Reid never got back to sleep on the plane, but neither did he open his eyes or move. He lay completely still, hoping that the turmoil inside him didn't show on the outside.

When the plane touched ground, he was the first one off, not speaking to anybody. Without so much as a good-bye he sped to his car to get home as soon as possible. He barely remembered the drive, but he made it home. Slamming his door behind him and locking it took the edge of his panic away. Here he felt safe. Safe but not happy. What had happened? What had he done wrong?

He went to the fridge and opened the door, then slammed it shut again. Nothing appealed to him, and he wasn't really hungry anyway. He angrily brushed his teeth, got undressed, set his alarm clock and got into bed. He lay there for all of two minutes before he realized that there was no way he would be able to sleep. Instead he got up and turned on the living room lights and started pacing.

He had to be rational. He hadn't screwed up anything important recently, had he? So why had they lost confidence in him? Hotchner had said that he had changed. But apparently in a bad way. And he wasn't sure how, he didn't feel very different. Would he be kicked out? That thought made him stop pacing, and he sank down in an armchair, staring unseeingly at the black TV screen. What would he do if he wasn't on the team? Would he be transferred to another department? Would another department welcome him? Perhaps he should just spare himself the humiliation and quit. Only, he didn't want to quit, and he didn't want to be kicked out. Would they really do that to him? They were his friends… weren't they?

He felt pretty confident that nothing would happen until this case was over. If nothing else, they were expecting him to solve the cipher. And he had been the one that solved the anagrams. He had done good things, he had helped them. That was why it was so confusing, why they didn't want him anymore. But he had heard Hotchner. He had said that he didn't belong with them.

He wondered how it would happen, who would be he one to tell him. Was the whole team in on it? Were they counting the days until they got rid of him? But he couldn't, wouldn't, believe that. They had always been friendly and straight with him. The chess-games with Gideon and Morgan's good-natured ribbing… he liked that. Sure, they could be a bit condescending at times, treating him like a little kid, which he hated. But it had never been in bad spirit, had it? Had he read the signals wrong? It wouldn't be the first time. Maybe they had simply grown weary of him and his awkwardness. It wouldn't be the first time either.

He decided that he would see this case through. There was no way he could walk away from it anyway. He owed it to Ann to find her killer. Funny, he never thought he would owe Ann anything. Maybe he should have told the others about Ann. Would it have made a difference? And it wasn't just Ann. The other women deserved to have their murderer stand trail for his actions too. But he would be watchful, trying to read his teammates, see what was going on. He would work harder than ever before, to prove them wrong. And then, if he saw no other way out, he would quit.

Having made his decision he headed back for his bedroom, but he stopped in the doorway, watching his bed. He was really too agitated to sleep, and he had just vowed to work harder than ever. So instead of getting into bed he got dressed again. The next morning when his alarm clock went off, he had already been at the office for hours. And he was making progress.

--

When Morgan and Elle came to work the next morning, they found Reid at his desk, staring hollowly at his computer screen.

"Hey, man. You're early." Morgan greeted him.

Reid shrugged without looking at them.

Elle looked searchingly at him. "You look tired."

He didn't acknowledge her statement. Instead he said tonelessly,

"I've solved the cipher."

"You did?" Morgan got excited, but it disappeared just as quickly as he looked at Reid. "But… that's a good thing, right?"

Reid shrugged again.

Morgan and Elle looked at each other. This was a far cry from the Reid who had been overly-excited when he solved the anagrams, not long ago.

"Are you going to tell us what it said?" Elle carefully asked.

Reid didn't answer, he just gathered his notes and walked towards the round-table room.

"What's going on?" Elle whispered to Morgan. He just shook his head, a bewildered look in his eyes. They fetched the others and followed Reid. When they came to the round-table room, Reid was standing at the table, looking through his notes.

"Morgan tells us you have figured out the cipher." Hotchner said.

Reid looked up at him hastily, and then down again, just as fast. The others sat down, but he remained standing.

"Do you want the long version or the short?"

"The long version, please." Gideon said, at the same time as Morgan said, "The short one."

They both looked at Hotchner. "The long version."

Reid picked up a marker and turned to an empty whiteboard, taking a deep breath, steadying his nerves.

"As I said when we first got the cipher, it looked like a diagraphic cipher. The key to a diagrapic cipher is made up by a big square divided into smaller squares, like a chessboard. In this simple variation, every square represents a letter. As you know, the squares on a chessboard have names, so to speak, that you use to describe your moves, A-1, A-2 etcetera. So does the squares in the cipher, and that's what makes up the code. There are 5 times 5 squares."

He drew a grid net with 25 squares.

"But there are 26 letters in the alphabet," Morgan interjected.

"But you can't make an even grid with 26 letters, so you take away the one or ones, depending on your language, that is least used. I took away X." He filled in all the squares from A to Z, leaving X out.

"Another proof that I was on the right track was that the whole cipher is made up by only five letters. When paired up, they can only make 25 different pairs, so I knew the keyword would be a word containing these letters. As you can see, the letters are E, L, M, T and U."

Hotchner wrinkled his forehead. "There is no word that's made up by those letters."

"In English, no. The keyword is letum, which is one of the Latin words for death."

"You speak Latin?" JJ asked, not knowing why she was surprised.

"A little. Anyway, to keep with the chess analogy, you write the word one time where the A-H would be on the chess board, and then once more where the 1-8 would be. So the first square, that would be called A-1 on a chessboard is here called LL, which equals A, then A-2 or EL, which equals B, and so one."

He had now drawn up the whole figure, and checked to see if the team was following his explanation, which they were.

"Once I figured that out, all I had to do was substitute the letters in the cipher against their correspondents in the key, and fill in the punctuation marks. This is the message I found." He handed out a paper on which he had written down the message.

To the BAU,

Welcome to the game. I have been waiting for you. But be aware, it takes a genius to find a genius.

'Til we meet again,

Caedwalla

"Caedwalla? What does that mean?" Elle wondered.

"Caedwalla is one of the patron saints of murderers. Murderers and converts actually." Reid explained.

"Murderers have patron saints?" Morgan sounded doubtful.

Reid smiled bleakly at him. "Actually, there are patron saints for everything from rope makers to oil refiners to the Internet."

"I hate it when he starts a sentence with 'actually'," Morgan stage whispered to Elle, at the same time as JJ almost choked on her coffee.

"The Internet? There's a patron saint for the Internet?" she asked incredulously.

"Uh-huh, Saint Isidore of Seville. Patron saint of computer technicians, computer users, computers, the Internet, schoolchildren and students. I think Garcia has his picture as a screensaver on one of her computers. Check it out."

"Aren't we somewhat off topic now?" Gideon's gentle rebuke wiped away the smiles as they started analyzing the message.

"'Welcome to the game,'" Elle read, "That means Gideon was right. The unsub thinks of these killings as a pastime, or an intellectual challenge. It's like he's competing with himself."

"And with us," Hotchner said. "The note was addressed to us. We are the adversary, the one to beat to stay ahead in the game. He wants to have someone to compete with, that's why he left the note, but he doesn't want to make it too easy for us, hence the cipher. And that genius remark… This note reads like a movie cliché."

"Lucky for us, we have a genius." Morgan said, grinning at Reid. Gideon also looked at Reid and frowned. Normally, a comment like that would have made him blush and look down, now it looked as if he hadn't even heard it, and he had been unusually quiet. Was he just tired, or was there something else?

"No," Gideon said, turning back to the team. "That's not lucky. That means that the unsub knows us. He wouldn't have given us a cipher if he hadn't been confident that we could solve it. That he is inviting us to his game means that he feels like he has the upper hand. He knows who we are, but we don't know who he is. He is going to recognize us in a crowd or if we come to question him. This is not good."

"Not to mention how much his arrogance shines through," Hotchner said. "This guy is dangerous."

"So," Elle summarized. "The message confirms our profile and even adds to it, but how does it help us find him?"

The team was quiet until Reid almost whispered, dejected, "It doesn't."

"But it will." Hotchner stood up. "All right then, let's…"

"There was one more thing," Reid said shyly.

Hotchner sat down again, and waited for Reid to speak, but he took his time.

"I…" he began hesitantly. "I've been thinking about something Uncle Joel said. He said that there were a lot more new employees who smoked at the Mastriano hotel next-door, than there was at Lohan's. So… maybe the unsub never worked at the hotel where the murder took place, maybe he worked at a hotel close by. He's smart enough to know that the first place the police are going to look is at the staff, especially those newly hired. And quitting the day after the murder will look highly suspicious."

"But if he worked in another hotel, how would he know who the guests at other hotels are?" Elle wanted to know.

Reid shrugged. "The staffs talk to each other. During cigarette breaks, for example. And in big hotel districts there are usually bars that are popular hangouts for hotel personnel, where they can mingle. It's not like they can comfortably drink where they work."

"Who would want to, anyway?" Morgan wondered.

"And," Reid continued. "If he befriended anyone from another hotel, he could probably use that person as an excuse to sneak into other hotels' 'staff only' areas and give himself access to computers, etcetera."

"That's a very good idea, Reid," Gideon said. "That's probably why we haven't been able to find any employees who fit the profile. We just haven't been able to get around the fact that the unsub knows the hotels so well, but if you are right, then that would explain it. We should explore this angle."

Hotchner agreed. "Liv Lashen was murdered in Arlington. It is only 30 or so miles from here. We can drive there today. Have Garcia make a list of all the hotels in the same district as the one where Lashen was killed."

--

The drive to Arlington was quiet. Gideon had opted to stay in Quantico to help JJ spread the word amongst the other cities, so there were only four of them. Morgan was driving, and in an uncharacteristic move, Hotchner had sat in the back with Reid, letting Elle ride shotgun. Morgan had made attempts at conversations, but had finally given up and turned on the radio instead, as all the rest had their noses buried in paperwork.

Although Reid's thoughts kept wandering during the ride and he kept steeling glances over at Hotchner, wondering what he was thinking about. It was difficult to match this man, who he thought he knew, to the words he had heard last night.

Morgan parked outside the hotel where the murder had taken place. Garcia had marked six other hotels of similar size in the area as likely locations. They got out of the car and Hotchner pulled out the list of hotels. He tore the list in half and gave the other half to Morgan.

"Okay," Morgan said, glancing at it. "Come on, Reid."

"No," Hotchner said. "I'll take Reid. Elle will go with you."

Morgan looked slightly surprised by the order, but made no objection as he and Elle waived goodbye and headed down the street, promising to call if they found anything.

Hotchner started walking in the opposite direction, expecting Reid to follow, which he did. But he kept wondering about Hotchner's choice of words. He'd said 'I'll take Reid', as if it was a chore to be endured. Had it been intentional or just unlucky phrasing? Reid hated that he had started questioning his teammates, but after what he had heard on the plane he couldn't help but wonder.

--

The first hotel Hotchner and Reid went to gave them nothing, but at the second one they were rewarded. They sat in visitors' chairs opposite the personnel manager, Sara Linden, who was looking through her files on her computer.

"Yes," she said, "We do have a desk clerk who fits your time-profile. He worked here for four weeks and quit the day after that gruesome murder down the street. I didn't think there was anything odd about it at the time. Do you think he's the killer?" There was a curious excitement in her voice.

"We don't know." Hotchner said. "Could we have a copy of his file please?"

"Sure." She hit print and they waited while the machine worked and then she handed the paper to Hotchner.

"Eddie Willis," he read.

"That's right," Sara said. "He was really good at his job too, very polite, very charming. He was well-liked by the guests. And by the rest of the staff. He was very funny. The stories he could tell… We were quite sad to see him go. He couldn't really be a serial killer, could he? He was so nice."

Hotchner handed the paper over to Reid who looked at it. Nothing stood out. Name, address, social security number, résumé. He had no doubt it was all fake. He kept scanning it, hoping to find something that would stand out and scream 'I'm here'.

"Do you have a photo?" he heard Hotchner ask.

"Sure, I'm printing it out now."

A short while later another paper was handed to him. He took one look at it and gasped, his face losing all its color.

"Oh my god, it's him!"

Hotchner looked at him.

"Him who? You know him?"

Reid looked up at him and Hotchner was taken aback by the look in his eyes. They were vast pools of emotions, as if his whole world was crashing down on him.

"I met him in Las Vegas. He was a waiter at the hotel we stayed in. He came up to me and said that he wanted to talk to me about my articles, that he had heard about me and what happened in Fairmount."

"What?" Hotchner couldn't believe what he was hearing.

Reid felt nauseous. "He was just playing me, the whole time. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."

"You didn't know."

"He was right there! Not two feet in front of me and I walked away from him. I should have known. Who would want to talk about my articles? There was something odd about him, I could feel it, and I just walked away and let him get away."

"Reid… Spencer, listen to me. You had no way of knowing, it's not your fault."

"Tell that to Caitlin Tytac."

--

TBC