A Voice Cries Out
Chapter 10
"It was the same mutilation. Part of the tongue was missing, and it looked like there were bite marks."
Reid's words were clearer now, as he and Morgan made their way back to the precinct.
"What about the heart?" Hotch wanted to be certain how much of the first body's condition had been signature.
"Gone. But no tissue left behind, so we don't know if the unsub was eating it. The evidence guys at the site thought this body was fresher than the last one, but the weather might still have an effect on the pathology."
JJ directed her voice at the speaker on Hotch's phone. "Any ID?"
Morgan took that one. "In his pocket. Wallet had a license that belongs to Jerome Farrell."
The other missing IRS employee. They definitely had a serial on their hands, and it seemed that the likely connection among his victims had to do with taxes. But they still couldn't tell if he was only going after the IRS, or if he might have been including others who worked in a related field, like their two missing tax attorneys.
"All right," said Hotch. "Come back in. We'll give the ME time to work, and Reid can get back to the journal."
JJ cleared her throat to interrupt her unit chief. She looked an apology for insubordination as she spoke. "Actually, maybe I can finish the journal and summarize it for Spence. Don't we need him to work with Garcia to look at his father's cases?"
Neither man remarked on it, but both Reid and Hotch realized she was trying to divert her husband's attention from something that might be emotionally taxing for him. Both respected her for it, and both trusted her judgment.
"Good idea," they said, almost simultaneously.
Following up on Rossi's first meeting with the man, Emily and Rossi gave Garcia the task of looking into whether William Reid's law firm, or the man himself, had ever been part of an investigation into political wrongdoing.
"Make that any kind of investigation at all, Garcia." Prentiss amended the instruction.
"Will do, my doves."
As they waited, the two profilers watched the strip mall come to life. When more than an hour had passed with no sign of life at Max Maxfield's law office, they began to wonder if they'd come on a fool's errand.
"Didn't they tell us the office was still open, even though Maxfield was missing?"
"Well," Rossi was sardonic, "there's 'open' and there's 'open'."
"Meaning what, exactly?"
"Meaning 'when the cat's away, the mice will play'."
Emily frowned. "Well, aren't you just a bundle of adages this morning."
Rossi tapped his temple. "The wisdom of age. Look at where we are. We're at a law office in a Vegas strip mall. Better yet, a tax lawyer's office. In Vegas. Where the bulk of his clientele were probably seniors trying to stretch their retirement dollars, or gambling addicts trying to write off debt. This guy Maxfield was probably barely getting by, and this was all he could afford. Whatever help he had in the office is probably phoning it in from their new job. At the very least, they'll be taking their time opening the door."
Emily considered that for a moment. "You're probably right. Except for one thing. If he's been gone for three months already, how can they still be paying rent on this place, let alone paying someone to keep the office open? Where's the money coming from?"
"Exactly what we need to find out." Rossi opened his phone and hit a speed dial number. "Penelope? We have another job for you."
When the two men returned to the precinct, Morgan went to join Hotch in a meeting with the leader of a newly formed task force, while Reid sought out JJ in the conference room.
"Bad, huh?" He asked, without preamble.
She knew exactly what he meant. "Nothing you don't already know about. But I thought it wouldn't be all that helpful to read through it just now."
He got it. "You want me to keep my head in the game, right?"
She smiled. "Right. And there will be plenty of time to go through it after."
After the case is over. After we know if William is dead or alive. Both sets of thoughts had gone in the same direction at once.
Reid heaved a deep breath. "All right. I guess I'll call Garcia and get busy on the cases."
JJ leaned up and kissed him, grateful for his trust in her, so securely placed. "I love you. In case you didn't know."
He turned the other cheek and pointed at it. "I think I need more convincing." Which she provided.
"It was Tammy, wasn't it?"
"It was Tawny. Her name was Tawny."
Rossi couldn't be sure if Prentiss was rolling her eyes at his getting the name wrong, or at the very name itself. But then he heard her add, "It should have been Bleached Blondie." And he was sure.
He smiled at his brunette colleague. "You have something against blondes? JJ's a blonde", he pointed out helpfully. "So is Garcia."
"But they have brains. This one….she was the stereotypical gum-smacking secretary of every bad detective novel." Emily Prentiss hated when anyone lived up to a bad stereotype.
"Ah. Well, stereotypes get developed for a reason, don't they?"
"Yeah. Reasons like Tawny. So, what did you think?"
"I think that, even if Maxfield is into something he shouldn't be, he hasn't shared it with her."
"I agree. Not that I think she could understand it, even if he did tell her."
"Hmm. I think we're gonna have to look at the books. If there's been an allegation against him, there's probably a warrant that makes his records available. And we can talk with the people who think he ran off with their money."
Emily realized there was a limitation as to how helpful that would be.
"We can talk to the people who complained to the police. But what about if there's a client who decided to leave out the middleman and take things into his own hands?"
Rossi nodded his acknowledgement. "For that, we'll need to dig into the records. Good thing we've got a speed reader on our team."
"Okay, sweet genius, I'll have you into their system in just a few more clicks. As I expected, they've put an extra security alert on there, and I can keep it quiet for a few loops, but that causes is to eat more CPUs, and that triggers another alert in the system, so…."
"I understand, Garcia. I need to be fast. Thanks."
They'd figured out that, if he used a tablet to read through the records, he could employ the fingering technique that helped him read books at 20,000 words per minute.
A smile crossed JJ's face as she watched him, hunched over in his chair, tablet in hand, a warrior prepared for the type of battle that only he could wage. My hero.
"Three, two, one….here we go!"
They were in the system. Garcia did some initial probing, and found the cases primarily handled by William, starting with the most recent date. Reid would go backwards with them for as long as Garcia felt it was safe, and then she would break the link. They would repeat the process as often as necessary.
JJ eased away from her husband and left the conference room, closing the door softly behind her. She put a finger to her lips when she saw Emily and Rossi heading her way.
"Shh. He's just getting going."
Emily watched through the window, her usual look of amazement at the skills of Spencer Reid evident on her face.
"How's he doing? Thank God it wasn't his father." They'd been alerted in the field.
"He's doing. I think it helps him to be busy."
Rossi grunted. "Well, then, he can thank us. We just found another office full of records for him to read through."
He explained their meeting with Tawny at Max Maxfield's office, ending with, "and Agent Prentiss found her too….blonde…for her taste."
"What! I did not! She was just too…..you know," she shrugged, "….bleached blonde."
JJ couldn't keep up the mock indignation. She'd joined her friends in laughter when Morgan and Hotch approached them from across the precinct's main room.
"What's the joke?"
"Nothing." In triplicate.
"All right, be that way. How's Pretty Boy doing in there?" Morgan nodded his chin in the direction of the conference room.
"He just got started. Garcia doesn't think he'll be able to stay in all that long. She found another security alarm installed since yesterday. She's pretty sure they know we want to look."
Emily didn't understand the reluctance on the part of William's office. "I thought they liked him over there. Why wouldn't they want to help?"
Morgan's background in law helped him understand. "They're more worried about their clients suing them for violating lawyer/client confidentiality. On the other hand, the office could always just let the security lapse for a little bit, and let us in, and no one would have to be the wiser."
Hotch responded to that one. "I had the sense the senior partner is the one insisting on it. It seems he's a bit of a stickler…."
"Or maybe he's not such a fan of William," suggested Rossi.
Hotch agreed with his old friend. "He may well be trying to protect some information. But I didn't get the sense he would offer to do anything to protect William."
Thirty minutes later, JJ watched as Reid sat back and closed his tablet. Obviously the connection had been broken. She knocked softly before entering the conference room.
"So…..how did it go?"
Reid rubbed at both eyes with his thumb and middle finger.
"I got through six months worth of files. He didn't seem to have any cases in common with either of our two IRS victims, and I didn't see Maxfield's name anywhere. There were some family disputes described in a few files…heirs fighting over an estate tax, or a refund. But no disputes directly with my dad. Although…well….there was one kind of odd thing."
"What?"
"It was a scanned document. It looked like it should have come from one of the family feud cases, but it was in its own folder. It was a note that said, "It happened before. It can happen again. Remember that." It just didn't seem to fit in with the other information in that file."
"Sounds vaguely threatening. Do you think it was directed at your dad?"
"That's the thing. It's hard to say. It would have made sense in one of the other files, if maybe a family member had received it from one of their rivals. But it didn't seem to be connected to anything. It was just there on its own."
"Hmm, " mused JJ. "And it's electronic. I don't suppose there's any chance they saved the actual note? You know, for prints, or to maybe identify the paper stock."
He shrugged in frustration. "Don't know. And there's not really any way we can ask. We weren't supposed to be looking at it."
The ME's report was similar to that of the first victim. The cause of death was dehydration, the bite marks on the tongue were human, but did not belong to the victim. But, with the very slightly fresher status of the remains, the ME could be certain that the tongue had been removed before the victim died.
"So it's definitely murder. And we definitely have a serial, " concluded Morgan.
"Could he say how long the body had been out there?" Reid wanted to establish a timeline that included the presumed dates of the disappearances, the deaths, and the discoveries of the bodies.
Hotch had spoken directly with the medical examiner. "As with the first one, the condition of the body made it hard to establish a time of death. He's fairly certain it's been over two weeks, but can't be more specific than that."
Emily sat back as she expelled a breath through pursed lips. "So we can't know if the unsub held them for a period of time before he killed them."
It was a crucial point. Especially if the unsub had taken William Reid. It made all the difference between holding out hope that he could still be found alive, and resigning themselves to the idea that he was already dead.
Reid understood it all too well. His fingers traced invisible circles on the table as he spoke.
"It's funny. I always used to wonder if some of our victims' families wouldn't rather be able to believe that their missing member would come home one day. If it was better not to know. Now….."
Rossi, sitting nearest him, reached over and patted Reid on the back.
"You'll know, Spencer. We'll find him, and you'll know."