Chapter 4: State of War
Reid: "There's no condition one adjusts to so quickly as a state of war." ― Alice Sebold
After getting off the phone with Reid, Emily had reassembled the rest of the team in the conference room at the BAU. She hadn't told them what this was about until they'd arrived, only Garcia knew the reality of the situation beforehand. Now JJ, Rossi, Morgan, Tara, and Matt were all staring at her with shocked and horrified expressions as if she'd just told them the world was ending.
"What do you mean Evina was poisoned?! I thought she had appendicitis!" JJ exclaimed.
"Who the hell botched that diagnosis?" Rossi asked.
"They didn't. The original diagnosis wasn't wrong, but we're dealing with an Unsub who uses a rare, lab-grade poison to induce appendicitis in their victims. That's why I had Garcia make sure protection details were placed on Reid's house and her hospital room. Now, Evina's life is out of immediate danger but we have no idea who else might have been exposed or what the unsub's motivation was, and until we know that, it's not safe for us to assume anything. So let's get to work." Emily ordered.
"Well, the methodology is actually pretty devious on the unsub's part." Rossi began. "They used a rare poison that wouldn't show up on a standard toxicology report, which also causes a highly dangerous but usually naturally occurring medical condition, both of which are most-likely meant to keep doctors and parents from looking deeper." Rossi began.
"Do we have an estimation on when Evina was dosed with this stuff?" JJ asked.
"According to her doctors, it was at least five days and no more than two weeks ago," Emily replied.
"Garcia, were there any clusters or spikes of kids being admitted to the hospital with similar symptoms in that window?" Matt asked.
"Already on it, my friend and the one thing I can tell you so far is that it doesn't look like this happened at school. There are no reports that I can find of this happening to other students. I'm still looking into her other activities though."
"Even if it's not clear right now who they are, my gut says there's gotta be more victims out there," Morgan said. Poisoning her exclusively would be way more of a risk. Given the level of planning and detail this unsub puts into self-preservation just going by their choice of weapon, they're not looking to get caught. Which means it makes much more sense to poison a whole mess of kids as collateral damage."
"Um, guys… I think I found the other victims…" Garcia interjected.
"Who are they, Garcia?" Morgan asked.
"And how do they connect back to Evina?" JJ added.
"Both of those are excellent questions, unfortunately, all I have right now is the answer to the first question and that is…a bunch of kids close to Evina's age all of them from up and down the East coast… we're talking up to two hundred kids between the ages of twelve and fourteen. They all showed up in the ER with appendicitis, all within the last thirty-six hours."
"That's a little weird, to have that many kids so close to Evina's age in that short of a timespan, all in basically our own backyard," JJ replied.
"Oh it totally is, which is why I'm running these kids' names to see if they pop up anywhere in the same place as our girl at any time during the window the doctors gave us for her being dosed. If we can figure out where and exactly when they were all poisoned we can get a beat on how this creeper got into Evina's life," Garcia told them as she typed away at her laptop. "Hold up ladies and gents, looks like we just got a lead…"
"What is it?" Emily asked.
"As far as I can tell there is only one common denominator between all of these kids and this is it, they're all martial artists who all participated in the Youth Regional Martial Arts Expo which took place six days ago, last Saturday."
"Ok, that has to be where they were dosed."
"Garcia, do any of the other kids have parents with high profile jobs? Politics, high ranking law enforcement, government officials, or ranked military personnel?" Matt asked.
"No, nothing…not a single one." Garcia replied.
"Ok, is it just me, or does it seem a little far-fetched to anyone else that an unsub this organized and this careful would be this reckless in their victim selection? I mean, assuming for a minute that Evina was not the primary target, attacking an FBI agent's daughter is a huge risk the unsub didn't have to take. I mean, they had to know that we'd come down on them like a ton of bricks." Tara pointed out.
"That's exactly where my head's at. An unsub this cautious wouldn't do something so dumb unless Evina was a crucial part of their plan all along, which means that she is most likely the unsub's primary target."
"Was that ever really in doubt? Someone's targeting Evina, who'd want to, and why?" Rossi asked. "Is this about Evina herself or is Reid the real target of the unsub's rage? Maybe it's some kind of blowback from an old case…"
"My money's on Reid being the real target here, I mean, who would be this angry at a thirteen-year-old girl?" Morgan asked.
"One thing's for sure, we're not looking for a peer. There's no way a teenager, especially one as young as they are would be this criminally sophisticated. On top of that, the use of poison and the attack of a child without abducting them profiles as female." Emily theorized. "A male unsub would most likely want to kidnap, rape, and torture her, but women don't usually have sexual components to their MOs. There is no compulsion here, everything she's done has been meticulous and purposeful. She's gone to great lengths to protect her identity, it's like she wants Reid to suffer but doesn't really care if he knows who's causing that suffering or not."
"Ok, I am using all this info to narrow down my search parameters. That martial arts expo supplies food and drinks for the participants, there are food tables on the sidelines with things like sandwiches, and snacks and sports drinks. I'm running all the vendors and their employees for red flags that includes any connection to Reid, so far everyone is squeaky clean but… official vendors are not the only way those food tables get filled. A lot of the parents bring food too." Garcia explained. "I'd betchya anything that that's how the Unsub did this because while the organizers do keep a record of all the kids who participate, they don't keep records of who comes to watch, or of who brings food and who doesn't."
"Which would make the exact source of the poison almost impossible to trace, Gracia's right. We're probably looking for another parent or at least someone who came there posing as one." Morgan agreed.
"The question remains though, why do this at all? To make Reid suffer? We can go back through old files but off the top of my head, everybody with any reason to hold this much of a grudge against him is either dead or in prison."
"It might not be as obvious as a past unsub he took down, I mean, we all remember when Cat and Lindsey got together and kidnapped his mother." Tara reminded them.
The others exchanged uncomfortable glances at each other. Ten years earlier they'd returned home from a case to find Diana Reid missing, apparently having been abducted by Lindsey Vaughn, a former victim from a case ten years before that, whose father had been a hitman. Reid had talked him out of one last murder. In the years between the two cases, Lindsey had fallen in love with a woman named Cat Adams, who after a fateful takedown in a DC restaurant, was taken into custody on multiple counts of murder. Not knowing about their relationship, none of them recognized it at the time, but that had served as Lindsey's secondary trigger and caused her to abduct Reid's mother as revenge. Fortunately, they'd found her and Lindsey before she could blow up her secondary location with both of them in it, but if there was one thing that incident proved it was that it wasn't always obvious when their actions on the job put a target on their backs.
"Ok, who might have a less obvious grudge against Reid?" Matt asked.
The rest of the team thought about that for a little while but everyone they came up with was either dead or in prison for life.
"Guys, we're going to keep dead-ending on this until we get a better idea of who the unsub is. We can spin ideas around all night, but it won't help until we get more information. Matt, go to the hospital, give Reid an update on what we've discovered so far and do a cognitive interview with him about the day Evina was poisoned. Tara, all these kids were poisoned at the same event, so we can't conclusively rule out that it had nothing to do with the Expo itself. Go talk to Evina's teacher and find out just how competitive events like that get and if Evina had any specific rivals. Morgan, JJ, we need the security footage from the Expo, this unsub is probably too smart to be that careless, but we should still see if they're on camera. Rossi, you're with me. We're gonna go talk to Maeve, Conan, and Isabel and see if any of them remember anything about that day that could be helpful."