So I meant to get this up Tuesday, but my shoulders have been giving me problems, which means pain. It's been a bit better the last couple of days, so I'm cautiously optimistic. If writing my paper goes as smoothly this weekend as I'm hoping, I should be able to work on another chapter and get that out this Tuesday.
More story related, no worries no one else is going to be peed on in this story. Though I will say for what I have planned the two chapters after this will be pretty emotionally heavy, so fair warning for that.
And thank you again to the people who emailed me about where to watch the show online, I got to see the premiere last night, and I'm deliriously happy because of it. :)
Thanks for reading and please review!
Prentiss just about stomped into the empty conference room, fuming as she drew her leg back, and sent a chair flying back. It wasn't a great kick though, because she clipped her toes, and proceeded to bounce on one foot, cursing furiously. "Goddamn it, Goddamn it!"
"Em?" A nervous, quiet voice asked.
Emily frowned, and scanned the room for an open laptop, locating it where JJ had been working at the end of the table. She walked over, and found Garcia looking worried back in her office at Quantico. "Hi."
"Everything okay?"
She sighed. "Yeah, just...interviews aren't going well."
"Oh?" Garcia relaxed a tiny bit. "Well, it can only be one of them, you're going to get a lot of dead ends."
Emily nodded, but that wasn't it. No, that was something she could live with. The problem was the two guys she interviewed began with, 'hey, didn't I see you on TV last night?' and subsequently launched into a pity narrative, and she couldn't get them to shut up and focus on her questions. One of the assholes even tried taunting her, and that was when Hotch pulled her out, and told her to work on running background and alibis with Garcia and JJ, who was busy dealing with some of their more rowdy subjects. Emily supposed she should be grateful she wasn't peed on, like poor Morgan.
"So, I'm actually glad you're here, because I found a couple of interesting things. You ready?" The tech looked enthusiastic, and Emily lousy mood lifted a little bit.
"Sure, what do you have?"
"Well, first we can cross a couple more fellows off our list. Doug Wright is still at a hotel in Atlantic City, that's why you guys can't find him. Warner Chesley is a night security guard for SimpleLife Construction, according to his employer he was working last night. Anthony Landrix has credit card purchases that put him in New Hampshire last night. So, three down, my dear."
Emily wiped them off the dry erase board. "You are truly a goddess, Garcia."
"Oh honey, I'm not done yet. I'm still running some of these guys. And, I found something else that at least gives me an icky feeling." She cringed and stuck her tongue out for effect.
Her eyebrows rose. "Icky?"
"So, a familiar name came up, you remember Jacob Freeling, he was in the first batch of names?"
"Yeah, Morgan and I interviewed him. He seemed like a good kid."
Garcia nodded. "His brother's name is on your potential list of suspects, so I decided to dig into these boys' history a bit. Their mother's name is Samantha Freeling, and she had Mathew, the older boy, when she was barely fifteen. She was twenty-six when Jacob came along. There isn't a father listed on either birth certificate, and according to census records, she was living with her father when she had Mathew, but not Jacob. George Freeling, Samatha's father, died in 1987, leaving her the house and whatever money he had."
"I'm still waiting on the icky part, Garcia," she said.
"Well, you guys put Mathew on the list because he was being sexually abused, and she didn't get pregnant with Jacob until after her father died...what if George Freeling was protecting his grandson from his crazy daughter?"
"And, when he died Samantha had no one to stop her from molesting her son," Emily filled in.
"Oh, sometimes I hate this job!" Garcia was cringing in horror.
"Hey, can you pull up Jacob's file. The type of abuse they suspect with him wasn't specified, right?"
"Hang on," she began and then cut herself off. "Oh god, Emily, are you thinking she was molesting Jacob as well?"
"He denied it when we spoke to him, said it was only physical, but if she was sexually abusing one son it would make sense that she'd abuse the other," she explained.
"Make sense? In what kind of world does a mother raping her on children makes sense?"
"Samantha Freeling's world, maybe."
Garcia shook her head, and Emily could hear her fingers clicking along the keyboard as she pulled up the file. "Alright, it looks like the teacher who made the allegation thought physical, but the social worker couldn't find proof of any kind of abuse."
"Do you have an address on the mother?" Emily asked.
"That's the other thing, Samantha Freeling is dead and buried beside her father. She died a month ago, after plowing her car into a telephone pole, she was severely inebriated according to the police report."
"That could be a stressor," she thought aloud. She swung around to the whiteboard filled with names. Mathew Freeling was listed under people they couldn't find. "Uh, Garcia did Samantha or George have any family around Ryeburg? And, can you check for who they're neighbors were during 1977 and 1988?"
"Sure, it might take me a minute though."
"That's fine, we've got too many people to get through here," she said. "Oh, and you're right, this is icky."
"What's icky?" She looked quickly up from the screen to see Morgan walking in, looking still a little annoyed.
"Hey, do you feel better?" She asked, getting up and walking toward him.
"I feel cleaner."
"You certainly smell cleaner."
His lips turned up in one of his uber-smooth smiles. "Yeah, well I know a clean, fresh scent drives the ladies crazy."
She rolled her eyes, and that's when they both heard the small voice calling out to them, and by the sound of it, she'd been calling out a while. "Yoohoo! Guys? What happened?"
"Sorry, Garcia!" Emily called rushing back toward her, Derek right behind her.
"What do you mean feels better? Were you sick?" She was looking entirely at Morgan now, eyes filled with concern, and a little bit of annoyance, probably because they forgot to mention it.
"No, damn drunk pissed all over me. I had to go back to the hotel room and shower," he explained. Then he looked between them. "What's icky?"
"You mean other than that?" Her nose was wrinkled and face squished in disgust.
Reid carefully wiped names off the whiteboard, men they'd interviewed and determined were not their killer. The cops had located and brought in thirty of the men, leaving seven still unaccounted for, and one of those was probably their killer. They'd gotten through twenty-three interviews, and Rossi, Hotch and Morgan each had a man in an interrogation room. That left four still waiting, and one more round of interviews.
This case was not going well, it felt like they were spinning their wheels without a real direction to take, and the county crime lab came up with nothing to help them. The killer didn't leave fluids, and while there was plenty of trace evidence collected, none of it was found at all four crime scenes. They couldn't link any of it specifically to the unsub.
A ringing startled him, and Reid jumped and dropped the eraser. He bent down and picked it up as he pulled his phone out of his pocket. "Reid."
"Dr. Spencer Reid?" An unfamiliar voice asked. A female voice, energetic, but cautious.
"Yes, this is he."
She began to speak very quickly. "This is Mandy Kasen with USA Today, I understand you work very closely with Emily Prentiss, and was wondering if you saw the special that aired on TrueTV last night?"
"No comment," he said, and went to hang up, but her frantic voice stopped him.
"Wait! Dr. Reid, if you'll please just hear me out, you don't have to say anything...please?"
"Fine." He could give her two minutes, and then hang up on her.
"Thank you," she said. "Dr. Reid, there have been a lot of voicing sounding off about the murders in Albany, and Senator Bennet's subsequent mental breakdown and the events following. But the only voice we haven't heard is the one that matters most, Agent Prentiss. Your teams' media liaison Agent Jareau has occasionally addressed the subject, but she hasn't said more than a few words, and keeps saying that Agent Prentiss isn't giving any kind of statement on anything. She is the victim in all this, Dr. Reid, if there's anyone with a right to be heard it's her. Is the FBI censoring her? Why is she refusing to speak?"
He sighed. "Ms. Kasen, I agree with you that if anyone has a right to a voice in this, it's Agent Prentiss, but I also believe she has a right to stay silent. And, she has a right to get on with her life without you and your colleagues following her around, and demanding sound bites from her. We are in Ryeburg trying to apprehend a serial rapist, and you are all making it more difficult for all of us." Reid hung up, shaking his head in disgust, and turned to see his female colleagues had re-entered the room and were watching him.
Emily turned to JJ, and then focused on both of them. "They've been calling all of you this whole time, haven't they?"
JJ shrugged. "They call me all the time anyway."
"Yeah, but not about me."
"I got some about Rossi when he first joined us, it's not a big deal, Emily."
She shook her head. "It is to me."
"It's really not, I usually just say no comment and hang up," Reid assured her. She still looked pissed, and he knew it wasn't because they kept the information from her.
Commotion at the door had them all turning to see Rossi and Hotch discussing their interviews, and Morgan looking frustrated and impatient. Reid figured he was probably eager for a door to kick down.
"What's going on?" Hotch asked, looking at the three of them.
"Have you guys also been fielding press calls about me?" Emily asked.
"It's nothing for you to worry about," Hotch assured her, then quickly changed the subject. "Where are we on the list?"
Truthfully, it wasn't new. They'd all be getting press inquiries since the week she was abducted, though they'd been expecting interest to die down. It hadn't. The Bureau had had Emily's number changed two days after they found her. They tended to hand out a lot of business cards, so it wasn't hard to get their phone numbers. The flurry of calls to her had been so intense the Bureau changed the number, and decided they wouldn't give her new business cards until it all died down. She still didn't have any. Unfortunately for the rest of the team, they had all still been working, and had to continue handing out business cards, so there was no point to changing their numbers.
"We've got four more to interview, five of the men we couldn't find are still unaccounted for, and three are still on our possible suspects list. Oh sorry, four on the possibles list, the fourth is on the list we couldn't interview," Reid explained, gesturing to their many lists.
Morgan's phone rang then, and he hurried to grab it and go out of earshot, so as not to interrupt them. Reid watched Hotch's severe expression falter for just a second, to reveal the exhaustion and stress he kept hidden from even them.
He nodded. "You can cross the three men we just interviewed from the list, none of them fit the profile."
There was a quiet snap, and Morgan rejoined the group just as JJ's phone went off, and she stepped away. Morgan looked at Reid. "Cross off Taylor Holmes too, Garcia just managed to get in touch with his sister, he's spent the last month at a sanitarium, he's an alcoholic. And," he glanced at the pad, "Jonathon Petrie can go, his alibi checks out, he was with a hooker last night."
"Nice alibi," Rossi commented.
That took one off their 'unable to find list' and one off the three interviewed possbiles. Progress, but still painfully slow. He noted JJ walking back toward them, her attention was on Hotch and Emily.
"That was one of the nurse's taking care of Jessica Kline, she's asking for you, Emily," she said.
Emily's mouth opened slightly, but she didn't react otherwise, except to turn to Hotch. He nodded. "Go see her, but take JJ with you." He paused. "While you're there, talk to the second victim-" Both women made to object, but he held a hand up. "I know, just try."
The second victim was still an inpatient at the local hospital, in their psychiatric ward. The Lieutenant didn't know much about it, but the young woman was apparently unable to function on her own after the attack. Reid did not envy his colleagues. Talking to victims is hard, but talking to a victim as broken as this woman is something you carry around with you for a while.
The two women exchanged an unhappy look, and headed out the door with a 'see you later' to them. Hotch looked at the four of them remaining. "We still have interviews to conduct."