Disclaimer: I do not own anything Criminal Minds related. Characters are merely borrowed and will be put back later. ;)

A/N: The new job is going very well, but I'm so tired! :D Either way, this is the next chapter, a day late again. :/ And it will have to do until Sunday, when I will post the next one. And it is a good one, I promise. Possibly the one some of you have been waiting for. :)

Thank you so much for your patience.

Suffer and Save

Chapter Twenty- The Phantom

***

"You alone can make my song take flight..
Help me make the Music of the Night."

From "The Phantom of the Opera"

***

The newspapers had begun to call him The Phantom, because the masks had somehow been leaked to the public. The Phantom might as well have truly been a ghost. Tracking him had proved almost impossible for the first few hours. Hotch had caught himself wondering what the public would say if they knew that the Phantom had a sidekick.

It had been an exceptionally long day already, and finally they were making progress. It had taken Garcia hours to trawl through the files she had started with that morning, and the local police force were doing their best with other files. The officers on the street had seen nothing suspicious or out of the ordinary, but Morgan knew that in truth, they were more likely to trust and listen to their Chief than they were to trust or listen to the BAU. He suspected that any suspicious behaviour that may have qualified, they might have let it slide somewhat, or they might have been less vigilant. It was frustrating, but he simply had no way to better that system. He, and the team, just had to get on with it.

And so when they had finally hit on a link, Hotch had been adamant that they follow it as quickly and efficiently as possible; quite frankly, he didn't want to be in New York for a minute longer than he had to be. Emily had already taken more breaks than was strictly necessary, and there had been moments when she simply had not been able to gather herself. They had long had a policy that losing it was okay, but the BAU could not let any outsiders see them lose it.

And she hadn't allowed anyone to see her as she struggled with the horror of what she had seen in the past day. She had simply left the building and gone for a short walk around the premises, or she had sat with one of the other members of the team and chatted with them (especially JJ) for just a few minutes to get herself back in check. None of the team commented on it. The moratorium on profiling one another still stood, but they noticed nonetheless that she was having a hard time.

Morgan had been working with Garcia over the phone, discussing with her the details of the women murdered so far. He tossed different search options to her and she tried them out. There were several connectors, and they were all sure that somewhere in there, was the right one.

"What about.... technical records?" Garcia asked him over the phone.

"As in, computer records for the company?" He asked, not quite sure what she was developing.

"Yeah. Here at the FBI, we have people contracted especially to fix our hardware when it breaks. They're specifically hired and forced to sign confidentiality agreements and everything. This business is a high tech one, and it has a lot of patented secrets and methods. Surely it might be something of the same," she said.

"So what's the company that services the hardware?" Morgan asked, trawling through files on the table as Garcia searched with her ever amazing software.

"It's called Tech Know," Garcia half yelled at him over the phone. She almost shuddered at the thought that such an innocent and corny company name hid the dangers of a serial killer in its grasp.

"Okay, how many employees do they have?" Morgan asked, beckoning Hotch and Reid closer. Rossi and Emily joined from the other side of the room and before long, Garcia was running details past them on speaker phone.

"Okay, so they have over 60 employees, about twenty of which fulfil the criteria we've set out in the profile," she said, her fingers tapping mercilessly at her keys.

"So we need to get there. Is their HQ close, Garcia?" Rossi asked loudly, and when Penelope answered, it was in the affirmative. "I'm sending the address to your PDAs," she said quickly, and before they knew what was going on, Emily was with Rossi and Hotch in a car, speeding towards the offices of Tech Know.

When they got there, it only took a few short questions to determined who they were looking for.

"Sure," the receptionist said almost immediately, "That sounds like Eoin McMahon."

"Where might he be?" Rossi asked, pushing the receptionist for more information.

"He was suspended without pay for three weeks, for sexual harassment of employees in the company. And just before that, he had been suspended without pay for two weeks. He's on his last chance. His next warning means he'll be sacked for sure," She said- and she sounded damn happy about it. Rossi immediately that she had more to say, and so he prodded Emily toward her while he spoke to Hotch at the side.

"We have his address. We can check there. He seems to take them during the night, so he might be there right now. The other one... he'll be harder to find," Rossi said pointedly, and Hotch nodded.

He was well aware that Emily fitted the description of the woman their strong unsub detested so much. They would simply have to keep her away from Eoin McMahon.

***

"Is there any other information you can give me about Mr McMahon?" Emily asked the receptionist gently, noting that her name was Polly, and that she was slightly shuddery.

"He- He tried to... he stalked me for a bit. And then when I complained to management, he called and sent letters... So I complained again and he was suspended. He turned up to my house about two months ago. He- He told me he loved me. He wanted to leave with me, to take me away. He was... He was very violent..."

Emily nodded understandingly, and after saying her goodbyes and thanking Polly profusely for her story, she returned to Hotch and Rossi.

"She's got brown hair. And she's in her 30s. She said that he stalked her, acted violently towards her. I think she was the first one. She rejected him, so he took it out on others," She said, sure that she was correct.

Hotch nodded at her and within seconds they were in the car again, on the way back to the station.

"Morgan, come with me to McMahon's house. Rossi and Reid will follow. If he's not there, we need to find out more about him. I'm leaving that with you and JJ, "Hotch directed to Emily. She nodded, half glad to be out of the line of fire for this one.

And within minutes, the sirens were screaming towards the house and Eoin McMahon was on his feet and rushing to the door, trying to get away. It took Morgan only a few seconds to catch him and tackle him, knocking him to the floor and holding him there, cuffing him and then pulling him to his feet, dragging him back to the station.

But even when he was there, he refused to tell them anything of the second man involved. He seemed surprised that the BAU knew the assaults were conducted by separate people, and refused to give up any information.

After thirty minutes of an interview, Hotch was aggravated and frankly, pissed off. He had had enough. He even yelled at McMahon to get him to talk, but there was nothing forthcoming. He left the interview room quite suddenly, and walked to Emily. "Tell me you found something," he said, half desperately.

"We might have something," she said softly, pushing a slip of paper into his hand. It was brushing on towards evening now, and Hotch took it tiredly looking at the picture imposed on it.

"Odd, isn't it?" Emily said. "He has no family, but he was in care when he was a child. This was the boy he spent most of his time with. We think that they've been operating together for quite some time."

"Where did you find this?" Hotch asked.

"His old care worker faxed it over. She's still in the business. She remembered him pretty well. Said he injured small animals and wet the bed until he was nine."

"So what's the other boy's name?" Hotch asked, delighted that she had found something useful.

"Thomas," she said, ignoring the similarity to the man who had abused her, and she looked him right in the eye to reassure him that she was alright. "I'm fine Aaron. It's just a name."

He nodded at her and took the page away to the interview room again, where he slammed it on the table and pushed Eoin McMahon for more details. He still got nothing. Emily wandered closer to the interview room, and before long, the Chief of Police came over and opened the door, stepping inside to speak with Hotch about overstepping his authority. As he pulled Hotch from the room, McMahon caught a glimpse of Emily, who locked eyes with him and didn't move from her spot.

Nobody was paying attention, and she walked closer to the room. As Rossi moved past with Morgan, trying to locate the boy Thomas, whose surname they could not even find, and Reid rushed to catch them up, she was alone outside the room, still looking right at Eoin McMahon.

And so she swallowed deeply and looked away, just as Hotch caught her arm and asked her if she was alright for sure. She nodded and told him she would watch the interview from the other side of the glass. He went back to the room, now even more aggravated because of the challenge to his authority by the Chief of Police.

He was still getting nowhere. "What will it take to get you to tell me?" He asked eventually, feeling quite beaten.

"I wanna see that woman outside the door," he said, and instantly Hotch's back rippled and anger flooded his system all over again. He pounded his fist against the table and declared his decision.

"Never."

Emily too was stiffened into non action right outside. But she knew what she had to do. She grabbed the earpiece Rossi had left behind and she pulled the microphone to her lips, talking quietly into it as she normally would.

"I can do this," she said. Aaron, still in the exam room, turned to the window and shook his head softly.

"Trust me," she said, "I need to try."

And so he let her. He nodded, defeated, and then left the room.

"I'm still not sure about this," he said seconds later as she prepared to enter the room.

"I am," she said, "I have to get back on track. I can be the bait, I've done it before. Stop worrying," she finished, and then she was inside.

When she was sitting opposite Eoin McMahon, he was happy to get straight to the point.

"What are you gonna give me if I tell you everything?" he asked malevolently.

"What do you want?" she retorted.

"To see you naked."

"It all depends on what you tell me," she said calmly, keeping her cool. Outside the window, Hotch's mouth dropped open and he sighed. What was she doing?!

But to his surprise, Eoin McMahon told her everything. Entirely caught up in the moment, he let slip.

"Me and Lynch used to go to the docks... And we'd see the girls... And I just wanted to kill them. But he wanted them afterwards... We had a team... The masks were perfect copies of their faces. Two faced whores who deserved to die... Yours would be beautiful... "

His eyes scanned her, totally lost in the pale colouring of her skin and the falling waves of her hair. And then she was gone.

"Thomas Lynch," she said, as soon as she got outside the door. "Thomas Lynch."

And she was shaking miserably, entirely disgusted by another creep who saw women as object and nothing more. Someone who was willing to kill them as vengeance for a basic rejection. Same thing, different day.

Her question now was, could she do this again? Could she really come back to this job? As she listened to Eoin McMahon pounding on the window behind her, she turned away from it, and she felt Hotch wrap a protective arm around her. "Let's go," he said, "It's almost 8pm. We'll pick up Lynch, and then we'll go to a hotel for the night."

It was exactly what she needed. Talking time, fixing time. She needed to fix herself and to know that she was able to continue with this job.

She didn't notice when Lynch was brought in. She didn't even take part in the investigation that found out where he was- though it was pretty easy, and only took Garcia about 50 seconds to work it out. Nonetheless, she had simply sat with JJ, who made her some tea and comforted her while Hotch signed some paperwork and prepared to get his team out of there.

He told them that he wasn't going to have them fly back to Quantico tonight. They would stay in the hotel, and return the following morning.