If you're unbelievably angry, I completely understand - I deserve it. But if you're in the mood, please accept my humblest apologies.
Disclaimer: Criminal Minds belongs to The Mark Gordon Company, ABC Studios, and CBS Television Studios. I only own my OC and my plot.
Episode featured in this chapter: 6x06 "Devil's Night"
October 27, 2010
"So, you're one of us now?" Emily asked when she ran into Ally in the elevator.
"You wish, Strauss decided that I'm a 'potential danger to the safety of this unit and therefore am on a probationary period'." Ally remarked, finger quotes and all.
"Probationary period? Do you get a parole officer too?" The two chuckled lightly before walking out of the elevator. They had barely been out for two minutes before Spencer jumped out at them in a mask. Emily and Ally jumped before Ally dissolved into giggles while Emily just scowled before walking ahead.
"Having fun Spencer?" Ally's smile grew at Spencer's energetic nod. The two started walking again while Spencer continued to babble on about Halloween. "Spence, as interested as I am, isn't that mask getting uncomfortable?" He shook his head rapidly before continuing on with the history of Halloween while following Ally into the briefing room. She met Morgan's eyes with an amused smile before gesturing for some help.
"So kid, what are you thinking of doing for Halloween?" Morgan asked, trying to help out a bit.
"I was toying between going to the Edgar Allan Poe shadow puppet show or the reenactment of-," Spencer frowned in disappointment when Rossi cut him off.
"I don't want to know."
"Oh, yeah you do, it's a reenactment of the nineteenth century practice that mixed science and magic and I just so happen to have an extra ticket." He made eye contact with a smiling Ally before quickly looking away, a slight blush coloring his cheeks. Seeing this, Garcia shot a wink at Morgan before passing out the files.
"I wouldn't have to worry about my feminine curves if you all worried about the amount of trees we're killing here."
"When'd you become an eco-freak?" Morgan shot at her with a smirk.
"Baby I was born green." Before Morgan could respond, Hotch walked in quickly getting everyone on track and shutting down any complaints about working on Halloween.
"Don't arsonists typically hit homes instead of people?" Ally questioned, looking at a picture of a charred skeleton.
"She's right, arsonists are typically white males between the age of 17-25 who can't stay away from fire, they're uninterested in the people, they only want to satisfy their addiction." Spencer supplied.
"So you're saying that even though this guy burns his victims alive, he's not an arsonist?" Penelope asked flabbergasted.
"Fire is simply his weapon." Morgan responded.
"And Devil's Night gives him perfect cover to kill." Spencer noted.
"And we've got 48 hours before he disappears completely." Hotch confirmed.
"The victim is athletic, had to have been hard to subdue."
"The UnSub has to be either equally as strong or stronger, if he was younger that would give him an upper-hand." Ally offered.
"Still, how does he transport his victims and get them inside buildings without being noticed?" Emily asked, staring at the screen displaying the pictures of the crime scene.
"That's what we have to find out." Rossi remarked.
"Wheels up in twenty."
Ally sped past Spencer to get to the seat next to Emily. She smirked up at him when he stood next to her and Spencer couldn't help but give her head a soft nudge. Morgan smiled at the scene before buckling in for take off. Once the plane was in the air, the team started in on the case.
"I thought Devil's Night was Halloween Eve." Emily remarked, flipping her folder open.
"Actually, the term Devil's Night is used in reference to a three day city-wide festival in Detroit." The team looked over at Ally while she just shrugged. "Spencer isn't the only one who can read."
"The Festival consists of masks, chaos, and costumes." Reid added.
"Try to say that three times fast." Rossi remarked sarcastically.
"So it's like Mardi Gras." Emily stated.
"A violent one, every year thousands of fires are lit and hundreds of crimes are committed." Spencer responded, moving to lean on Ally's seat. The change in position didn't go unnoticed by Morgan but he chose to redirect his attention to the practical history lesson Spencer was providing.
"We'll most likely be dealing with someone who has a hero complex." Ally remarked.
"First responders, fire-fighters, volunteers." Morgan expounded.
"All of whom we'll be working with." They continued to try to develop a preliminary profile before landing but Ally kept finding her mind drifting back to those months hunting down Pichtas. Emily noticed the distracted look on her friend's face but kept quiet, hoping to get some private time later on to help Ally face whatever demons were haunting her.
Once the jet landed, the team split into two groups, Rossi, Hotch, and Spencer would head to the Detroit Police Department while Morgan, Emily, and Ally went to the crime scene. All throughout the car ride, Emily sent furtive glances Ally's way trying to gauge whether or not she was coping well enough. There was a certain level of concern Emily had that she knew the others wouldn't necessarily understand when it came to dealing with someone who spent the better part of a year hunting and capturing a terrorist. They arrived at the scene with relative ease and Emily was forced to shake off her concern for Ally, at least for the time being.
"No wonder he picks this place to burn his victims, there's nobody to leave as a witness." Ally remarked while getting out of the car.
"He could beat, torture, or burn somebody and no-one's here to hear it." Morgan added.
"Never though the FBI would be here for a fine city tradition. I'm Al Garner with the DFD." A man walked up to the three of them, shaking hands with the three.
"Agents Morgan, Prentiss, and Jordan." Morgan introduced.
"Devil's Night must keep you pretty busy, huh?"
"Not as much as it used to, we've gotten the fires down from 700 to just 115. Luckily, we've had some help."
"I noticed the signs, have your cops increased their rounds." Ally asked, glancing at the sign pasted to the door.
"I wish we could, but we don't have the funds for it. Detroit's Finest is a community group with over a thousand members." The three agents shared a look before following Lt. Garner into the building.
"We're going to have to add some names to Garcia's list." Ally remarked while walking down the hallway.
"You think it's one of them?" Lt. Garner asked.
"We can't rule anyone out." Morgan responded. The hallway ended at a massive room, it could easily have been two to three stories high.
"What was this place?" Emily asked, looking around the room.
"An old engine room." Lt. Garner moved over to the charred boxes. "This is where we found his body."
"The char line ends over here." Ally stood at the end of the line and looked towards the pillar where the body was hung.
"Not a good vantage point." Emily remarked, moving to stand directly in front of the pillar.
"The exit's right there." Lt. Garner pointed out.
"He's uninterested in that, he's confident in his ability to handle the fire, he wants to watch his victims burn." Morgan responded.
"So why choose this spot? It doesn't have a good view of either the victim or out the windows." Ally remarked, shifting her position to look at the windows.
"He wants to stay in here the longest he possibly can without suffering any harm." Emily added, squatting near the remains of the boxes.
"There's a fire alarm, my men would be here in five minutes tops."
"Then he has to either know the response times or be listening to police calls." Morgan said before sharing a nod with both Ally and Emily.
Spencer, Hotch, and Rossi were crowded around the victims' case files trying to identify something that connected them when Ally walked in.
"How'd it go?" Rossi asked, barely glancing up from his reading.
"The only thing we got for sure is that he's listening to the police calls to track response times." She took the open seat next to Spencer before grabbing a file and reading it.
"The first time I looked at these victims on a map, none of it made sense. Seven different victims, various ages, sex, and ethnicities." Spencer started.
"What do you see now?" Rossi looked up at him.
"The first victim-"
"Often tells us the most."
"Tommy Proctor."
"Rap sheet's as long as the Nile, looks like he was accustomed to the dark side."
"The first kill inspired him, what was different about it?" Hotch flipped through to the information on Proctor.
"First of all, his body wasn't found for days. It was buried deep in the building." Spencer supplied.
"That tells us that they knew each other."
"Not to mention that it took many botched attempts to burn him."
"Because the UnSub didn't realize how difficult it is to actually burn a human body." Rossi said.
"Or the UnSub wanted him to feel the most pain." Ally added.
"Which would definitely make it personal." Hotch commented.
"If he knew the first victim, it's more than likely that he knew them all." Spencer glanced at the other three agents, his gaze lingering on Ally.
"If that's true then we just need to find out what connects them." She glanced up, looking at Spencer before shifting to look at the other two agents.
"We can start by talking to Tony Torell's wife." Hotch made eye contact with Rossi.
"I'm on it." Rossi headed out to meet with Mrs. Torell followed by Hotch who wanted to speak with Lt. Garner leaving Spencer and Ally in the room to finish setting up the board with the information they gathered. The two worked quietly and efficiently, they soon had everything set up and Ally took the back seat while letting Spencer tweak his geographical profile.
Her gaze drifted off to the side and her mind was instantly assaulted by memories of her time in Budapest. The running, the screaming, the hunting. It felt like years ago, a memory wished to be forgotten but never would. Her mind jumped to the Agents she was working with. Aksakov and Baker, she never thought that this mission would affect her as much as it did but it seemed that her thoughts would forever be plagued by it.
Spencer stared at Ally. His gut was telling him that something was wrong but he had no idea how to broach the subject with her. He knew it had to do with the mission she went on, but why was it causing her so much strife? Probably because her life was threatened. He silently agreed with what his inner voice was telling him and reasoned that it was a logical response to the situation she was in but still, despite the logic and the reasoning, his heart ached for his friend. In more ways than one.
"You make him sound like he's Freddy Kruger." Lt. Garner addressed Rossi once he had finished relaying the information to everybody.
"No, but I do think he's severely burned."
"It explains why he chooses this time of year, he doesn't have to hide his burns." Spencer remarked.
"What about his victims?" Lt. Garner asked, leaning on the table.
"He's punishing them for wronging him." Hotch looked up at him.
"Wronging him? What about his second victim? Have you looked at Josephine Davis's life? She was the nicest woman in the world, how does she wrong this guy?"
"She's probably related in some way to what caused his burns. A civil servant most probably." Ally posed.
"So he's acting out of revenge? Kierston and Tony didn't even talk to him that night."
"Like Agent Jordan said, it's probably related to his burns. Even if they didn't talk to him last night, they probably talked to him sometime in the past." Emily nodded at Ally.
"Wait a minute," Morgan who had stayed quiet up until this point said. "Josephine was abducted from her husband, Tony from his wife."
"You think these couples represent a happiness he covets?" Emily questioned.
"Or something he lost, he's a young guy with a deformity. Lots of insecurities come with that."
"A trauma like that, it's enough to rip a couple apart." Ally said, making eye contact with Morgan.
"Do you know how rare it is for an arsonist to be a burn victim?" Lt. Garner asked, taking a seat.
"Less than 3.5%" Spencer quickly responded causing Ally's lips to twitch in a small smile.
"This guy's not an arsonist. He's a serial killer who uses fire and that choice in weapon shows us that he's aggressive, driven, and destructive just like fire itself." Morgan tried to explain to Lt. Garner.
"But why would someone so controlling use a weapon that's so unpredictable?" Emily wonder out loud.
"This juxtaposition tells us that there's more going on with him than we realize." Spencer responded.
"There's a strong possibility that he had an accident and during that time he may have lost someone else." Ally suggested.
"We should look at accidents where couples were burned." Hotch said while nodding his agreement.
"You're talking about hundreds of fires." Lt. Garner informed.
"Focusing on ones where gas was the accelerant."
Morgan's phone started ringing at the exact same instant that Emily started speaking. "Leaving his victims in the center of these buildings themselves may be subconscious on his part but it says that his affected his very core."
"Somebody else has just been abducted."
"How do we know this is our guy?"
"Because his daughter said that a monster took her daddy away." Morgan immediately put Garcia on speaker so that everybody could listen to the information she was providing. It was quickly determined that the UnSub would already be within the Rivertown District and roadblocks were quickly established. Hotch and Lt. Garner left to go patrol the district leaving the rest of the team to try to form a connection between the man that was just abducted and the other victims.
"He was a general contractor." Garcia offered.
"Look for any sub-contractors he may have worked with." Morgan said.
"That's a humongous list, what do you want me to do with it?"
"Anything that requires flames; plumbers, electricians, welders. Did he fire a welder recently?" Rossi suggested.
"He's been using Vinnie's Welding and Fence but he hasn't hired them back in months. The list of employees is still a lofty handfull."
"We think he's been following the investigation. Look for volunteers with Detroit's Finest." Emily offered.
"This person was probably out of commission for a little while too. Anyone that wasn't at work for some time." Ally said.
"I'm crossing employees with volunteers. Nothing."
"Come on Baby Girl, keep checking, there's got to be a connection here." Morgan encouraged.
"I'm going to long shot it and cross the Michigan Business Directory with the Payroll Company and see if I've still got what it takes to find stuff." Garcia took a breath, typing rapidly. "And I do. His name's Kaman Scott."
"You got an address?"
"I'm working on that." Garcia continued to type frantically at her computer. "Okay, from a look at Kaman's early years he was on the fast track to becoming some kind of hoodlum super convict but something happened in 2004 that made him change his tune. There aren't any more arrests, suspicions, no rehab, he totally cleaned up."
"That's when he met someone." Ally suggested, meeting Spencer's eyes.
"Has he ever been arrested with a man named Tommy Proctor?" Spencer asked, breaking eye contact with Ally.
"Once in 2002. Yikes, and then they collided again in 2005. Like literally collided. Kaman was in an accident and his car blew up."
"There's your gas accelerant." Morgan remarked.
"He was hit by that guy. Tommy Proctor."
"And there's your revenge." Rossi added.
"So Tommy walks away without a scratch and Kaman suffers a ton of third degree burns, had a boat load of skin graphs, was in a coma for a couple of months, lost his apartment, oh and there's that guy! Tony Torrel, he was Kaman's landlord."
"So we're right, he does have a revenge list." Spencer stated, leaning in a bit to get closer to the intercom.
"What about family, friends, acquaintances?" Rossi questioned.
"No, that Kaman is a lone wolf and his address just came up. Big Bad lives at 5923 Mills." Morgan and Emily immediately shot up from their seats to head out.
"Thank you Baby Girl." Morgan called while walking out of the door.
"I'll go tell Hotch." Ally said before getting up to go call him. Once she got back, the three of them started trying to find anyone that could be connected to Kaman.
"What about a high school sweetheart?" Ally offered.
"No, that person would be a part of the life he was trying to leave behind. It had to have been someone completely new. Someone who wasn't there when he was on a downward spiral." Rossi refuted. The three were fully prepared to spend the rest of the time until Morgan and Prentiss came back determining where the person who changed Kaman Scott's life came from until they got a call saying that a man was found burned in the middle of the road. The three quickly set off with the local police to the crime scene where they met up with Hotch.
"Anything in the van?" Hotch asked.
"Welding equipment, cans of gasoline." Rossi started.
"And a cage." Spencer finished.
"I'm getting everyone in the city down here on this." Lt. Garner said before walking away to make some calls.
"Without his car he's going to lie in wait until he can't anymore." Hotch said.
"And then he'll lash out at the person who hurt him the most." Ally added. She and Spencer walked over to the dead body to try and find anything else while Hotch and Lt. Garner went back to patrolling the district. "He was rushing through this. Kaman didn't care if he suffered or not. He just wanted him to burn."
"He's only a couple of steps away from going after the woman then." Rossi stated, walking over to where the two stood. "While it's just the three of us, how you holding up kid?"
"I'm fine, really." She added after she met Rossi's disbelieving stare.
"Are you sure you are?" Spencer asked, moving closer to her. Her posture relaxed the closer he got, something Rossi took note of and smiled a bit at.
"Positive Spence." Just then, Ally's phone started ringing. Checking the ID, she saw that it was Garcia and quickly picked up.
"What's up Penny G?"
"The rest of the team is heading to Jay-Mo's to try and intercept Kaman. You should head over with your sidekicks."
"Copy that." She looked up to see Rossi's incredulous stare.
"Did she just call me a sidekick?"
"You and Spencer, yeah. We need to head over to Jay-Mo's." Ally responded with a small smile before heading over to one of the police officers to hitch a ride to the next scene. The two men followed her and as soon as they reached the car they were going to be traveling in, they heard a request for a fire truck for Jay-Mo's. Sharing a glance, they quickly got into the car before speeding off to the diner.
The three of them got there at the same time as Morgan and Emily to watch Hotch hustle around a few paramedics to get to Jay-Mo to ask him questions about the girl in the picture. He got as much information as he possibly could before turning back to the assembled agents.
"Hotch, you ran into a burning building?" Morgan asked immediately.
"I didn't have a choice. Her name's Tracy, Kaman's trying to find her." Hotch answered.
"That man put his life on the line for her." Spencer stated, his eyes never leaving the retreating ambulance.
"She must mean something to him." Emily reasoned.
"She means everything." Hotch amended before calling Garcia for more information. Garcia quickly listed off everything she could find about Tracy including that she was adopted by her aunt and that's most likely where she would be right then. As soon as the address was confirmed, the team set off to get there before Kaman could hurt anybody else. Hotch and Lt. Garner went first and got there far ahead of anyone else.
"Hotch is going in without backup." Morgan observed, frustration clear in his voice.
"He won't do anything to spin him." Reid reassured.
"It's not Kaman I'm worried about."
"This isn't his first time at the dance. We've got to trust him." Rossi countered, quelling any arguments for the moment. They all moved out and into the front yard, waiting patiently until the okay was given. Once it was, police went inside to get Kaman into handcuffs and escort him out of the house. The team stood by and watched as he was led to the police car and his son plastered himself against the window to say goodbye.
The plane ride passed with relative ease. Rossi and Ally were discussing different cooking techniques, Hotch and Emily were talking about Jack and what he would be doing for Halloween, and Morgan and Spencer were talking about Spencer's Halloween plans.
"Why don't you just ask Ally out? Didn't you say you had an extra ticket to something." Morgan suggested, rolling his eyes at Spencer's surprised expression.
"Why would I ask her out?" He retorted, looking over at her.
"Because you're practically drooling on yourself just looking at her."
"It's not like that. She's just a really good friend."
"And you'd like her to be more."
"She's just a friend."
"Then ask her out as a friend. C'mon kid, act like a man."
"I'm pretty sure she already has plans anyways."
"Has she told you that?"
"Well... no."
"Then just ask her."
"Statistically, taking into account that it's almost Halloween already, there's a 86% likelihood that she already has plans."
"And what about that other 24%?"
"It's all completely variable. She might already have a date."
"If you don't ask her, I will."
"You'll ask her out for me?"
"No I'll ask her out period."
"You can't do that."
"Oh look at that, Pretty Boy's got some fight in him."
"Just leave her alone, I'm telling you she probably already has plans."
"Fine, let's find out."
"What?" Spencer watched gobsmacked as Morgan walked over to Ally.
"So, baby cakes, you have any plans for Halloween?"
"Don't let Garcia hear you giving other people nicknames Morgan, she just might hurt you. And yes, I do have plans."
"Sitting at home by yourself watching horror movies does not count." Morgan raised a haughty eyebrow in her direction.
"What about sitting in someone else's home and watching movies with them?" She countered with a sarcastic smile. Spencer's gut clenched when he heard that. His mind started racing a mile a minute to try to figure out exactly who she would be spending her night with and the statistical probability that the date would lead to a romantic relationship, how far that relationship would go, and how long that relationship would last.
"Oh really, and who exactly are you spending the night with?" He could feel himself becoming more and more tense as the silence stretched on.
"Why, a little Miss Penny G of course." Spencer immediately felt himself relax, he could even feel a slight smile tugging at his lips.
"Care to expand that date?"
"Sorry hon, but no can do. I prefer having Penelope all to myself." Rossi started chuckling at that which got all three of them cracking up. Ally looked up and made eye contact with Spencer, the smile never fading and he was willing to bet money that it actually got brighter.
Thank you to everyone reading this. It takes some mean dedication on your part.
NothingIsPermament: I hope there were enough Ally/Spence moments in here for you. I am trying to pace them though, so I'm trying not to overload the moments.
Dalonega Noquisi: I didn't really give the characters a chance to get used to another person joining the team but seeing as how she's such an important member to them, I didn't think it would be very difficult for her to become an official member of the crew.
Thank you to the Guest who commented, I'm happy you're digging the relationship as much as I am.
