A/N 1: Cowritten with my bashful but brilliant beta, Esperanta, she who keeps my prose typo-free and boasts an imagination more twisted than my own. The only things we created were this creepy little world and a few OCs.

A/N 2: Trying to strike meaningful balance between team screen time and main story. Always grateful for reader input! Your comments are like dark chocolate and the smell of lilacs on a soft spring evening! And kittens! And bunnies! And they make us feel all warm and giggly, like maybe updating a little sooner!

Solitary 5.0

Chapter Eleven

A Matter of Timing

Glenna, the new kid on the second team, poked her narrow head into Morgan's office. "Sir," she said, her voice in that kind of controlled-quiet tone that rarely heralds good news, "you'll want to come to the conference room right away."

He gave her a quick, tight-lipped nod. It was late on Wednesday afternoon. Aaron Hotchner had been missing since Friday evening, and while there were a blue million slim leads, there was still nothing of substance.

Calm down; this doesn't necessarily mean bad news in the Hotch mess.

Could be another kind of bad news. Another 9/11-type attack. A presidential assassination attempt. A dumping ground with dozens of mutilated corpses.

Prentiss, JJ, Reid, and a pair of evidence techs had preceded him to the room with the round table, but no images had been thrown up on the big screens. Instead, everyone stood quietly looking at a large white envelope on the table. It was a US Postal Service Flat Rate envelope, the kind you could stuff with any old thing and throw into outgoing mail. It was addressed via computer printed label to the Behavioral Analysis Unit.

The return address was 8723 Westbrook Heights, Arlington.

Aaron Hotchner's address.

"Mailed out of Harrisburg early Monday morning," the elder of the two evidence techs said. "It isn't a bomb. They've already X-rayed it and checked for chemical evidence of explosives and, ah, organic decay."

"Anything show on the X-ray?"

"Watch, keys on a keychain, what appears to be a folding knife," the tech replied.

Everyone had gloves on, so Morgan pulled a pair from his own trouser pocket. Rossi and Garcia arrived while he was working them on over his fingers. He could feel everyone holding their breath.

OK, so no bombs and probably no body parts.

He slit the envelope open to reveal a mass of torn and crumpled strips of newspaper. "New York Times," he announced. "February third of this year." He unfolded the packing material to display Aaron Hotchner's credentials, his billfold, a set of keys, a watch, a pocket knife, and a partially-emptied pack of spearmint Tic-Tacs.

He jerked his head at the evidence techs and they descended on the envelope and the strips of paper.

There were a few seconds of complete silence, then David Rossi said, "Well, that doesn't add up to 'he-sleeps-with-the-fishes,' does it?"

Reid, his gaze riveted to the table, said, "It's almost like someone's saying, 'he won't need these while he's here.' Wherever 'here' is."

"But that isn't his watch," Garcia said. "He wears a Seiko. That's a Timex Ironman."

"It's one of his watches," Rossi told her. "He had—" He closed his eyes and bit his lip in consternation. "He has three that I know of. He wears the Timex when we're working with the kids, with the soccer team. He usually wears the Seiko to work. He has a classic Rolex, too; I think it was his dad's. I've only seen him wear that two or three times."

"The Rolex and the Seiko were both at the house when we were there," Emily said, then she opened Hotchner's wallet with a gloved finger. "There are pictures missing," she said. "He carries a studio portrait of himself and Jack, and Jack's current preschool picture, right there beside his driver's license." She looked around her defensively. "OK, so I peeked when he paid the tab for the St. Pat's Day party. Tell me you wouldn't have done the same thing."

"So, what's the significance of that?" Morgan asked the team. "Is our UNSUB letting Hotch keep pictures of Jack with him? Or is Hotch maybe already dead, and the UNSUB's targeting his son?"

He heard someone say something that sounded like We got prints, then Prentiss repeated, "They have prints!"

Yes 'Bout goddamn time we got some breaks here….

~ o ~

He arbitrarily called his two shaves of the day "Noon" and "Midnight." Absolute accuracy was less important than consistency.

He was edging toward the midnight shave of what should be Wednesday, May 19, and doing a little resource management of his own, dividing his three bottles of fruit juice into six half-bottles, when the lights went out.

God damn.

OK, then Warden has to be around, right?

"Oh, come on," he roared at what he hoped was Warden's audio monitoring system. He thumped his fist against the wall. "Hey! You should be happy that I'm keeping track of this!"

He capped both bottles and groped around in the dark for the sweater he had hung over the back of the chair. He was adjusting to the temperatures in his cell now, and no longer felt the need to wear the sweater when he was under the covers, but he recalled how the last time Warden had shut off the lights the temperature had dipped perceptibly.

Asshole. Dickwad. Loser.

Once he was bundled up and zipped, he helped himself to a sip of juice—cranberry-apple this time—and considered possibilities. He didn't want to get his hopes up, but … Warden might have cut the power if he sensed the authorities were coming his way, too.

The lights flickered back on for a few seconds. He reminded himself not to get his hopes up, not to get too invested in his interpretation of what was going on. Then they flickered back off again.

It was likely, he realized with a sigh, that the thing with the lights had nothing to do with either his activities or the approach of a rescue team. The bunker was supposedly way out in the boonies. Power out in the boonies could be an iffy thing.

He lay down, pulled the covers up over his head, and thought about Diana, wife of Warden. Diana, the blonde in the lime-green swimming suit with pandas frolicking across her tummy. Diana, whose somewhat plain features were made radiant by the goofy, troublemaker smile that she wore in four of the seven pictures he had been able to identify as hers. She seemed an odd match for the stiffly formal Warden.

And why were there no pictures of Warden? Unless he was somewhere in the random groups of small children at pools and picnics and parks of a bygone era, he was nowhere in evidence in the posted collages. Was he ashamed of himself? Was there something about his childhood and youth that he didn't want Aaron to know?

Or was it simpler than that? Maybe he was just the person who'd taken the pictures.

The lights flickered back on, dimmed, then returned to full power.

Aaron sat up, crosslegged, and reached for a legal pad. Among this time's "resources," there had been two more legal pads and four more pens, which probably meant there was a lot of writing in his future. For now, it meant that he could designate particular pads for particular purposes. The one that sat beside him day and night was the one he used for every kind of brainstorming and list-making.

He picked up a pen and flipped to p3/requests, where he added "matches, candles" to the list of things it couldn't hurt to ask Warden for.

His second resource box had been much like his first: water and fruit juices, toilet tissue, those terrible peanut butter and honey sandwiches, a scattering of apples and oranges, some bunny food and crackers. In addition to the extra legal pads and pens, Warden had included three Slim Jim beef jerky sticks, a refrigerator magnet in the shape of a pansy, and a packet of razor blades.

If Warden was crazy enough to trust Aaron around him while he was potentially armed with razor blades, then maybe he was crazy enough to trust him with some damn alternative light sources.

~ o ~

One last time before he turned in for the night, the man who had been born Norton Waldo Charpentier called up an astrology program on his laptop. Time was when he would have dismissed the whole sun-and-stars thing as worse than pseudo-science—and he knew that most public practitioners of the art were phonies and posers.

Then Eugene had come along, round-shouldered, Coke-bottle-glasses Eugene, a Mob minnow by profession and a recreational mathematician who was never without his pads of graph paper and his pencils of black and blue and red. He loved all numbers equally, including those that described the movements of the planets.

"Ya know, you're a natural communicator with a gift of gab," he had announced to Norton the second time they rubbed elbows at the prison breakfast table. "Your greatest gift is you can grab that opportunity that nobody else is seeing."

Norton had all but choked on his farina, because the description had been that of what could only be the anti-Norton. He had smiled politely, murmured, "Nah, I don't think so," and put it out of his mind.

"Seize the day," Eugene told him a week or so later. "Ya ain't taking advantage of the gifts the universe gives ya, man."

Norton knew exactly what he was. He was a timid, cringing blob with a prissy voice and zero people skills. He wasn't sure why Eugene had picked him to annoy, but he wasn't about to encourage him. He had turned away with a muttered, "Screw you."

"November 19, 1960? Elkton, Maryland?" Eugene had replied. "Around seventeen hundred hours? What, six minutes after your sister? Ringing any frickin' bells?"

Charpentier had glowered at the little jerk's accurate information. "Where'd you get those numbers?"

"I got my sources. That's you, right?" When Norton said nothing, Eugene had continued with his usual genial enthusiasm, "You got a Gemini ascendant, man. And Aquarius in your mid-heaven. You're all about communication and creativity. Why aren'tcha using it?"

Communication and creativity. Hell, if he'd had those, maybe he wouldn't have been such a total goddamn disappointment to his father, who'd expected to sire the next VP in charge of sales for the goddamn family company. Instead, his son had been, like Eugene, all about the numbers. Only with no people skills. No gift of gab. Certainly no noticeable creativity.

"Astrology is horseshit," he'd told Eugene flatly.

"Astrology is all about the tools the universe armed ya with when it sent ya into the world," the Mob minnow had retorted, obviously quoting from something he had read somewhere else. "Ya don't want to use it, that's your call, man. But you're missing out."

Norton's disbelief must have been written all over his face, because Eugene had pulled a piece of paper out of his pocket and unfolded it. "Looky here," he had said, stabbing with one nicotine-stained finger at the circle he had drawn on the paper. "You're all back-chart, I can see that. You're all about keeping it in, keeping it back. I get it. But nobody's making ya stay there, man, is all I'm saying."

But his days of doubt were over. Now, he chuckled to himself as he pulled up a chart for the coming day.

Eugene had been right, and astrology had tickled Norton's own love of numbers and patterns. He could and did perform the calculations himself, but he also enjoyed the glitzy software he'd purchased that did everything for him, and then showed it all with bright graphics.

Tomorrow, Moon would be running barefoot all over Mars in Leo, his fourth house of home, heritage, and foundations. Sweet, sweet energies for getting some stuff accomplished around the apartment.

Leo was Prisoner's seventh house of partners and lovers, and a bleak little house it was, too. Poor guy was all fore-chart, not much inner life to cling to.

Ah, well, that was Prisoner's problem, not Norton's.

Now, as to Prisoner's supporting cast: He used the standard 26 July 1908 birthdate for the FBI, the day Attorney General Bonaparte appointed the first agents. One of his contacts in American history had come up with an approximate time based on old journal entries. It wasn't exact, but it would do. There had been a huge traffic-jam in Cancer and Leo that day, anchored by the energies of that Retrograde Venus that always made Norton grin and picture J. Edgar Hoover in a dress.

He selected the relevant chart and clicked Update.

Yes.

Leo was the Bureau's ninth house. The next day should be a particularly interesting one for them, with hints of travel and foreign cultures and ethics.

~ o ~

Her name was Cherish Mottley. She had a dark complexion, perfect posture, intelligent, alert eyes, a heart-shaped face, and hair dyed gold and trimmed close to her scalp. She was 23 years old, a two-year veteran of the U.S. Army's military police. Her fingerprints were all over the February third New York Times that had been used to wrap Aaron Hotchner's personal effects.

She appeared on the BAU conference room screen via webcam, because she was where she had been ever since her deployment in mid-March: on duty in Iraq.

"I'm sorry, sir," she told Morgan, her expression earnest. "I left New York on the third. I was visiting my aunt and my cousins. I'm sure I had a newspaper because I always buy a paper when I take the train, but I can't tell you what I did with it. I coulda left it in the station, or threw it away on a smoke break—there were two, Philly and Harrisburg—or when I changed trains at Pittsburgh. Or I maybe I took it all the way to Cleveland, or maybe I just left it on the seat or in the snack car. I don't recall."

Derek noticed that beside him, Spencer Reid was marking on one of his maps, drawing small green squares around New York City, Harrisburg, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Cleveland. A red triangle already showed up in Harrisburg, and a blue square in Cleveland.

This is Furface's territory, Morgan realized. These are his stomping grounds.

"Did you notice anything or anyone unusual on your trip?" he asked Mottley, more to be thorough than because he expected her to report an old guy with muttonchop whiskers stalking her through train terminals.

"It was real crowded," she said. "'Cause of the ice storm, you know? 'Cause nothing was flying out of there, not for a couple days."

He sent a digital laydown of eight computer-generated faces to her screen there in Iraq, eight faces that included Furface with his sidewhiskers and without them. "Any of these faces look familiar to you?"

She studied them carefully. "Nobody jumps out at me," she said. "Can't say I ever saw any of them before."

"Who picked you up in Cleveland?"

She blinked. "My boyfriend."

"What kind of vehicle does he drive?"

She blinked again. "White Denali."

"Do you know anyone who drives a blue Ford F-150 truck?"

"In Cleveland?"

Morgan sighed. "Anywhere."

She pursed her lips, shook her head. "Nah, not that I can think of. My dad has a truck, but it's a red Ram."

Another strikeout—and it had felt so positive at first!

~ o ~

It was Thursday, May 20, 2010, heading up toward the noon shave.

He fiddled with the hair at his temples—he hated the way it flip-flopped; he had used gel at his temples for years and years. Now it just…flopped there like the Nineties were back, and he had few happy memories of the Nineties, especially the early part, when he was still trying to figure out exactly how much of his father he had in him (answer: too much).

He took a sip of water, screwed the cap back on, and flung the bottle across to the opposite wall with all of his strength. It didn't help; he was shaking uncontrollably.

He expects me to believe that I can survive here for five years, to believe that he'll just let me go, just…walk away, knowing who he is, as though nothing happened. Christ, I'd better figure out who he is!

He ripped the top two pages off the legal pad, balled them up tight, and threw them across the cell, too, blinking back tears of fury and frustration.

And Jack. Jesus, God, Jack.

He gathered up the bedclothes in his arms and hugged them to his chest. "Jack," he moaned, his voice cracking. "Jack, don't give up on me, I'll get out of here as soon as I can…."