Premeditated Chapter 2
This time, when he murdered the old man, when he disposed of the body, when he evaded the police, Reid was not afraid or disgusted. He was not filled with remorse. He had no chance to indulge in any feeling, good or bad, before a bullet whizzed through the air, penetrating his heart and kicking his brain into a frantic quest to let go of living.
The brain performed its palliative functions at the same time that the heart refused to give up. The heart beat faster and harder, faster and harder, pounding with an unrelenting rhythm that was not the rhythm of physical endurance, because it was not concomitant with the pounding of the brain. The brain had already accepted its demise, but the heart beat on, as if it were trying to escape its current host to find a new host before the brain seized control and shut it down forever.
Eventually, after a minute of dreamtime and a second of realtime, the heart muscle exploded, spreading a gush of hot agitated blood through the chest cavity. The sensations were so genuine that when he awakened, Reid was shocked to discover that he was still alive. He was thrilled, the pounding of his intact heart convincing his intact brain to snatch up a second chance at living. The single good feeling dominated his morning commute to work.
At work, on a cold rainy morning in November, Reid listened to Garcia bumble her way through a case briefing. He scanned the Round Table Room for the reactions of his fellow profilers.
Morgan and Prentiss maintained their poker faces as Garcia, hands covering eyes, passed out crime scene photos that she had never looked at during the case screening. Rossi rubbed his index finger along the side of his nose, letting slip a miniscule sigh of exasperation. Hotch blinked slightly faster than normal.
"Ew, ew, ew," Garcia scrunched up her face as she caught a glimpse of the victim in the photos.
Reid broke off a piece of his sugar cookie and crunched it in his mouth. He ignored Garcia's disgust as he focused in upon the disembodied ribcage in the top photo.
"The victim..." Garcia took a deep breath and rushed through her monologue. "The victim was a Caucasian woman in her early-60s, believed to have been a hitchhiker that the UnSub picked up on Interstate 65 between Indianapolis and Chicago. The UnSub drove the victim to a campground near the Tippecanoe Battlefield Memorial, raped her, beat her with a tire iron, and slashed her numerous times with a Swiss Army knife before finally strangling her with a power cord. He then dismembered the body with a handsaw and scattered the body parts all over the campsite. There's a photo of each body part at the crime scene and at the morgue. The medical examiner was able to piece together a nearly complete body. The only parts missing were the ears," she clapped her hands over her own ears, "Icky sticky!" she declared nonsensically.
"Maybe he ate them," Reid chewed, swallowed, and while his mouth was working, spewed out the first idea that came to mind.
"The UnSub appears to be a disorganized killer in the midst of a psychotic break," Prentiss ignored the comment. "The level of overkill indicates a substantial loss of control. The instruments of violence - the tire iron, the Swiss Army knife, the power cord - are everyday items, indicating that the UnSub did not possess a high enough level of organization to assemble a specialized murder kit."
"Maybe he's young and inexperienced rather than psychotic," Reid suggested. "That would explain the low level of organization and the age of the rape victim. Inexperienced serial killers have been known to demonstrate overkill, especially within quasi-natural environments such as the campground. The novel excitement of the experience, combined with the relative lack of artificial infrastructure, drives the killer into a predator-prey simulation, in which the predator chases down the prey, inflicts excessive bodily damage, and may or may not consume parts of the prey during and after the frenzy. That's why I suggested that the UnSub may have eaten the missing ears."
"I've never heard this theory of the predator-prey simulation," Rossi tipped his chair away from the table to glance at Reid sitting beside him.
"It's not an established theory," Reid dropped his eyes to the table and blushed. "It's a hypothesis that emerged from a statistical analysis of age versus M.O. for murders committed over the past century."
"So it's your personal theory?" Morgan chuckled. "Like 'Evil Twin, Eviler Twin'?"
"Not really my theory," Reid replied snappishly, annoyed with the reference to a throwaway comment that he had made on the BAU jet more than two years ago. "It was Gideon's theory. Before he left, Gideon had been working on a paper about the evolution of the serial offender. He was particularly interested in novice offenders. He told me once, while we were flying to that Datsun Z case in Seattle, that highly intelligent novices learn as they go and perfect their methods to become better killers over time."
"OK then, moving on..." Prentiss flipped through the police reports. "So far, we've established a low level of organization for the UnSub. We know that the UnSub raped his victims. What do we know about his age and sexual competence?"
Reid stared at Prentiss for a moment, stunned into unthinking silence by her dismissal of his ideas. Hadn't he already stated that the UnSub was young, based on the age of the victim? Didn't Prentiss know that the ages of rapists and the ages of rape victims were inversely correlated? Was Prentiss so distracted by Morgan's vacuous chuckling that she could no longer entertain a plausible hypothesis that had emerged from quantitative data?
Reid twiddled his pen in his fingers and popped another chunk of cookie into his mouth. He drowned out the voices of his colleagues as they discussed the UnSub. This was always the most boring part of the briefing, when Morgan and Prentiss droned endlessly, on and on and on, about the basic skeleton of the profile - age, race, level of organization, sexual competence. Reid always wanted to jump straight ahead into the meatier aspects of the profile, the specific parts that distinguished one impotent white male UnSub from another impotent white male UnSub. He was tired of the tedium, which was why he usually blocked off the auditory channel, inhibited the articulatory musculature of the face, and visualized scenes from Looney Tunes episodes during the briefings. In the episodes of his mind, Bugs Bunny was the predator, and Elmer Fudd was the prey.
In truth, as he had realized the minute that Garcia had waltzed into the Round Table Room with a stack of packets, Reid was miffed that he had been passed over for the case screening job. In his eyes, he was the ideal candidate to sit in JJ's dark cramped office and read through folder after folder of case files. He could have gotten through a hundred case files in the time that it took JJ to get through one. He could have constructed a partial profile for each case as he went along, such that once the winning case made its way into the Round Table Room, the team could have skipped right over the boring parts. It made no sense that Hotch had chosen Garcia, the squeamish technical analyst, over Reid, the clinical profiler who could read 20,000 words per minute and synthesize information in a higher plane and at a faster pace than anyone else in the FBI.
Reid was more than miffed. He was hurt and angry. He suspected that Hotch had passed over him for the case screening job only because Hotch didn't want to work with him anymore than absolutely necessary.
Reid took another bite of another cookie, checked into the briefing for a moment, heard Morgan say something about impotence, and checked back out in order to examine his interactions with Hotch over the past year, ever since Hotch, like Morgan, had started hating him. He recalled very few interactions that didn't involve Hotch saying something about the case or Hotch telling him to go play with Rossi or Hotch telling him to stay with the SUVs. Hotch had also made a comment about him joining a band, but Reid hadn't understood how Hotch had thought up such a unlikely scenario. The idea of Hotch thinking that he would join a band was repulsive to Reid. It showed that Hotch didn't know him outside of work at all.
"Why would you expect your boss to know you outside of work?" Reid asked himself. "Do you really want your boss to know you outside of work? Do you really want your boss to find out about your ant farm or your LEGO collection or your comic book? Other people are not interested in the same things that you're interested in! Other people are not like you! Get over it!"
Try as he might, Reid couldn't get over the drifting feeling that drifted him farther away from his teammates with each passing minute. It was not just the people that he drifted away from. It was also the job itself.
Back in the early years, whenever he returned home from a case, Reid would devote an entire weekend to writing up an account of the events. Following the account would be a detailed analysis, containing both qualitative and quantitative data, about his findings from the case. Each treatise would be a miniature Ph.D. dissertation, more than 100 pages long, with a wealth of material for the next generation of profilers to learn from. Every time Reid completed a treatise, he would print it out, bind the pages together, and drop it off on Gideon's desk. Gideon stored the collection in a file cabinet and referred to it now and then when he wrote up his own case files. Reid had always been proud that young and inexperienced as he was, he had occasionally been able to contribute some tiny detail to Gideon's understanding of a case. He couldn't imagine doing that for any boss but Gideon. He couldn't imagine anyone else taking the time to read his analyses or scrounging up the office space to store them. No one else possessed the requisite intellect and intellectual exuberance.
That was the root of the problem. Reid was bored with the BAU.
Now that Gideon had been gone for several years, Reid had difficulty recalling why exactly he had joined the BAU in the first place. The BAU did an important job, but was it as important as curing cancer? Curing cancer would save millions of lives. The BAU saved an average of five lives per case, based on the average number of victims that the average serial killer would go on to kill if the BAU had never gotten involved. In the grand scheme of human endeavors, the BAU was an insignificant mote. A genius with an IQ of 187 could use his talents for far grander purposes than hunting down psychotic freaks of human nature ensconced within hideously charming shells, one by one.
Reid was aware of all this. He had done the analysis. He had found that the only things that attached him to the BAU were the people in the BAU, the people that he formerly thought of as his current friends and colleagues and that he currently thought of as his former friends and colleagues. There was no other reason for Reid to be a profiler. As an intellectual pursuit, profiling was interesting, but so were a multitude of other things.
The BAU jet was undergoing repairs for a tailstrike that had occurred during landing several cases ago. It was not scheduled to take off until 7 PM, which meant that Reid had plenty of time to search the alley behind the MLK Central Library in Washington, DC. In the twelve hours since the dream, Reid had reconciled the location of the dumpster with the alley behind the library. It had somehow moved from its location in the self-storage facility. That was nothing out of the ordinary. Anything was possible in dreams.
Reid peered out at the dark alley from under the brim of his umbrella. He recognized the dumpster into which he had flipped the body of the old man. He looked around for the old man.
The alley was a narrow one-way passage that ran between 9th Street and 10th Street. Dumpsters lined both sides, as did trash, animate and inanimate. Reid fingered his revolver as he stepped slowly down the alley.
He passed a huddle to his left. He paused for a closer look. It was a pile of damp newspaper with a pair of feet and the hem of a skirt poking out from underneath the pages. The feet were clad in shiny red high heels, inconsistent with the dirty skirt and the whiskey bottles that littered the immediate area. The huddle breathed in and out in the rhythm of sleep, oblivious to its curious observer.
Reid moved on. Women or cross-dressing men, whatever the huddle was, did not fit the victomology.
The next huddle was alert. It was not a man or woman. It was a stray cat that arched its back and hissed at Reid as he swerved out of its path. Reid pulled his gun out of its holster, just in case he was intruding upon the domain of larger toothier prey.
The rest of the journey down the dark creepy passage was uneventful. Reid was disappointed and excited at the same time. He was disappointed that he had found nothing of note in the passage, even though he hadn't known what he was searching for or why he had come out here at all. He was excited that he now had an excuse to look into all the dumpsters that lined the passage. Having journeyed from one end to the other and having encountered many similar dumpsters, Reid was no longer certain into which dumpster he had flipped the body of the old man. He thought that checking all the dumpsters to find them devoid of dead bodies would help him convince himself that the experience, the disturbing dreams of murder and/or death, in which he had murdered and been murdered, were indeed fanciful constructs of his self-defeating imagination.
The first dumpster contained trash in the form of cardboard boxes that should have gone into the recycling bin. The second dumpster contained all the rest of the trash. The third dumpster was mostly empty.
Reid looked again.
The third dumpster contained the body of an old man. He was sleeping, or so Reid thought at first glance. In the darkness, he thought that he could see the man's chest moving up and down as the man breathed. A few glances later, he realized that the movement was accompanied by noise. It was not the noise of breathing, but the squeaky skittering noise of small animals, such as mice or rats, scurrying over the body of the old man.
Reid snapped his head back from the edge of the dumpster. He was horrified by the sight of rodents exploring and presumably devouring the body of the old man. The man had to be dead, not asleep as Reid had originally surmised, if the rodents had already come to clean house.
Reid stared at the side of the dumpster, unwilling, but deeply desiring, to look inside again. It was not to satisfy a sick fantasy. It was to ascertain that the old man was not the old man that he had murdered in his dream.
With a deep breath, Reid peeked over the side of the dumpster. He was relieved to find that the rodents had vacated the premises now that a living breathing human had shown up to stake his claim. He was even more relieved to discover that the old man was totally unlike his victim in every conceivable way.
His victim had been frail and thin. This old man was chunky. His victim had been bald, save for a fringe of white hair that had encircled the back of his head. This old man had a full head of salt-and-pepper hair done up in a long ponytail. His victim had sported a neatly trimmed mustache. This old man sported a large thick beard that no doubt trapped particles of food whenever he ate anything.
All in all, the two old men were separate entities. One was real, and the other was imagined. The only thing they had in common was their current husk-like state of non-existence.
Reid holstered his revolver. He grabbed his cell phone out of his pocket. He dialed 911 to report the death of the old homeless man, but the cell phone rang before he could press the call button.
It was Hotch, calling at 7 PM from the BAU jet to ask why Reid had not shown up at the airport.
"Oh sorry!" Reid noticed the time. "I'm so sorry, Hotch. I'll be over there as fast as I can!"
"Do you have your ready bag with you?" Hotch asked curtly.
"Uh no, I left it at the office."
"Are you at home? Can you pack a bag and get over here in less than 30 minutes?"
"Uh no, I'm not at home. I'm running some errands. I'll run home now and try to get there as fast as I can!"
"Don't bother," Hotch said with a hint of anger in his voice. "You can sit this one out. I'll see you in my office after the case."
"Hotch, I'm sorry!" Reid's voice took on a shrill tone. "I swear I can make it to the airport in 30 minutes."
"I'll see you when I get back, Reid. Have a good weekend," Hotch hung up.
Reid held the cell phone to his ear for a full minute after Hotch had hung up. He was frozen with fear and disgust. He was afraid of Hotch and the looming meeting in Hotch's office. He was disgusted with himself for losing track of time, here in this alley that he inhabited for no reason whatsoever. He was filled with remorse.
At the moment, the remorse that he experienced was completely different from the remorse that he had hoped to experience. It was more like a main dish of regret with a side dish of panic. On its own, regret was not the strongest of feelings, but when tinged with panic, regret was almost as strong a feeling as remorse. Reid regretted the series of misguided decisions that had led him into the alley instead of the jet. He regretted them so much that his breathing became shallow and his fingers began twitching. He felt shivery all of a sudden, standing as he did in the freezing rain, dripping as he did with cold water. He had dropped the umbrella in the same moment that he had realized the implications of his actions. The actions were simple, but the implications were complex.
He had missed the plane.
He had only missed the plane once before. Afterwards, he had sworn an oath.
"I'll never miss another plane again," he had sworn.
He had sworn the oath in a bar in New Orleans, watching his friend Ethan play the piano, seeing not his childhood friend but his adulthood friend and father figure sitting beside him. He had sworn the oath to Gideon and Gideon alone. Gideon was gone, and now, so was the oath.
In Freudian psychology, the father figure was called the super-ego. The super-ego watched and judged with a critical eye. It looked upon the doings of the id, the portion of the brain that was called the heart, and the ego, the portion of the brain that was called the self. The id was impulsive. It knew instincts. The ego was intellectual. It knew facts. The super-ego was perfect. It knew right and wrong.
The super-ego maintained the social contract between the self and the world, just as the plane maintained the social contract between Reid and the BAU.
"Super-ego, plane, whatever," Reid retrieved his umbrella from the ground and convinced himself that missing the plane was no big deal. So what if he sat out this one case? It was not the end of the world.
Reid headed out of the alley, towards 10th Street and the Metro. He laughed at himself for his silliness.
"Thinking about Freud in a dumpster-lined alley on a dark rainy night?" he thought. "This is new, even for you."
Reid stopped thinking about Freud. Or rather, his ego stopped consciously thinking about Freud. Most of Freud's theories had been discredited over the past century, so the ego was not about to let them affect it now.
The id continued the original train of thought. The id, not as intellectual as the ego, enjoyed ideas with the heart. It enjoyed Freud's tripartite construction of the human psyche.
Trios were beautiful.
Master Post