Chapter 11

The greatest enemy of any one of our truths may be the rest of our truths.
- William James

July 10, 2014

Garcia's hands were flying over her laptop keyboard and the others gathered back around the dining room table, finally eating the food Rossi and Reid had brought back a couple hours before. Emily was still visibly shaken by her revelations about Jacob and her mother, but she was holding it together. Their conversations focused, of course, on Jacob.

"We're talking about a tremendous amount of surveillance and data storage, if all of us were being monitored via our alarm systems. If Jacob heard me talking to Emily about coming back to the BAU and we have these pictures, that's tens of thousands of hours of video and audio surveillance." asked Hotch.

"Not quite, kind sir," said Garcia, never stopping her typing. "The focus here was Emily. The video cameras didn't go into JJ's house until Emily was staying there, and Will only found the one in the motion sensor in your guest room. So I think the video surveillance was mostly just Derek and Emily's houses, with a few small exceptions, and he only cared about looking at the video if Emily was there, so that's one location per day or session. If you scan through twenty-four hours of tape at 5X speed, only slowing down when you see what you're looking for, you could make it through a day in a little over four hours. Scan faster, and it's even less time. Remove the times when Emily is at work, and you're down to scanning video for maybe an hour a day at most."

"What about the audio, though?" asked Reid.

"Same way he did it with the alarm company. It would be hard to bug an FBI or Interpol phone and count on it to stay reliable, but it's easy to find our phone numbers. If he was able to write a code that impacted your alarm systems so a recording device clicked on when a particular number called any other particular number, you're not talking about many hours of recordings to go through," said Garcia.

"How could he do that? Make it so a recording device clicked on via the alarm system when someone made a call?" asked Hotch.

"It's a tangled world-wide web, Captain, but it's all connected. You just have to know how to unravel the web, and put it back together to your liking. And this guy is a pro at it," said Garcia.

"So what you're saying is that it's not likely we were all under surveillance all of the time," said JJ.

"Correctamundo," said Garcia. "Thank Buddha for that. You think those pictures are bad, my saucy little friends?" she asked while looking at Derek and Emily. "Think of what he would have seen and heard in my apartment!" She smiled at her friends while everyone laughed.

"Garcia, are you getting closer to an address?"

"Have I ever let you down, Boss Man? No, I have not, because I am the perfect woman. Jack Finch has a residence at 135 Fern Road in Fairfax."

"Are you sure that's our guy?" asked Derek.

"Moderately sure. I went back through everything and the addresses used on the passports were fakes, but then I thought about that burn phone he routed the alarm companies to. I tracked that phone back to the store where he purchased it, which was a small electronics store in Fairfax. I found the time the phone was sold, then hacked into a nearby street camera feed and went back through their data to that day around that time. It's definitely Jacob Hawthorne coming out of that store. He walks off down the block and I can follow him for about three blocks on the cameras before I lose him, but Fern Road is only two more blocks away and one Jack Finch does live there."

Garcia took a breath and looked at the team. "It sounds flimsy, I know, but then I did a little more sleuthing and the amount of bandwidth going in and out of that house is on par with my office at the BAU. What are the odds that there is another Jack Finch using that much wireless juice that lives within four blocks of the store where the mystery burn phone was purchased?"

"We're going with it," said Hotch as he stood.

"Wait a minute, Aaron. We can't just go blazing in there. We can't question this man as FBI agents, and we certainly can't point a gun at him or arrest him," said Rossi. "Unless we want to go to the FBI, show them the pictures and open a case."

Hotch sat back down. "Ideas?"

"No guns," said Emily firmly. "You guys are not going in there with guns. You are also not going to be the one breaking in any door if it comes to that. So far only one career in the BAU is on the line today and we are keeping it that way. And Derek," she paused to turn to him, "You will keep your hands to yourself. I know you are pissed and are just doing a great job of controlling it, but I know you'll probably lose it when you see Jacob. You are not going to pounce on him.

I still maintain that Jacob will not hurt me. There's something here we are missing, but I don't believe it's as nefarious as your worst-case scenarios. I'll concede that it's possible he snapped and got obsessive, but this all just doesn't add up. So we are going to get some answers, we are going to take any data files he might have, and we are going to make sure he knows that this stops now. But there will be no guns, and at least for today no police reports and no arrests."

"Oh, there you are Agent Prentiss. It's great to see you," said Garcia with a smile and Emily smiled back.

Derek stood up and said, "I understand, Em, but we need to make sure we're all safe, too. Rossi, you have a couple personal pieces here?"

Rossi nodded.

"You feel comfortable carrying into Hawthorne's house?"

"I've done my fair share of rogue investigations," he said with an affirmative shrug.

"Emily, you ok with that? Two guns go in, one with you and one with Rossi."

Emily stared at Rossi. "Can you keep it together? How pissed off are you about all of this?"

"How pissed off could I possibly be? I've had stellar pornography on my kitchen counter all day," he said with a smirk and a wink. "Seriously, Emily. I'm mad that this guy violated you both in this way, and I think Jacob is probably a very disturbed individual, but I don't think his end game is violence. I can stay calm. So let's go talk to him."

Everyone rose. "Garcia," said Hotch, "you're coming with us. We're going to need you on the computer end."

They all squeezed in to Rossi's suburban, Emily sitting in the front passenger seat. The sun was setting and it was a relatively quiet drive, Emily the most pensive of all. But at one point she turned around and looked at Hotch, who was sitting with his typical unreadable expression.

"I just want you to know that I was going to tell you," said Emily. "On Tuesday, when I was scheduled to come in, I was going to tell you about me and Derek and let you make the call about me coming back. I knew the chances were slim and I know they are probably non-existent now, but I want you to know that I wasn't planning to hide it from you. I don't want to spend another moment living a lie."

Hotch stared at her for a few moments and the car was absolutely silent. He gave a slight smile and an affirmative nod. "I appreciate that. Let's get through this and see where we end up."

Emily nodded.

"Will you stay in London if you don't come back to the BAU, Emily?" asked Reid.

Emily turned her head again and smiled at her friend. "No. I am unemployed as of August 1st. I already bought a house in Alexandria. I know the contractor who worked on it personally," she said with a smile at Derek. "This is my home and I'm ready to come back."

Everyone smiled happily, even Hotch, and Derek reached up from the seat behind her and squeezed her shoulder.

An hour later they pulled up in front of Jacob's house. The house was remodeled and modern, but small. That would make it easier. "Reid, stay in the car with Garcia until we give you the all clear," said Hotch.

Emily turned to Hotch, "You should stay in the car, too, until we clear the place. It's one thing for your agents to be going rogue; it's another thing all together for the director of a unit to do that. Think of your career, Hotch. Please." Hotch nodded in resignation and sat back down in the vehicle.

The rest made their way to the front porch. Emily raised her fist to knock on the door when they all heard an audible click that sounded like a bolt in a door. A second click and the door opened, but there was no one on the other side. "What the hell?" asked Rossi.

"He's not trying to keep us out. That could be really good, or really, really bad," said JJ.

Emily pushed open the door further and peered inside. Everything was tidy and comfortable in the living room at the front of the house. It looked empty. Emily took point with her gun and entered, followed by Morgan and JJ. Rossi and his gun brought up the rear. They quickly cleared the living room, bedroom, bathroom and kitchen.

They gathered at a door in the kitchen and opened it, staring down the steps to the basement. It was well-lit down there, and as soon as they opened the door, they could hear the hum of computer equipment. Emily started down the stairs and found herself looking at a single, square room. There was no one down there. Computer equipment lined one side of the wall and the desk faced out into the rest of the room. Against the remaining three walls there was a large couch, a loveseat and two armchairs. And above those were pictures. Hundreds of pictures hung in perfect symmetry.

Rossi dialed Hotch and gave the all clear for them to enter.

"The door opened for us. Where the hell did he go?" asked Morgan.

JJ looked bewildered and then said, "Morgan, look," pointing at Emily. Emily stood facing the farthest wall, gun hanging down by her side, staring at the sea of framed 4x6 pictures. Derek walked over to her and put a protective hand on her back, trying to absorb and analyze what he was seeing. Rossi and JJ joined them in silence, and a few moments later they heard the rest of the team on the stairs.

Everyone gathered in the space at the center of the room and stared for a few moments, trying to take it all in. All of the pictures featured Emily, but these were not the more detailed sex pictures. These were clothed, innocent and astoundingly captured the essence of Emily Prentiss through various stations of her life. They were date-stamped like the pictures Hotch received, and the earliest started on the left wall in the upper corner. If you stood back, you could see Emily's whole life laid out in pictures.

"Em?" asked Derek quietly. "How are you doing in that head of yours, my love?"

Emily just shook her head and went back to stand in front of the earliest pictures. Garcia quietly stepped over to the computer and started typing. The others stood back and followed Emily's lead, letting her stay quiet until she was ready to share her thoughts. This was a lot to take in.

Finally she pointed at the first picture of an absolutely adorable raven-haired girl in pigtails, smiling brightly at the camera and holding up a book. "That's Christmas 1975. Jacob gave me that book as a present: The Velveteen Rabbit. That's the first Christmas he was with us."

Her eyes traveled down the wall. She pointed again, "My mother was furious with me. We were in India at the time and I desperately wanted to ride an elephant. My mother didn't think that was dignified, but Jacob took me when my mother was away on business. We only got caught because someone who knew my mother saw us and mentioned it to her. I couldn't sit comfortably for about two days after she got her hands on me, but it was worth it."

The picture showed a smiling Emily of eight years old sitting in front of a much younger Jacob Hawthorne in a saddle on an elephant.

Emily's eyes filled with tears and she turned to Derek. "I don't have any of these pictures. These were all taken with Jacob's camera and he took it all with him when he left." She wearily leaned her forehead against Derek's chest. "I don't have a single picture from my childhood where I'm smiling like this, with genuine happiness."

Derek placed his hands on her upper arms and bent forward to kiss her head. "You will now, Em. We'll take them with us, I promise."

Emily took a deep breath and nodded, then turned again walking along the wall looking. "That's the last one from when he lived with us. It was the last day of summer vacation and we went to the park to read."

"And then this is where it gets weird," said JJ.

Emily nodded. The next picture of her was when she was sixteen, a junior in high school, after they'd returned to the US. Her father was home more and conceded when Emily begged to go to regular public school, much to her mother's dismay. Her parents were sent on an assignment later that year and Emily talked them into letting her stay behind, with a live-in assistant, so she could stay in school. She took the opportunity to rebel. In the picture she was sitting alone on a bench, looking off in the distance, thick makeup, cigarette in hand.

There were regular pictures of her throughout high school, college, and the early parts of her career; consistently two a year, one each summer and one each winter. Next there was a time gap of about two years, from 1995-1997.

"Why the time gap?" asked Hotch.

Emily shrugged. "No reason I can think of on my end. Maybe it was on his end and he couldn't follow me at that time."

The next time gap occurred in 2004. "Doyle," said Morgan bitterly. Emily nodded. The pictures picked up in frequency after that, in 2006 when she started with the BAU. There was no rhyme or reason to the pattern. Sometimes there were several pictures from one month and some months there were none at all, but still a dozen or more total from each year. There was a marked difference in Emily's expressions in those pictures; she looked happier. Everyone realized this and Hotch stepped forward and patted Emily's back, "One of the best career decisions I ever made, letting you on the team."

There was a picture of her out at a bar, laughing with JJ and Garcia, another of her and Derek sitting comfortably on her couch, smiling at each other. Her and Derek at the farmer's market, at the beach, at a restaurant. Emily reached her hand out and touched a picture of her sitting on her couch, wrapped in a blanket, a book open on her lap and Derek smiling at her from the other side of her laptop screen where it sat across from her.

Emily scanned the wall again and gasped, pointing at one of the pictures. May 2, 2011. Emily looked nothing like herself. She was sitting on a bench in a park; her eyes were red-rimmed and had dark circles under them. Everything about her looked devastated and defeated, from the shape of her mouth, to the way she held her shoulders. "He found me in Paris."

Reid stepped forward and looked at the picture. "I'm so sorry, Emily. You tried to explain to me that you were a mess, too, during that time, and I didn't appreciate what you went through. I'm sorry."

Emily reached over and gave his hand a gentle squeeze. "It's really ok. We've got to let that one go, Reid."

"Garcia, have you found anything?" asked Hotch.

"No. What the fuck? Excuse me, sir, but, seriously, what the fuck? I see his code here for the surveillance. I can get in right now to Derek's house and see his cameras, for instance, but that's a pointless waste of time. No videos, no pictures. OK, wait a minute. What is this file and why does it have so many layers of protection?"

"The videos?" asked JJ.

"I don't think so, it's a small file size for video, but it's protected like Fort Knox. Give me a minute."

Emily walked back to the beginning of the photographs and stared for a few minutes. "He surrounded himself with authentic and innocent pictures of me, most of them happy ones. Why would he do that, then send us the pictures he did, and not have any of the more graphic pictures on his computer or up here on the wall?" She gestured to the pictures around the room, "Does this look like someone who wanted to hurt me?"

"It looks like someone obsessed at the very least," responded JJ softly.

Emily glanced around the room again, thinking. Suddenly she moaned, "Oh my God."

"What is it, Emily?" asked Rossi. Emily held up her hand to them, asking them to be quiet.

She took a step back and surveyed the room and walked to the wall with the most recent pictures. She walked back over to the stairs and looked up into the kitchen, then came back to that wall, looking closely at the seams between the wallboard. Emily turned her head to look in the upper right corner of the room where a red light was blinking.

"The first picture of us dancing was a gift, an apology," Emily stated. "He did this, but he didn't want to."

At that moment Garcia let out a gasp. "Holy shitballs. It's a long document. It's a report of your daily activity, Emily, starting with your first day at the BAU. The pictures are in here; a short daily report and then one picture from each day, starting with your first day with us. It looks like when we traveled he just mentioned where we were, but there were no pictures. Hang on here." Garcia scrolled through the file quickly. "Here it is. A picture of your funeral and a one line report: 'Coffin empty.' And then another report in May: 'Finally located Emily. She is in Paris and she is safe. No contact information for her.'

Emily nodded like none of what Garcia said surprised her, and turned again to look at the camera in the corner. "It's ok, Jacob. You can come out now. I understand what's going on, and we need to talk."

The team looked shocked and stepped back as the wall pushed forward and slid open in front of them, revealing a small room filled with even more computer equipment. Jacob Hawthorne stood at the threshold. "Scout," he whispered. He stepped forward and the team tensed as he wrapped Emily in a hug. Derek rushed forward to place a protective hand on Emily's back.

Emily was torn. This was her Jem. But this was also a man who had done something terrible and she needed to know his part in it. She gingerly patted his back with one hand and then stepped away from him.

"How long have you been working for my mother?" asked Emily.