Chapter Text
Even though it was December, it was a hot day outside in Houston Texas. Everything seemed normal, to Alicia Davis as she waddled home early from her shift at work. She was as pregnant as she was tired, so when a beat up white truck approached and offered her a ride, she thought her prayers had been answered. Little did she know she only had one more prayer left in the budget before she would be murdered.
Twenty-four hours later things are bustling yet idle in the Behavioral Analysis Unit in Quantico. An open office going through the motions of privacy by allowing the desks to be divided by a sixteen inch barrier atop an otherwise conjoined and contiguous deskspace. Morgan, Prentiss and Reid sit and chat at their half-walled cubicles. Reid holds a newspaper working on one of the puzzles in the back. Occasionally he asks Prentiss about one of the clues but ultimately if he doesn't know the answer, Prentiss wouldn't either. He's better off asking Morgan because at least his interests give him expertise on topics like sports or cars. Morgan leans back in his chair, “You two got any plans for the holidays?”
Prentiss replies “Not really. Mother is going to be out of town on business so I'm volunteering at a local shelter.”
“Working on your week off? Something's not right with you.”
“Oh please, the two hours cooking for the needy feels like a vacation compared to what we do.” That's the strange thing about profiling for a living. Hard labor exhausts the body, mental labor exhausts the mind, but profiling? Profiling exhausts the soul and that's a kind of exhaustion one can't really recover from.
“I'm visiting my mother for the actual holidays, but the rest of the time? An extra week off is the perfect time to meet someone, maybe mess around a little bit. But if you've got no plans you can always join mine.” He smiles.
Emily rolls her eyes. “How did I know that was going to turn into an invitation.”
Reid doesn't even bother to look up from his word search, “You know, it's actually really common for victims of sexual assault to be hypersexual. It's a way to take back the control they feel they've lost to their assailant-”
“Don't. Just- Don't.” Morgan interrupts the guy. Prentiss looks at Reid confused. Reid forgets her and Rossi don't know about their mutual coworkers' trauma. Except he doesn’t forget. Reid has an eidetic memory, so this mistake is not born of confusion or error, but rather a carelessness. It’s not malicious, Spencer simply doesn’t bother to keep track of who in the BAU knows what about who’s backstory, in the forefront of his mind. Morgan insists he doesn't keep secrets but he's clearly more than happy letting his history go unexamined to save himself the embarrassment. He wants to be mad at Reid for bringing it up. It would be so easy to snap back and bring up Reid's addiction, but he knows Reid probably didn't mean to make fun of him.
JJ hurries by tapping the cubicle wall with a pen. “Have any of you seen Hotch and Rossi?”
“Too many times to count.” Morgan jokes.
“Oh ha ha. I've got a case and a jet waiting and I can't find either of them.”
The three agents pull their go-bags out from under their desks in unison. They know the drill. Prentiss rests her chin on her hands. “Is it somewhere warm this time? I could really use a Florida case right now.”
“Texas.”
“Close enough.”
It's around noon when Dave Strider joins the land of the living. Like many times before he doesn't recall falling asleep in his bed last night, yet still, true as the sun will rise, Dave Strider always wakes up in the same bed he has his entire life. He suspects Bro picks him up and carries him there, tucks him in all paternal like yet can't for a moment actually imagine him doing such a thing. Bro is too cool for that. Affection, genuineness, and sentimentality are all lame and gross and Bro isn't lame. If his brother is doing something so saccharine as tucking him into bed it obviously falls under the gross category. His favorite things to do with his brother are objectively pretty gross and yet doing them doesn't make Bro any less cool, so gross must be cool.
Dave's head hurts but he fails to recognize it as pain. His head has felt like this for as long as he can remember. He assumes whatever it is he feels is normal and simply the default experience of having a human skull. Squinting through the sunrays, Dave is unconcerned with most things in his life.
His first priority of the day is to figure out where Bro is. He listens and hears nothing except the traffic below and the birds outside. That's a good sign, he thinks. It's nothing out of the ordinary for his older brother to be out of the apartment. Dave prefers it when the guy manages to be gone all day. Bro is cool but Dave is best in small doses. Something about him rubs Bro the wrong way. What that something is, Dave has no idea and trying to narrow it down is slowly driving him mad.
Dave has gotten goddamn scientific with it. He has a journal logging his findings tucked between the mattress and the boxspring. Dave worried his chattiness was annoying to Bro so he ran an experiment and only spoke when addressed directly. Bro still summoned him to the roof that day for a fight so clearly Dave is obnoxious in other ways too. He tried just casually and quietly sitting on the couch next to Bro letting him do whatever he wanted and still, Dave got what he deserved on the roof. Maybe he was breathing too loud? He wishes Bro would just tell him what he's doing wrong, but Dave knows very well by now that is not how the game is played. The rules of the Strider household must be ascertained through trial and error. Explaining it ruins the fun. To be a Strider is to be a cool enigma, and asking questions isn't cool. He has to act like he already knows everything, even when he doesn’t. Dave is really good at putting the pieces of the puzzle together with nothing to work with. He's not supposed to have the puzzle, it's missing ninety percent of the pieces and of the pieces that remain they're all scattered about and hidden behind other things.
The longer Bro is in the apartment the worse his mood is and Dave is keenly aware of what happens when Bro loses his patience. On the flip side, when Bro is gone for a day or more he comes home in a rare state; Drunk and affectionate. That’s the state his brother was in last night and Dave considered himself lucky because he got to remember for a little while that Bro actually likes having him around. It's noon and Bro usually leaves early in the morning. If he comes home at sundown, Dave might just be lucky two nights in a row.
He slips out of bed and straightens his triangle shades on his face. He checks his phone, and feels even luckier. Today is December third. For the last few years Bro has avoided the apartment on his birthday and Dave considers this a sort of gift. Dave is safe for now. He sneaks into his desk chair and boots up his computer. John probably won't be online until later being one of those fucking weirdos who has school and stuff. Dave hopes he left a message or something.
EB: hey dave, check the mail!
TG: dude you didnt no fucking way
TG: john i dont even know where my mailbox is
TG: how could you
He checks his messages with Rose. She goes to school but she keeps having snow days. Worth a check. Unfortunately nothing. She'll be online later. Just as he's about to switch tabs he gets a message from Jade. Of all his friends he feels like he has the most in common with Jade. No parents, doesn't go to school, has never seen snow, ect. Whenever he says something Rose and John would judge, Jade just gets it. He hasn't told anyone else that he doesn't have parents. It doesn't effect him much and he doesn't want to have a pity party about some tragic backstory just so his friends with parents can feel better about their inability to do anything about it. He's gone this long without parents and he's never really noticed or cared if it's not the current topic of conversation.
GG: happy birthday dave! :D
TG: hey you remembered
GG: of course i did! i actually feel kinda bad for not getting you anything :(
TG: its okay i dunno where the mailbox is either
GG: oh yeah! you live in an apartment
GG: all that mail going to one building how does that work???
TG: well i know they dont deliver anything directly to the doors
GG: maybe it all goes into one big mailbox and you just gotta fish out whatever is yours and put the rest back?
TG: makes sense to me
TG: i know john sent me something
TG: ill say the cardboard box was from you
GG: oh come on! i want to send you something i just dont know how to get the mailman to come over here to pick anything up!
GG: i get deliveries just fine but sending things is a real pain in the butt!
TG: yuh huh real convenient
GG: im serious!
TG: anyway im gonna go scavenge for something to eat
TG: see you around
The agents of the Behavioral Analysis Unit lounge about the private jet. Reid sits upright at the table with his legs put together, Prentiss leans back in the chair opposite to him. Hotch lays down on the long seat pinching the bridge of his nose. Rossi sits with his foot crossed over his other knee and Morgan has both elbows on the table like a sailor. Not many cases are urgent enough to require briefing in transit. Usually when this happens that means they're dealing with an abduction or other circumstance where the victim is presumably alive and running out of time. Cases like that are paradoxically more stressful than the ones where the victims are dead on arrival. It's easier to come into a situation where everyone is accounted for. A failure of justice changes nothing, everything remains the same as it was before the BAU arrived, a failure to rescue means blood on their hands and that is a difference that weighs on the conscience.
JJ walks down the center aisle passing out copies of the case files. The folder is manila yellow as always with the FBI seal on the front. “Twenty-four year old Alicia Davis was found in her apartment yesterday in Houston Texas. She had stitches on her mouth, abdomen and genitals closing everything shut. Autopsy reports blood loss as the cause of death.”
“Stitches on the mouth usually represent an effort to silence the woman.” Reid takes the folder and squints at its contents. For a man with reading glasses he never seems to actually wear them. He's always reading yet acutely aware of the fact that wearing his glasses all the time would be bad for his vision in the long term. This leaves Reid in the awkward position of having a set of reading glasses tucked in a drawer at his desk ‘just in case’ only to never have them in the field. Basically Spencer only seems to have his reading glasses available when he needs them the least. He should really get a second pair and hang it on a necklace or something.
Morgan raises an eyebrow. “What about the naughty bits?”
“Sounds like sexual sadism to me.” Rossi adjusts his tie.
“That could also be symbolic. Obstructing the path to reproduction could be an attempt to create the female equivalent of castration. The only thing I'm stuck on here is the abdomen. Why cut someone open if you're just going to stitch them back up again?” Reid rambles thinking out loud.
“That's the thing. This is body number seven. Every single one had their uterus removed.”
Hotch suggests, “Eugenics? Hate crime maybe?”
JJ finally takes her seat next to Rossi. “You'd think but of the seven victims so far none of them have much in common. This guy kills without preference as far as anyone can tell. The women are different races, classes, hair colors, married, unmarried. And to top it all off, one of the missing uteruses arrived at the door of a local senator preserved in a jar. DNA analysis is tricky because the chemicals used break down the DNA over time, but what little segments of genetic code are left intact don't match any of the known victims or anyone in Vicap.”
“So assuming these crimes are related we may have an eighth victim.” Hotch looks up from the folder in his hands and sits up to face JJ. “Did the lab say how long the organ had been in the jar?”
“Kinda. The jar was filled with chemical preservatives common in taxidermy and embalming. An exact timestamp is impossible but they can say for certain the uterus has been in the jar for at least a year. It could be much older than that.”
“When did the killings start?” Hotch remains stoic throughout this. Just because he doesn't show it doesn't mean he's unaffected. He's seen worse dozens of times. These photos shouldn't phase him. Something about the softness in these victims' faces reminds him of his ex wife when she was pregnant. Alicia Davis was visibly pregnant in the crime scene photos. It's unthinkable to Hotch that anyone would do this, that there was no one there to protect her.
“The first body was found three months ago.”
Unless…?
Cause of death was bloodloss in every case, and that takes time. If the killer was quick to leave he may believe these women are still alive.
“It says here something about a sword?” Reid changes the subject before Hotch can get a word in.
“Uh, yeah, they think that's his signature. The unsub leaves his cutting tool, a sword of some kind at every crime scene. Some have had fingerprints in tact but Vicap has found nothing in the way of matches.”
Rossi sets his file aside and crosses his arms. “You'd think if there was an eighth body with a sword next to it someone would've noticed.”
Prentiss asks, “It took them seven confirmed bodies to call us in?”
Reid is already drawing on the map with whatever implements he can find. Looks like today the writing utensil is a hot pink highlighter from the chest pocket of Emily's sportsjacket. Prentiss is by now completely unphased by Reid's antics. She saw it coming when he started doing that thing with his hands. The frantic ‘Reid needs a pen’ dance she's come to recognize as an acceptable substitute for asking verbally like a normal person. “That's because until now they were all found in different police jurisdictions. They were all found in their homes but I'll bet you this guy is finding them in some place they'd travel to and following them home. The center of these points is remarkably close to where five different districts meet.”
“They probably thought it was a strange one off murder case. No reason to ask other jurisdictions until it happens twice.” Morgan chimes in with his perspective on the issue. He used to be a street cop. He remembers exactly how easy it is to brush something like this off as an officer who hasn't been trained in this sort of thing.
“It may be a forensic countermeasure. This guy is organized.” Hotch closes the file and puts his seatbelt back on as the plane prepares for landing. This case is going to be interesting.