"𝗪𝗶𝘁𝗵𝗶𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗰𝗼𝗿𝗲 𝗼𝗳 𝗲𝗮𝗰𝗵 𝗼𝗳 𝘂𝘀 𝗶𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗰𝗵𝗶𝗹𝗱 𝘄𝗲 𝗼𝗻𝗰𝗲 𝘄𝗲𝗿𝗲. 𝗧𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝗰𝗵𝗶𝗹𝗱 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝘀𝘁𝗶𝘁𝘂𝘁𝗲𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗳𝗼𝘂𝗻𝗱𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗼𝗳 𝘄𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝘄𝗲 𝗵𝗮𝘃𝗲 𝗯𝗲𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗲, 𝘄𝗵𝗼 𝘄𝗲 𝗮𝗿𝗲, 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝘄𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝘄𝗲 𝘄𝗶𝗹𝗹 𝗯𝗲"
- 𝗗𝗿. 𝗥. 𝗝𝗼𝘀𝗲𝗽𝗵

-----

𝗖𝗵𝗮𝗽𝘁𝗲𝗿 𝗧𝘄𝗲𝗻𝘁𝘆 𝗧𝘄𝗼 - 𝗗𝗮𝗺𝗮𝗴𝗲𝗱

Valentina was at the BAU for seven am but when she walked into the bullpen she saw Derek, Emily and JJ stood in Rossi's office without Rossi.

She frowned, placing her things on her desk before walking up the stairs and into Rossi's office "Why's this so messy?"

"No idea. Hotch is in Connecticut, right?" Emily asked.

"Yeah, with Spencer. They left last night. They're doing a custodial interview, Chester Hardwick" Valentina replied, scanning the many files on the floor as Emily replied with a "Oh, damn"

"He doesn't need anything else on his mind when he's dealing with a guy like Hardwick. You got any idea what Rossi was working on?" Derek asked the three agents next to him.

"I think Garcia might know. He stopped by her place last night" JJ spoke with an ounce of uncertainty in her voice.

"What?"

"Why?" Derek and Valentina questioned at the same time.

"I'm not really supposed to say" The group turned around to face the blonde tech analyst "He said he wanted to keep it between us. He didn't ask anyone for help"

"Penelope...Rossi is a guy who colour codes his handwritten notes in his notebooks. Blue pen for evidentiary items, red pen for supposition and theory. The guy is a fussy, anal-retentive neat freak who never leaves anything out of its place. I would say this" She pointed to inside of his office "is a scream for help"

"He's in Indianapolis, on a twenty year old double homicide. He said it's time someone pays for it and he was upset. He took a commercial flight this morning. He picked up a bureau SUV half an hour ago" Garcia blurted out.   

"Talk about a scream for help, Rossi doesn't fly commercial" Valentina said, glancing between her four coworkers.

"Jet's available"

"Let's go" Was all Derek said and with that, they headed to the plane.

-----

Now on the jet, Valentina was sat next to Derek as she took off her jacket and placed it on the back of her seat.

"You know there's not really much to this file, Garcia" Said Derek to Penelope who was on speaker.

"Yeah, well, there's a latent fingerprint that's making its second run through AFIS as we speak. As soon as I get results, I'll let you know. And then there's also, apparently, some crime scene notes that Agent Rossi wrote up that I'm still spelunking for"

"So, he was on the actual crime scene with the local detectives?" Valentina asked.

"Could be why it bothers him so much" JJ suggested.

"Well, I highly doubt this was his first scene" Derek replied.

JJ shrugged as Valentina turned her head to look at Derek "Yeah, but it was a bad one. The weapon was a long-handled ax"

"Yeah, but we've seen worse since he's been back" JJ said. They just couldn't figure out why this case bothered Rossi so much.

"There's nothing else cross-referenced? No other crimes tied to this?" Emily asked Garcia.

Garcia shook her head "No, nothing I can find. I mean, certainly nothing with these signature elements"

"Okay, so it's a double homicide, yes, but a single occurrence with no apparent issue of state lines. Was there a request from the local authorities for the FBI's help?" JJ questioned.

"I don't think so"

"Then what the hell is Rossi doing?" Valentina said.

"And why is this a BAU case?" Derek added.

"I don't think it was" Garcia said who was just as confused as the rest of them.

"All right, Garcia, I want you to double check any other unsolved murders in Indiana or the surrounding states near this time. Something this brutal doesn't feel like a one-time thing" Derek told her.

"You got it" And with that, she was off.

"What is it? What is it about this case for him?" Emily pondered out loud as the team sat there trying to make sense of everything.

-----

The four agents walked into the bar to meet Rossi after Garcia had called him to let him know they were coming which he wasn't very happy about.

"If you're buying, I'm drinking" Emily said as they approached the bar.

"I don't think any of us could afford this place otherwise" Derek added with a small smile on his face.

"Yeah, I know I can't" JJ said, looking around the place.

Valentina smiled "Me neither"

"Go home" Was Rossi's only response whilst keeping his eyes on the bar.

"We thought you might need some help" Emily tried but Rossi wasn't having any of it "You're wrong"

"Come on now, Rossi. Bounce some theories off us. Fresh eyes can't hurt" Derek reasoned.

"And we don't take no for an answer" Valentina told him, sitting down in the seat next to him.

"This isn't even a BAU case" Rossi continued to protest.

"Maybe not yet. But I can make anything a BAU case if I want to" JJ said causing Rossi to turn his head to look at her "It's about paperwork and I know the paperwork"

"Why do you care?"

"Because you do" Valentina said honestly as they all moved to a table where Rossi bought them all drinks and told them the case from the very beginning.

"I was here on a serial inquest in '88. It was pretty short work. The guy wasn't going to win any IQ contests. The day after we collared him, the local detective was driving me to the airport and hears a call on his walkie of kids screaming in a house not far from where we were. He asks if I mind taking the job in with him. We were first on the scene. Inside we found..."

Derek pulled out a file "Found this" Rossi nodded.

"The axe had been left behind, but it had been wiped clean. Turns out it belonged to the family. The oldest daughter, Connie, told me her father bought it on Christmas Eve a few months earlier. To cut down a Christmas tree" Rossi sighed "Now I always associate the whole thing with Christmas. Never been able to put a tree up myself again" He took another sip of his drink.

"So he never hurt the kids at all?" JJ asked.

"Not physically"

"But he would have known that the kids were in the house?" Derek stated and asked at the same time.

"He only hurt the parents and then left"

"Okay, so using a weapon he found at the scene and not eliminating all of the potential witnesses, that makes him disorganised" Emily spoke before looking over at Valentina.

"But he left no evidence, which suggests he's organised. There was one fingerprint behind the bedroom door. There should've been more prints in other places yet they were wiped clean" Val countered, leaning back into her chair with a sigh.

"And that one good print was not a match anywhere. I've been over this a million times. I keep thinking, if there was just one more piece, one more thing to go on, the answer was right in front of me"

"He might be dead" Emily let out.

"I have to be sure"

"Rossi, if he's dead, you may never really know" Valentina added in.

"When we arrived on the scene, before any of the other units got there, I could hear them. Before I even got out of the car. It was a warm morning and the erm...the windows were open in the upstairs bedroom and their voices floated out into the street. They were crying and calling for their mommy and daddy. Three terrified children screaming for their murdered parents. I've seen so much death and pain, but that sound...it's been twenty years and I can still hear them screaming every night. Crying. If I can't tell them for sure that whoever is responsible will never do it again, that screaming might never stop"

-----

It was the next day now. They pulled up to the house and stepped out of the SUV as a girl with blonde hair came walking down the front steps.

"Hi, Connie. I brought the team with me..." Rossi started before getting cut off by Connie's yelling which took everyone by surprise "Yeah, you need to stop this"

Valentina felt bad for the guy. He looked heartbroken "Excuse me?"

"Look, we thought that if we didn't call you back the last couple of times that you would just give up and leave us alone" Connie was crying now and the other two children had come out of the house to see what was going on.

"I know that it hurts, but I'm only trying to make sure someone pays for your parents' deaths" Rossi replied.

"We don't care anymore. It's been twenty years. We need to be able to move past it. Please!" She begged. Valentina looked at Derek who was stood next to her, it was painful to watch.

"I won't bother you kids again" Rossi nodded, walking back the SUV when Connie asked "And you'll stop it with the gifts, too?"

That made Rossi pause "Gifts?"

"What are we supposed to with a bunch of toys that remind us of the worst day of our lives?" Connie asked.

Rossi looked mortified. The killer was still out there "I never sent you any gifts"

The three kids let the agents into the house as they moved all the toys that they've received over the years onto the table.

"This is it?" Rossi asked as the entire table was covered with an assortment of stuffed animals.

"It's all we could find" Georgie, the brother, told him.

"We threw a lot of them away" Alicia added.

"I wish you would have told me about this" Rossi said to Connie.

"We thought you were sending them. At first, we kind of liked it. Then it just became a bad reminder" Connie explained.

JJ was taking some pictures as Emily and Valentina put on some gloves and started to inspect the toys.

"These are incredibly cheap" Valentina said as Rossi nodded.

"Where would you even buy toys like that?" Derek said from where he was leaning against the frame of the wall.

"Or why?" JJ added in.

"How did you receive them?" Rossi asked them.

"They're usually left on the front porch at night. Mine was found in my car this time" Connie told him. This wasn't good.

"So he's following you"

That seemed to spark a memory in Connie's head "There was a pickup outside the...Where I work. I just...I always thought it was you"

"What do you remember about the pickup?" Rossi questioned.

"All I saw was the shape and the headlights"

"Morgan, obsessional crimes are you speciality" Rossi looked over at him as Derek came to stand next to Rossi.

"Well, there's two kinds of obsessional offenders that would send gifts to survivors. Sadists, who want to make the families keep reliving the crime, or guilt-laden offenders, desperately trying to find some type of way to apologise" Derek explained.

"Sadists usually use something they know will remind the family of the person or the crime. Jewellery, newspaper clippings" Rossi pointed out.

"These don't look like the kind of things you would send to inflict on someone" Emily said.

"So, guilt-laden"

"You know, they do actually look like the kind of thing a child would send" Valentina said, looking at the toys.

"Okay, well, it's rare, but an UnSub who feels this much guilt sometimes commits the crime unintentionally. They tend to be developmentally disabled, extremely low-IQ offenders and generally, well, they're physically large and they're very strong. Strong enough to hurt somebody accidentally" Derek said, looking at Valentina.

"Like Lennie, in Of Mice and Men" Valentina said to him.

"Exactly"

"He needed help then. There wasn't a fragment of evidence left at the scene. That's not low-IQ" Rossi said to the two of them.

"Well, usually they're assisted by an older relative and it's almost always a parent. And this parent rationalises that the UnSub would never try to hurt anybody. See, in a lot of ways, this type of UnSub, they're sort of overgrown children" Derek looked over at JJ "JJ, when you get Garcia on the phone, tell her we're not looking for other homicides here. Get her to look into a string of less serious offences in this area. Parks, playgrounds, involving children, but not necessarily children that have been injured or abused"

JJ nodded "Okay" She walked out the room with her phone in hand.

Derek sighed "See, an UnSub like this, when they seek out children, they want to play with them, they don't really want to hurt them. But it's their size that frightens people"

Valentina looked over at Rossi "This could be that piece you were looking for"

Soon enough, they had Garcia on the phone and ready to go "Okay, crime fighters, I've got the information you were looking for, but it may lead to more questions than answers"

"Oh, of course" Emily said.

"There are scads of open petty crimes, as described in the very area of Indiana in the last twenty years. But here's the rub. A large portion of them only occur in the last week of March and the first week of April every year. And then it gets weirder. Because the same kind of crimes crop up in Springfield, Illinois for the next two weeks. And then Des Moines, Iowa in the couple of weeks after that"

"So he's travelling" Derek stated.

"On a specific schedule for years?" JJ asked.

"Maybe he's a salesmen?" Emily suggested yet Rossi and Valentina seemed to very deep in thought.

"Who takes a developmentally disabled partner on a sales call?" Derek countered as Valentina looked at him and then back at the table where the toys were.

"Wait, what about a carnival?" Valentina said as everyone looked over at her "My dad being in the army and all, we moved around a lot so my mom always took me to the carnivals. That would make sense how he's getting around"

"Yeah, we went to a carnival the day before. It's the last thing we did as a family" Connie realised.

"Did anything happen?" Emily asked.

Georgie shook his head "No"

"No, we had to leave early. There was this clown that made me a balloon animal. It didn't even look right, but then he kind of followed me around. He didn't really do anything, but my mom got afraid so we left" Connie said.

"You never told us that" Georgie looked over at her.

"I didn't even remember it until now" Connie replied.

"Penelope, pull permits. Find out if this carnival is still in business" Five minutes later, Garcia found the carnival and the street it was on. The team got into the blacked out SUV and made their way there.

"You guys look around. Prentiss, with me" Rossi said once they got out of the car as JJ, Valentina and Derek took off whilst Rossi and Emily went towards a man who was passing bottles and yelling at other people setting up a ride.

"I can't believe people actually pay good money to play these fixed games" Derek said to JJ and Val as they watched the stalls getting set up.

"Men" JJ stated as Valentina smiled.

"Excuse me?" Derek looked at her.

"It's not people. It's men"

"Is that a fact?"

"Only a man would waste fifty dollars trying to win that three dollar stuffed animal" JJ pointed to the stall that was covered in bears.

"Not my dad, he hated them because they just take your money. Even if he wasn't at work which was very unlikely, my mom and him would take me to whatever carnival was in town and he slagged off every stall we came across" Valentina chuckled "I surprised we wasn't told to leave, ya know bad for business and all"

Derek smiled "What about you, JJ? You go to carnivals as a kid?"

"Oh, yeah, every year" She replied.

"Yeah, me, too. The first place I had a drink" Just as Derek finished his sentence, Valentina spotted someone "Clown" She said instantly as they made eye contact with the guy who started to run.

JJ, Derek and Valentina were still looking for this guy thinking they'd lost him when Derek spotted something. Hands on their weapons, they got closer, taking out their guns as JJ took the tarp off the ride.

"FBI!" They shouted, the man was hiding under a ride as he started to yell "Daddy! Daddy!"

"Get your ass out of there right now!" Derek told him but he continued to yell "Daddy! Daddy!"

"Let's go! Let's go! Get out!" Derek hauled him out and onto the floor before putting his hands behind his back. Rossi and Emily came running over as they held his father back who was shouting at them to not hurt him.

JJ still had her gun drawn at the man incase he tried doing anything to hurt them as Valentina got down on her knees next to Derek.

"Stay down! I need your cuffs!" Derek said to her as Valentina cuffed the man whilst Derek kept him still. The profile was right once again.

-----

It wasn't long before the team was back in Virginia. Derek had his arm wrapped around Valentina, his duffel bag in the other hand as they all laughed at what story Emily was telling them.

"Pretty boy, how was Connecticut?" Derek smiled at him, lifting his arm up so Valentina could go to her desk to place her bag down but not before walking past Spencer and ruffling his hair as he smiled up at her before quickly flattening it back down.

"Ultimately uneventful"

"Hey, you know what is eventful?" Valentina said "Garcia and Captain James, sitting in a tree"

JJ laughed as she walked off to her office as Derek looked at her with raised eyebrows "Get out of here. You're serious?"

Valentina nodded as Rossi smirked, walking up to his office as Emily let out a shocked laugh "I gotta say, she's got great taste"

"What? What does that mean?" Spencer asked, still confused.

"Didn't you hear, Val?" Emily asked him.

"The song meant something? No. No, I missed it" The three agents chuckled at how clueless he was when a guy walked in with a large envelope and a clipboard.

"Is there an Agent Hotchner here?" He asked and just as Valentina went to speak, Hotch came walking through the doors. Speak of the devil.

"Yes, that would be me" Hotch answered as he took the envelope before signing the bottom of the paper that was on the clipboard.

"Aaron, you okay?" Valentina asked as Derek, Emily and Spencer looked at him.

"Haley's filing for divorce. I've been served" Hotch replied, walking out of the bullpen leaving the four agents shocked to say the least.