Things were fine the next couple of days and Leah seemed perfectly content to sit in Emily’s apartment. Emily didn’t question her just yet. It had to be hard enough to think about what was going on without adding anything else to it. Nagging could most certainly wait.
At work, things progressed as Emily felt was normal. She’d done a few consults for various departments around the nation, bantered with Derek and had her usual morning conversations with Dave. But that didn’t mean her teammates didn’t see a difference in her. In fact, there were stress lines where they usually formed during cases, there was a jerk to her head every time JJ came into the bullpen and she seemed to blow out a breath every time her phone rang.
It was making Hotch nervous. Emily was a rock, always had been, and though he hadn’t treated her as a team member when she’d come in, things had certainly changed since she caught him on the phone with Haley. Or, more accurately, she’d been in the office while he was talking to his ex-wife. It had taken a conversation with Dave to realize that she was there late because she wanted to make sure he went home. It was then that he started to watch. It was then he started to notice the way she treated her teammates. It was then he realized how much a family they truly were.
So her anxiousness was nerve-wracking, from a woman who had looked some pretty scary people in the face and interviewed them as if they were Joe Schmo from next door. She was calm, cool and collected. He rarely saw her actually lose her temper and any worry was quite carefully kept under wraps. This one, however, seemed to be leaking through and Hotch’s only conclusion was that this time, it was personal.
Her friends were trying. Each one of them had tried to talk to her, tried to reassure her that they were there for her through whatever the issue was. Emily smiled through the little small talk and at the end, had always managed to turn the conversation back on whomever she was talking to. It was disconcerting and somewhat annoying for each person who had attempted it. Even Penelope hadn’t been able to get anything out of Emily, and not for lack of trying.
Three days after Emily had almost run him over trying to get out of the bullpen, JJ walked in, face grim. Hotch knew that coolly professional look and, more importantly, knew what it meant. Something was amiss in the world and there was someone out there that needed their help.
“Agent Bob Spring, Seattle field office.”
Hotch knew Bob Spring. They’d worked together during Hotch’s brief stint in Seattle, before being called to the BAU. “This is with the Bureau?”
JJ nodded. Then quickly laid out the most important facts of the case. She’d been in this situation enough times to know what was significant and what was not. She knew how to make the BAU see the case as important. Still, there was a professional air to her as she detailed the case quickly and efficiently. She saw the almost imperceptible twitch of Hotch’s jaw and knew.
“I’ll take the file. We’ll meet in an hour.”
JJ nodded as she left and Hotch leaned back in his seat. An hour would give him more than enough time to go through the file not once, but at least the twice he required before going into a briefing. She wasn’t as good as their illustrious Dr Reid when it came to remembering things.
And this one looked to be a doozy.
Emily walked with trepidation to the conference room, Derek on her left, somber and serious. Cases so close together were a strain on all of them and with Emily’s extra emotional baggage… This one seemed to close to be coincidence. She took a seat to Dave’s left, right between the older man and her superior. Derek took Dave’s right, beside both Dave and Penelope, Reid, the other side of Hotch. JJ stood at the end of the table, file open, remote in hand.
“Seattle Washington,” JJ said, pulling up the crime scene photos and family pictures. “Just hit by a cross-country serial killer.”
“Cross-country?” Derek asked in surprise, flipping through the pages of the case file.
“They’re rare,” Reid agreed, his voice contemplative. “Very few serial killers feel comfortable enough to stretch that wide.”
“He started eight years ago in Chicago. The thought is that he’s been working his way across to Seattle,” JJ answered.
Dave whistled, impressed. “He’s hunting. Compulsively hunting.”
“What?” Derek asked.
Emily sighed, the first sound she’d made since the briefing began. She’d hoped it wasn’t going to come to this, that the case would stay out of their hands. “I think the more appropriate question is ‘who’.”
“He’s been chasing people across the country?” Derek asked, the idea sounding ludicrous to his ears.
“They’re sure these and the cross-country murders are connected to a string of murder-suicides that happened in Chicago around 2000,” JJ replied.
“I remember the case,” Derek said, nodding slowly. “PD passed it to the feds hoping they’d have better resources. Trail went cold after the Scott family was killed. Family of four, if I remember right. Stabbed to death in their home one night.”
Emily tried to keep the shaking of her hands under wraps, a difficult task when sitting between two men that pioneered the job she now enjoyed. Did Leah know about the cross-country trail? She knew the teenager was likely to catch on fast and blame herself for the deaths in between. That was just who Leah was.
“The eight-year-old daughter survived,” JJ added. “They put her in Witness Protection. Only a handful of people know where she is. Agent Spring, the agent in charge on the Seattle end, said that if Leah Scott had been in Seattle, she wouldn’t be now.”
“We need to know where she was living before she disappeared and where she could have gone. If he’s hunting her, I want to know why,” Hotch said.
Emily knew she was between a rock and a hard place. She flipped her file closed as JJ groaned.
“The red tape is going to be a disaster, Hotch. You know how closely WPP protects victims like her.”
“There’s no other way. We’ll have to hope they think she’s in as much danger as we do,” Hotch replied.
Emily looked around the room, noticing Dave’s curious gaze and blew out a breath. “She certainly thinks she’s in danger. The guy’s after her. She’s the one who got away.”
“We have no way of knowing that,” Dave argued.
“We don’t even have proof she was living in Seattle,” Derek agreed.
“She’s been living in Seattle since she was eight,” Emily said softly, looking down at the file in front of her. It was easier than meeting their eyes. “And he’s after her. Leah got a letter just before we put her in the program detailing what he’d do to her when he found her. It’s in the Chicago case file. We never told Leah about it.”
“We?” Dave asked mildly.
Emily locked her eyes on Dave’s. “Yeah, ‘we’,” she agreed dully. “It was my case.”