And not getting caught reinforces the distorted worldview for the next generation."
The door opened and they looked up to see Sheriff Bates; there was a certain steeling of selves as they waited for what could be yet more bad news. "We've got a report of an RV on fire about twenty miles from here."
Aaron raised an eyebrow. They were starting afresh, probably realising that the local law enforcement were onto them. It gave the team a window, though, (albeit one that was rapidly closing) and they may have left behind more than they knew.
"Dave – you, Reid and Morgan go check it out," he instructed.
"I want to go, too," said Pearce unexpectedly, getting to her feet with the others. "There's something I want to check on about the glass."
She met Hotch's gaze from across the room: steady, determined and calm. There was an edge of a question there, too. He thought about it for the briefest of moments. It was weird for her to volunteer to attend a fire scene, given her history, but she seemed to have more of a handle on the 'ritual' side of things this time out – and her reference to the glass, along with her earlier warning about dismissing folk magic, made his mind up for him.
"Right," he said, and she joined her fellow agents as they hurried out of the door. "Garcia, I need you to digitally alter Kathy Gray's photograph to simulate what she would look like today."
If there was a chance the family were still in the area, that could give them the hook they needed to bring them in.
"Consider it simulated."
0o0
As they pulled up to the scene of the RV fire there were three or four fire fighters and cops being sick in the bushes.
"Bad one?" Rossi asked the Sheriff, who had got there five minutes before so as to be able to brief them.
"No – no bodies," said the Sheriff, which surprised Spencer. "Think there's a bug goin' round."
He set off towards the RV without a second thought, leaving four agents who were used to thinking in terms of biological threats and health hazards behind him, sharing wary glances.
"It could just be a bug," said Rossi slowly.
"We should call it in, even if we only have a shred of doubt," Pearce pointed out.
Morgan looked around, his face a little pinched. "We lose these guys now, we lose them forever," he said. "We can't afford to slow this down right now."
"We wait and see if we start feeling sick," said Rossi, with some finality, and the four of them moved forward without hesitation, fully accepting the potential risks.
"It was started less than an hour ago," said Bates, running his flashlight over the body of the RV. "So they can't be far."
The mobile home was pretty much just a shell now, the burnt innards of which had been dragged outside to slow the fire down. The acrid stench of hot metal and burning plastic filled the air. Reid glanced at Pearce, aware of what the assault on the senses might be raising in her memory, but she looked resolute – if a little pale – so he turned his attention back to the RV.
There was something weird about it, but he couldn't put his finger on it – like a note out of place in a familiar song. He fought the urge to scratch the back of his neck; he didn't want to have to get out a new pair of gloves already.
Morgan bent to stir the remains with a gloved hand. "Looks like they left almost everything."
Suddenly, and he didn't quite know how he knew, Pearce stopped dead in her tracks. It made him clench his fists, and he realised, as he sent her a look along his shoulder, that something here was making his skin crawl.
Is this what happened to those other guys? He thought.
He shot Pearce a questioning look, wondering if she could feel it too. It was a fair bet that she could, the more he looked at her: her fists were clenched, too her knuckles showing white even through the blue of the gloves. She shivered.
Don't touch anything, she mouthed, noticing his attention, and he gave her the slightest of nods.
He wasn't about to – not without gloves, anyway. It felt like a thousand ants were crawling over his skin; the mad urge to brush them all off was building inside him, but he pushed it down. It was beginning to really get on his nerves.
Something that triggers an instinct, he thought.
"They got the girl they wanted. They're startin' over," Rossi guessed.
"Look at the clothes," said Morgan, picking one up. In Spencer's peripheral vision, Pearce visibly flinched, but no one commented.
At least he's wearing gloves, Spencer thought.
"Some still have the store's sensors on 'em."
"So how'd they get 'em past the security scanners?" Bates asked.
"Tin foil," Spencer explained, nudging some with the tip of his boot.
"Excuse me?"
Spencer glanced up at the Sheriff just in time to catch the end of Pearce's coat disappearing around the far side of the RV.
"Um… Kate Hale remembers being locked in a closet surrounded by clothing and tin foil, he said," hoping he was giving her the time she needed to do something about the thing that was rapidly and insistently climbing up his spine.
A forensic technician who had been processing some of the burnt material from the RV put his tools down rather quickly and rushed off to be sick. Rossi watched her go, frowning, before follows to check on her.
"Shoplifters use tin foil to line their bags and negate security alarms," Morgan explained.
"It also explains the bells she heard," said Spencer, spotting one. He picked it up with a gloved hand before remembering he shouldn't and dropped it back on the pile. "Katie said she heard the sound of bells, followed directly by the father talking to the son. I think that's probably what the mannequin's for."
Well, in for a penny, in for a pound, he thought, and picked up a scorched articulated dummy arm.
"The School of the Seven Bells…"
Sheriff Bates was watching him, perplexed. "You lost me."
"You dress a mannequin, you line a suit with seven bells," Morgan explained and Bates began to nod in understanding. "If you can pick his pocket without a bell ringing you're ready to work a crowd."
"So we know how they made their money," said Bates.
"That's not all we know," said Rossi, coming back. "You got a lot of sick guys today."
"I told you, it's a bug. "
"Might be worth checkin' for dangerous substances," said Morgan, shifting uncomfortably. "Gotta admit, I don't feel great."
"Yeah…" Spencer agreed, hoping that whatever Pearce was doing, she would do it soon. He was beginning to feel faintly nauseous himself.
"I'll have a word with the fire crew," suggested Rossi, departing before the Sheriff could stop him.
"These unsubs are guided entirely by ritual," Spencer reflected. "They abducted Evelyn Robelard in an area that they knew was swarming with police and the FBI . They had to. They can't deviate."
"We also know they're starting over," Morgan put in. "Which means they're gonna need some money. Where's the closest shopping mall?"
Bates thought for a moment. "'Bout fifteen miles from here."
Morgan's cell was already out of his pocket. "Hotch, we know where they're goin'."
All at once, the feeling of barely controlled distress left him and Spencer looked up.
She must've killed whatever was set up to do this to us, he thought.
Curious, he walked around the body of the RV, where to his surprise, Pearce was having an argument on her phone.
"No, I really can't get away. Yes, I know – but that's –"
Maybe she didn't do anything and it just wore off on its own, he thought, but then she looked up and noticed him and he got a good look at her eyes.
Her pupils were insanely wide – almost the whole of her iris was gone, leaving only a narrow band of blue, made all the more unsettling by the contrast with the black. The quality of the black was strange, too, as if it held much more depth than just the cavity inside her eyeball.
Spencer swallowed.
She didn't appear to have noticed his reaction, however, since whomever had called her was clearly doing a good job of irritating the hell out of her.
"No, I'm not deliberately putting you off!" she snapped, beginning to lose her temper. She rolled her eyes at Spencer, which was particularly weird given how odd they looked. "That's all very well, but I'm afraid tracing a missing ten year old whose parents have just been murdered rather takes priority over a social engagement I didn't agree to come to in the first place. Goodbye." She hung up and shoved her cell back in her pocket, clearly annoyed. "Some people!" she grumbled, and met his gaze. "Troy's family," she explained.
So that's 'Lily's' real name.
"Families are tricky," he found himself saying.
"You're right there." She sighed heavily. "Did it work, by the way?"
"What?" he asked, and then realised she was referring to the lack of phantom ants. "Oh, yeah. Well, I feel less… crowded at least."
"Good." She looked at the RV. "Nasty little thing, that was, but not permanently damaging."
She made a move towards the front of the RV, and suddenly Spencer was seized by the notion that people in law enforcement might make their own minds up about a pupil size like that.
"Um, Pearce – your – your eyes," he said, catching her elbow.
"My…" she met his worried gaze and seemed to understand. "Oh, have they gone weird?"
He nodded mutely. It was still kind of freaking him out – like someone had replaced her normal, human eyes, with something disproportionate, that a manga or anime character might have.
"Ah bollocks, I thought I'd be okay." She grimaced. "I… had to look for the source of it and sometimes the place I have to look – messes with my eyes."
Spencer swallowed. He'd read about it, back when they'd been fast friends and he'd wanted to know everything about her – and about her weird skills.
"Liminal space," he said, and saw her weird, overly dark eyes widen slightly.
"Yes, that's what Lemuel Grey calls it," she said, surprised.
They regarded one another for a moment, like strangers who had suddenly found common ground.
Or old friends who had remembered what it was like not to be enemies anymore, he thought.
Belatedly, he realised he was still holding onto her elbow and dropped his hand.
"Um, maybe just try to keep your gaze low until we get back in the SUV," he suggested, eliciting the faintest of smiles.
She looked away and then back again, and gave him a look that was equal parts amusement and frustration (and maybe the slightest hint of affection), her head tilted to one side.
"You know, that scarf really suits you," she said, to his utter confusion, and then shook her head (possibly at herself). "Come on," she said, the smile on her face turning rather more humourless. "Bad guys to catch."
And with that she strode off around the side of the RV, leaving him behind her, entirely baffled.
"Guys," said Morgan, when Spencer had convinced his feet to start moving. "Just got a call from Hotch – they got her."
"Evelyn Robelard?" Pearce asked hopefully; Spencer noticed she had pulled her fringe down over her eyes a little to conceal them.
"Kathy Gray. They caught her shoplifting at the mall."
Pearce looked up sharply, then immediately at Spencer. "Now, is it just me," she said, "or does that feel way too easy?"
