Chapter 10

The team gathered in the conference room to discuss their findings. They wanted to be as sure as they could before they announced it to the police and the news reporters got a hold of it.

"Where did Reid say he was going?" Morgan pried. Everyone else was sat down and ready to discuss the case but Reid still wasn't back.

"To check the drug cocktail. He's probably at the library." JJ shrugged and the others just glanced at each other. They didn't really have any time to waste and Hotch was looking on edge already.

"Right. We'll have to start now and Reid can catch up." Hotch said, catching everyone's attention quickly. Everyone sat with a cup of coffee or tea in their hands and a solemn expression on their faces. "Let's run through the facts." He walked over to the board and skipped Reid's writing, pointing at the writing underneath about the phones being tampered with.

"Riley, the friend of Grace and Penny, told me he remembers Penny having to get her phone screen repaired the week of the abduction after someone walked into her and she dropped her phone on the floor." JJ began. "Garcia is currently looking into the records of the other victims and the people they were in contact with to see if the same has happened to them. Two scenarios pop in my head; either the unsub is opportunistic and just picks people in the phone shop, making sure he places some sort of tracking device in the phones when they are being fixed – which in turn makes me think he is a worker in that kind of industry – or that he chooses the people by walking into them and someone else plants the device for him..." JJ scribbled her thoughts beside the original scribble about the phone.

"Either way they are very different scenarios and could change our unsub's profile dramatically." Morgan replied sharply. "We could go off on the wrong lead and be wasting time talking to phone repairmen when we should be looking for a guy who purposely damages phones, or vice versa."

"I know. We're waiting on Garcia to call back with the information on the other victims before we pursue anything from that. It's just something to think about as we carry on." JJ said carefully, everyone was looking at Morgan in confusion. Why was he so uptight about this case? What was making him so snappy? He sensed everyone's eyes on him and looked down at the table. Hotch moved swiftly onto the next thing on the board; the tyre tracks.

"Ok, so Morgan and I looked around the park, it's quite open and looks straight onto the road ahead but the gates stay open until late. We assumed the girls would meet each other at this gate, so we tried to think of the best angle the unsub would come at to be able to snatch two girls without anyone seeing or hearing a thing. We were at that park in the daytime and we didn't really see anyone in it, so we can only imagine at night it's pretty silent but we didn't think the unsub would be brave enough to pull up towards them on the road and try and pull them in his vehicle so we went further into the park. There are a few open gateways that would easily fit a vehicle through and it meant the unsub could sneak up behind them and drag them into the dark park and his vehicle without anyone seeing. We found a few different tyre tracks in the dirt and have sent them to be analysed. If any of them don't match the vehicles normally in the park for maintenance or whatever, we will definitely know." The team nodded and jotted some things down. This was great progress but it still wasn't enough, they were still waiting on too much information. If anyone was going to help right now, it needed to be Garcia or Reid. Maybe something one of those two had would connect some dots and lead them on the right path.

"Sorry I'm late!" Reid burst through the door, a coffee in one hand and three library books under his arm. Everyone jumped a little as the door hit against a small table and swung closed again, another banging noise echoing the room. His face turned a little red as everyone looked at him, some in amusement but others in annoyance.

"Reid, we said we were meeting at three to discuss the profile. You're late." Hotch had to show his managerial side was still there as he glanced down at his black watch and looked back up to Reid.

"I know and I'm sorry but I was onto something so big I couldn't leave." Reid said, throwing the books down on the large conference table and taking a sip of coffee before moving it to the side and opening the first book. Hotch looked at the hand written whiteboard and noted there wasn't much else on there to go by, so he nodded to Reid as if to say 'begin'.

"After getting confirmation from the lab about the same drugs being in all their systems, I wondered something. How did this unsub know those three would work together? He was either extremely lucky or he'd tested other mixtures of drugs in victim's systems before to find which ones worked the best. I contacted Garcia and asked her to run a check on all the unsolved crimes where the victim had a cocktail of drugs in their system that contained one or more of the ones we had now..." He pulled his phone out of his pocket and called Garcia, putting it on speaker. "Ok Garcia, they're listening."

"Hi everyone! The bearer of news is here!" She began chirpily. "So as Reid probably explained, he asked me to look into unsolved crimes in the area, and surrounding ones, where the victim had a cocktail of drugs in their systems. I thought we wouldn't find anything, until I came across this which I've sent to your tablets. There have actually been ten other murders in this area over the last ten years where the victims have been female and have been found to have a cocktail of drugs in their stomach. Five of these have the same physical features as the victims we have now. The drug cocktails were all over the place though, as Reid expected, the first victim Brianna Laurenson was found to have ecstacy and LSD mixed with high levels of alcohol. The second victim Susie St.John was found with cocaine, opium and was made to inhale solvents... As you can see on your tablets though, the mix of drugs gets closer to the one we have now by the time we reach victim nine, Rebecca Chambers. She had opium and marijuana in her system and the date of her death was pretty much exactly a year ago which, if you look at the chart i'm bringing up, fits with the timetable of all ten of these deaths." Everyone's eyes bore down on these tablets in disbelief. Here they were looking at ten more deaths; five taking place last year and five taking place the year before.

"How did they not notice this?" Morgan spat as he threw the tablet down on the table. "If it wasn't enough that this guy has killed all these people this year, and is holding two now, he's potentially killed another ten over the last two years?"

"I know it's frustrating Morgan." Hotch began. "But there was nothing we would have been able to do, it took until Keeley's disappearance for the Police Chief to ask for our help. They wanted to do this independently. They probably don't have an analyst who tracked through unsolved cases in and around St Louis and even if they did, the drugs are different, the victims are different. We're looking at it through his behaviour and I'm confident to say they are probably all victims of this man but they may not have seen this connection. Either way, we need to stay focused and catch him before anyone else gets hurt..." Hotch's face was stern as he spoke, everyone remained quiet and an eerie silence took over the room for the first time since they'd begun.

"That's only one part of what we discovered though, Sir..."

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