Essential Listening: Black Clouds, Papa Roach
0o0
He practically had his head pressed against the door.
"Hi," said Grace, brightly, a couple of feet behind him.
The man jumped and smacked his head on the door to the police-half of the interrogation room. He had 'lawyer' written all over him.
Detective Griffiths opened the door, surprised to be confronted with a grumpy and slightly bruised member of the local legal fraternity.
"Are you doing the right thing?" the lawyer asked, annoyed.
"We're holding him for seventy-two hours," Griffiths told him.
The lawyer, who looked very much like he wanted to say something else, shook his head and, throwing Grace a foul look, strode off.
"What was that about?" Hotch asked, cocking an inquisitive eyebrow.
"Caught him eavesdropping, make him jump, he banged his head on the door," Grace summarised, with a shrug.
Morgan chuckled and Hotch tried not to join in.
"That sneaky –" Griffiths began, but Gideon waved him down.
"He's doin' his job," he told him.
Grace took her turn to peer through the one-way glass at their suspect.
"What would you do?" Hotch asked, after a moment.
The first, unhelpful, thought that came to mind was quickly squashed, because while Gideon's interminable pacing was irritating the hell out of her, the man thought better while moving at speed. It was one of the reasons his office back at Quantico was such a mess.
She expelled air through her lips, making a rushing noise.
"Get shots of his victims, put them up on a board and put it in there with him, just outside his field of vision," she suggested. "Might kick off some of the remorse he felt after the fact. If he's our guy he won't be able to take his eyes off it – might loosen him up a bit." She put her head to one side, contemplatively. "Could put up the torn up picture of his wife and daughter there, too, but stuck back together. That ought to rattle him."
"That's good," said Gideon, pausing mid-stride to watch their caged bird.
"I'll go get a board set up," said Griffiths, departing.
"You done that before?" Morgan asked.
"Once," Grace admitted. "Took about thirty minutes to get a confession. He burst into tears."
"Like the Mary Frances case, Georgia, 1976," said Gideon.
"It's where I got the idea," she nodded. "As Douglas said, everybody's got a rock."
The four agents were silent for a few minutes, watching Tubbs sleep and trying to think of a way to persuade him to talk before the obligatory seventy-two hours was up.
"I got a text from JJ," said Grace, after a while.
"They find anythin' at the security office?" Morgan asked.
"Just porn and the clothes he was wearing before going on duty."
"That won't help us much," Morgan grumbled.
"She said the campus is lighting up like Blackpool Tower," said Grace. "Everybody's out tonight."
"Kids," Hotch remarked. "They bounce back."
0o0o0o0
The horror on their faces said it all – the students of Arizona College felt betrayed. They had put their trust in the police and the FBI, those near-mystical stalwarts of TV crime, and they had said they'd caught the bad guy. Now another young woman was dead and Grace could feel the panic rising around them; sporadic arguments were breaking out between students and officers on the perimeter. They were small incidents for the moment, but she knew it wouldn't be long before it began to spread and cascade into a real problem.
It was one of the reasons that only Hotch had stayed back at the station, largely to fend off Flagstaff's answer to Clarence Darrow. They'd need to work quickly here, or what was left of the situation would get badly out of hand.
The young woman on the ground was familiar, which meant that either she had been in the library when she was questioning people in the library the day before (which seemed like ever so much longer ago than that) or she was one of Amy Deckerman's dorm-mates. She didn't like to think of those girls going through another loss so soon.
She had been bludgeoned, which ruled out the original UnSub, and stabbed rather half-heartedly. That, the lack of tazer marks and the fact that she hadn't been posed spoke strongly to the existence of a copycat.
It was doubtful whether any of the students would see it that way.
She sighed and jogged up the small rise to the road that overlooked the small, ornamental copse to try to make a gap in the students large enough for the rather redundant ambulance to come through. She supposed it was as good a medium as any to get the poor woman out of there – and the paramedics were doing quite a good job of herding students, which was like herding cats, only less fun.
She'd just convinced their duty manager (via radio) to let them stick around for a bit in case anything kicked off when another female student charged past and straight over to JJ, who seemed to be trying to calm her down.
Suddenly, it clicked: Grace realised that the angry young woman and the deceased had been the two Spencer and JJ had been talking to the day before. They were probably best friends. She started towards them at about the same time as Reid did, from below. Neither got there quickly enough to prevent JJ getting spat on.
"Oy!" Grace shouted, almost an echo of Reid's "Hey!"
Figuring that he would take care of JJ if needed, Grace took off after the angry friend, intercepting her at the entrance to the dorms and piloting her into the nearest empty room.
The young woman, who Grace seemed to remember was called Katy, demanded if she was going to be arrested.
"Of course not," Grace snapped at her. "You just found out your best friend was brutally murdered. But that doesn't give you the right to spit in someone's face."
"She told us you 'had a guy in custody'," she yelled.
Grace could even hear the quotation marks.
"And so we do," she said, more calmly. "The way your friend died is different to the earlier three murders in several key ways – which tells us that this was someone else."
"Someone else?" Katy demanded – it had shocked him out of some of her rage, at least. "Who would want to kill Alyssa?"
"That's a very good question," said Grace. "Perhaps you could help find out," she added, and managed not to stagger when Katy burst into tears and collapsed against her shoulder.
0o0o0o0
The station, as might be expected, was not currently a good place to be an FBI agent. The general feeling seemed to be that the BAU were all mouth and no trousers, and had plumped for the wrong guy. Even Morgan was beginning to doubt the profile. The team was grumpy and a little bit desperate. Though they were working hard to keep it from their colleagues, behind closed doors the frustration was really beginning to show.
"I can't believe we're actually thinking about letting Tubbs go," JJ huffed, still feeling keenly responsible for Alyssa's death.
"Seconded," said Grace. "He spent all last night staring at the pictures of his victims. Someone who wasn't involved wouldn't have been able to look at them."
"We haven't got a shred of evidence," Morgan reminded them. "Tubbs' lawyer's not gonna let him talk so there's no way to get a confession out of him.
"Well, we could still hold him for another forty-eight hours," she insisted.
"You can't hold a suspect indefinitely with no evidence," Morgan returned.
"Not indefinitely," said JJ and Grace in perfect time.
"Forty-eight hours," JJ continued. "It's enough time to clear the campus."
"And prove to the local PD that this really is a copycat," Grace put in.
"Can we please forget about Tubbs for a minute?" Gideon interrupted, frustrated. "Let's just say we have a copycat. Who we talkin' about?"
There was a moment where everyone rearranged their minds to face the new problem.
"The most common examples are the ones people don't always think of as copycats," said Reid. "Kids who commit school shootings, also teen suicides – they tend to come in clusters."
"Anger bombers, too," Grace added. "Out for their five minutes of fame."
"All three models – we're talking about an age range that's consistent with the campus," said Prentiss.
"School shootings fit the classic copycat model," said Gideon. "They want their own piece of the glory. They're competing."
"Okay, but that doesn't jive with whoever wrote this note," Morgan pointed out. "'He's innocent.' That's about freein' Tubbs, not tryin' to steal any credit."
"So, could Tubbs have a partner?" JJ theorised.
"Oh yeah, sure, that's possible," Morgan allowed, "but I think it's highly unlikely. I mean, come on, look at Tubbs – he's a loner, he's anti-social. He's not the partner type."
"Could be more like a groupie," Reid suggested. "After Kenneth Bianchi was arrested, he actually convinced a woman he hardly knew to attempt a murder so the police would think the Hillside Strangler was at large."
"Oh, come on, he's hardly charismatic enough for that," Grace scoffed. "He couldn't talk his way out of a paper bag – and he knows it. That's why he clammed up so fast."
"And Tubbs subdues his victims first," Emily argued. "He's not powerful. Not to mention the stabbing most likely means he's impotent."
"Groupie doesn' have to know that," said Gideon. "All they have to believe is that Tubbs answers some need inside them. Whoever wrote this definitely needs somethin' from Nathan Tubbs," he continued, studying the letter. "'I'm still out here.'"
There was an uncomfortable pause; Grace was the one to break it, much to her own surprise.
"I've got a bad feeling about this," she muttered.
"Would you stop sayin' that?" Morgan snapped.
Grace looked up, surprised, to find all her co-workers staring at her. She hadn't realised she'd spoken aloud.
"Sorry," she apologised, gruffly. "I've been awake too long. My brain-to-mouth filter has turned itself off."
0o0
"Hey, Grace?" Spencer asked, as the two of them glared at Nathan Tubb's departing back from inside the conference room.
"Mmm?"
"You know you have a bad feeling about this?"
"Yeah?"
"Is it a bad feeling like…" he lowered his voice, "like the bad feeling you had in Gideon's apartment, or –"
"No, just a common-or-garden-variety bad feeling."
"Oh," said Spencer, not sounding all that relieved. "Good."
Grace glanced at him. Neither of them had mentioned his rather abrupt introduction to the spirit world and Grace wasn't entirely sure he believed it had really happened.
"Why?" she asked. "Out of curiosity."
He grimaced as Tubbs was ushered out of the door.
"Because I've got a really bad feeling about this, too."
Grace nodded.
"And you want to – document this for scientific purposes?"
The question caught him for a moment, but then he gave her a tentative smile.
"Something like that."
Together they turned to the evidence table. Next time Nathan Tubbs was brought in, they would have enough to charge him.
0o0o0o0
Spencer watched the falling blossom, feeling utterly wretched.
Although technically both the serial killer and his copycat had been permanently taken out of circulation, their deaths had been pointless and preventable. They had both managed to evade justice for their crimes. It didn't seem fair.
He glanced at the agent beside him, in case her 'super powers' (as he was currently choosing to classify them) stretched to hearing the uncomfortable thoughts in his head, which he was absolutely certain should not be said aloud.
Since Grace appeared to be staring down at the scene with the same sort of pensive expression on her face which he imagined was painted over his, he supposed that they didn't.
"She chose the location for her end-game well," she observed, darkly.
They had both watched the CCTV footage over Hotch's shoulder as the groupie had intercepted Tubbs and led him to this quiet corner of the campus.
"Limited access," Spencer observed, glancing over the wall. "Only one entry or exit point."
Which was why Morgan and Emily hadn't been able to get there in time.
"She wanted poetry at the end, I suppose," said Grace.
They moved out of the way to let the EMTs carry the young woman's remains past them.
"Katy told us she was a fan of Slyvia Plath," he said, sadly. A though occurred to him and his eyes flicked up to her face. "Can you…?" he nodded after the stretcher bearers.
She seemed to take his meaning.
"No," she said, following his gaze. "They don't always stay – and she wanted out of this world as fast as she could get. I think if she'd been stuck here after the fact it would have been a particularly cruel irony."
Spencer regarded her for a moment. He hadn't really talked to her abut the dead woman he'd seen fade into nothingness a few weeks previously.
He was, first and foremost, a man of science, and the sight of something so obviously otherworldly had rattled him. For the first time in his life, instead of bursting with curiosity about something new and unusual, he found himself uncertain that he really wanted to know anything else about what Grace could or couldn't do.
The mechanics of it frightened him.
Even the thought that there was something that had mechanics frightened him.
The cold, sad eyes of Mary Breitkopf had stayed with him through several sleepless nights. It had prompted something of a cooling off period in his and Grace's friendship; he was no longer sure what to make of the woman.
For a moment, it looked like Grace was about to ask him something – her eyes had narrowed slightly and there was a hesitance about her that someone who didn't know her well would miss. He supposed that she was wondering whether he had believed a word she'd just said. Since he wasn't sure himself, Spencer was quite glad when her body language closed off and she turned away.
It occurred to him, while he was still being surprised that he knew her well enough now to recognise her tells, that she may not know if she could trust him anymore. A glance at her posture seemed to confirm it: Grace was tense, her arms folded, body closed off. Guarded.
He frowned. That hadn't been his intention. Despite her apparent inability to live within the normal bounds of physics and reason, he quite liked his odd friend's company. He'd missed her presence lately, sensing the growing distance between them.
"Plath would have approved," she said, interrupting his thoughts.
He followed the direction of her gaze to what had once been a pleasant, quiet courtyard, littered with white bunches of fallen blossoms, large and soft as feathers. Here and there, one or two would float down from the trees and fall into a pool of blood, the petals tingeing an urgent pink in the gore.
"It's like the trees are weeping."