"We're not having dinner tonight, then?" Rossi asked Hotch as he sat across from him on the jet, and Hotch sighed.

"Apparently not," he murmured, and he glanced to Reid as he fell down into the seat beside Rossi, holding his coffee cup in his hands and letting it rest against his chest.

Reid hadn't been able to sleep at all last night. Next door to Hotch, the Goldmans had just brought home their new twins, and although Hotch had barely been able to hear it once they'd closed the windows, Reid had kept pacing the floor with his fingers in his ears, and ear plugs had done very little to help. Whenever he did finally try to sleep, a nightmare would wake him up immediately after Hotch had tried to offer something to help, but Reid had snapped that he wanted to be left alone and had just gone downstairs to let Hotch sleep. He'd just managed to settle in to actually sleep at six-thirty, and Hotch had planned to just leave him in bed until the afternoon – but days off were never guaranteed.

"Did you sleep at all?" Prentiss asked as she sank into the seat beside Hotch.

"I think I got about forty minutes," Reid mumbled, his fingers pressed against his temple and his chin leant on the palm of his head, looking beyond miserable.

"Out partying?" Rossi asked.

"Ha ha," Reid said darkly.

When Morgan ruffled his hair on his way past to sit down, and Reid tilted his head back to look at him miserably through his glasses – he wasn't going to put his contacts in until after he'd gotten some more sleep – Morgan whistled, and said, "Oh, pretty boy didn't get his beauty sleep. You okay?"

"Neighbours have two new twins and two small dogs," Reid mumbled. "Every time a baby cried, the other one cried too, and then the dogs barked."

"I thought your place was soundproofed?" Morgan asked.

"Soundproofed?" Rossi repeated.

"It wasn't my place," Reid said.

"Oh, you dog," Morgan said, grinning, although Hotch could see that he was a little cautious about how he proceeded. "You sure it was the neighbours that kept you up?"

"Pretty sure," Reid muttered. The bitterness in his voice took Hotch by surprise. "He slept fine."

"Ouch," Morgan said.

"You can sleep once we brief," Hotch said quietly, and Reid glanced at him, but then nodded his head.

"Sorry, sorry, I had a fight with the printer," JJ said as she came in, passing files to Morgan to hand out, and she sank into the other seat, turning to the monitor as the jet doors were pulled closed. "So, Yreka, county seat of Siskiyou California. A few hours ago, the body of Audrey Hamilton, who run a health food shop, was discovered. Mrs Hamilton sometimes opened for tarot readings and fortune telling in her backroom at night, and her skull had been caved in with a crystal ball before she was stabbed sixteen times."

Hotch pressed his lips together as JJ cycled through the images on the screen, and then brought up the pictures of Hamilton's body – wrapped in bedsheets and placed in her bath, with dried flowers and herbs scattered over her wrapped corpse, and floating in the water.

"Her niece found her when she came in to work this morning," JJ said quietly.

"That's some pretty serious remorse," Prentiss murmured, her brow furrowed.

"I don't know, it seems almost ritualistic," Rossi said. "Were the other bodies like this?"

"Maybe," JJ said. "So, our other victims have been spread out – six months ago, Rita Orr, who sold juices at the farmer's market in Yreka, was found six days after going missing while driving home. They found her car broken down at the side of the road, and she washed up on the shore of Shasta Lake – she'd been wrapped in the tablecloths she put on her tables at the market. Two months after that, the body of Maria Ortiz, a librarian in Montague, was found wrapped in some curtains on the shore of the Bass Lake. Both women had been hit with a blunt object before being stabbed multiple times, and they did have some flowers in their clothes but they were mostly disintegrated. Garcia?"

"Hi, hello, my babies," Garcia said – she'd popped up on JJ's laptop a few minutes ago, and had been waiting for her to go on. "So, those three women are the cases that the local enforcement sent on to us – I've found three similar deaths. One was a Carolina Sanders, a grandmother from Grenada, a little ways south from Montague and Yreka – she died at the scene, but they think her husband came in while our guy was getting ready to wrap her up, because the sheets had been pulled off their bed, and she was still alive when hubby came home with the grandkids.

"I have two unidentified women, one found in Lake Shasta a year ago, wrapped up, lotsa stabs, and another unidentified woman who was discovered three months ago, also in Lake Shasta – she had been stabbed, and she wasn't wrapped in anything, but she did have dried flowers and herbs under her clothes and in her hair."

"Good work, Garcia," Hotch murmured. "None of the women showed any sign of sexual assault?"

"No," JJ said. "And they're all middleclass women in their forties or fifties, most of them mothers or grandmothers."

"I'm still contrasting and comparing, but there does seem to be some crossover with purchases, sir – a lot of these ladies' families were big on homegrown, organic food, a lot of them regularly went to farmers markets, and I think maybe that a lot of them were into natural remedies, but it's kind of hard to dig into – most of the stores that sell these things seem to focus on cash transactions rather than cards, especially at the markets."

"Thanks, Garcia," JJ said, and Garcia gave them a little wave as she went back to work.

"Mothers and grandmothers all into the same natural remedies – surrogates for a real mother figure in his life?" Rossi asked.

"It's kind of hard to tell from these pictures," Reid said, squinting down at one of the photographs printed out, "but I think that these buds are dried calendula, and these stamens look like they might be from nasturtiums. They're both flowers that are used in natural medicine, for putting on wounds or in compresses – it's possible that our unsub is trying to heal the wounds he's inflicted."

"Bit late for that," Rossi murmured.

As everyone settled into working over the file, Reid made no move to get up, and Hotch reached over, pushing Reid's file closed.

"Hotch," Reid protested.

"Reid, if you don't sleep, you'll be a liability once we set down," Hotch said. "You can work on the geographical profile once we touch down in Siskiyou County and you have maps in front of you – you don't need to try to do it in your head."

Reid was silent for a moment, looking almost like he was ready to argue, but then he nodded his head. "Fine," he murmured, and Hotch watched as he got to his feet, putting his glasses into their case and putting them aside. He didn't wear an eye mask – Reid didn't like having his eyes covered, and blindfolds of any kind made him too anxious to relax at all – but he put in a pair of ear plugs before he laid down on the couch toward one end of the jet, and within fifteen minutes or so he was asleep.

JJ threw a blanket over him, and she took Reid's seat.

"You could tell he was trying to do it in his head?" Prentiss asked.

"Can you read all of our minds like that?" Morgan asked, and Hotch huffed out a low sound that wasn't quite a laugh, focusing on the file. "Just tell what we're thinking?"

"Only when I can see you mouthing latitude and longitude numbers while you do it," Hotch said, and Morgan laughed.

It was a long flight to Siskiyou County. Reid slept the whole journey through.

"There he is, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed!" Morgan said when Reid came out of the jet bathroom with his contacts in, and Reid laughed, reaching up and pushing his hair back from his face. Rossi and JJ had already started driving south to Grenada to talk to Carolina Sanders' widower, and the rest of them would be driving over to the Yreka PD. "Come on, pretty boy, we're ready to head out."

They jogged over to the car under the rain, and Reid slid into the backseat, letting Morgan follow in behind him.

"They have a board laid out for us already at the police department," Hotch said. "Reid, you and I can head there, Morgan, Prentiss, we'll drop you off at Audrey Hamilton's store."

"Got it," Morgan said, and then he looked at Reid, his lips quirked into a slight smile.

"What?" Reid asked.

"Nothing, nothing," Morgan said. "Just— first fight with the boyfriend, that's a big milestone, huh."

"We didn't fight," Reid said irritably, crossing his arms tightly over his chest and looking out of the window, not looking at Morgan, and definitely not looking at Hotch. Hotch had tried to stay up with him for a bit last night, had offered to give him a massage or to eat him out, had offered a variety of sleeping pills, ear plugs, and as tired and short-tempered as he'd already been, he'd quickly lost it and snapped at Hotch to just leave him alone. The guilt over that particular snap hadn't made it easier to sleep. They'd driven separately, so he hadn't even apologised to Hotch on the way over, and

"You sure?" Morgan asked, raising his eyebrows. "You sound pretty pissed off with the—"

"Would you quit it and just concentrate on the job?" Reid said, his voice sharp as he looked back at Morgan, and Morgan leaned back, spreading his hands. He didn't look angry, not really – he just looked surprised, and perhaps a bit concerned, but Reid didn't say anything, just pulling his file up and focusing on it again.

He'd made an internal list of potential flowers and herbs that were used in traditional healing methods – it was the sort of thing he remembered quizzing his mother on when they'd read medieval literature, sitting on her knee and demanding what would have been put in this poultice or in that wound-wrapping, but it wasn't as though people didn't use home remedies – Reid knew a lot of the plants that could be used for basic remedies in the field.

The first time he'd gone camping with Gideon – something he'd been reluctant to do, especially as at the time he'd been terrified of bears – he'd stressed himself into a headache, and he'd watched, taken aback, as Gideon had made him tea out of basswood flowers and crushed Granny's Bonnet seeds, and it had tasted foul, but it had helped. It was sticking in his head as he looked down at the file, pressing his lips loosely together.

"What are you thinking?" Hotch asked after they dropped Morgan and Prentiss off.

"Well, I might be wrong, but usually stuff like this, you make it into a tea, a poultice, or a paste, but… Some people do use certain herbs in baths – like dried lavender, so maybe it's the idea of soaking in water."

"You think our unsub has a background in alternative remedies?"

"I don't know," Reid said. "Maybe." He looked at Hotch, who was concentrating on the road as he took the turning to the PD, his expression serious. "I'm sorry about last night."

"For not being able to sleep?"

"For snapping at you about it."

"I didn't take it personally," Hotch said quietly. There was nothing in his face that showed deception, but Reid still felt a sickening guilt roiling in the base of his belly, especially when Hotch met his gaze in the mirror. "I was just worried, and I was annoyed when we got the call and I couldn't let you sleep. Do you feel better?"

"Yeah, I do. I just… feel bad."

"Don't," Hotch advised, pulling in. "You think I don't get moody when I'm tired?"

"I wasn't moody," Reid said.

"Oh, you were moody," Hotch replied, and Reid wanted to be annoyed, but Hotch was smiling at him slightly, keeping his gaze in the mirror. "Let's put the personal aside until we find this guy."

"Okay," Reid said softly, and he slipped out of the car.

Audrey Hamilton's shop downstairs was a bright, fragrant, open space, all sorts of fruits and vegetables, roots and tubers, and different flowers and herbs organised in troughs and baskets, sprigs of fragrant things hanging in bunches from the ceiling. She used a lot of glass in the room to make it seem bigger than it was, and the contrast between the main part of the store and the back room where she apparently delivered her fortunes was startling.

This room was a good deal smaller, barely wide enough to accommodate the table, which had a purple silk tablecloth, and more purple silk stapled to the walls in place of wallpaper, dousing the room in a tinted, shimmering light. A few vaguely occult objects hung from the walls – some crystals, a few runic symbols, and on one shelf were different divining objects – tarot cards, more crystals and stones, and even a small spirit board made of dark slate.

The blood spatter was here, and they'd figured out that their unsub had probably sit Hamilton from behind as she turned around to reach for something on the shelves, because at one point the table had been overturned and put back, and the blood had been smeared by it.

"No surveillance cameras, and no prints on the crystal ball," Morgan said, hanging up his phone, and Prentiss sighed.

"I can't see any sign of a client book or appointments in here," she said. "If it's not on her cell phone, maybe the unsub took her datebook – or maybe she just kept it all in her head. Small town like this, how many clients could she have?"

"No cell phone," Morgan said. "The niece said she was worried about the radiation – same for Ortiz and Orr, both anti-technology. Maybe the other women too."

"So, is it an anti=surveillance measure?" Prentiss asked, looking around the room.

"Well, the niece said that Mrs Hamilton didn't usually bring tourists back here, because they weren't in town long enough – mostly, she had clients around the area, people she already knew. No walk-ins."

"So, you're the unsub, I'm Hamilton," Prentiss said. "I open the door for you and I'm expecting you here – I bring you back here, the crystal ball is on the table… It's a narrow room, so as soon as I step inside, you have me trapped in here."

"Clear blow to the back of the head, no defensive wounds," Morgan said. "You turn away from me, and I pick up that ball and have a clear shot at your head, but you have to be facing away from me – you have to be looking at that shelving unit at the back."

It was a tall unit with a mix of open shelves and cabinets, and she pulled one of the cabinets open, looking inside. There were a few jars, big jars meant to hold two or three litres of something, and two of them were nearly empty. They had no labels, but she pulled one of them down, looking at it thoughtfully.

"This look like the flowers that were in the bath upstairs?"

"Yeah," Morgan said, leaning in to look at them. "So, our unsub comes in, asks Hamilton for some of this potpourri stuff, she turns to get it…"

"Bam," Prentiss murmured. "She falls sideways, knocks over the table – but he doesn't stab her here. He takes her upstairs to the bathroom, sits her down beside the bath, stabs her, then puts her in…"

"It's a water burial," Morgan said. "Has to be. Same with dumping the bodies – after they're dead, he wraps them up, lets them go…"

"So the flowers, these are, what, ceremonial?"

"I guess," Morgan said, and Prentiss hummed, shifting the jar.

"She's running low," he said. "And there are four different kinds here – different colours, different sorts of plants. I'll take some samples to bring back."

Morgan nodded, and Prentiss took out some evidence bags and started taking a few scoops of each of the jars. The dried flowers were fragrant, smelled nice, but she could smell there was a difference between each jar – maybe they were for tea?

"You think Reid is gonna tell us who his boyfriend is any time soon?" Morgan asked quietly.

"He'll tell us when he's ready," Prentiss said. "It was a pretty thing he did, telling us he was bisexual – and I think he's worried we won't like him. The boyfriend, I mean."

"What, just because Hotch doesn't like the guy means we'll all hate him? He told me he'd see how it went, then tell us – he's been with this guy four months now, still nothing."

A part of Prentiss was surprised that Reid hadn't told Morgan or JJ, but she'd realised, over time, that he was sensitive to how much they treated him as a little brother, sometimes – especially Morgan. There wasn't anything, she was sure, that Derek Morgan wouldn't do if Spencer Reid asked him to, but the other side of that coin was how much he cared about Morgan's opinion, his approval.

"He said he was older," Morgan murmured. "You think he's married?"

"The boyfriend?" Prentiss asked, not letting anything show in her face. "No, Reid wouldn't go in for that."

"Could be divorced, though," Morgan said. "It's not like they can discriminate against him at the FBI – too many of us would vouch for him, would be on his side."

"And if it's someone else at the FBI?"

"I don't know how that works," Morgan admitted. "I know there's a no-fraternisation policy, and I know there's stuff about conflict of interest, but unless Reid was dating one of us, I can't see the top brass taking it that seriously."

"I think it opens us up to lawsuits if things go wrong," Prentiss murmured. "And then there's just the optics of it – if Reid is dating some higher up at Quantico, and then he gets or doesn't get x or y promotion, opportunity… Say he was dating another field agent – would you be okay sharing a room with them?"

"Who cares? It's a case-by-case thing," Morgan said.

"We're field agents: we think like that," Prentiss said, smiling slightly. "But the people that sit at desks in the Bureau, they have to think about how this stuff looks like on paper, they have to think of policies for it."

"You really think that's why he won't tell us?" Morgan asked.

"No," Prentiss murmured. "No, I think he's scared that if he tells us all, it becomes too real, and maybe things change. You know how Reid feels about change."

Morgan was quiet for a few moments, his hands in his pockets, and then he slowly nodded his head. "You ready to go check out the bathroom?"

"Sure," Prentiss murmured.

They had to stay in the hall, to keep from getting the blood on their boots.

"Anything useful from Mr Sanders?" Hotch asked, half looking up from the coroner's reports he had spread out on the table in front of him. The stabs in the first of the victims – the unidentified woman that had been found in Lake Shasta – had been stabbed only twice, and the wounds were hesitant and uncertain, but the shape and width of the wounds did match up with the wounds on the other women, and the unsub had been right-handed in each case. The knife he was using, the coroner thought, was probably some sort of wide chopping blade, and he was evidently bringing it along with him.

At the other end of the room, completely immersed in his cartographical work, Reid was drawing circles around each of the dumpsites and murder locations, looking for points of intersection: as JJ and Rossi entered, he didn't even look up.

"He remembered smelling something fragrant when he found his wife," JJ said, standing behind Reid and looking over his shoulder. "We think it might have been the dried plant mix – Emily says they found jars of it in Hamilton's store."

"Sanders didn't have any?"

"She had a lot of local produce," Rossi said. "Local honeys, jellies, preserves, but nothing that looked like the dried mix we saw. Any clue on what it is?"

"Well, Reid was right," Hotch said. "Calendula and dandelion petals, cinnamon bark, garlic leaves, and then, uh… Matilja poppy—"

"Romneya coulteri," Reid said, not turning around. "It's a summer flower native to this area – like nasturtium flowers, it has antimicrobial qualities."

"—and a kind of laurel leaf."

"The California Bay Laurel is a flowering tree you can find in Northern California and the south of Oregon – early Californians used to tuck the leaves into their hats to repel vermin and ward off headaches."

"I don't suppose any of that is difficult to get hold of?" Rossi said, without much hope.

"All of it's pretty easy to grow domestically or to pick wild," Reid said. "But I don't think it's a tea – I think you're meant to put it in a bath to soak in, and it'll help small cuts and abrasions. Sanders and Hamilton both had gardens and took regular hikes, and Garcia says that Maria Ortiz had an allotment where she grew roses."

"All of the women that we know the names of were active in the local community, were eco-aware, had gardens or natural remedies on hand…" JJ murmured, her arms loosely crossed over her chest as she leaned back against the long table. "A lot of them didn't have cell phones and were sceptical of technology – all the same age. The victims must be surrogates, right? For someone our unsub hated?"

"But he feels remorse after he kills them," Rossi said. "And what, he thinks when he immerses them in water with this stuff that it'll heal their wounds?"

"Maybe he doesn't think it's about healing the wounds," Reid said idly. "Maybe it's not about healing them – maybe it's palliative. Maybe the mix is meant to soothe the pain."

Hotch's phone vibrated, and he picked it up, opening up the texted image Prentiss had sent him – a small, glass jar on the side of Hamilton's bath, filled with a similar mix of dried plants and flowers. It had a label on the jar: Punch Orchard.

"Garcia," he said after dialling her number, "what have you got on a place called Punch Orchard?" After reading out the longitude and latitude for Reid to note on his maps, he put Garcia on speaker.

"So, Punch Orchard has been a staple up here in Siskiyou County for a few decades… It was started by Christina Dagher and her husband, John, who died ten years ago in a car crash. Christina had two daughters, Emily and Mandy. Mandy is going to school in San Diego, but Emily runs… Aw. Emily has been running the Punch Orchard since her mom died two years back."

"What did she die of, Garcia?"

"A stroke," Garcia said. "She died a day after a day in hospital."

"Punch Orchard," Rossi said. "You know, some of the preserves at the Sanders place had that name on them."

"In the crime scene photos from Maria Ortiz' house, she had some marmalade from Punch Orchard too," Reid murmured, turning. "Do they have any other relatives in town, Garcia?"

"Doesn't look like it," Garcia said, and Hotch listened to the tap of her keyboard as she typed at lightning speed. "Christina Daghner, née Kipling, had no siblings that I can see, but also seems to have the same anti-tech leanings as every other lady we're talking about, because I'm seeing next-to-no digital footprint, just the visa forms she filled out for permanent residency with our Canadian friends.

"John Dagher had a brother who died when he was a little boy, and a cousin Jeff who is doing 5-10 in LA County for aggravated assault and some drug charges, but it doesn't look like he's had any contact with any of the current Daghers."

"Keep us updated, Garcia," Hotch said.

"It's worth going out and talking with them," Prentiss said. "It's possible our unsub is targeting their customers for some reason."

"Head out. Reid, go with her."

The Punch Orchard was a huge property, spreading out in all directions, but the dirt track led up to a big house that looked to have been built a hundred and fifty or so years back, and all around it were neat rows of fruits and vegetables, but also flowers and herbs.

The fragrances were strong, mingling with one another on the air, and Reid allowed himself a few moments to get used to them before they walked up the path toward the house.

"Two cars," Prentiss murmured: there was a neat Prius, and then there was a pick-up beside it. "But Garcia says it's just Emily and her daughter, Mara, living here at the moment. They have a few workers on payroll that live around, though – it's possible they have some workers from Mexico or other parts of South America, too."

"The National Agricultural Worker Survey surveyed that around 48% of farmworkers and agricultural labourers are undocumented," Reid said, "but some surveys estimate the number is closer to 70%. It's more than possible."

Prentiss went up to knock on the door.

"Emily Dagher?" she asked when the woman answered the door.

She was a tall woman, her black hair tied up in a bun, and she was dressed in dungarees over a blouse, a kerchief tied around her neck, and looking between the two of them, she didn't show any signs of anxiety, just confusion. "Yes?"

"My name is Agent Emily Prentiss, this is Doctor Spencer Reid," Prentiss said as they flashed their badges, and Dagher remained relaxed, not flinching, "we're with the Behavioural Analysis Unit of the FBI. We're in Yreka investigating some recent murders – would you mind if we asked you a few questions?"

"Oh, is this about Audrey Hamilton?" Dagher asked. "She used to babysit us when we were kids – I heard about her this morning."

"I'm afraid Mrs Hamilton isn't the only death we're investigating," Prentiss said.

"Please, come in," Dagher said, "come sit down."

Dagher led them into a cosy, warm living room with wide windows, showing a broad view of the garden. "I'll just be a second, please, sit," she said, stepping out of the room, and as Prentiss sank down into an armchair, texting Hotch to let them know they'd arrived, Reid kept on his feet, looking out over the garden, and then to the orchard ahead. There were hundreds of oranges, heavy on the trees, but they weren't ripe just yet, he didn't think.

"You and Hotch make up?" Prentiss asked in an undertone.

"We weren't fighting," Reid muttered, shooting her a scowl, and Prentiss smiled.

"It's normal to get annoyed with each other sometimes, you know."

"I know."

"Why are you so wound up about it then?"

"Some lemonade for you," Dagher said as she stepped inside, and Reid looked to see Mara, Dagher's little girl, carrying a tray of glasses into the room as her mother carried the jug. Reid smiled slightly, giving Mara a wave, but he didn't take a glass until Dagher had poured some for all four of them, and he'd seen her and Mara sip from the glasses themselves. "Uh, Mara, we're going to talk about some adult things for a little while – would you go play outside?"

"But, Mom, I want to talk to the FBI agents too!"

"Why don't we go outside and let Agent Prentiss talk to your mom?" Reid asked. "We can be just on the other side of that window, so you'll be able to see, and you can ask me any question you want."

"Really? Any question?"

"Any question."

"Have you ever killed anybody?"

Reid looked at Prentiss, who gave him a look that, he was pretty sure, translated to: You had that coming.

"No," Reid lied, and gave Mrs Dagher a small smile as he and Mara stepped out of the house, and to the other side, making sure that Dagher could see her daughter as they walked up and down the rows of plants in the garden. "How old are you, Mara?"

"Ten," Mara said. "How old are you?"

"Twenty-seven."

"Really? You look younger."

"People tell me that," Reid said.

"I think it's 'cause your hair is so floppy."

Reid laughed. "You think?"

Mara nodded, leaning over and plucking a few blueberries from one of the bushes, holding some out to Reid, which he took. They were slightly tart as he bit into them, and he chewed slowly.

"Must be pretty nice, living on an orchard, with all your own food."

"I guess," Mara said. "I'm gonna start school in September, and Mom says people are gonna ask how come I don't eat meat."

"You've never been to school?"

"Nope, Mom home schooled me, so I could learn more about the orchard and stuff. She was home schooled too, but she never went to school, not ever. Did you?"

"Yeah, but I went pretty early," Reid said. "I started high school around your age."

"I could do that," Mara said confidently. "But I want to talk to kids my age."

Reid smiled slightly. "That's a good choice, Mara."

"You want to play a game?"

"Uh, sure," Reid said, glancing back to the house, which was in view.

"Hide and seek?"

"Okay, but you can't go too far. We want to stay in sight of the house, so your mom can see us."

"Okay, okay, up against this tree, and put your hands over your eyes."

For a second, Reid hesitated, not wanting to cover them, but Mara was only ten, and it was just a game. He lifted his hands up, not pressing them tightly against his face as he closed his eyes.

"Okay, now count to a hundred, and you have to do it so I can hear you!"

"A hundred? How about twenty?"

"Okay, twenty, but you have to count slow!"

"I promise. Ready?"

"Ready!"

"One," Reid said, "Two—"

"Huh," Garcia said.

"Huh?" JJ repeated. "What's huh?"

"Looking up relatives of Christina Dagher. She's a really anti-tech, anti-government girl – home births, home schooled her kids the whole way through, no doctors records…

"She was an Iowa girl, came west when she met her husband at college, and there's a story about her in her old college paper – says she was inseparable from her cousin, Sarah-Lee, but from what I can tell, Sarah-Lee immigrated to Canada when she got married, got divorced, stayed in Canada because her son went to school there."

"What happened to her?"

"Well, she died, not sure what from, I'm looking at her obit, but she left behind a son, Andrew Cummings."

"Where's he now?"

"That's the huh. There's no record of him in Canada since he was eleven. He'd be around thirty now, but I haven't got any records at all, and… Oh."

"Oh?"

"Um, his mom, Sarah-Lee, she died of sepsis," Garcia said. "She had a rose thorn stuck in her hand, didn't go to the hospital until she developed septicaemia – she just kept using natural remedies."

Hotch felt, suddenly, like the floor had dropped out of his stomach. "Call Prentiss and Reid," he ordered crisply, getting to his feet. "Now."