CHAPTER SIX:
LIFE AFTER LIFE
( aka 03x08: lucky )

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THE NEW CRIME SCENE was a public restroom in an isolated park -- as expected, in Bridgewater. The heavy police presence seemed to interrupt the quiet nature of the place. Nobody else would've been around when Tracey Lambert, their newest victim, pulled up to use the bathroom. Her jeep was parked right by the door, unlocked. Her things were abandoned in one of the cubicles.

Dallis stood inside with the door shut, staring at the inverted pentagram painted there in red. Behind her were a neat stack of books on the closed toilet lid, most likely belonging to Tracey. They were placed there with care, organised by size and colour, and it struck Dallis as odd. It seemed almost obsessive, or maybe he was just taunting them, but this was different to how Abbey's body was presented.

"So, yesterday afternoon, Tracey Lambert told her roommate she was going for a hike," she said, leaving the cubicle.

Rossi was pacing the rest of the cubicles, finding them empty. "He was waiting for her."

"Blitz attack?" she questioned. "Like Abbey Kelton at the gas station? It's evident he targets low-risk victims, but what I don't understand is this--"

She stepped aside, gesturing for Rossi to take a look at the books.

"If the fingers were a message that us knowing gives him power," she said. "What do the books organised by colour and size mean?"

Rossi's expression was grave. "Our unsub was likely in a mental institution. The severely mentally ill have chaos all around them. When institutionalised, they're given order, taught to keep their rooms clean and neat. When discharged, they stop taking their meds and their minds fall back into chaos, but often they do one thing to keep some order back into it."

"So you believe this is compulsive?"

"I do."

"Okay," she nodded, bringing out her phone. "Let me get Garcia to work her magic."

Outside, she sought a moment of privacy behind the toilet block. The rest of the team were searching through Tracey's car just as Father Marks arrived on the scene. Morgan's shoulders bunched at the sight of the man, but Dallis trusted Hotch and the others would keep him in line, dialling Garcia's number and leaning against the brick wall.

"Hey, Hot Stuff, speak and be heard."

"Hot Stuff," Dallis grinned. "Thought that was reserved only for Derek."

Garcia scoffed. "As I said, he's in my bad books right now, so he's been demoted."

"Well, I'm certainly not complaining," she said. "I need you to look into Florida's state mental records."

"I can definitely do that," she could hear Garcia typing away on the other end of the line. "Am I searching for anything specific?"

Dallis sighed at that, subconsciously blowing at a strand of hair that had fallen in front of her eyes. She tucked the phone between her ear and her shoulder, yanking one of her gloves off to locate a silver bedazzled hair-clip she'd left in her pants pockets.

"Honestly? I'm not sure. We're looking for a male in his twenties or thirties. Expand your search across the last ten years and send through whatever you've got."

"Can do," Garcia exclaimed. "Ciao, my lovely! I'm waiting for your return so we can have our girls' night."

"Yeah, well, you just text me if you need to reschedule," Dallis said knowingly."

"Nothing is getting in the way of girls' night, but nice try."

By the time Dallis had finished calling Garcia, a volunteer search had been organised with Father Marks' congregation and a few other locals, using a sign-in sheet as a potential suspect list. Soon, the area was crawling with civilians eager to help. While Emily and JJ matched IDs and directed people to write their names down, Dallis and Reid handed out water bottles to the ones about to head out into the parklands. Once everyone was signed in, the search properly started, but it wasn't long before something went wrong.

Another woman went missing right under their noses. Sherryl Timmons, a thirty-two year old wife and mother. Her husband, John, was distraught as they returned to the police station. Dallis couldn't blame him. He was right there when it happened.

"What am I going to tell my boys?" he cried, keeled over in his chair with his head in his hands. "I mean, Matt's old enough to know what's going on... It's all my fault. I shouldn't have left her. Please tell me you'll find her."

"We're doing everything we can, John," Dallis assured as Hotch came over to take his statement. "I'll leave you with Agent Hotchner, okay?"

Once John managed a shaky nod, Dallis took this as her cue to leave. She found Father Marks hastily packing up his things in the back room. He had his head bowed as if he was praying, disguising the sheen of emotion in his eyes that seemed to echo to the bone. He paused when Dallis entered the room, heading straight for the mini kitchenette. She had a feeling they were in for another long night.

"If you're finished with the lists, you can leave them there," she said with a glance over her shoulder. "I need to do something. I'll take another look."

"I'm sorry that I couldn't be of more help," he remarked, holding his carry-bag to his chest.

"Nothing you can do about it," she shrugged.

Once she had the kettle running, another of those wretched earl grey tea bags waiting in a mug, she joined Father Marks by the table. She longed to escape to her pyjama pants and a sweatshirt instead of dress pants and a sage green silk top, to trade her ankle boots for socks, but the waking hours ahead of her went on for miles. She forced herself not to think of anything else, scanning the pages and pages of names that meant nothing to her, yet one of them held all the answers.

"Agent Cohen, right?" Father Marks asked. "Cohen derives from the Jewish presence in Eastern Europe. Did you know that?"

Dallis nodded. "That's my step-dad's step-dad's heritage. It's a bit of a nuisance to keep track of, if you ask me, the whole family tree thing."

"When was the last time you visited God's House, Agent Cohen?"

Dallis searched for what Morgan resented in Father Marks' face. There was nothing out of the ordinary. Just a man committed to his faith, and to sharing it with others. She waited for the moment of realisation, but he seemed only curious, as if everyone's path to God was different and he was interested in understanding them all.

"Before your church yesterday? I'd have been a child." She watched as the priest suddenly tensed, gazing over her shoulder at Morgan, who'd stormed past the door without so much as a glance inside. His jaw clenched with the visible restraint it took not to turn back around, indicating to Dallis that he and Father Marks had already exchanged one too many words. "Get home safely, Father Marks."

Once he was gone, she returned to her tea, but it wasn't long before news of another body reached the chaos of the station. Maria Lopez was found with her torso severed off in one of the pews at Father Marks' church. Morgan had come across her body -- though why he was at the church, Dallis was hesitant to ask. Much like the others, Maria had a history of prostitution and solicitation, but she'd been reported missing nine months ago and seemingly only dead for three days.

Seemingly.

Hotch and Emily joined the rest of the team with a theory.

"Eating them?" Dallis echoed as she stocked up on her third tea for the night.

Rossi had laughed when he saw her returning to the table once again with a fresh mug, joking that her body had to be running on hot water and tea leaves instead of blood. Dallis had no retort, merely narrowing her eyes and sipping her drink.

"Doctor Fulton confirmed it," Emily said. "Maria Lopez was frozen shortly after her death."

"Well, that explains why we haven't been able to find the other victims," said Morgan. "He's keeping them."

"That's a better way of putting it," Dallis nodded at him.

"How did you get to cannibalism?" JJ asked Hotch, wearing a disbelieving frown as she searched through all their previous files. Before the mention of the fingers, there was nothing to even suggest that the unsub had cannibalistic tendencies.

"He didn't take them for sex and he took their legs. He was trying to tell us by feeding the fingers to Abbey Kelton. The fingers were a message, but 'I've killed before' was only part of it. 'I'm eating them' was the other."

"Cannibalism, the greatest taboo," Rossi sighed. "That explains his drive to blame his appetite on an outside force."

JJ shook her head. "Why would anyone want to eat human flesh?"

"Try not to dwell on it," Dallis told her, stretching her legs out underneath the table. "Why do people kidnap, commit assault or murder?"

"It's like a sexual urge," added Reid. "The cross-wiring of the two most basic human drives, sustenance and sex."

"And it all fits," Morgan mumbled.

Emily's phone started to ring. Dallis glanced at Morgan, searching his blank expression when she said, "Hey, Garcia, I'm putting you on speaker."

"So I can't find any patients in Florida who have the charming cocktail of being both a satanist and a cannibal," Garcia jumped straight to business. "However, Hazelwood Mental Institution is the place to go for Florida's most dangerous kind of wackos, and they had a fire in 1998 that destroyed all their records."

"How far away is Hazelwood?" Hotch asked.

"Seventy miles," the answer came from Reid.

The two men weren't long at Hazelwood Mental Institution before a call came through to Rossi.

"Rossi, we've got something," Hotch's voice spoke through the speaker, followed by, "I need a name, Reid."

In the background, Reid stated, "Admitted after biting a large piece of flesh out of his nine-month-old sister."

Dallis blinked, stunned, leaning back in her chair as if putting distance between herself and the phone could erase from her memory what she'd just heard. A similar reaction crossed the faces of everyone else sitting around the table, including Detective Jordan, who was quiet and sullen as he took the chair next to Rossi.

"A name," Hotch pressed.

"Believes he's being possessed by a flesh-eating demon..."

"Reid."

"Floyd Feylinn Ferell."

"Feylinn?" Detective Jordan gasped, suddenly alarmed. "Floyd Feylinn?"

"You know him?" Dallis asked.

"Sure I do."

"He must've dropped his last name," said Emily, leading the way out to the main entry.

But Jordan wasn't confident. "Would he be that obvious?"

"Absolutely," Rossi said. "He's not that bright. He believes Satan would protect him from getting caught."

Feylinn's house was dark and lifeless when their SUVs pulled into the yard. There was no car in the drive, only one light on in one of the back rooms. Morgan took front and centre before the front door, nodding along to Rossi's quiet countdown before he kicked the door in. They rushed inside, moving like a well-oiled machine, guns raised, clearing each open entryway as they breached further into the house.

"It's clear," Morgan confirmed once they made it to the kitchen -- the only room with a light on.

"Well, there's no order to the chaos in here, that's for sure," Dallis murmured, gazing around at the cluttered benches.

There were used plates and cutlery climbing towards the ceiling in their tower beside the sink which was blocked by a large silver cooking pot. Dallis didn't even want to consider what was in it, let alone seeing for herself.

Suddenly, from the other side of the house came the soft but growing noise of music. The stairs on the other side of the door lead down to a basement of some kind. Their torches lit the way for them, exposing Dallis' white-knuckled grip on her weapon.

They took their practised positions. JJ swung open the door, stepping aside as Detective Jordan entered the cool chamber of a walk-in freezer lined with dozens of blue-skinned, frosted bodies. Dallis felt a tug on her wrist before she could follow the others into the room.

"With me," Rossi angled his head to the opposite door. "In here."

On the other side was the body of a woman -- thankfully, this one was alive. She swung her head around, letting out a desperate cry when she saw their FBI vests.

"Sherryl Timmons?" Dallis called out.

"Yes," she sighed, letting her head rest on the metal table she was chained to. Someone had come for her.

"You're safe now," Dallis assured. "Is Tracey Lambert here?"

"No," her answer was disappointing, but at least they'd found one of their missing victims alive.

But where was Feylinn? Had he known they were coming?

The music continued to taunt them, increasing in volume from the deliberate turn of a hand. The final room. Dallis set to work kicking in the padlocked cage Sherryl was trapped in. On the other side were a set of keys on a metal ring. They hung above Sherryl's head, just out of her reach, a reminder of the freedom that he'd taken from her. Dallis snatched them down and started unlocking all the chains.

"Thank you," Sherryl started to cry.

"You're okay," Dallis said again just as they heard Morgan and Rossi finding Feylinn on the other side of the wall. "Try not to listen. This'll all be over before you know it."

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FEYLINN DIDN'T LOOK LIKE the unsub Dallis expected, but then most of them never did match the pure evil of their actions. Feylinn's expression was vacant, but it held a sinister edge of enjoyment. He stared daggers through the two-way glass of the room they held him in,  dressed only in his underwear and a shirt provided by the station. When Rossi and Morgan had apprehended him, he'd been sitting haunched underneath a shrine to Satan. Rossi had confiscated several of the artworks he'd had displayed and books organised in the same compulsive pattern as the bathroom where Tracey Lambert went missing.

Their final girl to find.

"Francisco Goya. Known as The Black Paintings," Reid was busy looking through their evidence. "Lorenz' notes say that Feylinn was exposed to them as his therapeutic art therapy."

"I don't think it worked," Emily muttered.

At the same time, Dallis huffed out a disbelieving laugh. "Wouldn't this stuff only encourage the so-called demons in his head to come to life? What were they thinking?"

No one had an answer.

"He kills them after seventy-two hours," Hotch reminded them. "Tracey's been gone for twenty-four. See if you can find out where she is."

Morgan sighed, staring into the room where Feylinn waited, the room he'd have to enter and control. Dallis was no stranger to interrogating an unsub, they all had to do it, but she would gladly leave this one to Morgan. "I'll do what I can."

The team gathered around the glass to watch.

Morgan took his time looking through Feylinn's notebook in front of him before eventually settling on his desired page. "Kobe Girl Steak, huh? That's where you massage the meat, right? Floyd, these are some pretty unusual recipes you've got here. Did you try them all?" Feylinn said nothing. "You must've tried some of them, right? Talk to me. Which ones did you try?"

"They have a smiley-face by them," Feylinn mumbled. "Others have a frowny-face."

Morgan flipped to the next page. "They sure do. Why?"

"They didn't turn out so good."

"Well, thank you for that," he grimaced, slamming the book shut. "You hear voices, Floyd?"

"I'm not smart, but I have a smart friend who tells me things."

"What's your smart friend's name?"

Feylinn smiled. "He wants me to tell you something."

"Tell me what?" Morgan asked.

"Your watch has stopped."

Morgan glanced down at his watch as Feylinn finally angled his head towards him. He sat back in his seat, hiding the wrist he wore his watch on beneath his bicep.

"He's trying to spook him," said Rossi on the other side of the glass.

"That won't work," Hotch insisted.

"You know, we thought you chose athletically built women because you were attracted to them, but that's only part of it, right?" Morgan pressed. "You like a woman with a little meat on her bones, don't you? Makes for better recipes, doesn't it?"

"Skinny ones take drugs," was Feylinn's response.

"So, what, you don't like drug users?"

"They taste funny."

Morgan cast a look at the glass then stood to lean over Feylinn. "Where's Tracey Lambert, Floyd?"

"I'm not supposed to tell you. I'm only supposed to tell Father Marks. I'm going to stop talking now."

Morgan, giving up, left the room.

"Can we really ask this of Father Marks?" Dallis asked once he'd rejoined them.

Hotch considered this, running a hand along the tired lines of his face. "We might not have much of a choice. Morgan, call him and see if he's up for it."

Dallis really didn't think he would, but his love for the people won out. Even when they entered that room and he saw the state of Floyd Feylinn, he only hesitated for a second before sitting in the chair directly opposite him, his hands folded in his lap. Morgan took up position at the end of the table, the mediator between the two.

"Thank you for coming, Father," Feylinn drawled.

"Anything I can do to--"

But Morgan raised a silencing hand. "Floyd, I had to pull some serious strings to get him here. My bosses didn't like the idea at all of sending him in. Now, they're going to allow him to sit right here and listen, but you're going to talk to me, alright?"

"Okay," he said, and the words started pouring out. "I've done some really bad things."

"Everybody does things they're not proud of, Floyd. The only thing that helps is to talk about them, to tell other people. Things are always better when you talk about them."

"Not everything."

Rossi, who had been standing in the corner scanning the sign-on sheets for what felt like the millionth time that night, momentarily drew their attention away from the interrogation as he laid the papers out across the table. "This is strange. When he entered the park, Feylinn signed the volunteer sign-in sheet, but his name's not on the list of searchers."

"Nowhere?" Dallis frowned, leaning over to look for herself.

How was that possible?

"Nowhere," Rossi confirmed. "Something's wrong."

"Father, I feel so alone," Feylinn was saying. For the first time since they heard him speak, his voice rose with inflection. "I feel like God has abandoned me. Why?"

"You are not alone, my son," Father Marks addressed him after Morgan nodded his head. "God is in all of us."

A slow smile crept across Feylinn's face. "So is Tracey Lambert."

Dallis lurched out of her seat, feeling the blood drain from her face. Rossi and Hotch sprinted out of the room, rushing to help Morgan with Father Marks, whose temper had overcome the calling of God. He lurched across the table and tried to wrap his fists around Feylinn's neck. Feylinn shook with unadulterated laughter.

"He was feeding the volunteers," Jordan murmured, holding a hand to his mouth.

Dallis remembered seeing him. In passing, without thought, she'd been too busy handing out water bottles. He sat only a few feet away, those same silver pots from his kitchen lining tables under a gazebo. So is Tracey Lambert. He extended the whole congregation into his crime, sharing the weight of responsibility.

"I need another tea," Dallis murmured, pushing out of the room.

She'd have preferred something much stronger, but she'd save that for her girls' night with Garcia. At least she had that to look forward to, to remind her that she still had a life outside the mind-crushing loops of cases like this.

■ ■ ■ ■ ■

GARCIA'S PHONE RANG OUT for the third time in ten minutes.

"Pen, I'm warning you, I'm almost at your apartment and if I accidentally walk in on something, I'll never forgive you," Dallis laughed into Garcia's voicemail. "But if you're alone, I've got wine. Lots of it. See you soon, my lovely."

She rounded the corner of Garcia's street. She had grocery bags of alcohol and ice cream on either arm, a backpack with her overnight clothes hanging on her shoulder, her phone pressed between her shoulder and ear. She was busy trying to wriggle it back into her hands without dropping any of her precariously balanced luggage. She didn't stop to look around as she entered the familiar courtyard of the apartment complex.

Something moved in her peripheral vision. A faint whimper crept through the shadows that extended from the lone light above the steps.

Dallis would remember how cold it was that night, but when she looked up and saw her friend sprawled in a pool of her own blood on the steps, everything that was warm and good in the world disappeared. There was no hope of justice, of vengeance, when cruel hands had ripped a hole in Garcia's chest, and Dallis was sure she started screaming as her wine bottles fell and shattered.

"Penelope," she shouted, but it sounded like a whisper through the pounding of blood in her ears. It was all over her, this red stain of life. It seeped through her pants as she kneeled in the growing pool. It stuck beneath her fingernails as she desperately pressed her hands to the gunshot wound. It wasn't stopping. Why? "Pen! Who did this?"

She didn't even stop to think that the culprit might not have left the scene. That her life, for a moment, was also at risk. She was holding Penelope Garcia's heart in her hand and it would be on her if it stopped beating. That was what mattered. She had to think, she had to do something. Why wasn't she doing something?

"HELP!"

Blood and wine ran in a never-ending river. No one was coming. She moved one hand, searching for her phone in the mess. The screen was cracked but it lit up dutifully when Dallis managed to find the right contact number. Blood stuck to her face now, too.

"Dallis?" Hotch said her name with some confusion.

"Hotch," she sighed, and she knew he would come. It would be okay. "I need help."

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A/N: I actually hated writing this chapter oh my god. I seriously forgot the details of Tracey Lambert right up until writing that scene, part of me wanted to skip over it from how disturbing it is, but this is Criminal Minds like come on.

We're onto another episode I hate now. Can't wait to share some angst for poor Garcia. Was I evil for making Dallis find her? Probably lol, but can't take it back now. Enjoy!