Danny held the elevator door open while Kono and the FBI agents filed in. Between the eight of them, they carried a box of pastries, a bag of bagels with assorted toppings, and three carriers of coffee. They rode up in silence, all of them too tired to make much in the way of small talk.
The office was still except for the whirling sounds the smart table made as it ran, and Danny wasn't the least bit surprised to find both Chin and Penelope were both asleep. Chin at his desk and Penelope on the couch in Steve's office.
"Someone wanna wake up the sleeping beauties up and we'll get this ball rolling.." Danny said as he set the cups he had been holding in his hands down on the conference table.
"Sorry," Chin said with a yawn. "I was helping Garcia run down some leads and it was taking longer than we thought."
"I have run through more red tape then I've thought possible in the last twelve hours," Garcia sighed, walking back from Steve's office. "I've run through more people trying to get these cases then you would have thought possible. You would think that they would want to help! But no! They want hoops and red tape." She made a line straight for the coffee cups before she took in the room around her.
"Did you both just sleep here all night?" Danny asked. Though he knew the answer was yes.
"We didn't really intend to, but with the time change and all. I had planned on heading over to the hotel but made the mistake of sitting down and then it was morning."
"And I wasn't going to leave her here alone. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to grab a quick shower so I can finish waking the rest of the way up."
Danny nodded as Chin passed out of the office and to the elevator. "So what were you able to find out?" His attention turning back to the woman who was holding her coffee like it was the most precious thing in all the world.
"We found matches but I'm having a hell of a time getting the files. I've threatened, cajoled, verged on blackmail, and tempted but made absolutely no progress in getting even scans of them." She let her breath puff out. "At this point I'm at a loss for what to do. Some of the more recent cases, might be online somewhere, and I can just nab them, but not these older ones. Odds are there are still paper files, and we would need someone to fax us copies."
"I'll see what I can beat out of the bushes," Hotchner shrugged and walked into Steve's office.
"Can't hurt. Let me know if he's able to find us anything."
"Garcia, how are you and Chin sure we have other cases if no one is confirming things?" Danny questioned.
"Oh. Well, after we found the first two cases the set here and the set in New York, I started looking for pairs of obits that had cross over. Funerals were the same day, were military, didn't die overseas, things like that. That gave me names. At least a few to start with. Crossed that with whether or not they were reported missing. That gave me officers to talk to, and that was when I started getting bounced around. A few of the officers had retired and they were pretty helpful. I'm waiting on those faxes to come in. But the more recent cases, were investigated by either the M.P's or by groups inside the different branches of the military. That's when I started hitting walls."
"Well maybe I can be of some help then." Joe White's voice carried in from the doorway. In his arms was a large file box.
"Hey Joe. Whatcha got?" Kono asked as she took the box out of his hands.
"Chin called last night and said you guys were getting the run around trying to get the files you folks needed. So I poked around. Got you faxes and a drive with all the images on it," he answered her. "Friend who works for NCIS was able to scare up the files. And with your analyst shaking trees, all I had to do was pick up what fell out."
"Let me introduce you to the BAU from Quantico. They, the kidnappers, called them in specifically. This is Joe White. He was Steve's CC or Company Commander." After that he breezed through the rest of the teams' names.
"Wished we could have met one better terms. Let me know if you need anything else. Steve's like a son to me. I'll do anything I can to help find him and Maggie."
Danny thanked Joe and watched as the group started dividing up the files he left behind. "I'll send the autopsy reports to Max, our M.E. see if theres anything that stands out." He motioned as he looked at the sheer amount of files laid out. "How many kills do you think were looking at?"
"If all of these match up? Upwards of twenty-five or thirty. Makes these guys pretty active," Rossi said as he glanced up from what he was looking at.
"God.." Danny's mind whirled with the fact that so many people had been lost to this pair and no one had even gotten close to them was frightening. More over they had his partner, and his friend. He wasn't going to let them get away with this. He pulled his phone out and dialed in Max's number. "Hey Max, we have a bunch of files and pictures coming to you. Just compile all of them and let us know what you get."
"I'll let you know soon as it's done." Danny could almost hear Max nod into the phone when he spoke.
—
They had been at it for hours now. They had worked through lunch, and every time it seemed like they were making progress, something new popped up. The total number of kills was staggering. They had matched twenty cases. Those, they knew belonged to their killers. Two victims per case, meant that so far forty people had lost their lives. There were at least six cases that had a third body. Three of these were execution style kills and then another three that related to the the other victims. They were still debating on whether or not those six kills were the same killers or just copy cats.
The boards were now littered with pictures of victims, spanning fifteen years. They had the six cases that had extra bodies attached to them on a their own board. They were waiting on Max to get back to them and see if the ME reports matched up with the others, but at a glance it looked like they had fifty-eight victims.
"I just can't see a dominant personality like the one on the voice over sticking with the same partner for all these years," J.J sighed, dropping the folder she was holding to the table.
"Could the some of the 'extra' bodies be former partners?" Kono questioned the seasoned agents.
"Its possible, but all six of them can't have been. Four of the victims are male, they all vary in age, and the other two are women. Its very unlikely that the Alpha unsub, would work with a woman. So we can likely remove those two from the pool of possible partners," Derek said thoughtfully.
"We can discount the middle aged male found at kill twelve." Garcia's voice called out from where she was sitting. The big oak desk that Steve dominated, dwarfed the woman's smaller body. "He was the older brother of Officer Bryn. No military record. He was given up for adoption and thus had a different last name. I would have never found the connection if Bryn's wife hadn't mentioned it when they brought her in not long after the body showed up. She had never meet the brother but the ID on the body matched the name she gave the police for him."
"Then odds are high that these three were partners. It means he was training a new partner every what three and a half or four years?" Chin asked as he moved the three pictures to the unsub board.
"That's about one kill ever six to seven months. Means he's no where near devolving. Which means he's not going to break from the pattern of holding them for a week. That's good for us." Rossi looked over the sheer amount of information spread out on the tables and glass boards.
"We need to focus on the most recent kills first. And…" Hotchner paused as the computer squawked. He moved the file he had been looking at and hit the answer button on the smart table. "You've got the entire room, Dr. Bergman." The agent's voice was clear and commanding.
"Thank you. The victims all suffered varying amounts of trauma but there are a few things that carried through each crime. Each victims was struck with a heavy, stick along the back. It's heavy enough to cause bruising and crack bones, but not so heavy as to shatter them. All of the victims suffered through some form of electrocution, as well as dehydration and starvation. The only exception are the six cases that had an extra body. In those cases the third body shows little or no damage other than the killing blow. Three were shot and killed by a single bullet to the back of the head. The other three were stabbed. The stab wounds show a minor amount of hesitation in the initial wound, and little to no defensive wounds. I would hypothesize that they knew the killer."
"That lines up. The two female victims were a step-sister and daughter-in-law to victims at each of their scenes," Alex said holding up the two files in her hands.
"Did the other ME's have any idea how long they had, had the victims?"
"Not exactly but it appears to be about six days from when they were reported missing." Max's voice was soft. He was thinking the same thing that everyone else in the room was. They had five days left to find their friends alive.
"In each case there was an anonymous call into the police was made. That's why they found the bodies so quickly. But even with that, there was little to no evidence found," Reid's voice rang in the quiet that had stolen over the room.
"Anything else you were able to find Max?" Chin asked.
"Not at the moment. If I find anything else I'll make sure to let you know immediately."
The timeline felt even shorter now than it had this morning. They would find them, Danny told himself. If anyone could do it, they could. He settled himself down with a stack of case files and started reading through them, taking notes when anything stood out. Please let them hold on, just let them hold on until the could get there.
Silence had stolen over the group again, while they kept adding notes and scribbles to the ever growing amount of information.
"We got another video guys," J.J. said as the email icon blinked.
"Go a head and play it," Hotchner replied. Danny watched the man tense slightly. None of them wanted to watch this.
The video started up. Steve was suspended from his wrists by a pair of handcuffs hung on a hook that was attached to a thick chain. He wasn't wearing a shirt and the camera was over Maggie's shoulder. There wasn't any audio or voice over, but they could tell Maggie was screaming by her body language. They watched as a man with dark hair, his face obscured by a mask, poked Steve in the side with a black stick. He body jerked and tensed.
"Modified cattle prod," Reid said softly. The room nodded in agreement.
They watched as Steve's body collapsed, his form being supported completely by this wrists and shoulders. There was a clear cut in the video. When it started back up again, Steve face was pale and he was again bound to a chair. They could see Steve say something to the man in front of him, but the only words they heard was the same voice telling Steve that he would watch them break Maggie, before the broke him.
"You're a strong little thing aren't you? You can make the Lieutenant proud can't you and not scream?"
They looked at each other and Danny could see the worry etched on the faces of his friends. "We'll find them," he heard himself saying. He hoped he was right, but there was this was now this nagging thought that even if they got there, that maybe there wouldn't be anything left of them. Made the timeline even more important. Get there in enough time to make sure they would be still be them.
