REID

They all met in the Hotch's room the next morning for a quick briefing. They had received the results of the autopsies and JJ was running through the ME findings when he arrived.

"Spence, look at this," she beckoned him over with a nod of her head. He gratefully accepted the cup of coffee she handed him as he stopped next to her. "What do you make of this?"

His eyes scanned down the page swiftly, and his mind immediately sorted and cataloged the information. "Odd," he mumbled. "This blow here," he indicated a skull fracture on the pilot's right temporal bone, "doesn't look like it was caused by the crash."

"That's what the coroner thinks, too," JJ said. "It looks like someone bashed his head in." She flipped through the folder quickly, and his eyes lit on a picture that seemed out of place.

"Wait, go back," he pointed at the file, wiggling his finger when she complied. "Something's not right," he pulled the photo out of the folder. Someone had taken photos of the entire scene before they'd moved any of the bodies, and all of the pictures of the cockpit had been included in the report. "See this here?" he tapped the center of the picture where the pilot was still buckled into his seat. He hung limply in death, and the way the seat had twisted, only the safety harness had kept him from falling to the ground.

"What about it?"

"It's not right," Reid answered excitedly. He could feel his entire body thrumming with energy that had nothing to do with the coffee in his hand. It was the same buzz he experienced every time a case started to come together. This is important, his mind was telling him. Pay attention. "He's not buckled in properly," he mumbled, setting his coffee down on the small table as Hotch and Rossi came over.

"What's that?" Rossi peered over his shoulder.

"The pilot isn't buckled into his seat properly," Reid angled the photo so everyone could see. "It's not cinched down where it should be if he'd done it himself. I think someone else put him in the seat after knocking him out."

"The co-pilot?" Hotch posited.

"No, look," JJ had pulled out another photo and laid it alongside the autopsy report. "The co-pilot shows the same temporal fracture. And look," she pointed at the photo, "he was placed in his seat, too."

Hotch frowned as he looked at both photos. "Who else has access to the cockpit?"

"Flight attendants," Garcia's voice started them, and they all turned toward the door where she and Prentiss were hovering. Garcia had spent the rest of the previous evening phoning every hospital in a sixty mile radius to check for unconscious patients, amnesiacs, or even deceased John Does. Her search had come up empty, and at ten o'clock Hotch had ordered her back to the hotel with the rest of the team.

"She's right," Prentiss stepped in and closed the door behind them. "Flight attendants would have the necessary codes to get into the cockpit in the event of an emergency. It wouldn't be too hard to wait until one of them left - say, to the go to the bathroom?"

"If they were blitzed near the bathroom someone would have seen it," Hotch dismissed that line immediately. "It had to happen in the cockpit."

"So the attendant waits for one of the pilots to go to the bathroom, blitzes one in the cockpit, then the other when he returns?" Reid wondered aloud. It felt right. It fit the facts, and he could see the rest of the team agreed.

"Okay," Prentiss nodded, "but that's an awfully small space for an attack. The unsub would have to be pretty strong to knock them out with one blow and no leverage. I doubt any of the female attendants could have managed it."

"Agreed," Hotch said. "Our unsub is most likely a man." They all turned to their tech, but she was a step ahead of them. Garcia had already pulled her laptop from her bag and was typing away from a corner chair.

"There was only one male flight attendant on that plane," she turned the computer around to show the team. "Michael Rosenbath."

"Dig into his life," Hotch directed her. "You and I will go back to the station to look at the remaining passengers' lives. It's still a long shot that any of them were a target, but I want to be sure." He angled his body toward the team as he delegated the day's tasks. "Rossi, JJ, and Reid go back to the crash site and see if any new information has surfaced. JJ, since you already have a rapport with the airline, see if you can find out any information on Rosenbath. Reid I want you to take a look at the wreckage, see if anything else is out of place." He turned to Prentiss and handed her a slip of paper. "Prentiss I want you to meet Ms. Wilkers at the airport. No one could get a hold of her yesterday to deliver the news of Gerald's survival. I think she should hear it from us rather than the news. And Mr. Rinks may still be a target, so stay with him. Contact the local PD and see if they can lend us a few officers to guard him."

"Got it," Prentiss folded the paper into her pocket and slipped out the door. Garcia was still typing away, presumably tearing Michael Rosenbath's life apart. Reid let JJ push him out the door ahead of her and Rossi, but before the door closed behind him he heard Hotch telling her to pack everything up.

Reid spent the ride out to the crash site reciting the case facts in his head. He ran through everything in chronological order to see if anything felt out of place, but ever since the discovery of the pilots' murders it all seemed to fit. The odds of both pilots having been a part of the plot were almost astronomical, meaning at least one of them had to have been incapacitated before the crash. But nothing in either man's life indicated they were the type to murder a plane full of people. Reid would lay money on the odds that Rosenbath's background check came back with all sorts of anomalies.

All of the bodies that had been found had been removed, leaving a clearing full of wreckage and debris. Reid knew the violence of the impact could have decimated human remains completely, depending on how their bodies had impacted during the crash. Most of the workers still present were hovering around the two tents on the right side of the field, and Rossi made a beeline for one of them with JJ in tow as Reid ambled around the crash site.

He'd seen all the pictures, and his mind supplied the memory of each one as he walked through the different sections of the fuselage. The photos had been taken before they'd removed the crash victims, and so as he looked at each seat he could vividly recall the face of the passenger that had once occupied it. Sometimes, he thought, his memory was more of a curse than a gift.

He meant to go straight to first class to see where Gerald Rinks had sat, but his feet carried him to a section of seats a little further back in the cabin. Morgan had been right here, and as he knelt down Reid chronicled each detail with almost obsessive precision. There was blood on the seat, though the water from the fire hoses had washed most of it away. A pair of mangled headphones was wedged underneath the seat, and Reid swallowed the hard lump in his throat. He tried not to think about how many times he'd seen those headphones over the seats of their private jet or draped over Morgan's neck as he joked with the younger profiler. What drew his attention, however, was something else entirely, something that sent that little "this is important" bell ringing in his head again.

He stood and began walking among the seats, gathering data to support what his initial observation was telling him. After analyzing every possible row and recalling the chart of occupied seats that he'd compiled yesterday, Reid felt his heart rate pick up. He dug through his pockets until he found his phone, and his finger hit the speed dial for JJ even as he raised it to his ear.

"Jareau," she greeted.

"JJ, you and Rossi need to get out here," he said quickly. "I think Morgan may have survived."