JJ and Morrow rode with Maggie – she’d insisted on the name – to the Huxley home.
“Is Agent Hotchner-“
“-Always that intense? Yes,” JJ answered with a smile. She was used to questions like that. Hotch was someone everyone had to get used to.
“Wow. We figured you’d want to go to your hotel first and settle in,” Maggie admitted.
“There’s a small chance we can find Jason alive,” Morrow said without thinking. “We want to nip this in the bud.”
“We’d prefer to see everything as fresh as possible and talk to people while the event is still close to the surface. Painful, I know, but in the long run we’ve found it’s also probably our biggest help,” JJ amended. “The fresher the information, the more information we can probably learn about the guy we’re looking for.”
“And it’s most definitely a guy,” Morrow agreed.
“Who are we looking for?” Maggie, much like Detective Hooper – or at least from what she’d gleaned from the little she’d seen of the man – didn’t seem to put much stock in profiling. She’d been dazzled by their arrival, yes, but had yet to be dazzled by their skill.
“White male, thirty-five to forty-five with knowledge of all of the malls,” Morrow said.
JJ could tell her mind was processing as she said it.
“Probably insider knowledge. And he’s careful, probably stalks his victims before taking them.”
“That’s just the preliminary too,” JJ said, cutting Morrow off. Anything more could change by what they were about to listen to.
Still, Maggie had to admit that was pretty good. “How does he pick his kids?”
“Probably has something to do with recognition of a child he molested in his adolescence,” Morrow answered.
JJ sighed. “You sound like Reid.” She took a small perverse pleasure in the way the woman blushed bright crimson. JJ had a feeling she’d be watching her politics a little bit better from now on.
Maggie looked perplexed. “There was no sign of sexual assault.”
“Small relief,” JJ answered.
“Still something,” Morrow spoke up.
Maggie sighed as she pulled into the driveway of a neat little bungalow house. It struck JJ, as it always did, how normal most of the victims of crime were. She’d seen suburban housewives dead on their beds, husbands targeted for environmental reasons, all part of the same cozy household typology.
“This is it.”
There was a little bike in the front lawn, ribbons coming out of the handlebars. Another child. “At least they have one ray of hope.”
“Their daughter’s four,” Maggie offered. “Cousin Mark stays with them. His parents do a lot of traveling.”
JJ almost winced. She hoped Mark had a happy family in his aunt and uncle anyway. She knocked swiftly on the door, belaying her underlying anxiousness. The woman who opened the door had haunted eyes.
“Can I help you?”
“I’m Jennifer Jareau, with the FBI,” JJ introduced herself. “We want to talk to you-“
“About Jason’s disappearance,” the woman said without emotion. “We’ve told the officers everything.”
“I know ma’am,” JJ said patiently. “And I’m sorry to bring it up. There’s a few things that we need to ask that they haven’t.”
“Why?”
This was always the hard part to explain. “We’re behavioural analysts,” she said quietly. “We’re trained to look for different things than officers are.”
The woman let her in after a moment and led them to a homely living room decorated in burgundy and white. She took a seat on the couch while JJ sat on the nearby armchair. She was close enough to reach out and touch the other woman when the questions got too emotional. “What do you need to know?”
“Is your nephew here? We’d like to talk to him as well,” JJ asked gently.
“One moment.”
JJ allowed her eyes to close and released a breath when the woman had left the room. Families were always difficult. It was the only emotion she’d let herself show until she was safely at home in Washington DC. Thirteen-year-old Mark returned with his aunt.
“Aunt Kelly said you wanted to talk to me?”
“We want to talk to you about Jason’s disappearance,” JJ answered. She’d started with control of the interview and Morrow seemed completely at ease to let her hang on to that control.
“I don’t know what else I can tell you that I haven’t told the other detectives,” Mark said honestly.
He looked so terribly guilty that JJ’s heart went out to him. So did her hand, resting on his knee where he sat kitty-corner to her on the couch. “I know this has to be hard. I need you to close your eyes for me. Put yourself back in those moments before you realized Jason had disappeared.”
Mark took a deep breath, but did as JJ asked.
“Tell me what you see.”
“I was playing a video game,” he said quietly after a moment. “I… I wasn’t paying attention to Jason.”
“I don’t care about that,” JJ said softly. “We’ll get there. What video game?”
“A shooting game,” he said.
JJ knew he’d probably blocked out most of that day, probably blocked out the large majority of the details that could matter. She was glad the game wasn’t one of them. “Walk me through.”
“Jason… he was right beside me. He liked watching me play, like my own little cheerleader.”
It was obvious, even to JJ, that Mark adored his younger cousin. She found herself smiling.
“I’d beaten a level, drawn a crowd. Jason was afraid of crowds.”
“He doesn’t do well in large groups of people,” Kelly Huxley agreed tearfully. This was the first time she’d heard this in so much detail.
“What happened next?”
"Jason, he always details what I’ve done well and what I could have done better. He’s been watching me play since he was about four, I’d taught him some strategy stuff. He’s a bright kid.”
“I’ll bet he is,” JJ agreed.
“I didn’t hear anything. He wasn’t there. I looked and looked, called his name, asked the crowd. No one saw him. Everyone was too concentrated on how well I was doing. And there was so much noise…”
“Do you remember hearing anything odd?”
Mark opened his eyes then, shaking his head. “Jay always stuck close. The fear of crowds thing.”
JJ nodded. “What did you do then?”
“Went to security,” Mark replied. “As soon as I knew he was gone.”
“How long between that and the end of your game?” Morrow asked, speaking for the first time.
“Five, maybe ten minutes.”
JJ raised an eyebrow at Morrow. Their guy moved fast. “Did you know any of the other families?”
“Of the boys that went missing?” Kelly Huxley asked. Then she shook her head. “No.”
“We’ve played basketball against one or two of them,” Mark revealed. “I’ve never met them one on one, just on the court.”
JJ stood. “Thank you,” she said sincerely. She’d relay the information to the team, give herself time to separate her emotions from the information she’d gathered, then they’d put it into their profile. Whatever it was, she hoped it would save Jason’s life. This family looked torn up enough. She didn’t want to have to add to it.
“Here’s a question,” Derek said as he looked around from his position by the second mall’s door. They’d been systematically checking the area around all of the exits, including the ones that weren’t open to the general public. “Why didn’t anyone see our guy from here?”
Emily followed his gaze across the back loading lot, over the brown grass at the far edge as she considered the question. “Maybe not,” she suggested, feeling Aaron’s approach and hearing Strauss’ heels. Since they didn’t offer any information immediately, she figured their questioning of the arcade and security staff had come up empty.
“He wants time. He’s careful when he lays them out,” Derek argued. “Someone had to see him here. There’s always people loading or unloading something.” He waved vaguely to the trucks parked at the nearby loading bays.
“He leaves the body and snatches another one,” Emily hypothesized. “He takes time with the dead boy? When he’s got another one already waiting inside? That doesn’t make sense.”
“He spends enough time with them when he’s got them,” Aaron agreed quietly.
“All the more reason no one saw him,” Derek argued. “Either way, he’s either really careful, or really quick.”
They had to give him that.
“No one saw anything odd in the arcade,” Hooper spoke up. “Just a bunch of regulars that day. But there’s a school about four blocks from here. Kids come by the arcade after school.”
“Our unsub knows that,” Derek agreed. “He counts on it.”
“What makes you think he watches them?” Hooper asked, watching Derek take off at a jog across the pavement, heading for the long grass.
“His preference,” Emily answered. “He has to know that his type of boy is going to be where he wants them, under the circumstances he needs to take them.”
“You can tell all of that about this guy? From the nothing we’ve got?” Hooper was still skeptical.
“Ever move the unsub makes – or doesn’t make – can tell us something about him,” Emily answered patiently. Hooper was not the first person to doubt the usefulness of profiling, by far.
“Where’s Morgan?”
Emily had been about to ask herself the same question before Aaron’s voice had cut through the air. Derek had seemingly disappeared. Her cell rang and she glanced at it, rolling her eyes as she picked up. “Where are you?”
“Take a chill pill there, Mom,” Derek shot back as Emily put the phone on speaker. “This grass is higher than it looks.”
“How high?” Aaron asked, stepping into Emily’s personal space under the pretense of listening. He was, but he was absorbing her presence too.
“Five-ten, maybe. No taller than I am, so our guy can’t be that tall. He’s at least a runner, though my money’s on a hiker. This ground’s pretty uneven,” Derek answered.
“Come back in,” Aaron ordered. Then he turned to Emily. “Ask JJ if she can handle the interviews of other families.”
“You got it.”
The precinct looked almost like the swankiest hotel in the world when they all filed into the room they’d been allotted. Most of them knew the work was far from over, but just the chance to gather, to reevaluate, to look again at the facts and the new information after spending the day interviewing and double checking crime scenes was a little bit of comfort.
“Stressor's in the kid,” Derek said, tapping one of the pictures. “Something about the kid sets him off, makes him want them.”
“He goes largely unnoticed, he has to. No one thinks anything of the fact that he’s walking away with a child.”
“People see him but no one ever notices,” Emily agreed with Morrow’s statement. “Anonymity drives him.”
Strauss noticed that there wasn’t a single other person in the room sitting, not even JJ, who had spent her day interviewing in heels, just like Strauss. She watched the team gather around the table, withdrawing pictures, evidence and notes. Then she observed yet another spectacular feat by the team. Without running into each other, reaching for the same piece of paper, picture or evidence piece, Erin watched as the once-empty bulletin board slowly filled with the information they had, and the information they’d collected.
“Let’s go over this again,” Aaron suggested, looking over the case on their bulletin board. Child cases brought out part of the dark side that Aaron rarely ever acknowledged. His own beliefs, especially after the birth of his son, contributed largely to that push, that need to solve the case before anything else happened. Of course, they all carried the same need. Children were meant to be innocent, not meant to be preyed on. Child cases drove them harder than any other type of case, than any other type of unsub.
“What’s the trigger?” Emily asked, almost rhetorically as she looked at the things spread out in front of her eyes. She stood shoulder to shoulder with both Derek and Aaron, her arms wrapped around her stomach subconsciously leaning into the latter, trying to offer him unspoken support for what she knew he would go through in the coming days. Morrow stood on Derek’s other side.
“He takes them in broad daylight, so he’s bold,” Derek murmured.
“Overinflated sense of self worth,” Morrow agreed. “But that doesn’t tell us what drives him.”
“Something about him is off and someone’s noticed,” Reid said. “Something happened in his life that triggered this streak. Some catstrophic event.”
“Twenty says close family death,” Emily proposed, a smile touching the corners of her mouth. Odd humour was how they dealt with things.
“I’ll take your family death and propose loss of sexual outlet,” Derek replied.
“There was no sign of sexual assaults on the victims,” Morrow pointed out logically. “You’re fighting a losing battle.”
“Offenders that prey on young male victims have usually been predators for a while,” Emily recited, bringing them back to the serious things. “It manifests itself in adolescence.”
“Not every person’s a textbook case,” Derek argued.
“This guy is looking less and less textbook with everything we learn,” Aaron mumbled, eyes darting over everything. This one was going to give him nightmares, he could already sense it.
Emily watched his mind work, making a mental note to remind him to call Haley later, simply to talk to Jack. “Next step?”
He sighed. “We go back to the hotel. Rest, change, come back in the morning.”
JJ blew out a breath of air as she gathered her things, calling the attention of the rest of the team. The blond woman shook her head. “I hate child cases.”
Didn’t they all.