Chapter 20
Week 07
That afternoon the expert Katie had promised showed up. They spent the rest of the day camped out together in the conference room going over the piles of information they had gathered. The BAU team was naturally curious, but by the end of the day they still didn't know anything. Katie and her expert were still going at it when they left.
The next morning Katie, whose black eye was coming along nicely, sat both teams down for the profile, including Strauss. "Ok, the Unsubs we're looking for are white males, probably in their late 40's to 50's. We believe one or both of them are independently wealthy, they don't need to show up for work or to manage a business, they can travel for long periods of time and at least one of them has the connections and experience to breech the University Club and not stand out. That says money and power. We don't know exactly what they were doing but we know they needed people with an unusual combination of traits to do it so we suspect this might be some kind of scientific or engineering project, they're developing something for them and it's something less than legal, or else they're the guinea pigs. Whoever they are they are highly security minded and will be outwardly friendly while using their money and position as a shield to cover their activities."
"Guinea pigs?" JJ asked with a small shudder.
Katie nodded. "We suspect they were profiling for genetics, specifically they were looking for people with all of the positive symptoms of Asperger's syndrome and none of the negative. Now at first glance our victims seem to have very little in common, they're both Caucasian and they both hold at least one doctoral degree, or are near to completing one. However we've come to the conclusion that both victims have Asperger's. But because the negative symptoms of that syndrome have been masked they were never formally diagnosed. We believe that that masking effect is what fooled the Unsubs into believe that they had hit the genetic jackpot and what brought them into contact with these victims at this time. This was not a random crime; they deliberately stalked both victims for months before they made their move. They wanted these two and no one else."
"What do you mean by masking the negative symptoms?" Strauss asked.
"I think I'll leave this part up to the expert." Katie gestured for her guest to take the floor. "This is Dr. Amanda Cargill; she's from the Kennedy Kreiger Institute in Baltimore and is an expert on the effect of abuse and trauma in children and adolescents with ASD."
"Thank you." Dr. Cargill smiled and nodded to everyone. "Like other ASD forms, Asperger's syndrome is characterized by impairment in social interaction accompanied by restricted and repetitive interests and behavior; it differs from the other ASDs by having no general delay in language or cognitive development. In fact in many cases, such as with Dr. Reid and I believe it's Dr. Patterson now language and cognitive development can be anywhere from above average to highly advanced. While neither victim was ever formally diagnosed with Asperger's both were diagnosed with Hyperlexia, defined as the spontaneous development of sound-symbol relations in the brain. In other words being able to read words before the age of two and full sentences before the age of three. This used to be a separate diagnosis but now we realize that this is a hallmark of Asperger's. The other so-called positive trait is one of hyperfocus. An individual with Asperger's can focus in on a specific topic or interest with extreme intensity and keep it up for hours or even days without needing a distraction. This affects social interaction, of course, but is a trait usually valued by employers. And these traits can enhance natural intelligence, as I'm sure you're all aware Dr. Reid's IQ score places him in the extremely gifted rank Dr. Patterson's IQ of 174 places her in the gifted ranks as well."
"That's Reid." Rossi muttered.
Mike from the IIU team spoke up, "So they're both geniuses?"
"I would say that they're both highly intelligent and their language ability and hyperfocus enhances that intelligence." Dr. Cargill replied. "Now in most people with Asperger's those traits come at a price, specifically a lack of social empathy. By that I don't mean that they don't feel emotions, people with Asperger's feel the same emotions that you or I do, and I don't mean that they don't care about others, they care deeply about their friends and loved ones just like anyone else. But neurotypical people have the ability to tell how others are feeling. You just know when someone around you is irritated or sad or very happy. People with Asperger's have a great deal of difficulty with this, and they have the same difficulty identifying and communicating their own emotional states. Because of this they tend to say or do the wrong thing and then not understand why others are so bothered by their seeming obliviousness."
"Yep, still Reid." Morgan agreed.
"Now one thing that always bothered researchers was how many Asperger's cases we missed over the years. We kept seeing kids with all of the expected traits when it came to learning but emotionally they seemed right as tops. They were just fine, knew all the answers when it came to the social and emotional testing. Finally in 2000 a research team at the University of Wisconsin led us in the direction of the answer. They discovered something they started calling the Pollak Effect after the lead researcher. They found that children who grew up in abusive situations had the ability to identify other's emotional states 75% faster than children from healthy environments. After some exploration they came to realize that as a defense mechanism these children had become experts at reading the microexpressions and body language of the people around them and could use that feedback to mirror the emotional state they wanted the other person to be in until that person reached that state. They would say exactly what that person wanted to hear, arranged their body language in exactly the way that person needed to feel calm and unthreatened and so on. In children with Asperger's that increase in ability, a learned skill not a natural one, was enough to make up for the natural deficit causing them to appear to have all of the positive traits and not the negative ones."
"Yeah, but Reid didn't grow up in an abusive environment." Morgan protested. "His mom's nuts about him."
"Diana Reid gave me this black eye." Katie replied. "While I'll agree that she does deeply love her son, a deteriorating paranoid schizophrenic can be just as violent as a mean drunk. According to her doctor she has attacked her son a number of times over the years, and from what I could tell from the file it grew worse as he grew older. When she becomes delusional she tends to mistake people for Garry Brendan Michaels and attack them for threatening her child. And before you say that we don't know for certain that she became violent with her son I'll agree, but point out that identifying marks and scars have to be listed in the personnel files of field agents. Reid has a number on his torso that point to abuse, including two hot water burns and what looks like a burn from a hot iron, both of which are indicative of child abuse."
"Yeah, but Reid didn't have to pretend or anything to us." Garcia insisted. "We're his friends."
Dr. Cargill smiled patiently. "Actually we believed both victims were in the process of healing and learning to open up and trust. Once they both entered the university system they found the support and the space with which to do so. But starting about four years ago they each went through a series of events that lead them to pick the old, protective behaviors again. In Dr. Patterson's case her friend Martha Walderman had a stroke and was rendered uncommunicative. Martha Walderman was a retired special-ed teacher, one with experience working with Autistic and abused children, we believe that she was not only Dr. Patterson's friend she was working with her therapeutically as well. About a year after that Dr. Patterson's stepmother, who suffers from Narcissistic Personality Disorder, began embezzling fund from her husband, and when the discrepancy was noticed she convinced her husband that she'd been using the money to help Laura after she was caught shoplifting. We believe that the loss of her only intimate friend and the realization, that even after going no-contact her stepmother could still cause her problems, caused Laura Patterson to once again close up her shell. She retreated back into the safety of her own mind and started reflecting the people around her, becoming the perfect student, co-worker, employee and even friend, all the while keeping them all at arm's length, and while mimicking the social empathy she did not feel."
Katie took the floor. "Ok, this is where the BAU starts calling me a bitch. For Dr. Reid we believe the downhill started with the Doyle case. I won't go into the details, they're in the file, suffice it to say that the clean-up phase was a complete cockup. And the resolution after the Maeve Donovan case only made it worse. By the time those two cases were resolved we believe that Dr Reid had lost trust in his team, at least on the emotional level. Again, he closed into his shell and started reflecting so well that not even a brace of the best profilers in the FBI knew that anything was wrong. So when the Unsubs in this case came looking they found two people with the intelligence, language ability and hyperfocus of Asperger's but apparently all of the social empathy needed to effectively function in society without a hint of anything wrong. That's what they wanted and that's what they got."
"But why?" Morgan asked.
"We still don't know. Our best estimate is that either they wanted the intelligence and for them to be able to work together, in which case they're being forced to work on a project for the Unsub or they wanted the genetic code in which case they might be test subjects themselves. We just don't have enough data to determine that at this time." She looked around the room. "Any questions?"