"What the hell?" Garcia's eyes narrowed at the data pouring in on the screen.
"Did you find something?" Adam looked up from the three dimensional reconstruction of Lopez's wound tract he was attempting to put together for Mac.
"Yes…" Garcia pointed to the screen and Adam's jaw dropped.
"That's just disgusting and wrong," He said averting his eyes and going very red in the cheeks.
"I need Hotch and your boss in here right now." Garcia said as she pulled a tiny flash drive out of her enormous hot pink bag and slipped it into the computer's USB port.
"I'll go find them," Adam promised her, happy for the excuse to leave the room.
Tears streamed down Garcia's red cheeks as rage burned through her whole body, leaving nothing else there but the urge to wrap her hands around Lopez's throat. "If you weren't already dead," She whispered in a choked voice. "I'd kill you myself in some drawn out and very painful manner."
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"Damn it!" Stella cursed loudly as the photograph of Lucy slipped out of her fingers and dropped to the floor of the lab. She slammed the door to the fuming chamber shut and stooped down to grab the photo. It had been years since she'd dropped evidence in the lab and this particular evidence had to be able to stand up in court if… No - she thought angrily - when they caught Shane Casey. God… She wanted to get him in an interrogation room alone for just thirty seconds.
"Stella," Mac said entering the room in that silent way he had that freaked out the new people. She was used to it by now.
"I dropped the damn picture."
She carefully laid it on the table and attempted to keep her eyes off the child she considered her niece. It wasn't right to see her this way. She swallowed hard against tears of righteous anger and faced her boss.
"What's wrong Stella?" His eyes held only kindness in them as he studied her face.
"Oh I don't know Mac," She began to rant unable to hold her temper down anymore. "I am so sick and tired of chasing this guy. It's as if he has some kind of malevolent guardian angel helping him. He's escaped us three times and now he has -" Her voice broke. "He has Lucy God knows where with God only knows what kind of people. I can't bear to think of what they might be doing to her. I want him dead. I want to kill him with my bare hands. I haven't felt like this since - " She broke off, swiped away a tear that leaked out of her eye and turned back to the photograph and it's nicely developed finger prints.
"I understand more then you know Stella. I love her too, I feel the same impulse to cause him excruciatingly, and deadly pain, but we have to keep it together for her sake. We can break down after this is over. We're being watched." He reminded her. "Nothing can risk this case for us."
She glanced over to see the icy edge of rage back in his eyes and knew that Shane Casey had finally gone too far. He'd better hope that someone other then Mac found him. The thought made the corners of her mouth turn up. "So I take it that you're not in the mood to hear about what I'd like to do to him if I ever got him in a room alone." She teased.
"I think you'd have to wait in line behind everyone else on the team." Mac said sardonically.
She laughed and some of the pain that hid behind her eyes burst like a bubble. Then she sobered again and said. "I almost couldn't make myself touch this long enough to process it."
She picked it up gingerly with the tips of her forefinger and thumb, careful to hold it at the edge of the photo. She transferred it to the scanner. She wiped her fingers on her white lab coat as though she'd touched something nasty like boogers left under the edge of a table.
"I'd be very concerned about you if you could." Mac said. "I'm very happy that we can still become disgusted and enraged by the things we see and deal with on a daily basis."
Stella nodded as the machine beeped and the computer began to run its matches. She opened the scanner and pulled out the picture. "I'm finished with this. I'm going to seal it up in evidence. I hope I never have to see it again."
"I'll drink to that," Mac agreed with a small smile as the computer beeped that it had a match.
Adam burst into the lab at the same time the printer spit out a photograph and rap sheet of one Herbert Stanley, a level three child predator.
"We found something on Lopez's computer." He nearly shouted. "Penelope, I mean Garcia asked me to come get you and Agent Hotchner."
Mac nearly laughed at the young man's enthusiasm. You could always count on Adam to break the unbearable tension.
"Alright settle down Adam," Mac said. "I think Agent Hotchner and Dr. Reid are in the morgue with Hawkes and Sid."
"Right," Adam turned for the door. "I'll go get them."
He hurried back out the door. Mac raised an eyebrow at Stella who had a huge grin on her face. "Something funny…"
"I think someone's got a bit of a crush." She laughed.
"Adam and that tech girl?" Mac inquired a smile lifting the corners of his mouth despite the fact that they had a pedophile to catch.
"Yeah, stranger things have happened." Stella quipped.
"Let's go talk to our new computer hacker genius." Mac held open the door for his friend
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"I've sent samples of his blood up to tox, but the cause of death was exsanguination." Sid told the three men standing at the opposite side of the autopsy table.
"Come on Sid…" Hawkes said, "I know you've got more then that for us." He teased his friend. "Out with it."
"Okay… I've seen every type of stabbing wound you can imagine. This is different. I've never seen this kind of wound in my years as a medical examiner. Also, there's a wound on the back of his head."
He turned the man's head and showed them the torn and bloody flesh. "Someone knocked him out and then stabbed him while he was down." He pulled his glasses up to his eyes and let the magnets hook the two halves together over his nose.
Sid bent over Lopez's corpse and pointed a latex gloved finger at the hole in his chest. "See the edges or the wound."
Hawkes and Reid leaned over the same time nearly bumping heads as they watched fascinated as Sid explained what he'd found in the autopsy.
"It's smooth not jagged and the shape is odd." Hawkes said confusion darkening his eyes.
"Yes…" Sid touched the inside of the wound. "I took a closer look from the inside. Whatever was used to penetrate this man's flesh in such a distressing way, entered from above, moving up and down."
Dr. Reid and Hawkes straightened up and backed away from the body so that Sid could show them what he meant. The smell of fresh blood, formaldehyde and other body fluids made Reid's nose itch. He managed not to touch the tip with his bloody gloved thankfully, the other didn't notice until he sneezed.
"Bless you," Hawkes said.
"Did you know that saying "God bless you," to a person that sneezed began because people used to think that evil spirits could enter and exit through the nasal cavity." He fell into lecture mode missing the look on Sid's face. "Sorry," He apologized. "It's an occupational hazard with me."
"Don't apologize… I find your knowledge of odd facts refreshing." He looked significantly at Hawkes.
"Why are you looking at me like that Sid?" Hawkes asked with a smile. "I appreciate your endless supply of useless trivia."
"Okay… we all have our interesting personality quirks," Hotch spoke up for the first time. "Let the man get on with his demonstration."
"Thank you," Sid said to Hotch.
Sid pretended to push something and pull it out of the wound. He pistoned his arms as though using an old-fashioned butter churn paddle. "He had to be lying on his back when it happened."
Hawkes nodded his head in agreement. "The blood splatter at the scene backs up your assertions."
"I've seen this somewhere before," Reid said as he bent over the wound tract again.
"What do you mean?" Hotch asked.
"I'm not sure. It looks like something I was reading about a couple of months ago. I need to go have Garcia look something up on the computer for me."
"Go… We'll finish up here."
"Actually, Mac sent me down to get you." Adam said hurrying into the room from the elevator. "Garcia found something you all need to see."
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The rest of the team crowded into the AV lab a few minutes later. "You wanted to see us." Hotch asked first.
"I went through Lopez's computer files." She began her fingers flying over the computer keyboard like a concert pianist at Carnegie Hall. "He's got tons of kiddie porn on his hard drive."
"You have that look on your face that said I'm about to get a headache." Hotch said from his position just over her shoulder.
She looked up at him through her sapphire colored frames. "You know me to well my liege. Everything in this particular file was downloaded to his computer in the last six hours."
"Sid told us he was killed less then four hours ago." Reid said.
"That's my point mon cher," Garcia continued not seeing the smirks of the CSI team at her endearment. "Why would you download all this porn into your computer in the same day? There's no record of anything like this since he was released from prison."
"He could have been experimenting." Adam put in hopefully only to be glared at by three different people.
"I doubt that, he was a hit man and a drug dealer. He wasn't the type," Mac said.
"I agree," Hotch put in. "There's something not right about this at all."
"So who'd want to make it look like he sold Lucy to a pedophile ring?"
"Shane Casey," Everyone answered at the same time.
"Were you able to trace the download?" Mac asked her.
"Oh yeah… It was child's play." Garcia said.