"Garcia? You've got to be kidding me! My god this just keeps getting better and better, doesn't it?" Emily sat down heavily in the closest chair and tried to come to terms with Morgan's news. Planting her elbows on the table, she propped her spinning head up with her fingertips, and rubbed circles on her temples. Her mind was reeling yet at the same time, it rushed forward at a frantic pace trying to put all the pieces together.
Beside her, Rossi was fairing no better. The bizarre twists and turns in this case would frustrate and try the patience of even the most seasoned agent, and David Rossi was no exception. Instead of answered questions getting them closer to a solution, the more answers the team unearthed, the more questions piled up in their place. With growing anger now both tangible and concrete, it saturated his words, his tone turning them acerbic. "None of this makes any damn sense! Why the hell would Garcia file a missing person's report for Christina Marx? Morgan?"
With a quick shrug of his shoulders, Morgan threw the manilla folder in his hands down on the table, and dropped into a chair. Running a hand along his jaw and across his mouth, Derek tried to come up a plausible reason as to why Garcia was involved in all this. He tried to remember if Pen ever mentioned Marx or if he'd ever seen the two of them together, but at the moment, he was coming up blank. Surely if she knew her well enough to file a MP report, he'd have seen them together at least once, especially given that he and Pen spent most of their free time together. Going back to the first time he met Christina Marx, Derek began methodically organizing his thoughts. Hoping it might help to jar something new from his memory, he decided to verbalize those same thoughts aloud to the team.
"Okay I'm going to say it's a safe assumption that at some point in time, Garcia and Marx met right here in this building, since it's what makes the most sense. So, let's start with plausible locations. Marx's personnel file says she was a T.A. right? So it's not inconceivable for the two of them to have met in that capacity. Or maybe they met after one of my classes. More often than not, Garcia used to wait around for me on class nights if we had plans to hang out afterwords. There would have been plenty of opportunities for her to strike up a convo with Marx. Garcia is a friendly, affable, and non-threatening person. She also has the ability to spot and befriend those she calls wounded birds, no matter how high their walls. And if Pen decides she wants to be your friend, it's only a matter of time before she is, no matter how hard you try otherwise."
"So what's your point, Morgan?" Rossi couldn't help but let some of his impatience colour his words.
"My point Rossi, is that the places and times they could've met are practically endless and the reasoning behind their budding friendship easily benign, so realistically speaking, there's really no merit in looking at things from that angle. Hell guys when you think about it, we all could've met her at any given time if given the right opportunity, and for no other reason then because we worked in the same building. The fact of the matter is Garcia is exactly the type of person who'd not only befriend someone like Marx, but would also think it was her duty and obligation to look out for her, especially if she knew there was no one else in the girl's life. That said, the fact that she knew her isn't what's yanking on my chain right now. What's bothering me is not the fact that Garcia knew her and didn't mention her not even once, which granted for her is strange enough in itself, but more that she didn't come to any of us after reporting Marx missing. Even if it was to do nothing more than express concern about a friend or to find out if there was anything else she should do. So why didn't Garcia say anything not only to me, but to anyone?"
"Morgan's right. PG was the first person on the team to welcome me with open arms and I willingly walked right into them, even though my first instinct when meeting new people is to hold them at arms length. She's just got the kind of personality that screams 'you can trust me' and you do, without a second's hesitation," Emily reasoned.
"Trust. Maybe it's as simple as that," Reid mused aloud.
"What do you mean, Kid?" Morgan turned away from Emily and faced Reid.
"Guys, what if it's as simple as Christina Marx asking Garcia to keep their friendship quiet? What if Marx told her the real reason she was here under the explicit condition of keeping it a secret? That would explain why she never told us anything about her. Garcia would never betray a friend's trust, at least not willingly. The missing person report was probably a case of her concern finally outweighing the promise of silence, since according to Marx's file, she stopped coming to work three weeks prior to the MP report. And if the time line and all our supposition about Garcia's involvement is correct, she went missing herself in the following month, just one week after filing the report. That means she wouldn't have had time to tell any of us anything before being taken."
"Makes a helluva lot more sense as anything else we've come up with so far," Rossi agreed.
"And it's about to make even more sense, and believe me, not in a good way. I'm afraid our case just got a whole lot more complicated." Walking in the conference room, Hotch's words rang both ominous and forbidding, his face little more than a grim mask. "According to the Federal Marshall's office, before being placed in the Witness Protection Program and becoming Christina Marx, Candi Lansky was a certified and practicing Hypnotherapist in Daytona Beach. Right before she went missing, Candi was about to turn State's evidence and testify against her twin brother, Casimiro Lansky. You may know him as Judge 'Cut 'em loose' Caslansky, the Federal Appeals Court's youngest and newest Judge."