Reviews seriously (worryingly) dropped for the last chapter – please do let me know how you find each chapter, otherwise paranoia seeps in and puts me off writing! We have about five more chapters to go after this, so it should be all over by a week on Thursday! Then if there's still interest I'll start the trip to Ireland fic.

Thank you to those people who did review the last chapter. I'll reply as soon as I can, and I will write you a little extra scene at the weekend – suggestions appreciated!

Enjoy, and please do review.

Sarah x

Where the Blue of the Night

"It always looks darkest just before it gets totally black."

- Charlie Brown (fictional character)

Chapter Forty-Five

November 10th

It had taken three cups of scalding coffee before her mouth felt defrosted enough to begin to join in the conversation. The rain had turned to snow, its grim whiteness giving the scene at the house an eerie atmosphere. The girl's eyes were glassy, almost like a doll's with their dull shine, and Emily knew she would see them again in her nightmares.

Eleven minutes after it had been called in the place was swamped with FBI agents, bringing an unnatural light to the house that it had been empty of for what appeared to be years. Emily had wanted to escape at that point; to have left in the car and never seen that place again, but they had to stay, see what they could learn about Dan Clark that was new.

They'd remained there for almost an hour before heading to the place Rossi had called them to. It was in the midst of a small hamlet, a scattering of farmhouses and stables, erected temporarily twelve years ago when there had been a suspicious death and the local officers has needed a base while they worked the case. It was cold inside, and Emily made use of the blanket Hotch had pulled from the back of their vehicle, trying to cover Reid as much as she could as well. He did not look well; the dark shadows under his eyes were worse than usual, and he had a faraway look, as if he was trying and succeeding to distance himself mentally from what was happening.

Hotch's eyes meeting hers made her focus, ignoring the cold and her concerns about Reid. "We know he's killed Lydia Callahan who has a strong resemblance to JJ. The time of her death was approximately ten to twelve days ago, when we were in Utah and around the same time Agent Mansfield was killed. Lydia was strangled to death with bare hands, most likely in the place where we found her."

"That place was owned by his great aunt's step son, Maurice Joyner," Rossi said, glancing at his hand held where Garcia's notes were on screen. "He's a property developer with around a hundred and sixteen houses either being let, renovated, or waiting to be renovated. Most are currently in the third state, as Maurice Joyner is in Switzerland at the moment, hoping to not be extradited to the U.S. for a variety of white collar crimes, leaving him oblivious as to what his distant relative is up to. Clark must have gotten the details by hacking into Joyner's company. That's too many places for us to search easily, even with however men we have at our disposal. We have to look at this from a different point of view."

"In the meantime," Hotch said. "There are three teams checking each property, working outwards from where JJ went missing. We have to sweep for explosives first."

Which would take them longer, Emily knew. But they had found a bomb, similar to the one planted at Rossi's, on the door of the house. There was no way they could take the risk of barging into a place for the sake of a few minutes. "What do we do?" she said.

"We work out where Clark is holding JJ and probably Sophie as well," Hotch said as the door opened and a printer was brought in by Agent Anderson along with the cold air and a few flakes of snow. "The list is going to get longer as we delve further into Dan Clark. He has several pseudonyms set up to help Maurice Joyner launder money, it appears. All have a convincing trail of paperwork and have been put together in the past five years."

Emily glanced at the small print that was showing on the screen of her hand held. Clearly Garcia and Lynch were onto something here, but unfortunately the something was going to add a hell of a lot to the hoops they would have to go through to find where JJ was. She rubbed her eyes, noting how dry they felt, as if someone had poured sand into them. It would have to be adrenaline that carried them all through.

"What Garcia has sent you are the details of every property that can be connected to Dan Clark in any way possible. There are two hundred and nine in total. We can discount one hundred and fifty four as they are occupied at present by paying tenants who check out as being real people etcetera, the rest need to be looked at carefully," Hotch said, looking round the table. "We know we're dealing with someone who has stalker tendencies, who has been married and can present well on a day to day basis. It's likely he's a compulsive liar, so he won't have issues with doing all this in a house that has neighbours, but I think we can agree that he'd prefer a property that is secluded and isolated. He knows the area well. Garcia has sectioned the properties into five groups according to the alphabet, so if we each take one. For any you think deserve immediate attention, call Detective Warren who is directing the search operations."

Emily nodded, looking down at her phone and making the writing larger. It was going to be difficult to concentrate in some ways; tiredness and fatigue were affecting them all. But they needed something to cling to keep them afloat, and this was it: the only thing they could do at present to help JJ.

Will had been seconded to one of the search parties. Hotch saw his restlessness and had known he wouldn't be able to sit and read and work out. He was more of a day to day cop; an intelligent one, granted, but he needed to be out doing rather than sat inside. Emily was thankful for his absence. She hadn't been sure of what to say exactly, and it felt all the time he was in the car with her and Hotch, that they had failed him, failed to keep JJ safe.

She rubbed her eyes and focused on the handheld again, thankful that the words had now stopped jumping and she could make some sense out of them.

...

Silence brought no comfort or kindness. The stone grey walls gave away no secrets, and shared no warmth. She shivered, trying to push away memories of a warm bed, a warm home, and steeled resolve within herself, bracing for a long night.

This was a form of torture. She knew he had planned it carefully, knowing what would most upset her. The small room, the bound hands, the enclosed space. It reminded her of North Mamon, and the three girls who'd been kept locked in a basement, having to chose which one lived. That choice wasn't necessary here; she just had to decide on her actions without knowing their consequences.

Her fingers were numb with the cold and lack of movement. If she could loosen the ties and break free, she could sit and wait for him when he entered, catch him off guard, off balance and somehow get past him. But then she wouldn't know where she was, or how to get back home - or to the BAU.

Yet she couldn't be reliant on him as she was now. It had been nearly twenty four hours since he'd taken her, captured her like a butterfly in a net, then doused her with a poison that had prevented any memories of the journey.

JJ pulled at the ropes that tied her to the chair. They bound like an attacking snake around her wrists. Then suddenly she stopped; reclaiming sanity. Craning her neck, she looked at the tie on her right hand. If she could manipulate the rope to gain some slack, she could eventually free her hand. And once her right hand was free, she could untie herself.

As long as he didn't come back.

Cold sweat fell across her forehead, her hair clinging to her face. She didn't notice, intent on freeing herself. She hadn't eaten for over a day, and couldn't remember the last time she'd had a drink. The pain in her kidneys was now sharp, the familiar signs of an infection clear. How much time had passed since she had begun her task she didn't know; time no longer seemed relevant. And then there was a fierce pull, before the slackness of release. One hand was free.

...

Llewellyn stood in the middle of a field with a map in one hand and a compass in the other. He was working an instinct that Boyd would have shredded him for but Mansfield would have encouraged. He'd still not considered the fallout from Boyd; he'd been put in temporary charge of the unit, and no doubt once they had caught Mansfield's killer there would be a sea of paperwork and inquiries to drown in, but he didn't bother considering it right now.

He felt calm, unflustered, so not a great deal had changed with Boyd's arrest. He was concerned about JJ, of course, as much as he was capable of understand concern, but he saw things in a different way. Her place of captivity was a puzzle to be solved, and puzzles always had logic.

Dawn had broke thirty minutes ago and there was just enough light for him to see the map without a torch. On it, he had circled the whereabouts of all properties Clark was connected with in the area. Reid had crossed out the ones that were unlikely and had double circled the ones that looked promising. Black marker had been used to show ones that had already been searched, and a red one had been used to show where the bodies had been found.

They'd found and identified another one. Hannah Michell, aged thirty, was another JJ lookalike. She'd been killed about two months ago and left with her driver's licence in the master bedroom of a house that had apparently been rented out.

Llewellyn looked towards the trees. He had to consider that they were looking at this wrong, that JJ wasn't hidden in some complex way, but it was something more obvious. Llewellyn folded the map and put it into his pocket, taking out his phone instead and called Lynch. He knew that Garcia had been made to take an hour to try and sleep, although he doubted she'd manage to get much.

"Kevin," he said as Lynch answered. "I want to look at something else."

"Go ahead, because right now these houses are all on dead ends," Lynch said, sounding coffee fuelled.

"Clark's current address has been ruled out, hasn't it?"

"Indeed it has. His ex-wife still lives there," Lynch said. "She was sending his bills and correspondence to a PO Box that is registered under the wife's address, so we don't have where Clark's been living confirmed."

"What about where he lived before he was married?"

"We've checked there too; it was his mother's house and where he grew up. It's currently rented out to a couple and officers have been there and spoken to them. You want the address?"

"Yes, give me a second," Llewellyn said, taking the map back out and pulling out a pen. "Go on."

Lynch gave him the address. "I've got to go," he said. "Hotch is on the other phone." He ended the call quickly.

Llewellyn stared at the map. Something wasn't right. He carried on walking.

...

Sophie knew that there was only one storey above her, and by now, she could pretty much tell whereabouts he was in the house if she listened hard enough. She listened, guessing at what he was doing: tying his shoe laces, putting on his jacket, going to the door...

She heard it open, then close. A few seconds later there was the sound of a car engine coming to life and then the rumbling faded.

Standing up immediately, she went over to the unit that blocked the window and forced it out of the way. Breathing heavily with the exertion, she crouched next to the window and assessed the glass situation. She would have to go out head first – if she did it backwards she'd probably get stuck because of her ears. She recalled Stephen Jones in her elementary school class poking his head through railings. He'd managed to get it through, but not back as his ears got in the way.

That meant she'd need to put one side of her body out first and hope the window frame could take her weight. Which also meant there needed to be as little glass there was possible. Sophie got a small heavy wooden ornament she had spied under the sofa and began to use it to knock out the fragments of glass that were left. She was thorough, taking her time rather than panicking and rushing and within minutes she had cleared the wooden frame.

Now was the hard bit. Not giving it any more thought, she used the unit to get herself level with the frame and stuck her head out, knowing that she probably wouldn't be able to get it back through without rather a lot of pain. She could have tried to have taken out the frame itself, but that would have used up more time, and she wasn't sure how long she had.

Then she swung her body so the frame was now taking all her weight, and slid her right leg and arm over, hanging precariously out of the window.

It was then she looked down.

The building had been erected on a slope, so the ground at the front of the house buried the basement, but at the back it looked out onto a garden that had been chiselled out of the ground. She had a good ten or fifteen foot drop to reach the floor and nothing to cling onto.

She was just going to have to fall.