The List - Part 1
Title: The List
Rating: Mature (language/mild sexual content)
Pairing: CM: Gen - Casefic / QAF: Brian/Justin
Timeline: CM: Between 307 and 308 / QAF: Two years post-513
Parts: 1/ ? (estimated about 14 at this point; 10 are finished.)
Warnings: Minor character deaths (really minor)
Beta: roane, the wonderous and amazing. She’s never seen QAF, alas (working on it!), so the character sections there are only beta-ed for the writing. All errors are mine.
Summary:
Someone is mutilating and killing men in Pittsburgh’s gay village. When Pittsburgh’s finest can’t save Pittsburgh’s hottest, they call on the FBI for help. Can the BAU stop the Liberty Avenue Killer before the unsub strikes again?
Without Prejudice. The names of all characters contained here-in are the property of CowLips and The Mark Gordon Company. No infringements of these copyrights are intended, and are used here without permission.
The List
1.
Cue the pulse to begin.
He’s just as beautiful as I remember, his body taut and firm in all the places that matter, soft and yielding in the others. He moves underneath me, reaching, yearning, the pair of us climbing together towards that moment of ecstasy when the skies open and you can see, just for a moment, the face of God.
He spills himself all over my hands, his pulse hot and wet and slick, the air filling with the tang of salt and iron.
“Was it good for you, too?” I murmur into his ear. He doesn’t answer, of course. Overwhelmed, overcome; I’m the one who brought him to that, the culmination of everything he’s ever felt, or will ever feel again. I did that. Me.
I dress him after we’ve bathed, buttoning his shirt for him, cuffs and collar.
And when I leave him in the Toolshed parking lot, sweet skin so pale against the black tarmac, red blood a vivid stain against them both, my fairy-tale lover (Sleeping Beauty and Snow White in one) - I fold his hands for him, to hide his shame.
It’s the least I can do.
Hatred is active, and envy passive dislike; there is but one step from envy to hate.
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
November 12th, 2007, 9 am
“Have you seen the new guy in polygraph?” FBI technical analyst Penelope Garcia flashed a wide and sunny grin at her co-worker as they entered the bullpen at the BAU. Special Agent Emily Prentiss, as slim and brunette as Garcia was extravagantly blonde, her charcoal pantsuit a visual foil for Garcia’s purple dress, shook her head and dropped down into her desk chair.
“Cute?”
“Super cute. Tall, dark, bit of a baby face, awesome glasses.” Garcia described, leaning on Prentiss’ desk. Derek Morgan, who fit that description reasonably well himself but for the lack of glasses, looked up from his computer and flashed the women a bemused look.
“Careful,” Prentiss warned, with a smile of her own. “You’re going to make Morgan jealous.”
“Jealous of who?” He leaned back in his chair and crossed one foot over onto the opposite knee as he reclined.
“The new guy in polygraph,” Prentiss supplied the answer.
“New hottie on deck,” Garcia elaborated. “But don’t you worry, muffin,” she directed that at Morgan, with a wink. “No one will ever come between you and me.”
“Millard? He’s gay,” came the voice from the fourth desk in the quad. Three heads turned in unison as though choreographed to stare at Doctor Spencer Reid, sitting cross-legged in his chair, his desk buried under about half a dozen open file folders. He’d been head-down and scribbling when the women entered, not joining the conversation until he delivered his succinct summation.
“How do you know?” Morgan asked the question on all of their lips, raising a dark eyebrow at the spindly, floppy-haired agent at the next desk.
Reid looked around at his teammates, oblivious to their surprise. “I saw his partner dropping him off at work Tuesday morning. Blond, short hair, business suit, beard.”
“Could be a friend,” Prentiss suggested, cocking her head.
“Or a carpool,” Garcia added, poking her pen, decorated with a purple feather, in Reid’s general direction as emphasis.
“You french-kiss your carpool driver?” Reid asked, not quite as oblivious to their reactions as his original expression would have had them believe.
“OK, that’s a point.” Garcia sighed.
“Why are all the cute ones gay? Or married?” Prentiss complained incautiously, only half-joking.
Morgan gave her an offended look, as did Reid. “Hey!”
Prentiss laughed, holding up her hands in surrender. “Sorry. Gay, married, or immediate co-workers, and therefore off-limits to all but the most platonic forms of abject adoration.”
“You’re forgiven,” Morgan accepted the correction magnanimously. He waggled his own pen at her in admonition. “This time.”
The door opened and a trio of agents entered the bullpen, two dark-haired men trailed - but not by much - by a slim blonde woman. Hotchner, the younger of the two men, clean-shaven, his dark suit sitting neatly on his shoulders, gestured for the rest of the team to join him before trotting quickly up the stairs to the conference room. Rossi and JJ followed, the older man’s vaguely scruffy appearance a dark contrast to JJ’s fresh, polished fairness.
Prentiss tracked them with her eyes and rose from her chair, the two men at the desks following suit. “Here we go.”
--
Five of the six field agents of the BAU were seated around the table in short order, the only sounds the momentary scrapes and shuffle of paper as they opened the files set before them. JJ stayed standing, and slid a photograph into place on the bulletin board that faced the round table. The colours were the first thing that jumped out at Morgan when he studied the image; the young man - close-cropped dark hair; snug jeans, faded; white button-down shirt over a clinging wifebeater; the red stain that flooded up across the bottom of the shirt, stark in its brutality. His hands had been carefully folded over his crotch, one cupping the other, as though protecting himself. Or covering something.
“Alexander Easley,” JJ began, nodding at the photograph. Another picture joined the first, another good-looking young guy. In his mid-twenties, Morgan estimated, just from the look, also dressed casually, this time in a clinging silk shirt and jeans with artfully-placed tears and fade marks. Expensive shoes. Same pose. Same blood. “And Anthony Penn,” JJ continued, once she’d secured the picture in its place. “Penn was the first victim, killed September twenty first. His body was found in the parking lot of Pistols, a local bar. Pittsburgh PD assumed it was a crime of passion, until Easley’s body showed up two days ago, in another parking lot in the same area.”
“Another club?” Prentiss frowned at the images, already running through potential connections in her mind.
“Another club in the same neighbourhood,” JJ confirmed. “The Toolshed, a few blocks away. Both are on Liberty Avenue, which is the center of Pittsburgh’s gay village. Both men were drugged, death was by exsanguination-” she gave the men in the room a vaguely apologetic look and a small grimace of distaste, “following castration.”
Morgan couldn’t help the wince. He felt a little better at the visceral reaction when he noticed both Reid and Rossi crossing their legs; he couldn’t see Hotch from there, but he wouldn’t have been surprised if his boss had done the same. Prentiss was laughing at him with her eyes, though, and he gave a half-hearted shrug.
“Any sexual assault?” Hotch moved on, ever-efficient, flipping the pages of the file to get to the ME reports.
“Uncertain,” JJ picked up the answer with a shake of her head. “The ME noted that both men had engaged in anal sex shortly before death, but there was no evidence of assault. No defensive wounds, nothing to suggest that it was anything short of consensual. But that all depends, of course, on when the sedative got into their systems - before, or after.”
“Presence of lubricant and absence of damage suggests that pain wasn’t the point, here;” Rossi interjected, turning a paper clip over in his fingers as he thought aloud. “No DNA left behind, so the attacker used a condom or a substitute-“
“Suggesting impotence, maybe, sexual frustration?” Reid leaned forward in his chair, tipping the back legs up and balancing against the edge of the table. “The specific mutilation, the way the bodies have been cleaned, redressed, the unnatural pose - the killer wanted them to be found, and he cared about them. This was something intensely personal for him.”
“An ex-lover?” Prentiss suggested, glancing at JJ for confirmation. “Do we know if the victims were gay?”
“Penn was on the volunteer board of the local Gay and Lesbian Center, so it’s safe to say that he likely was; Easley is unknown. His last known address was an apartment in the gay village, though, so it’s entirely possible.” JJ shrugged, unable to give them any more than that. “Given the ritualistic nature of the way the bodies were posed, and now that this isn’t just a one-off, the local PD have asked us to weigh in.”
“Do we -“ Prentiss hesitated for a moment before asking, then pressed on. “Do we know what happened to the victims’ genitals?”
“No sign of them at the scene,” JJ replied, shaking her head. “Maybe he’s disposing of them somewhere else?”
Rossi frowned, his expression dark. “Or keeping them as trophies.”
Hotch nodded, taciturn as always, keeping any further thoughts to himself for the moment. “Wheels up in half an hour.”