My Life Had Stood
Chapter 11: Interrogation
James smirked, sitting alone in the interrogation room, his hands cuffed. He waited, his eyes roaming over his reflection in the observation window. Though he couldn't see them, he knew the agents were on the other side, watching him. That's what these half-mirrored windows were for after all.
He leaned back in his chair, wondering if David Rossi was observing him. His biological father who hadn't searched for him but had instead believed the doctor saying he had died...James didn't know whether he felt hatred or disappointment for the elder man.
Anger, yes, but hatred was what he felt for Amy, who had pretended to be his mother, yet had abandoned him when he was twelve.
'She's dead now.' James repeated in his thoughts like a litany. After being brought into custody he had managed to glean that bit of info. It disappointed him that he hadn't been present at the time.
0
"Dave." Hotch addressed Rossi as he approached the older man. Rossi barely made any sign that he heard, instead staring at James through the interrogation room window. "You should take some time to process things. Perhaps visit Reid in the hospital, JJ called saying he's awake. Morgan and I will handle the questioning."
"..." Rossi took in a deep breath, shaking his head. "No. I can't do that. I need to understand what happened. How did James..."
"Dave, I can't let you question him. He was deliberately trying to rile you up the whole way here." Hotch replied. After they had arrested him at the hospital, James had taunted Rossi with only thinly veiled accusations that Rossi was a terrible father for never realizing what Amy Vaughn had done. Even less subtle were the tidbits James gave about the abuse he'd suffered growing up.
"...what if this was your son, Hotch? Would you be able to just leave? Wouldn't you want to understand what happened and why?" Rossi snapped, turning to face Hotch.
Hotch swallowed, the question not unexpected. He had actually asked himself those same questions. And he empathized with Rossi a lot - if it was him going through this rather than Rossi, Hotch knew he'd react just like the older man.
"I would. I would want to know." Hotch nodded. "But Dave, if you go in there, James is going to try riling you up and pushing your buttons just like he did coming to the station. We still need to get his confession."
Rossi glared at Hotch, about to protest.
"David, the sophistication that went into the abductions and ocular mutilations suggest these aren't James' first victims." Hotch continued, stopping only when Rossi inhaled sharply. The older man's demeanor livid as well as disconcerted.
"...fine. But I'm not leaving. I'll watch from this side." Rossi replied, once more staring at James through the glass. He shook his head slightly. It was uncanny, looking at his grown up son after so many years of believing he was dead. The fact that James was their unsub, even more so.
"You can't blame yourself for this, Dave. What Amy Vaughn did wasn't something you could've known at the time." Hotch said, though Rossi didn't reply except to say Hotch and Morgan should get on with the interview.
0
"What?!" A man, with peppered hair and a wizened face, growled into his office phone. He sat in an office chair, at a desk meticulously arrayed with papers, pens and other office utensils. "He's gotten in contact with them? How?"
The man listened, growing pale with each passing second. At the same time his beady, cold eyes grew more livid. His thin lips pulled taut.
"You had the opportunity to stop this from happening. You knew what his 'signature' would be..." He clicked his tongue, the protests from the other end grating his ears. His heavily wrinkled hands tensed holding the phone. What he had tried to circumvent decades ago by one key move had suddenly become a bane. "If those in the BAU find out the truth, it won't just be me facing prosecution. Understand? Do whatever it takes to stop them from finding out."
He hung up the phone around the same time his receptionist knocked at his office door, saying he'd been sent a package. Giving her the go ahead to enter, he reclined back on his chair. Trying not to allow his rage to be shown to the mid-aged woman bringing in the package.
"Thank you, Sarah. You can go home now, I'll finish filing the notes on today's patients."
"But Dr. Somerfield, there's a lot left to do..."
"It's fine. Isn't your grand daughter's recital today? I wouldn't want you to miss it. Her mother's in hospice, correct? You should take rest of today and tomorrow off. Paid vacation." Somerfield replied, prodding the receptionist until she agreed and thanked him.
He waited until she had left before opening the package.
Inside it was a pair of human eyes, with the irises painstakingly cut out. Just like the six other pairs that had been sent to him over the past month. Seeing them he sighed and shook his head.
"James, James, James." He repeated the name in a tone similar to how a caregiver would a child's name when they were disappointed. "You could have went anywhere. Hid, anywhere."
Somerfield exhaled and opened the locked bottom drawer of the armoire to the right of his desk. Inside were files, one of which he pulled out. This one thicker than the others.
"...how did you find out?" He muttered, perusing the file. "Who was it that told you?"
Somerfield continued through the file, the grandfather clock out in his office's corridor ticking away the seconds.
0
"Like I said, maybe there were, maybe there weren't." James replied, Hotch having repeated the question of whether there were more victims.
"That's not an answer. If you want any leniency shown to you, you need to answer our questions." Hotch replied, after nearly thirty minutes of questioning the young man he'd felt more frustrated than during any other interrogation. The first ten minutes James had been completely silent, his eyes on the observation window rather than the two agents.
It hadn't been until they had gotten up to leave when James responded.
"..." James smirked, giving a brief and almost humorless laugh.
"You think this is funny?" Morgan snapped. "We have you for the attacks on eight women. Your DNA and fingerprints were found on each of them."
"Only on seven of them. I didn't rape Julie." James corrected, leaning forward for a moment before sitting up straight. "Despite everything I still considered her my sister. Hah. And there are some lines I wouldn't cross..." He paused in thought, giving another mirthless laugh. "I did know someone that that wouldn't have mattered to, but...well, to each their own."
"Then why attack her at all?" Hotch asked, his frustration lessened slightly by James finally answering unambiguously.
James considered the question, tapping his foot as well as chewing a bit on his tongue while mulling it over. The fidgeting behaviors were something the agents had noticed before they'd even started questioning him.
"She was supposed to be a message to that liar mother of hers." James finally growled, his detest apparent.
"...Amy Vaughn raised you. She even reported her husband when you were ten and she realized the extent of his abuse towards you." Hotch said. Before beginning this interrogation, he had Garcia send all the information she'd been able to glean about the Wagner family. Though Amy had to have been privy to the physical abuse James had suffered from her first husband, she seemed not to have known Kevin Wagner Sr. had been a pedophile.
"Yeah, well she was more concerned with that bastard son of a devil harming her daughter than me." James replied, biting hard enough on his tongue to cause himself to wince. "Then again I wasn't really her son. Just a surrogate, so to speak."
"..." Morgan and Hotch studied James, pondering his word choice. "And these women you attacked, they were surrogates for Amy Vaughn?"
James tilted his head in response, but said nothing.
"If you hated her so much, and these women were surrogates for her, why didn't you kill them? Why leave them alive?" Morgan asked.
For the first time James hesitated, dropping his eyes to his hands.
"You couldn't, could you?" Hotch said after a moment considering things. "That's another line you wouldn't cross."
James took in a deep breath, his eyes locked on his own hands. The next moment he looked up, glaring at Hotch. "Why would I give them that peace? No more pain or fear? Ha! You know how many times growing up I wished - hoped - for that? Ha. Why would I show them that mercy? I never received it."
James leaned back in the chair again, no longer responding to either agent's questions. Instead he stared at the table, hands folded with his thumb nails pressing into his palm.
It was while Hotch and Morgan were leaving the interrogation room when James spoke again.
"...if you really want answers. Look into how m...Amy," James spat out the name. "Was able to switch babies without someone noticing. And when you find him, make sure you put him in the same cell with me."
Hotch and Morgan shared a look, surprised at the parting statement. James closed his eyes, his body language shouting that he would no longer talk to them.
Rossi met them outside the interrogation room, having watched the whole thing through the observation window.
"That last thing he said, about Amy Vaughn's switching the children not being noticed..." Rossi started, his son's words resonating with a suspicion he'd had ever since learning of the switch. That Amy couldn't have done it alone. "Could she have had help?"
"I don't know. James was a newborn at the time." Hotch replied. "It could be what he believes or was told by someone else."
"It makes sense though, her having help. While it would've been possible for her to kidnap another baby after losing hers, it's unlikely she'd be able to switch the two without someone knowing." Morgan said.
Rossi drew in a breath, his mind locking in on what had eluded him. "The doctor in charge of her and her son's care, who told her that her baby died, had to have known the baby she left the hospital with wasn't hers."
"...then that doctor was in on it." Morgan felt pissed.
"Not just him." Hotch crossed his arms, his stomach tensing. "Any nurses in the maternity ward who knew which newborn had died had to be in on it. Even if only after the fact." He met Rossi's eye. "Maybe even the doctor who informed you and Carolyn that James had been the one that died."
"That son of a..." Rossi cursed, first in English then Italian. The plethora of swears revealing only a fraction of what he felt. That the doctor he and his wife had trusted all those years ago could've known about the switch, even have had a hand in it, infuriated him. It took a few minutes before he managed something other than a curse. "When I get my hands on that..."
"Rossi, we're going to find out who was responsible for helping the Wagner's switch the children. And anyone who was involved or knew about it." Hotch reassured the older agent.