Many, many thanks to PlatypusTVlover, who is a GREAT beta... turned this sprawling chapter around in an unbelievably short time!
Author's Note: No, I still don't own any characters you recognize on TV, nor do I have any commercial interest in weapons, ammunition, vehicles, or websites mentioned here. There is at least one "easter egg" in nearly each chapter I write. I've got an odd sense of humor and I like to sneak in cross-references to other TV shows and to other media. The three of you still reading this at home can make a game of finding the easter eggs. Let me know in a review what you think they are.
Previously in "Criminal Minds: The Prodigal": Hotchner sighed. This could go wrong in so many different ways. He walked up the steps to the front porch, though, and knocked on the door.
"Hey, old friend. We need to talk."
There was no answer to Hotchner's knock, even though there were lights on inside the house, and he could hear Phillips shifting with impatience behind him. He knocked again.
"You in there?" He strained to hear anything from inside the house, but it was still quiet. Phillips finally muttered something under his breath and stepped past him to knock on the door.
"Sir? This is Chief John Phillips of the Oakhurst Police Department. I need to talk to you, and I'm going to talk to you. Are you going to let me in?"
There was silence for a moment, then Hotchner heard a chair scrape against a wooden floor and footsteps crossed slowly to the front door. He heard a deadbolt drawn back, and then the door swung open in front of them. Gideon was standing beside it, not blocking their entry but not welcoming them into his space either.
Phillips pushed through the doorway, almost but not quite bumping into Gideon as he went past. Hotchner wondered just how this interview was going to go, with Phillips already playing the aggressor. As Hotchner followed Phillips into the small living room, Gideon gazed at him silently; to Hotch, it felt like he had let his friend down, but what else could he have done? He wasn't here to piss off the local police.
Gideon closed the door behind them, then returned to the desk chair he had apparently been sitting at, turning it to face into the room. Phillips had already sat down on the sofa and was leaning back against the cushions. At a loss for what else to do, Hotchner sat down in the easy chair next to the sofa, hoping that he could stay in both Gideon's and Phillips' line of sight to have some input into the interview.
"So, your friend here has vouched for your character, but he won't tell me your name. You gonna help me out here?" There was a definite challenging tone in Phillips' voice.
"You can call me Isaac," Gideon said after a moment.
"I can call you Isaac? Sounds to me like that's not actually your name."
"No, it's not."
"Any reason you don't want to tell me your name? You got some warrants out on you somewhere? What would I find if I looked you up?" Phillips was leaning forward off the couch now, more and more aggressive with each question.
"No wants, no warrants, you wouldn't find anything criminal in my past. But there's enough in my past that hasn't worked out, that I don't want to be that person anymore." From where Hotchner was sitting, it looked like Gideon was staring defiantly at Phillips.
"Tell me, Isaac, earlier today you had a gun. Where is it now?"
Gideon leaned aside slightly and pointed at the desktop. "Under this notebook."
"It loaded?" Phillips stood up, his right arm slightly cocked to bring his right hand closer to his own holstered weapon.
"Always. One in the chamber, nine in the magazine. Safety's on."
"Safety or no, I'll hold on to it for a while." Phillips walked over to the desk, and Hotchner could see Gideon being very careful to keep his hands in plain view until Phillips was back at the sofa, the gun in its nylon holster lying beside him. "So, you got a permit for this?"
"I did."
"OK, we'll deal with that later. Any other weapons in the house?"
"Three .22 rifles, camp property, locked up in the utility room at the back of the house. I have the locker key in my pocket if you need it." At Phillips' nod, Gideon pulled a jangling ring of keys out of his front pants pocket, slipped one of the keys off of it, and met Phillips halfway across the living room to hand over the key.
"So, Isaac, you've been out here for what, 2 years? Haven't seen you around much."
"Just about two years, yeah. I don't get into town much, especially not in the winter."
"You got a vehicle of some kind?"
At Phillips' question, Hotchner wondered if Gideon's answer to that question would solve the whole thing. The last car he'd seen Gideon driving was a Chevy Tahoe, clearly an SUV. Would that get him off the hook?
"I do. Don't use it, though."
"You wanna show it to me?" Although Phillips asked the question casually, his slightly tensed posture suggested that the answer was important.
Gideon looked at Hotchner, not giving away anything that was going through his head, then nodded. "All right. Let me get a flashlight." He disappeared into the small kitchen for a moment and came back with a heavy black MagLight. Switching it on, he ushered Phillips and Hotchner out the front door and led them around to the back of the house.
A blue tarp was neatly tied over and around a Tahoe-sized hulk, and Gideon looked at Phillips. At the chief's nod, Gideon bent and untied the knots at the back of the vehicle and flipped the tarp back enough to show that it was indeed an SUV. Hotchner winced inside as he saw Phillips notice that the plates had been removed. Was Gideon trying to get arrested for obstruction? The plastic tarp rustled as Phillips pulled more of it back, exposing the driver's side doors and part of the windshield. He peered in, grunting as he accidentally bumped his toe into the concrete blocks holding the car off the ground.
"When's the last time you drove this thing?"
"About a week after I got here."
"Hmm. You got the papers for it?"
"Just the title."
"No registration? Plates? Insurance?"
"I've been trying to disappear, Chief. It's hard to do that when you've got to keep a car insured and inspected and registered."
"Yeah, you'd said something about disappearing. OK, that's enough, let's get back inside." He stepped back to let Gideon precede them into the house, with Hotchner bringing up the rear of their little parade. Once in the living room, Gideon headed for the desk chair again but was stopped by Phillips.
"Let me have that chair, why don't you take the sofa? It's gotta be drafty over here by this window."
Phillips moved the desk chair into the middle of the living room, turned it around, and straddled it as Gideon sat down obediently on the couch. It was clear to Hotchner that the chief was shifting into a different mode now.
"So Isaac, what'd you do today?"
"Well, you know, with my busy schedule it's so hard to keep track. Let me just –"
"Look, cut the crap. You don't have a busy schedule, and you know it as well as I do. What'd you do?"
Gideon seemed to be thinking before he answered, and Hotchner wondered what there was to think about.
"Finished hanging the shutters on the cabins in girls' camp this morning, checked the boys' camp shower house to make sure the pipes are insulated, had lunch, and then you all showed up. Once Aaron here left, I did some writing, and was thinking about dinner when you came back again."
"Anyone see you?"
"No one but the magpies that tried to steal the bolts from me this morning." Gideon chuckled lightly, obviously still as attracted to birds as he always had been. "Damn things wouldn't leave me alone the whole time."
"No one stopped by? No hikers came through or anything?"
"Nope. Nobody to confirm that I was here all day, if that's what you're getting at."
"That's what I was after." Phillips shifted on the chair, making himself fractionally taller. "So Isaac, you said earlier that you did have a permit for this weapon, and that you didn't have anything but the title on that car. What'd you do with all of it?"
"The first bucketful of ashes I took out of this fireplace was nearly every piece of paper or plastic that could ID me. Two years ago."
"You burned it all?" Phillips leaned forward, spreading his hands as if in disbelief. Hotchner just shook his head, amazed at how stupid his former colleague could be.
"I burned it all. It was a good way to make the split."
As Phillips opened his mouth, Hotchner felt his phone buzz against his hip. Of all the times for the phone to ring… but on second thought, was this a bad time for an interruption or a good one?
"What is it, Morgan?"
"Hotch, the car got keyed tonight. Up on that hill, while we were up at the crime scene, that sick bastard was keying our car."
"What? You're sure it's been keyed, and not just scratched on the brush or something?"
"Look man, I think I know the difference between keying and just a little scratch from a twig. This is keyed from front to back and top to bottom, man. He took his time with it."
Hotchner looked over at Phillips. "Chief, Morgan says the Suburban got keyed over across the highway tonight. You think some of your guys could have a look at it?"
"Sure, we can do that. Lemme talk to him?" Hotchner handed the phone over and sat back, thinking of the options they had now.
"Agent Morgan? This is Chief Phillips. Look, you stay put. We're not done up here, especially not now, so I'm gonna have a couple of my guys come and see if they can get any prints off your car. We haven't gotten any off the other cars, but maybe in the dark he made a mistake. Where are you?" He was silent for a minute while Morgan spoke.
"Oh, you ate there, did you? Should have gone to the one next door, it's much better. Yeah, wait in the car if they've locked the restaurant up, but my guys'll be right over. Here, let me give you back to Agent Hotchner so I can call them."
"OK, thanks, Chief." As Phillips took out his own cell phone, Hotchner took the phone back.
"You OK down there, Derek?"
"Yeah, I'm fine. Got a little spooked up on the hill, but now I'm just royally pissed at this guy. I'm really lookin' forward to catching him. You need me to come up there tonight?"
"No, once the local cops release the car again, go on back to the motel. We're gonna be up here a while, getting this guy to open up is almost impossible. I don't know, I think Phillips is halfway to dragging him in to town and putting him in a cell overnight to see if that would work. You have any brilliant ideas over dinner?" Hotchner's voice was full of frustration.
"Not really, no. I'm gonna call Garcia first thing tomorrow and get her started on a couple more counties. I think we need to look at more than just Oakhurst and Mariposa, and see if we can't get a better geographic profile. Then I'll go over to Mariposa myself and see what they've got in their cold files."
"OK. If you're still up when we get back to town I'll come fill you in, otherwise we'll try to sit down tomorrow afternoon and see where we are." Hotchner ended the call and looked over at Phillips. "Sure sounds like the guy we're looking for was over across the way tonight while we were up there."
"Yeah, it does. And you know, the kids from this camp hike up that little mountain every summer, even the little 10-year-olds, and it doesn't take them that long."
"What are you saying, Chief?"
"I'm saying that I've got someone here who seems to have gone out of his way to hide something, and I've got 6 dead guys, and I'm wondering if they're all related. I'm wondering if Isaac here took a little walk this evening and did some damage to that Suburban of yours."
Hotchner waved Gideon to silence when it looked like the other man was going to speak. "Chief, I can understand what you're saying. But you've got to understand me, too. I've known this man for years and this isn't him."
"You've known this guy? Did you think he'd burn almost every scrap of paper that tied him to an identity? Did you think he'd come out here, grow an Old Testament beard, and work as a handyman? Is that really the guy you knew?"
Hotchner looked over at Gideon, who had recoiled against the back of the chair with Phillips' tirade. He had to admit, the beard and the talk of 'me and not-me' had been more than a little odd. But he was sure of his friend, and that was what counted. "It's not what I would have expected, no. But I would stake my life on saying that it's not him."
"That's fine for you to say that. But since I have to live here after you leave, and I have a responsibility to everyone around here, I'm going to have to have a little more evidence than someone I don't know coming out from Washington and vouching for a hermit. Isaac, I'm taking you in to town with me. You want to lock up now?"
"Chief Phillips, could I just talk to you out on the porch for a second?" Hotchner stood, pressuring the cop into getting up as well. They went outside and he closed the door behind them. "Look, chief, this guy really meant a lot to those of us who worked with him. Our tech wizard has traps all over the databases. If you try to run anything, whether it's the VIN number from his truck, or the serial number from that gun, or his prints, it's going to spring one of her traps. That'll set off her cell phone, and she'll be calling my cell phone within 15 minutes. It'll just upset everyone who hears about it, and it'll upset him as well."
"Your point being?"
"I don't think you need to print him yet, do you? Or run any other searches on him?"
"Agent Hotchner, what other searches am I going to run? All I know is, you know him. Can't run that through the database, can I?"
"Actually, I wouldn't be surprised if our tech wizard could, but no, I guess you don't have a lot to work with."
Phillips reflected for a moment, absently tossing Gideon's holstered weapon and the key to the gun safe in his hand. "All right. I'll take him down and put him in an interview room, but I won't print him. Yet. But if he keeps getting' in my way like he has been, I may run his prints just to see if it'll shake him. Fair enough?"
"It's enough for now. Thanks."
Chief Phillips didn't respond, but instead stepped back to the front door and opened it.
"You ready to go in there, Isaac? Night's not getting any younger here."
Gideon came out onto the porch, key ring in his hand, and turned his back on them to lock the front door. He leaned his head against the door jam, looking to Hotchner as though he was saying goodbye to the house. After a moment, he turned to face them, and Phillips gestured him towards the Jeep sitting in the drive.
"After you, Isaac. Why don't you sit in the back?"
It was a silent ride back to town. Hotchner could see Gideon out of the corner of his eye, staring blankly out at the darkness. For his part, he was trying to figure out if there was any way to intercede in the rest of the "interview" and keep things from getting any worse. By the time they reached the lights of Oakhurst, though, he hadn't come up with any ideas.