"I believe that lovers should be chained together

And thrown into a fire with their songs and letters

And left there to burn

Left there to burn in their arrogance"

-Bright Eyes, "A Perfect Sonnet"

August 16, 2004

Quantico, VA

Helena's first morning at the BAU began, as one might expect, with blood and adrenaline.

The gawky young agent tasked with her orientation had left her briefly in the kitchen to accommodate her caffeine craving, and she reluctantly turned her back to the door to prepare the correct cocktail of sugar and cream that would make the muddy drip coffee bearable. She shuddered as she took a sip, set the mug back down and reached for the creamer again. It was then that she felt a silent presence at her shoulder, betrayed only by a soft rustle of breath. Instinctively, she spun around, throwing out her elbow to catch her intruder squarely in the gut, forcing them to double over so that their nose met her knee as she brought it upwards.

Only when the burly man was staggering back, clutching his nose and swearing, did she pause long enough to recognize him as Jason Gideon.

Oh nice. Break the boss's nose on your first day. Why not just set fire to the whole building while you're at it?

"Fuck, Agent Gideon, I'm so sorry."

The man was still bent double, holding his middle and gasping, perplexing and worrying Helena. Had she broken one of his ribs?

"Agent Gideon?"

Slowly, he straightened, wiping his eyes. Tears.

He was laughing.

"Holy hypervigilance, Blythe," a new voice said from the doorway. Jack Flynn leaned his colossal shoulder on the frame, grinning from ear to ear. "That's a hell of an elbow you've got there."

"Must be all the cream she puts in her coffee," remarked Gideon, his breath apparently recovered. He crossed to the counter and moistened a paper towel to press to the generous blood flow from his nose. "The girl's chock-full of calcium. And tooth cavities, I assume."

Helena feigned indignation, deciding that the best way out of the awkwardness was to participate in the japery.

"I don't normally drown my coffee that way. But I'm fairly sure that this… concoction is made of soot."

"We get the ashes straight from the coroner's office," Flynn confirmed solemnly. "Freshly cremated."

"If you're finished hazing the rookie, gentlemen, we've got a case in the briefing room."

Hotch's deep, mellifluous voice, emanating from somewhere behind the monolith that was Jack Flynn, had a curiously soothing effect on Helena, who had been painfully tense since she had arrived.

"Already? It's only 8:00. We still have two more hours to scare her off."

Hotch squeezed past Flynn into the increasingly cramped kitchen. With a glance, he took in the bloodied Gideon and the apologetic Blythe, remarking only:

"Blythe, you got blood on your trousers."

She glanced down, and noticing the smear of red on her right knee with which she had hit Gideon.

"Damn. My dry-cleaner will kill me."

"What did Gideon do to earn the bloody nose?" he asked conversationally.

"Oh, nothing really. I just make it a point to draw blood within my first hour in a new milieu. Assert dominance, you know."

Hotch nodded absently, turning to Jack.

"I think this is a full-team kind of case. We need to move quickly, or I would have run it by you first."

The older agent waved his hand dismissively.

"You don't have to keep running to me, sport. Hell, you can do the case selection yourself if you like."

"Nice try. That pleasure's still all yours." He glanced back at Helena and noted her quizzical expression. "Jack likes to try to Tom Sawyer me into taking on his workload. Now will you all come to briefing? I'm aiming for wheels up in an hour."

Helena's stomach flipped uncomfortably. A case within her first hour at the BAU seemed excessive. And yet, she already felt the familiar, heady feeling rising through her bloodstream. The mingling of curiosity, suspense, and excitement that came at the beginning of a new novel or a fresh mission. It must have shown in her expression and posture, because Gideon chuckled.

"She's an eager one, isn't she?"

Hotch led them to the briefing room and Helena allowed her eyes to wander appreciatively over his strapping frame. He cut quite a figure, striding authoritatively through headquarters. Helena noted the deferential treatment he received from the agents in the bullpen; though he held no official position in the leadership of the unit, he seemed to act as the third member of Gideon and Flynn's triumvirate.

At the round table in the briefing room, she settled between Flynn and the jumpy boy who had been with Hotch in Chicago. (Reid, she recalled with some difficulty-that day had passed in such a haze.)

"Hi," he said in a small voice. She gave him her most unthreatening smile, which he hesitantly returned. He was, she noted, quite a beautiful specimen in his own way: tall and rather too thin, with a romantic, consumptive face. His enormous dark eyes flicked over her face with guileless curiosity.

"Good to see you under less dire circumstances, Doc."

"Can I ask you something that's been bothering me for months?"

"Later, Reid," interjected Hotch. Reid jumped and fixed his eyes immediately upon his superior. "You can interrogate her on the plane.

"We have a series of suspicious deaths in New York," he continued, addressing the whole room."

Flynn passed Helena a stack of photographs, which she began to peruse with growing disgust; the first body, already in an advanced state of decay, belonged to what might once have been a slender blonde in skimpy clothing. The remnants of her skin sported fragments of tattoos.

The second body, that of a black woman in her thirties, appeared to be more recent. Her body, frozen in its final pose, was horrifically contorted as though in agony. Her woolen pant suit and practical leather shoes suggested

The last body was fresh and young. The olive-skinned girl could not have been older than fourteen, and her body was bent backward into an arch, her face twisted in mingled panic and pain. Helena's hands shook as she examined the last victim, her eyes flicking over the marks on the girl's inner thighs and forearms. Her makeup was heavy and excessively dark, ringing her eyes in thick kohl.

Her mind raced, and she struggled to restrain it from settling upon the immediate conclusion that jumped out at her.

"Blythe?"

She jerked her head up to return Hotch's gaze, marshalling her features into a tranquil expression.

"Sir?"

"Are you up to this? No one would blame you for sitting this one out and focusing on getting acclimated."

Helena bristled, but quickly reminded herself that Hotch meant to be kind. She forced a convincing smile.

"Thank you, sir, but I can handle it. Where better to learn than in the field?"

Hotch looked a far cry from convinced, but Flynn clapped her on the back (once again with bruising force) and Morgan winked at her from across the table.

"We've got three women found buried in the woods outside of Seattle. They've all been positively identified, but nothing will be released to the press until we say so. Kelly Jones, 27, prostitute. She was never declared missing, but she's been dead for about four months. Sophie Jackson, 34, worked for Prometheus, a successful tech startup. She was declared missing two weeks ago and she appears to have been killed at around that time.-"

"So the unsub doesn't keep them for long."

"It doesn't seem likely that there's any abduction at all. Deaths are consistent with strychnine poisoning. No defensive wounds were found on the bodies."

"What about the last victim?" Helena cut in, her heart in her throat. The face in the picture was so very young.

"Elicia Diaz, 13. She hadn't been reported missing yet. She's been dead for less than three days."

"Evidence of self-harm," she observed, attempting to sound casual.

"Yes, and a lengthy disciplinary record. She was a troubled girl. If it weren't for Sophie Jackson, there would be a relatively strong correlation between the victims. As it is, though, victimology is all over the place."

"Can I see the pictures of Elicia Diaz, Blythe?" asked Morgan suddenly. She passed him the folder, noticing his brows knit as he examined the photographs.

"The scattershot victimology doesn't fit such an organized killer. It's not that easy to slip someone strychnine," reflected Blythe, leaning back and staring at the ceiling to clear the images from her mind's eye. "You'd need to fix them a strong drink or find a way to force them to inhale it."

"The cycle's getting shorter. How were the bodies found?"

"Anonymous tip to local police. Traced to a phone booth."

"The killer?"

"Yeah. The voice was too heavily distorted to yield any details."

"Well," said Gideon, speaking slowly, "I'm convinced. Wheels up in 30, everyone."

The team rose quickly and quietly and trooped out of the briefing room. Helena exited last, casting a glance back at the innocuous-looking folder on the round table.

"Hey, Duchess."

"Yeah?" she responded, shifting her gaze to Flynn, who had turned back to address her.

"You got a go-bag?"

"Pfft." She waved a dismissive hand and grinned at him. "I was born with a go-bag. Race you to the jet."

As the jet taxied off the runway, Helena leaned back and closed her eyes, weighing the evidence in her mind, chiding herself. She was dangerously close to fixating on the last victim, excluding the others from her thought process. The signs were so familiar, so obvious.

Zoom out. Patterns. Look for patterns, woman. Objectivity above all.

"Blythe, what are your thoughts on Diaz?"

Her eyes snapped open and she jerked her head around to stare at Gideon, who sat beside her.

So much for the zooming out stratagem.

Hotch watched the girl sitting across from him, taking in the tightness around her mouth and the wideness of her bright eyes. When Gideon addressed her, he saw her expression falter for a moment, a contortion of what looked like pain.

"I…" she hesitated, lowering her eyes and breathing in. When she resumed eye contact with Gideon, her expression had cleared. "I don't want to jump the gun, sir. Especially since the characteristics that caught my eye don't help to establish a general victimology. I'll keep an eye out and let you know if my hunch yields anything."

Flynn shifted next to Hotch, leaning forward across the table.

"I know that this isn't how you C.I. types do things, but in the BAU, we share our ideas."

Blythe stared at him, her expression unreadable.

"I have reason to believe that my personal experiences may be biasing my observations. I don't want to derail the investigation with premature-"

"We promise not to take you too seriously," said Gideon, smiling gently.

"Well, again, I'm speculating wildly here. But… the makeup, the juvenile record, the self-harm. This girl is trying to act older than she is, she's self-loathing, and she has a problem with authority. I don't want to project, but to me it screams sexual abuse."

Gideon leaned back, appearing to examine the table in minute detail. The silence stretched. Hotch watched Blythe as discreetly as he could. She was trying unsuccessfully to behave casually, twirling a pen around her slim white fingers and occasionally making eye contact with one of her curious colleagues.

Finally, Morgan broke the silence.
"I agree, actually. I've seen a case or two like this in Chicago. It's a theory that fits the information-"

"But by no means the only theory that would fit," Blythe interjected hurriedly. "Obviously it needs substantiation."

"We're going to have to do some serious digging on the victims anyway. A killer this organized is almost certain to have a methodology for picking his victims. We'll find a link eventually. Blythe, you can investigate Elicia. Jack-"

"I'll go with her," said Flynn, nodding. Blythe smiled at him, and Hotch had to wrestle down a feeling of inexplicable disappointment.

"Alright, other impressions?"

"The first victim had the poison injected directly into her vein," said Reid, brow furrowed. "Coroner reports signs of a heroin habit. But both of the other victims ingested the strychnine orally."

"The unsub convinced three very different women to consume poison, apparently without resistance."

"That bothers me. I don't know a single city girl who would drink something that's been out of her sight for a moment. So how did he get Jackson?"

"Blythe, who would you trust to fix you a drink out of your line of sight?"

"Me personally?" she asked with a wry smile. "Nobody. If I went down a few levels in paranoia, though… I could see it from anyone clearly unthreatening: a child or someone I'd known for a few years, especially if I had reason to believe that they weren't interested in me sexually. Married, straight woman, or gay man."

"It's hard to place the unsub demographically given the inconsistent victimology. The crimes aren't obviously sexually sadistic in nature, but a series of female victims, all fairly young? It points towards a male killer."

"Let's focus on the victims for now. The unsub will just have to wait."

Seattle, Washington

Helena bit back her frustration. Ellie Diaz's teachers seemed to be unable to comment on anything other than the girl's penchant for questioning authority and collecting detentions. She had neither friends nor hobbies, kept her nose in cheap paperbacks during lunch break, and turned in messy, half-completed assignments.

The mulish middle-aged English teacher that Blythe and Flynn were currently interviewing, and who had taken immediate exception to Helena's increasingly accusatory tone, glared with unconcealed hostility at the two agents.

"You're telling me that you don't have a single one of her essays or reports?"

"That's what I said, isn't it?"

"What did she like to read? Romance novels? Fantasy?"

' "How would I know? The little brat took off first after every class."

"Ms. Pitt," interjected Flynn, his manner apologetic and deferential, "we're so sorry to have wasted your time. May I ask just one more question?"

He threw her a twinkling smile as he leaned on Ms. Pitt's desk. The homely woman altered her expression instantly, her face taking on a look of grotesque coquettishness.

"Yeah, I guess."

"Who's in charge of detention here? Is there some teacher who stays with the kids?"

"You're looking for Lloyd Franklin. He volunteered for the job, God knows why. Nice man, but too soft. Much nicer to those delinquent brats than they deserve, if you ask me."

When they left Pitt's classroom, it was with a room number for Franklin and a phone number for Pitt herself. The latter, Flynn quickly discarded with a shudder.

"It's never the pretty ones who throw themselves at me," he said plaintively. "Why don't they ever look like you, Duchess?"

"If you laid it on as thick with me as you did with that harpy, Flynn, you might end up with my phone number too."

Flynn chuckled.

"Or a stiletto to the throat."

"High risk, high reward, darling."

"I bet you are."

She laughed, finding herself enjoying the relaxed, low-stakes flirtation. Jack Flynn had nothing to prove and everything to teach her, and it had been a long time since she had met a man without an agenda.

"Shall we interview Franklin today?" she asked, reminding herself that he was, in fact, her superior despite his apparent inability to behave formally.

"Oh, I think so. We can uproot the girl's room this evening."

They knocked at the classroom door, and it was thrown open immediately.

"Jenny, you're late agai-Oh. Hello." The man at the door blinked in surprise at the sight of the beauty and the behemoth. "Can I help you?"

He was an undeniably attractive man in his mid-forties, dressed in slacks and a button-down shirt that traced a well-formed frame. His face was kind and his eyes a warm blue and prone to crinkling at the edges.

"Mr. Franklin, we're special agents Flynn and Blythe. We were hoping to ask you some questions. Could you step outside for a few minutes?"

"I'm with a class. Well, with detainees, technically-"

"It won't take long," volunteered Helena with her most charming smile. If Flynn could do it, she could too. The effect was gratifyingly quick; Franklin's eyes caught on her and traced the familiar path between her eyes, her lips, and her figure. "It's about one of your more frequent visitors," she continued. "Elicia Diaz?"

At the mention of the name, the man's eyes snapped back to hers from their meandering path down her torso. In the split second after their eyes met, Blythe saw a hard, shrewd expression flash over his face. It vanished so swiftly that she might easily have believed it a figment of her imagination if she hadn't noted as well the tightening of his left hand into a white-knuckled fist. Or the wedding ring thereupon.

"Elicia. Yes, she hasn't been in for a few days. I took it as a good sign. She's not in any trouble, is she?"

"We're just making a few inquiries," Flynn assured him. "She may have information pertinent to an ongoing investigation."

Franklin's eyebrows shot up and his pupils dilated. He struggled to compose his face into an expression of mild interest.

Well that scared the shit out of him.

A quick glance at Jack told her that he was thinking along similar lines.

"Do you know anything about Elicia's social life, Mr. Franklin?" asked Flynn, pressing their advantage.
"Only that she doesn't have much of one. She's never fit in with the other detention regulars."

"How so?"

"Ellie's… mature for her age. She liked to read. She listens to different music. She's an old soul. Not like other kids her age at all."

Helena felt a shiver run down her spine at the familiarity of the phrases.

You disgusting son of a bitch.

Then: Don't jump the gun, Blythe.

"Ms. Pitt told us that you take a personal interest in your students-"

"What's that supposed to mean?" demanded the man with sudden aggression.

Helena smiled and held her hand up in a pacifying gesture.

Bingo.

"I was trying to pay you a compliment, Mr. Franklin. It's so uplifting to see a teacher reaching out to troubled students without an ulterior motive."

While Franklin was settling his ruffled feathers, Flynn struck.

"Did Elicia have a boyfriend, sir? Was she sexually active with one of her peers?"

The question, levelled while he was still recovering from the presumed allegation, caught him off-balance. An ugly grimace twisted his mouth.

"Of course not. Ellie would never mess around with pubescent goons. I told you. She's too mature for that."

"Right. Thank you for your time, Mr. Franklin."

Flynn wrapped a large hand around Blythe's forearm and steered her firmly away from the door.

"Thanks," she murmured. "I think I was about to kill him."

Hotch and Morgan stood together in the foyer of the Prometheus premises, weighing the gossip that they had gathered.

"So she was sleeping with her boss. What does it matter? She still doesn't fit in with the other victims."

"But it does add another dimension to the victimology."

"A prostitute, a sex abuse victim, and a woman sleeping with her married boss? That's not even a connection, even if Blythe's hunch pans out.

"And speaking of Blythe, are you okay to work with her?"

Hotch turned an icy glare on Morgan.

"Excuse me?"

"Look, I don't want to pry into your private life, but come on, Hotch. You've got a soft spot the size of Siberia for that girl."

"I'm a happily married man, Morgan. That's all there is to say-"

"Coffee, gentlemen?"

The men spun around to face the small, crumpled woman who pushed the coffee cart. She smiled, her face transforming into a complex series of folds and wrinkles.

"No thank you, ma'am. We were just leaving."

Hotch and Morgan returned to the police station in tense silence. Morgan glanced occasionally at Hotch, whose face was set in a hard, unreadable mask.

Flynn, Helena, Reid, and Gideon had already arrived and set up an evidence board. They stood in a huddle, heads bent over a shoebox.

"Morgan, looks like you and Blythe were right about the third victim. She's been living the contents of Lolita for about a year from the looks of it."

"Is that confirmed?"

"We don't have a confession, but the evidence is pretty clear. Look."

Hotch and Morgan moved forward to examine the contents of the box: an expensive-looking opal necklace, a pair of ticket stubs for The Life Aquatic, a hardcover anthology of Romantic poetry, a charm bracelet, an envelope marked "to my beloved Ellie," and a boxcutter. On the interior of the flimsy cardboard, Morgan noted what appeared to be drops of dried blood.

"Goddammit," he muttered, eyes fixed on the macabre keepsakes. "Who?"

"The teacher who runs detention at her school. We met him today."

"You're sure?"

"We don't have incontrovertible proof yet," admitted Blythe, whose face was very pale and tense, "but I'm confident that the handwriting in that letter will match his. Or alternatively, if we bring him in I can promise you a confession."

Gideon shot her a sharp look.

"Blythe, I need to know that you can keep your head through this. If you start taking this personally-"

"I can and I'm not. All I meant was that I'm good at getting information out of people."

Gideon did not look convinced in the slightest, but he turned reluctantly to the newly arrived agents.

"What did you find out about Jackson?"

"Well, for one thing, she was a teetotaler. However she was poisoned, it almost certainly wasn't through an alcoholic beverage."

"Curiouser and curiouser," murmured Blythe. "So what did she consume that could conceal the taste of the strychnine?"

"She was incredibly frugal. Packed lunch, snacks, and dinner every day, never ate out, and spent every minute from 7:00 in the morning to 10:00 at night in the office. First to arrive, last to leave type of worker, apparently."

"That's an incredibly low-risk victim. Poisoning her would take work. So much for murders of opportunity."

"She had one vice, though. She had a long-standing ongoing affair with her direct supervisor," said Hotch. "We got confirmation from the man himself. He was on vacation in Munich when Jackson died, though."

"Well that's an obvious lie," said Flynn with a derisive snort. "Who goes to Munich for a vacation?"

"Actually, Munich's technical museum is-"

"Reid," Gideon interrupted, preempting the tangent, "he was joking."

"What do we know about the first victim?"

"We have her little black book. Garcia's running through the names now. Looks like our girl worked more hours a week than we do."

"Her last roommate told us that Jones had gotten clean by the end, but that she was struggling. She had fallen in love with one of her clients, thought he would leave his wife for her. But then he cut contact and moved out of the city with his family two days before she disappeared. When she disappeared, the roommate assumed that she had fallen off the wagon and taken off."

"Easy pickings, in other words. All the unsub would have to do is wave the tainted heroin under her nose."

"But the question remains, how the hell do the victims fit together? It's increasingly unlikely that they were picked at random."

"Blythe, the teacher who molested Diaz, is he married?" asked Hotch suddenly.

She raised a brow at him and nodded.

"I think that's it," he said, and Helena's eyes widened in comprehension that apparently no one else shared.

"You're going to have to be a little more explicit," Flynn told him.

"They're homewreckers," murmured Blythe, her gaze wandering over the faces of the three victims. "They were all involved with married men."

Morgan shook his head.

"That's ridiculous. The situations were all completely different. Diaz was a kid, for God's sake."

"And no one knew about Franklin's abuse," added Flynn. "How would the unsub figure it out?"

"They went out together if the movie tickets are any indication. The unsub could have seen them."

"Is this really a productive line of inquiry?"

"It's the closest thing to a connection that we can find. I think it's worth exploring, don't you?"

"So, what kind of unsub would go after the affair partner instead of the adulterer? A woman scorned?"

"It's quite common to blame the other woman. I think we should look at divorces in Seattle over the last year and cross-check them with people involved in the lives of the victims."

"How do we even find the cross-section between the people in the victims' lives?"

"Well, it's someone who successfully got each of the victims alone. That suggests some level of trust. And it's someone who knew about the affairs."

"And someone who wanted the bodies found, which means that the unsub was confident that he or she couldn't be connected to the bodies."

"We should focus on Jackson. She'd have been the hardest to poison."

"It would most likely have been at work. A coworker who brought her lunch or coffee one day?"

"Coffee could conceal the taste of strychnine, but how did the unsub poison her in the office and then transport her body? People would have seen her die."

"Except that she was a workaholic and often the only one in the office. She arrived a full two hours before the others."

"What about the first victim? Who would she trust?"

"Her roommate said that she didn't really have friends. The only time she went out for anything other than a client, it was for Narcotics Anonymous."

"It'll be impossible to find out who attended her meetings with her."

"We should go through her things. See if we can find the name of her sponsor."

"We can't. She's been dead for four months. The roommate sold everything after a week."

"Fuck."

The conversation continued late into the night, the team running in ever smaller circles. Flynn and Morgan remained firmly opposed to the affair theory, Hotch and Blythe grew more convinced of it, Reid vacillated, and Gideon remained laconic. By the time they retired to their hotel rooms, it was with a pervasive sense of annoyance and confusion.

Author's note: I had planned to write the first case in one installment, but it's already long and messy enough. The concluding installment should come more quickly than the first.

I would really appreciate feedback on the cases; I'm not sure if I'm quite doing justice to the profiling process, so any suggestions are valuable.