Emily is at the shooting range, squeezing off rounds. She finds peace in the kickbacks and watches holes bloom in her target.
The cruelty within herself opens tiny flowers. She always knew she could kill; that ridge of steel has been buried inside her since childhood, a barbed wall to hide behind and beyond that a tiny empty room where nothing matters. For the first time she enjoys the power, the raw force kicking into her palms, and knows how it feels to put all of her ill will behind a bullet. She spends a lot of time at the shooting range. After work, if she’s in town, she goes straight to a long narrow corridor and headphones and the paper target. A half hour of shooting gives her the serenity she needs to step out of her car, walk into her townhouse, and refill her life.
Fooling a profiler takes a certain hipshot level of skill, a down-low sense of improvisation that covers its own tracks. Letting some things slip and being up front about others while covering up the rest creates a shifting map that’s difficult for even the most skilled of readers to follow. In a way it’s like playing jazz: keep the key consistent and the chord changes within a certain range, and people will pick it up and make it their own. Flash an occasional Mona Lisa smile and they’ll queue up to invent your secrets.
Morgan, Garcia, Rossi, and JJ all think she’s got romantic troubles. They have coordinated a family-style reconnaissance mission: Rossi brings her coffee, Garcia and JJ bring her lunch, and all of them roll earnest talk over food, hoping to come up roses. They do the verbal tango with her subtle distress and offer consolation. Every once in a while, Morgan will pull her aside and ask her, with a lift of his eyebrows, if things are all right. Reid thinks there’s more to it, that perhaps she’s working the romance angle to cover up problems with her family, and conscious of his own rock-ribbed need for privacy he does not come knocking on hers. Hotch is the dangerous one. He never asks with his mouth but he’s always asking with his eyes, and she feels his desire for knowledge between them like a tightening knot. He’ll read the map that he can’t understand and still remember all the landmarks. He’s patient. He’s a collector of keys. In his spare moments he’ll sit at the table of his imagination, going through them, lining up the edges and waiting to unlock her mystery.
A little over a week. Nine days, to be precise, since she broke the connection. In the beginning she couldn’t sleep, but that passed with the lengthening hours. She felt raw to the world, open, chilled beneath a shadow of endless possibilities. Her mind built elaborate scenarios during every waking minute even as she discarded them all, infuriated because it was what he wanted. He got off imagining her imagining all the terrors in his hands.
Foyet knows how to mess with people, how to mess with her, and she’s forcing herself to relax into his rhythm. She’s falling into his step, spinning out, gliding into strange territory that belongs only to him. The dance imagery sparks a bitter smile. But is it so wrong? First there is music, a dance card, the contact of a hand; you’re on your feet, following someone’s body and learning on the fly how to read a shift in posture, a tightening of the hand. Transmission of intent skin to skin, an interplay of muscles. Is the dance beginning, is this the middle, or is it the end? What is the music? Her life is the dance floor and she’s pinning down stray notes with the heels of her tango shoes. The music is a mystery, written a phrase at a time, doled out by a miser’s hand. There is a rose in her teeth and it’s digging thorns into her lips. She’ll hold onto it, slurping up the blood, for as long as she needs to.
A threat is concrete. It can be deconstructed and examined for weak spots. But the imagination…there’s a sense of disconnection from her world, a thin barrier between herself and the tenderness of her mind. She keeps a watch on it, determined to take steps should it thicken into dissociation. She doesn’t think it will. There’s a rotten freedom that tastes sweet because it is so rotten: certain things no longer seem so important when you know that your own life is snoozing on the chopping block, dreaming calamitous dreams. That you are a misplaced action away from personal tragedy.
Theoretically everyone is anyway, she thinks, ramming home a fresh clip. But it’s different when you can name it. Names have power, substance. And thus is the name made flesh. She straightens out her elbow and squeezes off a handful of rounds. Holes blink open in a tight cluster around the heart. And flesh dies.
She sits in her car with the windows rolled down. The breeze is cool but still holds the scent of the day’s heat. Flower petals stick to her windshield. She sees people in the parking lot, returning to their cars and leaving them, and she wonders at their life stories. It’s amazing how much can hide in the rolled-up, tucked away personas that people use to navigate their everyday lives. How many secrets graven in ink so old that the whorls and loops of the letters are starting to fade? Scars slumber deep beneath the skin. Many of them are government employees, their edges sanded to uniform size and their presentations polished to a dull glow. What looked like a shield now looks more like a mask. Smooth, nonthreatening, neutral. Something to hide behind.
She grips the steering wheel and asks the same question she asks every night:
Do I go home?
After Jake’s, sitting in her car, the blue light from the neighboring bar pouring into her eyes, she looked at her cell phone display. She dug a pad out of her purse and wrote down the number. It was a local number. Ten-digit code to unlock the mess of one bad decision. Tears burned and she struggled with the urge to make it right, to take the whole story to Hotch’s apartment and vomit all of it up into his hands. He would believe her. He would take it away, and they’d wash his hands together.
Her gnawing anger made her pull over. She wiped her eyes and dialed the number and chewed on her bottom lip. The answering click thrummed in her veins. The guy on the other end had a thick New Jersey accent and no idea who she was: Yeah, I was at Jake’s tonight. A guy there paid me a hundred bucks to use the phone. I’m behind on the bills, you know, because the horses ain’t been so nice. No, he didn’t tell me his name. He was a white guy. Sorry, sweetheart. Beyond that I got nothing. He said you’d probably call, though. Does that help? Frustrated, she said thank you and hung up.
She leaned her head into the headrest and imagined confiscating the phone, dusting it for prints, creating a chain of evidence. Beyond a single link it crumbled. The realization that in the wrong eyes it could appear as though she was manufacturing this herself, that a disinterested chain of command and a vicious press could paint her into the crazy corner with a handful of precise strokes, filled her with impotent rage. Hotch would believe her, but beyond the confines of his office? Beyond the loyalty of her team? The Bureau looked down on Hotch. They looked down on his team. Their edges weren’t sanded down enough and the masks they hid behind still held some semblance of emotion.
Emily watches a young blonde woman get into her car. Do I go home?