Part 7
The walls keep changing color.
Reid feels washed out when he looks at them, black and white, like he's in a dream and the walls are keeping all the color for themselves.
When he was a child, his mother had sometimes ranted about painted walls. Insisting the colors were wrong. Insisting that someone had come through the house during the night and changed them. Once, she'd torn sheets up, dropping them haphazardly underneath open cans of paint, then stood next to them in her nightgown, spreading green across every smooth surface with her bare hands.
He remembers the smell—fumes trapped behind shuttered glass—and the sharpness of finding her that way. Shards of broken moonlight reflected off her hands. The brittle undercurrent in his father's reaction. The sounds are there too, just more abstract. He remembers the bang and clatter of his mother sending a paint can towards his father's head, and the slamming of the front door, but the sounds are out of sequence, like the memory has been abandoned by him for so long his brain doesn't quite know how to wire it back together.
"Hotch, he's not ready for this."
Reid looks up, tracking his gaze from Hotch to Morgan and back again. "I'm okay," he says, moderating the clench of his shoulder blades.
"Reid," Morgan begins.
"I can keep going." Sitting straighter, Reid looks away from Morgan's too-compassionate face and flutters his fingers towards the tape holding down the IV. The hairs trapped underneath are itching like mad.
Hotch taps his wrist lightly and pulls it away. "Close your eyes," he instructs. "Take it slow. What else do you see?"
Reid complies, but when his lids close, the memory lingering behind them is of himself, kneeling on his mother's floor, trying to clean spilled paint from the wood. Sound waves from the slamming front door are buzzing under his bent knees. I can't keep doing this, Diana. I can't keep cleaning up after you.
Springing his eyes open, Reid takes a dark, hard breath. "Wouldn't this be more effective if you took me back to the scene?" he says.
Morgan sighs loudly, stepping back from the bed. Reid doesn't look at him.
Hotch shakes his head. "If we need to, we can do that later. For now, this is enough. Close your eyes."
Reid runs a finger down the bridge of his nose, tapping it against the headache pulsing under the cartilage. His eyelashes feel prickly against his skin and he has to wait for the persistence of vision to fade before trying to draw the coffee shop back into his mind. He wants to help. He needs to help. He's just not sure he can get this to work. His thoughts aren't linear. He feels ghost-like in comparison to his surroundings. Reaching for Kant's theories on the noumenal world does nothing but make his heart beat harder and he wonders if this is the panic his mother feels whenever the medications get too low.
"Go back to what you were telling me," says Hotch, voice like an anchor. "You said you saw four cork boards on the back wall. You walked towards them. Music is playing on the overhead speaker."
Slowly, it starts to return. The coffee shop's bright interior. The scuff of tile under his feet and the smell of French roast. The image shakes for a second, but holds. "I see the cork boards," he says.
"Good. Go on."
"I'm memorizing all the fliers, but the unsub's isn't there."
"Okay. Is anyone watching you besides the girl behind the counter?"
"Three elderly gentlemen are at a table to my left. They glance at me and they're talking but… I think they're talking about fishing." In his mind, sunlight is refracting through the windows, obscuring their faces. A voice is saying something about trout. Behind him, the girl working the counter is talking too.
She's asking about the flier. She's looking at his gun. Undercutting her words is a clicking sound, steady and constant.
"Someone is tapping a pen to my right," Reid tells Hotch.
"Can you see who it is?"
Tipping his head to the side, Reid tries to hone in on it. The tapping grows louder in his ears. "Two more customers are sitting at a barstool-height table near the counter on the other side of the shop. A man and a woman. I think it's one of them. But…"
"But?" prompts Morgan.
Reid licks his lips. The image skips back and forth over the woman's smile. "The woman feels… fake." He starts to lift his head, begins to open his eyes, but Hotch stops him, setting a solid hand on his shoulder. It's safe and steadying but feels too close to his skin through the papery hospital gown. It feels like if it shifts the wrong way it could break the membrane protecting his sanity.
"Fake in what way?" asks Hotch.
"I don't know." Reid swallows. "Just… fake."
"Okay. Leave that for now. Go back to the employees. Do you remember the girl handing you the coffee?"
Nodding, Reid says, "I think so. I was leaving. I'm almost to the door when the girl calls to me." Clenching his eyes tighter, he juts his chin down. The pictures are there. He can see the workers behind the counter moving their mouths, but everything they're saying is being taken over by background noise.
The tapping pen is speeding up.
Then, suddenly, everything goes silent and the images start skipping, fast forwarding without his say so, rushing through the motions before stopping abruptly on the shiny glint of sunlight reflecting off Gideon's dangled keys.
Reid feels, again, his lips start to tingle, the metallic taste back in his mouth. He feels the coffee cup slip from his hand.
"Hey, take it easy," says Morgan.
Unlocking his eyelids, Reid looks up. He gets his mouth open, but can't seem to speak. "The tapping stopped," he finally says.
"What?" asks Hotch.
Looking down at his hands, Reid tries once more to slow the images and reorder the sound. "While I was talking to the girl—before she handed me the coffee—the tapping of the pen stopped."
"Are you sure?" asks Hotch.
"No," Reid admits, shaking his head. Nothing's clear, and everything still ends on Gideon, like the screen is frozen in that moment.
"Okay. That's enough for now," says Hotch. He and Morgan trade looks. "Morgan."
Morgan nods, flicking his gaze down at Reid. "I'll go update the others," he says. "I'll be right back. Okay, Reid?"
"Yeah."
Hotch takes a deep breath after the door clicks. There is something preparatory about the sound. Something waiting. "Morgan tells me you saw Gideon," he says.
Reid feels himself go still and looks up, swallowing carefully. "He was across the street when I came out of the coffee shop."
Hotch nods, then starts to shake his head. "I had Garcia do a search, but so far—"
"That's okay," Reid says quickly, looking down, flitting his eyes back up briefly. "I was drugged. I know I probably didn't really see him."
Hotch watches for a moment, opening his mouth, then closing it. "Okay," he says, finally. Reaching out, he sets his hand once more to Reid's shoulder, over that thin membrane of sanity, then lets go, following Morgan out the door.
\
Tension is waiting in the hallway when Hotch steps into it. Extra vigilance hidden in casual stances. Rossi has his hands in his pockets. Across the hallway, JJ is holding her phone. Facing the other direction, Prentiss has the case file in her hands. Morgan is standing next to her with a shoulder to the wall.
The way they're angled, they haven't left a vantage point uncovered.
"We just got the call," explains JJ, looking in Hotch's direction. "There's another girl missing."
"Where?" says Hotch.
"The Douglas Lodge. It's next door to where we stayed last night. A woman went down the hallway to get some ice. Her sister said she never came back. The police chief is over there now. He's waiting for us."
"Did we get anything off the security cameras at our hotel?"
"Nothing," says Prentiss, turning farther to face him. "They were disconnected shortly before 5am, and the desk clerk was asleep. He doesn't remember seeing anyone. Garcia is checking at the Douglas. So far, nothing."
"Okay," Hotch sighs. They've been waiting for this, but something feels off. "We need to investigate the new disappearance, but we also need to go back to the coffee shop and I don't want us spread too thin. We have to assume he's still watching."
Rossi shifts subtly, expression too neutral. Hotch looks at him. "What are you thinking?" he prompts.
"Us," says Rossi. "He's still watching us. Not just random police officers. Us. It's us he's threatening. It's us he sees as his opponents."
"We know that, Rossi," Morgan says carefully. "That's why he left the drawing of JJ."
"Right." Rossi steps farther forward. "But when did he start? When did it become us? Think about this. Emily, you keep saying that he's been two steps ahead of us this whole time, and you're right. We know he's a narcissist. Staying ahead of us, the media attention, that's how he's been feeding his ego. But we also know he's highly intelligent and that dealing with us is a game. If we look at this like a game of chess, then each move he makes isn't just an attack, it's an invitation, designed to provoke a limited set of possible responding moves from us."
"And you're saying he's studied us," says Morgan. "Profilers. Our team. He knows our moves."
"He knows how we play the game," Hotch clarifies.
"My god," Prentiss says, looking up from the case file. "Where will I be next? He's been asking us that on every drawing he left. He's been moving across state lines. He knew we'd be called in and he practically begged us to focus on a geographic profile."
"Are you saying he herded us here?" asks JJ.
"It makes sense," says Prentiss, closing the file. "Think about it. He usually moves on, but he hasn't. He waited for us here. He poisoned Reid. He knew we'd be right behind him. He's breaking pattern, he's escalating, but not in the way we expected him to."
"Okay, so we need to figure out why here," Morgan concludes, folding his arms. "We need to figure out what's so special about Breckenridge."
"But we need to be careful," says Rossi. "We're fully in his game now. If we're right, every move he's making is about us and how he predicts us to respond."
Morgan closes his eyes, pinching the bridge of his nose.
Hotch takes a breath. He's about to speak when a loud crash rings out from far down the hallway, followed by a scream, muted behind the hallway's double doors.
Drawing his weapon, Hotch moves. "Prentiss, check Reid," he orders. "Morgan, watch the hallway. Rossi, JJ, with me."
tbc
P.S. On a slightly unrelated thank you—I really appreciated the detailed feedback on Abjuration from those of you who gave it. Of everything I've posted in this sandbox, I was most hesitant about that one, so again, thank you.
