Their arrival in the small-town police department's headquarters seemed like something to be envied.
The jet landed, an SUV waited, doors opened, and sunglasses went from faces to pockets almost as quickly as six minds went from zero to sixty.
While Hotch and Gideon introduced the team and began the process of updating the local department, Reid, Morgan, Elle, and the sixth member of the team (blonde, petite PR advisor Special Agent Jennifer Jareau) began the task of setting up a small, but powerful, headquarters of their own.
The room they'd been given was roughly the size of a coffin and smelled like stale coffee, but it would do. A whiteboard filled the north wall, a counter the east, and a closed window filtered in the west-setting sun. The coffeemaker and sink were heavily used, but clean. There were plenty of dry-erase markers below the board, and the floor had just been vacuumed. A handful of desks, chairs, and laptops were obviously new recruits.
"This is nice," Derek said, genuinely impressed. Often, local departments reacted with fear and hostility upon the arrival of the FBI, and barely gave them more than two desks and a bathroom. The amenities they could see looked like the best this department had to offer.
Two rooms and a hundred decibels away, Hotch and Gideon spoke to the commander of the department in voices that had long since learned the art of being both urgent and calming.
"While my team is getting set up in the conference room, I'd like to get the homicide's files and evidence documentation in there as well," said Hotch.
"Understood. We're in over our heads here, Agent Hotchner. We appreciate you guys coming down. The extent of our crime here rarely gets beyond domestic assaults, bar fights, and kids flipping their cars and killing themselves." Commander Mitchell ran about fifty, with steel-gray hair (buzzed short and practical), and blue eyes. Their weariness told of a desperate fight against the tide.
"What's your staff like?" Gideon asked.
"Eight on-duty cops, five of whom operate on a rotating schedule. The other three are day-shift admin. Also, we've got a jail administrator, and a dispatcher."
Gideon felt his jaw wanting to drop. He didn't let it. Nor did he let his disappointment show. "That's it?"
"Yes."
"A city of several thousand people and a county the size of Montana, and that's all you get with our state's budget," said another officer. He stepped towards them and offered his hand. "Officer Keenan," he said. Keenan had the dark hair and eyes of a Hollywood celebrity, but his strong build and experienced demeanor informed the agents of just how many hours he had undoubtedly spent chasing down runners, flipping drunks, and working out in a small, cramped gym.
"I wanted to let you know I was the one who worked the initial scene," he said. "We can't afford some of the heavier equipment, so I got the students out and secured the scene until State showed up."
"Good work. Where are the state guys, anyway?"
"Oh, they're around," said Mitchell darkly. "State saw what was going down, they dumped the evidence truck and some guys and called you as fast as they could. It's one thing for them to cover a homicide. It's another thing completely for them to cover one like this. The guys they sent have been working their fingers to the bone to get what forensic evidence they could."
"All right. We'll need to get that."
"It's on it's way. Let me know when you need anything."
Twenty-four hours later, back in the conference room, they had the beginnings of a profile, and the beginnings of a headache.
Half of the board was filled with still photos of the crime scene--- murder's little art exhibit. The other half held facts: times, dates, names, forensic notations. One column remained bare, left for the appearance of the most important character: the profile itself.
Gideon stood, beginning to scrawl the first of many adjectives. "All right, here's the rundown on this, based on accumulated evidence.
"He's organized. Methodical. This was not a crime of spontaneity. He planned everything from his entrance into the apartment to his use of the girlfriend for a week-long excuse. Once she served no further use to him as a hostage, he shot her. He brought his tools with him, and took everything except the chair and the chains. He wanted the body to remain the way he had left it, probably out of a sense of apathy--- he didn't pose it, as would someone with an emotional desire to cause the maximum visual effect."
"Like we figured, his methods suggest military training," Reid said, sounding (as always) as though he was reading from a book, and more exhaling knowledge than actually thinking it. "The unsub was smart enough not to leave a physical trace of himself at the scene, save your classic "right-handed, hundred-seventy-five-pound" forensic indicators, left by weapon movement and trajectory."
"He used strong, largely unbreakable blades and power tools, leaving no pieces of the weapons behind. As expected, all of them are nondescript, carpentry and-or combat, military, and hunting issue," said Elle. "Virtual untraceable, except to your nearest Gander Mountain."
"The nearest military base is nothing more than a National Guard armory," said JJ, looking up from her file. "It's nearly six hours away, and there have been no reports of weapons theft or personnel changes."
"He's from out of the area. Door-to-door interviews indicate no young, strong, active military personnel live in the city, only sixty years and up retired vets," Morgan continued. "Local residents also say there have been no signs of emotional disturbance in Green and Synthia's relationship--- no missed work, no public fights, no signs of sleeplessness. Nothing, in fact, except a pretty obvious happiness between the couple."
"So it's not some psychotic affair thing," JJ finished.
"We're dealing with some kind of professional killer, with military background and knowledge of technique, from somewhere other than here and most likely out of state," Hotch said. "No interviews of area businesses mentioned any such appearance--- no mysterious guy in black at the local convenience store, no unnamed check-in at the Super 8."
"We'll run like crimes tomorrow," Gideon said. "For now I think we need to catch a few hours and hit this again in the morning."
(What happened next was not a coincidence.)
They'd all been thinking it. As they packed up files and grabbed their coats and headed back across the street to the hotel, they were all thinking it. In the background, running on wires, was a small, simple fact. The reason Green was the community's darling, the reason everyone knew him, was because he was the smartest person in the entire town.
His career was high. His intelligence was higher. The college had never had a younger professor, and they'd certainly never had anyone with an I.Q. of at least one-eighty. His apartment was full of books and his notepads were full of words. His friends and family oftentimes hadn't been able to keep up with the speed and quantity of his memorized information, and until he met Amanda Synthia, he'd rarely gone outside his realm of school and home.
His hair was long, to his ears, and he constantly brushed it back with long, thin fingers. He wore rumpled sweaters and never had a tan. His girlfriend was the one reminding him to eat regularly, and his work was all that kept him from hanging out in libraries and at computers all day.
Reid rubbed his face with his hand as he dropped his bag on the thin, scratchy chair in the corner of his motel room. What were the chances? Five years and a girlfriend were all that separated the victim, dead in the morgue, and the very much alive young man in the motel six blocks away.
He stripped off his gun and miscellaneous layers of clothing, folding them in a haphazard pile on top of his suitcase, before laying down on top of the covers and eyeing the "Rules", framed on the wall opposite his head. The third rule dictated that there was to be no watching of dirty movies on the room's television.
Before Reid could qualify that statement in any way, there came a knock on the door.
Mildly annoyed, but cautious ever the same, he slipped on a pair of jeans and a t-shirt, going to open the door with his gun in his hand.
It never went off. It simply fell to the floor with a clunk, a split second after a hypodermic needle entered a small point in the skin of his throat.
The next morning, he was gone.
