Blood Hungry- 1:11
Harita's POV
You know, I've been to way too many funerals in my life time, but not too many to make up the amount of deaths I've seen/been in. Saline's grandma's funeral was pretty dark. All who came were Saline, me, and a few of her grandma's friends. I mourned and I have moved on. Well, a part of me has. A tiny part of me is still lingering on. But let's go back to the present. We had a case. I was sitting on my chair, eating my raspberries. Yes, I do like raspberries, and I will fight you if you disagree. I was wearing black pants, a long sleeved light purple shirt, and some light purple Converse. My hair was in a side ponytail and I wore my glasses. Everyone but Gideon was here.
"Hope everyone had a restful weekend." Hotch greeted.
"That sounds ominous." Elle chuckled.
"Harringtonville, Tennessee, population 5,000. 64 years since they had a homicide. They've had 2 in the past 48 hours." JJ said. She put up a picture of the first victim on the TV.
"First victim, 57-year-old widower and grandfather Paul Thompson. Ambushed in his yard, 18 stab wounds to his chest and his neck. No forced entry into the house and the only item taken was a shotgun." Hotch explained.
"Last night, Annie Stuart, 39, was also ambushed and it appears bludgeoned to death in her home with Thompson's stolen shotgun." JJ put a picture of her on the TV. "In this case, the unsub apparently stole CDs, DVDs, and a little jewelry."
"This is a little extreme for a burglary." Morgan stated.
"That's an understatement." Elle said.
"As you can see, Annie's throat was eviscerated." Hotch pointed out.
"Yet the first victim wasn't eviscerated and the unsub seems to have used a different weapon at each crime scene." Spencer explained.
"2 different MO's." Hotch said.
"2 different killers?" I asked.
"Or one very psychotic individual." Gideon's voice was heard. I looked towards him and saw his right foot bandaged and he was on crutches.
"What happened to you?" Hotch asked.
"I got a list of things I want to try before it's too late." Gideon said. I don't blame him, he is pretty old.
"And orthopedic surgery is one of them?" Elle teased.
"No, skydiving. Apparently it's all about the landing." Gideon elaborated.
"How long on the crutches?" Hotch asked.
"Just a couple days." Gideon admitted.
"So you can't go out in the field?" I asked.
"Not on crutches, no." Gideon sounded defeated. "Don't worry. I'll find a way to be helpful here. Got a blitz attack. No effort to remove the body, clean up evidence." Gideon announced as he looked through the crime scene photos.
"With organized killers, we see a pattern. We're able to predict their behavior but with psychotic killers, they're guided by a given delusion." Hotch addressed.
"Ok, until we understand the nature of the delusion we can't predict his next move." Morgan pointed out.
"That's nearly impossible to do." I said.
"Actually, I think we might have a clue. These rings at that crime scene might be some kind of signature?"
"I can work this angle. I'll see if there's any significance to the patterns." Gideon took the pictures and looked at them.
"Psychotic killers are normally not that difficult to catch because they don't try to hide." Hotch said.
"Does that make your job easier?" JJ asked.
"Oh, no. Cause until we do locate him he'll keep doing that." Gideon said, clearly talking about the picture in the middle of the table which showed a girl who was beaten up, bloody and bruised.
…
*CUE INTRO*
(For one of the 'pictures' in the intro, imagine Harita fidgeting with a pen, looking at a map with her left eyebrow raised.)
...
"Hey, you guys find anything?" Morgan asked Elle and Spencer as we, Hotch, Morgan, and I, walked through the doors to the Police Station. The three of us went to the Thompson's house to get a feel for the neighborhood, while the other two went to the Stuart's house.
"Yeah. Elle found an eyewitness, a little boy who saw someone in the driveway." Spencer announced.
"That's more than we got at Thompson's." Hotch admitted.
"We got 2 suspects." The detective said as she came over to us and handed the files to us. "Judd Franklin and Domino Thacker."
"I know Domino. He's bad news. Serious tweaker. Cooks his own stuff." The sheriff stated as he walked towards us.
"He lives near the crime scenes?" Elle asked.
"Almost directly between them."
"Robbery, armed robbery, possession, possession with intent. This guy's been hospitalized for overdoses and attempted suicide." I read from the file.
"What do you think?" Hotch queried.
"I think we need to find Domino." Elle said.
...
"Domino Thacker, FBI!" I yelled as I got out of the car. I saw Domino, but he tried to run. So I ran after him.
"Stay. Don't move, we just want to talk to you. Domino!" Morgan yelled as Domino tried to escape his house. He was near the gate fence so I opened it and slammed it onto him so he could stay down and stop running. I turned him onto his stomach and arrested him.
"You can't arrest me." Domino shouted.
"Domino Thacker, FBI. You're under arrest." Morgan simply said.
…
Morgan, Elle, and Hotch interrogated him, and soon found out he was there just to rob Mrs. Stuart, not to murder her. So we gave the profile to the officers, given with the information we had, plus with what Gideon and Garcia found out back in Quantico.
"We are looking for a 20- 30-year-old male." Hotch started.
"The unsub engages in anthropophagy. It's a psychotic conviction that he must drink human blood and possibly eat human flesh." Morgan explained.
"For Richard Rrenton Chase, the vampire killer he drank his victims' blood because he believed that aliens had invaded his body and were slowly drinking his blood." Spencer recalled.
"And if he didn't get the blood he needed, he'd die. Anthropophagy suggests such an extreme level of psychosis and disorganization, meaning that he couldn't have ventured very far from home to commit these crimes." I acknowledged.
"This guy lives or has lived in this town." Morgan said.
"He knows the territory." Hotch added.
"You've all seen him." Morgan continued. "Maybe at the ballpark. Or riding his bike home from the grocery store. He wasn't always a threat. He could have been your neighbor. He might have been your friend. We think something about his delusion is keeping him here in town."
"So we're gonna start at Annie Stuart's house and we're gonna spread out there in quadrants. We're gonna eliminate all of his hiding places." Hotch ordered.
"Paul Thompson's funeral is this afternoon. A lot of his neighbors are gonna be there." The officer said.
"So we'll start there."
...
Funny how this is my second funeral I have been to in the past two weeks. A bit too much I have to say. I examined everyone's expressions/behavior at the funeral, and I had to say, everyone acted normally. While I was doing that, JJ and Elle had compiled a list of possible suspects. The one that stood out the most was Oley Maynor.
"I saw him just the other day." Mrs. Mays, a woman who went to the funeral spoke up.
"You saw him where?" I asked.
"He was with his brother. And, in fact I think it looked like they didn't want to be seen. Because he took Oley out of the car and went straight into his house."
"When was this, Mrs. Mays?" Elle asked.
"3 days ago."
…
Elle and Morgan went to go and talk to him, while the rest of us went back to the station. We found out that it wasn't Oley, he had a strong alibi. What was worse was that there was another murder.
"The little boy was at both crime scenes." Hotch observed.
"The unsub might have been after him all along." Derek added.
"I'm sure that's what Mrs. Brisbane thinks." Elle sassed.
"I want you to talk to her when she calms down, see if she can come up with any leads." Hotch ordered.
"She's not gonna want to talk to me." Elle argued.
"Persuade her." Elle left to go and talk to her.
"You found the body, right, deputy?" I asked.
"Yes, ma'am. If you don't mind, I'll wait out here."
"That's fine." Hotch responded. Reid and I followed Hotch into the room where the grandmother was killed. We started to examine the body, but there was a heck ton of blood.
"Another evisceration. Her throat was slashed." Reid detected.
"That's why nobody heard her scream." Hotch commented.
"He split her rib cage open?" I questioned, trying to figure out how.
"With these." Hotch pulled out a pair of garden clippers that were very bloody.
"Looks like this time his target was the heart." Reid observed.
"Did he take it?" I asked.
"Yes."
...
"He took the heart? Hotch?" Gideon yelled over the phone. He really needs to take it down a few notches.
"Yeah." Hotch replied.
"The heart has always had incredible symbolic significance. I mean, aside from just banal romantic associations. The Egyptians left the heart in mummies because they believed the organ ensured eternal life." Spencer recited.
"Something I read- oh" There was a lot of banging around and mumbling between Garica and Gideon on the other line.
"There was-"
"Gideon calm down and take it down a few notches." I said, cutting off his shouting.
"Sorry." Gideon calmly said. "There was an article by a cambridge professor. It seems that, uh, all the organs the unsub's taken, stomach, liver, now the heart, were thought to be the seat of the soul at one time or another."
"Then he drinks their blood." Spencer added.
"So when this man drinks his victims' blood-"
"He believes he's encountering the divine." Spencer finished for Hotch.
"Wait a minute. None of this explains why he took the kid."
"Well, the, uh, unsub made the victim into an angel. Maybe the kid's a messianic figure." Gideon suggested.
"Let's just hope he doesn't feel the need to sacrifice him." Hotch concluded.
...
Morgan, Elle, and I were assigned to patrol watch to scout out a few of the churches just to see any weird, suspicious behaviour. I was munching on some brownie biscuits, which are actually good, occasionally giving some to the other two.
"4 churches in 4 blocks. Ever feel like we just stepped into Mayberry?" Elle asked.
"Mayberry with a psychotic killer running around." Derek responded.
"And good food." I added, taking a bite.
"There's that." Elle chuckled. "Hey, does that look like a '72 Buick to you?" Elle asked, motioning to the car that just pulled in into the parking lot of the church we were at.
"Yes, it does." I got out of the car and pointed my gun at it. With a bunch of 'FBI' and 'Don't move' being screamed, he did as told, went down on his knees and put his hands above his head. As Morgan handcuffed him, I picked up the thing he dropped. It was a container of blood, and a human part.
"I think we got our guy."
…
This guy was a real psychopath. Even after we arrested him, he was screaming his balls off. His name's Eddy Mays, 21 years old." The sheriff said.
"Do you know him?" I asked.
"Yeah. I just can't believe a boy like Eddy would do something like this. He was the nicest kid you ever saw." The sheriff argued.
"He's mentally ill, sheriff. A boy like Eddy Mays could really use an insanity plea in a court of law." Spencer claimed.
"You know, the ironic thing about psychotic illness is generally they're less violent than the rest of the population." Hotch explained.
"By the nature of psychotic delusions, when they do get violent…" Elle faltered.
"We're never gonna get anywhere with him." Derek said, defeated. "Not like this. Look at the guy. You can't read him his rights. You can't even process him."
"I better call his mother. It's a damn shame. His daddy died just a couple years ago. This is gonna fall awful hard on her." The sheriff said.
"What's the family like?" Hotch asked.
"Dad was a doctor and Mary Gwathmey Mays comes from one of the oldest families in Tennessee."
"I'd like to meet her."
"We already have." I recalled.
...
Morgan, Elle, and I went to go and inspect the Mays' house, and to say, it was… interesting.
"You got anything?" Morgan asked, after him and Elle were finished bickering.
"Yeah. Mrs. Mays definitely has obsessive-compulsive disorder. Her house looks like a home decorating catalog. Even Hotch isn't this neat, and I thought he was the most organized person on earth. You?" I asked.
"I checked every nook and cranny, all 8 bedrooms, fireplaces. Nothing. No evidence of murder, no sign of the boy. If Eddy Mays did come here, he was very careful not to leave anything behind."
"Do you smell that?" Elle questioned. I inhaled deeply, only to find the smell of bleach surrounding my nostrils.
"Yeah. It smells like bleach." Derek answered.
"A lot of bleach." I added. Elle opened the fridge door, only to find out that it was empty.
" Okay, it's just way too clean." Derek observed. "Elle, Harita." Morgan shined the flashlight to the ground, underneath the fridge and found a dark mark. He then pushed the fridge back, revealing a blood stain.
"Looks like somebody missed a spot." I said.
...
To sum up what happened at the station while the three of us were inspecting the house, Hotch and Reid interrogated Eddy, a few minutes later he tried to kill himself. Mrs. Mays was lying and didn't tell us about Eddy being in a mental hospital and getting released a week ago, just when the murders started.
"She's definitely lying. I don't know exactly what she's lying about, but she's lying." Hotch professed.
"You don't think she'd let that boy die to save her son, do you?" JJ asked.
"I don't know."
"She drives a Cadillac, right?" Morgan questioned.
"Yeah." Elle answered.
"They got GPSs in them. So let's go see where she's been."
...
We got into her car and inspected her locations she's been at.
"It's got every stop she's made and how long she spent there." Elle said.
"You know, these things could cause more divorces than internet porn." Morgan joked.
"Tell that to my step-mom." I replied.
"Hey, look at that. That's interesting." Elle exclaimed. "She stopped at the same place on Route 3 like 6 times."
"Hell, let's get Mary and take her to her spot on route 3. We can tell her that we're going to visit Eddy in the hospital."
"Ok."
"How long have you lived in Harringtonville?" Hotch asked, trying to start up a conversation.
"All my life. My ancestors have been there since the late 18th century. Plus I went to school in Virginia. But aside from that, I've lived right here. This is not the way to the hospital." Mary pointed out.
"I've got to make a quick stop first. Where did you go to school?" Hotch questioned.
"High school, St. Catherine's hall. College, Sweet Briar."
"You were a Sweet Briar vixen?" Hotch asked.
"You know Sweet Briar?"
"My mother went to Mary Baldwin."
"She's from Virginia?"
"Manassas." Hotch replied.
"I've visited both Staunton and Manassas, and I know where your mother's from. Are we driving out of town?" Mary faltered.
"Mary Gwathmey Mays. Gwathmey's an old tidewater family, isn't it?" Hotch asked.
"Where are we going?" Mary replied as we kept on going away from the hospital and instead to Route 3.
"Old south. Old money. A lot of tradition there. A lot of reputation to protect."
"Excuse me?"
"Mary, I don't think that you were protecting your son. I think you were protecting yourself. From the shame, the humiliation of people finding out that he was mentally ill. You didn't visit him in the hospital in 6 months. Not once."
"What are we doing here?" Mary asked.
"We checked the GPS device in your car. You stopped here 6 times in less than 2 hours." Elle professed.
"There are a dozen officers on their way over here with a pack of dogs and we will find that little boy. It would be in your best interest to help us." I threatened. We got out of the car, took out our flashlights, and followed the search dog and the few other officers to this abandoned shed.
"We're coming for you, Wally! Hang on, Wally!" Elle announced. The officer opened the door and found Wally wrapped up in a dark blue blanket in the corner, shivering.
"Come here. Come here. It's ok." Elle cooed. Wally got up and ran to Elle. She brought him to his parents, who then dragged him away. I was about to walk away when Mrs. Mays caught my attention.
"Mr. Hotchner. Do you have children?"
"Yes, I do."
"Is there anything you wouldn't do for them?" She asked.
"I wouldn't clean the blood of their victims off the floor."
"I didn't know my son was killing those people until he brought home that boy." Mary professed.
"You know, Mary, sometimes what we don't do is every bit as powerful as what we do."
"You don't understand."
"I understand that your son was drowning and you made no effort to save him."
"You don't know what I did."
"I know what you didn't do." Hotch argued. "You didn't call the police. And every day of your life you're gonna have to ask yourself what would have happened if you'd gone to Boston to help him."
"Eddy told me he was bringing me an angel. I wanted to protect my son. What else was I supposed to do?"
"Almost anything would have been better." Hotch said as he left. I followed him back to the cars.
...
"Nice work, everybody, by the way." Hotch said as we all got out of the elevator to the six floor.
"Thank you. Now I get to go back to the 15 folders on my desk." Elle said.
"Wait a minute. 15?" Reid questioned. "I have 24."
"That's 'cause I slipped you 4 of mine, on Friday." Elle confessed.
"Oh Harita, meet me in my office in 10." Hotch said.
"You got it." I replied as I went back to my desk to start some of my files. I only had 12, only because I gave a few to Morgan, which is how I show my love. But first I watched the scene profound between Hotch and Garcia, who was carrying a bin of… Gideon's stuff?
"I may not be a supervisory special agent, but that does not make me a maid." Garcia huffed.
"What do you mean?" Hotch asked.
"What do I mean? This is the third box of crap that Gideon left in my office, there's at least 2 more, and everything smells like soy sauce." Garcia complained.
"I'll take care of it." Hotch took the box from Garcia and went to Gideon's office. Garcia walked down the stairs, but before she passed by my desk, I caught her attention. She looked back at me and I dangled a bag of brownie biscuits in my hand.
"Thank you." She took them and left, with a smile on her face. I looked up to see Morgan staring daggers at me.
"Hey, lay off. She's mine." He warned as I put my hands in the air, in a surrender position.
"All yours." I chuckled.
So two chapters in two days back to back. Never thought that would happen. Oh, also, thank you guys, girls, they/thems, and every other human/living organism on this earth for 500 views! I am so thankful for each and every one of yall.
Toodles,
HernameisBurrito