Chapter 2: The Chief
Chapter 2: The Chief
I must be nuts. Sense left
with shoes and house...
-Neil Gaiman, "Going Wodwo"
Emily Prentiss was a city girl. She'd been born and raised in Chicago, and the city was bred into every cell and bone and fiber of her being. Long open stretches of road made her antsy. Quiet nights made her jittery. Woods made her crazy.
"You owe me for this, Derek Morgan," she said.
He could tell she wasn't really kidding. "Come on, Prentiss, it's pretty. Look, that's like a stream waterfall thing." He pointed to a trickle of water winding down the sheer rock face that the road somehow precariously clung to.
She shot him a dirty look. "I don't like stream waterfall things. I like the Chicago River and Lake Michigan. I like hot dogs dragged through the garden and deep-dish pizza. I like Wrigley Field and the Sears tower. I do not like fucking mountains and fucking mountain people and country fried steak!"
He struggled to keep a straight face as he navigated the road's switchbacks. "No one's asking you to fuck any mountain people, Prentiss."
She made a noise that sounded suspiciously like a hiss and slumped down in the car seat. "I can't believe I let you talk me into this."
"Christ, Prentiss, what crawled up your ass and died? All we gotta do is poke around a bit, hassle the locals some, maybe check out the woods-"
"Stop right there. I don't do woods. You know that, Morgan. You know my strict anti-nature policy."
He counted silently to five before he started to speak again. "We have to check out where they went missing, Prentiss. You know that."
Knowing he was right pissed her off that much more, but she managed to swallow it. "Tell me about this cop we're gonna be dealing with," she said, changing the subject.
"Name's Aaron Hotchner. He used to be some big shot homicide guy in Boston, but he called it quits about five years ago."
"Hhmm. Any idea why he left, or why he chose this backwater?"
Morgan shrugged without taking his eyes off the road. "You ever heard of the Boston Reaper?"
"I'm not stupid, Morgan."
His mouth quirked. "Yeah, well, apparently the Reaper had a real hard-on for Detective Hotchner. Things got personal. It didn't end well."
"How bad?"
"Son of a bitch attacked him, cut him all up. Killed his wife, too."
Prentiss winced. "Ouch. God. That might be enough to get anyone to flee to the sticks." Her mouth formed a little O as it sunk in. "He's that Aaron Hotchner? Caught the Boston Reaper Aaron Hotchner? Holy shit."
Morgan nodded. "By all reports he's a good cop, real thorough. I'm not really sure why he let these disappearances go."
"There's a lot of land out there," she said. On the other side of the guardrail was a sheer drop into a long, sweeping valley. It was shrouded in mist and shadow as the sun sank behind the mountain's gentle, weathered peak. "It's obvious he searched, or they wouldn't've found the video. I guess once they did he figured the case was solved."
"There's a bunch more of it. Rossi's daughter said it's in evidence at the Walter's Gap police station."
"Walter's Gap. This has got to be some parallel universe. I'm going to a place called Walter's fucking Gap!" She shifted in her seat; studied her partner from the corner of her eye. "It's been a year, Morgan. What makes you think we'll find anything at all?"
"I don't know." He shrugged again, restlessly. "It's a feeling I got, that's all."
"We've been partners a while," she said.
"Eight years."
"Eight long, lean years."
"Haven't I earned a little faith in eight years?"
She pretended to consider it. "I guess you have," she finally decided. "Enough to get me on a plane. And into a car. And onto a mountain."
"Enough to get you into the woods?"
"I don't know if that much faith exists, partner mine. But I'll think about it."
"Wow. Those musta been some eight years."
She smiled, and for once there was so sarcasm or mocking in it. "The best. In spite of everything, the best."
"In spite of? I thought because of."
"Eh." She waved a hand. "Don't push it."
The brief history Morgan had given Prentiss about Aaron Hotchner was true. It was the facts, dry and hard, without any of the wet, squishy, messy emotions that had marked the whole ordeal.
The Reaper - George Foyet - had become obsessed with Detective Aaron Hotchner, and he had named him his nemesis. He wrote him taunting notes. Left little jibes directed at him with the victims. It only made Hotch (as he had been nicknamed way back at the Academy) that much more determined to catch him.
That single-minded determination was what had made him such a great detective, but it was also his major weakness. He was so set on capturing Foyet that he forgot his own vulnerability; he forgot to protect what needed protecting. Foyet, like any good predator, sniffed out Hotch's Achilles' heel, and like Paris guided by Apollo, he attacked it.
First he went after the man himself, slicing him with the care and skill of a surgeon. As he lay bleeding on the dining room floor, Foyet sank back into the darkness and waited. When Hotch's pretty wife came home, small son in tow, he struck again. Luckily the boy was able to hide somewhere, and Haley managed to trigger the burglar alarm before she died, but the look on Aaron Hotchner's face as he watched his wife die had kept Foyet quiet, murder-wise, for months.
Once Hotch recovered from his injuries, Foyet began killing again. He was as careful as ever. As meticulous and as ruthless. What he hadn't counted on - due to his own weakness, the one most hated by the gods: hubris - was that stabbing the detective and killing his wife had only made him more determined, more dangerous, and with his son stashed with some far away relative, the determination was no longer a vulnerability.
Foyet's arrest was Hotch's last act as a Boston Homicide detective, and he tendered his resignation the next day. He applied for and got the job as Walter's Gap's chief of police. He scooped up his son, packed the few things they'd be taking with them, and said goodbye to Boston forever.
Five years later, he still had zero regrets. Jack was thriving and happy. The town was small and sleepy. He'd built a new life for them here, and the things that haunted his dreams at night were normal, mundane things: a leaky roof; a carburetor going bad; Jack growing up too fast.
He had never forgotten the missing filmmakers, had worried about them from the moment they arrived in town, looking so city and so green. He'd spoken to Dave Rossi, the team's leader, and had warned him about the dangers they might face in the hills surrounding Walter's Gap. Rossi had seemed confident - blithe, even - and Hotch had tried to borrow a bit of the older man's chutzpah.
It had taken a year to find that stupid camera, and that had been an accident. A group of hikers had stumbled across it and brought it back to the Walter's Gap police station. The battery had been completely dead, so luckily they hadn't been able to watch any of the footage the camera had captured.
What Hotch saw had made his blood run cold. He wanted to erase it from his memory; it wasn't anything he wanted to know, ever, but once seen it couldn't be unseen.
Darker things than roofs and cars haunted his dreams now, and it was with no little trepidation that he had even agreed to take Derek Morgan's call. The big city PIs had no clue what they were in for, and Hotch wasn't completely sure he was willing to enlighten them. When one of the uniforms poked his head around Hotch's door and told him the detectives from Chicago had arrived, Hotch rose from his desk, straightened his tie, and went to meet the visitors.
It was going to be an interesting couple of days.
A review from you, kind reader, would make my day. Yes, you!
Return to Top