A Voice Cries Out

Chapter 8

"Were you able to tell anything?"

Charles Jareau could hear the stress in his son-in-law's voice.

"Well, it looks to me like your mother used one or two volumes per year. I'm guessing that might have depended on how well she was feeling?"

On the other end of the connection, Reid sighed. "Probably. But not in the way you would think. I noticed, when I read through them before, that she was pretty prolific when she was most deluded. I think she believed she could be heard through her journals, in a way that she couldn't when she spoke."

He couldn't see Charles' nod of understanding. "So she got it out of her system by writing."

"Yes. And, somehow, I think she really thought people would believe her if it was on paper. Like it made it more legitimate. But that just shows how poorly she processed things. She wrote like someone else would read her journal. But I think I'm the only one who ever did, besides herself."

Although now he realized that someone else had read at least one of those journals. William Reid. His father. Who'd taken one of them, and kept it for over twenty years.

"All right. Well, it's hard to tell if something is missing, since I can't go by the number of journals, and she didn't consistently record a date." Charles sounded frustrated about not being able to help.

"Don't worry about it. It's probably not that important. It's just….. I remember, when I read through them, thinking that she'd been too upset during the time of this particular journal. I noticed the incident was missing, but I assumed she'd chosen not to write about it. Now I have evidence to the contrary."

"Spencer, if you have the missing journal, why do you need me to go through the rest?"

This was hard to explain, but Reid knew instinctively that it was important. He needed to understand if his father had taken the journal at the time Diana was writing it, or at some later date. If the former, it might mean that William realized she'd written something that might implicate one or both of them in the crime that followed Riley Jenkins' murder. It might have meant he was being protective of Diana….or maybe he was just being protective of himself.

Reid wasn't at all sure, now, if he should have believed his parents when they'd banded together to tell him the story of what happened after Riley's killer was murdered. She was so easily influenced. Maybe he made her lie to me.

If William had taken the journal much later, it might mean something very different. What, exactly, Reid didn't know. I doubt it was a memento of a marriage he couldn't wait to escape. Could he have been trying to protect her from being upset, if she read through it? Could he have been trying to protect me? Reid rejected the latter thoughts outright. They didn't jell with his image of William.

He tried to give Charles a sanitized version of what he was thinking.

"I just need to figure out if he might have taken it close to the time she wrote it. If he did, there will be a substitute journal that seems out of synch with the others, like she had to start it over. If he took it a long time after she wrote it, there won't be any gap in her writing."

"You weren't able to tell, when you read through the journals before?"

"I knew there was a period of time she hadn't written about. I just thought she'd been too upset to write then. It never occurred to me that there might be a journal missing."

JJ and Reid hadn't shared the Riley Jenkins episode with her parents. There hadn't seemed a need to, and it was a generally traumatic memory for Reid to revisit. Still, his very perceptive father-in-law sensed the emotional tension in the young man.

"Son, I don't know the context of the missing information, but it's obvious that it's important to you. Now that you have the missing journal, just remember that it holds only words. It's hard to take things out of context. Try not to read anything into them that your mother may not have intended."

Reid was more grateful than his powerful vocabulary could ever express to have Charles Jareau in his life. That the man treated him as a son, and not simply as his daughter's husband, was a completely unexpected gift, and one he treasured. Now he thanked Charles for the fatherly advice.

"I know, you're right. I'll be careful about it. It's just….."

The older man understood. "It's just that you need to use every available tool to find your father, I know. I'm sorry I haven't been of much help."

Reid rubbed at his eyes with his free hand, frustrated. He knew it would have been much easier for him to look through the other journals himself, but that wasn't an option just now.

"You're helping enough. Maybe if you could just look at the first entries in each one, you'll notice something. I'll finish reading through this one to see if it tells me anything new."

"All right, Spencer. I'll get right on it."

"Char….Dad? Are the kids there?" Reid still wasn't used to the eponym.

Charles heard the need in Reid's voice and understood. He sounded regretful when he answered. "I'm sorry, Spencer. Sandy took them to the park. She wanted to let me concentrate."

Despite being disappointed, Reid smiled. "Are you saying that somehow my children cause a lack of concentration?"

Now Charles laughed. "If not by their good looks, then by their volume. I swear Henry is teaching Rosie that the only setting on the loudness meter is 'high'."

The kids' father chuckled. "Yep. Those are my kids, all right. Tell them we'll call them tonight, okay?"

"Will do. I'll get busy with the journals again now, and call you if I find anything."

"Thanks…Dad."

Reid's pace was considerably slower than his usual 20,000 words per minute, as he pored through Diana's missing journal. He kept getting mired in her handwriting, which was reflective of the turmoil of that time.

As he'd read through the other journals a few years ago, Reid had been able to tell, even before the words turned to expressions of fear and paranoia, that they were about to. Diana's customarily fluent penmanship would become interrupted, the letters angular, the volume of ink erratic, as she pressed her pen more deeply into the paper. It's the written version of staccato speech, he'd thought, recognizing one of the external symptoms of mental illness.

The writing had often changed up to a week before the delusions began. And it wouldn't settle back into its usual pattern until well after the delusions were gone. It was one of the ways Reid had come to better understand the extent of his mother's internal battle. He'd been very aware of its external manifestation. That, he'd lived with all his young life. But he'd not quite understood the internal struggle that preceded and followed each delusional episode.

No wonder she was so exhausted all the time, he'd thought when he'd first read through the books. No wonder she couldn't get out of bed. In his adulthood, he'd felt the guilt of the young boy who'd chided his mother so often about this behavior.

The 'Riley Jenkins journal', as he'd come to think of it, was comprised almost entirely of the troubled penmanship. Between that, and Reid's own emotional connection to that time, both in his childhood and his adulthood, he was moving through it at a frustratingly slow pace. He was only about a quarter of the way through when JJ returned to the precinct, Morgan right behind her.

"Hey….is that it?" She tipped her head toward the book.

"This is it. I can't believe I didn't realize there was a journal missing. I'd always just assumed she was too upset to write about it."

"How far did you get?"

When he didn't answer right away, JJ became concerned that he'd discovered something they hadn't known about before. "Spence?"

His shoulders went up and down with a large inhalation and exhalation. "I'm not even up to Riley yet. Just…you know, she told me about this, but she dismissed it so quickly. I didn't even think to question it. But…well….she used to take me to the park, when she was having good days. When I was younger, there were a lot more days like that. And my dad used to be happy about it. I remember that. I think he thought she was taking me to play on the playground or something. But she wasn't. She'd bring me over to this area that had a few tables with chessboards, and we would play against each other."

He smiled, remembering something, and JJ asked him about it.

"It was just…she was this expert in medieval literature, you know? And she was teaching me chess. She said that it was really my dad who should be teaching me, because his side of the family was so good with math and science. But he wanted me to be 'normal'. He insisted I do the usual kid things. That's why he got me into Little League. And I guess he stayed in it himself."

"Didn't he realize your intelligence?" She'd spent many an hour trying to form an accurate picture of the young Spencer Reid, and what he must have been like as a child. She'd been especially devoted to the task since Rosie had come into their lives.

"He did. And he respected it, I think. But….I don't know, but I've wondered. For such a long time, I only knew that he had a brother, and then his brother died. I didn't know…not until we were investigating this case," holding up the journal, "that Uncle Daniel had committed suicide. They found him in the desert, with a gunshot wound to his chest. That's all my Mom told me. I don't remember him, really, but I remember them talking about him. How he was a genius himself, how he had so much potential. And then he killed himself. So I wondered if Dad worried that I would be like him."

JJ nodded slowly, taking it in. "And he tried to make sure you weren't. So it was your Mom, the medieval lit professor, who taught you chess."

He snorted. "Exactly. And she turned it into a kind of story every time. What the knight would do to protect his queen. How the king would send his pawn to sacrifice his life."

"Chess as medieval drama?"

"Technically, I think it was allegory. And yes, that was Mom. She made everything different….better…when she was healthy."

It was so rare to hear him recount any happy memories of his childhood. JJ savored the moment.

"So she was responsible for your love of chess?"

"Mm-hmm. I guess I probably would have found it anyway, but she got me started."

"And Gideon taught you to master it." JJ remembered their former colleague's delight in teaching, and especially in besting, his protégé.

Reid shook his head. "I think I was mostly self-taught. It was just different with Gideon. With my Mom, it was all about saving the King and Queen, and the relationships among all the pieces. With Gideon, it was all about the checkmate—it was all about the kill."

As soon as she heard him say it, she recognized the truth. The relationship between Gideon and Reid had always put her on edge, and he'd just put words to part of the reason why. Gideon's investment in Reid had been egotistical, not emotional. And the relationship between the two had never been entirely healthy. Just as the relationship between Reid and William. Which brought her thoughts back to the issue at hand.

"So, did you talk to Dad?"

Reid explained the situation with Charles. "He'll call me back if he figures anything out. I just wish I could look at them myself. I think I'd know, now that I know to look for it."

"Does it really make all that much difference, Spence?"

He knew what she meant. He had the 'missing' journal, and the information it contained, after all. But, for whatever reason, he felt like he needed to understand the circumstances of William having taken it, and, it seemed, hidden it. Like understanding would tell him something about the man his father was. Is, he corrected himself. We don't know that anything's happened to him. Remember that, genius.

Instead of answering, he changed the subject. "How did it go with the victim's daughter?"

"Okay, I guess." JJ and Morgan had met Davidovitch's daughter at his home. "She didn't seem as upset as I might have thought, considering what happened to her father. But they weren't all that close, according to her."

"I'd say that was true, considering she hadn't even spoken to him in the past six months." Morgan brought his cup of coffee over and joined them.

JJ defended the young mother. "Well, her father was retired, wasn't he? He could have gone to see her at any time. And she was pregnant, he shouldn't have expected her to travel to him."

"I didn't get the sense that she was all that broken up about not seeing him, did you?"

JJ considered it. "No, I guess not. It was more like she realized it was the holidays, and she hadn't gotten the usual gift. But I had the sense that she felt a little guilty, thinking that she hadn't even noticed he was missing."

"For all we know, he wasn't. We only know that six months ago was the last time any of our current witness list can say they saw him or spoke with him."

JJ shook her head. "What a lonely life. To be so…..inconsequential…..that no one notices whether or not you're there. No one even thinks about you."

Just after she'd said it, she realized she'd used the word Rossi had used to describe William Reid. Inconsequential. And she made a personal vow that, should it not already prove to be too late, she would never let those words apply to her husband's father again.

Even if Spence thinks he's not ready. We can't let it happen to someone in our family, black sheep or not. You'll be glad about it one day. Won't you, Spence?

In her peripheral vision, she could see Hotch hurrying over, phone in hand. When he reached them, he seemed to hesitate a moment, looking back and forth among his profilers. Finally, he seemed to settle on a decision.

"Morgan, Reid…I need you in the field. Another set of remains has been found, also in the desert, about ten miles from the original victim's."

JJ opened her mouth to volunteer, to save Reid from what he might see. But Hotch preempted her.

"I need the two of you to compare the location with where the other body was found. I'm sorry….."

"It's all right, Hotch. I can do it."

Morgan was impressed that Reid's words sounded convincing. But, just in case, he sent his unit chief a look before leaving.

I've got him.

A.N. Still over-committed for another couple of weeks. If you're still reading this, thanks for hanging in there...