Word going around the office at Quantico said that our very own Jason Gideon had gotten up close and personal with the stammering convenience store clerk, also known as the Footpath Killer. And he'd gotten away with his life by telling the man the reason why he stutters. And while a bunch of our co-workers were asking him how it went down, I found myself in Aaron Hotchner's office. He'd pulled me away from my desk to have a chat. We'd barely had a chance to talk one-one-one since he'd offered me the job, so I hoped he only had nice things to say.
"How do you think you're adjusting to the new position, McCarthy?" he asked me.
"I like it," I told him. "It's a change, but definitely a welcome one. Although sometimes I find that I have doubts."
"About what?"
"I dunno," I shrugged. "If I'm good enough to be here with you guys. Negotiations I can do. I mean, I learned from the best. I've seen David Rossi speak, I've read his books, I took classes all but based on him and his work. I was confident in the CNU, but here not as much. Some days I feel good, but other days…"
"Two things, McCarthy: One, you're still relatively new. It'll come to you just as negotiations did. I wouldn't have hired you if I didn't have faith in your abilities. Two, Rossi also started the BAU with Gideon. If he could make the transition, let alone create a unit devoted to it, you can do it too," Hotch told me.
"Thanks, Hotch," I smiled. "I feel better now."
"And if you're still having doubts and feel the burning need for more reassurance, I have Dave's personal number. I can get him in contact with you," he added. "I'm sure he'd be glad to talk with you."
I couldn't hold back the grin that took over my face. The agent we were speaking of was a legend in both hostage negotiations and profiling, and he was also one of my personal heroes. I had always hoped to meet him (well, other than a quick, "hi, your work has meant so much to me, please sign this to Hunter McCarthy" at a book signing), but he had retired early. Part of me also hoped he'd come back to the BAU someday. I would love to get inside his head.
"My only concern going forward is that your doubts might cloud your judgment. I can't have you out in the field if you're going to be constantly second-guessing yourself," Hotch brought me back to reality.
"Of course," I nodded. "Maybe I'm just a little intimidated by Gideon."
"He tends to have that effect on people," Hotch bounced his eyebrows and I smirked. "Don't let it get to you. You are an asset to this team. And you need to start believing that."
"Thank you, sir."
I stood up just as a courier came in with a small package for Hotch. I bowed out and traveled down the stairs to my desk where I had a half-finished case report waiting for me on my computer.
"Reid, are you playing chess by yourself?" I asked, grinning at the doctor at the desk across from me. He seemed to have a travel-sized version of the game. "I've never been patient enough to figure out how to play. I'd rather play Phase-10 or something."
"I can teach you some time, i-if you like," Reid offered.
"I might take you up on that," I smiled. "But don't get mad if I just fool around with the horse pieces."
"They're actually called knights."
"Aha," I nodded slowly. "Maybe I'm not quite ready, then."
Morgan snickered from his desk not too far away. "What did Hotch want?"
"He wanted to tell me that he was going to cut everyone from the unit except me because I'm so incredible at this job," I deadpanned.
Before Morgan could press me for more details, Gideon came down from his office and stopped by Reid's desk, moving a piece on the board. "Check. Checkmate in three moves," he said, sauntering off.
"…What?" Reid furrowed his brow, showing a rare sign of confusion. He looked as though his life had gone crashing down in front of him.
"You know, you'll beat him when you start learning," Morgan leaned back in his swivel chair.
"Learning what?" Reid asked.
Morgan looked back at his office work. "To think outside of the box."
"Question for you," Elle asked as she descended the stairs. She had just exited Gideon's office, no doubt after asking him about the aforementioned stammering convenience store clerk.
"Shoot," I turned to her.
"The Footpath Killer. Why did he stutter?" she came to sit on the desk beside me.
"Come on, Elle, we've all asked him and he won't say," Morgan leaned back again.
"He wants us to figure it out, the bastard," I added, picking up the blue and green Koosh ball on my desk. I absentmindedly began to play with the rubber filaments.
"Okay. I'm up for a challenge," Elle smirked.
"Good," said one of the prettiest and nicest blonde women I'd ever met, "because these go to you. Special Agent Jennifer Jareau, or JJ, if you like," JJ put her stack of files down on the desk and shook Elle's hand.
"Elle," the other replied.
"Greenaway—highest number of solved cases in Seattle three years running. Specialty in sex offender cases," JJ recited.
Elle paused. "Not bad."
"Well, I'm the Unit Liaison," JJ began to walk up the stairs, but kept talking. "My specialty is untangling bureaucratic knots. You'll probably be talking to me a lot. My door's always open. Mostly because I'm never in my office, so just call me on my cell, okay? We'll talk."
JJ crossed paths with a fast-paced Hotch who was heading to the bullpen. They exchanged words, but I couldn't hear them.
"BAU team, can you meet me in the conference room, please?" Hotch called out to us, holding a tape in his hand. "I need to show you something."
I put the Koosh ball down, got up from my desk, and led the way up the stairs to follow Hotch. I grabbed one of the swivel chairs and sat around the table. As soon as everyone else had joined us, Hotch began to explain.
"This is from the Phoenix office. Bradshaw College in Tempe, six fires in seven months," he said.
"Who recorded it?" Gideon asked.
"Uh, a student with a digital camcorder," JJ told him. "He was watching a fire in the building across from their dorm. The other person you'll see is his roommate, twenty year-old Matthew Rowland." She grabbed a remote and turned on the large screen on one of the walls.
"What? This is crazy," said a young man's voice as the camera zoomed in on a fire blazing from across the way. "Hey, Matt, get over here. You've gotta see this, the building's on fire."
"Bro, you gettin' this?" another boy said excitedly, popping his head in front of the camera.
"Is that the kid?" Gideon wondered.
"Yeah, that's him," Hotch spoke over more dialogue between the boys.
"Ah, relax, man. There's always fires during rush week," the one holding the camera said. He was focusing on Matthew's face.
"Yeah, but that's pretty big," Matthew began to move. "Dude, over here. Check this out." He bent over by their door to see a shiny substance pouring in from underneath it.
"What is it?"
"I don't know, but it's comin' underneath the door."
"Is someone in the hallway?"
The door handle turned a few times.
"Hey, someone's trying to get in," Matthew said.
"Hey, man, you should get away from there—"
"Whoa!"
A clear liquid spilled in from under the doorway.
"Oh my God," said the cameraman.
"It smells like gas," Matthew commented a split second before his body lit up in flames. I winced. I didn't particularly enjoy fire. "Oh, God! GOD! OH MY GOD! OH MY GOD, AAH!" The camera dropped and Matthew threw himself to the floor. The cameraman frantically tried to extinguish the flames with a blanket, to no avail. "AAH, PUT ME OUT! OH MY GOD! OH GOD! HELP!"
"There are two common stressors for a serial arsonist," Reid said, setting up his travel-sized chessboard on the jet. He and I were sitting on the same side of a table in padded swiveling chairs.
"Loss of job and loss of love," I filled in, opening up my case file.
"When was the first fire set?" Morgan asked from his chair further past our table.
"March. Uh, the next one was in May," Hotch told him, flicking through his own file as he sat at a two-person table near Morgan. "And the third one wasn't until September. Then two weeks later there were three in one night."
"He's speeding up. Fires are closer together," Gideon pointed out. He was sitting across from Hotch.
"Hey, Reid, you got a statistic on arsonists?" Morgan asked, putting together a spreadsheet.
"Eighty-two percent are white males between seventeen and twenty-seven," the genius said as he started to play chess. "Female arsonists are far less-likely, their motive typically being revenge."
"Sounds like our boy's a student," I commented.
"Oh, don't be so sure," Gideon looked at me, his glasses very far down his nose. "You rely too much on precedent, you don't allow for the unexpected."
I nodded. That sounded like advice I'd take to my grave.
"If he went from one fire to setting one fire to three in two weeks' time…" Gideon continued.
"Rapid escalation," Hotch said.
"He's gone from the power to damage a building to something far more satisfying—the power over life and death. Who're we talking to first?"
"Dean of Students, Ellen Turner."
I pulled the key out of the ignition and slid out from behind the wheel of the Chevy Suburban. We had just pulled up at Bradshaw College.
"No badges," Gideon ordered, heading down a small flight of stairs. "I don't wanna satisfy the unsub's need for attention by letting him know we've got the FBI here. Try not to look official."
Now that I was in the shade, I slid my aviators up onto my head and glanced down at my vertically striped blouse and slacks. Gideon turned and looked back at us. Elle, Morgan, and Hotch were wearing suits with their black sunglasses. Reid was wearing a short-sleeved button-up and tie. None of us looked nearly as casual as Gideon.
"Try to look less official," he corrected himself, entering the school.
"Obviously I'd rather be meeting you under different circumstances," Ellen Turner said, showing us to the latest crime scene. "This is Fire Inspector Zhang," she gestured to the Asian man walking with us.
"This morning the chemistry department reported several bottles of highly flammable chemicals missing," he told us.
"I'm prepared to evacuate this campus," Ellen remarked as Gideon and Hotch held a pair of double doors open for her. "Thank you."
"Uh, that brings with it its own problems," Hotch said.
"You might evacuate the arsonist as well," Gideon pointed out.
"Then the case goes unsolved. The campus is reopened, but the fires start up again," Elle added.
"Wait, Hotch, Gideon, hold on a second," Morgan said, his file open in his hands. We all stopped in the middle of the lobby we were in. Morgan looked at Zhang. "You said the chemicals were missing today."
"Uh-huh," Zhang nodded.
"It says here that one of the previous fires was set with diesel fuel that disappeared from the grounds keeping facility. How long after it disappeared was the fire was set?" Morgan asked.
"One day," Ellen said.
Gideon and Hotch stepped away from us, leaving Ellen staring back at them.
Hotch, Reid, and I arrived on Matthew's floor and found the charred entryway of his room. What was left of the door was wrapped in police tape. Reid pulled it off and I stepped inside after him.
"Door was locked," Hotch commented, leaning against the jamb.
"Matthew Rowland and his roommate watched as the doorknob turned against the lock," Reid crossed his arms.
"But the unsub couldn't get in," I said.
"So he pours the accelerant into the room from the hallway," Reid continued.
"Which means he couldn't see the fire," Hotch furrowed his dark brow.
"But he could hear Matthew Rowling screaming."
"Yeah, but not for long. He would've left quickly."
"To avoid being spotted," I took my sunglasses off the top of my head and clipped them in the neckline of my blouse. I gathered my long hair into my hands and started to braid it. It was hot in Arizona.
"It doesn't make sense," Hotch came inside.
"Pyromania as a mental disorder may just be a simple myth, but we do know from precedent that serial arsonists derive pleasure from pathological fire-setting," Reid pointed out.
"Sex and power," I nodded, chewing the corner of my lip. Something wasn't adding up. "But a serial arsonist wouldn't just set a fire and walk away."
"He needs to experience it," Hotch said.
"So why would he set a fire he couldn't watch?" Reid wondered.
"They turned the water off just before the fire," Zhang told us, opening a cardboard box on the table in the small room we were all standing in. "The last three were set with these. Two devices, simultaneous ignition."
I peered over Elle's shoulder and looked at said devices. They were blue and mangled. One of them even looked like a GameCube controller, but they were actually road flares.
"There was no device used on Matthew Rowland," Gideon stood up. "Unsub set that one manually?" He reached into his breast pocket and pulled out his wire-rim glasses.
"He wanted to be there, to enjoy the kid's death," Morgan theorized.
"Not necessarily," Hotch said.
"Well, if the target was Matthew Rowland, then why set the other two fires?" Elle asked.
"Motives for arson are relatively simple. There's vandalism, crime concealment, political statement, profit…" Reid explained.
"And revenge," Hotch added.
"We interviewed Matthew Rowland's roommate. He said Matthew was very well-liked," Zhang said. "No reason for revenge."
"What about vandalism?" Ellen suggested.
"No, the fires are too sophisticated. And if he's trying to make a political statement, he's not being too clear about it," I told her.
Gideon looked at me from over the glasses on the tip of his nose. I couldn't tell if he was displeased with my statement or if he was agreeing with it. But I wasn't going to let this intimidate me. Not after that talk with Hotch.
"There's an underlying strategy to this case," he said, picking up one of the objects in the box. "Matthew, firefighters, injured victims. To the unsub, they're not people. They're—"
"They're objects," Hotch said.
"More like, uh—"
"Chess pieces," Reid interjected. Gideon looked up at him and tossed the object back into the box.
I exited the building we had set up shop in, Morgan and Elle in front of me. We were about to meet Gideon while he talked to Ellen. I thought I could faintly hear the sound of an alarm coming from that particular building. I looked up and saw smoke pouring out of the roof. Students were running down the exterior stairs in panic. The unsub had struck again.
God, I really hated fire.
Morgan, Elle, and I rushed down the remaining stairs and ran across the campus. The former football star raced ahead, yelling for the students to get out of the way, leaving Elle and me to direct them away from the building. Morgan even dared go into the building to help out. I looked around to see if I could find other people on our team. I found Hotch running over the quad. But what was really strange was that I saw Ellen by herself.
"Where's Gideon?" I turned to Elle.
An ambulance drove up to the building. Above the vehicle I could see Morgan dragging the agent in question out onto the stairs. Gideon fought him off, clearly reluctant to leave. But Morgan was stronger than him (and most people). He restrained Gideon against the railing, his forearm against the older man's throat for a moment.
"He might be watching," Hotch stepped over, just as Reid had jogged nearby too. Hotch handed her a camera. "Elle, take pictures—as many as you can."
"You got it," she said, following his orders and aiming the camera at the students.
I took my aviators out of my shirt and put them on my face. I began to scan the crowd. I looked at all the men and tried to pinpoint who was the least frightened by this event, or who might have even been enjoying it. And in looking around I saw that everyone else on our team was doing this as well. Even the sooty Gideon leaning against the brick wall of the building.
Later that night we found out that the fire had claimed the life of a professor, and Gideon had apparently tried in vain to save him when Morgan pulled him away. We ordered police and security to interview everyone who had been in the building and were now strongly considering evacuating the school, even though it might accelerate the unsub's timeline.
We all sat in the room we were working out of, looking over the pictures Elle took. Both Gideon and Morgan had changed into different shirts—a brown tee for Gideon and a light gray polo for Morgan. Hotch was not looking very hopeful.
"We've been at this all night and we've got nothin'," Morgan lamented, pacing around the room. He picked up one of the pictures on the table. "Look at these expressions." He put it down again. "We got fear, a touch of horror, even a little bit of panic. Where's the guy gettin' off?"
"When asked about his motives, Peter Dinsdale said, 'I am devoted to fire. Fire is my master'," Reid said.
"Okay, so who's our boy's master?" Morgan asked, stepping over to the bulletin board. "Ten-thousand plus students," he pulled out a lighter from his pocket and stared at the board as if he were imagining himself in the quad with his lighter. Then he turned around. "And one has a serious fascination with fire."
"Fire-starting is one third of the homicidal triad," I mentioned as he put out the lighter. "An early predictor of adult dissociative criminal behavior. If we looked into his childhood, we'd probably find all three. Bedwetting and cruelty to animals."
"Absent or abusive father, trouble with the opposite sex, chronic low self-esteem," Gideon rubbed at his face. "M.O. would be dynamic; evolving, as the fire setting escalates, they thrive on panic, fear. It's just the standard profile of a serial arsonist."
"Based on hundreds of interviews," Reid supported that claim.
"Based on precedent," Morgan added from the chair he was now sitting in.
"Everything the unsub should be, according to research," Elle said.
"We're off the mark," Hotch said in a soft voice.
"Because of two missing elements," Gideon responded.
"Sex and power," Morgan waved his hand that was holding the lighter. "The two motives that drive a serial arsonist."
"And without 'em, we do not have a profile."
While we'd been talking, a student from the chemistry club or something had spoken to Ellen. He'd said that they knew how the unsub committed the crimes and could help out. I went with Hotch and Reid to go to their lab. On the way over, Reid was a few steps ahead, leaving Hotch and me to walk stride-by-stride.
"I hope I don't seem patronizing when I tell you that I'm proud of you," he said in a low voice.
The corners of my mouth curled upwards into a tiny smile. "No, I appreciate it. Thank you."
"Especially considering your fear of fire."
I gulped, not wanting to talk about it. "I, uh, don't know if I'd really consider it a fear, per se. More like an aversion to it. For understandable reasons, of course."
"Of course. But I applaud you for not letting it get in the way of the investigation," Hotch continued.
"Please, Hotch," I smirked at him, putting my hand on his shoulder. "I'm a professional. I leave my baggage at the door."
At least, I try to.
We entered the lab after Reid and met with Zhang. I stood with the latter near the wall. Reid stood behind a table at the head of the room. There were only four students in there—three girls and the boy who spoke to Ellen, Jeremy.
"Reid," Hotch went over to the young doctor, who was fiddling around with some equipment. "Since you're more their age, why don't you do the talking?"
Reid seemed taken aback. Public speaking wasn't exactly his strong suit. But when Hotch came to stand next to me, Reid began talking.
"Ahem. Uh, h-h-hi, guys. My name's, uh, S-Dr. Spencer Reid. I'm a, uh, h-agent with the BAU—the Behavioral Analysis Unit of the FBI," he began step out from behind the desk, "which, um, i-it used to be called BSU, the Behavioral Science Unit, but not anymore. They changed it to the BAU. Um, it's part of the NCAVC—the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime—which is also part of this thing called the CIRG—the, uh, Critical Incident Response Group—"
I exchanged glances with Hotch, who stepped forward in order to cut off our rambling teammate.
"What he's trying to say is we'd love to know how you can help us."
I smiled at Reid. He looked a little sheepish, holding a lightbulb in his pale hands. Reid was a sweetheart, if not a little socially awkward. But I guess that's what you get when you're a child prodigy.
Jeremy stood up. "May I, please?" He gestured to the lightbulb, which Reid gave to him. "Thank you. See this?" He held up the bulb so we could see it, pointing at it. "Drill a hole in the side, fill it with gasoline or whatever's good and flammable. Turn the light on. Boom."
Reid looked at Jeremy, then at me, then at Hotch.
"That is what went down, didn't it?"
"This stuff's all over the 'net," piped up the girl in the very back. She snickered. "Wanna know how to make a Molotov cocktail that sets itself on fire? Potassium, sulfur…and normal sugar." The girl appeared to be amused, holding up three fingers. "Sugar-sugar, which is—"
"Not exactly plutonium," Jeremy smirked, just as the girl rotated a ring on her finger a few times. "You could get the stuff anywhere."
"Sugar from the supermarket," the girl continued. There was something kind of strange about her.
"But you don't need to be a chem major to know that," I chewed my lip.
"Do you think it's a chem student?" Zhang asked her.
"You wanna know what I think?" Jeremy said with a smile on his face. He slowly ambled towards us. "I think," he held the lightbulb up to his forehead, "it would be a good time to take the semester off." He pressed the object into Reid's chest.
I raised a brow. Was that a warning?
"Hold on," Jeremy said after Hotch tried to press a button in the elevator. He reached his key out and unlocked a compartment on the panel. "You need a key to get it movin' after ten PM."
"So what are you still doin' here?" Hotch asked him. I could feel a little suspicion coming from him.
"Oh, I can't leave. We've all got projects," he scoffed. "You know how to solve the three body problem?"
I noticed Reid nodding his head beside me.
"Computing the mutual gravitational interaction between the earth, sun, and moon?"
Hotch looked back at Reid, who was still nodding.
"Charon. I do this for Charon," said the digitally-altered raspy voice on the recording. Someone had left this on our tip hotline.
"Play it again," Gideon requested softly.
"The call came from the office right next to Wallace's five minutes before the fire was started," Morgan said, referring to the professor who was killed.
Gideon closed his eyes. "Play it again."
"Charon. I do this for Charon."
"Again, louder."
Morgan stared at Gideon as he adjusted the sound on the speaker and turned it so it would face him.
"Charon. I do this for Charon."
"What is it?" Hotch asked.
"I'm not sure, somethin' about it," Gideon muttered, his eyes still shut tightly.
"Is he saying Karen?" I furrowed my brow.
"Is this tape clean?" Hotch asked Morgan.
We split up shortly afterward. Morgan video-called Garcia and asked for her help in cleaning up the recording. Then he met up with Elle and Ellen. I, meanwhile, was out on the quad with Gideon and Reid. The latter was sitting under a shady tree, while Gideon paced. I gnawed on the inside of my cheek, watching as some students packed up theirs and their parents' cars and drove off.
"What if the unsub is one of the students leaving?" Reid asked.
"No, he's not done yet," Gideon said confidently. "He's not goin' anywhere. Keep thinkin'."
I crossed my arms over my blouse-clad chest, grasping my opposite shoulders, tucking in my elbows. I was scanning the students from behind my sunglasses.
"You mean out-outside the box?" Reid raised his eyebrows. "'s…That's what Morgan's always telling me. He says that's why I can never beat you at chess."
"Well, he's probably right," Gideon grinned, throwing his hands out to the side.
Reid chuckled silently. "But, I mean, in this situation, what exactly is the box?"
"What do you think, McCarthy?" Gideon turned to me.
"The standard profile of a serial arsonist," I cocked a brow.
"Correct. If everything you know goes in the box, what's left?"
"What you don't know," Reid answered.
"The unknown," I wiggled my fingers ominously.
"Sometimes you have to get creative. Even if you think it's utterly unlikely, you have to think of things nobody else thought of," Gideon said.
"'You rely too much on precedent, you don't allow for the unexpected'," I echoed his words from the jet. Gideon gave me what I believe amounts to half of a smile.
"Like a stutter," Reid looked up at him.
"Yeah, exactly," he continued pacing.
Reid and I went back inside, Gideon deciding to look inside one of the academic buildings. The doctor and I met up with Morgan inside our make-shift office room. He was on the phone with Garcia, using a douchey earpiece.
"…Garcia, what the hell is 'ka-rone'?" he asked as I stared at our whiteboard on the easel. Morgan chuckled at something she said. "Most definitely, sweetness—with Reid."
I cocked my head, unsure if I even wanted to know what Garcia would most definitely be doing with Reid.
"Bye. Hey, Reid," Morgan called over to said doctor, who was further back in the room than me. "Garcia says it's not Karen, it's actually somethin' more like—"
"Charon," Gideon jogged into the room.
"Charon?" Reid repeated.
"'Charon. I do it because of Charon'."
"It's Hebrew."
"It's God's burning anger."
"Yeah."
"So the motive is now religious?" I asked.
"'Scuse me," Gideon grabbed my elbows and gently pushed me away from the whiteboard so he could start scribbling things down.
"Sorry," I mumbled, noticing that Elle and Hotch had spilled into the room as well.
"Well, you know, i-in a lot of religions, God is related to fire," Reid pointed out.
"Well, Agni is fire in Hinduism," Hotch said. Elle contributed something, but I couldn't make it out. "And the Jews see God as a pillar of fire, and Christians worship God as a consuming fire."
"Okay, so we're looking for a theology major. Maybe he's punishing the other students for their sins," Morgan suggested.
Elle tossed Reid what looked like a plastic container with salad in it.
"I don't want this," he put it on the table.
"What's the most sinful place on campus?" I asked.
"Come on, Mick, when I was in college that was everywhere," Morgan held his arms out in a W-shape.
"Fair enough," I bounced my eyebrows, remembering my days as a criminal justice major.
"A fraternity?" Hotch proposed.
"A campus bar?" Elle threw-out.
"No, 'cause that's not consistent with the previous target," I gnawed on the inside of my check again—I know, bad habits.
"What about the idea of baptism by fire?" Morgan said. "Aren't we all supposed to be tested through fire in Revelations?"
"Look, it's good, it's good," Gideon turned away from the whiteboard. "But let's please do not jump to conclusions. Religion might be a part of it, but it's not necessarily the prime compulsion."
"Gideon, rush to conclusions, jump to conclusions, who cares?"
"We are running out of time," Elle said over him.
"Compulsion," Reid started to rub his chin. But I seemed to be the only one who heard him.
Reid had thought outside of the box and discovered a pattern of threes involving the fires and their victims. He had spoken to Hotch and Gideon about it, and the former had narrowed it down to a surprising conclusion.
It was the girl from the chemistry meeting, Clara Hayes.
"Okay, got it," Morgan hung up his phone as Elle and I followed him down the stairs of the building, two local officers in tow. "Her apartment's off-campus."
"But how is he sure it's this girl?" Elle asked.
"You didn't see her," I told her. "She had a ring on her finger and she kept turning it in intervals of three. She was also really happy to be talking about Molotov cocktails. They can be made with three ingredients and when she told us them, she said the last one three times."
The local cops led us to Clara's apartment and they opened the door to find a creepy site. We lowered our Glocks down once we saw that it was empty. Her room was lit with candles and her walls were covered with handwritten Bible passages about, you guessed it, fire.
"No one in here," one of the officers said, looking out one of her windows, which had a beaded shade over it. He gestured to us to come in with his head. "Clear."
"Oh, you gotta be kiddin' me," Morgan muttered under his breath.
On further inspection, the walls also had pictures of fires on them. In fact, her walls were papered with her pictures and messages. And by papered I mean they were small pieces of paper overlapping each other, like fish scales.
"OCD? I'm thinkin' more like OMG," he added.
"OMG?" Elle asked.
"Oh my God," I translated.
Elle stepped forward and read a particular quote. "'A fire is kindled in my anger and shall burn into the lowest hell', Deuteronomy."
"'And again the fire of Heaven came down and killed them all'." Morgan read a different quote.
I looked down and saw that Clara had a picture of Thích Quảng Đức, the Buddhist monk who famously set himself on fire as a protest. Then I looked up at the wall and saw a drawing of Charon, a fiery spirt, ferrying souls to the underworld.
"'I do this for Charon'," I pointed at the picture. "There's the sucker right there. The Greek mythological ferryman of the dead. Basically Hades' river-bitch."
"It's also the name of Pluto's only moon," Morgan said. He started to look at more of her quotes. "Paradise Lost. 'Moloch, horrid king, besmeared with blood of human sacrifice and parents' tears'."
Morgan contacted Reid and asked him about Moloch, then we were made privy to dirty details about Clara Hayes. She'd narrowly escaped a house fire when she was a teenager and her religious fanatic mother described it as a test from God, which exacerbated Clara's OCD. The icing on the cake? Her house was number three hundred and thirty-three.
"Hey, Morgan," Elle said.
"Hmm?" he grunted.
"You know what magical thinking is?" she asked.
"Obsessive thoughts," said the expert on obsessional crimes. "It's like a superstition. It controls them."
"Kinda like, 'step on a crack, break your mother's back'," Elle added.
"Except she actually believes it," Morgan said.
"God tested her with fire, and now when three threes show up around another person, God tells her to test them," I put my hands on my hips and exchanged glances with Morgan before he got another phone call. I was on the hunt for an indication of the next pattern of threes.
"Hey, Hotch, we're lookin', man. I don't think she would'a left behind a day planner that says, 'set next fire here' written in it," Morgan said.
Elle started to look around the room and went to a side doorway that was covered by long beads, just like the windows.
"Yeah—I underst—wait 'til you see this place."
"Uh, Morgan, McCarthy," Elle leaned back and gestured for us to come see.
"I'll call you back," Morgan hung up the phone and met us.
The beads were covering a walk-in closet filled with accelerants and Molotov cocktails.
"Hey, Gideon," I said into my cell phone after we evacuated the apartment and headed back to campus. Clara had shut down all the school elevators and was preparing for her next fire.
"I don't have a lot of time, McCarthy, make it fast," he said in a clipped voice. "We're going to find Clara."
"Perfect—that's what I need to talk to you about. Clara is likely a good person, someone who never wanted to do anyone any harm, like any other rational person. But there's nothing rational about Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. You can't reason with her because you can't reason with a physiological problem. She's not setting these fires because she wants to. She's setting them because she has to," I said quickly.
"What are you trying to say?" Gideon asked.
"Don't try to convince her to stop because you won't be able to."
Gideon was silent for a moment. "Thank you, McCarthy," he said before hanging up.
We arrived at campus and each took to investigating different buildings, running through them to see if we could find Clara and save her potential victims before anything happened to them. But we were each turning up nothing. Luckily, Hotch managed to get to Clara on the third floor of the science building, where she'd trapped her three teammates in an elevator and had sprayed them down with three accelerants. While Hotch tried to reason with her, against my advice, Gideon shot the girl in the leg and stopped her flare before it rolled into the elevator.
"You know, I figured it out," Elle said as she and Gideon filed into the jet. I had already settled onto the couch and was going to try to take a nap. "The stutter."
"You know why the Footpath Killer stuttered?" Gideon asked.
"When you and Hotch were talking earlier, that's when I got it. He said he was just trying to stall Clara."
"Right."
"Well, that's it, isn't it? The Footpath Killer. You were just trying to stall him. You said, 'I know why you stutter' because you were buying time. You were stalling. But you don't really know why he stuttered," she shook her head.
"I don't?" Gideon questioned softly.
"I looked it up. No one does."
"There are some theories about a neurological basis."
"But they're just theories," Elle leaned over the table she was sitting at. "What really happened in the convenience store?"
Gideon stared at her for a moment. "I'll tell you what I do know about a stutter: I know how to provoke one."
Hoping you guys are liking this!
I'm going to be skipping around a lot because I'm way too excited to get to Rossi
