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WARNING: some violence in this chapter...
We're almost at the end. Almost... :)
Enjoy!
On blood and roses
"What do you mean you want to wait?" he's freaking out
"Are you stupid or you're just trying to make me nervous?" she says, there's an edge of amusement in her voice
"I am just saying that we don't have much time left. They are getting closer.."
"Dear, sometimes speaking with you is so frustrating" she sighs in disappointment "what do we always say?"
"If a game is well played you don't mind the final score" he repeats not seeming really persuaded.
"Exactly. So do you think that what we did up to now was just not to be caught?"
Silence.
"Bravo." She comments keeping her voice calm and relaxed, Emily can perceive her smiling "We did something grand and the last one is going to be special. So, now let down your scalpel or I swear I'll shove it up your ass so high that…"
"Okay, okay, okay!" he cries in a submissive tone "just don't get mad at me"
Emily regained progressively memory of what happened while listening at that odd conversation. That sedative they gave her left a feeling of hung-over and a disgusting taste in her mouth. She tried to look around to understand where she was and the possible escapes, but she realized that her head as well as her entire body were tied to what seemed to be a surgical table, judging by the cold hard surface she was lying on. She tried to move her fingers and toes and her limbs. Everything was still in place; whatever they wanted to do to her they hadn't started with the slicing yet. At least some good news..
The woman got closer to Emily, her eyes two dead ice blue mirrors. "Hi Emily" still that note of amusement in her calm tone "If you are not going to shout I'll remove the gag from your mouth. If you are not going to play G.I. Joe I'll untie you. You break the rules, I cut your throat. Clear?"
Emily nodded.
They moved into a room where there was a couch, a table with two chairs and a piano and nothing else, it was probably an apartment rented temporarily just for the time to chop her.
The woman gave her a big excited smile, the first hint of emotion in her eyes "First of all, I owe you a big thank you" she started.
Emily frowned.
"For finding me. My goodness! Ten years gutting people around the country and not a policeman chasing us. I was seriously considering a change in our modus operandi, I thought maybe if I stick on a pole a couple of bodies I will spark more interest… But then you started putting the pieces together, and you play also, what a fortunate coincidence! Not bad for an amateur, by the way.." Then she grinned, "Oh gosh, I am being so rude, I didn't even introduce myself properly. I am…"
"Rose Lawson" Emily preceded her.
A big smile of approval "You are so good. It's such a shame that I have to kill you" but the shine in her eyes was telling another story.
Emily looked at her expression; this woman was pure psychopath, the utter lucidity and excitement with which she was referring to the murders was petrifying "If you are going to kill me why did you untie me?"
"Because you deserve a treat. The rule is simple, you play the game at your best until you get caught, and now you found us. Well technically we found you, but you were almost there. So I want to be generous, you have the right to ask me one questions before you die"
How generous. "Any question?"
"Any"
The only choice Emily had was to play along and make her talk as much as she could to buy sometime, hoping the others would get at her before it was too late. She casted a glance to the clock on the wall, it had been three hours since she had been taken and at that point they must have realized something was wrong. She looked back at Rose, she was beautiful, long blond waves framed her big blue eyes and crimson lips on a porcelain skin, one could barely notice the rigidity in her hand. "I want to hear your story" she said looking her straight in the eyes.
"Because you want to buy time?" she asked her maliciously
"Because I want to understand how a beautiful, successful woman turns herself and her husband into merciless killers" she answered without winking.
"Well then, let's start" Rose smiled back.
"No, I am not calming down. I want to know how a serial killer enters the bureau, knocks down two guards and an agent and abducts one of my agents!" Hotch was furiously shouting at the phone with the responsible of the security.
The rest of the team had been working frantically to find where McAdams was after not finding him at work neither at home, but without success.
Garcia was typing at her fastest on the keyboard chasing ten leads at a time and always ending with an impasse; Derek was sitting in her office going through all the information they could gather on McAdams, he hadn't spoken a word since they found out that Emily was missing. The agent supposed to protect her had been knocked out and near him a red rose with a fragment of a musical score was found.
"Derek? Please say something. You are scaring me" the analyst begged him without stopping the movement of her hands on the keys.
"I promised I would protect her, I promised I would help her to catch this bastard and now she's in the hands of a serial killer ready to cut her into pieces and we don't have a damn idea on where she could be."
"Honey it's not your fault"
"All this time, Penelope. All those months watching each other in the distance, like strangers, picking ridicule excuses as the bureau rules, seeking comfort in the wrong places... And now I don't know if I will ever see her again" he ran a hand on his forehead, and was about to say something when Reid and Rossi entered the room, another person behind them.
"You two remember Emily's friend, Mr …?"
"Call me Eddie" the man stepped forward "I know Emily was abducted so I thought maybe there is something I can do, some detail I can provide to help you"
"Thanks a lot, maybe you can follow Dr Reid and answer some questions" Derek suggested.
Eddie liked Derek; he had liked him since the very first moment he noticed the way he looked at Emily. He nodded and turned to leave the room when he noticed the pictures, "Oh, Van Horn's Rose" he commented.
"Excuse me?" Derek asked.
"That's the way she was called. She was his best pupil, his rose. Rumors had that they were lovers, and considering Van Horn's reputation it was probably true. They said she drove the car off road because he was trying to leave her and go back with his wife. They said that she actually never died and came back to kill him."
"What do you mean?" asked Rossi.
"She left a letter and then she jumped into a river, her husband was the only witness. Her body was never found."
"Garcia, check all the properties, accounts, contracts under the name Rose Lawson or Mike Lawson or Adam Lawson. He might be using her name, or if she's still alive they might be working together" Derek suggested.
"Do you think Rose did all this?" Eddie asked.
"We don't know but at this point we can't rule out anything" Reid explained handing him toward the door.
"Another question" Derek stopped them again "You told Emily that the man who contacted your daughter had a weird voice. Anything more you can remember about that?"
"She said it seemed a counterfeited voice, very feminine. That's all I remember"
"Thank you very much sir"
Reid and Eddie left the room, Rossi stayed "Emily was right in having doubts about McAdams being our unsub. He's probably the executor, but Rose is the head of everything"
"So you are saying that this beautiful young woman tried to kill his lover, then staged her death, manipulated another man – her husband- and partnered up with him to kill her ex fling and mutilate people around the country for ten years? How do you turn in such a monster?" Garcia commented horrified.
"I have always been good at getting what I wanted, from men especially. I find them so pathetic, with this idea of being in control, of being the ones who make decisions and provide for you. Instead they are only basic creatures with basic needs, eating, sleeping, emptying their gonads. On Sunday they walk their families to the church, showing off in front of friends and neighbors how such loving caring husbands and fathers they are. But at night in the dim light of their bedrooms, where nobody can see them, they crawl back to their wives blubbering and begging forgiveness for their disgusting filthy lies. There is only one kind of man, and the sooner you learn it the better off you'll be."
She took a pause and sighed deeply then she went on "And then there are two kinds of women: the wives and the others. A good wife is supposed to cover the cracks, to put up with this animal who broke all his promises, to go on smiling and when faking becomes to painful to look away and add a sip of good old bourbon to her coffee. In order not to face the shame of the public humiliation she has to lose her self-respect and to accept back into her bed, into her womb that filthy animal, night after night, the smell of his whore still on him when he takes her. Then there are the others, they have the benefits of having a man in their bed and his money in their pockets but not the responsibility of covering for his hideous face. They know how powerful a woman can be when she knows the right buttons to push, she can reduce the most respectable and honorable man into a door mat, making him destroy his family, abandon his children, betray his ideals. My mother used to blame the woman who did this to my father, I say she was just jealous for not being as her, I say my father was to blame, but nobody ever did, I say the woman who uncovered the real monster he was, she was a goddess. Since the first time I saw her I knew who I wanted to become, I knew no man would ever humiliate or left me anymore"
"But the Van Horn came.." Emily suggested.
Rose gave her a nasty look, hurt by that memory "We were supposed to run away, to be lovers forever. I trusted him, I thought he was different. And all of a sudden he comes out saying that he's not sure anymore, that after all Maureen doesn't deserve this. But he doesn't want to lose me. After the accident when I told him I was leaving he started whining like a child, he promised money, he gave me the fellowship. So lame; I gave up everything for him, my love, my career, my dreams and he thought that some money could fix it.. I didn't want him to get away with it easily. Mike was so easy to set up, he loves me childishly, he cannot stand the idea of me leaving him or even being mad at him. I enjoyed Van Horn's pain during all my engagement with Mike, I also invited him and his wife at the marriage. Then I staged my suicide. When he saw me at school the night we took him he almost fainted, he didn't know whether to cry or to smile. He really didn't understand what was going on until he saw Mike with his instruments. He was crying like a pig, a coward till his last breath" now she was a mask of rage and disgust, her eyes on the hand that would never work at the same anymore.
"If you hate men so much, why did you kill also women?" asked Emily try to find a way in the maze of her mind.
"It doesn't make any sense Morgan" snapped. "The profile we put up according to her past is the one of a woman who finds gratification from taking control over men, manipulating and using them. In this case she convinced McAdams to cooperate with her in staging her suicide and killing 26 people around the country. But why does she use this particular MO, the collection of the fingers, the rose, the scores?"
"She's bold" Rossi answered, "she's overconfident in her capacities, she knows she can charm whoever she wants. Maybe in her mind this is some kind of game and she's challenging whoever is smart enough to face and defeat her. That's why the distinctive MO, she wants to be sure that someone sees her."
"Ok, then" Hotch continued "she hates men. She's been left by her father who preferred a younger woman to her and her mother, so she turns into this kind of woman to be sure she will receive love and her lover turns her down preferring his wife, the model of woman she discarded in first instance. At this point it's something personal, she hates all men because all men are betrayers"
"So why does she partner up with one of them. And if her motive is the hatred toward men, why the victims belong to both sexes?" objected Morgan.
"You're right. This woman is a maze and until we don't understand the profile well we won't be able to understand where she's heading" concluded Rossi.
Eddie had tagged along with the team, everyone agreeing on his presence as a valuable source of information; only now Reid noticed him staring intently at the musical scores attached on the panel and mumbling something, "Eddie, is everything okay?" he addressed the old man.
"It's Ondine," Eddie concluded his train of thoughts at loud voice "how could I miss it? Emily must have known it, that's why she was putting all the fragments together" he addressed the team members who were all looking at him with confused expressions.
"Ondi- what?" Rossi asked.
"The score that Emily put together form the fragments sent to all those people" really he couldn't use the term victims, it would have meant taking the distances from his daughter and considering her as a casualty, "It's the first movement of Gaspar de la Nuit a concert written by Ravel, considered one of the most challenging pieces for a pianist. This first movement is called Ondine, it's a tale about a fairy of the water who seduces men and lure them to follow her and visit her kingdom at the bottom of a lake" the initial enthusiasm for recognizing the musical piece wore out as a new awareness kicked in "but this doesn't mean anything, does it?" asked disheartened to the team.
"Well actually it might" Reid suggested, "what if killing was not the final purpose but the mean?"
Rose stared at Emily with disappointment, like a teacher with a promising pupil who doesn't get the obvious "It was never about the victims. It was about taking a respectable, good-hearted man who vowed to help people for all his life and turn him into a merciless killer who would do whatever I wanted just because I was asking it. The first time he went on crying and vomiting for two days, and even now he has nightmares all the time" she smiled smugly.
"You killed all those people to prove you could corrupt a man to the marrow of the bone?" Emily asked, a sudden cloth of nausea coming up to her stomach.
"Well literally I didn't kill anybody, Mike did all the Kill-Bill job and strictly speaking I am dead, I'm not even prosecutable. But yes, I chose our targets to see how far I could drive him and how long would we be in the game before someone caught us. Useless to say that I didn't envision to carry it on for such a long time."
Emily was disgusted and upset by the total lack of emotion in Rose recount, but she couldn't help asking the next question and feeling even more uneasy in doing that "Why targeting pianists and why using their fingers?" She knew there was no way to make sense out of the atrocities unsubs committed, but knowing as much as she could about the whys and hows had helped her in the years to feel less useless and dirty after being inside their minds. Being aware of how an unsub mind worked helped her to draw the line between her and them and at the end of the day allowed her to say to herself 'I'm not like them'.
Rose smiled, again a sparkle of life in her gaze "Ah, that thing. That is a funny story actually"
Emily couldn't help shivering with disgust at the use of the adjective funny, Rose was describing the atrocities she had been perpetrating for ten years as if she was recounting a trip to the countryside.
"After all I'm an artist. I wanted to have an original signature, targeting pianists, sending them roses and notes, cutting away their fingers sounded original. As for the piano making, I know it's a bit of a macabre thing but in the beginning it was fun. Then after the first round I was already deadly bored of it, but I thought to stick to it in order to be consistent in my style and to give Mike a final purpose for all this cutting and chopping. But to be honest the music, the piano etcetera is just a framework linked to my personal taste, frankly they could have been plumbers, I don't care." Her voice now was almost childish.
Emily tried hard to concentrate on the fact that she had to keep her talking and delay as much as she could the end of their conversation, but she was frankly lost while contemplating this monster. Pure evil came with the face of a porcelain doll.
"You don't get it, do you?" Rose went on "I turned a respectable man turn into a sadistic killer, got 26 people killed around the country and in the process I haven't touched anybody. Even if I got caught today nobody could deny that I am a goddess." She turned her face to the window "It's getting dark and we've talked enough. It's time for stakes! Come on Emily, get up" she announced with a bright smile.
"So choosing to send fragments of Ondine was casual as well? You don't identify with that fairy, do you?" Emily didn't move a finger and stared at her opponent determined in gaining as much time as she could.
Rose froze, then she sat down again and settled a pleased smile "As I said it's a shame I have to kill you."
"The thing is that you're all wrong, and you know it also." Emily continued, Rose suddenly turned at her surprised, not used to be antagonized "You've been unlucky, your father abandoned you for a fairy so you decided to be as well and not to follow your mother's example of faithful wife thinking this would prevent you from pain and loss. But then you fell in love with a man who preferred his faithful wife to you. And there you snapped, because you started thinking it was not a problem with men being mean or with a specific type of woman, the problem was with you, men were leaving you. But the truth is that there are real good men, capable of sincere and affectionate love, who don't need to be lured or charmed to stay with you because they just love you for the way you are. There is no such thing as men and women, wives and others, Rose. There are people who make choices and choose for the good or the evil. You made your choice and ended 28 lives and you're the only one to blame for this"
"28?"
"The 26 people you killed, Mike and yourself"
Rose was uncertain for a second, then she swallowed and regained her composure "So you think that your Prince Charming is different, uh? That he will come to rescue you and he'll take care of you. Even though at the ceremony it wasn't you sitting beside him, it wasn't you gently touching his arm. Nope, you were in a corner, all alone, with an old man who could be your father because you are so scared and insecure that you cannot even get a man for a night. And when Prince Charming ran after you crying for a second chance you gave it to him; you weak, naïve woman. How long would it take before he chooses another bed to jump into? You should be thankful that you won't have the chance to experience this humiliation twice" she got up from her seat "Mike! She's all yours!"
"So what you are saying is that all this time her target was McAdams and not the victims?" Morgan searched for a validation in Reid's eyes.
"Exactly. McAdams and the category he represents. The good man who is good not because he's brave, but because he's too weak to stand up for the good or the bad, and thus can be corrupted into an evil person by someone who can manipulate him" Reid explained.
The others looked at each others, the profile actually made sense, but it wasn't easy to accept the idea that 26 innocents died just because a rejected woman wanted to make a statement.
"Okay. This sheds light on her psychosis, but how does it help to find Emily. The clock is ticking" Rossi pointed out.
"She's trying to get even with men in general, but in particular with the three men in her life who disappointed her most" Derek reasoned loud voice "her father, Van Horn, McAdams. Garcia search for all the properties rented under one of these three names in the last month, let's say."
"Got it" she exclaimed after few moments of frantic typing on her keyboard "Rose Van Horn. Could I be more stupid for not trying it before?"
"Garcia, no time for this. We need an address" Morgan pressed.
In no time they were heading to the address Garcia gave them. The drive seemed endless to Morgan, his jaw clenched with tension, his mind focused on the necessary hope to save her, to him it was impossible to consider any other outcome.
He tied her to the table, again. The surface hard and cold under her body, the belts hindering any movements, fastened so tight that her limbs soon started going numb.
"She's going to leave you"
Then he started cutting her clothes in the areas where he would cut and chop her. His hands intent on her body, his eyes never meeting her gaze.
"She will leave you alone with your hands covered in blood and nothing of your humanity left"
He started running the scalpel on her skin, thin blood ripples dripping down to the table, marks for the future deeper incisions drawn as a map on her body.
"I know you think you don't have anything left, but you still have a choice" she hissed in pain.
Finally he turned to her, desperation and sorrow in his eyes "I am already a hollow man, I lost my humanity, I sold my soul to the devil. I know she's evil, but at night when we are alone after I took another life for her, she reveals to me a part that I only can see. In those moments I can have back the sweet girl she was once, her smile, the glow in her eyes, the scent of her skin. For few precious instants she's again with me. This is the reason why I do this, why I kill, to resuscitate her once in a while. To preserved that part of her that, even though buried deep down, still lives in her"
"There's no good part Mike. She is evil to the core, and what you see is what she makes you believe in order to keep you killing for her. Who do you think will be charged for the murders?"
"I am already a dead man and everything they will do to me will be the right expiation for not being able to save her ten years ago, for not healing her arm, for destroying her future." He knew the procedure already. It was the most excruciating pain every time to take away a life, to tear apart a body, but the thought of having his Rose back afterward was enough to guide him through it. The first hits were the worst, then a shield would kick in, and he wouldn't feel or hear anything anymore. Everything would go black and he would know exactly where to hit, slash after slash. He took the cleaver and raised it over his head, then looked briefly at Emily "I am sorry" he whined pathetically, tears in his eyes.
Then he went down.
She saw the blade coming down and afterward everything went black.
To be continued...