Chapter 4: The Wait

Disclaimer: I appear to have done more research on the geography of Ohio than the writers of Glee, but much less research on profiling than the Criminal Minds writers. Needless to say, I own neither show.

I'm going to stop posting a detailed warning again every chapter, because if you haven't read the last three I don't suppose you'll start now. But I don't want to trigger anyone, so I'll say for the last time: if you can't handle the depiction of assault, rape and murder, not to mention our unsub's point of view, please turn back now.

All of the victims were pale, with slender frames and high cheekbones. "They look like birds," Rossi sighed as he shuffled through the photos of them in life. Meeks had been thin to the point of gauntness, the legacy of drug abuse and more years as a sex worker than the others. Cornelius was a little heavy; she ran every day as part of an effort to drop 10 pounds. But as a whole they were a thin group, slips of women with narrow hips and pushup bras.

Three had brown eyes, though Lauri Webber was wearing violet contacts the day she died. Beck's were blue, and Caitlin Cornelius had large hazel eyes. In one photo they looked green, in another gold.

And of course, they all had light brown hair. Beck might have described hers as "dishwater blonde" and McKenzie had lowlights. Cornelius wore her hair to nearly her waist, while Webber kept hers short. But the color was an immediate similarity for anyone who looked at the group.

Cornelius proved the killer wouldn't only go after prostitutes and Webber proved that he wasn't limited to the Columbus area. Ohio panicked. The national news media arrived.

Tanning salons saw an explosion in business and women who'd never cared about their hair before rushed to bleach it or dye it black. There was an uptick in the sales of wigs and spray-on tans, but it was nothing to the increase in gun sales. Although Ohio law prohibited guns for people under 18, one father gave a proud interview about the personal handgun he'd bought his 14-year-old daughter. The police fined him; if they'd tried to arrest him or take the gun away they'd have had a rebellion on their hands. As it was, women carried their weapons openly into bars, schools and churches, ignoring the need for licenses or weapons bans in such places.

But nothing happened. A week dragged past, than another. There was a copycat, a man killing his brown-haired girlfriend. Ironically, one of the first giveaways was the care he took to leave no fingerprints behind. He also used a different knife, and when Hotch and Prentiss arrived to interview him he burst into tears and immediately confessed. "The bitch deserved to die," he told Prentiss as she cuffed him, "but what kind of sick fuck cuts off breasts?"

The team ran through the profile, found fourteen men with troubled pasts and hatred of a pale woman with brown hair. They all had an alibi for at least one of the murders, and none of their fingerprints matched anyway.

As the end of the third week approached, the BAU's role in Columbus became more confused. They were unhappy with the profile, but absent new information there was little they could do to refine it. The local LEOs were questioning their presence ("Surely you're needed elsewhere…" the police chief told them), and the head of the BAU was also pressuring Hotch to bring the team home. She said, "Look, if there's a new development in the case, you can certainly go back to Ohio, but it's unproductive to have so many agents out of the office like this."

Though he resented her tone, Hotch did largely agree with her. Although this gap between victims wasn't statistically very long, usually once a profile was given, the BAU did move on. But they knew they were missing something, and sensed it was something big; that made it difficult to go.

So Hotch made an unconventional decision. "We're going to have one last brainstorming session this afternoon, then most of the team will be going back to Quantico. Reid, Morgan, I'd like you two to stay here and continue to focus your attention on this case." He'd chosen the two carefully. He was team leader, as Morgan also had been for a time. With one of them staying behind, the team would have leadership experience in both places. Hotch was going home because being there for his son trumped Morgan's dog. Due to family commitments he was also bringing JJ and Prentiss back to Virginia. He'd debated between Rossi and Reid, but decided that between the two, Morgan worked better with Reid. Besides, Hotch had a feeling that this case might require one of Reid's intuitive leaps.

Neither Morgan nor Reid look happy to be away from home even longer, but they took the assignment without complaint. JJ looked uneasy to be separated from Reid—she would always carry the memories of Tobias Hankel with her—but settled for warning both men to be careful.

Once the logistics of the trip home had been worked out and go bags repacked, the full team sat around their conference table for the last time. With little else to do for the past few weeks, the members of the BAU had been obsessively searching for a connection between the places the bodies were found. As Rossi said, "This guy's more lucky than smart, but not many people are comfortable with all the suburbs of a city this size." Garcia's databases and Reid's prodigious memory gave them an edge in analyzing trends and finding patterns, but it was Morgan who finally came up with a possible connection.

He'd been thinking about how the unsub was likely young and how he almost certainly saw himself as very athletic, very alpha. If he was only a few years out of high school or college, then chances were high he'd been a student athlete. Looking into college sports conferences didn't yield any results, but when Morgan looked up the most direct route between central Columbus and Grove City High School, the park where Ashley Beck's body was found was directly along that route.

Give what they'd figured out about the likely location for the murder site, the unsub probably approached the next city of Hilliard from the north or east. The dumpster where he left Shawna was in a shopping complex he would have surely passed on his way to Darby High School had he come into town via Highway 33. Highway 33 also passed through Marysville, where the fourth victim had been abducted.

The last two dump sites were more difficult to tie in with Morgan's theory, because Cornelius's body was left at a rest area outside Gahanna. Many motorists who didn't know Gahanna itself would still see the rest area every day as they commuted. And the most recent victim had been left in New California, which was much too small to have a school district.

However, the rest area was still directly en route between Columbus and Gahanna's Lincoln High School. And New California also lay on Highway 33. Maybe the unsub planned to leave another victim in Hilliard, or maybe he'd had a different location in mind. The team speculated that driving north to find his victim and then back south to dispose of the body had left the killer rushed for time, and he hadn't made it as far as he wanted to leave the body.

It was only a loose theory, but supported by the fact that the high schools in Grove City, Hilliard and Gahanna were all part of the same athletic conference. There were 16 high schools in the conference, including schools in the suburbs of Dublin and Westerville, Lakeview High School along Highway 33, and even William McKinley High School in the more distant city of Lima.

"This unsub's whole identity is structured around his view of himself as strong and hyper-masculine" Morgan explained to Detective Callahan. "He was probably a bigshot athlete in his high school. That was the core of his identity. But it's stopped working for him; maybe he couldn't hack it at the university level, or didn't make it onto a college team at all. He definitely would have tried."

"It's unlikely his athletic failure is the stressor that triggered him into killing," Rossi added. "If that were the case, the outlet of his rage would be the men he sees as competitors. But it's a sound theory, Agent Morgan. It fits in with what little we know about him."

Almost to himself, Reid mused, "Is it possible he's still in high school?" Seeing the surprised and contemplative looks from the others, he explained further: "I know that would make him younger than the profile, but age is the factor most likely to be off anyway. Looking at these crimes, it seems like there's a mind behind them that's not unintelligent, and there's clearly some planning involved. No one has caught on to the kill site yet. But in other ways the crimes seem so sloppy and disorganized; maybe it's not low intelligence propelling that, but low experience."

He bit his lip like he was expecting them to dismiss the idea out of hand, but the team thought through the idea with the same intensity they'd given to Morgan's high school sports theory. Morgan himself was the first to respond. "The younger he is, the less likely he is to have already had run-ins with the law. Hence his prints not being in IAFIS. Besides, the longer he's been out of high school the less likely he will be to remember features along the route to different schools. Oh, he'll remember the games and the high school arenas, but the park as the bus came into town?"

"Not to mention some features change over time," said Prentiss. "I'll check on how long that shopping center in Hilliard has been there."

Before she could go, Hotch stopped her. "Let's say the unsub either is or was a high school athlete in the Ohio Capital Conference, even though that's far from proven. Where does that get us?"

Morgan answered. "Garcia is currently running searches on crimes from shoplifting to drug dealing to murder in the area between Toledo, Mansfield, Columbus and Lima. She's looking for people who potentially fit the profile and also potential victims. She could shift her attention to the communities with schools in this conference. We know the unsub hasn't been fingerprinted, so he hasn't been booked by police for anything, but she could quickly find out if a current student or recent graduate has changed his behavior recently. If he was abused as a child, Garcia could also find any records documenting it."

"She's already trying to find potential victims between the ages of 14 and 40," Reid said. Although the unsub's preference was clearly for younger women, they couldn't ignore the age of his first victim, and with each of the victims being younger, they couldn't be sure they knew how young the unsub would go. "Looking at a school yearbook would be a quick way to see if any students or faculty fit his victimology. Since he's left bodies south, east, west and northwest of Columbus, I recommend that she look at Westerville's high schools first. Westerville is directly due north of Columbus."

Garcia, who was listening to the conversation by now, typed quickly and reported, "It's got three high schools; West, South and North. Oh, and it also has a couple private schools."

"Private schools wouldn't be part of the same conference," Morgan told her. "Stick to the public ones for now."

"Copying that, and saving Northside Christian, Crawford Country Day and Dalton Academy for last. Next?"

Reid said, "After that, I'd look first at schools right off of Highway 33, like Hilliard, Dublin, Lakeview and maybe Lima."

"Even with my mad skills this will take time," she warned them, and they assured her that they understood.

Hotch was pleased about that afternoon's progress. It wasn't enough to change his mind about most of the team departing, since it was really just speculation. But it would give Morgan and Reid a few more avenues to explore, and he was encouraged by the way the two had been in tune with each other during the discussion.

JJ briefly spoke to the reporters still clustered around the police station, praising the various local police departments for their work and urging the public to be cautious but calm. One of them shouted questions at her back as she walked away. "Has the killer really stopped? Or is he just being more careful about where he hides the bodies?"

Every day, the police debated that very idea. Was he keeping bodies at the kill site now? Was he going further yet to find his victims, or had he moved to an entirely new part of the country? Could he have died himself, in a robbery gone wrong or a common car accident?

Of all the theories proposed by detectives and television personalities, none of them guessed the truth: the unsub was grounded.

Dave's parents had finally caught on to the fact that he'd been leaving at the usual time in the morning for school without actually getting there. He should have just left that last one in Marysville instead of trying to make it to Dublin; as it was his mother got home before him and heard the message from the school about his "truancy."

They'd taken away his car keys and called the school personally at the start of every day, before and after lunch, and for a report of his attendance at the end of the day. He didn't know why they bothered at lunchtime since he wasn't allowed to go off-campus for lunch anyway.

His parents took away his computer, too, and monitored his time online every night when Dave said he needed it for homework. They thought he was using drugs. He thought that was pretty funny. If they knew what he was really doing, they'd WISH it was drugs.

Somehow, even grounded he managed to start dating a cheerleader named Vicky. He scored big points with her by telling her he thought her B-cup boobs were just fine the size they were. That was a lie; he thought they were too big. He even asked her if she'd ever considered getting a shorter haircut, but she said Coach Sylvester wouldn't let her.

Vicky wasn't as easy as Brittany Pierce or Santana Lopez, but she was still pretty slutty, especially after a pack of wine coolers. He told her that condoms broke sometimes so the only way to make sure she didn't get knocked up was to do her in the ass.

She was more agreeable to this than he thought she would be. She didn't usually get off when they had sex, but she faked that she did, and Dave wasn't going to tell her he knew any different. Even so, he could tell he was getting better at it. Sex. The satisfaction he got from that definitely made up for not having a spring season sport, which had always annoyed him in the past.

The whole relationship thing was much easier than he thought it would be. He felt so much more confident these days. And he knew if people found out about IT, they'd say a lot of things about him, but one thing they wouldn't accuse him of was being a fag.

Still… he paid that jewfro kid for Rachel Berry's facebook account information. When the jewfro thought that meant Dave was into the big-nosed freak too and wanted to like, work together to get a dirty photo of her, Dave calmly took his shirt collar and said, "Mention it to me again, or to anyone else, and I'll kill you. Got it, kike?"

Jewro had been all apologies and nervous looks after that, not that Dave paid much attention. He didn't need to push losers into lockers or throw them into dumpsters anymore. He still tossed a slushy sometimes, especially at the Glee Club freaks, but that was just for fun.

His parents wanted to look at every facebook friend he had (he knew they had guesses about which ones were the drug dealers) but after that, when they saw the colors and layout of facebook on his computer at night, they didn't try for a closer look. So every night when his homework was done, he logged on as Rachel Berry and went to look at Kurt Hummel's page.

He knew deep down that all his confused feelings were Hummel's fault. Berry was friends with Hummel's prep school boyfriend too, but Dave didn't trust himself to visit that tool's profile. His parents were watching too closely for him to get angry around them. He saw a lot of pictures of the guy on Hummel's page though, and the douche was always leaving links and comments and "likes".

Dave went through all of Hummel's photo albums, all his groups and games and the pages he was a "fan" of. He looked at the photos of Westerville shops that Hummel uploaded with his iPhone and the witty descriptions of just what Hummel thought of their merchandise. Dave had been to a lot of them in the last few months.

The Monday morning his parents expressed their pride in his "progress" and returned his keys, Dave drove straight to school. He wasn't stupid. He took Vicky for a drive that night and she blew him in his car. He went to school on Tuesday, too.

Wednesday morning he went to homeroom, then skipped. He stopped at home first and cleared everything out of his car except the tire iron, winter blanket and duct tape, which he put in the trunk. He got the sex toy and the padded restraints and put them in a paper lunch bag and hid it under the passenger seat.

Last night, and the night before, and the night before that, when he'd stroked himself and imagined it was Hummel he was touching, when he woke in the morning gasping Kurt's name, he'd hated himself, but he'd hated the little fairy even more than that, for doing this to him.

He was going to Westerville and he was going to kill that faggot. Dave was sure if he did this, the dreams would stop.