A/N: This one might be a little rough, I'm also writing for NaNoWriMo 2011 this month and I pushed this piece out after I finished today's NaNo quota.


The whole team had broken the elements of the photocopied FBI file down between them to let everybody apply their individual specializations to it.

Gideon had the original profile in front of him, Prentiss was still reading the dissertation, and Morgan was looking unhappily at the victims. "The unsub's an omnivore. Men, women, black, white, Hispanic, he has no type, except they're all adults."

"These kills are not completely random, there's something in their lives that links these people and that is what draws the unsub to choose them. We find it, we find him." Gideon was sure of that.

Prentiss handed a page to Hotch. "Large chunks of the dissertation are plagiarized, I recognize sections of this from Rossi's older books and the ones you wrote recently."

Rossi took a look, leaning over Hotch. "Reid made note of that in the original case, they referenced the entire text against school records across the country. The only match on the text was a doctoral student at UCLA, but the name ended up being false and there weren't records anywhere else."

Morgan lined up coroner's photographs of the victims, both the bodies found in Roanoke and the bodies from Tallahassee. "A ghost. One who traveled 500 miles just to get the BAU's attention again."

Reminding them of their presence, Ada and Karen said it at the same time. "531 miles."

JJ and Garcia looked at the twins at the same time. JJ couldn't help herself. "You guys really did steal your dad's brain when you were born, didn't you?"

Ada thought a moment and nodded her head up and down. "Can we help you?"

Morgan tried to hide the gruesome pictures. Disembowelment was up there on his 'horrible ways to die' list. "I don't think Reid would want you girls seeing these."

"Just let me examine the dissertation." Ada looked at Prentiss. "I'm working on a PhD right now, I can give some valuable insights on it, even if me and Karen don't have Dad's training."

After a moment, she handed the photocopied sheets to Ada. "What does it tell you if large chunks of it were plagiarized?"

Karen blinked. "Somebody's lazy, wants to appear smarter than he really is."

Rossi had his notebook open. "But what if you know the person reading it will recognize what you plagiarized, even before they check it. I think everybody here can agree Reid of all people would recognize excerpts from my books and Hotch's."

Morgan, Prentiss and JJ all three thought on that. It was JJ who said it first. "It's spite. The unsub didn't care whether or not Spence recognized it as blatant plagiarism."

Morgan argued back, giving a hand wave. "That doesn't make any sense. I do everything I can short of a banner ad in the newspaper to scream 'I am smarter than the FBI' and then I plagiarize the dissertation I send to the triple PhD unit chief?"

Prentiss moved her chair back. "But you plagiarize the books of two men that unit chief respects and looks up to, knowing enough about him to know that he'll recognize them instantly."

"That could be a coincidence. We don't know that this guy is doing this about Reid specifically. A lot of people would cite Rossi's books without knowing a damn thing about him or the team."

Gideon stopped the argument with one hand. "The dissertation was sent directly to Spencer, and the unsub traveled 531 miles to start killing again. It's about Reid and his team."

Garcia shivered. "The same agents he's got with him now. Oh my baby."

Harris was in the bathroom, he'd latched the stall shut behind him as he tried to get his heart to stop pounding. The first 100 days were always and absolutely unmitigated Hell, and he was only 60 days clean this time. This time. It hurt physically to think that. The longest he'd ever gone had been 170 days. One month to get it out of his system, and 20 weeks at the Academy.

That period of sobriety had gone done the toilet when he'd been posted in New York, right back at home, surrounded by the same people and same places he'd grown up in.

Cassidy and Branthau were organizing the latest information on the white board, while Lawrence and Reid established priorities.

The unit chief paced around the conference room they'd been given. "Something connects these seven people, we missed it in Tallahassee, but there has to be a connection."

Reid could name some vicious cases where the victimology was truly random. "Some people kill because they simply have to kill, Lawrence. Anyone will do."

"I know that, sir, but I don't feel that that is the case here. There's a connection."

Cooper and Delolly parked the SUV and got out to speak to the families of two of the victims from the mass grave. Cooper had a tablet computer in his hands as he read over the Roanoke detective's notes on the family. "Peter and Mary Ellen Bell, mother and father of Tracy and Tora Bell. They've already been informed and they know we were coming."

Delolly hugged herself, remembering their last encounter with this guy. She still didn't know why he'd left her alive, when he had butchered so many other people. The composite sketch off of her description had gotten them nowhere. "Right, we'll just ask some questions."

"Hey, lookit here." Cooper laid his computer on the driver's seat. "You're okay, aren't you?"

"Yeah, Cooper, I'm fine. I can handle this."

"Dana, we all know what happened. If you want to talk . . ."

"All of Quantico knows what happened. I don't want to talk about it, Arthur." She slammed the SUV's door and stomped off.

Cooper huffed out a breath and went after her. He knew Dana Delolly wasn't fine. Most of the legends of the BAU had gotten to kill the killer who had plagued them. Delolly's had gone free for seven years.

On the Bell's couch, Cooper took the lead. "We are so sorry for your loss, Mr. and Mrs. Bell, I can't imagine what you're going through."

Mary Ellen Bell dabbed at her eyes with a tissue. "Well, it's, not as bad as it could be. The girls had been missing for some time, we, we knew the odds of them still being alive weren't good, I guess I already knew months ago my girls were dead."

She put her head in her hands and started to sob into the tissue while her husband put an arm around her shaking shoulders. Peter Bell looked helpless with what to do. "Anything we can do to help you and your team, Agent Cooper, we will. What do you need to know?"

Delolly stepped in. "Lifestyle, interests, friends, anything about your daughters. Something in their life made this man target them, and when we find out what, we've got him."

"They were students, model students at college. They were both so bright, Tracy was going to be a lawyer and Tora was studying literature, she wanted to write." Peter Bell stopped to collect himself.

Mary Ellen found enough of her voice to speak up. "They both had boyfriends, they were very popular but they were good girls, always careful and respected themselves." She started crying immediately again. "They were so careful, how could this happen?"

Delolly tried to comfort the mother. "Sometimes the world isn't fair, and no matter how cautious you are, horrible things happen. You can have a black belt in three martial arts and carry a gun,"

Cooper tried to make eye contact to stop her from talking as she continued.

"But even if you do everything right, terrible things still happen."

Mary Ellen looked up. "You? You were? But why did he kill my girls and not you?"

Cooper wanted to facepalm as the woman started sobbing again.

"I wish I knew, Mrs. Bell."

Harris was looking at the board, while Branthau worked on the geographical profile. "Wish to hell we'd borrowed Bellamy instead of Cassidy."

Harris blinked at his friend. "You're a lot better geographer than Bellamy, and you're really good with maps, like so much better than he is."

Branthau shoved two pushpins into the board, marking where two victims had been grabbed and a different color pin for the mass grave. "You can quit flattering me now. You okay?"

Harris nodded weakly. "I can do this."

"Coroner's and crime scene photos are on the other board. You were in the bathroom a long time, man."

Did everybody know? He shivered again. Yes, they did. Sometimes he hated his teammates.

"I'm fine." Harris walked over to the crime scene photos. "You would know if I did anything because I wouldn't look like hell right now."

Branthau looked up and heaved a breath. "I hate to say this, but I can't make many conclusions until he dumps another body. The abduction sites are spread out all over the city, and they go back years. He moved here almost immediately after we didn't get him in Florida."

Reid walked in to check on the pair. "Then why did he wait this long to let the grave be found?"

Harris looked closer at the pictures. "They're in different states of decay, buried at different times over the past five years. How was the grave found, sir?"

"Anonymous tip from a pay phone."

The younger men both turned to look at their section chief. Harris blinked. "What's a pay phone?"

Spencer Reid seriously considered running back to Quantico on the spot and apologizing to Hotch and Rossi for every time he made them feel this old. "It's a phone you put coins in to use."

Branthau looked at the coroner's pictures, as he held a tablet in front of him to do the geographic profile of the abduction sites. "The victims died from blood loss, but there's some odd scarring here, you see it, sir?"

Reid looked at the picture of the fourth body from the grave, an unidentified man in his mid-fifties. No way, it couldn't be, it was in the wrong spot. And yet, he knew those scars. "Harris, take a look at this and tell me I'm not seeing what I think I'm seeing."

The agent looked too and choked. "I need to see the bodies and their apartments."

Branthau tapper his Bluetooth. "Coop, it's Branthau. Ask the families if the victims had any history of intravenuous drug use."

"You think they're going to admit that, Branthau? Even if they know, they're not going to tell us." In the background, he could hear Delolly screeching about Cooper's driving.

Harris looked away from the coroner's pictures. "The families won't know, the victims will have hidden it so well they wouldn't imagine. If they know, they'll be ashamed and defensive, and it'll be obvious the drug user hasn't been back home in months if not longer."

Gideon looked around the table of retired profilers, a retired tech analyst with her computer in front of her on the hotel's wireless, and two twenty-something year olds. "All right, on the spot, what do we know about the unsub?"

Morgan started. "He's probably between the ages of thirty and fifty, white, highly intelligent, highly organized."

Prentiss picked up from there. "He'll have a severe inferiority complex, anyone who seems to be smarter than him imtimidates him and challenges him mentally to prove he's smarter. He's powerless in his everyday life, and the careful control of the abductions and dump sites lets him regain some of that power for himself."

Rossi added. "He's taken a variety of college level courses in psychology and criminology, but is unlikely to have a completed degree in anything, and will have been kicked out of at least one degree program for plagiarism. We'll find an extensive collection of books on the subject and a compiled history of news stories about Reid and his agents."

Hotch had one more thought to add, looking at the photographs of the diamond solitaire rings that had been shoved in the guts of the dead victims, and the cubic zirconia ones that were being used now, otherwise identical in cut and setting. "He lost a fiancee or a wife, in some kind of connection to whatever made him choose these victims, and he's suffered a significant financial setback since Tallahassee, he can't afford to use diamonds anymore."

JJ considered that point as she rotated her own rings. "What if it's not the same unsub? That's a pretty big thing to change, Hotch, even if he's in dire financial straits."

"We'll float the theory and our preliminary profile to Reid and his team in Roanoke."

Ada nodded. "And don't tell Dad me and Karen were involved, Uncle Aaron. He tries to keep Karen away from cases."

She rolled her eyes. "Just because I'm a defense attorney, Dad loves me as a daughter, hates me as a lawyer."

The team had the courtesy to look a little bashful.

She rolled her eyes. "That always annoys me, I walk into a police station and I get swamped in dirty looks. It really isn't right to hold it against people for invoking their Constitutional rights. I mean 'lawyering up' shouldn't be a dirty word."

Rossi effortlessly changed the subject. "Let's find a fax machine and send our profile to Reid."

The woman slammed her door behind her, keeping her ex-boyfriend from coming in by locking the door. "Erica, you slut! Open this door, I want to talk about you did!"

"What I did? What about what you did? I had sex with your dealer so he wouldn't kill you, you jerk! How much do you owe him?"

"Only a couple of thousand, Erica, I'm sorry, I have this, I don't want you to-"

Erica turned to the door when she heard the noise of a fight outside it. "Really funny, Nick. You think I'm going to open this door, just because you pound around a lit – tle."

Her heart started to pound as blood steadily seeped in under the apartment door. She yanked it open to face her ex's sliced open body in the hallway. And screamed.