CHAPTER ELEVEN: A MALEVOLENT SUSPECT (HOTCH)

I watched Hale as she crutched her way back inside the police department. When I bumped into her at the coffee shop that day, I never would have expected her to have experienced so much horror in her life. She seemed so...put together. But her father, her mother, now her sister-in-law and niece…and a man had abused her as well. I took out my phone and dialed Garcia's number.

"Speak and be heard, mortal."

"Garcia, can you email me a copy of Natalie Hale's file?"

"Why do I always see 'Morgan' instead of 'Hotch' when you call? Sorry for the unprofessional dialogue there. Again. And sure thing, boss. On its way now."

"Make sure it has everything about her from the day her father went missing until now. I mean everything you've got, Garcia."

"I sure hope you don't expect anything less," she replied.

"Thanks."

I hung up and hurried inside the building. I walked up to the nearest police officer. "Do you have a printer and a computer available?" I asked.

"Yes, sir," he responded, and he proceeded to show me to a copying room. A computer sat on a small desk inside, and so did a printer. I thanked him and quickly opened my email. I extracted Natalie Hale's file from my inbox and quickly printed it out. Then I deleted all the information and pocketed the file.

I went to go find Rossi. He was speaking with the local police chief. When he saw me, he said something quickly to the chief and walked over to me. "Need something, Aaron?"

"I need an hour to review Natalie Hale's file so that I can give her a badge."

Rossi grinned. "So you've decided to let her in on this case?"

"I've decided to give her a badge," I said. "Can you buy me an hour, maybe less?"

"Consider it done."

I thanked him and searched on my phone for the nearest coffee shop. It was within walking distance, and so I decided it was time to stretch my legs. For a moment, I thought about how Haley had always wanted me to be a bit more active, despite the fact that I was constantly on the move for my job. She wanted to take walks, ride bikes, all the family things. I'd have done anything to go back and try again. Anything.

The coffee shop was a locally owned joint called The Beanie, and very few people were in it. I ordered my usual drink and sat in a corner, finally opening the file that had been burning in my pocket since I'd gotten my hands on it.

I went through her childhood first. It was fairly average for a little girl. Ballet until she was five, gymnastics until she was ten. Track team star for three years. She had a private education through tenth grade, after which she attended a local public school. No living grandparents, aunts, or uncles. Just her father, mother, and brother.

After she'd been notified of her father's disappearance, a few bumps in the road came into her life. A few speeding tickets, a couple misdemeanors. Nothing too serious. Just a teenaged girl lashing out at the world for taking her father away from her. Her brother had gone to college, it was just Hale and her mom.

After that it got more complicated. There was a paper with a copy of Hale's statement the day her mother was murdered. I read it with a certain degree of horror. She had seen every moment of it firsthand.

We were watching a movie. The Lion King. It's a childhood favorite. We heard a knock on the door and I went to answer it. I didn't look through the peephole because our neighbors are always really friendly and stopping by to see us, especially after my dad went missing. But it wasn't a neighbor. A man in a ski mask grabbed me the moment I opened the door and put a knife to my throat. I screamed for my mom but he pushed the knife harder against my throat and I stopped. My mom ran into the room and begged him to let me go. He said he'd make a trade—my life for another. My mom ignored him and just kept begging him to let me go, and somehow she got him to. He threw me down onto the ground and I scrambled for the phone. The moment I dialed 911, he was plunging his knife into my mom. He stabbed her twelve times before she finally stopped screaming, and by that time I had finished my 911 call. It took another ten stabs for her to finally die. There was blood everywhere, even on me from ten feet away, and I was trying to get her to wake up. He moved towards me with the knife, and he was so close I could see the color of his eyes, an almost black-brown, but the sirens sounded, and he bolted.

I held my breath and turned the page of the file. It was a record of Hale going into the foster system for a year. And the next page after that showed me what I had been most anxious to see.

Natalie Hale was put into the foster home of Jarrod and Michaela Harris. Along with Hale they had three other foster kids: Jamal Gordon, Lily Brighton, and Keeton Peterson. It showed the record of Jarrod Harris' arrest two months after Hale got out of the foster system. He was charged with the physical and sexual assault of his foster kids, and there were descriptions of what he'd done to them included in the file.

First I glanced at the boys. They'd sustained minor physical injuries, and they'd mostly just been beaten around. The worst was a broken wrist sustained by Jamal. The girls were a different story. I glanced at Lily Brighton's statements, and was surprised to read her story. Apparently, she had first been the object of Jarrod's abuse. He frequently threw punches and molested her. When Hale got wind of this, Brighton stated, she did everything to protect the younger girl, included standing right in front of him as he attempted to bust her skull in. After constant attempts to stop him from further hurting Brighton, he turned the force of his abuse towards Hale. She reported multiple beatings that ended with the boys needing to take her to nearby walk-in clinics, each one different so that nothing was suspected. Along with the beatings, she reported frequent molestation, something it seemed she had refused to speak much about. When asked why she hadn't come to anyone earlier, she told the police that Jarrod Harris had threatened kill Lily, and Hale said she couldn't let that happen. She dealt with it for the whole of her experience in the foster system.

The day she turned eighteen, she saw her brother, who immediately suspected abuse. Even though she told him not to, he called Jarrod Harris and yelled at him. When Daniel went to the police, Hale knew Harris would take it out on Lily. She rushed back to the foster home to find Jarrod attacking Lily, and she quickly overpowered him with a knife and a jump rope that had been lying around. She was waiting for them, prisoner in hand, when the police came barging in.

After reading the account, I flipped the page and saw pictures of the victims. The boys each displayed bruises and scars, but they looked healthy enough. The pictures of Lily Brighton and Natalie Hale painted a different picture. Lily didn't look a day over eight years old, but was actually thirteen, due to her small, thin stature. It looked like she was starved. She had her arm in a sling and a large scrape under her left eye. The pictures of eighteen-year-old Hale were even more devastating. Her hair was tied into a braid, and little tendrils of dark auburn hair came out of it, as if she'd been in a fistfight. She had a black eye and a busted lip, and there were dark purple bruises around her collar bone where he had tried to strangle her. There were additional pictures of old bruises and scars all over her body, in particular a jagged scar on her hip that disappeared into her jeans, which the papers I held in my hand said were made by a knife Jarrod had wielded the first time Hale had rejected his advances.

The rest of the file I already knew. Yale, FBI Academy, culinary school…the rest was history. I searched for an event after or during her FBI training that might've triggered her to resent it, but there was nothing. Just constant recommendations from her superiors and a thick set of papers from unit chiefs all over the FBI asking for her to consider their team for her position. Nothing but good reviews all across the board, and nothing to indicate she'd suffered any emotional trauma in her life at that point in time. If she was hiding something, she was doing a great job at doing it.

But according to this file, the worst of her life had to have already passed.

I looked at the pictures of Hale again, and I felt a familiar pang of protectiveness over her. It was the same way I felt about Jack. The same way I felt about my team. The same way I had felt about Haley. I wanted to find Jarrod Harris and hit him square in the jaw for ruining Hale like that. For ruining those other children, too. He wasn't even in jail anymore. He'd been released early on good behavior.

I closed the file. I'd seen enough.

I was giving Hale her badge as soon as I could.

After my coffee was gone, I tucked the file back into my pocket and walked out of the shop. As I did, my phone rang. "Hotchner," I said immediately as I held it up to my ear.

"Hotch, we've got something," Morgan's voice echoed into my ear. "A pair of prints was found at the crime scene. Could be our guy."

"It'd be very careless of him," I noted. "Who is it?"

"A man by the name of Jarrod Harris. His print was on the handle of their sink. He washed his hands before he left."

"Did you just say Jarrod Harris?"

"Yeah. Does that mean anything to you?"

"I'll be back there in five minutes. Don't tell Hale."

"Why—"

I hung up on him and started back towards the police station at a jog. Once I got there, Morgan greeted me outside with a, "What aren't you telling me, Hotch?"

I looked at one of my best agents. He needed to know. This wasn't something we could keep from Hale, either. Her sensitivities could not be a hindrance to getting justice for Rachel Hale or to finding little Emma. Hale was a big girl, and she'd been through a lot. But this had to be done. "I'll tell you inside," I said. "Might as well let everyone know at once."

We walked inside, and I saw everyone gathered in the section of the police station the locals had set apart for us. They all looked at Morgan and I expectantly as I scanned the room. "Where's Hale?" I asked.

"She left with Daniel," JJ said. "She wanted to verify that Dylan was alright. She'll be back soon."

"Good. I'll get you up to speed now." I moved towards the board where the name Jarrod Harris was jotted under the word suspects. "Jarrod Harris has a pretty important tie to the Hale family."

"What's that?" Prentiss asked.

"He was her foster parent."

Before anyone could say anything, a voice popped out of the laptop sitting on a foldout table. It was Garcia on the webcam. "And not just your ordinary negligent state-fund-stealing foster parent. He's a convicted felon, and he was turned into the cops by Hale herself."

"What was he convicted of?" Reid asked.

"Assault and rape. It looks like Hale and another girl in the house were the prime recipients of his abuse."

The looks of shock on the team's face were immediate and saddening. They recovered after a moment. Rossi was the first to speak. "So…we're thinking Harris came back to torture her for getting him caught?"

"He's not the unsub, though," I argued. "I saw him, and they don't look anything alike. It's possible this is a completely unrelated crime."

"But the way Rachel Hale was murdered is an exact match to how our unsub murdered those other women," Morgan said. "The details of those murders were never released to the public."

I considered his input. "But judging by the evidence, and the fact that he has motive, I'd say it's safe to say Jarrod Harris is probably the man who murdered Rachel Hale and kidnapped Emma."

There was a sound of a clunk of metal crashing onto the floor. We looked over and saw Hale trying to balance on one crutch as the other lay inert on the ground. There was a shocked look on her face, which immediately began to whiten. She tried to recover as Reid rushed over to lift up the fallen crutch, and she gave him a rushed thank you that sounded almost breathy. "So clumsy," she muttered as she righted herself. Then she looked up at me, and I saw the fear in her eyes that her facial features refused to betray. "Did you say Jarrod Harris is our prime suspect?"

"They found his prints at the scene," Morgan said gently. "I'm sorry."

"So you all know then?" she asked, defeated. Everyone nodded quietly, and she glanced at me. "I can't believe, of all the sick people in the world, it had to be him."

No one knew what to say. Hale bit her lip, a mechanism designed to hide the fact that for just a moment, it trembled. She took a barely perceptible breath to calm herself, and then she looked back at all of us. "It doesn't matter," she finally said. "Knowing our possible unsub isn't going to deter my focus. I want to find Emma. Alive. And I won't let any of my bias get in the way of us saving her. But I will be damned if I don't take him down at the same time. Doing what he's already done was bad enough, and I won't let him ruin Emma." The unspoken words hung in the air. I won't let him ruin Emma like he ruined me.

Prentiss walked up to Hale and touched her arm softly. "Nat, we need you to tell us everything you can about him. It could help us find where he is, and where he has Emma."

I saw the change in Hale when Prentiss called her Nat. She softened, became less FBI and more the girl who wanted to be an assistant chef. But she just nodded. "Ask me anything. I won't hold any information back."

Morgan and Prentiss walked her away from the group. Once they were gone, Reid watched her walk away. "She's different," he said finally.

"How so?" Rossi asked.

"She has a lot of trauma in her past, and yet she seems to have a lot going for her. I mean did you see her? She barely lost her composure when we dropped a huge bomb on her. Or, well, when you dropped a huge bomb on her, Hotch."

"She's got a lot to lose if she breaks down now," I said, ignoring his jibe. "She cares too much about her family to let that happen. She'll be a good addition to the team."

"So you're sure about this, Hotch?" JJ asked. "I mean I think I can speak for the rest of the team when I say we all think Hale is a great person and an excellent profiler, but do you think she's got what's needed for this kind of job?"

"I'd say I'm a pretty good judge of character," I replied. "And I really think she's the right one for the job."

"Well, we trust your judgment Hotch," Reid said. "I just wonder if she's been traumatized enough already. All of this and she's not even a team member yet."

"She is though," I said. "I'm giving her a badge today. She'll have a bit more paperwork once we get back, but she's as official as she needs to be."

"She hasn't even passed a physical or a psych test yet," JJ remarked.

"Reid can do the psychiatric evaluation," I said. "And she's in no state to do a physical now. She'll be a probationary agent until she can fulfill those requirements, but she'll still be a part of this team."

"I can't do the pysch eval while she's in her current emotional state," Reid said. "It would be completely skewed."

"Well, even without it she can be a probationary agent. While I know it has its risks, I've agreed to let her help with this case. She might be swayed by her emotions, but she's a good profiler. She'll be a good asset."

"I hope so," Rossi said, pointing at the picture of Emma Hale posted on the board. "Because this little girl's life is depending on it."

I promise, action and a more central plot are coming soon! Follow, Favorite, Send Comments/Love/Constructive Criticism... Thanks! :)