Essential Listening: Strong, by London Grammar

0o0

Penelope clutched her purse and laptop bag to her chest like she was an elderly lady on a train in the 1950s. Not that the Subaru the team had sent to collect her from the airstrip was in any way unpleasant – and the agent from the Detroit field office was lovely, in a penal code sort of way. But she had been keeping tabs on the progress of both her searches and the investigation in general and the more she heard, the more creeped out she felt.

An early morning phone call (what other kinds were there, in their line of work?) with her very own Adonis had told her than their number of victims had jumped considerably, and though the team had been forbidden from communicating details over the phone, she had read from his voice that this one was real bad.

She couldn't help thinking of the last time she had been in the field, in Meridian, which had been somewhat traumatic for various reasons*.

By the time she had landed, the news had started running the 'Have You Seen This Man?' story for their unsub, and she had peered at the picture, trying to see evil in his face. As usual, she failed. He just looked like an average farm dude to her – but then, she wasn't a profiler.

They pulled up and Penelope thanked the agent before getting out of the car. In deference to the fact that the address she had found was a farm, she had elected to wear chunkier heels in a more subdued colour than usual, and even though she wasn't looking down, the lack of flamboyance was making her mildly uncomfortable.

She looked around. This was the chaos she usually avoided, even when she was in the field. There was usually a degree of removal for a technical analyst, but here at the farm there were forensic technicians, the coroner (which suggested the possibility of remains, which was not something she was a fan of being in the vicinity of), every manner of cop, news vans, journalists, desperate and grieving family members, agents, pigs, and – somewhere, she presumed – a man who might be a witness, an accomplice or the dominant unsub.

It was a lot.

The voices and faces of her team swirled around her, making her feel like she was walking through a sort of law-enforcement whirlwind.

There was a crowd of people by the end of the drive, with cars parked or pulling up alongside. JJ was at the heart of the throng, directing people to one of several tables that had been set up with a cop or junior detective at each, stacks of papers and pens at their elbows.

Garcia recognised the set up. These were the family members of people who had gone missing in the area, flocking to the place they had heard their relatives might have been held – and probably died, based on JJ's grim nod, as Penelope passed.

"If you have photos, I can take them here," she called, to the people hurrying in her general direction. "We have police officers that can answer questions about your loved ones."

Penelope missed the next part of her spiel as a group of K9 officers and their handlers jogged past.

"Andre, these are the unsub's coveralls," Emily called, delivering the bundle of fabric to one of the dog handlers. "It looks like they haven't been washed in some time, so it should be a good scent source.

"I want samples taken of all the tools in the barn," Grace said, over to the left, clearly marshalling a team of forensic technicians. "We know from the staining that the table in there was one of his kill sites, so I want you to preserve the whole thing, if you can." She turned, just for a moment, and winked at Penelope as she passed, before continuing. "Pay particular attention to containers – he might well be putting the bodies in the pig pens whole, but he may also have decided that they would go down better in… smaller chunks."

Penelope grimaced, resisting the urge to stick her fingers in her ears, mostly in deference to the presence of the families and the news casters.

Morgan was standing with his back to her beside what she presumed were the pig pens (though currently they held anonymous looking forensic people in Tyvek suits), staring at a large expanse of blue tarpaulin with pair after pair of muddy and forlorn, ownerless shoes.

Penelope's hand leapt to her throat.

Oh God, there's so many.

Reid and Rossi were nowhere to be seen. She presumed one or more of them must be searching the woods or the outbuildings, of which there were several.

She came to a halt beside Hotch, who was talking to a man she presumed was in charge of the Ontario branch of the investigation, based on the suit and the level of contained stress. At about the same time she reached them, a cop handed the man a folded piece of paper that looked a lot like a search warrant.

"Well, you can search all his files and hard drives," said the stranger.

"Let's go serve it," said Hotch and turned to find Penelope feeling vastly out of place behind him. "Great," he said, looking pleased to see her. "Garcia, find me something."

"Yes, sir," she said, and made her way into the house, narrowly avoiding another RCMP officer who was reporting in on his radio.

0o0

When he heard his name called, he tore his eyes from the lines of shoes and turned to find Detective Benning making a beeline for him. Derek sighed. He'd spent the past few hours liaising with the local search and rescue teams and tramping through his least favourite terrain. He'd come back out to change clothes in the back of one of the SUVs and check in with the others, but that blue tarp with its forlorn contents had stopped him in his tracks. He'd been dwelling on them for a while, as the sun rose above the woods in the east.

He shook himself, ready for the next step.

"You got here fast," he remarked.

She shrugged. "Detroit's not that far."

And you gunned it the whole way, because you feel like you failed Hightower and the rest of the victims, he thought, reading the tension in her frame. He felt for her. In Baltimore, he'd been part of an overstretched, underfunded team, too – but he'd never turned someone's concern away in quite the same fashion.

She looked around, taking in the general chaos.

"Did you bring the case files?" he asked.

She nodded. "I got thirty-five open missings."

"That's all?" he asked, surprised.

But then, they had been turning away anyone reporting missing persons in the Cass Corridor – perhaps that had become routine.

"That's not enough?" she remarked.

Derek turned, nodding at the sea of shoes behind him. "Eighty-nine pairs," he said.

Benning's mouth fell open. "Eighty-nine?"

"So far."

She took an unconscious step towards the shoes, mesmerised. "Oh… God."

Derek quirked an eyebrow. "I don't think God's been out here in a long time."

The detective recovered quickly. Her eyes travelled to William Hightower, who was sitting on a bale of hay, staring disconsolately at a picture of his sister and staying out of the way as much as he could. "How is he?"

"How would you be?" Derek couldn't help but snap, as much as he liked Benning. "He asked for help and nobody ever looked for his sister."

"We did the best we could," she said, a touch defensively.

Derek gave her a Look. "Ignoring him was the best you could do?"

"We were undermanned!"

Derek shook his head, feeling increasingly sour. He gestured towards the shoe pile. "Well, these are just all throwaway people to you anyway, right?"

"That is not fair!" she snapped.

"Isn't it?"

Her response was curtailed by a shout from one of the pig pens. "Agent Pearce!"

Derek and Benning, both still stewing, watched Pearce emerge from the barn and navigate a safe path between various patches of earth that were being turned over or where casts were taken.

"What've you got?" she asked, managing to lean into the pen without touching any part of the fence.

Deciding he would rather be a part of the solution than dwelling on the problems that had created this awful situation, Derek uncrossed his arms. "Grab your files," he told the detective, and then went to join Pearce.

"Got something?" he asked, as the Tyvek suit indicated the find with his digging implement.

Pearce gave a huff of breath. "Dog tags." She looked at Derek, then both of them turned to glance at Hightower. "I guess I better break the news. Can you photograph that for me and process it as a priority?" she asked the tech, who nodded. "I don't want Sergeant Hightower seeing them by accident. He's been through enough."

"Yes ma'am."

"Found much?" Derek asked, as they detached from the pen.

"Too much," Pearce groused. "Hard to say what stain is pig and what stain is…" she waved a hand in the direction of the shoes. Then her eyes narrowed on his face. "What's eating you?"

"Gotta work with Tay Benning," he said, in a low voice. "And I like her, and I think she's a good cop at heart, but…"

"But she looked at a lot of these missings and dismissed them because they wouldn't be chased up," Grace finished, with a grimace. "I get it. I mean, at a certain point you have to make a call about where to point very limited resources. It's easy to apportion blame in hindsight."

Derek quirked an eyebrow at her and she gave him a rueful smile.

"I know," she said. "I want to tear her a new one, too, but she's probably going to drive herself crazy over this without our input. Besides, it won't help us recover Kelly, or prosecute the Turner brothers."

Derek nodded, making an effort to push his anger aside. "Yeah, well." He gave a hollow chuckle. "What you doin' 007, schoolin me?"

She smirked. "Well, don't be needin' it, cupcake." They shared a smile, then Pearce clapped his shoulder. "Come on, let's get waist deep in human horror and catch these bastards."

0o0

"Mason says his brother sometimes sleeps on the couch in the living room," Reid told him. "Or disappears for days at a time."

Aaron frowned. Watching over the entire operation could distract you from the micro-focus that you needed to peel back the layers of an unsub, which was why he had delegated Lucas Turner to Reid. Micro-focus was kind of his thing.

"He doesn't have a room?"

"Not according to Mason," said Reid, wearing an expression that suggested he believed that man's words about as much as Rossi did – but most lies were based on small truths. You had to be prepared to mine for them.

Was Mason describing the behaviour of a dangerous psychotic, or was Lucas so afraid of his paraplegic brother that he had allowed himself to be largely erased from the farmhouse? Everybody needed a place that was just their own – and it must be here, somewhere.

"Keep looking around," he told him. "They've lived here their whole lives. There's gotta be something here that gives us an idea of who he is.

0o0

"You can't touch that, that is my personal property," Turner complained, as Rossi closed up the computer on the desk.

"Not anymore," he said, and something about the tone in her friend's voice sent a shiver up Penelope's spine.

The whole team, every one of them, was operating under a vast cloud of controlled rage. It was far more pronounced than she had ever felt it before, and they were covering it well, not letting it get in the way of their work, but Penelope knew them all well enough to see it. It was in the tightness at the corners of their eyes, the quirk of mouths and eyebrows, even the purposeful way they strode about, keeping the evidence collection ticking over.

It was making her antsy.

"I showed you the warrant," Bedwell reminded Turner.

"I have research on there," he went on, ignoring him. "Proprietary research. I helped you. I told you everything I know."

Penelope took the laptop, trying not to make eye contact with the man in the bed. She was no profiler, but sinister was rolling off him in waves; even without the way Rossi and Bedwell were looking at him, she would have wanted out of the farmhouse as fast as she could.

As it was, she had been allocated a place in the kitchen, which was the next room. She was reasonably sure Turner couldn't see her, but she could hear the conversation loud and clear, and there was something about having her back to the door that made the back of her neck feel extremely vulnerable. She resisted the compulsion to move the chair.

"If what you've told me is your total involvement, there shouldn't be anything on this computer that you don't want us to see," said Rossi.

"Do you need anything, Dave?" Bedwell asked.

"No," Rossi replied, and Penelope recognised the slightly arrogant, false interrogation tone from the time he'd had her pretend the team were in trouble**. "Me and Mason are having a great time. Aren't we, Mason?"

Penelope started setting up her kit on the kitchen table, unable to prevent herself eavesdropping. She heard Bedwell let himself out and close the door behind him.

"Once I saw my brother strangle a man so forcefully, blood dripped from his eye sockets," said Turner, in a dead voice.

Penelope closed her eyes. It was an obvious attempt at dissembling, even to her. He was trying to distract them with a level of horror most would turn away from. Really, she ought to stick her headphones in and drown him out, but something stopped her. Something told her that this was a thing she had to witness. A kind of solidarity with Rossi, at the very least.

"I'm not talking petechia," Turner continued, apparently enjoying having an audience. "Actual dripping blood."

Rossi was silent, just letting him talk.

"He can be very volatile… when things don't go his way."

"Are you trying to scare me?" Rossi asked, managing to sound both calm and bored.

"I'm just saying," Mason said, and Penelope was weirdly reminded of a crappy ex-boyfriend who had always wanted to impress people by being shocking. "You better hurry up and find that girl, or… he's gonna tear her to pieces."

Penelope shoved the USB connector into the port with more force than was strictly necessary.

You sound so upset about that, she thought scathingly.

0o0

He followed the sound of rats to the upper portion of the second barn. This one was a place for animals and cars, and seemed almost serene in comparison to the first. In the other, a localised swarm of forensic technicians were processing a large range of vicious implements and jars that looked suspiciously like they were full of gore, under the watchful gaze of Grace, who had waved him past with a look that said, 'I know I don't have to tell you out loud, but you fuck up my crime scene and you're sleeping alone from now on'.

Spencer shared a private smile with one of the rats. It was a weird sort of place and time to think your girlfriend was adorable, but that was just who they were. He hauled himself the rest of the way up the ladder, ignoring the swell of germaphobia that accompanied the filth of the upper barn.

He looked around. There were no mysterious jars of fluid up here, or farmyard things that could be used as weapons. Just rats in a cage (too big to be store bought pets, but fat and well-fed, and provided with a water bowl), a collection of clothes large enough to match Lucas Turner's description (in various stages of dirty), and a mattress. It was a forlorn space, but curiously bereft of horror, in a way the farmhouse (which on the surface was merely a little dreary) really wasn't. Someone – presumably Lucas – has strung fairy lights across the far end of the barn. There were pictures tacked up there. The kind a child might draw.

Lucas must have spent a reasonable amount of time in this space, above it all – and away from his brother's influence.

On the table below the pictures were a lantern, a stack of drawing paper and a box of worn-down crayons. An elderly teddy bear sat sentinel on the desk, watching over it like a talisman. Next to it was a jar of buttons.

The mattress on the floor was unmade, but clearly regularly slept in. Everything was covered in stalks of yellow straw.

Beginning to draw his own conclusions about the owner of these items, Spencer peered at the pictures. They were crudely drawn, with sweeping strokes and inaccurate shapes, and none of the colours stayed within the lines the artist had set down. They were mostly of the barn, or the pigs, or of happy looking figures – one step up from stick men – holding hands.

On every single one of the pictures was an eye. Not in a face, just floating somewhere in the top of the picture. Big and wide and blue, and somehow menacing.

Spencer picked out an image in vibrant orange of someone in a hospital bed – presumably Mason Turner. Or was it one of the victims? Perhaps what he had taken for a bed was the well-used slaughter table in the main barn below. There was a large, red cross through the person. On this one, the eye was huge, taking up much of the top third of the page.

Well, that's suggestive, he thought.

0o0

*See Moments of Grace – Season Four, Act Six: The Song of the Sharks, Chapters 13-25.

**See Moments of Grace – Season Four, Act Two: A Glass Darkly, Chapter 13.