Fiona sat in the jet. She turned around to see if anyone else was with her, no one behind her. She faced normally to see someone she thought she'd never see again.
"Daddy?"
Shadow and Sonic were coming off the elevator. They had just missed Fiona getting on another elevator to be taken up to surgery. The two hedgehogs went to the admit desk, Shadow pulled out his badge and showed it to the person sitting there.
"FBI, one of my agents was just brought in," Shadow demanded.
"Agent Hotchner, I am sorry," Thompson came up to the two BAU agents, Shadow put his badge away. His eyes were puffy and red, they were crying before Sonic and Shadow came.
"Thompson, where is she?"
"I got there just as the ambulance was leaving."
"Where is she, Thompson?"
"They just took her up to surgery."
"Then she's alive," Sonic concluded.
"What do we know?" Shadow asked Thompson.
"The local PD said someone forced her back door and surprised her in the living room. They were probably laying in wait for her. After she was-," Thompson started to say, he was ready to cry again but composed himself to finish the situation. "It appears she dialled 911 herself before she passed out."
"Why weren't we notified?" Sonic asked him confused.
"The offender apparently took her ID and gun. The uniform I talked to didn't even know she was in the bureau until I arrived on scene."
"Get back over there," Shadow ordered him. "This is a federal crime scene. Nobody touches anything. We process it. Go."
"Yes, sir."
Thompson left the hospital to get a CSU team to process the crime scene; Shadow and Sonic waited at the hospital.
Tails and Rouge were in the conference room ready to try the book code out to see if it worked. Tails would talk to the librarian on the phone and Rouge would write the words down on the board.
"Mrs. Valez, are you there?" Tails asked the woman on the other side of the phone line.
"Yes, Dr. Reid, I am," she responded. "I have a first edition of The Collector, published in Great Britain in 1963, doctor."
"Wonderful. Mrs. Valez, I'm gonna read you a set of three numbers. The first is gonna be a page number, the second a line number on that page, and the third, a word number in that line. Do you understand me?"
"Yes, I understand."
"All right, the first is page 222."
"Page 222. Got it."
"Line 23."
"Line 23. Got it."
"What is the 16th word on that line, ms. Valez?"
"'The.'"
"'The'? Great," Tails pointed to Rouge and she wrote down the word 'the'. "Page 91, line 11, word 13."
"'Path.' Does that make sense?"
"'The path.' Yeah, that absolutely makes sense!" Tails said excitedly as Rouge wrote down the word 'path'. "All right, please go to page 31-"
This was going to take awhile.
Sonic and Shadow were in a hallway of the hospital. Shadow was pacing, Sonic was leaning against the wall.
"Trap and trace got nothin'," Sonic said disappointed once he got off his cell. "Unsub used a disposable cell."
"We got our best CSU team," Shadow said trying to comfort himself. "If he left anything, a print, a hair, sweat, anything-"
"They'll find it."
"I sent her home, Sonic."
"This wasn't you."
"I should have been clearer with Thompson."
"Try Knuckles and BJ again."
"I tried 'em three times. They're out of cell range."
"Well, try 'em again. I don't want 'em to hear about this on the news."
Shadow grabbed his cell again and tried calling the two again.
Meanwhile, Knuckles and BJ were driving to South Boston to get more information on Rebecca Bryant. Knuckles was driving and BJ was reading the file.
"She was sixteen when she was abducted," BJ said reading the file. "She's eighteen now. Her birthday was in August... In that little cell."
All right, let's go over this one more time," Knuckles asked her. "She took off for school, but never got there, correct?"
"Correct."
"None of the neighbors saw her that morning?"
"It doesn't even appear that they canvassed at all."
"Okay, BJ, I need you to see if the originating detective can meet us at the house 'cause there's just something really funky about this whole investigation."
"Well, I will as soon as we re-enter the world of cell phone service."
BJ waited until they got service before she called the original detective. They weren't much farther until their destination.
Tails and Rouge had figured out the puzzle, at last. They stared at the worded phrase.
"'The path to the end began at his start. To find her first calm, her long broken heart. She sits in a window with secrets from her knight. Is it adventure that keeps him out of her sight?'" Rouge read the clue. "Another puzzle?"
"It's a riddle," Tails said. He started thinking out loud again, like he did in her office earlier. He remembered that the team needed to 'help him save her'. Tails was the 'him', they figured that much out. 'His start'... Tails' start? 'Sits in a window'... Who does? 'Her knight'... Someone important to 'her'? 'Adventure'... Only one person called Tails' cases 'adventures'. Tails grabbed the note that was in the music box, the quote from The Parliament of Fowls. "'Never would it be night, but always clear day.' It's never night in Las Vegas."
"Excuse me?"
Tails ignored Rouge's remark as he picked up the landline on the round table and dialled a few numbers.
"I need to be connected to the field office closest to Las Vegas, Nevada, immediately," Tails waited for someone to get connected. "Hi. This is Dr. Miles Reid at the Behavioural Analysis Unit at Quantico. Look, I need my mother picked up and brought to Virginia in protective custody as soon as possible... We're searching for an Unsub who shot one of our agents today, and I think he might know my mother, and I believe she may be in danger... Yes... She's at the Bennington Sanitarium in Las Vegas. Her name's Rosemary Reid. She's a patient there."
Tails was somewhat ashamed of his mother's condition of schizophrenia, and to have others know about it is not only personal, but judgemental. But there was more, more as to why Tails was so afraid of the mental splitting.
