With A Whimper
A/N: Thank you very much to all who placed this on favourite/alerts lists, and most especially thank you to all who left a review! It's so nice to hear opinions!
I'm not the biggest fan of this chapter, but I felt it necessary to the story. Don't worry; I shan't drag on the profile for ten chapters (I hate that); I just wanted you to see some background into Elle's life and what led her to this.
One week earlier
"We've been called in by the Portland Police Bureau after two men were shot to death in the past month: Anthony Dwyer, aged forty five, and Samuel Monteith, thirty seven. Both were shot at night in the gardens out the front of their homes and were located quickly: Monteith by his neighbour and Dwyer by his seventeen year old daughter."
"What makes them think these aren't just isolated incidents?" Rossi asked, flicking through the pictures on his iPad.
"Both were shot three times in the chest with an unidentifiable nine millimetre handgun," Garcia said, "but apart from that… Detective Claire Owens, the lead detective on the case, recently transferred from Boise Police Department in Idaho, and she dealt with another murder with the same MO shortly before she left. They never found the perpetrator."
"And so they widened the search," continued Morgan, having read the information from his tablet. "Nineteen people dead and seven wounded in unsolved incidents across twelve states over the past two years? How did nobody spot this before now?"
"Well, he's getting sloppy now," Hotch murmured. "These are the first murders committed within the same jurisdiction as each other. It's likely that either the unsub is still in Portland or else is somewhere close by. We need to move now. Wheels up in thirty."
"There are three thousand four hundred and forty five reported cases of violent crime annually in Portland, Oregon, with twenty six murders a year," recited Reid as they sat down on the plane. Nobody asked him how or why he knew that; they were more than used to his facts. It would have been more surprising if the team had made it to take off without any fact-spurting at all.
"So there is always a chance one of the murders was the work of a copycat, or just a coincidence," Morgan mused.
"I doubt it," JJ said. "There hasn't been any media coverage of the murders. Simple shootings… they aren't as interesting as torture and mutilation."
"We need to assume it wasn't simple coincidence," Hotch said. "The killer is clearly highly methodical; he's managed to kill nineteen people and injure seven without even being detected. He could be tired of not being recognised and is beginning to push his limits, or else he's just tired of trying so hard. Either way he's devolving, and we need to catch him before he goes down in a rain of bullets. Morgan, go to the crime scene. Find out exactly where the unsub was shooting from and see if there's any way we can get witnesses. Rossi, Prentiss; talk to the families – try and find out if the unsub was stalking the victims beforehand or if he just saw them and decided to pull out a gun. JJ, you and I go through the files of past victims; we'll do victimology. Reid, do a geographic profile. This unsub is highly mobile. We need to find him before he travels somewhere else and finds a new pool of victims."
The police station was busy and crowded, and after greeting the team and showing them to a conference room in which they could set up, the local police interacted little, preferring to leave the agents to their work. The lead detective was at the crime scene with Morgan, and would be catching up with them later.
"Ohio, Connecticut, Texas, Oklahoma, Colorado, Maine, North Dakota, California, Utah, South Carolina, Massachusetts and now Oregon… that's all over the place," Reid muttered to himself as he pored over a map of the United States, putting pins in the places the shootings had occurred.
"What?" JJ asked, having missed what Reid had said so quietly.
Reid frowned. "He's jumping all over the place. He shoots all the victims from one state while he's there; he doesn't double back for more, but aside from that the places seem completely random and out of order. It's one thing attacking someone in Texas and then travelling to Oklahoma to kill the next person, but following Massachusetts with Oregon… that makes no geographical sense."
"So he probably has a list he has to follow in order, regardless of inconvenience," Hotch said. "That fits in with the methodical profile."
"Well, yes, but he never doubles back over a state," Reid continued. "The unsub killed Michael Bower in San Francisco, followed immediately by Harry Tench in Los Angeles and then injuring Cole Bradbury in San Diego… if he were following a list of targets across the country, why would they be completely out of order by the states visited, but in order for the targets within a specific state? Geographically speaking, I mean." Hotch and JJ said nothing, the frowns on their faces now matching Reid's. "It also tells us he doesn't have a steady job, but he does have significant finances to back himself up. He could be working freelance, or perhaps have come from old money or have previously held a prestigious job for an extended period of time. It's too expensive to follow this travel plan for this period of time for the average person, no matter how much he skimped on things like motel rooms."
Hotch nodded. "Good work, Reid," he said. "Keep working on the local geographic profile; if he does have a residence in Portland I want to know where it is. I'm going to call the Mexican Federal Police and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to see if this unsub has crossed the borders. He's clearly highly mobile and it doesn't look as though distances deter him from accomplishing his goal."
Hotch walked out of the room, and JJ barely had time to find her place on the file of Arthur Clemens before the phone in the middle of her table rang. Knowing who it would be, she hit the button for speakerphone and said, "Go, Garcia."
"Alright, my pretties, prepare to be astounded by my brilliance."
"Yes, you're absolutely radiant, Garcia," remarked JJ dryly. "What did you discover?"
"Well get this – of the total twenty six victims of this unsub, the first twenty three were all either tried for or linked to sex crimes. None of them were convicted; that's why it's not in any file, but as we all know I can discover things that have been lying in wait for centuries, untouched by any human hands."
"Well, we know he's devolving," said Reid. "Could be he used to be a vigilante, but then that got old and he began hunting people who had committed more personal slights."
"What kind of sex crimes, Garcia?" JJ asked. "Rape, child molestation… what?"
"Mostly rape, it looks like. Seems there were a lot of victims who told the police but when push came to shove they couldn't handle the thought of a trial and backed out. There were a couple of rape cases where the guy was acquitted because of insufficient evidence or – and here I bemoan the state of our judicial system – because the woman was dressing provocatively or dancing with her attacker before it happened. Suppose they thought she was asking for it."
"What about child sex crimes?" Reid asked. "And of the victims who weren't linked to any sex crimes, did they have any record at all?"
"Slow down, hotshot. In answer to your first question: no, there were no child sex offenders; just adult men attacking adult women. And the later victims' files were all squeaky clean. Joshua Perkins was a cardiologist in a hospital in Boston, four kids and a wife; and your two Portland victims appeared to be just as innocent."
JJ nodded slowly. "Right, thanks Garcia," she said, and hung up the phone. "Hotch and I weren't up to Perkins' file," she told Reid. "But he worked in the healthcare system – so did Dwyer and Monteith, the last two victims. Since the killer is devolving and he's likely now attacking for personal slights, it's likely he works in the healthcare system."
"Excuse me," said a sudden voice from the doorway, and Reid and JJ looked over to see a woman in her early forties, with dark hair and eyes and a small stature, walking in through the plain glass door. "I'm Claire Owens, the lead detective on the case. I'm afraid a proper introduction is going to have to wait, though. They just found another body."
"We believe our unsub is a white male between the ages of thirty five and fifty," Hotch said, addressing the room full of police officers in chairs, sitting on desks, or standing taking notes. "He was previously a vigilante with obsessive compulsive tendencies, which were what made him travel far to commit murders in a specific order all across the country. He went after men who had been linked to, but never convicted for sex crimes against adult women, which leads us to believe he knew somebody – possibly a spouse – who was raped and whose attacker was not brought to justice. He is not currently married: it is more than likely his spouse, unable to cope with the trauma of a sexual assault, left him two years ago, when the killings started."
"He previously held a higher paying job, which enabled him to travel over long distances and for long periods of time without having to worry for funds," continued Prentiss, "however his funds have almost dried up. He has abandoned his vigilante motives of attacking sexual predators and is now going after men in the medical profession. This leads us to believe he now holds a job in the medical field himself, and that these later victims have delivered him a personal or professional slight recently. While we said he had previously held a high paying job, don't assume this was in the medical profession. He would likely have changed careers, and he now appears to be low in the corporate hierarchy; a nurse or an orderly, perhaps. His anger at his newly lowered paycheck and his lack of professional superiority feed into his anger, amplifying the slights paid to him by individuals such as Joshua Perkins, Anthony Dwyer and Samuel Monteith and allowing him to kill these individuals in retribution for this slight."
"His latest victim, Cory Harrison, was a twenty eight year old accountant," said Morgan. "He, too, was innocent of any sexual misconduct. This change in victimology tells us the unsub knew him personally, and he probably resides in the area surrounding Tanasbourne, here in Portland. This also definitively tells us he has stopped travelling. He will continue to remain in Portland and kill citizens of the city until he is caught, and with each day that goes by, his fuse grows shorter, and the body count will rise. It's imperative we catch him soon."
"'Scuse me," interrupted one of the officers, "but can't you tell what hospital he's working in if he's killing his colleagues?"
"All three of those victims in the medical field worked in different hospitals," Reid explained. "It's impossible to come up with a geographic profile that tells us with any certainty where he works with that little data, particularly since one of the victims was from Boston."
"And how d'you know it's a man?" another officer asked. "Female nurses are more common, and it could just be a woman who got raped and wanted revenge."
"It could," said Rossi, "but female serial killers are extremely rare, and when they do show up they tend to use less messy ways of killing a person, like poison. Our unsub shot each and every victim three times in the chest. A female shooter would more likely shoot once before turning away from what she had done. This signature of three means she had to watch the first bullets impacting with the body as she continued to shoot. A female would not do this, much less twenty seven times over."
"He distances himself from the victims by using a gun, and he leaves the body where it lies after the victim has been wounded. He does not even check to see if he's dead," JJ said. "He also does it under cover of night, in the victim's yard. This tells us that he would like to hurt the victims in their home, but he is unable to enter there, perhaps for respect of the family or the sanctity of a home. He is able to talk the victims out of their homes, at least to the front yard. It's likely he lacks confidence amongst large crowds, and dislikes public speaking."
"The unsub may also have problems with a depressive substance, such as alcohol or an opioid," Hotch added. "Keep your eyes open. The unsub will strike again soon, at night, and we have a fairly good idea of the where. Hopefully we'll catch him before any more harm is done."
Their big break in the case came two days later.
Hotch had gotten the phone call from Detective Owens that a shooting had been reported outside a bar late at night, when he and the rest of his team had been sleeping. Three bullets to the chest, just like all the previous victims, except this time there had been two victims. The shooting hadn't been outside a home; it had been in a street. This break in MO was a terrible mistake on behalf of the unsub, and it was possible there were witnesses besides the two who had been shot.
Hotch jumped out of bed, pulling on his clothes as fast as he could and going to wake the others.
The two victims had been Roger Davidson, twenty seven, and Peter Faulkner, twenty five. Faulkner had taken a bullet straight to the heart and was pronounced DOA, while Davidson had been holding on when the ambulance arrived. He had been in a bad way; anybody would be after taking three bullets to the chest, but hopefully he would continue to survive past surgery.
But despite the sadness, the team could scarcely believe their luck. The unsub had made a fatal mistake. Davidson and Faulkner had been at the bar with two other friends, who were now being interviewed.
"Is there anyone the two of your friends talked to last night?" Morgan was asking. "Maybe someone they might have upset?"
Seth Goodwin and Travis Yates both shrugged. "Not really," said Goodwin. "They're nice people. They were trying to pick up a girl – we all were – so they might have accidentally upset a boyfriend; but apart from that I don't know."
"They were trying to pick up a girl?" Morgan repeated, eyebrows raised.
"Yeah," Yates interjected. "There was this one girl they left with – was she killed too?"
Prentiss, who had been silently standing next to Morgan until this point, stepped in. "Can you tell us what she looked like?" she asked.
"Kinda," said Yates. "I wasn't really concentrating that hard. She looked pretty hot, though, for an older woman."
"Older?" prompted Morgan, barely able to contain his excitement.
"She was probably in her late thirties," estimated Goodwin. "They struck out on the younger girls, so they approached this woman. She was sitting at the end of the bar. She was curvy, but not overweight. Nice boobs. Hispanic, I thought; though I didn't get a real good look – she could have been Native American."
"What did she do with your friends?" Prentiss asked.
"They chatted some," explained Goodwin, "then I assume she must have said she had a friend outside, because they're not the type of guys to go for a threesome. She left with them. Do you think she had a boyfriend who did this?"
Morgan ignored the question. "Do you think you can sit down with a police artist and get a sketch of her?"
The boys nodded, and, without waiting for Prentiss, Morgan turned around and hurried back to Hotch. "Hotch – our unsub is a woman."
A/N: I don't really like this chapter to be honest. But next chapter, they begin to close in on the killer. I promise excitement!
To motivate me to write quickly, please leave a review! All comments are appreciated!