Chapter 5: Memory
4 hours later…
It had been hours since the profile briefing. The hospital had immediately taken the precautions the team had suggested and given them a list of all the nurses and orderlies. Now they were waiting for Garcia to figure out who on that list overlapped all of the cases.
Finally, she called them back via Reid's phone. He answered it, put her on speaker, and set his phone down on the table.
"Hi Garcia, you're on speakerphone…"
"I have spent the past few hours combing and cross checking that list of nurses and orderlies and let me tell you something… the doctors themselves might all be neatly compartmentalized and have their separate lists of patients all separate and in neat little boxes… but with these guys it's a whole different story, you know who overlaps all of these cases on that list? I'll tell you who on that list overlaps with all the victims, Everyone. They're very orderly, pun intended, in the way they organize the doctors but everyone else is all over the place…Meaning that unless we find a stressor that I can search for via a deep background check we're not going to find the unsub this way… no leads on the mystery woman who used to be the little girl in the photograph either…"
"None?" Reid asked.
"Reid, the age parameters you gave me give us 10,000 possible matches… I'm gonna need a first name, more exact age, birthday, hometown, something else identifiable to narrow this down…"
"Have all of them gone to the Unsub's hospital?"
"Are we talking people who have gone there at one time or another or people who have gone there consistently?"
"Start with frequent flyers and work your way out from there…she knew to of our victims, and as young as they were, if it wasn't school it was probably something more like sharing a hospital or support group or something…" Morgan suggested.
"That still gets us 284 matches, any other ideas?" Garcia asked.
"Do any of them live in Chicago or Woodridge?" Reid asked.
"Surprisingly no…"
"Ok, how about in Illinois and surrounding states…?" JJ asked.
"That's still a hundred and fifty…"
"Are there any scheduled to have surgery at Hope Children's Hospital within the next month?" Reid asked.
"Reid you amaze me… there are only fifteen CHD survivors between the ages of twenty and twenty-five who are having surgery at that hospital in the next month… eight of whom are women… five of them are natural brunets… and oh, there's one here that's a super interesting hit…"
"Who is it?"
"Anastasia Blackthorn… she's a twenty-one year old junior at the University of Wisconsin Whitewater… she was born with three structural heart defects and left pulmonary artery stenosis…I don't know what that means…" Garcia told him.
"Pulmonary Artery Stenosis is a condition in which the artery is narrowed at birth to the extent of not allowing for the proper distribution of oxygenated blood… if left untreated the artery could have pinched off entirely, but I'm guessing it wasn't…" Reid said as if he was asking a question.
"You would be correct, she had a stent put in when she was five, it was expanded again when she was eleven, and it is set to be redone once again on Friday morning… Even better, she listed a certain someone by the name of Matthew Ethridge on her social media profile on a list of inspiring people, and if I use my age regression software to see what she would have looked like fifteen years ago when she was six, that's her, she's the little girl from the photograph…" Garcia replied happily.
"What's her cellphone number?" Morgan asked.
"I haven't found one yet, and her address is still listed as her parents' house, guys I'm not sure that she has one, not in her own name anyway…I can't even find a family plan under her parents' names… and we know from her online activity she's not a Luddite like the Good Dr. so what the heck is going on?" Garcia asked, sounding frustrated.
"Do her parents still have a landline by any chance?" Reid asked.
"Yes, they do and I've gotten their answering machine half a dozen times already… nobody's home at that house…" She told him.
"Hm… my guess is that she's at the university… I will say that even with the hospital basically on lockdown, it would still be less risky for this unsub to get to her there and make sure that something goes medically wrong. With her procedure less than a week away he might actually wait…" JJ said hopefully.
"Guys, it's late and we aren't going to find her by running ourselves into the ground… everybody should go to the hotel and get some sleep, we'll start fresh on this at six o'clock tomorrow morning unless we get some new information overnight…" Hotch ordered.
…
A half hour later, Reid was pacing the length of his hotel room, trying to make sense of it all, the killings, the haunting, the unsub… the room was an average single, plain, neutral color scheme, with what was probably the tackiest floral bedspread Reid had ever seen.
Matthew was there as always, sitting cross-legged on the bed.
"Why don't you just ask me what you wanna know? He asked.
Reid stopped in his tracks, that caught him by surprise.
"You speak English…?" he asked.
The child gave him a dubious look.
"Of course I do… also Latin…that's one of the good things about Catholic school…" the little boy replied.
"Why didn't you just speak English before then? It would have been easier…"
"'Cause… as a ghost I can only communicate indirectly with people who don't know who I was when I was alive… the barrier can be anything, language, silence, writing… it just can't be us verbally talking if we have the same first language… not until you figured out on your own who I was…" he explained.
"Matthew… I know you started haunting me, challenged me to solve your murder, because you were trying to protect James, sorry, you knew him as Bo… but… if that's the case… he's gone… he's on your side now… so why are you still here?" Reid asked.
"You know why. I asked you to solve my murder, you haven't yet… besides, Bo may be dead… but Ana's not…" Matthew reminded him.
"She's the unsub's next target, isn't she?" Reid asked, sure he already knew the answer.
Matthew nodded.
"I can't move on while my friends are still in danger, that's what ghosts are. We are the souls of those who should have passed on by now but couldn't; because there's something holding us here… I can't leave until the people I knew who are still alive are safe…" The little boy explained.
"Why did you choose me? I know you did, because I'm the only one who can see you… I just don't understand why…" Reid asked.
"The simple version…? You're the most open-minded of the people on your team I could have chosen… you were the most likely to see me for what I am and not assume that I was a figment of your imagination…here's the thing, I can only choose people who have seen The Gate, the doorway to the other side… That would be you, your boss, and computer girl… and they can't be anyone I used to know. I can communicate in very indirect ways, I can watch over Ana and my siblings, but I can't haunt them, I can't communicate with them even just like I did with you at first."
"Why can't you…?" Reid asked.
"Because this… this veil of separation from everyone you knew, is part of being dead… But that doesn't change anything. I'm not going anywhere until Ana's safe. I can't. She was like my big sister… she'd have died for me if given the chance. I'm already dead, but if I have to wait a little longer to move on so we can put this guy behind bars… I will…"
Reid nodded.
…
JJ was in the hallway outside of Reid's hotel room, she'd come to tell him that they'd gotten a late-night lead on the case after all and that Hotch wanted everyone back at the field office ASAP, when she heard him talking to someone. She couldn't hear exactly what he was saying, but something in her gut made her worry. It was after midnight here, which meant that it was after one in the morning in Virginia, it was unlikely that Maeve was still awake for him to talk to, would she? There had been something strange about his behavior the past week as well, he'd seemed…somehow on edge… like he was hiding something…
She knocked on the door.
"Spence… Anastasia Blackthorn was just reported missing by her mother…Hotch wants us all back at the field office…" She told him through the door.
He came out thirty seconds later.
"Spence, you ok?"
"Yeah… why wouldn't I be?" He asked.
JJ could tell that he was trying to appear calm, but there was an edge to his voice, like he was afraid that she'd noticed something she shouldn't. However, JJ had known him more than long enough to know he'd just shut down if she pressed the issue, so she pretended to believe him.
"How long as she been missing?" He asked.
"A neighbor said that he saw someone they didn't recognize come in through the garage door about eight-thirty, and saw the two of them drive off in her car around eight forty-five…" she replied.
"Make and model?" he asked.
"She drives a maroon, 2005 ford focus…" JJ answered.
"Leaving in her car was probably to ensure that the neighbors would assume she left willingly…what time did her mom call it in?" He asked.
"About an hour ago…"
"This unsub has never abducted one of his victims before, who knows how much time she as, we need to figure out where he's taking her and fast…"