It wasn't like him to be late.
More often than not, the young genius was nearly the first in the room and the last to leave, his dedication shown up only by Gideon and Hotch. When they hadn't seen him at the motel's cheap continental breakfast, they assumed he'd already gotten to work. But when they got to the conference room, and he wasn't sitting at his computer, poring over a file, or doodling randomly on the whiteboard (he was particularly fond of doing small caricatures of the team), this caused a brief moment of alarm.
"Where's Reid?"
"I don't know--- I thought he was here," JJ said slowly. "No one's seen him?"
Gideon felt a small stir of annoyance. If Reid was going to hold up the investigation because for he'd overslept for some reason--- but then Gideon felt a second stir of something else: worry. Reid never overslept. The boy hardly slept at all, anyway.
"Here, I'll call his cell," he said, pulling out his phone. Reid was on speed-dial, and in a moment Gideon was hearing nothing but silence, before another beep sounded. Following Reid's automated message, Gideon snapped the phone shut. "It's off."
"Weird," Morgan decided. "Should I have the motel buzz him?"
"Yes," Hotch said. "Have them see what's going on."
Minutes passed in quiet, marked only by the slow turning of a page or the squeak of the ergonomic chairs. Then Morgan closed his phone. For the first time, he looked worried. "He isn't there," he said. "They knocked and there was no answer. They opened the door..."
"And?"
"They found his gun on the floor, like it had been knocked out of his hand," Morgan continued. "The maid's words, not mine."
"Christ," Elle swore. "Damn it, Reid, what did you get yourself into?"
Hotch blinked, once and once only. "All right," he said, his voice snapping into authority. "We'll spread out. Start low--- ask the desk, ask some staff. If there's nothing, we'll start door-to-doors and see if anyone noticed anything on the floor. Understood?"
An hour later, they'd heard nothing that mattered--- except one very, very valuable testimony: the midnight janitor.
"He said he saw three guys standing around outside Reid's room. One of them knocked on his door. Then the janitor passed by and didn't see anything else."
"What did they look like?"
"Military was his first thought," JJ answered. "Crew cuts, monochromatic dress. Also said something like a ring glinted on one of the guys' hands--- but he didn't stop to look."
"Get me any and all security tapes from the motel," Hotch said.
"There won't be many," JJ responded, "but I'm on it."
By lunch, the rest of the police department had caught wind of what was going on, and all eight members crowded the window of the conference room, while the six agents watched Hotch hit "play" on the cued tape.
The image was grainy and grayscale, but it worked. They saw three men, all dressed roughly alike. What the janitor had thought was a ring wasn't a ring at all--- it was a hypodermic needle.
The door opened. There was Reid, looking tousled but awake and aware, his gun swinging up (with an aim, they had learned, was better than expected). But it never met its line of sight. The first man darted forward and hit him with the needle faster than Reid could have pulled the trigger. The tape barely caught up.
Six pairs of eyes melted in sympathy and pain, as they watched Reid drop the gun. He threw out his right arm, attempting to brace himself against the side of the door, and for a second he held himself up--- they could see his large brown eyes meeting his attacker's for one extremely brief, lucid moment--- before his hand slid lifelessly off the beam and he pitched forward. The second man, in a movement than resonated too loudly of indifference, caught his slender weight with one large arm, before swinging him up into a fireman's carry and disappearing down the hallway and into an elevator.
None of the tapes after that picked any of them up. It was like they had disappeared.
The screen went black. "Okay. I want to start running those men's images through every system and lab available to us. Get Garcia on the phone, have her work on that," said Hotch.
Morgan nodded and grabbed his phone.
Raising his voice, Hotch continued. "Everyone else, keep working like crimes, but expand it to include use of hypodermic needles by more than one assailant. Expand torture to include military technique."
Morgan dialed Garcia's number.
"Welcome to the jungle, baby," she answered, hundreds of miles away, her eyes distracted as she put a red eight on a black nine.
"No sugar today, honey," Morgan said. "This is incredibly important. Reid was kidnapped this morning."
"What!" Garcia didn't particularly love Reid (she considered him to be lacking in the flair department, unlike her platonic lover Morgan), but she liked him well enough, and the thought of anything happening to the poor boy sent a cold, hard punch to her gut. "How?"
"Needle, following the abduction, torture, and subsequent homicide of Newman, New York's local genius. They're connected, we can feel it--- and we've only got a week before he's dead. I'm sending you photos of three men discovered kidnapping him. If you can ID these guys, we can get him back."
"I'm on it. Hurry," she said, her manicured nails already beginning to fly over the keyboard.
Back at the department, while everyone else launched into a flurry of activity and shouted orders, Gideon stared at the screen, replaying the tape, bit by bit, thinking of what Hotch had told him to do. I need you to work the victim.
"Why did you do it?" he whispered, watching the needle drive into his boy's throat. "What's in it for you? You're military, not a serial killer. You're working for someone else... but why Reid?"
Then he stopped. "Why Green?" he corrected. "Why both of them, in such close proximity? Was Green a ploy, a tactic? Or is Reid simply part two?"
He blinked. Reaching out to click the replay button one more time, he suddenly froze. Someone, somewhere in the department, was screaming blue murder.
He launched upwards, almost tripping over himself as he flew out the door of the conference room and into the department's main area, where a woman was standing next a desk, screaming, tears running down her face. Unintelligible words ran thickly out of her mouth and her hands shook.
Following the direction of her trembling fingertip, he stared. Officer Keenan, his two hundred pounds and well-made expertise negated, lay sprawled back in his chair. On his screen was a report of a torturous crime, committed in Michigan.
He'd been working like crimes when he was killed. He lay there, his eyes wide and dead, seeming to be nothing more than asleep with his eyes open.
Next to him, Hotch paled. Gideon ignored him. He was staring, staring, wheels clicking, at a small, bizarre patch on Keenan's chest. His shirt had been unbuttoned, his tie removed and hung over the chair. But beneath his skin, pressing forward, it's corners sharp, was a little, square object. A dark red line noted where his skin had been cut open and the object inserted.
"What is that?" he said, his voice low. He moved forward, crouching at the body. He pulled out his knife, clicking it open. All around him, people moved, fidgeted, or made noises of confusion and worry. What is he doing?
He slid open the score, parting the envelope of flesh. The object slid gently into his hand.
It was a tape.
Well, spooky!... Luckily the next chapter explains some things. And, also fortunately, I am catching on and have begun to cut down on some of the over-detailing (which should correct some of the slowness.) The bad news, though, is that with band, work, and an impromptu family vacation, I won't be updating til at least next week. Stay tuned!... what happens next? ;)
