TUESDAY, APRIL 23, 2013 AT 2:25 PM | QUANTICO, VIRGINIA
"Yes, I agree, Dave. I'll brief everyone else shortly and we'll fly out afterwards." Aaron Hotchner had taken the time to look over the case file that was sent to him and Penelope Garcia, and his sense of urgency was piqued.
"Sounds good, Aaron," David Rossi responded from the other end of the line. "This has the makings of being something nasty. I didn't come up to Jersey to guest lecture for this."
Aaron gave a deep titter. "The wicked never rest on our behalf, Dave. You know this all too well."
"Hah! Put it on my tombstone. See you in a few hours."
Aaron let out a small puff of air as he hung up the phone. He looked at his watch in chagrin and resignation. It was almost half past two o'clock; he had been nearing the end of his workday today with the intention that he and his son, Jack, were going to enjoy the rest of the day bonding, building a fort, eating breakfast for dinner, and getting into other tomfoolery while Beth was away. He grabbed his cell phone, reluctant to dial Jessica's number to inform her of the change in plans.
After the brief and amicable conversation with his former sister-in-law—in which he requested that she apologize to his napping son on his behalf and tell him that he loved him—he gathered the casefile and stood up from his seat. Blessed he was for Jessica's patience and tolerance of his unpredictable schedule (though she admitted in jest that since he and Beth had begun seeing each other regularly, she was beginning to feel a bit ignored and missed her nephew anyway).
He made his way to Penelope's office. Knocking twice as a mere courtesy, he let himself in. "Garcia, you ready?"
Penelope swiveled around in her seat and nodded at Aaron. "Sir, yes! Just finished sending everything we have so far to the tablets and a printed copy for the resident dinosaur." After a few clacks at her keyboard, she stood. "Let's assemble the avengers, Cap."
"Good." Aaron left the room and Penelope followed suit after a moment, walking into the bullpen and up the short flight of steps to make her way over to the briefing room.
Aaron then stopped at Derek Morgan's office to tell him that they needed to gather within the next five minutes for a new case. Heading toward the bullpen again, he directed his words to the other members of the team—Spencer Reid, Alex Blake, and Jennifer Jareau—who were working at their desks. "Blake, Reid, JJ." He pivoted without breaking his stride. As he was wont to do, he wasted no words—"New case; briefing room in five, please."—then continued to the briefing room.
Alex and Jennifer both nodded at Aaron in acknowledgement and then they fixed their attention on Spencer, who was angled over his desk with a hand shading his eyes as he stared at his paperwork. He hadn't budged at Aaron's words, yet he wasn't reading over the text before him with his customary finger-gliding, page-turning speed, either.
His head was elsewhere.
The two shared a knowing look, and Jennifer stood up from her desk. She straightened her mouth into a thin line, eyebrows puckering in worry. With a slight dip of her head at Alex, she blinked at the rush of heat behind her eyes before tilting away in resignation.
Things weren't the same between her and Spencer after Emily returned from the dead. Maeve's death had served to widen the chasm. There was still love and trust, yes, but it came with a palpable reluctance. She understood this for what it was: where there had been an eagerness in the past, Spencer lost the confidence to disclose personal things with her anymore.
After all, while Jennifer had come to the realization in the fall that Spencer was seeing someone, he never came to her for any insight or with any enthusiasm. She wondered if anything had come about from that secret relationship. Evidently, something had continued to sprout—something significant—and he hadn't relied on her to help him nurture it.
Lately, she found herself staring at him when he would retreat and gaze through things rather than at them, and she wondered what insecurities were plaguing him—what pains he was reliving from the life that he was beginning to believe was cursed. Her friend was hurting and in return she felt hurt at her heart that things were so unbalanced between them to the extent that she couldn't help him in the face of Maeve's death. He was suffering and he wasn't letting anyone in.
Well, that wasn't true.
Alex seemed to get through to him more often in these past few months, and in such unconventional ways. With that understanding, she sent another glance at him before she walked past the threshold and into the briefing room, confident that Alex would get his attention.
—
"Hey, Spencer?" Alex began, sauntering to Spencer's desk so as not to surprise him.
Her chary approach was a fruitless endeavor; Spencer curled his body, frazzled from his thoughts, and placed the papers in his hand onto his desk. He turned to Alex and looked up at her with a misplaced half-smile.
"Did you hear Hotch before? We've got a new one." She tipped her head toward the briefing room.
"Oh?" Spencer looked over at the private room that Jennifer had just entered. He turned back to his desk and breathed out, blinking. It looked to be a realignment to attention, and he kept blinking.
"You okay? I saw you reading over the same page for too long. Your average is . . . four seconds?" She tried at levity, but it fell flat.
Spencer squinted at her with furling eyebrows, gave a noncommittal I'm great, Alex, and stood up, avoiding the possibility of any other inquiries by turning to walk away.
Alex reached her hand out before he could take another step. "Spencer, please," she implored. The guilt often gnawed at her, though it was in Spencer's nature to reason with her that there was nothing for which she should feel guilty. What cut her deeper was that he didn't blame anyone else for what happened to Maeve—though he'd relied on them to help—but rather turned all his torment inward.
She would awaken some nights thinking about the horror he suffered, and the thought would ruminate in her mind in those waking hours: if she hadn't pushed Spencer to meet Maeve—if Alex had allowed his reluctance to preclude him from meeting Maeve that night when they'd decided to meet—something would have gone differently that would have changed the course of events that followed.
She tried to express that very sentiment to him nearly a month ago, tried to have him open up to her, and his response chilled her:
'It was an inevitability,' Spencer had uttered. 'Whether I'd met her then or later, her stalker was determined to take everything from her. If her stalker felt dissatisfied that this measure wasn't sufficient to destroy her life, she would ultimately kill her. And that's precisely what happened.'
His words were dismissive, fatalistic. But it was an obvious attempt to distance himself from his trauma. He could say neither Diane Turner's name nor Maeve's name with the same clinical detachment with which he alluded to the series of the events that resulted in their deaths.
No, he couldn't detach himself from it all. The effects of Maeve's death clung to Spencer like a gossamer that had formed a husk around him, slow to disintegrate and leaving tendrils of its presence in cracks on his skin that he couldn't—or wouldn't—yet reach. It seemed there was a permanence in them.
She raised her hands and began to speak to him, "You sure there's nothing wrong?"
Spencer gave Alex a blanketed expression, fingers twiddling on the strap of his satchel. A heavy sigh puffed out before he lifted his hands and spoke without verbalizing the words. "Another headache." There was no further flourish or explanation.
It was enough for Alex to understand, though.
After Spencer had returned to work, he began to find ways of isolating himself—not that he was a social person in the first place. He took their cases in stride, smiled in ways that no one felt mollified by, and his grief counseling had gone well. But he knew how the system worked, knew how to answer questions in a way that he wasn't found unfit to return to work. Alex was unconvinced of his recovery and suspected that it was too soon for him to get back to a normal working schedule. She wasn't the only one who felt this way.
Yet, Spencer dove into his work as a means of distraction and did so with little trouble for less than two weeks before it became evident that he wasn't doing well. Then, with February's end came the cryptic Zugzwang message on the bouquet of flowers sent to Jennifer, throwing the team into a disturbing case. The setback was near instantaneous.
He pushed through the case well, but not long came another case that intensified the setback. His failed attempt to get through to the perpetrator, Peter Harper [1] , plagued him with thoughts of that horrific night and of how no amount of training—no pacifying lies or harsh truths—could prevent a person who was so determined to die from following through with their resolve. Just as he couldn't talk down Diane Turner, he couldn't talk Peter down from killing himself. He expressed this to Aaron, and everyone spoke of it later when he wasn't present. Other cases began to further shed light on his deepening anguish, weighing on him until the combination of it all began to have adverse effects, such as what he felt now.
Within those first couple of weeks of his return to his regular work schedule, the headaches that Spencer had suffered in the past returned. Alex heard of them, and she was unsure if they were psychosomatic in nature this time as opposed to the physiological symptoms he'd endured before she joined the team. It may have been a subconscious trigger caused by the irrationality and suddenness of Maeve's death. Or they could very well be real.
After the Peter Harper case, however, the headaches, which were tolerable before, began to debilitate him. What was more, Alex noticed that he was less verbal when certain conversations came up, or when he was lost in thought, and while it could also be psychosomatic, its effects were again physiological. His voice would quiver, drift, and fade away.
In the neatest bow, all of this could be attributed to post-traumatic stress disorder.
One particular day, when they were on the jet travelling from a case and Spencer was experiencing a migraine—in which the team was merciful and spoke in hushed tones while he laid down near the back, bobbing his foot to assuage the pain—Alex sat across from where he laid on his side and whispered to him, asking if he would be able to sit up if she made him some tea with honey. Spencer couldn't even nod his head; but rather nodded a closed fist after a few seconds of silence, foot still wobbling to allay the torment. Alex was aware that Spencer knew some level of Sign language as two began guest lecturing together about a year and a half ago, but the unexpected gesture surprised her at that moment. She got up and patted his leg to acknowledge his response.
By the time she had made her way back to him and sat in front of him, shielding him from the rest of the team, he'd managed to sit up, though bent over at the waist, and he expressed his gratitude toward her—again, unvoiced but for a groan. After glancing over and seeing that each team member was occupied or averting their gazes to let him hold onto a morsel of dignity, Spencer accepted her holding the mug for him as he drank from it. One of her hands braced the back of his head, the other held the mug, and his hand shook as he tried to hold her arm for support. Less than half an hour later, he'd vomited in the bathroom. She drove him home after the jet landed instead of allowing him to take his usual system of trains, and that evening—despite his protestations—she stayed with him in his apartment until the next morning.
As he slept, she patted his leg, smoothed his knotting brows, hushed him when he jostled about and murmured Maeve's name, and lost herself in thought. The thoughts circulated around what he had suffered before she herself joined the team. Though he was a private person, their conversations over the time she knew him had graduated from professional to personal.
Those conversations surrounded Jason and his abrupt departure, Spencer's sick mother and the occasional violent episodes, his father's abandonment, his difficulties in the public school system, his evasion of Child Protective Services, and how he was still within the threshold to succumb to his mother's illness.
She knew about Tobias Hankel and the emotional, psychological, and physical torture Spencer suffered the two days he was held captive. He was mock executed, he was forced to become complicit in the murder of his captor's victims, and in the end, he had to kill a man whose own past traumas had caused his mind to fracture into multiple dissociative identities. There was a weight that came with that.
In fact, she wondered if this had been the start of whatever addiction he had in the past. She only knew that he was an addict because after the case in which Peter Harper committed suicide, she saw Spencer staring with desperation at a token between his twiddling fingers while they travelled back to their hub in Quantico. She wondered what had started the addiction, took a guess at what his vice might have been—illicit drugs or maybe alcohol since she never saw him imbibing—but never broached the subject. People with minds like Spencer's—the ones that couldn't shut off—sometimes sought ways to escape, to drown out, to numb, to slow down the onslaught of thoughts.
If Spencer weren't such a devout man of the law and a champion of justice, he might be at its other end. He was the quintessential poster child of a serial offender. It was why she feared that there was little left of him to spare before he broke instead of bouncing back. Spencer had triggers and stressors in spades; this place, with these people he saw every day—this was his only other family and home, and it damaged him.
In conversing behind closed doors and on separate occasions with both David and Aaron, as well as through her own observations, Alex was positive that Spencer didn't process things well as most people would. Though this was a normal grieving process, things were never normal with him. She made an inference before that Spencer might be on the autism spectrum and was therefore more careful, conscientious, and observant of how she treated him and how he reacted to things.
Avoidance—with them, with anything to do with voicing his grief—was his shield, but it was a weight he couldn't handle. He chose not to burden his friends with his problems and share that weight, ignoring the fact that he didn't have to bear it alone.
So, Alex found a way to begin chipping away at that shield.
Since that interaction on the plane where he used brief Sign language, Alex began to exchange phrases and words to share between them whenever they were paired together during cases—which increased in frequency—or when they were stuck in the bullpen. It allayed her guilt because she knew it took his mind off things too painful to dwell on. But more importantly, he was more willing to verbalize himself in this manner whenever he became non-verbal. Of course, he devoured new words with a capacity that made Alex envious, but at times had trouble with his motor skills. When he would get excitable and try to sign with the same speed with which he would speak whenever he was given to bouts of ramblings, he became ungainly. Alex laughed at some of his sillier mistakes, and he flushed and smiled in that self-deprecating manner.
She also noticed him integrating the language more and more in his everyday verbal speech: when he gestured as he spoke, his hands often contorted to awkward shapes that had purpose to only him, but now he put meaning behind them. This all began almost two months ago, and he now had a survival-range command of the language. He picked up on and memorized new words after he would fingerspell it and she would correct him. It was no surprise, given his proclivity to learning things, but she also suspected that he was looking at books or maybe even online tutorials at the library. She knew he would learn better if he were to communicate with people who communicated via Sign, but he assured her that what he was learning was sufficient for the moment and would probably never be able to take full advantage of the language.
Ever an academic, Spencer never rejected learning something new, and he welcomed any kind of distraction, but this was something that she encouraged him not to be distracted by. If he were to continue to learn, he should do so with a goal to go beyond academics and to have a personal attachment to those in the Deaf Community or with non-verbal people. In this, Alex was staunch in those beliefs. Hereditary deafness ran in her family and was one of the reasons she took up the study of Linguistics in the first place, but her dealings with John Myers[2], The Silencer, had sputtered and stoked a rarely-used engine. Now it was running more often.
However, on that note, Alex continued the communication with Spencer in this manner because she suspected that he might have been non-verbal as a little child. The signs he did know before meeting her, he knew for years. And while he wasn't non-verbal on a regular basis, he became so with increasing frequency over the past months since Maeve's death. So yes, she was suspect of it.
Breaking from her musing, Alex asked Spencer in Sign language if he was still okay to go up to the briefing room. He nodded and shot her a quick, embarrassed smile. Mouthing a whispery Okay, she patted his arm and gave him a fond smile as he turned to the briefing room, where the two walked in and sat.
—
"Okay, guys," Penelope began as she stood in front of the screen. "Pack up some hiking gear 'cause we'll be headed to Stokes State Forest in northwest Jersey for a grizzly one."
"Why isn't the Newark division overlooking this?" Jennifer asked.
"Dave was guest speaking this morning at the Rutgers School of Criminal Justice along with SSA Stevens from the Newark division," Aaron answered. "They requested he look over the case, which they received yesterday evening, and have decided to let our team oversee it instead."
"Ah." Jennifer kicked her head in understanding.
Turning to the screen, Penelope raised the remote and clicked, showing the site of an excavation of two bodies within the frame. "Yesterday early evening, the Head Ranger at the forest was alerted by the Sanders family whose nine-year-old son and adorable pup wanted to go off path a little to do some excavating. The two adventurers stumbled across this. Victim A." On the screen was the overhead picture of a deep and wide hole in the ground. The shadowy outline of a face was perceptible based on the stretch of fabric that seemed to once have been a white linen. She continued clicking to the next few pictures.
"The Head Ranger immediately contacted the local sheriff, who contacted the Newark division, and since then people have been working on excavating the . . . somewhat whole remains of Victim A, as well as a second body, Victim B, found super early this morning with Ground Penetrating Radar." The next slide was of Victim A, whose excavation was near complete. There his body laid, presenting the visage of a young, blond man whose eyes were wrapped with multiple layers of white fabric. His mouth was also wrapped in the same manner. He was clothed with a white fitted t-shirt and white boxers.
Spencer, who for a moment studied the victim's face—the eyes wrapped several times with fabric—recalled Maeve's promise: 'When we finally meet, I'm going to make blindfolds fun again.' He rubbed his hands over his eyes to dispel the onslaught of memories and with a fierce determination to focus on the case.
Burying this victim's body in such a manner slowed the decomposition process and preserved his wounds. His flesh had hints of fresh purple-pink bruising overlaying a motley of yellow and green bruises, as well as abrasions. He couldn't have been buried long.
Jennifer, flipping from one picture to the next on her tablet, looked up at her team members with furled eyebrows. "Huh . . . his hands are cut off. Forensic countermeasure?" The next few pictures that she saw revealed how this victim's arms, resting at his sides, were missing the hands from above the wrists and were bound in more white fabric in one picture.
Spencer lifted his eyebrows and without turning to his team said, "This all seems like a taxing process. The physical act of carrying the body to the burial site requires stamina, which means we're looking for a fit individual—likely a male. This victim wasn't just dumped into this burial site."
Derek spoke up and made his own observations. "Mm. And this kid looks like he's—what?—a buck fifty? One person dragging or carrying 150 pounds of dead weight that far through the woods—that takes dedication. The depth of the burial coupled with the fact that the bodies aren't dismembered beyond the missing hands says something about the profile."
"Yeah; that he values this person even in death," Jennifer supplied.
Derek tightened his jaw, then pointed two fingers at his tablet, thumb sticking up. "So—what?—he cuts off their hands, our unsub blindfolds them—"
"Wraps their bodies, which is peculiar," Spencer interjected. "It could be to assist in slowing the decomposition rate and minimize the initial onset of insect activity, and the same can be said for taking the extra measure to wrap the exposed flesh. The white linen, white t-shirt and boxer shorts, mouth covering, and bl-blindfold?" He looked up at his teammates, hoping they didn't catch him stammer over the word. "This is meticulous and highly symbolic. Also, he's sending mixed messages, given that this victim seems to have sustained multiple physical injuries, and shows signs of strangulation."
"The binding of the eyes and mouth. . ." Alex began. "Maybe he's sending out a very clear message."
"What? See no evil, speak no evil?" Derek didn't find it difficult to connect the dots.
"I don't think so. Think about what that would suggest about the victim." Jennifer's expression showed her dubiousness at the notion. "White—the color of cleanliness, or innocence. Seeing no evil and speaking no evil: turning a blind eye to something that is legally or morally wrong. The two conflict with each other."
Alex perked up. "I agree—there's a conflict in the method of burial and with what the bruises show. Those, by the way, speak to a violence that could have lasted for . . . a few days?"
"At least a week and a half, I'd wager," Spencer countered. "Some of the bruises are yellowed, others more recent, and it looks like evidence of scarring that was sustained more than a week previous."
Aaron listened to his teammates before looking at the site from a different angle—one that could reveal the psychology of the unsub. "On one hand there is brutal force that potentially speaks to the unsub's rage, and on the other hand, wrapping and what seems to be cleaning the victim shows remorse, or care for the victim."
"It might speak to an instability, an impulsivity," Derek suggested.
"We'll see," Aaron began. "This has the makings of an abduction, and it's not his first time. Each abduction teaches the unsub how to become better at his craft, and we can only hope that he hasn't found a new victim yet. We don't have any concrete evidence yet since this is so fresh. The most recent decedent, Victim A, is almost fully disinterred and will be taken to the ME after we've taken a look at him in respects to the burial site."
"Well, the sooner we find out who our fresh victim is, the sooner we can get better insight into any victimology," said Alex. "We could be looking at this from the wrong angle," she continued, pointing to the picture of the latest victim. His pale body was surrounded by the white linen like it was an aura, exposed to the serene forest. He wasn't posed in a lewd manner to be made a spectacle of. It was almost reverent.
"Well that all sounds . . . yeah, good and all," Penelope mumbled, "but as we speak, the previously dispatched CSU continue to shed light on further evidence."
Flicking his gaze from Penelope to those seated at the table, Aaron stopped them from delving any deeper. "We can discuss it more on the jet," he interjected. Many of these valid conclusions were those he'd made as well, and there was much more to unravel, as Penelope just said. Considering the many angles they'd just discussed, he predicted that this would be a time-consuming case for them to solve, if they did at all. If not, he hoped that he and his unit would at least be able to point the local jurisdiction in the right direction and leave the rest to them.
He didn't have to look up as he stood from his seat, gathering his things. "Wheels up in thirty."
In reference to the footnotes [1] and [2] in this chapter, you can find additional information on my tumblr.