As always, I do not own any aspect of Criminal Minds or its characters.

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Chapter 9

Rossi yawned and looked up at the clock. It read three forty-five.

He had gone through plenty of sleepless nights before. The job description didn't describe that particular side-effect of working as a behavioral profiler for the FBI, but it should have. Under other—better—circumstances, he would have laughed at the irony that on the nights he wanted nothing better than to fall asleep, he could not while, on nights like tonight, when it was of utmost importance that he remain awake, his eyes would continually droop downward at the most unhelpful of times. As it was, it was nothing more or less than frustrating.

He picked up his pen and placed its ball on a blank page in his notebook, ready to jot down whatever notes came to mind, but he promptly forgot the first. He struggled for near a minute to remember what it was that he had found so important that he would write it down for his own future reference, and he came up empty. He slammed the pen down and rubbed his forehead, staring at a random spot on the carpeted floor for no reason in particular.

Gunshots and screaming. That was all he heard, and as he spun in circles, he could see every man that had ever pointed a gun in his direction. He saw each of their faces in perfect detail, their mouths forming words that he couldn't individually hear above the din. Everywhere he turned, a weapon was pointed in his face, and he realized suddenly that he was in the middle of an enormous circle, the target on all sides. Then, the guns all fired at once.

"Rossi!"

Rossi jerked awake and reflexively seized his handgun from its holster on his hip, aiming it directly at Prentiss. JJ stood in the doorway, holding a cardboard tray of coffee cups.

Prentiss raised her hands in surrender. "It's Prentiss! It's Emily!" she said.

Rossi, stood up and spun in a circle, like he had in his nightmare, aiming his handgun into every corner of the room until he subconsciously convinced that the danger had passed. That was, if there had ever been any danger to begin with. He shook his head, trying to rid himself of sleep as he recounted the dream. It had been so lifelike, so convincing…

"Rossi, are you okay?"

Rossi nodded as he slid his weapon back into its holster. "Must have…fallen asleep…"

JJ stepped carefully into the room, pulling large coffee from the tray in her hands and handing it to Rossi. "When did you get back? We were going to wait, but it was eleven, and we had to get some sleep…"

"Then I must have just missed you because that's about the time I got back. Been working on the case. There…there isn't anything new…Is Garcia coming?"

"She's getting her things from the SUV," JJ said. "She doesn't trust enough to leave her equipment here overnight without someone she knows to watch it, and we didn't know if you'd be coming back…"

"Where did you go?" Prentiss sipped from her coffee.

Rossi glared at her, and she immediately dropped the subject. Sipping from his own coffee as he settled into his seat again, he picked up where he'd left off. His most recent personal interviews of the parents of the missing girls had hardly turned over anything he hadn't already known, at least to a degree.

The girls had all gone missing from the neighborhood: riding a bike, at the nearby park, walking the dog—which had been found dead later—and weeding a neighbor's garden for some extra pocket money. Rossi had to conclude that the kidnapper lived in the neighborhood near them, even if that wasn't where he was keeping the girls.

Rossi sighed in frustration, in anger, and, most recently, in anticipation. As he looked at the map of the homes, he knew well what it would take to finish the case. A needle in a haystack was not necessarily so difficult to find if you were looking and discarding one straw at a time.

He settled back and waited for Garcia as he reran the information he had and tried to specifically profile the man behind this. He was almost positive it was a man, since it was girls he was taking rather than boys. On top of that, the victimology was very specific, but very opportunistic. He abducted a very specific type of girl—Caucasian and between the ages thirteen and fifteen—and from his specific area.

Was his selection random? Perhaps. But he didn't think the kidnappings were. He saw the girl, dogged her for a few days, and abducted her when he knew he could get away with it. Selection of opportunity, premeditated crime. There was no connection between the girls other than their residences…and that somehow, these girls played into their unsub's fantasy, whatever it may have been.

He suspected a sex-related motive. He didn't have any solid evidence other than a hunch and that these girls were specifically white and approximately the same age. He knew he needed more than that.

So how did he find his unsub?

Slowly. But he did in fact have a plan, however crude it might have been. Considering the best agents on the team were not at his disposal—which was in fact the condition under which he operated—he decided that the ends would most definitely justify the means.

Garcia came in through the door, two heavy-looking bags over her shoulder, her laptop case under her arm, and pulling with her an equipment box on wheels. Rossi waited patiently for her to set up and get running before he asked his question.

"Garcia, would you be able to pull records of all the men living on Norumbega Circle, Franklin?"

"Have you forgotten who you're talking to?" Garcia's keys clacked as she pulled up a map of specific house numbers along the specific road Rossi had indicated. "I am the magician of the computerized world known to the general population as cyberspace."

Rossi ignored her coping mechanism and sipped his coffee again. It was a minute or two of unnerving clacking, Garcia's tongue sticking slightly out the corner of her mouth as she concentrated, before she spoke again.

"Okay, bear with me here. I can access the files, but this'll take time because I have to search, isolate, and print all of these individually. Believe it or not, Norumbega Circle is a much bigger circle than it looks to be on a map." She chuckled as her fingers flew over the keys on her keyboard. "As I find them, I'll print them to that printer." She pointed to a large and slightly-outdated printer sitting on a cheap folding table against the wall behind her. As she spoke, it whirred to life and a page glided onto the tray.

Rossi walked behind her to the printer and picked up the first two sheets, which was a general profile of one Lou Mills, number twelve Norumbega Circle, including a juvenile criminal record for shoplifting when he had been seventeen.

"Do you need help?"

Rossi looked up at JJ as the printer started to roll again.

"I know I can't really profile, but if you tell me what you're looking for," she said as she picked up the next page the printer spit out, "I can help you sort through these."

Rossi nodded, and she pulled a swivel chair out from the conference table and sat down.

"Push over those boxes and lay these out on the table as I hand them to you," Rossi said as she handed her Lou Mills' information, and he started relaying to her what he had figured out about their unsub's profile. Prentiss jumped to action, moving the boxes from the table to the floor in order to give them all the room they needed.

"This guy is…he's organized," Rossi started. "He is probably late-thirties to early forties and Caucasian. He takes these girls for their age, not for their physical features. He may have a sexual fantasy about younger girls." He paused to hand JJ what felt like five or six pages-worth of information on the next man. "He is also new to this. Whatever his motive, it isn't personal, and he therefore has few boundaries. However, he doesn't take advantage of the freedom, at least not yet."

"Help me understand that…'Not yet'?"

"This man has the freedom to do almost whatever he wants with these girls. No time restraints, which may mean that he is recently unemployed, recently divorced, or works out of his house. He also lives by himself. He is too careful about these kidnappings to risk being noticed, and since I'm virtually positive he watches these girls for a little time before he makes his move, he would have needed the time to do that. That's something that a spouse or girlfriend would have noticed. He also has the space somewhere to do what he wants with them; perhaps even in his house, since the lack of family means there is little chance of somebody discovering them. Now, he may not have discovered what he can really do yet, but that isn't to say that he won't, or that he won't expand upon whatever he's doing when he does."

JJ nodded and accepted another profile.

"So," Rossi continued, "he doesn't live with anybody, and yet he lives on Norumbega Circle, an extremely upper-middle class society. He either has a steady occupation, had a steady occupation, or inherited a lot of money from somewhere. He also cares more for himself than for other people, which may in itself be a cause for him to be alone."

JJ nodded. "So…a middle-aged, single white guy that earned or inherited the money to live in a house on Norumbega Circle, but was most likely out of work for the moment."

Rossi nodded. "He also was probably sexually abused by somebody when he was much younger…or he may have watched someone close to him being abused."

"Okay, sir profiler, sir," Garcia said, "I believe that is all of the men on Norumbega Circle. Do your profiler thing."

"Thank you, Garcia," Rossi said, and he slid his chair over beside JJ. "Remember, white, late-thirties to early-forties, single, no time restraints, money to support himself, possibly a second property…"

JJ stared at him as he trailed off. "I could never have figured all that out by myself," she said.

Rossi shrugged. "It took years to perfect it," he said.

"Rossi?"

"Hm?"

JJ sighed and looked around at the other two in the room, who had paused in their various acts of bringing criminals to justice, and she knew she was voicing aloud the thoughts of the entire room. "They are going to be okay, right?"

Rossi stared at her for a long moment before he shook his head. "I would lie to you and tell you that they would, but I really don't know."

JJ looked down at her hands, which were resting on top of a small packet of papers. "I guess I knew that." She chuckled and wiped a tear from her eye. "Okay, let's get this done."

Rossi nodded silently, and he picked up one of the stacks of paper. He immediately discarded it because the man was fifty-three. The second one, too, he tossed aside because he lived with a family of five. For ten minutes, the two of them searched through the accumulation of information, pulling aside a few that looked promising, until JJ pushed one under Rossi's nose.

"I am absolutely not a profiler, but this guys fits what you said to a T," she said quickly, and Rossi took the ten-or-so papers.

They belonged to Kevin Rutledge. He was thirty-nine, and his photo showed a man who was much thinner than he ought to have been with thinning, curly red hair. The second page was the deed to his home, paid in full. He had inherited 1.3 million dollars from his father, who had owned the Paul Davis national franchise company. Two of the papers were a marriage license and copy of a written, mutual divorce only ten months later, both six years previously. The rest of the pages were records of various misdemeanors and juvenile misdeeds. When he got to the last three pages, he felt his eyes widen.

"This is our guy," he said, and he immediately leapt from his seat, picking up his jacket and dialing his cell phone. He left the room.

"What do those say?" Prentiss asked, as she had been startled by her superior's sudden reaction. She picked up the documents from the table. "But…that makes such perfect sense!"

"What is it?" Garcia asked.

"Twenty-nine years ago," Prentiss read from the pages, "Rutledge's father was arrested for sexually assaulting his three daughters, Rutledge's sisters. Rutledge testified on the stand that he had witnessed it several times." She looked up from the papers, disgust etched upon her face. "He was ten," she said.

"Prentiss! JJ!" Rossi poked his head back into the room. "Grab your weapons and come with me. The judge already signed the warrant to search all property belonging to Rutledge."

The three quickly left the room, and Garcia stared after them from where she sat. She minimized the window she had been working on to see the pictures she had pulled up of Reid, Hotch, and Morgan. She stared at them for a long minute, trying her best not to imagine them on that horrible concrete floor, staring fearfully at the camera that captured them that way.

"Hold on, guys," she said, her lower lip quivering. "They're coming for you."

I don't have much to say about this chapter, other than that this story isn't nearly as over as it seems like it is :-)

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