F is for Flags

by firechild

Rated T

Spoilers: none come to mind...

Warning: Allusion to character death.

Disclaimer: Sadly, I still own only my rolaids.

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"Yes, sir. Yes--yes, I understand. Ye--I appreciate that, sir, yes. No, sir, that won't be necessary. Yes, sir, I will. Thank you, sir. Yes, you have a good day, too." Don put the handset back on the cradle and sighed, eyes turned down as he stared off into space and rubbed his forehead.

"Problem, boss?" Don glanced up to the side to see Colby gazing at him with concern.

"Huh? Oh. Sorry. No, all's cool." Don drew in a breath and drew himself up to his full height, working his eyes to keep them open as he turned slightly and put on his agent face. "Listen up," he said in a voice that he knew would get his team's attention despite its ragged edge. "That was the director. Our day just got turned upside down."

"The director?" Megan leaned on the edge of her desk, trying to avoid sitting down for fear that she might not get up again. After six days of almost no downtime, Don's entire team was dragging, but it was a mark of how tired she was that she didn't even try to keep the snark out of her voice. "Of the Bureau? Did we screw something up? Forget to dot an i somewhere?"

"No, no, nothing like that. Everything's fine. Actually, he called to personally thank us for wrapping up both the Blue Cove and Persephone cases this week, and to tell us that he has every confidence that our work with the CIA will help them nail Nitzmorr to the wall. Apparently, our hard work and," here he chuckled a little, "'tireless' dedication have caught the attention of the powers that be; we've been ordered to consider ourselves submitted for commendation. He also 'suggested' that we all reacquaint ourselves with sunshine, sustenance, and sleep, in that order, effective immediately. So file whatever form you're working on now, get me your 1210s, and then go find yourselves someplace to have a very long lunch. You're done till Monday."

Don surveyed his team, seeing his own exhaustion mirrored in their eyes. He also saw that his exclusion of himself from the order to take off hadn't gone unnoticed, but he wasn't going to address that, he wasn't going to put it up for discussion. He planned to stick around for at least another couple of hours, see if he could finish up his paperwork before heading back to his apartment to crash. He winced inwardly when he remembered that he would have to stop at the store on the way, since he was out of food and Rolaids, and while he could probably go another day or so without the food, the antacids were crucial to his continued existence. He pulled himself out of his thoughts with more effort than he'd want to admit, but he managed it.

When no one moved after a few moments, he barked, "Well, what are you all waiting for? A checkered flag? Get out of here!" Don missed the fleeting grin that passed between his team members, but he didn't miss the way Megan doubled her writing speed or the engine sounds David made under his breath. Colby snickered a little as he worked through the form in front of him, and though they didn't see it, Don smiled at their backs, glad that they could still manage to be silly.

Ten minutes later, Colby was filed and freed, followed shortly by Megan and then David. The youngest agent was halfway to the parking garage in one of the elevators when his partner and their profiler reached the elevator bank. David stepped into the nearest elevator and turned to hold it for Megan, who told him to go on when she remembered that she'd left something in the break room. She waved him off and headed for the kitchenette, and she was just closing the freezer door when she spotted Don out of the corner of her eye; he was on his desk phone, pulling himself to his feet again and grabbing his suit coat, and he did not look happy. She met him halfway across the bullpen; she knew the look in his eye, the one that marked him as a seasoned agent who would never cease to be offended by crime in his city.

"What's up?"

Don glanced at her but kept up his pace, striding for the elevator bank and trying not to snarl. "Shouldn't you be gone?"

Knowing him well enough to not take the comment personally, Megan shrugged and matched her pace to his. "Forgot something. Now, what's up?"

Don sighed. "I don't want you on this. You've been working doubles for two weeks and practically nonstop for six days—you need to go home and eat something non-Atkins and get some sleep. Get out of here, Reeves, I don't want to see you for the next three-and-a-half days. I'll handle this."

Megan followed her partner onto the first elevator that stopped, folding her arms over her chest and leveling a narrow gaze on his face. "I don't want you on this, either, especially looking like a zombie reject, but since you've obviously taken on whatever it is, despite there being dozens of other agents who can see straight, I guess that means you're still on the job. And since I'm your partner, that means I'm still on the job. We'll handle this. Deal with it, Eppes."

He knew he should reprimand her, but at the moment all of his mental energy was devoted to gathering enough wits about him to speak coherently when he—or rather, they—arrived at the scene. Finally, seeing no good way around it, he gave her a single tight-lipped nod and watched the floor indicator. He saw Megan take out her phone and figured that she was sending a text message to Larry, so he was fairly surprised to see that David was sitting behind the wheel of the black Crown Vic he used at work, parked next to Don's Suburban while he talked on the phone. Megan tapped on the passenger window, which he lowered so that he could tell her that Colby would meet them wherever they were going once they gave him a location. Clearly not happy with any of this, Don growled an address and the name of a hotel, which David repeated into his phone. Less than a minute later, the two dark vehicles caravanned out of the parking garage and turned toward the heart of downtown Los Angeles.

"Special Agent Don Eppes, FBI, this is my team, I'm looking for a Detective Galvin?" The agents were pointed toward a petite blonde woman wearing a plum suit and a badge. They exchanged introductions, and then she drew in a deep breath and met Don's eyes.

"Thank you for coming so quickly--we appreciate the help. We'd hoped to have this solved by now, obviously, but I have a feeling that there's a lot more going on here than just some whack job going cherry-picking."

Don nodded, picking up on the genuine desire for cooperation. "Why don't you bring us up to speed--you spoke with me over the phone, but I didn't have time to get all of the information and my team was headed home when your call came in."

Detective Galvin winced slightly, sending them sympathetic looks; she hadn't made detective by not being able to read people, and everything about these four read as professional but weary. She quickly explained that the hotel they were standing in was hosting a nine-day firefighters' convention, offering seminars and activities for professional and volunteer firefighters from all over the United States and Canada. It should have been a peaceful event, part informative and part recreational, for deserving civil servants, but shortly after midmorning, three bodies had been found, and the medical examiner who'd been called to the case had determined visually that the three men had been murdered at different times by the same killer and the same method. The lab was still working on processing evidence to confirm the single killer theory, but Detective Galvin had heard about this case incidentally and had asked to be primary when she realized that what she was seeing looked familiar--she'd majored in forensics for almost four years before transferring to criminal justice, and in that time she'd read a few old reports on the Coleman Killer, a serial from the late 1970s who had murdered campers and wrapped them in their tents. There were many unanswered questions about that case, too many, including why the killer, who was never apprehended, abruptly stopped his spree in early 1979, but one thing that struck Galvin about the case at the convention was that all three of the victims were wrapped, almost swaddled, in flags. She knew that there could be a thousand explanations for that that didn't involve the return of a serial killer who had been dead or dormant for almost three decades, but her gut told her to take the chance and call in the FBI.

Don and his team took a moment to process this information, Don nodding slowly. "The vics you're processing now—were they--?" Still thinking through the cobwebs, he gestured toward the crowd in the lobby, clusters of men and women in civilian clothing who were obviously waiting for news or release. Galvin caught his meaning and nodded.

"Yes, all three were firefighters, although beyond their gender and occupation, and the fact that they were all attendees, we haven't found any obvious connections. They were from different states, staying on different floors, they had different builds, they weren't even all the same ethnicity. We're trying to cross-ref their movements over the past six days or so, to see if maybe they'd all shared a focal point at the seminar or all met with one particular person, but as far as we can tell at this point, they seem to be random."

"Yeah, well, as the Great Chuck would say, nothing is truly random." Don let out half a chuckle, then noticed that, rather than seeming puzzled by his statement, Galvin looked as though she was turning something over in her mind. Reminding himself that the LAPD had actually only had the case for around three hours, he pulled himself together again and focused on her, willing to see her spirit of sharing and raise her some serious respect. "I appreciate your quick thinking and your organization, Detective—you've got good instincts. I vaguely remember some of the details of the Coleman Killer case, since my former partner did a study on it at Quantico; you may have something here, and even if there is no connection between this case and that one, what we learn here might fill in some of the old holes. Now what aren't you telling me?"

Galvin reddened at his compliment and then more as he called her on her expression. "Forgive me, Agents, I'm just trying out something in my mind, checking on the fit."

Megan nodded. "Ah, the jigsaw of justice," she said, prompting slanted looks from Colby and David as they thought privately that she was even starting to sound like Fleinhardt.

Galvin smiled at the comment, and it seemed to infuse her with a little more confidence. "Well, the Coleman Killer's calling card had to do with maps, right?"

Don nodded. "He used orange caution flags to stake area maps to the chests of his victims—that's usually how they were found. And that was never revealed to the press. Why—do you think it pertains to this case?"

Her eyes lit with grim determination, Galvin nodded. "I think we've found the Coleman Killer."

The uniformed officers securing the sixth floor of the hotel nodded shortly as Detective Galvin led Don and Megan down the hall toward the room designated as Crime Scene 1, where the first victim had been murdered in his own room. Galvin gave the two agents the basic information on the victim, as well as pointing out that he was wrapped in the Wisconsin state flag and bore a map of Green Bay pinned to his chest by the post of a small orange caution flag. One of the CS team members in the room, who'd been asked to stay at the scene after processing in case Galvin was successful in drawing in the FBI, explained that all three of the victims, who had been discovered at nearly the same time in three different parts of the hotel, fit the same pattern—death by blunt force trauma to the back of the head, wrapping in a state flag, inclusion of a map. A very young-looking uniform, stuttering and looking very nervous, pointed out that all three of the victims had been wrapped in the flags of their own states and left with the maps of their own cities.

Don blew out a breath as he scrubbed a hand through his hair. "So not only is the killer very possibly still on the grounds, and either a too-well-informed copycat or an unhindered serial from nearly thirty years ago, but he's showing us that he can get at least that close to his victims. Three of whom he's taken in one day. He's stepping up the pace. Terrific. Is there anything to suggest why he picked these three, or what state he'll be gunning for next?"

While the two agents, Detective Galvin, the CSI, and the nervous young officer who'd been included at the detective's behest discussed the situation in detail and started mapping out a plan of action, David and Colby, after a quick update from Don, were questioning possible witnesses in the large lobby area. Most of the people present were professionals who had a deep respect for law enforcement, which gave them a little bit of an advantage, but there were still characters who seemed to think that they were in the middle of some sort of murder mystery weekend; the police had not shared the details of the events with anyone who was not involved in law enforcement or hotel security, but as happens in such a large, enclosed population, some information had leaked and spread as rumor. The two agents understood everyone's curiosity and the underlying anxiety, but they had neither the time nor the patience to sort fact from fiction for the lay crowd. If this killer wasn't stopped, there was no telling what might happen to any of these well-meaning folks.

Keeping up matching attitudes of friendly professionalism, David and Colby worked their way through a number of guests and personnel, some who had been questioned by the police and some who hadn't yet. Sinclair had to hand it to his partner—Granger was a man of action, yet he seemed to handle the nervous and the eager with equal amounts of compassion and ease. This kind of thing was part of David's nature, but as many times as he'd seen it from Colby, it was still a bit of a surprise, and he thought to himself that he'd have to needle him about it later, see if there were any good stories there.

David was holding desperately to his own last nerve, trying to keep the man he was questioning—an overexcited firefighter from North Dakota—focused on the subject at hand, so he only vaguely registered seeing his partner's eyes widen suddenly. Colby, who was currently between interviews, shifted his weight, his eyes focused on something in the distance, and he paled a shade.

"Aww, no, man. This isn't… Oh, you have got to be kidding me…" The already-tall agent leaned to one side, raised himself up to stand on the balls of his feet, refocused on the other side of the lobby, and then swore under his breath. "Cr."

He pivoted to catch his partner's eye. "Sorry, Agent Sinclair, but there's something that requires our attention."

"Oh?" David felt the firefighter pressing against his arm as he leaned in to overhear, but the agent didn't have a chance to extricate himself before Colby responded.

"UV at eleven o'clock."

Sinclair couldn't quite define the odd glint in the younger agent's eye, but he caught Colby's code and gave a sharp nod in return. "Understood." He turned briskly to the Dakotan and got a contact number for him, thanking and dismissing him with a single phrase. David stepped to his partner's side, leaving the firefighter with the disappointed look of a little boy who'd just had his secret decoder ring taken away, but when a trio of other convention attendees surrounded him with questions, he quickly forgot having been brushed off and proceeded to recount the last few minutes with his own suppositions liberally added.

The two agents started across the lobby, the younger visibly tense, deep new shadows in his eyes that couldn't be explained away as simple exhaustion. "Okay, Granger, what am I walking into here?"

Colby glanced sideways at David. "Nothing you need to worry about," he assured the older agent. "It's just a twist I wasn't expecting, a little bit of history come back to haunt me; it's not a problem now, and I'm gonna make sure it stays not a problem. Just go with calm and professional—no need to alarm anyone." He couldn't miss the puzzled and somewhat annoyed look his partner shot him at that, and Colby sighed; the last thing he wanted was to have to explain how this day and this case had just gone from the frying pan and into the fire, let alone how dangerous that 'little bit of history' really was. "Look, I'll explain everything later, like when getting dead goes out of style, but for right now, can you just go with it?" David nodded, ignoring the red flags the younger agent's sudden shift in attitude was raising, and immediately choosing to trust his partner as they approached a loose gathering of hotel guests, staff, and uniformed officers.

Stepping into the demeanor of a hardened Federal agent as though he was stepping into his own skin, Special Agent Granger strode into the crowd, flashing his ID at the two uniformed police officers and ignoring the resentful glare that one of them shot his way. With surprise, serious concern, and no small amount of pride in his partner, Special Agent Sinclair kept pace with the younger man, showing his own badge to the officers and pinning the disrespectful one with a look that had the young man literally squirming in his regulation cop shoes.

Colby noticed the rookie's discomfort out of the corner of his eye and deduced what had happened; he appreciated David's unflagging support more than he could say, especially at this moment, but he had to wonder how David would react if his partner had confessed that lightning did strike the same place twice, that he was a marked man--that there was a distinct possibility that, before the day was done, one person in this room was going to kill Colby Granger.

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