Disclaimer: I do not own Criminal Minds and intend no copyright infringement.
Ivanhoe Salisbury practically went through the roof when Rossi and Garcia asked him to haul in two students for questioning, but he stood no chance against a fiercely determined technical analyst and a legendary profiler with friends in high places. The boys, twin brothers Alec and Rick Garrett, were brought to the police station where Salisbury and his team had set up their command center.
"Tell me what happened on the day of the biology excursion", Rossi asked them. The boy's parents, sitting right next to them with their lawyer, looked confused, they had thought this was about the shooting, but Rick started chewing his lip violently, and Alec began to shake. They knew exactly what the FBI Agent was talking about. Nevertheless no one said a word. "Okay, no problem, I can do this without your help. Of course, cooperation could earn you some brownie points with the jury…."
Alec, the boy with the glasses, swallowed hard. The lawyer wanted to jump in and stop him , his brother shot him a warning glance, but the teenager had made a decision. "I can't do this anymore, Rick", he whispered, trembling like an aspen leaf. "I hear the screams every night. I can't go on like this.." He looked at Rossi: "It was an accident." Rick started to cry. Deeply shocked, the parents stared at their children as if they were strangers.
"Are you kidding me? How can a school shooting be an accident?", Agent Salisbury chipped in. The senior agent silenced him with a single meaningful look.
"Let's start from the beginning", Rossi said calmly."You, your brother, Arielle Stetson, Lucy Greener and Kelly Hobson were all in one group at the excursion, right? After the teacher sent you on the factory's premises, you were out of his sight… No adult control whatsoever till the evening. You didn't waste the whole beautiful day with collecting probes, did you?"
"Lucy had brought some grass. We left the premises and found ourselves a picnic place near a waterfall. Everything went fine, but then this girl appeared…"
"Patty Ridgemont, six years of age…", Rossi said. "She often played near the waterfall. Her parents didn't mind, they said she knew the terrain very well."
"She got on our nerves, said our cigarettes smelt funny… We just wanted to scare her off, so…" Alec couldn't go on. His voice trailed off in a series of sobs.
"We started pushing her around a little…", his brother continued, barely audible. "Maybe it was the grass… we overdid it… she stumbled backwards and fell into the water… We tried to safe her! Arielle, Alec and me, we jumped after her and dragged her out, but… she must have hit a rock during the fall… Her head was smashed… she was dead…."
"So instead of calling an ambulance and the police you decided to hush everything up… You pushed her back into the water and left… on the way back to the factory you stole sportswear from a clothesline because your own clothes had gotten wet and contaminated with blood." Garcia had found a police report on stolen jogging clothes dating from the day in question. Rossi showed it to them.
The boys slowly nodded. "But how did you connect this with us?", Alec asked after a moment of silence.
"Arielle mimicked Patty's death when she took her own life. She put on clothes similar to those Patty wore on the day of her death and she chose to drown just like her", Rossi explained. "She couldn't live with the guilt."
"Lucy Greener and Kelly Hobson both died in the massacre at your High School two weeks later! You did it! To make sure no one would uncover your deed, you staged a school shooting! This way you could kill Lucy Greener and Kelly Hobson without drawing too much attention – Arielle was lucky, she escaped your evil plan!" Smug as hell, Salisbury looked around, waiting for praise.
Rossi shook his head. "I'm afraid Ivanhoe, it's not that easy. These boys killed a little girl by accident. To go from there to a semi-terroristic act like a school shooting in hardly two weeks would be a very fast and rather unlikely deterioration. I'm not saying it's impossible but if I were you I wouldn't focus on these two as the perpetrators." The profiler didn't continue, but Salisbury understood very well what Rossi had left unsaid: "And don't you dare blame it on them just because you don't find anyone else… ."
"Mom? Dad?", the twins turned to their parents. Wordlessly, the Garretts embraced their children.