Chapter 2: Team Work

The panic was back again, clawing at the inside of his throat, making it burn and sting and he struggled to expand his lungs and pull air through his constricted throat, causing it to spasm painfully.

His hands tightened on the edge of the counter and turned his knuckles white. It was currently the only thing keeping him upright.

He has her. He has her.

Her terrified screams echoed in his head.

'SPENCER!'

"Spence?"

He peeled his eyes open when JJ's soft voice reached his ears and he felt one of her tiny hands on his arm.

"I can't breathe." he confessed, trying again to pull air into his lungs. He was starting to feel dizzy.

She grabbed both his hands at once and turned him around to face her so that his back was pressed into the edge of the counter.

"Spence, we're going to help you. " she said calmly, her voice holding an edge of promise to it. "You have an expert team of people by your side who are the best at what they do."

Her words of reason are what finally penetrated the fog of panic clouding his head. Scattered shards of thoughts, shattered by the silence of the line going dead in his ear, began to fall back into place, no longer cutting at his mind and allowing panic to bleed out.

A few calming breaths later and everything had slowed to a stop. His heart no longer pounded in his ears, allowing him to focus and he opened his eyes to see his whole team staring at him. Some looking worried, some looking confused, but all with an air of readiness about them.

They were prepared to hear his story and eager to get started on helping him finish it with a happy ending.

A sense of clarity overcame him them, the likes of which he had only felt a few times before. This is what he did. This was the one area where he could confidently say he was one of the best. He'd dealt with worse people than this scumbag and come out the victor.

He pushed a silent breath past his lips and started, his voice icy cold, snapping out from behind his teeth like a whip.

"Ok, here's the deal. Everyone knows I was having issues with severe migraines about six months ago and I'm sure everyone noticed when they miraculously stopped. This is wholly due to a geneticist named Maeve who's assistance and expertise I sought to try and put a stop to them. Over a span of six months we spoke regularly, strictly professional at first and on matters pertaining only to the issue of my migraines. After a while, however, our conversations gradually branched into more and more personal areas and it wasn't long before we both realized that..." he let the implication hang, confident that they understood what he had not said. "She confessed wanting to meet in person but..." he hesitated here for a second, used to thinking of the whole situation as top secret, "but there was a problem. She had a stalker."

Comprehension finally dawned on the faces of his teammates at the final piece of the puzzle.

"He's your stereotypical stalker. Threatening letters, love letters, letters of undying devotion and loyalty with a creepy amount of unjustified anger. The only thing that she said stood out was that he seemed to be pretty limited in the way he wrote to her. Like he had an underdevelloped vocabulary or something."

He placed his hands on his hips, biting his lip contemplatively.

"The last two months the letters started turning violent. He didn't understand why she wasn't answering him. He didn't understand why she didn't see what he was trying to show her. He became angry, threatening to kill her if she so much as left the house, believing that every time she did up until then that she'd been going to see some other guy." he sighed, "Then, three weeks ago, the letters and emails and phone calls just...stopped. I was concerned at first as, you all know as well as I, that when a stalker stops stalking it usually means he's reached his breaking point and is planning something drastic." He shook his head, "But as the days stretched into weeks and nothing happened and there was no sign of the guy anywhere, we both started to relax. I thought maybe he'd committed suicide as it seemed unlikely that he'd lose interest or switch focus to another person so abruptly."

"And now he has her." Morgan said quietly.

Reid nodded slowly. "And now he has her."

Hotch ran a hand over his face and folded his arms across his chest. "What do you know about this guy?"

"Almost nothing!" Reid snapped, angry at himself for not pushing Maeve harder to give him information about the guy. "I tried asking about him but she was so reluctant to tell me anything. She was scared he might find out about me." he shook his head. "His voice sounded like a grown man's. No accent. But there was something about the way he spoke. His choice of words suggested immaturity or naivety."

"A mental disorder maybe?"

Reid shook his head dismissively. "No. Not like that." he frowned as he thought back to his conversation, concentrating hard on how the man's voice had sounded, what words and syllables he had stressed and which one he hadn't. Where he speech had picked up or slowed down. His choice of words and...

Suddenly it hit him and he stared open mouthed at his team. "No...like he was talking to someone younger than him. Like he was talking down to me or like he thought I wouldn't understand what he was saying."

"So he thinks he's smarter than you." Blake said. "Purposefully dumbing down his words to a level that he thinks you're capable of understanding."

JJ frowned then. "Didn't you say that he was doing the same kind of thing when writing his letters to Maeve?"

Morgan nodded, "Ok, so he's confident, arrogant, aggressive and thinks he's the greatest thing since sliced bread. Classic narcissistic personality. But that doesn't explain why he would accommodate his speech as if everyone around him were somehow...children who wouldn't otherwise understand what he was saying. That suggest something deeper than a holier-than-thou complex."

Rossi, having been silent up until then, finally stepped in.

"It sounds like we might be looking at someone in psychosis, someone detached from reality. Not enough to be unable to function outside of an institution but enough to distort his perceptions of the people around him." he folded his arms across his chest, mirroring Hotch's tense posture. "If he's gone through a psychotic break, maybe we can start by looking for men with past careers that involved dealing with people of a young age or a less than stellar IQ score. Like teachers, psychologists and doctors."

"That's still a lot of people." Morgan said.

"Not if I get Garcia to narrow it down to people who have documented interactions with Geneticists in Virginia." Reid said, already jogging towards the tech analyst's office.

He felt a small flame of hope ignite amongst the twisting, thorny vines tearing at his insides. The Unsub would have to of had initial contact with Maeve at some point, and it would have had to be scheduled and documented.

"Garcia!" He nearly shouted in his excitement, bursting through her door without knocking.

She looked startled at his dramatic entrance but she didn't have time to ask the obvious question that was posed on her lips before Reid started talking so fast it was hard for her to keep up.

"I need you to look up men in Virginia who used to be teachers, doctors or psychologists but who either quit or were let go within the last year. Specific focus on those who had multiple trips to either a specialist of some kind or a doctor. Once you pull all those up, cross reference them with those who have had one or more trips to a geneticist."

He began to pace as she typed furiously on her keyboard, her fingers a mere blur as they flew.

"If the profile is correct then the Unsub could have an unstable mental past, whether it be with his family members or with himself, so it is likely he'll have had a few trips to some kind of doctor. If he knows Maeve then he might have been sent there by one of his doctors. If that is the case then it will have been documented." he paused, considering the other option with distaste, "Unless of course they randomly met in a coffee shop somewhere, then we're back to square one."

"Give me time, Junior G man and you shall have the answers that you seek." Garcia mumbled distractedly.

He watched with bated breath as boxes with pictures and dialogue popped in and out of existence on several different monitors at once, her head swivelling this way and that to catch the information in a fraction of a second before it disappeared before her eyes, her hands never slowing in their flurry across the keyboard in her lap.

After a few more seconds of the dizzying display of organized chaos, everything stilled and Garcia swiveled in her chair to look at him, the faces of four men filling her main monitor behind her head.

"Ok Reid, we have Aaron Caldwick, Robert Casey, Thomas Freeman and Carlos Cormier. I am printing off their info and their relevancy to the search parameters you set for me as we speak!" She finished with a smile, standing to make her way to the printer across the room.

She gathered the generous pile of papers in her hand and handed them over to Reid, who took them and then proceeded to wrap his arms around her shoulders in a grateful hug.

"You're as much of a genius as I am Garcia." He pulled away, keeping his hand on her shoulder as he looked her in the eye. "Maybe more."

She looked worried now, her smile having vanished at the uncharacteristic hug. "Reid, what's going on? Is everything ok?"

He hesitated before replying with "Everything is fine." like he normally would, because that would be a lie.

"No. Things are a mess for me right now. In a big way." he smiled sadly at her panicked look, "But I'm going to try and make it right again."

She nodded, her mouth hanging open and tears gathering in her eyes. She knew it must have been bad. If Reid, of all people, was admitting to the urgency of the situation, then it must be really awful.

She nodded shakily, making beads in her hair clack together. "Ok. Ok, I will be right here if you need me. You need anything, you call me right away, understand?"

"Thanks Garcia."

He fled the office, the papers in hand, and checked his watch as he reentered the bullpen. Eighteen minutes had passed since the line went dead on his phone.

"What do we got?" Morgan called as soon as he rounded the corner. The team had migrated back to the kitchenette and stood around the large table, all of them with their arms crossed tensely, following Reid's progress across the room.

He sorted the papers on the table into four piles, one for each man. He picked up the first and began reading out loud.

"Aaron Caldwick. Thirty two year old caucasian male." The man looked dirty and this photo was clearly a mug shot. The man was already grey, his hair and beard disheveled and unkempt looking. He quickly scanned through the file for pertinent information. "His mother was committed to a mental hospital in 1998 and was later diagnosed with a slew of disorders including schizophrenia and later dementia before she died in 2003. Suicide. Caldwick was in and out of Juvi all through his teenage years but seemed to smarted up after that. He finished highschool with outstanding grades and then went on to university to get his PhD in Psychology and...was arrested in 2010 for assault, which he claims was self defence because," he frowned, re-reading the text to make sure he'd read it right, "because he claimed the assailant was a vampire trying to turn him."

Rossi cocked an eyebrow, "That doesn't sound like our guy. He seems way too out of touch with reality to be someone who could plan carefully enough to stalk someone without getting caught."

Reid nodded in agreement, scanning the rest of the file in seconds. "Says his license was revoked after the charges and he saw many different doctors before the incident and many after it, . Was admitted once, by himself, but then release three months later. He was scheduled to see a geneticist once in 2011 but it says he never showed to the appointment or to any thereafter. His girlfriend at the time filed a missing persons report around the same time but he has yet to be found." he tossed the papers aside. "That's not him."

"Robert Casey. Thirty nine year old caucasian male. Mother and father were both teachers." He said, his eyes scanning quickly. "Both were killed in a car accident when he was eleven. He was well behaved all through the rest of his school years, average grades. Looks like he dropped off the grid between 1992 and 1995 and then resurfaced in Colorado, where he enrolled in the University there. He then disappeared again from 1999, the year he graduated, to 2001 when he suddenly comes back on record as a teacher here in Virginia."

"Seriously?" Blake said in surprise. "Didn't they do a background check on the guy and see all those missing holes?"

Morgan smirked. "Not everyone is as cynical as us, Blake. Most people would see a gap in time like that and assume they eloped or when backpacking in Europe or something."

She still look disturbed but shrugged none the less.

Reid continued reading. "Casey's criminal record is clean but his medical ones are not. He's been on a cocktail of different medications for issues such as anxiety, depression and anger and he's seen three different psychologists and one specialist. The specialist recommended he see a geneticist and did up the paperwork. Maeve was the one who consulted with him." He said, keeping his tone even as his eyes traced her name on the paper. "They only met the one time and he continues to see the same specialist for ongoing issues. He's still employed at the same school."

He placed the papers neatly off to the side, officially designating it the 'maybe' pile.

"Ok, Thomas Freeman, forty eight year old caucasian male..." he trailed off frowning down at the documents in his hands, before tossing it on top of Caldwick's file. "That's not him."

"How do you know?" Hotch asked, looking down at the discarded file as if itching to grab it.

"Because he spent the last nine months in prison." He froze, his muscles locking when he realized what he'd just said, before snatching the papers back up and shuffling through them quickly.

The rest of his team watched quietly as his eyes snapped back and forth over the words, a hint of desperation in his gaze.

When he finally found what he was looking for he sat down, grateful that there happened to be a chair behind him.

"He was released in the same week Maeve stopped getting her letters from him."

The team exchanged glances and then JJ told him to read them the file quickly.

"His mother was a janitor and his father was a grade two teacher at the same school Thomas attended. In 1975 Thomas witnessed his father shoot his mother in the back of the head after they'd all sat down at the dinner table. He then shot and killed himself."

"Jesus." Morgan murmured.

"He bounced around foster homes but did surprisingly well in school. After he graduated he went on to become..." he sighed, "...he was a grade two teacher at the same school his father taught at. Everything was fine until about a year when he saw a doctor about a headache he'd had for a solid week that didn't seem to show any signs of going away. He had several MRI and and a CAT scans done with little success in finding the source of the headache. He was then refered to a psychologist when it was thought to be a psychosomatic issue." Reid swallowed, chilled by the similarity between what he'd been told by doctors for similar problems. "Not long after he started seeing the psychologist he was referred to Maeve. Nine months ago he was arrested, charged and sent to jail for attacking his psychologist when he refused to schedule another meeting with her at Thomas' insistence." He looked up, his lips pressed in a thin line. "Nine months ago is approximately when Maeve remembers the letters starting."

"That's gotta be him." Morgan said, Rossi nodding beside him.

"Like I said, he was released from prison in the same week that Maeve stopped getting his letters. He likely spent the two weeks after his release planning the abduction." Reid said, rolling his bottom lips between his teeth again, his legs already tensing in his anticipation to run for the SUV's in the parking garage. He continued speaking, more to himself than anything. "So all those letters saying he knew she was going out and that he was sitting in front of her house...all the threats to kill her if she left..." he shook his head. "They were blind threats. The only way he could try and control her from inside his cell."

He checked his watch. Thirty two minutes since the line went dead.

Hotch was already pulling out his cellphone, grabbing the page with Freeman's address on it. "I'll get the search warrant."

Rossi smoothed out his jacked and straightened his tie. "I'll make sure Strauss is on board. That way we shouldn't run into any...trouble."

Reid watched him walk away with a small frown, but he could not hold that train of thought for long before he started thinking about his next move.

JJ, Blake and Morgan had all scattered to their respective desks and offices to gather whatever it was that they thought they might need.

For his part, Reid made his way to his desk and the first thing he did was grab his gun, wondering if this feeling inside him might cause him to fire when he didn't have to.

As he holstered the weapon, Hotch and Rossi both strode back into the bullpen side by side and Hotch called from the doorway. "We've got our warrant, lets go!"

As Reid passed Morgan in the hall, he snatched the keys to the SUV out of the man's hand, glaring when the elder agent made a move to take them back.

His voice was cold as he stared Morgan in the eye, moving the keys out of reach. "I'm driving."

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