“Reese didn’t talk to too many people,” Max Cabot lamented. “She was pretty much a loner.” He sat in Captain O’Hare’s office, two FBI agents in front of him.
He hadn’t been all that excited to get Shaw’s call. Both men went back to the academy together. They’d trained together, become friends. Shaw had been the one to give him the news about Reese. He’d been shocked to say the least. Sure, Reese was damned good at her job and that often meant that people got upset, but she had a good heart and even that showed through in her work.
“She didn’t have any friends?”
Max met the eyes of the blond agent, Morrow, his mind catalogued. “Not that I knew of, ma’am. In our job you see a lot of things, deal with a lot of unsavoury people. You don’t want to take that home to somebody.” He had a feeling that both agents knew that feeling all too well.
“Was there a family that was particularly upset with your partner?”
“We work sex crimes, Agent Morgan,” Max answered, a note of irony slipping into his voice. “There are people out there who firmly believe their victims deserve what they get.”
“Did Reese talk to her family?” Morgan asked. “Anybody outside the precinct?”
“She talked to me,” Max answered. “In the car mostly, but we went out to lunch sometimes. I think I was her only friend.”
“Can you think of any reason, any at all, that would make Reese a target?” Morrow asked.
“No,” Max admitted honestly. “Even in the last six months I can’t think of a controversial case we’ve handled, or even testified in. And Reese spent way too much time at her desk to be seeing anybody.”
Logically, Max knew that these questions had to be asked, but they didn’t feel like it was helping. It was an odd feeling for him, to be on the other side of the table and be questioned instead of doing the questioning. It was difficult too. “Reese helped a lot of people. She was the one you went to if you had a female victim that wouldn’t cooperate. There was something about her that people just gravitated to. She just kept to herself, that was all.”
“You filed the missing persons?” Morrow asked.
Max nodded. “Reese missed a shift. The woman never took a day off let alone missed a shift. She volunteered at a community center when she wasn’t working. When they hadn’t seen her, I knew something was off.”
“Where’s the community center?”
“East Monte Vista Drive. Reese lived in there. She talked about it all the time.” He watched the agents exchange a look. “She spoke highly of all of the people there, even took me by once. I don’t think anyone there wanted her dead.”
“Was there anyone she didn’t like? Anyone who thought she was in the way? Anyone who thought she didn’t belong in the department?” Morrow asked carefully.
“There was a dinner a few months back, just before Christmas. Reese won an award of excellence, beat out a guy who was pretty vocal about how she shouldn’t have gotten it. Vaughan Tynan’s the guy’s name. Works in cyber crime.”
It was always difficult to talk to the families of victims. Emily compartmentalized with the best of them. Families knew nothing other than the grief they experienced at the loss of a loved one, unsubs were cruel heartless bastards. It was what helped her through cases. Still, every time they had to talk to a victim’s family “ and she never thought of those that actually survived crimes “ Emily’s heart did funny leaps and twists.
“Mr Raghnall, what was Erica doing when she went missing?” Aaron asked gently.
Andy Raghnall had red rims around his eyes, a testament to how his wife’s death was affecting him. Otherwise, Emily had to admit, he was an attractive man. He wore khakis and a polo, leaning forward on his elbows where they rested on his knees.
“She’d left to go to work,” he said. “She calls me-“ He stopped, closing his eyes. “She used to call me when she got to work.”
“You worried about her?”
“I always have. I… I never wanted anything to happen to her.”
Emily and Aaron exchanged a look. “When did you know she was missing?”
“She didn’t call. I called her captain “ I know he doesn’t like it when his officers take personal calls, but I was worried “ and no one in the unit had seen her at all.”
“Did your wife have anyone who was out to get her?” Emily asked. “Anyone you could think of who would want her dead?”
“She worked in the gang unit. There were plenty of people who would want her out of commission.”
“Anyone in particular? Anyone you can single out?”
Mr Raghnall sighed. “Not dead, no. Erica… she was a special type of officer. Her sister… when they were teenagers her sister was in a gang. She didn’t exactly have the best childhood. Her parents were never around, Candace, that’s her sister, got involved when she was young…”
Both Emily and Aaron knew where he was coming from. Many of their unsubs, many people who fell into a criminal lifestyle, followed the same problem.
“But Erica… she didn’t want to be like her sister. She worked hard to get where she was and there wasn’t another unit for her. She wanted the gang unit more than anything,” he continued, twisting a tissue in his hands. “She knew how to get through to those kids. I don’t know how she does it, no one’s really sure how she does it, but… she had a gift.”
A knock on the door startled all three of them. Reid poked his head in with an apologetic look. “Sorry. Mr Raghnall, could your wife cook?”
Aaron raised an eyebrow at the young doctor. He had that gleam in his eye that said he was on to something and Aaron had never known Reid to ask a question that didn’t have significance. At least not during a case.
Mr Raghnall shook his head with an affectionate smile. “Not to save her life. She tried every year, but she could burn water.”
Reid nodded, putting that piece into the puzzle in his mind. “I think I’ve got something.”
The team gathered in the conference room where Reid had tacked up the letters. Reid was pacing the front of the room, the way he did when his brain was moving faster than anything else around him.
“What is it, Reid?” Hotch asked, taking a seat at the table.
“I figured out these notes,” Reid replied, waving at them. “They’re handwritten Morse Code.”
Morgan raised an eyebrow. “What now?”
“Morse Code,” Reid repeated. “The lines and dots signal a long tone or a short one, respectively. With a little help from Garcia we translated all three of them. They’re all quotations.”
He’d written all three of them under their respective notes in the order they were found.
Feminism is the radical notion that women are people.
Women upset everything.
Fresh clean sheets are one of life’s small joys.
“And this led to a revelation?” Morrow asked, skeptical.
“Well, first of all, the second one is only part of George Bernard Shaw’s words,” Reid said. “He goes on to say ‘when you let them into your life, you find that the woman is driving at one thing and you’re driving at another’, but I don’t think that suited his purposes.”
“Which was why he left it out,” JJ agreed, hanging onto Reid’s words.
“Most likely. It was Michelle Pegeen’s quotation that made me realize something. What if the significance of the duster, the frying pan and the pillowcase signified how they died and why.”
“Why? You figured out why?” Hotch asked. Reid often pulled miracles, but this was something that surprised all of them.
“I checked the autopsy reports and Reese Joshlynn had some sort of residue in her mouth. When they tested it, they concluded it was feathers.”
“She was choked to death with the feather duster?” Emily asked, tapping her pen on a stack of papers to muffle the sound.
“We’d probably find her DNA on it, yes,” Reid agreed. “Erica Raghnall was bludgeoned to death-“
“With the frying pan,” Emily picked up. “That’s why you came in to ask if she could cook.” She knew where Reid was going.
“I don’t get it,” Morgan said. “What does that have to do with anything.”
“He’s created the idyllic out of something that isn’t. His trigger is when they can’t do what he asks them to. They can’t cook, so they don’t fit his model-“
“And he kills them,” Hotch finished.
“Exactly.”
“Reese Joshlynn’s apartment was a mess,” Shaw volunteered. “Max always said she was organized chaos.”
“Erica Raghnall couldn’t cook,” Reid jumped in, his voice that excited tone that he got when they’d put something together. “And I wouldn’t be surprised if Michelle Pegeen had never done laundry before.”
Morrow was nodding slowly. “Suffocated with a pillowcase.”
“What does that tell us?” Coop asked, leaning against the wall.
“A lot,” Hotch replied.
“He idolizes the ideal woman, the one that cooks and cleans, does the laundry… the type of woman that stays home all day to take care of her man,” Emily picked up.
“It’s in the way he dresses them,” Morgan continued. “And in the way he kills them.”
“But why?” Shaw asked.
“He probably has a problem with women in law enforcement. He’s probably had a bad encounter with female officers before and it’s made him hate them all,” Morgan replied.
“So he kidnaps them and kills them?” Coop inquired, still not fully believing what was going on around him.
“He keeps them for a while, probably tries to figure out if they can follow that traditional model. Then, when he finds a deficiency and it bothers him enough, he loses his cool and kills them,” Emily tried to explain. “Like Erica Raghnall. He probably asked her to cook a meal and when she couldn’t fit that idyllic model, he lost his temper and bludgeoned her to death.”
“It’s almost like two different profiles,” Emily said shaking her head.
“But he’s probably not bipolar or multiple personality,” Reid spoke up.
Emily nodded her agreement. “I’m saying it looks like it, not that it is.”
“He wants attention. Why? So he can see what he’s done?” Morgan asked.
“It’s his release,” Morrow suggested. “He sees his work splayed across the front page and sees it as a success, as a way to warn other women out of a job he feels they don’t belong in.”
“Some of our officers have beat out males that are larger than they are to get their posts,” Shaw defended. “We take the women because they can do the job and in some cases, can do it better than men can.”
“It tells us his focus is more than just finding women who do not fit an old version of their gender role,” Hotch said.
Shaw looked at each of the agents. “Does it help?”
Reid nodded enthusiastically. “It does.”
Shaw’s nod was less energetic than Reid’s. “Then that’s what matters.”