that highlander/supernatural one (with mccormick, not methos)
and still more fic. sorry for spamming your f'list, everyone.
Chapter Two: Joined the Blues
Officer Charlotte Byrd was a petite red-head whose fierce green eyes and stubborn mouth reminded Matthew of a Parisian girl he'd known during the Second World War who'd taken off to play Bonnie and Clyde with Cory after it was all over, ordinary life having proven too tame for her after the excitement of la Resistance. Byrd nodded politely to him and to Jeremy when introduced, and the casually formal greeting she exchanged with Detective Anderson seemed to indicate that he had little doubt as to her abilities as an officer.
"This is about the Winchester brothers, isn't it?" she asked, taking the seat that Anderson indicated. Matthew exchanged a glance with Jeremy, while Anderson frowned.
"You knew you'd spotted a couple of serial killers and you didn't say anything to me?" he asked, pulling out the chair across from her and dropping wearily into it as Jeremy took one of the other remaining seats. Matthew remained on his feet; psychological control of a room was easier for the only one standing.
"I told Sergeant Thompson, sir," Byrd said defensively.
"Thompson's an idiot." Anderson made a dismissive gesture with one hand. "Next time you get any information on one of my cases, you bring it to me and I'll straighten it out with him later."
"Yes, sir." Byrd's raised eyebrows spoke eloquently of her surprise, but she didn't press the point. Anderson nodded once in satisfaction, and the matter was apparently dropped. Matthew took the opportunity to take back control of the interview.
"How certain are you that it was the Winchesters you saw, Officer Byrd?"
"Very, sir," she answered firmly, her expression telling him what she thought about that question. It was enough to satisfy Matthew as to her certainty on the subject.
"Why don't you tell us what happened, then?" he asked, leaning against the wall to listen while she told her story. It didn't take her long. She'd been driving through the park, shining her spotlight for trespassers, when she'd spotted two young men doing something near the base of one of the statues. When she'd called for them to put their hands up and come towards her, they'd looked up for one startled minute, their faces clear in the spotlight, and then taken off. She'd run after them, but to no avail, and had heard an engine start a few minutes after she lost sight of them in the shadows.
"A loud engine," she finished. "Powerful. A V8, or maybe a Hemi. I'm not sure which."
"Did you see a vehicle?" Jeremy asked, looking up from the table.
"Sorry, no." She paused. "The shorter one -- Dean -- was moving like he was hurt."
"Thank you, Officer Byrd," Matthew said, and motioned Jeremy out into the hall for a quick conference.
"We need to check the hospitals," Jeremy said. "See if anyone fitting Dean Winchester's description has checked in."
"We'll get Peters to send us some people." Matthew glanced back into the interrogation room, where Anderson and Byrd had their heads together. "Richmond's police department is almost terminally understaffed, and I don't want to foster resentment by commandeering more of their officers than we have to."
"Sounds good to me," Jeremy said, and went back into the interrogation room to talk to Detective Anderson while Matthew got his cell phone out and called his department head for reinforcements. Peters was cranky but amenable as usual; he'd come to BAU as a supervisor and tended to trust his profilers to tell him what they needed in the field. In the end he agreed to send five agents from Violent Crimes down to do legwork. They wouldn't be profilers, but then they didn't need to be. Matthew hung up with Peters' gruff warning to be careful still ringing in his ears, and beckoned Jeremy out of his conversation with Byrd and Anderson.
"He's sending us Donovan, Lidinsky, O'Connell, Lavalle, and Reyes," Matthew reported.
"Not Harris?" Jeremy asked, in the almost-deadpan that meant that he thought he was being amusing.
"Fortunately, his presence was required elsewhere," Matthew said dryly. He and Harris had a particularly antagonistic relationship that had begun with a shared case early in Harris' time with the BAU, and their mutual enmity was a source of amusement for Jeremy -- who got along with everybody, despite an appalling sense of humour that tended to alternate between very bad puns and a mildly sarcastic commentary on whatever was on his mind.
"What do you want me to do?"
"You and I are going to commandeer an office and acquaint ourselves with the contents of Detective Monroe's files before starting our own profile on the Winchesters. The rest of the team can start the legwork when they arrive. If you feel like you have to get out of the office, let me know."
He'd worked with Jeremy before, and though the other man deferred to him as a matter of course, it didn't change the fact that Jeremy was better at building the details of a profile, better at figuring out the little things that were so essential to identifying a subject, or to flushing an already-identified suspect out of hiding. Matthew's own profiling skills were based largely on experience and reinforced by study -- serial killing was hardly a modern phenomenon, though the FBI's approach to it was -- but Jeremy could get into someone else's head with an ease and accuracy that could still be unsettling on occasion, and had more to do with natural ability than it did his degree in abnormal psychology. A few hundred years ago, he'd have been a valued counselor -- or, given his tempermant, burned for heresy. Matthew had learned early in their relationship to trust his unexplained hunches as much as he did his own experience and instincts.
***
Two hours later, the reinforcements had arrived and been sent out on their various assignments. Two hours after that, Jeremy was wishing that he'd gone with them. Lidinsky, O'Connell, and Lavalle were all recent Academy graduates, newcomers to the Violent Crimes division and to the FBI. Reyes and Donovan were a little more experienced, but they were new to Violent Crimes as well, both of them having recently transferred from field offices -- Reyes from Kansas City, Donovan from St. Paul.
None of them were trained profilers, and as a result, Jeremy and McCormick were going through the entire Winchester file by themselves. The crimes themselves were like something out of a horror movie -- Matthew's Stephen King analogy was surprisingly apt -- and Henricksen's increasingly disjointed notes were nearly as bad. The disintegration of his mind was almost tangible through the pages, and even though Jeremy had been anything but fond of him, the devolution of his handwriting from its once-neat lines into a barely-legible scrawl was painful to see. Jeremy was stiff and tired, and he could feel a headache building at the base of his skull.
Putting aside a report on a girl whose throat had apparently been clawed out, he leaned back in his chair, ignoring the protest from his cramped back muscles. McCormick glanced up from his own stack of papers.
"Getting tired?"
"I'm fine." Jeremy rubbed at his eyes. "But this case -- it doesn't make any damn sense! Are we sure that Henricksen wasn't secretly crazy from the day he took the case? Because your Stephen King comparison is making more and more sense. We've got three bludgeonings in Oklahoma, two eviscerations in Montana, and a series of strangulations in Denver. Where's the pattern of escalation? Where's the M.O., for God's sake? I thought I was missing something the first time I looked at it, but I'm not. Forget Stephen King -- why the hell didn't they give this one to Mulder? He loves this weird shit."
"You think this qualifies as an X-File?" McCormick's expression was unreadable. Jeremy shrugged and went for it.
"Hell, yes. Or did you miss the death certificate that the city of St. Louis issued for Dean two years ago?" He shook his head. "I need to get out of the office. Let's go talk to some college students."
"Oh?" Matthew asked casually.
"All of our victims come from VCU. Even if they didn't, it would still be a good place to look for the Winchesters. They'll be able to blend in on a university campus without much problem, especially one as large as VCU." He cracked his neck, trying to get rid of the worst of the stiffness. "After that, I want to sit down and put together an actual profile on the Winchesters. One that makes some honest to God sense."
***
so there really ought to be a title for this. any takers? if i use your suggestion, i'll write you some fic.