Reckless

Chapter 33

"No," Penelope groaned, pressing her hand down over her ear to block out the sound of her cell phone ringing. "We're supposed to have today off."

"That was yesterday," Luke corrected with a chuckle as he reached across her to grab the ringing phone. Last night, he tried to remind Penelope of their impending early morning while she was ordering her third margarita. But she wasn't any more interested in listening to him then than she was in hearing what he had to say now. As he sifted through the small collection of phones on her bedside table to find the one that was ringing, Penelope grabbed one of her fluffy throw pillows and held it down over her pounding head.

"Alvez," Luke announced, answering Hotch's call just before he would have been sent to voicemail.

If the BAU unit chief was phased by one of his agents answering the other one's phone, he didn't show it. His deep voice remained as monotone as ever. "Both of you were supposed to be in the office thirty minutes ago," Hotch barked.

"We have the day off today," Penelope whined, her voice distorted by the pillow she was still clutching against her head.

"Garcia says we're supposed to have the day off," Luke repeated, trying his best not to laugh at her pillow muffled moans.

Hotch's only response to this objection were the only three words likely to get Penelope out from under her pillow anytime soon. "We've got a case."

Luke was able to coax Penelope out of bed with the promise of a nitro brew coffee drink. A short time later, he was driving them both into the office with his dog in the backseat and a whole cup carrier full of coffee balanced carefully on the console between them. Luke smiled as he watched Penelope out of the corner of his eye. She had a phone in each hand, trying to extract as much information as she could about their impending case as Luke weaved through the morning commute traffic.

"Have you thought any more about what I asked you?," he mentioned. He was trying to act nonchalant, even though he was nervously waiting to hear what she had to say. A grunt of confusion wasn't exactly the response he was hoping for. "About moving in together?," he clarified.

With how often the BAU was on assignment, Luke's apartment wasn't going to get much use. If he was going to be spending his off time sleeping at Penelope's place, he didn't see the point in paying DC inflated rent prices for what was now serving as a storage unit for his limited collection of personal items. At least, that's what he said when he pitched his idea about moving in together to Penelope. The truth was, Luke wanted a more serious relationship with her. The problem with that was he had a sneaking suspicion that if he started talking about love and commitment, he'd send her running as fast as her heels could carry her in the opposite direction.

"I don't know," Penelope replied. "I have my apartment the way I like it." She flicked her eyes towards him for a moment, scowling before she returned to her furious double fisted phone scrolling. "There's no space in my closets," she announced, her voice rising in pitch.

Luke fought back a smile. There was no room anywhere in Penelope's apartment. She had more clothes and shoes than anyone he'd ever met in his life. Her closets and dressers were stuffed to the brim. Every available inch of space that wasn't being used to house her wardrobe was covered in her eclectic collection of brightly colored knick knacks. He really didn't mind. Her eccentricities were part of her charm.

"If you need more closet space, I could hang another clothes rod up for you," he offered. "...and some more shelves."

Penelope considered this new proposal. From her expression, the fact that Luke was handy around the house was clearly a selling point for her. However, she still seemed hesitant. For someone that was so eager to jump into bed with him, he found how intent she was on avoiding any sort of actual commitment almost ironically funny. Luke suspected he wasn't the first one of her trysts that tried for more. The difference between him and them was that he wasn't going to get shot down.

"I'm not sure about moving in," Penelope admitted. "But I can give you a few dresser drawers and some space in the bathroom so you don't have to live out of your go bag. Let's try that first and see how it goes…"

Luke was unable to hold back the grin that spread across his face as he pulled into his assigned parking spot in the bureau's garage. Moving the carrier full of coffee out of his way first, he reached across the seat and pulled Penelope in for a kiss. She kissed him back, letting out a contented sigh when he finally broke the kiss. After she fixed her lipstick in the visor mirror, they climbed out of the car and hurried into the office.

Toni was so absorbed in the file in front of her, she didn't even notice when Luke and Penelope finally entered the conference room. This wasn't her first time reading through the FBI file on Peter Lewis. But this was her first real deep dive. Toni pulled everything they had on the man, down to his elementary school grade cards. She might be new to profiling, but Toni was an experienced manhunter. Instead of trying to figure out the inner workings of Scratch's twisted mind, she decided to read his file with the trained eye she had for tracking. Every location that was listed in his file, she was making note of it. Even the most highly intelligent people were still creatures of habit. Eventually, Lewis would turn back up at one of the places he'd been before. And when he did, she'd be waiting.

'Where's Spencer?," Penelope asked, glancing around the room with concern the moment she noticed he was missing.

"Reid won't be joining us on this case," Hotch announced. "He had a family emergency."

When she heard Penelope's voice Toni looked up, carefully marking her place in the file before she tucked it away under her laptop. She took the coffee Luke offered her with a grateful smile. But as she took a sip, she realized several of her colleagues had their attention intently focused on her. Penelope, in particular, was giving her an expectant stare. Toni lifted her cup again, this time to hide her heated cheeks. Everyone clearly assumed that she must know where Spencer was and what he was doing. But the truth was, she didn't know much more than what Hotch just announced.
"Something is going on with his mother, I think," Toni offered, hoping that would be enough to satisfy their curiosity. Spencer didn't tell her much more than that. Truthfully, he'd never really even mentioned his mother to her before he had to run off to deal with her. Toni figured he'd call and let her know more when he had a moment, but he never did. The last two days, Toni was busy with her brothers. After Carlos and Matias took Benny home, she spent her other day off un-enrolling her son from public school and gathering together the papers she needed to apply for the private school scholarship Hotch told her about. She was too busy to worry about Spencer's lack of communication. But now that they were back in the office and Spencer was still missing in action, Toni was starting to worry.

"Oh, I guess the Alzheimer's study he enrolled her in must not be going well," JJ said, her voice filled with concern. She turned to Toni and asked, "Is he taking her back to the facility she was in before?"

Toni felt her face getting warmer as she had to admit that she had no idea what JJ was talking about. "I'm not sure," she said. Toni knew that nothing romantic was going on between JJ and Spencer. They'd been friends for years. But having another woman know more about her boyfriend than she did still stung. It was embarrassing. Toni was also flooded with guilt, upset at herself for never asking Spencer about his family. Suddenly, she felt like she barely knew anything about him at all. As Penelope helped Rossi pull up the briefing for their current case, Toni sent Spencer a quick text, asking him how things were going with his mother.

Toni tucked her phone away and turned her attention to the images Penelope helped Rossi que up on the large conference room screen. Two women had been found murdered and left at a construction dumpsite. Sad as it was to say, there was nothing unusual about that. It was the manner in which they were killed that warranted attention from the bureau's profiling team. Each woman had been stuffed into a large metal barrel and then drowned alive in concrete. Toni was sure she could have lived the rest of her life without seeing the scan of the poor woman's body, showing that she was trying to escape as she slowly suffocated and died. The image replayed in Toni's mind on the way to the BAU's private jet.

After they took a few moments to read over the limited information available on the case, the team started kicking around theories and ideas. Some of them were wild, but Toni liked the way her new colleagues weren't afraid to mention anything they thought might have a bearing on the case no matter how strange it sounded.

"Cement shoes are a mafia thing," Rossi suggested. "It could be gang related."

Toni considered that possibility. The area they were headed towards was a coastal town in Florida, around an hour north of Miami. Some gang activity was possible, but the area mostly served as a family friendly tourist attraction. Also, the mafia used cement to sink bodies so that they wouldn't be found. This unsub seemed to be leaving them lying around in the hopes that someone would find them.

"One of the women worked at a bank," JJ observed. "Maybe there was some sort of fraud going on and she was killed for being a whistleblower."

That seemed even less likely than the mafia theory, at least in Toni's opinion. She highly doubted that the local credit union was murdering their employees and encasing them in concrete. Even if they were, which seemed far fetched even for a movie plot let alone real life, again it begged the question as to why the killer would leave the bodies lying around for local kids to find while they were picking through fresh construction trash.

"I feel like I've seen something like this before," Toni said. She snapped her fingers, trying to force the victim's name to the forefront of her mind. "Junko Furuta," she exclaimed. The case was mentioned during a seminar Toni took on violent crimes committed by juvenile offenders. The story stuck in her mind because it was one of the more brutal and strange cases she heard that day. "She was kidnapped and held captive for over a month by four young men. After they finally killed her, they stuffed her body in a metal drum and filled it with concrete."

"You think we might be looking at more than one unsub?," Alvez asked, though the question seemed rhetorical since he answered it himself a moment later. Luke rubbed his hand over the sleek fur of Roxy's head as he considered his own inquiry. "How much do you think a barrel of concrete that size weighs? At least five hundred pounds? Either there's more than one of them… or the killer has access to a truck with a lift on it."

"He'd also need access to a cement truck," Toni agreed. "There's no way he's mixing up 55 gallons of that crap by hand."

As they made their final descent into Boynton Beach, Luke called Penelope. After a greeting that turned his neck red, he reported their forming theories back to her. Toni wasn't sure how many cement trucks there were in the area, but she guessed there could only be so many. She hoped it would be few enough to narrow down their search.

Once they landed in Palm Beach, the team split up. Rossi and JJ stayed in the area to talk to the medical examiner. Hotch left by himself, headed for the local precinct that called in their assistance. Toni missed Spencer, but she was pleased to be partnered with Luke as they headed towards the dump site where the bodies were found.

By the time Toni stepped out of the vehicle, the humidity was already turning her curls into a giant frizzy mane. She shucked her jacket off, leaving it on the driver's seat of their rented SUV. The area where the bodies were found was marked off with bright yellow construction tape. Nearby, a local officer was waiting for them. His eyes lingered on the neckline of Toni's tank top as he introduced himself. Despite his wandering eye, the man proved to be somewhat helpful. He showed them exactly where the bodies were found and explained that the recent rain had unfortunately washed away any tire tracks the killer might have left behind. There were still deep divots in the soft sandy earth, but identifying the make or model of the vehicle from them would be impossible.

As the officer continued in his attempt to make small talk with her, Toni glanced behind her. She was hoping Luke might swoop in and distract the young man so she could escape before his inevitable offer of dinner came. But unfortunately, her partner was busy trying to keep Roxy from pawing through the assorted piles of construction refuse.

"I'd be happy to show you around while you're in town," the officer said, offering her a handsome smile. "There's a local place I know that makes the best fried gator tail." Toni glanced at the man as she did her best to control her facial expression. He was good looking enough, with a muscular build and broad shoulders. But Toni wasn't the least bit interested in him. Even if she was, Toni went out of her way to avoid any romantic entanglements when she was on the job. Sleeping with Spencer was the one and only exception to that rule.

Thankfully, before Toni was forced to drum up a polite refusal Roxy started barking like crazy. "Uh… excuse me for a minute," Toni said, quickly darting away towards the raucous. Luke was calling Roxy away from a large pile of what looked less like construction debris and more like junk someone dumped off because they couldn't fit it in their household dumpster. Toni joined Luke, grasping one side of a large mattress and flipping out backwards onto the ground. Underneath, there was another barrel. It was the same color and size of the ones that contained the women's bodies.

Luke grasped the poorly fastened lid, hollering at Roxy to stop her barking as he pried it the rest of the way off the barrel. As it tumbled into the dirt, Toni sucked in a hard breath and stepped back. She covered her mouth and nose with her hand, fighting back the wave of nausea that was threatening to overtake her. Like the others, the barrel was filled with cement. In the center, a woman's hand was poking up from the surface. It couldn't have been there long. Toni could still tell what color nail polish the woman had on. But the Florida heat and humidity combined to create a distinctly foul odor of decay.

"I thought you said you searched this area," Toni said, glancing back at the overly friendly officer.

"We did," he replied. The man grasped his radio, calling their morbid find in with a tone of obvious concern in his voice. "This wasn't here yesterday, I swear," he insisted.

Toni had her doubts. But then Luke stepped back towards the barrel. Reaching in, he felt the surface of the cement. When he lifted his hand, some grey concrete residue was visible on his fingertips. "I don't think this was here yesterday," he observed. "The cement is still wet."