Thanks to everyone who read and stilljustme for reviewing.

"Hey, Gina, Coop," Mick said as they entered the warehouse. "Any luck?"

"Hey," Gina returned as Sam nodded in greeting. Beth and Prophet murmured hellos in their general direction, but their focus was obviously on the computer on the table between them.

"Both of the guys we talked to seemed pretty clean," Gina continued, answering Mick's question. "We could only confirm one of the alibis, but the other sounded good too. What about you?"

"Looks like we've got three possibilities—well, minus the people with no alibis—but one of them seems too disorganized to be our guy. And I still say the kills are too ritualistic for it to be simple displacement which rules out a second. He's got enough of a relationship with his mother for her to alibi him."

Sam couldn't tell from his sideways glance if it was Prophet or Beth who disagreed with him, and neither of them glanced back at the comment to help him decide. Well, actually the fact that neither of them glanced back was a pretty good indication that it was Beth since unless and until things became painfully serious Mick and Prophet rarely missed a chance to tease each other.

"If the anger is stemming from that relationship with his mother, it might not take much," Gina said.

Mick shook his head.

"Who's the third?" Sam asked.

"Aaron Bolver, Prophet's pick from yesterday. His boss alibis him for being out on a roofing job, but he alibis him awfully forcefully for not ever having seen him, and Beth is guessing it was a by-the-hour job so he—the boss—would have a reason to claim it took longer than it did. The building Bolver was supposed to be working on is within a couple miles of where Nina was last seen, too."

"A couple miles is a lot of ground to cover if the only incentive he had was running into Nina and Tiara in a convenience store once," Gina said with a frown. "He'd almost have had to hunt her down."

"Or he could have just taken a chance," Mick argued. "Nina disappeared in the same general neighborhood as that convenience store."

"It's also an area known for prostitutes and they've been his chosen targets all along. Maybe he was only planning to stake out the area for a potential next target but happened across Nina in the process." That seemed more likely to Sam than their unsub deliberately stalking Nina after one chance encounter.

"Saw her and felt compelled to grab her since she met his target criteria and they'd had an altercation before," Mick said. "That could have happened even if he wasn't hunting, if he was just cruising looking for something to do when he was supposedly at work."

Sam nodded. The police reports from the early victims were pretty thin on the details, but there were no confrontations listed in any of the other files, and they'd already speculated that some kind of personal interaction could have triggered the change in the timeline.

"Did he lose a business shortly before the first murder?" Gina asked.

"Not that Garcia found, but there might not have been a real business to find," Prophet said, and Sam realized that he and Beth had finished with whatever they'd been discussing and turned their attention to the rest of the team.

"I've seen plenty of fly-by-night construction 'businesses,'" Prophet continued, "and usually they're just one or two man ops doing some work under the table. Skim some materials off a legit job, cash-only payments…." He shrugged. "He clearly doesn't have any issue with his boss sticking it to customers on a normal job, and it's even easier on the side unless someone who knows what he's looking for starts poking around."

"Which, the IRS would qualify," Beth said. "Especially since they were already looking into fraud and money laundering courtesy of Mr. Griggs."

"So, what's the timeline?" Sam asked, grabbing a piece of chalk and turning to the nearest empty chalkboard. "Bolver is driving for Griggs—I think we're agreed that there has to be some connection to the garbage truck route beyond the obvious symbolism given the locations of the bodies matching the route before it was changed—but at some point the IRS starts looking into Griggs' business and ends up shutting it down. That was what, twelve months ago?" He drew a line on the board and then put a slash and quick notation at the near end when Gina nodded.

"About that, a couple months before the dumpster was moved."

"And the kidnap-and-murders happened less than a week ago, three weeks ago, two and a half months before that, and just barely three months earlier than that for the first one." He marked them in quickly, starting from the opposite end of the line with Nina and moving back towards the middle, and then stared at the board. There was an awful lot of empty space on the line between the shutdown of Griggs' business and that first kill…it wasn't impossible, but six months was a long wait for an unsub after a triggering event.

"The first known kill?" Beth suggested, clearly thinking along the same lines.

"But we checked the last time we were here, and there were no other bodies found even vaguely resembling our unsub's MO," Gina said. "Even if he was just starting to develop his ritual, there should have been some similarities between his first victims and the later ones. No other victims of any sort have been found in that area around the dump sites in the last year, either."

"Well, first kills are usually close to home," Mick said. "Maybe he went too close, hid that body, and then started using the garbage truck route."

A victim they hadn't found was something Sam had considered, and he still didn't have a good answer. He tapped the chalk against the board lightly. "Let's look at this another way. If Bolver is our prime suspect," and even if he was the best option among those they'd cleared alibis for they were ignoring several people who hadn't had alibis in the first place, "do we really think that he was driving for Griggs, working at a legitimate construction company, and taking jobs on the side all that the same time? That's an awful lot of hours for one man to be putting in."

Prophet shrugged. "It's doable. I mean, there were times when I double-shifted on legit jobs when money was tight, and a guy working under the table gets a lot more leeway to pick his schedule. Could have been taking side jobs on his days off. And it's not like driving a garbage truck would be too high stress."

"How long could he keep that up, though?" Gina asked. "Even if it was just on his days off that's a lot of heavy work, and time spent driving the truck was still time he couldn't spend sleeping."

"Probably not long," Prophet admitted. "And I can't imagine he was doing it without a damn good reason, either. The IRS didn't find gambling debts or drug debts or anything like that one him, did they?"

"No, but I haven't met a lot of bookies or dealers who file tax returns," Beth pointed out. "The IRS didn't talk to him until well after Griggs was shut down, though—no files so no indication that he was driving for Griggs, if he even was—and he was just one from their general sweep of everyone Griggs interacted with when they were trying to get more ammunition for trial so they didn't dig too far into his background."

"If not for driving then how did he come up?" Sam asked.

"Apparently he was the foreman for some job Griggs had crossed paths with."

"Probably how Griggs met him in the first place," Mick said. "What about this? A year ago the guy's working construction as his day job and doing some off the book runs for Griggs for cash. Or, well, all of the bodies were dumped in a pretty localized area, so maybe he just did one off the books run. Griggs could have had a couple drivers."

"Probably would have since using one person adds increases the risk of them cutting him out," Beth said.

Mick nodded. "Then Griggs gets shut down, but there's no attention on Bolver since his name wasn't written anywhere so he starts his own construction 'business' on the side to keep his extra money coming. For whatever he needed it for. But then when the IRS finally gets to him…."

"He has to shut down his business too," Sam completed. "Or at least he feels like he does. When did they interview him?"

Beth checked the computer quickly. "Almost eight months ago."

Eight months…that was after the dumpster was moved, but if he wasn't doing that run any more he wouldn't have known that. Sam put another slash on the board for the dumpster movement and a second for Bolver's interview and then stared at the now much narrower gap between the last slash and the first murder. Two months after a trigger—the loss of his business—for the pressure to build until he snatched and murdered the first prostitute. That was a lot closer to a typical timeline. He could see the rest of his team coming to the same conclusion and nodded. "Right now this is still speculation, but have Garcia open up his background. Let's see if he was having money trouble."

"So what do you think?" Prophet asked.

Beth looked up at him, away from the scene in the interview room. She had the distinct impression that there was a challenge there, but he wasn't nearly as obvious about it as Mick. Then again, he'd probably had more reasons to learn subtlety. "I think someone's been making small-time deals from the corner and is now realizing that career criminal isn't the life for him."

Prophet's lips twitched and he went back to watching the interview, and after a moment Beth did the same.

As Sam had said, what they'd come up with yesterday had all been speculation. Reasonable enough on the surface, sure, but a lot of things that were perfectly reasonable had nothing to do with reality and vice-versa. And due diligence meant that in addition to interviewing Bolver today they had to start bringing in their other potential suspects too…the bad date, the mother alibi, and the first of the lot with no alibis at all. It was Mr. Harris in there now, the one who'd asked his ex-girlfriend to be his alibi, and Beth was pretty sure that he was about two minutes away from incriminating himself on any number of petty crimes just from sheer terror at being in a police station. And Sam and Gina had yet to say much of anything beyond that they knew that he hadn't been on a date.

Sam and Prophet had been in there earlier with Mr. Keegan, the one who'd been alibied by his mother, and he hadn't been much better. Well, he hadn't been at the point of spontaneously confessing to anything, at least, but he hadn't shown any characteristics that would mark him as an unsub, either. It was possible that he was just a good actor—plenty of unsubs were, and Beth didn't like him any more today than she had the other day—but even she hadn't had a good reason that they should keep him around. They couldn't even prove that he hadn't been with his mother.

"Anything?" Mick asked, coming up behind them.

"Not that's useful to us," Prophet said, turning to face him. "Probably pin a couple drug charges on him for the locals, but he's not going to be building a criminal empire anytime soon."

"Figures," Mick said with a snort. "Told you he was weasel-y."

"Did Garcia find anything on Bolver?" Beth asked.

"Nothing specific. If he is in debt he's smart enough to keep it to cash. She did find a string of drink charges going back about a year and a half from a bar that Sergeant Thomas was happy to chat with me about. Apparently it's well known as a horse track hotspot." He grinned at Prophet. "Sergeant Thomas is the blonde."

"The blonde whose boyfriend was waiting for her when we got back from canvassing the last time we were here?"

"No one asked you, mate. Are you coming with me to pick up Bolver?"

The second part of that was directed at Beth since, as Prophet and Mick had been the ones to interview Mr. Harris the first time, one of them needed to stay and observe this time, and she nodded. "Sure." Even if regulations didn't frown heavily on it, no one with any sense wanted to go around picking up suspects alone, especially the suspect who was still first on their suspect list.

"Might as well get going, then. If Harris' interview is going that badly we might as well have him ready to send in next. Or are you doing that interview?"

Beth shrugged. It could go either way…Sam and Gina both stayed in, or she swapped out with one of them. Well, if she was going to swap out with one of them better it was Gina; Sam had her beat hands down when it came to reading people and she didn't mind admitting it. Sam had most people beat hands down.

"Don't let him drive, he never remembers which side of the road he's supposed to be on," Prophet murmured as Beth pulled her jacket on.

"Laugh it up; we all know you're jealous of my skills."

"Not sure you can call dodging the oncoming traffic you just turned into a skill."

Two of Mick's fingers flicked up briefly, and Beth wasn't sure how many of the officers in the station would have recognized the gesture given that it wasn't exactly the American version, but if Prophet's grin was anything to go by he'd seen it before. Whatever he might have said in response was cut off, though, as something Harris said distracted him.

Whatever it was Beth missed it, but before she could ask he shook his head. "Yeah. No criminal empire there."

Mick nodded towards the door—they were borrowing a police vehicle for their pickups since no one thought that having any of their top suspects loose in the car with them was a great idea—and with a quick look at Prophet Beth matched her pace to his. It had probably been more teasing between the two of them; Sam would have said something if Mick should legitimately be kept from driving. She hoped.

Despite her worries Mick got them out onto the main road without any difficulties, and she tapped the screen of the GPS unit and checked the address of their destination. A job site, judging by the look of the labels on the other buildings in the neighborhood. "This is where he was when you talked to him the other day?"

"Yeah. They didn't look like they were anywhere near finished so he should still be there."

Neither of them had much to say on the ride over, but it wasn't a particularly uncomfortable silence. It was certainly better than what Beth had been dealing with from her own teammates for the past several months. Old teammates, rather. She ought to check in with Dawson and make sure that her transfer paperwork was moving along smoothly, but at this point it probably wasn't necessary. She should probably feel offended or hurt or something that the first time in months he'd expended effort on her behalf was to get rid of her, but it wasn't the first time this had happened and she knew damn well it wasn't her competence that was the problem. She wasn't exactly sorry to see the last of them either.

"That's it," Mick said with a nod as they turned a corner and found a half-finished building in front of them. Commercial offices, by the look of the place, with a temporary fence surrounding the work site. Mick took the first open space among the trucks.

"Any sign of him?" Beth asked as they got out of the car. There were a number of workmen in view all occupied with various tasks, and the best she had to go on was a rough description that probably fit half of the people here.

He scanned the area and then shook his head. "Guess we check in with the boss."

The boss being the one standing in front of a large trailer with a clipboard in one hand, presumably, but before they rounded the narrow gap in the fence that served as an entrance one of the men he was speaking to turned to look at them.

"Running," Beth said as soon as she saw his face. She'd seen that look before. "FBI!"

The shout didn't do any good—it never did, when someone had already decided to run—but at least it identified them to the rest of the crew, and Mick took off almost as quickly as the man had. Beth was on his heels, but she already knew that she wouldn't be able to keep up for long. Endurance wasn't a problem, but shorter legs were, although if she could figure out which way he was going to go she might be able to cut him off. There was just so much crap lying around…bricks, scaffolding, who knew what else just asking for someone to turn an ankle. Most likely she or Mick because they didn't know the site the way he would.

Plenty of workmen stopped to stare as they ran past, but no one seemed inclined to get in their way. Of course, no one seemed inclined to help, either, and Beth didn't even know if it was Bolver they were chasing or someone else who had reason to run from the police. Mick might know—hopefully knew—but if this guy wasn't Bolver the commotion they were causing was giving him both ample warning and ample time to get away.

"Exit!" Mick barked.

Beth saw the break in the fence an instant later and cut right as their target ran to the opposite side of a pile of long pipes stacked a good foot higher than a normal man's head. Bolver or whoever this guy was was almost certainly heading for one of the trucks parked just outside the fence which meant he'd have to circle back to get to it. Circle back or go over, anyway, and while climbing the fence wasn't out of the question for a man in good condition, the fence was tall enough and Mick was close enough that he should be able to pull him down if he tried.

The man doubled back as she'd hoped, rounding the far side of the pipes, and she had her gun out and leveled before she'd even consciously thought about it. "Freeze, FBI!"

He froze, and for a moment she couldn't tell whether he was going to make another break for it or not, but then Mick was there and the choice was gone.

"FBI, we'd like a word with you," Mick said.