Aaron looked up at the knock on his door, unsurprised when it was simply pushed open. What did surprise him was that it wasn’t Emily poking her head in, but Morgan.
“Morning, Hotch.”
He nodded his reply.
“I’ve got Garcia on the phone. We’re going to want to hear this.”
Half an hour later, each with a cup of Sacramento PD’s finest sludge disguised as coffee, the team and Kian sat around the conference table in the room they’d claimed as their own. Morgan dialed Garcia.
“Alright, Baby Girl, you’re up.”
“Okay, ladies and gents, here’s the deal. In our time difference bliss, not to mention my own insomniac tendencies, I took a look through that site. And let me tell you, the Kama Sutra has nothing on this.”
Morgan’s lips quirked upwards. “Save the dirty talk for later, Sweetness.”
The pout was clear in Garcia’s voice. “You take the fun out of everything. So, skipping through all of the technical jargon, blah, blah, blah, html, video file uplink, yada, yada, yada, I come across links on the profiles of our girls.”
Aaron’s eyebrow went up. “And?”
“Well, sir, each girl has a blog. So I made a call to the guy who runs the site.”
“Wait, you knew who ran the site?” Kian asked.
“In a manner of speaking,” Garcia said cryptically.
“You don’t want to know,” Emily murmured. “And what did our friendly administrator have to say?”
“The blogs are there so the people on the site can see they’re real girls. Now, I’m not a profiler, but I believe Crime 101 says those things can be dangerous.”
“The Dawson College shooter had a blog that told of his entire psychological state,” Reid said before Kian could ask questions. “He called himself an ‘Angel of Death’ and posted pictures of himself holding guns and knives. But, most of the people who have accounts on these journal sites are harmless.”
“Garcia, what are these blogs telling us?” Aaron asked, trying to keep them on track.
“In the way of our guy, you’re still looking at give or take fifty pervs. About the girls, we’re getting a different picture.”
“Oh?”
“Chloe, Katrina, Stephanie, Jade and Tiffany all have happy lives, according to their blogs. Madeline Ray, on the other hand, paints a picture of classic oppression. But,” she said, emphasizing the last word. “The one thing that is the same across the board, all of the girls said they wanted out. Plus, plus, also, and… there was one user on every blog that offered them a way out.”
“Come on, Mama, cut to the chase,” Morgan said, bouncing on his toes.
“Half of the information is in the build up,” Garcia scolded. “He leaves an e-mail for them, so I went back to the inboxes of our girls to see what I could find. Turns out all of our girls responded to the offer. They wanted out and they wanted out quick.”
“So he offers them a way out by kidnapping them?” Morrow asked, wrinkling her brow.
“His exact words were he would, and I quote ‘make them disappear’,” Garcia responded. “I’m still tracking down the guy’s e-mail. He’s threaded it through hundreds of thousands of routers, so my baby is still getting through it.”
“So these girls see their chance and take it? There’s got to be another way out,” JJ said.
“They’re bound by contracts,” Garcia contradicted. “Five years at a time, loopholes are minimal, but even these girls are looking at this money going ‘hey, I could get through college with that’. Until they actually get into it.”
“And then?” Reid asked, his eyes telling the team that his brain was already filing this away into his seemingly endless memory bank.
“Most of the money they are supposed to make goes back to the company that pays them. We’re looking at a good eighty percent going back to the people that run the site, not to mention the recruiters and the sleezeball that runs the site,” Garcia responded. “Four of the girls had to fall back on loans even with the job to get themselves through.”
“And these blogs say they want out? Isn’t there something in the contract that forbids that?”
“Nope. Here’s the kicker. The guy that posted the video of Katrina Stark’s murder? Same guy who’s offering these girls a way out.”
That was what they wanted to hear.
“You are fantastic, Girl. Let us know when you track the guy down.”
“You got it.”
It wasn’t often that the BAU got time to breathe on cases, but when they did, they all took hold of it with both hands. They had a feeling it wouldn’t be long before Garcia came through for them, so they took the time to hunt down breakfast and re-focus themselves, things they hadn’t had a chance to do since Garcia had placed her call to Morgan so early in the morning. Even Kian joined them for their breakfast that morning, introducing them to a little café she often frequented for quick breakfasts or other snacks while on the job. It wasn’t until they were all seated that the conversation grew again.
“Is all that information really going to help us?” Kian asked.
“It’s actually completely altered our original profile,” Reid said. “We originally thought our unsub was charming, finding these girls and luring them so he could kidnap them.”
“This goes against that completely,” Morgan picked up. “This tells us he’s a loner, someone who isn’t confident with women.”
“He’s probably been rejected a number of times, probably lives with his father himself,” Emily added. “His lack of confidence may even spread to his job.”
“Just his father?”
“He’s angry,” Aaron agreed as the waitress came over to take their orders. “It wouldn’t be surprising to find that his mother left his father. He thinks of women as sexual playthings, and at the same time, he hates that he sees them like that. Or more specifically, hates that they make him see them like that.”
Kian raised an eyebrow, briefly giving her order before speaking. “He blames them.”
“Exactly,” JJ agreed, stirring a spoonful of sugar into her coffee. “He blames them for everything wrong in his life.”
“So he relies on the internet,” Kian said.
“His way to get dates, his way to communicate with people, everything,” Morrow nodded. “We’ll probably find him a member of a number of chat rooms and other porn sites.”
Kian was shaking her head. “You know a lot about this guy.”
“We don’t know his age. Internet crime is difficult to profile an age group,” Emily said.
“But we know he’s white,” Reid said. “Interracial crimes are rare.”
“That’s amazing.”
Morgan had been rather quiet through the entire exchange, his eyes on his coffee, dragging a finger along the lip of the mug. He cocked his head to the side, looking at the team. “What if he blames his mother for something that happened to his father?”
“Like?” Aaron asked.
“Tim Woodson was in a car accident when his son was thirteen. His mother was driving, his father’s been using a cane since.”
Emily’s eyebrow arched. “And his mother?”
“Dead on scene.”
“So Cody Woodson was lying,” Morrow said.
Morgan shrugged. “It’s possible.”
“If Cody Woodson is the guy on that site, it could be the way his phone number is connected,” Emily pointed out. “Coincidences just don’t exist.”
“How did we miss it?” Derek asked no one in particular.
“We didn’t have the site at the time,” JJ pointed out. “And we didn’t have the blogs.”
“God bless the internet,” Emily agreed.
Talk turned away from the case as they waited for their food. When their meals arrived, Morrow and Kian watched in absolute awe as the team went about trading food like it was candy. Morgan had gotten the biggest breakfast, and willingly handed his breakfast ham off to Emily. Emily picked through her fruit salad and Aaron’s, switching oranges for pineapples in both bowls. She hated pineapples, he disliked oranges. Reid traded one of his eggs over easy for half of JJ’s scrambled eggs while Emily handed one of Morgan’s two pieces of ham to the blond. It spoke of the team’s comfort level and knowledge of each other.
“I thought intra-team profiling was against the rules,” Morrow said, her voice belaying her shock.
The four looked up, exchanged looks with each other, then realized what Morrow was referring to.
“We practically live together while working cases,” Morgan offered with a shrug. “It’s not exactly profiling.”
“Isn’t profiling simply noticing behaviour?” Morrow pointed out.
“This isn’t noticing behaviour. It’s getting to know your colleagues,” Morgan responded promptly. He saw Morrow as an insert into the team, someone who wasn’t part of their family.
Emily reached across the table for a fork full of Morgan’s potatoes, distracting him enough to be able to send him an arched eyebrow. Leave her alone.
“That’s impressive,” Kian said. “You guys never talked about what you eat and what you don’t?”
“When you spend as much time together as we do it’s kind of a given,” Reid answered.
“It’s got to be hard though, travelling all the time?”
Every profiler shrugged. It came with the job and they all knew that when they signed on.
“And families? Relationships?”
Responses to questions like that always varied with the team. Usually they were good enough at their jobs that people were baffled by the idea of behavioural science. It wasn’t often that family life came up, nor was it normal for questions of relationships to come up in these cases. When they weren’t working together, they were out together. They had few friends outside of each other. It was just easier, with all the time they spent together, with the things they saw, not to involve someone else with their demons.
“We make due,” Morgan finally answered. His phone rang before anything else could happen. He grinned. “Go ahead Gorgeous.”
“I found your Pandora’s Box, Hot Stuff.”
“We’re listening.”
“So, I’m backtracking through internet routers, IP addresses, you know, the usual, when my babies start screaming. Madeline Ray posted on her blog not five minutes ago. I did some quick backtracking. Turns out, the IP address is registered to-“
“Tim Woodson?” Emily guessed.
“You’re no fun,” Garcia responded, pout in her voice. “But you’re right.”
Kian was already pulling out her cell phone. “I’ll get a search warrant.”
“That’s not all,” Garcia’s voice came through the phone. “You’ll never guess what I found out.”
“Come on Girl,” Morgan prompted. He could already see the adrenaline snaking through the team, making them all sit just a little bit straighter.
“It’s a doozy,” the blond technical analyst said, a grin in her voice.
“Garcia!”
“Cody Woodson is Madeline Ray’s boyfriend.”