Chapter Eleven
Day 15
At the suggestion of the firemen they went down through the door closest to the kitchen. The stairs were metal and concrete, still sturdy after the fire. The damage hadn't been centered in here, but the smoke and water damage was pretty bad. "A storeroom?" Kate asked.
"Looks like it." Dave opened a chest freezer, the one Barnes had been stocking when Reid jumped him, and found frozen fish and chicken, more or less. "Barnes knew them well enough to get Clara her medication; he would know that she would need to eat fresh food to keep her blood sugar stable. That's how Reid was able to know when he was coming back; he could only stock them with groceries for a week at most."
"So on his first visit Reid observes and then makes a plan for the second." Kate nodded. "That would be the genius."
"But how did he manage to sneak up on Barnes? He should have been looking for that." Dave looked over the lock to the roll up door that opened to the boat house. "This whole island is built like a series of airlocks. Barnes could isolate them in one area and work in another, never coming in direct contact with them. So how did he not know that Reid was in there?"
"He went somewhere over here first." Kate said, gesturing down the right side of the double slip. There was a door over there, in the direction of the worst of the damage. "What's in here?"
In there was the remains of a small meeting room, with what might have been a kitchenette in the corner. Past that was a room that reminded them of Garcia's lair, looking through the worst of the damage. "The cameras," Rossi said with a nod. "He looked in here first. Somehow Reid made it look like he was upstairs."
"The head in the hammock. " Kate said. "Life sized. Bundle some pillows up in some blankets and it might have looked like he was having a nap."
"So Barnes thinks Reid is in the hammock, Clara is somewhere else in the house, locks the doors at the top of the stairs, unlocks the roll up and goes about his business. Slick. When he leaves he unlocks the one at the top and locks the roll up, giving them access to the storeroom. But did he just observe them?"
"Where does the door at the foot of the stairs go?" Kate asked.
Dave considered the mental map he'd been making, and left the computer room, turning left and heading down a hallway. The end of it opened into the other center of the fire. "Here," he said. "And I don't like the look of it."
"Neither do I." Kate agreed.
The center of the room held some kind of medical scanning device, a large square with a hole in the center and a table to slide someone in and out. And around the device were a number of mechanical arms, all plastic, now melted badly enough to make their actual purpose hard to discern. "All plastic." Kate said. "I bet that's an MRI. Was an MRI."
"Another airlock door," Dave said, gesturing to the one they had entered. "So he locks them out of the cellar, unloads, locks the door between the store room and the rest of this floor. He opened the door at the foot of the stairs and tells them to come down. But how does he make them if they don't? He's not big enough to overpower them."
"Cyanide," Kate said. "Do what I want or you die. Or the other one dies."
Dave nodded. "That would work on Reid. But then how does Barnes get him to submit here, he does not want to deal with them face to face at all." Just then his phone chimed a text. He looked at it and felt a cold chill settle around his heart. "This is how. One of the drugs in those ports was propofol, a short acting sedative."
"So he threatens them to get one down here and then sedates them long enough to get them into the MRI. Retreats to his control room and does what he does. When he's done he releases them and they likely run back upstairs." Kate nodded. "Very organized, slick set up. It probably didn't even cost as much as you might think, that might be an older, used model. What do you think he was trying to do?"
"I don't think I want to know." Dave said with a sigh.
"What?"
"The third port Reid was carrying held Sildenafil."
It took a moment for Kate to remember the name, "O-kay, left turn to squick-ville there."
"Yeah," Dave shook off his sadness over the whole thing and looked over the room again. "So how did Barnes die? Reid left him in the storeroom and took the boat."
"Well, we were thinking blitz attach to take Reid in the first place. And this is a lot for one man to operate."
"And there is room for more than one boat in that slip." Dave nodded. "We're looking for at least one more Unsub. He showed up, realized that the victims escaped and started eliminating evidence and witnesses, including his partner. We could see this place for a long time as we were coming up, I bet he saw the MA boat coming in the distance and panicked, forgot to clip the zip ties on the body."
"What's he going to do when he finds out that Reid and Clara aren't dead?" Kate asked.
"I have no idea."
Just then the NCIS agent came back to them. "Excuse me, Agent Rossi?" He asked.
"Yeah?"
"We found something you should have a look at."