Essential Listening: After the Fall, by Kodaline

"Lee disappeared. I asked William to find her," said Maxine Hightower, with a deep sigh. "But it wasn't fair to him."

"I'm sure he wanted to find her as much as you did," JJ reassured her, but Maxine shook her head.

"He'd just gotten home. He lost his leg, and he was going to physical therapy. He hadn't even processed what happened to him yet."

"But he found her," said Rossi.

They had brought her into the conference room, since in many ways she and her son were as big a part of this investigation as they were. Detective Bedwell had brought her a cup of the same coffee he'd made for them earlier, and which Spencer was still clutching greedily, recognising the tired sadness of a woman who had been walking through hell for some time.

Maxine nodded sadly. "First time. She came home for two weeks and I had her go to meetings. I even got her onto welfare."

"So, what happened?" Bedwell asked, with as much kindness as someone could manage in a room like the one they were in, with a case like this.

Maxine turned sad eyes on him. "The day after the first check came, she disappeared."

Spencer's ears pricked up. "Wait," he said, reaching for his notes. "What was that date?"

"The second?" JJ replied.

"What if that's it?" he asked, leaning forward and staring at the board.

"What?" Rossi enquired.

"Lee Hightower was abducted on the second," he began, plucking the information more from memory than from the screen. "The day after she cashed a welfare check."

"So?" Bedwell asked.

"Look at the dates of the other abductions," he insisted and heard JJ gasp.

"All the men are abducted around the first and the fifteenth of the month," she realised.

"When welfare checks are issued," Bedwell said, cottoning on.

"What if he's not intentionally clustering them male-female? What if this is how he best isolates his victims!" Spencer exclaimed.

"You think he has a way to get them alone based on how they cash their checks?" Rossi inferred.

"And then the rest of the month he resorts to picking up prostitutes," Spencer said, then glanced at Maxine Hightower and made an effort to dial back his enthusiasm for this fresh discovery.

He needn't have worried, however, because when he shyly met her gaze she looked just as intensely caught up as he felt.

"It would explain the pattern," said Bedwell.

Rossi pulled out his cell at the same time as Spencer. "We need to find out where these men cash their checks."

"We don't have last names," JJ pointed out. "There's no way to find them."

"Grace," said Spencer, when she picked up on the second ring, "Figure out how many people on the streets are cashing their welfare checks."

"Connection?" she asked, without bothering with pleasantries. Clearly, she had picked up on the urgency from his voice.

"We think he might be using the money to separate some of his victims."

"Gotcha. I'll hit you back."

Across the table, Rossi's phone beeped, and Spencer hung up.

"Sir."

"Garcia, I need you to find out if Lee Hightower ever cashed a welfare check," Rossi said.

"Okay, I'm typing my fastest," she promised.

0o0

Derek pulled up at the kerb, with Pearce in the back seat, making notes on her phone, and Detective Benning up front with him, peering out into the street.

The detective called over to the young man who had helped them out earlier in the night. "Walter!"

He walked up, looking a little uncomfortable – though more with the general situation than with talking to them.

"Listen, when someone out here's on welfare, where do they go when they get their check?"

Walter thought for a moment. "It depends what they want."

"What do you mean?" Benning asked.

"Those checks have strings," he explained. "You gotta either spend it on food or lodging."

"Okay," said Benning.

He gave them a haunted sort of half-smile. "A lot of people out here don't want food or lodging."

"So, they have to find somewhere willing to convert the check into cash," Pearce guessed.

Walter nodded.

"This is one of those money secrets you were talking about?" Derek asked.

"There was a bodega that would do it, but the owners were screwing people over, so Ganymede shut them down," said Walter.

Out of the corner of his eye, Derek saw Pearce nodding as if she had come across the name before.

"There's a motel on third," Walter offered. "They'll cash your check for thirty cents on the dollar, providing you don't take the room."

"So, you walk away with drug money, but you're still on the street," Derek mused.

"Dope fiends keep it quiet," Walter explained. "They don't want people knowing they're holding that much cash."

"It explains why they're alone," Benning remarked.

"And they'd be lookin' to score," Derek suggested.

"If they thought somebody was a dealer, they might walk right over to them," Pearce finished.

0o0

As soon as they pulled into the parking lot, everyone scattered.

Grace piled out of the car after Morgan and Detective Benning, and hung back a pace or two, keeping an eye on the patrons who were standing their ground, in case anyone got the wrong impression about their visit and tried to do something stupid about it.

"What's going on?" the motel owner called, from the office.

There was concern in his voice, but also the fear of about to be caught doing something nefarious.

Detective Benning slammed her badge against the office window as the second SUV pulled up and Hotch, Prentiss and Hightower joined their huddle. "Police."

Prentiss made her way to the window with the others, but Hotch took up a nonchalantly defensive position alongside Grace. Hightower, content to leave the investigative work to the experts, now that the experts were actually on it, hovered between the two groups, trying to stay calm

"FBI," Morgan announced, pushing pictures of their missings in the owner's face. "Have you seen any of these men?"

"Uh," he said, plainly thinking fast. "Maybe."

"Not maybe," Benning informed him. "Yes or No."

"Have you been giving them cash in exchange for their welfare checks?" Morgan demanded.

Over his shoulder, Grace watched the man's face attain that deer-in-headlights look, which was quickly buried under defiant arrogance.

"They need the cash and I need the business." He shrugged. "Nobody gets hurt, folks."

Hotch made a tutting noise, pulled out the photograph of the most recent victim and hurried around to the office door.

"Garcia traced William's sister to this location on the night that she disappeared," Prentiss told them, ignoring this manoeuvring. "The others were here too."

The motel owner jumped as Hotch appeared behind him, grabbed his shoulder and showed him the picture of the young woman who had vanished from her usual patch. "You seen this girl?" he demanded, leaving the man no wiggle room for his answer.

"Yeah," said the owner, surprised. "She was here maybe fifteen minutes ago."

Grace and Hightower ran back down the entry ramp, in case she was still visible, as Prentiss harangued the motel owner. "Did anyone approach her when she left?"

"There was a dealer across the street," the man told them, catching hold of some of the urgency of the situation. "He just sits there and then they signal."

"He's not here now," Grace called, running back towards the ramp.

"Do you know his name?" Hotch asked.

"No, I never seen his face. Just the car. They all use him."

"Anonymous and trusted at the same damn time," Grace growled. "Perfect."

0o0

"That's it," said Bedwell, taking the photograph Hotch had sent to Garcia and Garcia had faxed to the office and handing it to one of the junior detectives. "Get this photo to every agent, every border cross." He started matching his pace to Dave's as the other man sprang into action.

"Car's a dark-coloured American sedan," he said, fresh off a call with Prentiss.

Bedwell nodded. "I want full searches of anything that even remotely matches the description," he announced to the office at large.

"Thanks for putting your ass on the line over Hightower," said Dave.

"Thanks for being right," said Jeff.

0o0

The team was coalescing at the border from two different directions. JJ and Rossi were in a car on the Canadian side as Bedwell checked in with the guards; Reid had crossed back to American soil to get in the car with Emily and Hightower; Pearce and Morgan were hanging back a little with Detective Benning, in case there was a chase on the US side of the border. Hotch was making his way along the line in the opposite direction to Bedwell.

He had not been wrong, Emily felt, when he'd said that this was the busiest border cross in the country. There were a lot of cars, and a large proportion of them matched their description of the one that had carried away their latest victim.

Even with the 'blues and twos', as Grace sometimes called them when she lost focus and slipped into her London vernacular, their guy had had at least a fifteen minute head start – and that's only if they believed the motel owner.

She was inclined to, solely because as soon as he'd figured out someone he had just spoken to had been abducted, he had freaked out and given them all the information they might need, access to his CCTV (what little was backed up from the past day or two, at any rate) and turned over his records to Detective Benning's colleagues without any attempt at obstruction.

It was amazing how that one degree of separation could really bring something home to you.

If he'd already crossed, they would at least be able to track who had passed between the time she had been picked up and the time they had arrived at the checkpoint, but it wouldn't surprise Emily tremendously if he'd been using a different place to cross for some time.

The guy had clearly been operating for a while and his choice of victims and method of separating them from the safety of the crowd suggested organisation. Would he regularly put himself at risk of discovery by using the border cross with his victims in the car?

She said as much aloud to Reid, conscious that one of those victims was the sister of the third occupant of the SUV, and he nodded. "I know what you mean," he said, with a glance in Hightower's direction. "But we've seen unsubs before who are arrogant enough to believe they can meet any law enforcement challenge and get through unscathed. Like the traffic cop that stopped Bundy."

She grunted her agreement.

"How do you guys come up with this stuff?" Hightower asked, without taking his eyes off the border post he had seriously disrupted only a day previously.

"It's mostly based on precedent," Emily explained. Having spent the past few hours working with the sergeant she had grown to rather like him. "Our department has spent years collecting data on people like this."

"And how often does it turn out… well?" he asked, clearly thinking about Lee.

In the rear view mirror she met Reid's gaze.

"Sometimes we save the most recent victims," she said, gently.

Even if this guy was keeping people alive for extended periods, the number of victims who had vanished since Lee's last sighting suggested that none of them lasted long. There was no point burdening him with hope.

Reid sighed. "Mostly it starts bad, gets worse and stays there," he admitted, with unusual melancholy. "By the time we're called in, there are often multiple victims, and our job is to work out what awful things have happened to them. All we can do is try to stop the bad guys so they can't hurt anyone else."

"It doesn't get to you?" Hightower asked.

Prentiss smiled sadly. "Every time."

Hightower shook his head.

Across the line of waiting cars, which was dwindling now as the night crawled steadily away from midnight, Grace and Morgan got out of their car and made their way to the border proper, where Hotch and Bedwell were talking. JJ and Rossi did the same.

"Something happen?" Reid asked, leaning forward.

"Nothing urgent," Emily remarked. "They're not moving fast enough."

They watched as Hotch waved them over.

"Come on."

"I don't think he's coming," said Grace, who had her pocket watch out.

Reid quirked an eyebrow. "They should have tried to make the cross at least an hour ago."

"Any word from the off-road sites," Rossi asked.

Bedwell shook his head. "I have agents at every known drug smuggling entry. Nothing."

"This unsub's smart," said Hotch, studying the map someone had spread out on the bonnet of the SUV. "Everything about his plan is well researched. I think his border crossings would be consistent."

"Are there former shipping lanes somebody could have studied in advance?" Reid asked.

"Nothing marked," Bedwell replied. "Hunters might know the terrain, but it's word of mouth. Nothing documented."

"What about the underground railroad?" Hightower asked.

For a moment, everyone stared at him.

"Like, the slave escaping underground railroad?" Grace asked and he nodded.

"Yeah. In the civil war, Detroit was the last stop for a slave before they escaped to freedom in Canada," he said. "They made the crossing in this area."

"You think something might still be here?" Grace asked.

"He's right," said Bedwell. "But there aren't any historical landmarks that register the crossing points."

"Well, if I remember right, they built a series of Victorian homes along the river to signify safe passage," Morgan remarked, glancing at Hightower for a nod of confirmation. "Some of those homes might still exist."

"We know your sister's cell phone registered at a tower near Port Huron," Rossi recalled. "He had to be close by when he crossed the border."

"That narrows it down," said Reid, following the river with his finger.

Grace leaned in for a better look and he moved to let her, essentially allowing her to entirely invade his personal bubble.

Emily pressed her lips together, amused despite the situation.

"These ones should be older," she said, pointing out a run of houses on their own.

"How do you know?" Emily asked, frowning.

"Oh, er – I took a couple of archaeology modules at uni," she explained, oddly bashful. "It's the arrangement of the houses and the shape of the road. Assuming this is the old toll road?" she asked Bedwell, who nodded. "If I was back home I'd get the OS site up – they have all the historical maps and you can overlay them on the modern ones."

"I can think of someone who could do that." Hotch pulled out his phone and hit speed-dial. "Garcia, is it possible to cross-reference civil war maps with Victorian homes that still exist in the Port Huron area?"

"Well, I'm gonna take that question as rhetorical and…" Garcia replied. "Got one! Three miles south of the Blue Water Bridge."

"Can you send me a GPS map?" Hotch requested.

"Coming now."

"Thanks. Prentiss, you and William come with me. The rest of you stay here. We might need to be mobile in a hurry."