Chapter 40

"Okay, so how did he do it?" Katie and Blake were down in the cellar, trying to work out the crime. Now Katie stepped back and took a look around. "Laura's given birth less than twenty-four hours before so she's probably in bed with the baby."

"Yeah. That bed's big enough for all three of them and all of the furniture is bolted down so Spencer can't move a chair in there, so he's in bed with them." Blake nodded. "He sees Rudger come in, you can't miss it from this angle. His first instinct would be to get between Rudger and his family."

"But he doesn't have any way of stopping Rudger."

"No, but by then he would know that Rudger wants the baby. And Rudger has been so careful up till now; trying to control every variable he'd know that Rudger would want Laura to breastfeed. But he doesn't need Spencer any longer, he's played stud, he's played nurse, he's played midwife, now he's just another mouth to feed. And Spencer would know it." Blake turned; playing out Spencer's part. "He'd ask to move to another part of the cell, less danger of a ricochet, and so Laura wouldn't have to see it. Either Rudger answers or he doesn't, either way he knows something Spencer doesn't, it's a non-lethal round."

Katie lifted her hands, mimed the faint 'boom' of a shotgun. "Reid goes down only not like dead weight. He goes down thrashing, his muscles jumping from the tazer shot, maybe making sounds from the pain. Laura hasn't seen anyone tazed, she panics, gets out of bed and runs to him. But she's not used to the baby yet so she'd leave her in the bed." She mimed another boom. With both of them incapacitated Rudger enters the cell. He drags them over and cuffs them both to the bars to restrain them." She nodded at the handcuffs hanging off the bars. "Then he goes to check on the baby. Now it looked healthy to me, assuming the coroner confirms that what would he see that caused him to believe that the experiment failed?"

"Gender," Blake said bitterly. "He was a Men's Rights activist; I bet he wanted a son. So he takes the baby, locks the cell, unlocks the cuffs….no, he wouldn't. She's a preemie; has to be. He'd have to unswaddle her to look; the shock of the cold air would start her screaming and squirming, too hard to hold while he locked up." Blake was standing beside the bed; she could see it in her mind's eye, the parents, now in control of their muscles again, fighting frantically to get free, the small baby screaming. "He did it right here. That's why they weren't frantic to find her when we got here. He did it in front of them." She mimed a quick twist, like wringing the neck of a chicken. All of a sudden there would be silence. She could see the shock, the horror on her friend's face. "Bundled her up in her blanket, stuck her under his arm, locked the cell door, unlocked the cuffs, and went on about his business. But why did it take them so long to escape?"

"Oh come on, you've had new mothers come back to work before." Katie said. "You've never had one wait too long to switch to a bottle, then they're complaining for weeks about how engorged they are? He would have had to wait for her to recover and dry up her milk supply, and then build back her strength; he didn't know how far they'd have to walk."

"Why not just call?" Blake asked.

"Rudger changed the password on the computer to voice activation, probably after he caught Lizzy using it. There was no other phone in the house and who knows if he can trust the people across the way, Lizzy couldn't get close enough to check. You know, I can just picture them having to do that, having to bind her up, to hurt Laura when he wanted to coddle her; to wash the sheets to get rid of the smell. It would be like they were erasing Maggie altogether. No wonder they're a mess. But then how did he trick Rudger?"

"He got Lizzy to send down corn syrup and food coloring." Blake said. "And made some coffee to make it look like a uterine discharge, like maybe she had an infection from the birth. Hold on…" She went and looked in the basket by the chair. "There's cotton yarn down here, the only stuff unwound. So he takes the string, ties one end around his thumb, and the other….the other to one of the weights in the exercise room. He'd need to get some drop on it, maybe using the bars or the treadmill. Tie it tight, let it go and…" She could see it, Spencer's face contorted in agony as his thumb was almost ripped off. "He'd have to ensure that he tore the tendons and popped it out of joint. He wouldn't be able to use it but once the swelling went down it would be loose enough to fold over. Then he got Laura into bed, poured the fake blood over her thighs, and sent a note up to Lizzy causing her to panic."

"Lizzy's panic makes Rudger think it's an emergency." Katie nodded. "He comes down here to see what's going on and Reid sells it. He begs him to check, he's not a doctor, he's not even a vet. You don't need the shotgun, I'll cuff myself. And he does, those mitts he was wearing would conceal the bruising on his hand. Rudger makes sure the cuff is tight, enters the cell, goes to check Laura, Reid folds his thumb in, slips his hand out of the cuff, and now it's just him and the bastard who killed his baby girl." She looked at the destroyed bedroom and sighed. "You know, I can't say I blame him."

"Hotch is calling it self-defense, no one is questioning it." Blake looked round again. "Once Rudger is down Spencer gets Laura moving. They go upstairs, Spencer finds the shotgun, probably double checks the computer, they change into clothing for the weather, and start working on Lizzy's collar when Harris comes in. Reid has no qualms about firing, he knows it's a non-lethal round, so when Harris pulls his gun, boom." She sighed. "And then we walk in."

Katie nodded, "The end."

Hotch hung up his phone and joined JJ in the lobby of the coroner's office, where they had been, drinking too much bad coffee, eating junk food out of the machine, and waiting. JJ simply could not stop quietly crying. "I still remember when I asked Spence to be Henry's godfather." She said at one point. "He'd just come back from the Riley Jenkins case and I put Henry in his hands and he just looked down at him and said 'Hello Henry' in this kind of wowed, astonished voice. I can just hear him talking to her in that same voice, 'Hello Maggie. I'm your father'. " She groaned. "Tell me we did everything we could."

"We did." Hotch replied. "These were remarkably well-organized Unsubs. They had this planned specifically to counter us from the beginning. But they didn't think that Lizzy would be told to take down license plates. They didn't expect Reid to be able to communicate with her that well."

"How do we make this right Hotch? How do we fix this?"

"We can't. There is no fixing this. There's only going through and supporting them while they make their lives make sense again."

They were quiet a while, then… "This is karma, you know. Some kind of divine retribution."

"How so?"

"We made him grieve for no reason, we watched his suffering knowing we could alleviate it and yet we did nothing. Now we have to watch it again, only worse, knowing we helped cause it, and there's not a dammed thing we can do to make it right this time." She sighed. "No matter what they do in the future we're never going to shake this guilt, are we?"

"I don't know." Hotch said. "Maybe when their lives make sense again. Maybe when we help them do that. I don't know. "

The coroner came out, "Baby Jane Doe?" She asked.

They stood. "Not Jane Doe." Hotch said, "Margaret Faith Reid."