Sorry for the long wait, I know it's been awhile since I updated. Anyway, here's the new chapter, please let me know what you think!
"Think about it, Emily. We're the Prentiss sisters. Together, we're enough to make Gandhi hate us."
"This Unsub isn't Gandhi, Anna. He already hates us." Emily pointed out.
"Come on, what's the worst that's going to happen?" Anna deliberately kept her voice light.
Emily spoke bluntly, knowing that's what Anna really wanted her to do. "If we provoke him, he's going to escalate. He'll snap. And then he'll kill us. Unless…"
"Unless what?"
"Okay, follow me on this one."
"I'm following."
"When he was in here before, he asked you why you let me speak for you. He was trying to get a rise out of you, trying to get you to say that it annoyed you, that it bothered you."
"Okay. So?"
"So he was trying to pit us against each other. I think that's what he wants. His issue is with me; he blames me for betraying his brother, but he targeted you first." Emily appeared to be talking more to herself now, she wasn't looking at Anna, though she had managed to sit up and was sitting with her back against the wall staring straight ahead.
Anna stared at her but stayed silent. Emily did this all the time; she needed to work through it in her own head before she could explain it.
"I'll bet anything that if he'd only taken you, he would have blamed it on me. He would have wanted you to think that I had betrayed you. He's trying to destroy our relationship, because that's what he feels happened to his brother. He feels like he betrayed his brother; that he let him down because he couldn't save him." She was talking faster now. "That's what the phone calls were about. He would have made you call me. He would have lured me here somehow; but he would have already killed you. He wants me to feel the way he did. And then he would have killed me." Her voice trailed off, and she turned her head to Anna.
"So eventually, he's going to kill us both."
"No."
"No?"
"No. The team will find us first. I can promise you that."
"So, what do we do in the meantime?"
Now Emily smiled. "It's like you said. We give him hell."
Anna grinned. This was the Emily she knew and loved. "What do you suggest we do?"
"Okay. We know he wants to destroy our relationship; pit us against each other. We just can't let him do that."
"Emily, he couldn't do that no matter how hard he tries." Anna said softly.
"I know that. But he doesn't."
"So what do we do?"
"It depends on what he does. We just have to show him that he can't tear us apart."
Anna smiled again. "This could be fun."
Morgan slammed his fist down on the table. "Dammit! What the hell are they thinking? This Unsub doesn't need any more provocation. They're going to get themselves killed." He yelled. On the tape, Emily and Anna were still talking softly; their voices low murmurs in the background.
"Morgan, take a walk. Calm down." Hotch instructed. He didn't like their plan any more than Morgan did, but he was trying to keep a level head. Morgan slammed out of the room at these words; they heard him storming down the stairs. Hotch leaned on the table and let out a long, slow breath. He knew that Emily wouldn't intentionally be reckless and that she was a fully trained FBI profiler, but at the same time, he couldn't help but feel that her plan was going to go terribly wrong. He vaguely noticed that Reid had left the room, presumably to go after Morgan. He pulled himself out of his reverie when he heard Rossi's voice next to him.
"Emily knows what she's doing. We have to trust that she's only making these calls because she's there. We can't know what's going on."
"But we do know what's going on. We're watching."
"Aaron, you know as well as I do that we can only get so much from the video. Emily and Anna are experiencing all of this first hand. Emily knows what she's doing." He said again.
Hotch knew he was right. But it didn't help as much as it should have.
Ross spoke again. "Aaron, you need to keep your personal feelings out of this. I know it's hard. But you can't be too close to this."
"We're all close to this Dave." Hotch regarded him sternly.
"You know what I mean. I know how you feel about Emily. I know how she feels about you."
"Emily is a member of this team. I care about her just like I care about everyone else." Hotch was almost glaring now and Rossi thought it best to drop the subject. Now wasn't the time to have this conversation.
Downstairs, Reid and Morgan were having a similar conversation, Reid making the same argument as Rossi.
"They know what they're doing." He concluded.
Morgan ran his hands over his head. "I know, I know. But this Unsub is volatile, kid. You saw that, we all did."
Reid cleared his throat. "Do you think you're overanalyzing this?"
"What's to overanalyze? We're profilers, Reid; this is what we're supposed to do." Morgan's voice was harsh.
He cleared his throat again. "Do you think it's because you have, um, romantic feelings for Anna?"
"She's a good person, Reid. I just want to bring her home safe. Her and Emily."
Reid nodded. "Okay, well, I would say they have a pretty good chance of getting back safe."
"What makes you say that? Are there statistics and probabilities of how often victims of serial killers survive? Because I would assume they're pretty damn low."
"No. Actually, statistically, if you look at all the serial killers and all of their victims and compare that to the number of potential victims-"
"Rhetorical Reid, that was rhetorical."
"Oh."
"So, if you weren't going to quote statistics, what were you going to say?"
"I was going to say that they're chances are good because they have us. And they know that we won't stop until we find them. But standing out here isn't doing them any good."
Morgan looked at his colleague. "You're right kid. You're right." Morgan headed for the stairs but paused before climbing them. "Reid?"
"Yeah?"
"Thanks."
The pair walked back upstairs where Garcia was still having no luck tracing the video. "I've tried everything I can think of. I can't trace it. And I have the property lists running searching for anything with any combination of the names Benjamin, Jonathan, Cyrus, and Mulgrew. If there's anything under any of those names I'll find it. But so far, I've got nothing." She sounded exasperated.
"Calm down, Baby Girl." Morgan said, rubbing her back lightly. "What do you have?"
"What I have, my burning hunk of handsome is the life of Benjamin Mulgrew. Lived with his dad after mom took Benjamin and left. I've got quite a few trips to the emergency room: broken arm, broken leg, concussion, you get the idea. Went to public school, mediocre student. No disciplinary problems. Enlisted in the Army right after high school. Barely made it through boot camp; he was dishonorably discharged a year later…apparently he had trouble taking orders."
"What happened?" JJ asked.
"He beat his commanding officer because he felt that he was being treated unfairly. There was no sign of provocation, and the C/O ended up in the hospital for over a month and required reconstructive surgery on his face...found guilty, sentenced to five years for assault but only served three. Get this; he got out on good behavior. No sign of trouble since then."
"So he was abused by his father, enlisted, but his childhood made him incapable of taking orders. He sees them as personal attacks." Morgan said.
"What about work? Is employed?" Hotch asked.
Garcia pressed a few keys. "No, his dad died a few years ago and daddy was loaded. There was no will, so Jonathan got everything."
"So he has unlimited time to plan and execute these murders. He's organized." Rossi posited.
"How did his father die?" Reid asked.
"His death was ruled as a suicide; police say he laid down on some train tracks and got hit by a freight train. But, there's a different police report for earlier that night; police were called to his father's house because of a dispute. The fight between Jonathan and his father got physical and neighbors called the police."
"What was the fight about?"
"According to the police report, money. His father thought Jonathan was irresponsible, he wanted him to get a job and start supporting himself. Jonathan didn't take kindly to that."
"He doesn't like being challenged. And when someone does challenge him; he gets violent. I'll bet anything he killed his father. If he did get run over by a freight train, that would mask any other injuries he sustained. He was probably dead before he was hit." Hotch said.
Morgan said what no one else would. "So Anna and Emily are going to provoke an Unsub that not only already wants to kill them, but who also kills people that provoke him. Fantastic." His voice was bitter.
"It might not happen like that." Rossi brought up. "Think about the other parts of the profile. He needs his victims to break. He has to turn one of them against the other."
"So?" Morgan asked.
"So, if Emily and Anna do what they're planning, he won't kill them. If he can't break them, he'll have to keep them alive until he does. He won't kill them just because they're making him mad."
"Yeah, but what will he do to them?" Reid asked.
As if on cue, they heard a door slam on the video. The Unsub was back.
