Premeditated Chapter 21
When two points connected, the connection was a line. When two spheres intersected, the intersection was a circle. The points representing the North Carolina and Georgia cases connected in a line. The spheres representing the North Carolina and Georgia cases intersected in a circle. Against a dark starless field, the figures - the points, the line, the spheres, and the circle - glowed in the visual channel and zoomed in the auditory channel, conceiving a world to show and tell a truth to a mind that cared and dared to know it.
To the mind that cared and dared to know, the two figures - the line and the circle - represented the two killers who had gone to school at two times and two places within the one mind after they had worked and played at two times and two places within the one world. For triangulation and trilateration to work and play, one and two were insufficient, so three was necessary to show and tell the truth.
With his eyes, Reid stared intensely into the air a few feet from his face. With his mind, he stared intensely at the figures upon the field. He closed his eyes. The figures disappeared. He opened his eyes. The figures reappeared. Intensely, he stared into the air to conjure up a big red reset button. It appeared, not before his eyes as an honored guest, but behind his forehead as a serving utensil, bearing a striking resemblance to the Staples easy button. Without the aid of his fingers, physical or mental, he pressed it. Like slices of bread in a toaster, the button dropped down, froze in place, and popped back up, its clinking clanking motions wiping the field clean to fill the room with the aroma of fresh toast, strawberry jam, and coffee, dark as the field, to go along with breakfast. To Reid, mathematics was simple, but narrative complex, so one had to be shown, sum by sum in summation, before the other could be told, as the integral whole.
On a map of the United States, two red points appeared, one in North Carolina and one in Georgia. Holding the points steady, Reid blinked to undraw the map. Letting go, he labeled one point "NC" and one point "GA", the two points wobbling in place until a line zoomed, left to right, to connect them. Like the points, the line glowed red. Reid labeled it "US". Together, the one line, two points, and three labels glowed red and zoomed soft, waiting for the three labels, two lines, and one point that were necessary and sufficient to complete the triangle.
Intensely, Reid stared, and as he stared, the point "NC" glowed red, then green, then yellow, a green line zooming to connect it to a green point centered over his own body, dead-center over his chest and off-center over his heart. He stared further, and as he stared, the point "GA" glowed red, then blue, then magenta, a blue line zooming to connect it to a blue point centered over the green point that glowed green, then blue, then cyan. He labeled the green line "JG", the blue line "TH", and the point "SR". Brilliantly, the triangle glowed, its colors fitting the trichromatic color model of machines conceived to fit the trichromatic color vision of humans, each of whom differentiated millions of different colors with his one mind and two eyes, each of which contained three types of cone cells to respond to three types of wavelengths of visible light - L for long (564-580 nm), M for medium (534-545 nm), and S for short (420-440 nm). In the RGB color model, the three primary colors red, green, and blue combined at different intensities to produce millions of different colors. At equal intensities, two primary colors combined to produce one secondary color, and three primary colors combined to produce white light. In the triangle, red and green combined to produce yellow, red and blue magenta, green and blue cyan, and red, green, and blue white light. Reid stared, and as he stared, the figures - the points and the lines - glowed white to triangulate a truth, from the inside out, that he had cared and dared to know. He stared further, and as he stared, the point "SR" flipped upwards and away, taking with it all the other figures, to rotate the plane of the triangle parallel to the plane of the field. Brilliantly, the triangle glowed white upon the field. Now that none of the points was centered over his own body, Reid saw and heard the truth, glowing and zooming, from the outside in as well.
Holding himself steady, he revolved the field around his body to place the triangle at the back of his mind, leaving behind a primordial darkness unconstellated by stars yet to be born. He blinked to redraw the map. On a map of the United States, two red points appeared. He blinked to undraw the map, leaving behind the two points that wobbled in place until they expanded in three dimensions into the two spheres that blew up in size until they intersected in a circle. He labeled one sphere "GA", one sphere "NC", and the circle "US". The plane of the circle was perpendicular to the plane of the field, so he rotated the spheres, 90 degrees prograde, until the plane of the circle was parallel to the plane of the field. With a blink, the sphere "GA" disappeared above the plane of the circle. Another blink, and the sphere "NC" did the same below. All that remained was the circle, which, tasting like bubblegum, tasted pink, but only vaguely, because the circle was only vaguely pink, as were the spheres that had blown up from the points to lose the intensity of their redness. Actually, the spheres were colorless and the circle white, but Reid happened to like the taste of pink.
When a sphere intersected a circle, the intersection was one point on a tangent or two points on a secant. In the top left quadrant, Reid conjured up a sphere "SR". Several times in succession, he blinked. With each blink, the sphere zoomed closer to the circle until they intersected at one point on a tangent, then two points on a secant. In the bottom left quadrant, he conjured up a sphere "TH" and blinked it into place, intersecting the sphere "SR" and the circle "US" at the bottom point of their intersection. In the top right quadrant, a sphere "JG" intersected the sphere "SR" and the circle "US" at the top point of their intersection. Reid stared, waiting for the figures to glow white. They remained inert, so, bewildered, he frowned. As soon as he frowned, he recognized his error. With a bemused smirk, he blinked to redraw the spheres "GA" and "NC" above and below the plane of the circle. Now, the figures were complete. Without blinking, but shifting his eyes back and forth amongst the figures, he focused in upon the spheres "GA", "NC", and "SR" surrounding the circle "US". Under his gaze, they glowed red. Surrounding the same circle, the spheres "GA", "SR", and "TH" glowed blue, and the spheres "NC", "SR", and "JG" glowed green. Brilliantly, the spheres glowed red, then blue, then green, color after color after color in shifting succession until shifting intensified into staring. Reid stared, and as he stared, the figures - the spheres, the circles, and the points - glowed white to trilaterate a truth, from the outside in, that he had cared and dared to know. He stared further, and as he stared, the sphere "SR" bounced forwards and sideways, bringing with it all the other figures, to rotate the plane of the circle perpendicular to the plane of the field. Brilliantly, the spheres glowed white, but not upon the field. Now that one of the spheres was centered over his own body, Reid thought and felt the truth, glowing and zooming, from the inside out as well.
Holding himself steady, he revolved the field around his body to place the triangle at the front of his mind, its last known configuration a constellation of white dwarf stars - small, massive, and dense - in the darkest night sky. Of its own volition, the point "SR" flipped downwards over the sphere "SR", vertex to center, as both points of both figures wobbled in place over his chest and in time with his heart. With a blink, the figures jumped up onto the field. Another blink, and the figures jumped down over his body. Between the two perspectives, the outside in and the inside out, Reid shifted, seeing and hearing a universal objective truth in its mathematical simplicity and beauty as he thought and felt a personal subjective experience in its narrative complexity and humanity.
From the point "SR", it was only a hop, skip, and jump to land on the line "US", as it was from the sphere "SR" to the circle "US", center to center or surface to arc. With a hop, skip, and jump, Reid landed himself in the shoes of the UnSub. Under standard conditions of coffee and sleep, triple jumps made with his mind, unlike triple jumps made with his body, were almost always successful.
As he jumped away, he spoke, in a soft indefinable murmur, of his personal subjective experience in the words of the universal objective truth, as if generalizing, experience to truth and narrative to mathematics, the stressors, internal and external and external and internal, that had tripped to devolve him from the child - Dr. Spencer Reid, Philosopher - that he should have always remained into the adult - Dr. Spencer Reid, Profiler - that he should have never become. As he jumped back, he fumbled for his cell phone, knocked it onto the floor, picked it up, and dialed Garcia.
"Ahoy, me hearties! Arrrrrrr!" Garcia answered.
"Trilateration," Reid murmured.
"Triangulation," Reid murmured again.
"Aye, matey, a-pirating I go with me tricorn and me flag o'skull n'bones," gift given, but not yet unwrapped to be received.
"They're the same case," Reid mumbled softly, half into the room, half into the phone, and fully ignoring either human at either end. "They're the same case!" he spoke loudly into the room. "I chose this case, but I could have chosen that case, but I didn't have to choose either case, because they're the same case!" he raised his voice until he was nearly shouting into the phone.
"Esqueeze me?" Garcia asked quizzically.
"They're the same case!" Reid shouted.
"OK, OK! They're the same case! Jebus, Reid, my ears! Say it, don't spray it!" Garcia complained.
"Sorry, sorry," Reid apologized in distraction. "Hmmph..." a huff, puff, and sigh to gather his thoughts and feelings. "They're the same case," he spoke calmly and clearly. "Remember the two cases that we talked about over the weekend? This one and the one in Georgia with the missing children? I was having trouble deciding between them, but we ended up taking this case over that case."
"Yeah, we took this case, because that case was cold," Garcia said.
"That case was cold, because the UnSub in that case has been too busy killing people in this case to continue killing people in that case," Reid declared.
"What!" Garcia asked, not in the form of a question.
"They're the same case, and they're the same UnSub. The same UnSub has been killing people in both cases, different but same," Reid explained. "Between July and September, he killed women and children in Georgia, in the suburbs around Atlanta. Twelve dead, two missing. In early September, he stopped. In late October, he started up again. Since October, he's been killing women and children in North Carolina, in the suburbs around the Triangle. Twelve victims so far. What appears to be two killers is actually one killer."
"What?" Garcia asked, this time inflecting a question.
"There are similarities in the physical evidence between the two cases," Reid replied. "In both cases, the women were shot in the head with a 9 millimeter, or 0.35 inch, or .35-caliber weapon. In addition, based on the scarcity of gun residue at all the crime scenes, the local PDs independently concluded that a suppressor was used with the weapon."
"Weapon, caliber, suppressor, whatever," Garcia summarized for her own benefit. "You and I both know that I don't know anything about guns, so pardoning my blissful ignorance for a moment...How common are these .35-caliber weapons?"
"Extremely," Reid said. "We use them in the Bureau, but they're available to anyone."
"And suppressors? Are those the same as silencers?"
"Yes, silencers don't actually silence, so they're more accurately termed suppressors," Reid answered. "They only suppress and distort the sounds of the gunshots."
"And anyone can buy them?"
"Search ATF databases for all suppressors purchased in Georgia between January and July 2010," Reid ignored the question to place an order. "All suppressor purchases are automatically reported to the ATF."
"Will do! Easy breezy beautiful!" Garcia answered eagerly. "By which I mean 'I-can-run-that-search-in-a-breeze-easy-breezy-beautiful', not 'I'm-calling-you-easy-breezy-beautiful', but of course you are, but being a more feminine term of endearment, 'easy breezy beautiful' is more like something that I'd call JJ or Prentiss, but not as in 'You're-dyeing-your-hair-to-cover-up-the-gray-easy-breezy-beautiful', but more as in 'You-brain-wielding-gun-toting-amazon-mastermind-you-easy-breezy-beautiful'. Kapish?"
"..."
"Sorry, a glitch in the programming just now," Garcia said. "To get back on topic, you didn't answer my question about the suppressors, but I, using my awesomest powers of deduction, have concluded that anyone can buy them as long as you, I, and Big Brother are all staring at our computer screens, tirelessly watching."
"Anyone can buy them wherever they're legally sold," Reid clarified. "They're legal in Georgia and North Carolina and many other states, but not in California, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Iowa, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, Vermont, or DC."
"Ooohkaaay! Should I search for suppressors purchased in North Carolina as well? If you're right about the two killers being one killer, then the crimes started in Georgia, but still..." Garcia clacked away at her keyboard. "And why January to July 2010? That's a pretty narrow range of dates. I can do much better than that. What if the UnSub bought the suppressor last year or the year before or several years ago?"
"We don't want to inflate the dataset," Reid said. "A list of people who purchased suppressors within the past ten years in both Georgia and North Carolina isn't going to help us much at all. That's more data than we can analyze. We'll start with a narrow range of dates and locations and go backwards and forwards from there. Isolate the data for the five counties - Fulton, DeKalb, Gwinnett, Cobb, and Clayton - that make up the core of the Atlanta metropolitan area. Also, not every suppressor fits every weapon, so filter the data based on the specific models purchased. JJ kept a big binder listing all the makes and models of firearms and firearm accessories in the bottom drawer of the file cabinet in her office. It should still be there. Make a list of .35-caliber weapons and the suppressors that fit them. Cross reference with the list of suppressor purchases to narrow down the data."
"Got it! Now we're talking!" Garcia intensified her clacking. "Lists, lists, lists! Making lists! Sorting lists! Did you know that list-making and -sorting are two of my thousands of super special specialties? Indeed, I am to listing as you are to geniusing!"
"Hmm..." Reid wasn't sure how to reciprocate the compliment, grammatically incorrect, but factually accurate.
"While I'm listing for you, Genius, maybe you'd like to do a little geniusing for me," Garcia clued him in. "I still don't get why the two cases are the same case. Do explain, Dr. Flying Spaghetti Monster, why two different cases with two Big Bads be one case with Big Bad one and the same. Couldn't the similarities in the physical evidence have been 100% coincidental? As you said, .35-caliber weapons are extremely common, and suppressors can be purchased by anyone wherever they're legally sold. Am I missing something here? Is there some crucial detail that's going to make the clouds part, the heavens open, and the angels sing?"
"No, that's all the physical evidence linking the two cases," Reid said.
"And you do agree that 'all the physical evidence linking the two cases' is way too scanty to link the two cases?" Garcia suggested.
"Well, based on the physical evidence alone, we don't have much to go on, but when the physical evidence runs out, there's..." Reid trailed off, pausing to translate mathematics into narrative in a process that almost always appeared, but was almost never actually, easy breezy beautiful.
"Yeah, yeah, yeah, physical evidence runs out, so local numbnuts invoke mystical profilers, who, assisted by enigmatic oracle, descend from heavenly abode to bridge gaps, solve cases, and destroy evildoers," Garcia said impatiently. "So tell me, O Sky Lords Up On High, what's the profile, and how did you guys come up with it?"
"Ummmmmmm..." Reid hesitated as he considered launching into an explanation of the triangulation and trilateration algorithms that he so very much wished to explain, realized that such an exercise was synonymous with futility in any mind but his own, and decided against it. Instead, he ducked the question, "Imagine that you're the UnSub. You..."
"Excuse me! I don't want to be the UnSub!" Garcia protested.
"Fine," Reid said, a sub-atomic particle of snappishness creeping into his tone. "Imagine that I'm the UnSub. I..."
"I don't want you to be the UnSub either," Garcia protested further.
"Someone has to be the UnSub," Reid snapped out a teeny-tiny electron, the teeny-tiny unit of electrical charge catapulting out of his mouth to meander aimlessly around the room before landing above his left eye, where it caused one of his upper eyelashes to veer down and away from its numerous bristly cohorts, the lonely little follicle fluttering in his field of view to minimally obstruct his view of the field. "The psychology and behavior of the UnSub are easier to understand from his perspective. From the outside in, it all looks crazy, sounds crazy, is crazy, but from the inside out, it all makes sense...sort of."
"Alright, I'm the UnSub," he continued without waiting for a response. "I'm a serial killer who has murdered twenty-four, possibly twenty-six, victims during the past five months. I killed pregnant women and unborn children in North Carolina. I killed women and small children - all toddlers, all two to three years old, all boys - in Georgia. To us, the profilers, the victimologies are completely different, but to him, the killer, they are exactly the same."
"How the heck are they 'exactly the same'?" Garcia asked in a manner that implied air quotes, if not physical, then mental.
"Mothers and children," Reid said. "Specifically, the UnSub, his child, and the mother of his child."
"The UnSub's child? Did you guys change your minds about the UnSub? I thought that the UnSub's child was supposed to have been...not born..."
"Right, the child was aborted," Reid said bluntly. "The abortion was the external stressor that triggered the internal stressor that triggered the crimes. Imagine that I'm the UnSub. Prior to the stressors, I was a normal guy living a normal life. I had a job and a relationship. My job could have grown into a career. My relationship could have grown into a family. In addition, I had the family and friends that I grew up with all around me. I was an emotionally healthy individual with a solid support system. I had a lot to live for in the present and a lot to plan for in the future. I had hopes and dreams for what my life was going to be like one, five, ten, twenty years down the line. In summary, I had it all, and there was no rhyme or reason for me to give it all up to become a serial killer."
"Until one day..." Garcia prompted as Reid paused.
"Until one day when my wife or girlfriend, let's say wife, came to tell me the bad news," Reid continued. "For her, the bad news was that she was pregnant. For me, the news may or may not have been bad at first, but even if it had been, then it wouldn't have stayed that way for long. Eventually, for me, bad news became good news. At first, the pregnancy was unexpected and a huge shock and difficult to digest, but once the dust had settled to reveal my true thoughts and feelings, it became clear to me that it was the best possible news. I started to look forward to having a child. I started to imagine myself as a father. I couldn't wait to have a family of my own."
"Aww, that's so sweet of you, Reid, but I don't think that the UnSub would have used analogies like 'dust settling to reveal true nature of bestest news'," Garcia commented.
"I know, I'm not doing a very good impression of him," Reid said. "What I'm trying to say is that while the pregnancy was unplanned, the UnSub was the one who wanted the child, and his wife was the one who didn't, neither in the beginning or in the end."
"That's the opposite of the normal case," Garcia said. "Normally, it's the guy who freaks out and doesn't want the kid and runs away to flee the scourge of his unwelcome spawn. That's why the world is filled to the brim with deadbeat dads instead of...um-um-um..." search in progress for maternal version of shameful appellation, "...miscreant moms," search complete.
"Actually, parents of both genders are termed 'deadbeats' if they fail to contribute to the financial support of their underage children," Reid corrected. "Curiously, when used in its strictest sense in court, the term says nothing about other areas of support, such as..."
"Pff, whatever, I'm sticking to my guns," Garcia cut him off. "My terminology is alliterative and therefore superior."
"Good point," Reid conceded, succumbing, as he sometimes did, not to peer or logical, but aesthetic, review.
"Why, thank you!" Garcia exclaimed happily. "OK, back to the evildoer's tale of evildoing please. I'm officially rapt."
"The UnSub's wife didn't want the child, so she had an abortion," Reid said. "Most likely, she did it during the third or fourth month of pregnancy, just as she was starting to 'show' and just like the pregnant victims that he later killed. The third or fourth month is fairly late to have an abortion, so she might have procrastinated until the last possible minute. Beyond the 16th to 20th weeks of pregnancy, abortions are more complicated to perform, usually requiring a procedure called intact dilation and extraction, also known as intrauterine cranial decompression, also known as partial birth abortion, also known as illegal in the United States. She must have gone through with it before then. As for the UnSub, I don't know how much he knew about it or whether he knew about it at all, but there's no way that he could have stopped it, no matter how much he had wanted the child or how much he had opposed abortion on principle. The mother is the one who carries the baby, and it's her body that gets pregnant, so it's her right to terminate her pregnancy, so it's her right to have an abortion, and there's nothing that he could have done about it as the father. In this country, men don't have reproductive rights, and we're not going to have any until we figure out a way to carry babies ourselves, or, failing that, to grow them...in...tanks."
Garcia snickered, an expression of delight at the adorable prospect of male pregnancy. Hot on the heels of the snicker came the shudder that accompanied her recollection of a movie that she had once made the mistake of watching. In it, Arnold Schwarzenegger had played a gynecologist who had developed a fertility drug that, after being rejected by the FDA, he had naturally taken to impregnate himself with the donated egg of a fellow misguided physician played by Emma Thompson. Along the way, he had complained about his nipples hurting, eaten copious amounts and unappetizing combinations of various food items, and disguised himself as an extremely masculine woman who had become extremely masculine due to excessive consumption of anabolic steroids during the halcyon days of her deeply regrettable youth. In the end, he had given birth by caesarean section as the only exit strategy available. All these gems Garcia was just about to share with Reid, when Reid, tracing the mathematics in his mind to track the narrative in his mouth, lost his train of thought just in the nick of time, "Uhh, Garcia, what was I saying just now?"
"Mpreg," Garcia answered immediately. "Speaking of which, let me tell you about a mov..."
"Yes, the UnSub lost an unborn child of his own when the mother of his child terminated her pregnancy," Reid, sensing no danger, escaped its clutches just in the nick of time. "In response, he targeted pregnant women and unborn children as victims."
"But that doesn't make any sense," Garcia said. "He didn't target pregnant women right away. He targeted women and small children - toddlers, not babies. Can you say 'Out Of Order'?"
"As fast as you can say 'Does Not Compute'," Reid said. "From the outside in, nothing makes sense. From the inside out, everything makes sense. Think about it this way. What are toddlers? Toddlers are just babies who have outgrown babyhood. Babies and toddlers are just children at different stages of childhood development. In the Georgia case, the common thread linking the crimes was the age and gender of the children. All were two to three years old. All were boys. All were substitutes for the UnSub's own child, who, had he been born, would have been three years old this year. Specifically, he would have been three years and five months old at this date."
"Three years and five months old..." Garcia repeated slowly. "Three years and five months ago...is...July 2007."
"The crimes started in July 2010," Reid said.
"Around the third birthday of his unborn child," Garcia contemplated. "Oh God, Reid, are you telling me that the UnSub was in effect celebrating the non-existent birthday of his non-existent child by killing similar victims - small children and their mothers too?"
"Yes," Reid answered. "If the timeline is accurate, then the child would have been born in July 2007, which means that the abortion would have occurred earlier that year, by February at the latest. 2007 to 2010, three years, third anniversary. Third anniversaries, plural. 2010 is the third anniversary of both events - the abortion that occurred and the birth that didn't. January to July...Sometime during that period, the UnSub finally 'lost it', so to speak. The internal stressor that had been building up since the external stressor of three years ago finally tripped to devolve him from 'Normal Guy' into 'Serial Killer'. In July, he finally snapped and killed, but he had probably been considering, possibly even planning, the crimes for some time before then. That's why I asked you to search for suppressors purchased between January and July of this year."
"Genius!" Garcia shrieked. "The UnSub killed small children just like the small child that he never had to love and lose and unborn children just like the unborn child that he loved and lost! Oh, and their mothers too. The victimologies are exactly the same!"
"Yes," Reid answered.
"Search for all abortions performed in Georgia in January and February 2007, isolating the data for the five counties - whatever they are - that make up the core of the Atlanta metropolitan area," Garcia ordered herself as Reid would have done had she not done so before he could have done so.
"Fulton, DeKalb, Gwinett, Cobb, and Clayton," Reid filled in the blanks.
"Curious that you know those off the top of your head," Garcia mused. "By which I mean not curious at all..."
"When I was little, around four or five years old, I had this hobby called 'Traveling By Map'," Reid explained unnecessarily. "That's the best way to travel, because you can go anywhere you want, even to the Moon or Mars. I remember sitting on the living room floor on Saturday afternoons, looking through stacks of big heavy atlases and traveling by map. Every 2-D geographical feature that I saw on a map, I'd turn it into a 3-D mountain or canyon or river or whatever, right there in the living room with me, so I could imagine what it would be like to visit all those places on the map. It worked so well that if I were imagining the Sahara around me, then the living room floor would feel blistering hot, and I'd have to jump up and dance around on one foot at a time. Sometimes, I ended up at one of the nuclear test sites in Nevada, and whenever that happened, I'd go 'beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep' like a Geiger counter for the rest of the day. I'd do this for hours at a time, and the whole time that my dad was trying to get me out of the house for Little League practice, I'd pretend not to hear him, because I was much happier playing mental sports on my own than physical sports with the other kids. It was so much fun studying maps of the Martian surface and imagining myself as an explorer in my bulky spacesuit climbing up Olympus Mons and leaping down Valles Marineris and skimming over the polar ice caps in my jetpack. I even imagined myself as one of the Viking landers, touching down onto the ground, turning my photovoltaic panels towards the Sun, and reaching out with my robotic arm to scoop up soil samples for experiments to detect Martian life. But no matter how much fun that was, I'd always stop as soon as my mom waved a book in front of my face and flipped the pages at me and announced that she was going to read a story to anyone who happened to hear it. The funny part was that I'd want to hear the stories read to me, even though I could read them much faster myself, and I'd want to hear the same story time and again, even though I had memorized all the stories just like I had memorized all the maps. So my mom would read me the same story everyday for a week or two, until I came up with the brilliant idea to flip to a random page in a random book to get sucked into a different story all of a sudden, and that would be the one that I'd latch onto for another week or two until I randomly picked yet another. Meanwhile, I'd chew through a huge number of books on my own, but if anyone tried to read me anything other than the one thing that I wanted to hear, then there would be hell to pay. One time, I became obsessed with the phone book after one of the kids from Little League mentioned that all our parents' names were listed in it. During the middle of practice, when my dad was coaching the catcher, I ran home to check, and I couldn't believe my eyes when I saw that my dad's name was there, just like the shortstop had said! After that, my parents had to take turns reading me the phone book for an entire month until I became obsessed with the DSM. It was a neverending cycle that must have driven them...half...crazy..." he chuckled, reminiscing over the childhood that he had most definitely outgrown and applying the adjective most accurately to his parents, only half of whom had been driven crazy by him.
"Aww, how precious!" Garcia cooed.
"Itsy bitsy Spencer traversed the Martian lands,
Down went the Sun to chill the Martian sands!
Itsy bitsy Spencer lost his darkened way,
Up came the Sun to find a bright new day!
Well? What do you think?" so concluded the impromptu nursery rhyme, neither its composition or performance interfering with the clacking of the keys.
"Bravo," Reid replied in quiet appreciation.
"Great minds taste alike," Garcia said. "Now, back to business. After I finish 'accessing' the medical records in a completely legal, secure, and undetectable manner, I'm going to cross-reference the husbands' and/or fathers' names with the list of people, male, who purchased suppressors three years later between one third anniversary and another. That is not the problem. The problem is this. What if the UnSub was never recorded as the father in the medical records? What if the UnSub was never married to the mother of his child? As far as I know, there are no official government records for 'hooking up', 'going steady', or 'moving in together'. In the end, after all our hard work, we might be left with two blobs of data and zero ways to link them."
"I know," Reid agreed. "All or nothing: either we get all the way there in a few searches, or we get nowhere at all. I wish that there were some other way to identify the UnSub."
"Yeah, me too. But not to worry, Itsy Bitsy, not to worry one itsy bitsy bit," Garcia said. "All these shenanigans are going to take awhile to play themselves out, but once my minions and I get through with them, they're going to all work out to deliver us the UnSub's name to be replaced by his head on a silver platter. Or so I've chosen to hope.
'Accentuate the positive,
Eliminate the negative,
Latch onto the affirmative,
Don't mess with Mister In-Between!'
Hey, Reid, mind if I call you back later? For this job, I'm going to have to go into warp drive. At least warp 1, possibly warp 2, maybe even warp 3."
"Yeah, sure, no problem, 27 times the speed of light," Reid said, understanding perfectly what Garcia had meant about hyperluminal focus and superluminal flow and anticipating his own return to those particular states of mind. "I have to go interview the families of the victims now," he sighed unhappily. "I'll talk to you afterwards."
"Smell ya later, Easy Breezy!" Garcia signed off.
"Easy breezy?" Reid hung up and whispered to himself. "Easy breezy beautiful?" he mouthed silently, still devoting a whole percent of his amazing mental faculties to the parsing of this particular tidbit.
Finding the tidbit utterly incomprehensible, he shifted his eyes to focus his mind back onto the figures upon the field. Upon the field, the figures glowed white and zoomed soft, tempting him to take them apart and put them back together, over and over and over again. To temptation, he gave in, differentiating the forest into the trees and integrating the trees into the forest, color after color after color, each and every cycle of red, green, blue, and white or red, blue, green, and white showing and telling him a tidbit more of each and every truth that he saw and heard and thought and felt and knew. Eventually, he knew enough to name the profiles, if not the UnSub. Jumping away, he named them in their proper order for the UnSub - the blue one "Complicity" and the green one "Pay Forwards". Jumping back, he named them in their proper order for himself - the green one "Pay Forwards" and the blue one "Complicity". Then, he smiled, a smile as big and bright on the outside as the one that he felt on the inside. The funny part was that all this morning, during this whole time that he had been alone at school, he had been alone there as a profiler and a profiler alone. When the clouds had parted, the heavens opened, and the angels sung, there had been no fallen one for the others to look down upon. Somehow, Reid had forgotten that he was a killer as well.
Three hours later, he remembered. The recollection hit him as he sank his teeth into the cheesy saucy deep-dish pizza that Morgan had preferred, Prentiss hadn't, and Rossi had ordered, because the quarter had come up tails instead of heads. For all three hours between recess and lunch, the BAU had interviewed the families of the victims and reassured them that the team was going to do everything within its power to hunt down and put away the killer who was going to have to pay for the heinous crimes that he had committed against their loved ones. Reid had done it too, and the whole time that he had done it, he had been a nervous wreck, fidgeting each of his limbs in turn, bumbling and stumbling over the simplest words of "you", "we", "he", and "she", and shifting his eyes amongst the various pieces of jewelry worn by the various living mothers of the various dead mothers, all to avoid laughing hysterically or crying deliriously in the middle of the police station an unnecessarily long flight away from another police station where the MPD was no doubt interviewing other families of other victims and reassuring them that another team was going to do everything within its power to hunt down and put away another killer who was going to have to pay for the heinous crimes that he had committed against their loved ones. Throughout the process, he hadn't recognized the stressor that had triggered his distress, and no one else had even recognized his distress, buried as it, along with his ever worsening limp, had been under his usual mannerisms of "Reid Being Reid". It wasn't until lunchtime that he had remembered the truth about himself, that he, having long ago devolved from child into adult and philosopher into profiler, had not long ago evolved from profiler into killer and adult into child again. Curiously, by which he meant not curiously at all, it wasn't until lunchtime that he had come up with a brilliant idea for some other way to identify the UnSub.
As his colleagues discussed the interviews over lunch, Reid snuck back into the conference room, quiet and dim like the bridge of the USS Enterprise at the end of a long tedious stardate. To the profilers, he hadn't yet mentioned anything about the profiles. First of all, he hadn't wished to tell. To tell the narrative, he needed time and lots of it. Second of all, he had wished to show. To show the mathematics, he needed data, the more the merrier.
Reid grabbed his cell phone out of his pocket, turned it off when he had meant to turn it on, sighed, waited, turned it on when it had turned itself off, and dialed Garcia.
"Blobs, Reid, blobs!" Garcia answered in distress.
"Trilateration," Reid murmured.
"Triangulation," Reid murmured again.
"What is this? Groundhog Day?" Garcia asked.
"Hey, Garcia, can you give me Kevin's phone number?"
"Kevin's phone number? You want the phone number of my boyfriend Kevin Lynch?"
"Yeah, I need him to look up some data for me, so I can run some algorithms on it. Remember the software that we talked about over the weekend? The one for accessing the databases of the telecom companies to access the cell phone records of their customers?"
"Warrantless cell phone tracking," Garcia said.
"Warrantless cell phone tracking," Reid said.
"To do what?" Garcia asked.
"To hunt down the killer and put him away," Reid answered.
Master Post