AUTHOR: LosingInTranslation (losingntrnslatn, Jennifer)
DISCLAIMER: Don't own anything associated with the show… I just like playing with the characters in it from time to time. Dance Monkeys! Dance!
RATING: T - Teen
SPOILERS: Through US Aired Episodes of Season 4
WORD COUNT: 2562
SUMMARY: The BAU is asked to investigate an unusual missing persons case that has a very personal connection to the team.

A/N: This is one of those monster epics I am so well know for in the CSI fandom. It is completely written and I am going through the edits with my betas as quickly as possible. There are a total of nine chapters, and I will post them as I complete the edits. It is most definitely a case file fic, with a lot of interaction between the entire team. I hope you enjoy it.

REVIEWS: Reviews are the way I know if people are enjoying the work or not. So, if you leave one, THANKS! And if not, I hope you found at least a little something to brighten your day, and thanks for taking the time to read.

Chapter 6

Too much time in the cramped quarters of the FBI field service van with the tech team's supervisor breathing down her neck finally took its toll on Penelope's nerves. Completely taking over the tech room at the Coeur D'Alene field office helped a little, but she decided nothing was really going to get better until they found Agent Gideon.

Before leaving the compound, Penelope scanned all of the print cards into the computer and sent them off to the print analysis unit at Quantico to run them through all the databases. In the meantime, she was keeping herself busy tracking the money trail. Missing person cases, especially when the person disappeared themselves, always came down to the money.

The money was easy to follow, when you knew what you were doing. And no one knew that better than Penelope Garcia. She tracked down the Mexican accounts Gideon shared with his son, the Bahamian bank the money from his U.S. accounts was transferred into, and even the dummy corporate account at the credit union in Spokane from which Steven Degault paid his expenses. Penelope was actually impressed with the way Gideon had hidden his money, and that rarely happened for her.

The frustrating part of the whole exercise was waiting for the evidence to be processed, Penelope was used to instant information gratification, and patience was not a word in her vocabulary. Penelope hated waiting for anything. She had already gone so far as to get Kevin to use his CIA contacts to help speed up the DNA analysis, but she was still left waiting for something to pop.

She was rescued from the boredom by the sound of an incoming call. A quick check of the caller ID made her smile. "You have reached the Queen of Information, speak and you shall be heard. Talk dirty and you'll also get an answer."

"I don't know any other way to talk to a hot mama such as yourself." There was no doubt about it; Derek Morgan was good for a girl's ego.

"Just for that, you get two questions answered. Talk to me, sweet stuff."

"We just got done at the compound, and we're on our way to meet up with Rossi and Prentiss." She could hear Reid and Hotch in the background and knew that she was once again on speakerphone.

"This is sounding decidedly un-naughty… What's up, buttercup?" Penelope knew when it was time to get down to business.

"Have you had any luck with those unidentified prints?"

"Oh, that's a question you didn't want to ask if you were looking for good news."

Reid jumped into the conversation with disbelief. "How is that possible? There were no matches at all?"

"I said no such thing, Junior Ranger, but so far, everything else has come back to Gideon, the daughter-in-law or the cops." Her caller ID chirped with an incoming call. "Hold on, more subjects for the Queen."

Penelope clicked the call from Agent Rossi's phone into a conference with the others. "The Queen of Information will take your call. Speak, and share your knowledge with her minions."

"Hey, Penelope." It was Emily's voice, which made Penelope smile. They must have mixed up their phones again. "We just finished our interviews in the town and wanted to check in with you for a status update."

"As I was just informing the delightful agents Hotchner, Morgan and Reid… Wow, that sounds like a bad ass law firm, doesn't it?" Penelope used a split second to conjure up that scenario in her head and then got back down to business. "So, yeah, the only prints to match up are the cops, Gideon's and the daughter-in-law's. But I still have some that are coming up empty. I have them running on two more databases, but so far they're still the guest star to be named later." Penelope checked both monitors to see if anything had popped yet, but to no avail. "You don't happen to have a suspect to compare them with, do you?"

"Sadly, no, but Rossi and Prentiss got a description from the locals about a fine young honey that started showing her face a while back. She hasn't been seen since Gideon did his latest vanishing act." Derek always had a way with words, but Penelope had no time to play with him.

"Seriously?" Penelope was shocked to hear that. "Wow, I never thought Gideon would be swimming in the kiddie pool."

"I wouldn't go that far. They just said she was younger, probably mid-thirties." Emily sounded a little defensive, but Penelope just chalked it up to a little transference going on.

"Whatever…" Penelope quickly changed the subject. "What are your plans for food? Because I've been cooped up inside SUVs, vans and another analyst's room all freaking day and I need some social interaction and food that doesn't come out of a vending machine. Comprenez mes amours?"

"I'm feelin' ya, Baby Girl. Why don't you find us a nice quiet out of the way place we can meet up and talk this thing out." Derek's amused laughter filtered in through her headset, instantly bringing a smile to her face.

"Already done, my fine muscled friend… Sending the coordinates to your GPS as we speak." With several quick keystrokes, Penelope fed the address into the navigation computers and activated the directions from their current locations.

She had just enough time to load everything they needed into her FBI issue laptop before the troops arrived. And the time she spent waiting for the transfer could be used having a nice little private chat with Kevin on her own laptop.

Penelope arrived at the restaurant ahead of the team and secured the back room for the group. While nothing in the case had reached the top of the squick meter yet, there was no telling where the conversation could go, and it was better for the other patrons not to be subjected to it.

The waiter and the manager had just finished rearranging the tables and chairs when Derek came strutting into the room. "When I said quiet and out of the way, I wasn't expecting anything like this."

His arms outstretched, gesturing at the private room brought a wicked smile to her face. "Hey, you know I treat my baby right."

They all filed in after that, with Emily and Rossi curiously last to the restaurant. Penelope checked her watch and asked, "What took you so long? By my calculations you should have been here first?"

Rossi very quickly dismissed her question. "Had to drop the interview recordings off at the field office first, and then stopped for fuel." Everyone nodded at his explanation as the two took seats at opposite ends of the table and their conversations soon filled with small talk as they waited.

Once the meal was under way, they started talking out the case. Penelope was always surprised by the way each of their minds worked. Reid and Hotchner were methodical and pragmatic, while Derek did his best to put himself in the mind of the unsub. J.J. always sat back and listened to the whole thing, taking it in, and only speaking up when she had a question, which often helped everyone see it from a different angle. Emily was more of a holistic investigator; observing, learning, turning it all over in her mind, playing the devil's advocate, until she finally had the answer she needed to be able to act, because action was what she wanted more than anything. Penelope was still trying to understand Rossi, but even she could see that he was the most well-rounded agent in the whole BAU. And yet, though he was getting better, he was still handicapped by falling back into his reliance on the old ways, and his sometimes desperate need to do things on his own.

These incredibly diverse people, these wonderful minds, these brave souls, they were more than her co-workers. As they sat around the tables, chewing on the facts as much as the food, struggling to find the answers to Jason Gideon's second vanishing act, Penelope truly understood who these people really were.

They were her family.

"Okay, we've got two very distinct homes. One has been practically sterilized from all traces of human existence, save for Reid's little discovery and some random household paperwork the field unit pulled from the office." Emily worked through her recap.

"A bunker that screams Gideon on the inside, but the outside is right out of Patriots-R-Us Surplus." Morgan injected his brand of analysis into the mix. "And all of his things left in place, like he just went out for a stroll in the woods."

Rossi picked up from there. "A town that barely saw the man. His monthly trips to the post office and general store were so uneventful we couldn't even get a consistent description from the store's owners."

"I found it curious that there were prints left on the outside of the main house, but everything on the inside was scrubbed down with an almost clinical efficiency. And yet, the bunker clearly had not undergone any kind of rigorous cleaning." Reid began to drone through his own analysis, and Penelope distracted herself with the latest results streaming into her computer from the field lab.

"It was almost as though the first house had been vacated some time ago, and all activity moved to the bunker. You can actually see the patched holes in the wall of the main house where the bookcases used to stand. Like Gideon was methodically pulling himself away from the last vestiges of civilization. The excessive amount of security is a secondary indicator of his degradation into a state of aberrant paranoia."

J.J. asked, "If that's the secondary, then what's the primary indicator?"

"The great lengths he went to in order to completely disappear from sight. Breaking the promise to his son was the final step in that process." The despair in Reid's voice was evident to everyone around the table.

"Reid…do you really think Gideon just walked away?" Derek asked, his voice heavy with concern.

"I think the evidence and his past behavior very clearly indicate that conclusion, don't you?" Reid's face was carefully blank as he delivered his final analysis.

"Let's not forget that there is an unidentified woman, described only as white, though possibly Hispanic, attractive with long dark hair. She was only seen once or twice by each person and by no one in the months following Jason's disappearance." Hotch was all business.

"Where does the unidentified woman or the hair samples fit into your theory?" Rossi was doing his best to counter Reid's argument.

"What hair samples?" The surprise in Reid's face made everyone cringe as they turned to Hotch.

"I was waiting until the analysis could be performed…" Hotch swallowed hard as he went on to explain the evidence to Reid. "The field unit found several samples of hair inconsistent with any known person."

"Where were they found?" Reid was not about to let him off easy.

"They were, ah… They were found primarily in the bedroom, Reid." Reid's face shifted from shock, to disbelief, to understanding, all in the blink of an eye.

Eventually Derek noticed that Penelope was not really paying attention to the rest of them, and he used the opportunity to deflect the attention away from Reid. "What's got all your attention over there, Baby Girl?"

Penelope shook her head as she continued to stare at the still unidentified prints. "These prints, they just aren't adding up."

Derek wiped his mouth with the napkin before asking, "What's wrong with them?"

"Well, the whorls, it's like they've been jumbled up, or altered somehow."

Reid slipped on his glasses and moved closer to her when he asked, "How do you mean?"

"Well, look…" She enlarged the most distinctive print one hundred times and flipped the screen around for everyone to see. At that level of magnification, even Mr. Magoo could see what she was talking about. "Can you see the lines? It's like they're cutting through the ridge detail on this one."

"That's scarring." Emily looked a little closer and then it appeared as though a light bulb went on over her head. "Garcia, have the print lab isolate the sections between those scars and run them as partial prints, instead of as a whole."

When everyone looked to her clarification, she only shrugged and answered, "My mother was posted to eastern Europe for a while… It's a common trick in the crime rings there. Slicing up their finger pads repeatedly in order to avoid a print match. Interpol and the local authorities finally figured out that if they ran the pieces of the prints as partials, they got a hit every time."

"Agent Prentiss gets a gold star for that one!" Penelope immediately isolated several significant portions of the unidentified prints and sent them back to her friends at Langley to run them through the system on a high priority scan. "If this works… We should have an answer back in the next hour, max."

The team got back to their dinners and the post mortem for the day, forgetting all about the print results for a while. Usually when someone said they would get results in an hour, everyone knew that really meant an hour in government time, which could equal three or four hours in real time.

Just as Hotch reached across the table for the check, Penelope's computer and his phone went off in sequence. She looked at the screen and found only a security warning for an administrative password request. Penelope looked up from the screen, "Um… This can't be good, huh?"

Hotch looked at the display screen on his phone and narrowed his gaze. "No, it can't."

He flipped open the phone. "SSA Hotchner… Yes, Ma'am… No, I understand… I have a laptop right here…" He gestured for Penelope to get ready to enter a code. "Capital echo, one, five, niner, alpha, delta, ampersand, bravo, two, zero."

After entering the code precisely as Hotch called it out, Penelope found another administrative screen glaring at her. "Now where?"

"Secure priority message center…" As she clicked on the screen she found a message titled "Priority Flag Hit - Internal Investigation #SSA-EG0023-BAU." Hotch was standing over her shoulder and she heard him say, "That's the one, Garcia. Would you excuse me, please?"

Penelope did her best to hop out of the way and Hotch swiftly slid into her seat to view the new message. After a few more keystrokes on her computer, he was finally bringing the message into view. For a moment she thought she needed to turn away from the screen, but then he asked her to look closer. "Come in here… They've ID'd the partials, and the ID came back to a high-priority flagged entry." He turned to Penelope with a stern expression on his face as he explained, "A file that was flagged by you, for me."

A huge lump rose in Penelope's throat, because she knew there were only two files Hotch had ever asked her to flag. One was Agent Gideon, and the other…

He twisted the screen around to show everyone else as the file came into view. With a gasp, she heard the name spoken softly in several voices: "Elle."