Read my Lips

Chapter 18

The world stopped. Spencer registered the difference in temperature when Derek pushed him into the backseat of an SUV and turned the air conditioning on full blast. But he couldn't hear or respond to anything the other man was saying to him. He'd seen so many horrible things over the years. Deranged and sickening, violent acts that no one that wasn't in his line of work would ever believe that one human was capable of doing to another. Because of the way his mind worked, he was unable to forget a single one of them. As the images came rushing back at rapid fire in his mind, he pictured every horrible torture he'd ever seen inflicted happening to Elaina. And somewhere in the distance, Spencer heard his name being called.

"Reid!," Morgan barked. "REID!" He snapped his fingers in front of Spencer's face. And finally Spencer blinked his eyes, focusing on Morgan's hand. He swallowed hard, his body coming alive again with a jolt.

"He took her," Spencer said, his voice barely audible against the roar of the air conditioning. "The unsub. He took Eliana."

"I know," Derek said. His voice was full of empathy. And he forced a bottle of water into Spencer's hand. "Drink that." Spencer twisted the cap off and did as he was told, chugging the entire bottle until there was nothing left. Water dribbled from the corner of his mouth and ran down over the smeared concealer on his neck. The makeup melted off in the heat, revealing the small fading suction marks Eliana left on his neck. What served as amusement for his coworkers on the ride over now stood testament to how recently she was safe in his arms and how quickly things had changed.

"You want to get her back?," Derek asked. The question was clearly rhetorical. But Spencer answered anyway with a nod of his head. "Okay. Then you have to get it together and focus. Because he's been three steps ahead of us this entire time. And we can't do this without you." Spencer considered the absolute truth of Derek's statement. Another girl was missing. Another one was dead. And they were no closer to finding this creep than they were when they stepped off the jet.

"I need to get back to the station," Spencer said. He couldn't get anything done sitting in an SUV in the middle of the woods. Derek nodded, giving him a pat on the shoulder before he began to slide towards the vehicle door. But before he could swing it open, Spencer caught him by the sleeve of his shirt. "When we find him, we're not taking him in alive," Spencer hissed. "I'm going to shoot him myself."

"You're on speaker babygirl," Morgan said. And even Spencer noticed that his greeting was more somber than usual. In the blink of an eye, this case turned into all of their worst nightmares. The woman abducted was associated with Spencer. But it could have been any one of them. Time passed, but everyone still remembered what happened to their former team leader's wife. On the drive back, Morgan wasn't the only member of the team that called his spouse and cautioned her to take their young son to a hotel or a family member's home until they found the man they were searching for. "Tell me you've got something for me."

As always, Penelope's voice was accompanied by the soft hum of her fingers flying across her keyboard. "I've got lots of somethings," she chirped. Their phones and laptops started buzzing with notifications. And as the information Penelope found trickled in, she gave them an overview of everything she spent the morning and most of the day before digging up. "I did the search for previous similar crimes. And oh boy did I find the motherload. The problem is, the crimes are similar, but they're not previous. Every time a girl was taken from that greater Raleigh Durham area, another girl disappeared almost immediately afterwards. In California. Each one of these women looks almost identical to one taken right before, like down to the hair color and facial features. It's majorly weird. I sent all the details to your phones." She and Morgan exchanged their usual goodbyes. But like the greeting, it seemed less enthusiastic than their normal exchanges. Making sex jokes when someone's loved one was likely being assaulted as they spoke wasn't funny to anyone, not even them.

Spencer took a moment to scan over the mass of information Penelope sent. She was right. The dates and physical description of the woman taken was far too similar to be a coincidence. Spencer's first assumption was that their killer was bi-costal. But there were too many differences in the signature. All the women that went missing in California were found dead soon after they were reported missing. Or at least most of their bodies had been found. All of them were missing their feet, which had been surgically removed. They were raped, like Casanova's victims. But after he finished with them, they were killed in a much more brutal and vicious way.

When working on a case, there was no such thing as bad information. Every scrap of evidence was useful to them. There were some things about this new development that would help them. It explained some of the mysteries of why Casanova was harder to profile than their typical unsub. But it also just doubled the work they were going to have to do to catch him. Because they weren't just looking for him. Now they had two killers to catch.

The drive from DC to Chapel Hill, North Carolina was over four hours long. Kevin Lynch made it in just under three. The backseat of his vintage AMC pacer was stuffed with files and computer hardware. He also stopped by Eliana's house and filled a bag with her personal belongings. When they found her, and there was no doubt in his mind that they would, he knew she would appreciate having her own clothes and toiletries. He was planning to drive Reid's mom and her caretaker down from DC with him. But she had a bad concussion, so the hospital was admitting her overnight for observation.

"Parker didn't mind you leaving to work on this case?," Prentiss asked, eyeing the bag of technical equipment that Kevin dumped onto a nearby tabletop. He plugged in two laptops before he glanced over at her, a smile twitching up the corners of his lips. His new department lead wasn't exactly known for being a team player.

"I told him the missing woman was a friend of mine," Kevin explained. "...and he told me that my mandatory training was more important and that you already had your own analyst so you didn't need me anyway." He smiled again, plopping down in his seat and flipping his laptops open. Prentiss gave him a questioning glance as she waited for the rest of his explanation. He grinned again, his fingers already tapping across the keyboard at lightning speed. "...so I went into the breakroom and chugged an entire bottle of coffee creamer. Then I puked it up all over his desk."

"Good lord," Prentiss grumbled, shaking her head at him. Technical analysts were an entirely different breed of human from the rest of the FBI. Kevin's team lead should probably count his blessings that all he got was a desk full of vomit and not his entire internet system crashed and the lights turned on and off for hours.

"I brought this," Kevin added, reaching into his bag and pulling out the calling card Casanova left in Reid's apartment. Prentiss turned the card over in her hands, glancing at the drawing through the plastic bag they'd placed it in. Unlike the others, which were portraits of the missing girls, this one was a sketch of a naked woman chained to a t-post. She planned to send the card to the lab when they got done looking at it, in the hopes that its sender had left some trace of himself behind. But none of them were hopeful about that. Casanova was cocky. But he wasn't stupid.

"You think he left that note for me, personally?," Reid asked. It wouldn't be the first time an unsub had some sort of personal fixation with him. Or on any of them. But Reid didn't think that fit with the rest of the profile for Casanova that he was compiling in his mind. This unsub fancied himself to be some sort of extreme ladies man. He named himself after the greatest lover in history. Reid was the furthest possible extreme from that. He could barely get women to talk to him, let alone sleep with him. Yet, the man left the note in his apartment. After he abducted a woman Spencer was having an intimate relationship with. Spencer was adding up facts. But they weren't computing. He was missing something. Spencer glanced over at the long row of images that now included a photo of Eliana that Penelope pulled from social media.

"It wouldn't be the first time an unsub wanted to prove they were smarter than you," Morgan declared. Like the rest of them, he was staring at the two rows of pictures with such concentration that he didn't even turn towards Spencer when he spoke.

"These women. They're all attractive. But they're more than that…"

"...they're all highly intelligent," Prentiss said, rising from her seat and moving to stand shoulder to shoulder with Morgan. "And they're all special in some way." The team took turns, going down the row of photos and listing the talents of each missing or deceased woman. Dakota, the girl who's home JJ and Spencer visited the day before, was an extremely talented artist. Another one of the girls was a concert violinist. Kate McNamara, the woman Casanova abducted right before he took Eliana, was an intern that got into one of the most competitive medical schools in the country with nothing more than her raw genius and determination.

"He's a narcissist," JJ offered. "He wants a woman that he thinks is his intellectual and physical equal. He thinks he's extraordinary. Maybe he discarded the women that didn't measure up to his standards?"

"Or they might have offended or insulted him in some way. The friends and family members I spoke to described these women as strong willed," Rossi added. He glanced at Reid. "Would you describe Eliana that way?"

Spencer considered the question for a moment, his thoughts lingering on the first time he met her. He thought about the way Eliana strode into his apartment like she owned the place and shut his mother's fit down in thirty seconds flat. And then he nodded. "Her dad's a three star army general. And she joined the peace corps."

"...Holding women like that captive probably brings out the control freak in him. He wants a challenge. He wants to break someone that pushes back," Rossi said.

While they brainstormed, Kevin's typing was like white noise. He had a headset on, talking quietly to Penelope in the weird complete each other sentences way that no one else but them could understand. JJ was sitting closest to him. And he startled her when he suddenly shouted out. "I've got something!"

Kevin spun his laptop around. And Spencer recognized the man in the image on the screen. It was Eliana's ex-finance. The one she broke up with right before she came home to the states from Morocco. She never said much about him. But then again, Spencer didn't ask.

"I know you thought this was about Reid," Kevin explained. "But I thought there was a possibility that Eliana was the target all along. So I started looking into the people in her life." It wasn't hard since he knew half her friends before he started. Kevin pointed to the image on the screen. It was a photo of Eliana's ex in his bathing suit at the beach. He had a big smile on his face and a frisbee in his hand, looking every bit the all american boy next door with his blonde tousled hair and tanned chest.

"You think her ex is involved?," Spencer asked. That possibility hadn't crossed his mind. Reid tried his best not to dig too far into Eliana's personal life. He wanted to get to know her organically. But after they kissed outside her friend's trivia party, he was too curious not to look up at least a little about her ex. There wasn't much to find. All Reid really knew about Riley Phillipson was that he worked out a lot and volunteered the rest of his time helping those less fortunate. He worked as a missionary through his church. And then joined the peace corps. It certainly wasn't the typical profile for a rapist and murderer. But then again, this wouldn't be the first time that a bad breakup served as the trigger that pushed someone over the edge.

"The killer has to be someone that knows the area, right?," Kevin asked. He waited until he got a few nods. The bodies of the women they found were in fairly remote areas. The unsub was likely from the area or had lived there long enough to become familiar with it. "Riley is from here. He got back from his tour two months ago."

"That's right around the time of the first abduction," Reid confirmed. "Maybe the reason we're not finding any priors is because they happened outside the country…"

"Where is he now?," Morgan asked.

Kevin turned his laptop back around, clicking at the keys before he answered. "His parents own a house and a bunch of farmland over in Nash county." Morgan and Reid exchanged glances. Farmland meant there was plenty of space to hide half a dozen missing girls.

"Send me the address," Morgan barked. And before Kevin could reply, the entire team was out the door and heading for their vehicles.