A/N: As always, thanks to everyone who read and reviewed the last chapter.
Chapter 26
It felt weird not having Hannah there in the morning. It hadn't even been a full week, but Emily got used to having her daughter there. She missed her already.
She was, however, ready to get back to work and knew she wouldn't have been able to do that if Hannah was still there. She would never have left the fourteen year old alone overnight with no supervision.
Although the team had been out of rotation, Emily had been staying on top of her email. Everyone on the team knew they had a case and would be meeting in the conference room at 9:00 am to brief the new case - a killer in Portland who was blinding his victims before killing them. They had two confirmed murders and two potential murders. Serial killers didn't take the holidays off.
Emily was the first one in the office. She had about an hour before everyone else would be there. She took the time to start working her way through the large stack of mail that had accumulated on her desk, not expecting anything terribly interesting. She was going to be in for a big surprise – and not a good one.
There was a notification of an upcoming parole hearing in Colorado that someone from the BAU would need to attend. They didn't always attend parole hearings, but there were times like this when their presence was requested. Emily tried to remember the details of the case in question as she debated between sending Reid or Rossi to the parole hearing – they were the only other two profilers on the team at the time the offender who was now up for parole was arrested. JJ had been on the team as well but as the Communications Liaison.
Emily temporarily set aside a thick, bulging manila envelope with a return address of the Sheriff's Department in a small town in rural Alabama. Most requests for their help came in electronically, but there were still some departments that sent hard copy requests along with copies of the file they had up until that point on whatever case they were requesting the BAU's help with. Sometimes they did this because they thought physical mail would be more likely to get a positive response than email. It was easy to decide an email request didn't merit BAU help without even opening the attachments, but it was impossible to ignore the gruesome crime scene photos that would spill out of an envelope such as this one when opened. Other times it was just an old school sheriff who was set in his or her ways and resisting the shift to technology.
There was another large manila envelope under the first. Emily was prepared to set it aside as well, but the lack of return address gave her pause. Any incoming mail went through a rigid screening process before it ever made its way to her desk so she knew it was safe to open, but an envelope with no return address wasn't usually a good thing in this line of work. That wasn't the only thing that was strange. It was addressed to Hotch, not her.
It happened less and less, but she did still get occasional mail that had her predecessor's name on it instead of her own. Opening someone else's mail was considered a federal offense, but mail that was intended for the former Unit Chief of the BAU was re-routed to her as a matter of course. The Bureau assumed anything addressed to Aaron Hotchner was really intended for the current Unit Chief of the BAU – Emily Prentiss – and usually it was.
Emily decided to go ahead and open it. The only thing in the large manila envelope was a single picture of a young teenage boy. It had been years since she'd last seen Jack Hotchner, but Emily recognized him immediately. He had his father's eyes and his father's dimples when he smiled. He was definitely a Hotchner. Jack wasn't posing for the picture. He didn't even appear to know it was being taken. He was smiling in the picture but not for the camera. He was looking off to the side at someone else, and not the person taking the photo.
There were two more manila envelopes that had been buried under the one addressed to Hotch. One of them was addressed to Emily and the other was addressed to Derek Morgan. Otherwise, the envelopes were identical to the one containing the picture of Jack – no return address, same exact font on the printed label with the name of the person the envelope was intended for, same size and weight.
Emily put latex gloves on before carefully opening the envelope that was addressed to her. She expected it, but she still felt a shiver run down her spine when a picture of Hannah fell out of the envelope. The girl was standing in front of Emily's building and the clothes she was wearing were the clothes she wore on New Year's Eve. Emily assumed the picture was taken when Hannah was outside waiting for her ride. It was greatly disturbing that someone had gotten close enough to her fourteen year old daughter to take the photo when the girl was under Emily's care. Shaken to her core, Emily stared at the picture for several long seconds. There was no note with the picture. The picture was the message, and the threat was implied.
Emily already knew what was in the envelope addressed to Derek without opening it. She put it aside for now, disposed of the latex gloves she was wearing, and got up from her chair.
Emily found Penelope in the break room, happily chatting away to Rossi and JJ about the holidays while the three of them waited for a pot of coffee to brew.
"Hey Penelope, can you check school attendance records and see if Jack Hotchner and Hannah Johnson were present in their first period classes today?" Emily asked with a note of urgency in her voice.
The unusual request first thing in the morning before she'd even had her coffee flustered Penelope, who blinked in confusion as she processed the request. "Hannah Johnson – you mean your Hannah?"
"Yes," Emily answered simply, not offering any additional information yet.
"Emily, what's going on?" Rossi questioned, his internal alarm flaring at the mention of his godson and a girl he already thought of as family.
"I'll explain," Emily promised. "But I need to know that both Jack and Hannah are okay first."
Penelope Garcia's curiosity was killing her, but there would be time for Emily to answer all of her questions – and Emily would answer all of her questions - once they knew the teenagers were at school. "You'll know where mini-Hotch and mini-Emily are before the magical elixir also known as coffee is done brewing," the tech analyst assured her friend, leaving her still-empty unicorn mug on the counter in the break room as she left for her lair.
"Have either of you checked your mail yet?" Emily asked the two profilers who remained in the room with her.
JJ shook her head. "Should we have?" She queried a little warily.
Emily nodded with a grave expression. "I need to know if you received a large manila envelope with no return address. If you did, don't open it yet."
"Okay," JJ said slowly, finding the instruction strange but trusting Emily enough to follow it.
The only reason the mail addressed to Aaron Hotchner and Derek Morgan came to Emily was because they were no longer agents and she was the leader of the team they had once been a part of. For all the Unit Chief knew, everyone on the team had received a similar envelope.
As it turned out, JJ was the only other member of the team to receive one. Emily checked with the others who were slowly filtering in as she headed back up to her office with JJ following closely behind, envelope in hand.
"You may want to sit down," Emily suggested worriedly as the two women entered Emily's office, her words only serving to make the blonde profiler more anxious. Emily sat down in her desk chair so she was facing JJ. Once they were both seated, Emily slid the photograph of her daughter across the surface of her desk so the blonde could see it. "This is what was in the envelope that was addressed to me." She thought it would help prepare JJ if she knew what to expect.
When JJ tore her own envelope open, two pictures fell out of it – one of her three year old sitting in the new electric police car Santa brought him for Christmas on the sidewalk in front of their house and one of her ten year old kicking the soccer ball around in their front yard.
Emily reached over to put a comforting hand on top of JJ's and asked, "Where are Henry and Michael right now?"
"Will dropped Michael off at daycare, and Henry – oh, God, Henry took the bus to school," JJ said, looking up at Emily with horror as she realized her oldest son had been waiting at the bus stop alone that morning.
"He's probably fine," Emily spoke quickly to try to reassure her friend. "The picture of Hannah was taken when she was alone in front of my building waiting for a friend to pick her up. Whoever took it had an opportunity to take her and didn't. Call the school and make sure Henry's there."
JJ made the call and confirmed that Henry was, in fact, at school. She called the daycare, too, even though Will would have called her if anything happened.
According to Penelope, Jack and Hannah were also both marked present in their first period classes that morning.
Once they knew none of their kids were actually missing, they agreed to regroup in the conference room in fifteen minutes. Penelope argued a little because she wanted to know everything right that very second, but Emily wasn't budging. Emily had two phone calls to make, and she wasn't really looking forward to either of them.
Because Hank Spencer Morgan was the only child they hadn't checked on (he wasn't old enough to be in school), Emily called Derek first.
"Hey, princess," Derek answered fondly, his smile coming through in his voice. "Long time, no talk. What, are you too busy for us peasants now that you're Unit Chief?" He teased.
"We do need to catch up, but that's not why I called," Emily told him regretfully.
"So I take it this isn't a social call?" Derek surmised, no longer smiling.
"No," Emily responded with a weary sigh. "I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but-"
"Is everyone okay?" Derek interrupted as his worry built. It was a valid question. With what they did, anything could happen. Since Derek had been gone, Reid had gone to prison. And then JJ had called him just over a year ago when Garcia was having a hard time with memories from when she was shot. He worried about them...all of them.
"Everyone's okay here," Emily assured her old friend. "Is Hank okay?"
"Yeah. Why wouldn't he be?" Derek demanded, instantly on edge.
"Some of us received envelopes containing pictures of our loved ones in the mail," Emily began to explain. "Derek…there's an envelope here for you."
"What are you waiting for? Go ahead and open it," Derek told her. If Savannah or Hank were in danger, he needed to know.
There was a moment of silence as Emily put a new pair of latex gloves on and opened the envelope. The grinning toddler in the picture that fell out of the envelope had grown so much since the last time Emily had seen a baby picture of him. Even though he wasn't immediately recognizable to her, Emily knew it was Hank Spencer Morgan. "It's a picture of Hank," she confirmed.
"Where is he? What's he doing?" Derek questioned her as he wondered how in the hell someone got a picture of his baby boy without him noticing.
Instead of guessing at the answers he wanted, Emily took a picture of the photograph with her cell phone and texted it to Derek.
"This was taken at the park by our house. He was with me," Derek said in a surprised tone as he looked at the picture of his son. "Emily, I didn't notice anyone suspicious."
"Don't feel bad," Emily told him. "No one else did either."
"This is why I left that job in the first place," Derek vented his frustration. "Now some sick freak is taking pictures of my son. Do you have any idea who it was?"
"It has to be someone we crossed paths with when you and Hotch were still on the team. Other than that, no," Emily said, thinking aloud. She didn't mention that it would be from a time she was on the team, too. They could ignore cases from the months she was in Paris and any cases the BAU took after she accepted a position as Unit Chief with Interpol in London.
Because Derek didn't know about Hannah, Emily couldn't possibly explain the picture she received. She wasn't going to tell her old friend that she had Ian Doyle's baby over the phone. After her fake death, Derek was the one who went after Doyle basically on his own. With the bad blood there, he probably wasn't going to congratulate Emily for bringing Doyle's baby into the world.
Derek groaned. "Oh, man, not Hotch, too?"
"He's my next call," Emily said grimly.
"Good luck with that," Derek told her, not unkindly.
"Thanks," Emily said sarcastically. "I'll keep you updated-" Emily started to promise.
"Keep me updated?" Derek cut her off. "Emily, you don't really think I'm gonna sit here and do nothing when my son's being targeted, do you? Not if I can help."
Emily nodded in understanding even though he couldn't see her. She would have felt the same way. "I'll see you soon."
Emily was absolutely dreading her next call.
Hotch already lost Haley because he refused to make a deal with Foyet. He could have easily lost Jack then, too. The little boy had been alone in that house with a serial killer. And then Hotch lost his friends for not just months but years when he and Jack were in the Witness Protection Program hiding from Mr. Scratch. Emily felt terrible that her friend's son was once again in danger. Didn't the father and son deserve a break?
"Let me guess, you're calling to cancel because you have a case," Hotch said when he answered, assuming that was why she was calling. He'd made that same call to Haley and Beth enough times, but it felt strange to be on the other side of it. He was looking forward to dinner with Emily and had to make a concerted effort to keep the disappointment out of his voice.
Cancel? The plans they made to grab dinner and drinks were the furthest thing from her mind so it took Emily a second to figure out what he was talking about. She was sure they would not be going to dinner, at least not any time soon, but that wasn't actually why she was calling. Somehow, she didn't think he would want to leave Jack to have dinner after he heard what she had to say. She decided to just rip off the band-aid.
"No," she said solemnly. She took a deep breath. "I'm calling because some of us received envelopes containing pictures, and, uh – there's really no easy way to say this - there was an envelope here for you with a picture of Jack in it. I'm sending you the picture now. Check your text messages." She pressed the send button on her phone, sending the digital picture she'd taken of the hard copy.
"This was sent to the BAU?" Hotch questioned, his voice coming across as more distant because he put her on speaker phone to check his text messages.
"Yes," Emily replied. "Obviously, there was no return address. The envelopes and pictures need to be processed, but…"
"They won't find anything we don't already know," Hotch said knowingly, finishing her thought. They both knew there would be no fingerprints or DNA. "That's Jessica's house in the background, which means whoever took the photo of Jack is in D.C. We don't need to know what postal zone it came from to know that."
"No, we don't," Emily agreed with him. "The other pictures were all taken in D.C., too."
"Who else received one?" Hotch inquired.
"JJ, Derek, you, and me," Emily responded. "So far it's just the pictures. The picture of Hannah was taken when she was alone. She could have been taken then, but she wasn't. And Henry rode the bus to school today. He could have been taken when he was waiting at the bus stop, but he wasn't."
"He's taunting us," Hotch said, referring to the unknown sender. "There was no note?"
"No," Emily said. "Only the pictures."
They were both wondering the same thing – how long the unknown sender would be content to taunt them with pictures before making a move on one of their kids.
"You know you'll never get protective detail approved for all of us, not if all you have is the photos. You're going to need all the help you can get," Hotch told her.
"If you're offering, I'm not saying no," Emily replied.
"I'm offering."
After they said goodbye, Emily called down to the front desk to let them know Derek Morgan and Aaron Hotchner were coming and would need visitor's badges. By the time they arrived, Emily had filled the team in. They had over a hundred old case files on the table in the conference room and were just discussing which cases they should start with.
"All we really know is that Aaron, Emily, JJ, and Derek all worked the case. You all worked together for, what, six years? That doesn't exactly narrow it down, does it?" Rossi mused wryly.
"It does, actually," Reid offered, looking up from an open case file to meet Rossi's gaze with a pensive expression as he had what he thought was a lightbulb moment. "You didn't get anything, and you were on the team for most of that time. If we take all the cases you worked out, there are only seventeen cases Emily worked that you didn't."
They'd all worked with Reid long enough not to question how he knew the exact number of BAU cases Emily worked with the team prior to Rossi coming back to the BAU off the top of his head.
"Or maybe I didn't get anything because I don't have any little Rossis running around," Rossi responded dryly.
"You have Joy," Emily pointed out.
"Yeah, but Joy's not really a kid anymore," Rossi reasoned.
"Dave's right. If the unsub's fixated on children, he wouldn't be interested in adult children," Tara spoke up in agreement with Rossi.
"Okay, then we need to go back through every case the four of us ever worked where the unsub was targeting children, looking for anyone who might hold a grudge against us," Emily concluded wearily. "Forget Portland. We're not even going to think about taking on another case until we know who's behind these pictures."
"Wouldn't it only be cases where the guy got away or is out of prison now?" Luke asked.
"Unless it's not the guy we arrested. What if we're looking for a parent whose kid we couldn't save?" Dave wondered as he tried to think through who would threaten the kids of profilers. "We couldn't save their kid, and now they're targeting our kids so we know how it feels."
"Grief can make people do things they wouldn't normally do, but if the death of the child were the trigger, why would the parent of a victim who died several years ago wait until now to seek revenge?" Tara questioned logically.
"They wouldn't," Simmons stated matter-of-factly.
"Nah, it's got to be someone who was locked up until now," Luke said confidently.
"So what we're actually looking for here is a case where the unsub lost a child?" Reid clarified. "That doesn't necessarily mean the case involved children."
Emily glanced down at her cell phone, reading a text message from the front desk. "Derek's here. I'll be right back."
Visitors to the FBI headquarters needed an escort. Emily intended to give the former team members free rein, but she still had to go down and get them from the lobby.
She was glad Derek was the first to arrive. It would give her a chance to tell him about her daughter.
After giving him a quick hug and exchanging pleasantries, Emily badged Derek in and found an unused conference room on the first floor where they could talk.
"Aren't we going up to the BAU?" Derek asked as he followed her. He didn't have any intention of sitting down. From the moment he found out someone was threatening his son, Derek felt the familiar rush of adrenaline that he always felt when he was knee-deep in a case. He needed to do something. There was nothing he could do in this empty conference room.
"We are, but Hotch should be here soon so we might as well wait for him," Emily explained. "And there's something I need to tell you before we go up," she added as she closed the door to the conference room behind them.
"I'm listening," Derek told her, giving Emily his full attention.
Emily was afraid to tell him, but she knew she either told him now or he would find out in front of everyone else. He was going to notice the picture of a random teenage girl up there with all of the other pictures. "You already know that the unsub sent a picture of Hank and Jack," Emily started. "He also sent a picture of Henry and Michael, and one of my daughter."
"Hold up, your daughter? You have a kid now?" Derek said with a surprised look on his face. He knew Emily wanted kids – they all knew that. She'd almost taken a kid who was orphaned during one of their cases home with her. "You finally did it then? Adopted?" He automatically assumed, his face breaking out into a quick, easy grin. "That's great, Emily."
"Derek, stop," Emily stopped him, knowing he wouldn't be saying that if he knew everything. "I didn't adopt." Quite the opposite, in fact. "I gave her up for adoption…fourteen years ago. She's…" Emily looked down, not wanting to see the way Derek would look at her after this. "She's Ian Doyle's."
Her romantic relationship with Doyle wasn't news to him. A younger, less mature version of Derek Morgan had once summed their relationship up as Emily sleeping with Ian Doyle for a profile. He'd been angry at the time, and rightfully so with all of the secrets and lies, but he wasn't angry anymore. He hadn't been angry with her about Doyle for a long time now.
He was glad Emily didn't ever hear him say that. Back then he only said it to Rossi when he was really fired up. It wasn't what he was going to say to Emily now.
Maybe he'd grown up a little since then. Or maybe it was because knowing about Declan changed things for him. Derek knew why Emily did what she did. Even if he didn't agree with it, he got it.
Going under that deep and for that long and still coming out of it on the other side as the person he knew as his friend and partner…that was something not everyone could – or would – be able to do. Emily Prentiss was still his friend.
"Emily, look at me," Derek said as he took in his strong, brave friend's unusually defeated posture. He waited for her to lift her gaze, hating the self-doubt he saw in her eyes. "Do you remember what I said to you when we found you in that warehouse in Boston?"
"When I was bleeding out?" Emily asked with raised eyebrows. "No."
In her defense, she'd been lying on the ground, half-alive, at the time.
"I said I knew why you did it. I said I was proud of you," Derek told her, looking her straight in the eye. "I still am. You saved Declan. He still doing okay?"
"He's in college now, playing soccer for Georgetown. Last time I checked on him, he wanted to be a teacher," Emily said with a small, fond smile.
"Good for him. You know, he grew up to be a good kid in spite of who his dad was. That's all because of you. You know that, right? You did what you had to do for him," Derek said. "I know how much you wanted kids, and I always thought you'd be a good mom, but you did what you had to for your daughter, too. There's no way Doyle would've left her alone when he came after you all those years ago. But what I don't get is this…you hid her from Doyle, and someone finds out about her now? How is that possible?"
Emily blew out a breath. "Because for the last month, I've been getting to know her. And someone's already using her to get to me." She shook her head in frustration. "This job…"
"I know," Derek said. "We're going to get this guy before anyone gets hurt."
Emily nodded in agreement, offering him a small smile.
When they emerged from the conference room, they saw Hotch checking in with the front desk. It was perfect timing.
The three of them exchanged greetings and headed up to the BAU, where everyone was busy poring over old case files, which they'd sorted into three different piles. Reid explained the "classification system" they came up with to Emily, Hotch, and Morgan.
There was one stack for cases where the unsub had a child and another for cases where children were the victims. And, finally, there was a stack for cases where both criteria were met…the unsub had a child and his or her victims were children. This last stack was the one they started with. Each profiler had a folder from it open in front of them. While they did this, Penelope was in her office, checking prison databases so they could eliminate any cases where the unsub was still incarcerated.
"The gang's all back together again," Rossi quipped as the old team members joined them at the table, ready to get to work.
A/N: Thanks for reading! I know some people wanted to see Derek Morgan. I didn't have this particular story line planned out when I started this story, but I thought it was a good way to bring Derek and Hotch back to the BAU for one case and it actually helps me develop some other plot points that I did have planned. Anyway, the unsub is someone we've seen before in the show, and the agents targeted by this unsub will hopefully make sense as this story line plays out. I hope the readers who wanted Derek enjoy :) He'll be around for a little while. If there's something or someone you want to see, please let me know and I'll do my best to include it if it fits with the direction of this story.
