Criminal Minds: Trompe L'oeil (part 20)
Maybe a mild warning for imagery on this one - not anything that hasn't been alluded to in the story already, and nothing exactly explicit, but I feel to put it out there.
~ (part twenty) ~
Thunder breaks overhead. Sounding closer. Louder. Like boulders being dumped across the roof. Quick and kinetic. Culled against the motionless police house. Mocking.
The air inside the station is stale.
The two minutes since Reid left have turned into two centuries.
The desk under Morgan's fists feels like a barrier. The walls like a prison. A world caught in slow motion. Everything shifting in half-timed beats. Like ticker tape. But when Morgan looks up, Emily finally has keys in her hand, and JJ is standing next to her.
"Back up?" he asks.
JJ nods. "Gearing up. The chief is coordinating, but they'll wait for our signal. The hand radios will give us a five mile reception zone. Less in the storm, but it should be enough."
Morgan leans into his knuckles to rock himself straight, re-checking his weapon, already angling towards the exit. "Then give the signal. Let's go."
"Wait," says JJ, one hand gripping his arm, the brief pull like the lock of a steel restraint.
"JJ, we have to go."
"No. Wait." Her voice is solid, feet and expression stone steady. "The unsub's going to be ready for us."
Morgan starts to shake his head, then stops, sprinting back over her words. Catching the serious crease behind her eyes, he shifts to face her more fully, a sudden itch spiking under the skin at the back of his neck.
"Look, I don't know how Hotch connected the unsub to Eastport Farms," she continues. "But chances are, if we kept going, we would have too. The unsub is waiting for this. He used the name Hank Miller at the gallery when he didn't have to. He wanted us to find the painting. He wants us to figure this out."
Morgan feels the teeth click at the back of his jaw. He hears the hard beat of his blood thrum once in his ear, then a sharp silence.
"She's right," says Prentiss, meeting his eyes.
"I know," he answers. Loosening the grip on his gun, he turns his head, looking through the glass to the evidence board in the conference room. At the drawings. The crime scene photos. The profile notes and shifting patterns. "JJ," he says dully. "If you were to look back at Gideon's press coverage-not the serial killers he caught, but him, just him-where did he get the most attention?"
JJ follows his gaze to the board and back, the line between her eyes rigid and confused. "Adrian Bale," she says after a beat.
Prentiss looks at her too. "The agents who died in the Boston explosion," she says, nodding. "I remember. It was everywhere for months."
Morgan feels the hollow snap of dread stretch into his skin. Facing Prentiss, he re-adjusts the grip on his weapon. "We know now that Gideon is the missing piece in the profile. If we look again at everything our unsub's done with that piece in place, what does it tell us?"
Prentiss stands stationary, then starts a slow tilt to her head. "He's an organized sexual sadist," she begins, mouth lingering empty at the end, waiting for the remainder of words to converge. Morgan can see it when she reaches the same place he did. A subtle tightening in her shoulders. A dull depression of lines. She meets his look. "He's a sadist… not a bomber. He's not a bomber, but he used an explosive."
Hand pressed flat to her sternum, just below her neck, JJ breathes. "What does it mean?"
Morgan answers. "It means Gregory Hanks knows about Gideon's leave after he lost the agents in Boston to Adrian Bale's explosion, and he's not about to be out done by anyone. It means the explosive at the gallery isn't the only bomb he's set for us to find."
~
Reid's foot is locked against the gas pedal. Racing the sky. Like he can't drive fast enough. Like he is already too late, and this won't end well because of it.
Stacks of felled logs edge the dirt roadway, clustered in intervals between even rows of overgrown pine, becoming more haphazard the farther in he gets. The increasing chaos feels like a harbinger. Like the rough road to Gideon's cabin. Portend of nothing good. He stares straight as he drives, and tries to ignore it-tries not to think of cabins and cornfields, or dead girls already in the leaves.
The roll of a gun.
A dispassionate voice.
Choose one to die.
His throat constricts. I won't do it.
Quick lines of lighting cast silent streaks across the windshield, gnashes of thunder following after. Under the scent of ozone, he catches the memory of burning fish guts and can't let it go.
He's just spotted Hotch and Rossi's vehicle, abandoned in the distance, when the sky breaks.
A furious rain.
Dragging the SUV to a stop, killing the lights and the engine, he's soaked before he even gets the door closed, nearly slipping in the mud as he does. He keeps hold of the car, standing abruptly still once he has his feet-hand pressed to the paneling, water running under the edge of his collar.
"Hotch," he mouths, breathing heavily. Everything is silent, except for the rain. Dead and quiet.
His eyes are slow to adjust to the dark. Through the shadowed maze of old logs, he finds the square outline of a sawmill, or a storage house-maybe both-standing solid to the north, rain bouncing off the roof.
He is in a lumberyard. Long unused. An excavation site. Like all that's left for him is to surface the bones. The rest of his thoughts are like loose threads following after. Tugged at until he can't keep the stitching from coming undone. Maybe the girls are already dead. Maybe Hotch. Maybe Rossi. Maybe everything that's happened here has already occurred, and both Gideon and this man will remain ghosts that will haunt the rest of them, and never again let them sleep.
Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.
He coils his brain against the thoughts, but they persist, dancing in the same ugly loop as his mixed up memories. Pushing the drip of wet hair off his forehead, he presses his shoulder to a stack of neat wood, working slick, wavering fingers to draw his revolver. Marking the grey-shaded door, he moves again, slipping closer as he feels a drop in air pressure. For one short moment, the rain lets up. The whispering in his ears goes silent. Then, a burst of lightning claws lines across the sky, and under the angry moan of thunder, the whispering returns, trudging something new with it.
A wounded voice. Keenly human. Leeching into the dark.
Reid's lips go numb, locking down with the stampede on the nerve endings around his frozen lungs. Stuttering through two short breaths, he touches the door handle. Tentatively, then more determined. Twisting with his fingers, he stands to the side, pushing in with his foot, weapon aimed, undeviating.
Nothing.
There is nothing.
He is staring down an empty corridor. Or the facsimile of one. A wide pathway opens before him between walls of slotted shelves-crates stacked high with cut wood and folded canvass, propping up sheet after sheet of corrugated metal at the base. It stretches maze-like along the wall inside the building.
A dim glow from somewhere deeper in the storage house casts shadows through the interior.
Absurdly warm air reaches out to him and he follows.
The voice he heard from outside burns loud inside the building. A moan. A buried scream. Then silence.
Around a corner, the light coming through the shelves on the interior side of the corridor begins to stagger-like a fan blade is moving under the source in intervals, choppy stripes sliding through the wood and over the iron to dart across his toes. He squints, trying to see between the slats. He's edging around another corner into another oblique pathway when he feels the touch on his back-an arm over his shoulder, a hand on his mouth. The slice of panic is instantly dizzying, painful in his chest as he's hauled backwards, vision turning solid grey.
Crushed into a dark corner, back locked against a solid chest, a roar of sound invades his ears-Tobias Hankel bellowing behind his eyes, shoving a resonating tremor into his jaw muscle.
"Reid," says Hotch, low and steady into Reid's ear, the pale reflection of his knuckles catching the light as he holds his palm over Reid's mouth.
Reid stills, then drops his head back with a shaky-deep breath, feeling his temple brush the edge of Hotch's rough jaw. He closes his eyes for a moment. Morgan was right. He's not okay. He's not okay, and he's not even sure he's going to be, but he nods, lifting his head off Hotch's shoulder, feeling Hotch's hand dip away from his mouth. The air he tastes is clean, and that seems wrong. He knows what they're going to find here. He should be tasting death.
"Do you have your weapon?" Hotch asks quietly, voice stoic-calm. He doesn't comment on the way Reid is shaking, but the sensation of his heart beats mutely against Reid's shoulder blade and feels like a commentary all its own.
Nodding again, Reid flexes his grip, finding a better balance to his feet. Sawdust under his shoes. Damp itch in his eyebrow.
Hotch shifts, letting go and stepping to the side. "Stay behind me," he orders. "Do you understand?"
Reid jerks his chin down, then licks his lips. "Rossi?" he whispers with a voice that sounds like it belongs to another person.
"Around the other side," answers Hotch. He doesn't ask about the others, seeming to have deduced that Reid has come alone. He turns left, into the flickering light, then stops, staring back. The shadows on his face are all wrong. Distorted. "Reid, he knows we're here. I need your head in this."
Reid digs cold knuckles into his eye socket and nods, wondering suddenly if the stutter of light over Hotch's face is real, or in his mind. Underneath it, he hears the sound of a tapping pen, and that seems wrong too. He opens his mouth. "His name is Gregory Hanks," he says quietly, running his eyes in towards the core of the building, seeing a shard of movement there through the slats. "He wants…"
"Gideon," Hotch finishes. He holds on Reid's face, then looks the other way. The cry has come again. A stilted wauler.
Four more steps and the light evens within their pathway to show more distinct shapes. A flash of dirt-blond hair. Two-day scruff. Loose jeans. Booted feet. A man pacing casually through the open center beyond the crated shelves.
"You wanted us here," Rossi's voice abruptly echoes, somewhere out of view on the other side of the warehouse. "We're here."
The pacing stops.
Through the wood staging, next to the pacing man, Reid makes out three stone boxes, platformed off the floor. Custom carved. Tombs. Like in the painting. Fear sounding from within, as though wired to a speaker. A shiver sticks its way under his wet hair and presses down the sudden sensation that he should conserve air.
"I don't think so, Agent Rossi," bleeds a relaxed voice. "You're not him. See, I'm pretty sure you've figured it out by now-they don't come out of the boxes unless it's him."
"Who's him?" Rossi questions.
Reid rubs knuckles below his twitching eye, bending lower, angling for a better view between the planks. The stone coffins are evenly spaced. Under the light. Like a presentation. A shell game. Or a magic trick.
Reid, I need your head in this, he hears again, distinctly, but when he glances over, Hotch hasn't said anything.
"Come on now. You wouldn't be here without him. I planned it that way."
"Did you?" says Rossi. "Don't know what to tell you. I don't know who you're talking about."
Steadying his hand over the rough board in front of him, Reid feels splinters bite into his palm. A magic trick, he thinks again. Look this way. Where will I be next? "He's directing us," he whispers.
Hotch stares at him.
"Drawing our attention," Reid explains, easing back from the slats. "This whole time, he keeps telling us where he wants us to look, and we've followed. We're only seeing what he wants us to see, when he wants us to see it. We're not looking where we really should."
Hotch's expression is sharp, and he steps back also, turning quietly to stare around them.
A frustrated laugh ricochets to the ceiling. "You really want to play pretend, Agent Rossi?" says Hanks. "Agent. Gideon. I'm talking about Agent Gideon."
"Jason?" Rossi throws back, indifferently. "He had better things to do. He's moved on. No good reason for him to stay."
Reid digs at his eye, crushing the lashes, working a coarse swallow over the taste of metal on his teeth.
"I can tell when someone's lying, Agent Rossi. Can't you?"
"Then listen to my voice. He's not here. I've only come for the girls."
"I'll say this one more time. He has to be here. They don't come out, unless he's here."
Reid looks at the stone coffins again, then at Hotch. Hotch is staring upwards at the strip of bare wall above the pallet racking. Reid sees the silver glint of wire tubing and follows it down at the same time Hotch does, looking for the connecting switch that will turn on the overhead lights. Hotch moves, patting a hand softly between the slats on the back wall until he locates the source. With a steadying glance at Reid, he pulls the cover and hits the light switch. A barrage of bright white fills the building, washing away the staggered silhouettes, but it's the painting that catches Reid off guard. Flooded over the entire south wall under a row of high bay lights are images of faces and bodies, visible even through the crates. Paintings of girls with eyes closed. Arms crossed. Shuttered out of reality. Jaggedly lined together in a Picasso-like mural. Victim after victim after victim.
Wires are spread in wide parallel lines down the whole of it. Connected in pockets to something that looks like c-4.
His hands go cold.
A moment later an angry voice charges towards them. "No."
Reid hears the growl, but he's not fast enough to dodge the movement in his periphery-the rushing approach to the other side of the pallet racking, nor the strong shove to the crates. He trips back as the shelving tips, fragments breaking into his skin as he scrambles out of the way. The entire section of shelving in front of them hits the wall with the force of a thunderclap. In the splinter-crash of wood and canvass, he watches Hotch go down under the debris.
Dragging air, Reid makes it to his feet, crawling out of the mess just as a fist hooks into his shirt. He makes one attempt to jerk away, but a line of ragged fingernails are jugged into his collarbone. The click of a gun grates right behind his left ear.
Do you know what this is? It's God's will.
~
tbc
~
The pacing is not quite what I hoped it would be in this section, but alas, here it be. Life’s been an unfortunate, weltered, massive mess of busy. Thanks for hanging in there.