Murder in the Forest, Chapter Thirteen
The following morning, the agents and Ford's selected deputies, including the computer- wise Winston Hso, met as planned at the IHOP restaurant. They had received copies of the phone videos and studied them and had held a brief discussion at the motel the previous night and were almost ready to state their conclusions. But they debated as they awaited their orders.
Reid had been a little embarrassed to order a Rooty Tooty Fresh and Fruity breakfast, but Rossi had told him that he shouldn't feel self-conscious about the silly name. "It's one of the best breakfast deals ever, I think, "he reassured, and ordered the same thing.
With the waitresses gone for the moment, Hotchner glanced around the room, noting the long solid glass wall between this room and the rest of the restaurant. The view of the woods behind the restaurant was splendid and both calming and cheering.
"Shall we begin?" he asked. "Is there anyone here who can't discuss these matters at breakfast? Some of that footage is pretty humiliating to the captives and some may be seriously offensive to our female agents."
Seaver and Jareau looked at one another and both shrugged. "We've seen far worse," summed up JJ. "At least, these girls are alive. I hope we can keep them that way. Just you guys try not to leer too hard. Those videos are sort of sexy in a degenerate way."
"Okay, we'll go around the table and offer our thoughts," Hotchner continued. "We'll start with you, JJ. By the way, when the food comes, just wait until the waitresses leave again to discuss this. I think it goes without saying that we won't leave our tablets or laptops on, showing those images while the servers are at the table."
Everyone nodded, and the blonde FBI agent began her summary. "Ashley and I talked about what we saw and one of the first things we noticed that may have gotten past you guys is that the lingerie is probably not what you'd expect the girls to wear. We think someone who took them provided it, to be more spectacular than what they probably had on when kidnapped."
"Yeah," added Seaver. "Many girls have things like that, but mainly for fancy date nights or when their men insist they wear it. These two were just college girls, on a class day. No reason to dress up like that under their clothes. Even the Cassidy girl probably didn't dress that provocatively to go to work, regardless of her dancing and soliciting drinks in even less. Dancers wear special thongs called T-backs. They don't perform in their normal underwear. By the way, I know this stuff and other things about strip clubs because I generally work human trafficking cases. I've dealt with a lot of women smuggled into the US or just solicited here to be topless dancers or to be call girls and other whores. Many wind up in Los Angeles, hoping to become actresses. They get taken over by pimps and other profiteers and pressed into prostitution or into dancing in clubs to make ends meet while they wait to be discovered by a talent scout or producer. Some are really pretty and may even be talented, especially by the standards of high school stage performances. But most chicks save their best lingerie for hot dates; they don't wear it around town day-to-day. Actresses or models might wear nice undies to auditions, where they might have to undress to get a role, I guess. The casting couch is still operative in Hollywood, if less overtly so than it once was. " She looked to JJ to continue.
"Agreed," that woman said. "And our point here is not just that the girls were made to dress up in those distinctive panties and bras; we think it might be possible to trace them to whoever bought them. So, unless they were ordered by some guy's girlfriend or wife under her own name, we think that mail orders of those exact styles will be fairly easy to trace in a small town. Credit card purchases in stores might nail the buyers, too. It's well past Valentine's Day, when men are most likely to buy their ladies things like that, and the Christmas buying season isn't really much underway yet. So, expensive lacy black items like these may stand out, especially if they bought several sets. We know they bought at least two, because the items worn in the videos were slightly different for each girl. Courtney needs a little larger bra than Melissa does, I bet, so they have to have different sizes bought to fit the size girls they intended to kidnap. They may even have targeted Courtney and Melissa in advance and gone after them specifically. "
"Don't bras have to be selected for the girl who'll wear them, and in a size and style of cup that fits? I've dated girls to whom I've given lingerie and they had to exchange a few things to get them right. One said to let her come along when buying bras. If the captors had to guess sizes, mightn't they have gotten those wrong? The alternative is that they waited to buy this stuff until after they had the girls, and then got the information about sizes from them or from looking at the items they were forced to take off. What I'm thinking here is that the videos weren't made for several days after both were taken, so the thugs could get that data directly from the girls, and then hit the stores. If that's the case, we're looking at local purchases; they haven't had time to receive mail orders yet, except maybe for Melissa." Waters looked as if he was embarrassed to be saying these things but hopeful that he made sense.
"That might just be a really useful line of investigation," allowed Sheriff Ford. "By golly, you geniuses at the Bureau are onto this lingerie stuff, aren't you? But kidding aside, maybe we ought to get someone to visit the stores here that are most likely to sell these things, especially at this time of year. Winston? Can you make printouts of the girls in those outfits and blur the faces to save them embarrassment? That way, whoever visits the shops can show the clerks the exact styles involved."
Hso nodded. "Sure, I can do that, and I'll blow some images up and crop them to give a better view of just the merchandise. I can probably have that ready this afternoon. Who's going to go to the stores? "
"I'll volunteer," laughed Peter Blacklaws. "But I want a female agent with me. It would probably help. Ashley, are you interested? I'll buy you lunch, too. And not just at a McDonald's. You deserve more than that."
Seaver blushed and looked at her boss. "Hotch? May I go? Peter is flirting, but he's really who should come with me. He's good looking and funny and smart and the sales girls will probably try harder to think of what they've sold to impress him. And we get along well together. If I'm going to go lingerie shipping with a man, I'd feel less self-conscious with him than most."
Jareau was amused. "Yeah, Ash: let Peter talk to the clerks while you shop. Maybe you'll luck out and catch a sale! They'll tell him what they know, and you can shop on duty and get paid for it. Smooth move!"
That led to a mix of laughter and groans.
Okay, we'll do that," agreed Hotchner. "Seaver and Blacklaws can cover that. Now, what's next that we noticed on the videos? What sort of men are we dealing with? I think there is more than one, although in theory, just one man could have taken both girls. Who feels how about that? One man? More?"