Premeditated Chapter 4
The advancing footsteps hit the ground with heavy thuds at low frequency. When he turned, Reid was not surprised to see a tall imposing figure looming beyond a curtain of rain. He shot the figure through the heart, felling it before it moved another inch towards him. The figure stumbled backwards and crumpled to the pavement, following the path of its useless unused knife. The sound of the knife clattering over the asphalt was obscured by the sound of the second shot, the one that plowed through the throat of a smaller slighter figure, who collapsed voicelessly, paying a price for its momentary hesitation. The third figure, unarmed and panic-stricken, turned and fled. Reid gave chase.
The predator-prey simulation played itself out within seconds. The predator sprinted after the sprinting prey, its long legs carrying it effortlessly down the alley, its large feet splashing up miniature tsunamis of puddle water. The prey weaved back and forth as it ran, hoping that its weaving would throw off the predator's aim, knowing that its weaving would slow itself down as well.
The predator waited until it had gained within five feet of the prey before firing. The shot missed, hitting the head rather than the torso, which law enforcement personnel were trained to target, due to its greater surface area and lesser degrees of freedom. The prey dropped in mid-stride as the bullet pierced its brainstem. It flopped face-first onto a pile of soggy brown leaves, their autumn dullness abruptly infused with the thick metallic richness of blood.
Reid shortened his stride and pulled up to the feet of his victim. He panted with his hands on his knees. He exhaled breaths of warm moist air, the small white clouds rushing out of his lungs in their eagerness to frolick in the rain. He inhaled rapidly, pushing his abdomen outwards as he sucked in gulp after gulp of air, dispatching a nourishing stream of oxygen to his racing brain. After a minute, he gained enough composure to stoop down and palpate for a pulse at the carotid artery.
Finding none, Reid straightened up and peered cautiously down the alley in both directions. No figures sprang out to shadow the darkness. No footsteps sprang up to accompany the storm. The binary sequence of 111 had attracted no one to the crime scene. This area of Washington, DC, two blocks north of FBI Headquarters in the J. Edgar Hoover Building, was usually deserted at night, save for a few muggers and loiterers who had nothing else to do and nowhere else to go.
The rain fell harder as Reid retraced his steps towards 10th Street. An errant gust of wind, blowing from the east, aided his progress through the storm. He avoided the rivulets of blood that colored the rainwater pink. Most of the blood had already swirled down the drain, so he had no need to tiptoe around it until he reached the source.
At the source, Reid checked for signs of life amidst the stillness. The larger figure lay on its back, its aorta ruptured by the passage of a bullet through the ascending section. The smaller figure lay on its side, its spinal cord severed by the passage of a bullet through the neck, front to back. All three victims had died quickly. Death had worked its way from the heart up the spine to the brain, and Reid doubted that any of the dead, when dying, had put up much of a struggle.
A final glance backwards, and it was high time to flee. Reid restored God's Will to its designated pocket in his messenger bag. He retrieved his umbrella from the ground and adjusted the canopy over the spokes. He was soaked, through and through, but he still considered the umbrella a shield against the pouring rain.
The rest of the evening passed without incident. Reid arrived home around 10 PM. He hung his jacket from a hook on the door, tossed his umbrella into the kitchen sink, and dumped his messenger bag onto the floor. He stowed his gun in its usual location in the top drawer of the nightstand. He took a shower and crawled into bed. Within five minutes, he was asleep. Within thirty minutes, he was awake, feeling like he had slept for a whole night with nothing to show for it but a nagging sensation at the back of his neck.
Reid burrowed deeper into the covers, curling himself into a ball within the pocket of air that he had warmed up with his own body heat. The nagging sensation wormed its way under the sheets, wrapping its tentacles over his shoulders and threatening to smother him with its unbearable persistence. He wiggled his shoulders, trying to shake it off, but it clamped its suckers tightly onto his back. The sensation spoke to him in his own voice, asking a simple question for which there was no simple answer. How had it come to this?
With all the things that had ever happened in his life, it was not the first time that this particular voice had asked this particular question. Reid knew exactly how to respond.
He pushed away the covers and bounded onto the floor from his high bed. Through the moon-lit darkness, he padded into the adjoining bathroom. From the medicine cabinet, he grabbed a bottle of Tylenol. He popped three tablets into his mouth, turned on the faucet, and scooped up enough water in his hands to wash down the pills. He returned to bed, yawning and blinking as he crawled back under the covers. In 15 minutes, once the side effects of Tylenol had set in, he would be happily asleep in his warm comfortable bed on a Friday at midnight.
Tylenol, with its active ingredient acetaminophen, was not approved by the FDA for use as a sleeping pill. It was only used for its sedative purposes in the Reid household, ever since Reid had stopped using harder drugs to fulfill the same needs. For some people, acetaminophen caused drowsiness, such that they should never operate motor vehicles or heavy machinery after an administration of the drug. For Reid, acetaminophen caused extreme drowsiness, such that he could always depend on the drug to send him into a restful slumber whenever he felt the need to escape. For Reid, acetaminophen was basically morphine. He had not discovered the benefits of Tylenol until the past couple of years, because he had grown up taking Advil as his analgesic of choice. If Advil, with its active ingredient ibuprofen, had possessed the same properties as Tylenol, then Reid would never have become addicted to Dilaudid. Neither would he have become addicted if he had grown up taking Tylenol in the first place. If he had grown up taking Tylenol, then he would have known about the beneficial side effects, and he would have substituted the non-addictive aniline analgesic for the addictive opioid analgesic. As usual, in this and many other areas, his life history had worked against him. When he was four, the family cat had died after accidentally ingesting a tablet of Tylenol that his father had dropped on the floor. Cats lacked the necessary enzymes to break down acetaminophen. For cats, acetaminophen was basically strychnine. After the tragic incident, his mother had banned Tylenol from the house. She had also refused to get another cat, and to this day, she still petted the specter of the huge fluffy Maine coon, Felix sylvester, whenever she remembered to miss her family.
Reid lay awake in bed, freely indulging in fear, disgust, and remorse, now that he was guaranteed an escape from reality. He began negotiating his way through the five stages of grief, originally set forth by Elisabeth Kuebler-Ross in her book, "On Death and Dying".
In the first stage, Denial, Reid tried to convince himself that his actions had constituted self-defense. When he had shot the first mugger, he had only been defending himself. Actually, at the time, he had not even been consciously defending himself. He had pulled the trigger as a subconscious physical response to the impending knife attack. That one had not counted. When he had shot the second mugger, he had been consciously defending himself. That one had counted, but it could be excused in a court of law. When he had shot the third mugger, he had not been defending himself at all. He had been playing out the predator-prey simulation of the novice killer. That one had counted, and it was inexcusable.
The third shot was premeditated murder, and so, by extension, were the first two. All three shots had been fired from the same weapon. In an act of self-defense, Reid would have drawn the first weapon within his reach. That was the revolver in its holster on his belt. In an act of murder, Reid had drawn a different weapon. That was the revolver in his messenger bag, which he had needed to unbuckle and unzip before he had felt the strength of God's Will in his fingers. In the final minute before he fell asleep, Reid realized that God's Will had been nothing but an expression of his own will.
In the same minute, he vowed to confess his sins and make amends, however costly those amends turned out to be. On Friday morning, when he arrived at the office, he would knock on Hotch's door and tell Hotch the whole story of what had happened the night before. Hotch, who had once been an attorney, would advise him on his options. Surely, he would have to pay a price for murdering three human beings, muggers or not. He was happy to pay a price, as long as he could also figure out, in the intervening years, why he had done it. Like Chester Hardwicke before his execution, Spencer Reid was not willing to escape from reality until the question had been answered. How had it come to this?
At midnight, Reid fell asleep.
This time, when he awakened from the dream, Reid experienced a soft serene well-being. The feeling, like that of waking from a fever alleviated by a drug-induced slumber, arose from the dream, which had done its duty to conflate reality with fantasy. In fantasy, the events of the previous night had occurred, in their exact sequence and with their exact details, a countless number of times. In reality, the events had occurred once. Reality could never compare to fantasy. In reality, Reid had murdered three people, but when conflated with fantasy, Reid had murdered three people in a dream. From the one old man to the three muggers, the crimes had escalated, and Reid was disturbed that his subconsious mind had come up with such a sequence of events. He reminded himself not to mention any of this at work, lest his friends and colleagues, who had been eagerly awaiting the opportunity, used his purported hallucinations as an excuse to commit him to the loony bin. Before he left on his morning commute, he did not check the number of bullets in Tobias Hankel's revolver.
At work, on a cold sunny morning in November, Reid knocked on the door of Hotch's office.
"Yeah, Reid, come in," Hotch waved at him through the open blinds.
"Um...Hi Hotch," Reid opened the door a crack, squeezed through the narrow opening, and closed the door behind him. "Sorry I missed you yesterday when you got back from the case. I was over at the Academy for a special seminar," he lied. "'Evolution of Motive and Intent in Serial Offenders With Poor Impulse Control'. The speaker argued that such offenders have no motives, or specific reasons, for committing their crimes, but that they have the intent, or specific desire, to do so. Over time, as the offender evolves, motive becomes conflated with intent, such that the only reason for committing the crimes becomes the desire itself. Ironically, the more frequently the offender gives in to his emotional desires, the more clinical, calculated, and intellectual his crimes become. Eventually, when the offender is caught, the authorities find him unable to analyze his motives or express his intent, instead relying on others to speak for him. He recalls only the physical details of the crimes, not his own intellectual or emotional involvement, and this detachment is often viewed as a lack of remorse, leading judges and juries to impose the harshest sentences, such as life in prison or the death penalty. In my opinion, the majority of offenders do feel genuine remorse, but the remorse is masked behind the psychological trauma incurred by the offender over the series of crimes."
"You've been keeping yourself busy," Hotch smirked drily.
"Uh...Yeah...I guess I have," Reid stammered. "I didn't really have anything to do this week, while everyone else was away on the case..." he dropped his eyes to the floor.
"I take it that you know what happened on the case?" Hotch asked.
"Garcia told me all about it," Reid replied. "Sorry to hear that the case didn't go well..."
"Well, that's how cases go sometimes," Hotch sighed. "Or to use Garcia's terminology, 'The case went to the Deepest Depths of Hell.' The BAU may be an elite team, but we can't guarantee happy endings, and our record is far from perfect."
"Yeah, the Olympic Park bombing, Amerithrax, the Beltway snipers, the Chicago Tylenol murders," Reid listed the imperfections. "We've failed on a number of high-profile cases," he added, neglecting to mention that the recited failures had all occurred prior to his own stint in the BAU.
"Each failure takes some time to get over," Hotch remarked, "Even if the Bureau eventually solves the case and catches the UnSub. Afterwards, you're constantly questioning yourself, wondering why you didn't know this little factoid or why you didn't notice that tiny detail, either of which could have led you to the UnSub."
"It's hard to let go of failure," Reid said. "Ten successes can't make up for one failure. People remember failures more than successes."
"Tell me about it," Hotch nodded. "Better yet, tell Gideon. He had Boston, with Adrian Bale and the six dead agents, then a whole string of successes after he came back, then Frank. After Frank, it was all over for Jason Gideon in the BAU."
"Gideon was tired of playing the game," Reid explained. "To him, each case was a chess game. As soon as he finished one game, he found himself starting another. They were all variations on the same theme."
"You make it sound like Gideon was bored with his job," Hotch said. "Actually, now that I think about it, maybe he was. Along with you, he was the most brilliant mind we've ever had in the BAU," he paused, hesitating and considering, before making up his mind to speak his mind. "Let me ask you something, Reid, but don't take this the wrong way. Do you often find yourself with nothing to do here? Do you often find yourself bored with your work? At this moment, do you still find your job as intellectually stimulating as it was when you first joined the BAU?"
"What? What do you mean?" Reid widened his eyes in concern. "No, Hotch, I'm not bored with my work. I've got plenty to do here. Sometimes, it looks like I'm sitting at my desk doing nothing, but I swear that I'm always thinking about the cases."
"Calm down, Reid, I'm not questioning your diligence," Hotch reassured him. "But I couldn't help noticing that you've been a little unfocused lately. You hardly ever speak up during case briefings anymore. In fact, it often looks like you're tuning out on purpose. That's why I asked you to sit out the latest case. I thought that a break would help you refocus on upcoming cases. We're going to need you on those cases, Reid. I know that I was blunt on the phone last week, but this was my only rationale for leaving you behind."
"Oh," Reid stared, digesting the unexpected insight into Hotch's thought processes. "Um...I guess you're right that I've been distracted lately. I've been thinking about some other projects, turning over some other ideas in my head. Work-related projects and ideas," he added.
"New theories to publish?" Hotch asked. "Statistical analyses of old cases? Mathematical formulas for geographical profiling?"
"Yeah, pretty much all of those," Reid lied. "I promise that I won't let them affect my work anymore. Actually, I think I'll drop them. They're not that important."
"Don't do that," Hotch said. "We need you to advance the field, even if it costs us some of your expertise on current cases. It'll benefit the BAU in the long run. But I have a feeling that you can juggle both worlds and still have time to school the child prodigies and old geezers in chess games at the park. Am I right, Reid?"
"You know about my chess games at the park?" Reid asked, raising his eyebrows in surprise.
"We unit chiefs have our ways of finding things out," Hotch replied slyly. "Although I still haven't put together the exact nature of Emily's Sin-to-Win weekends. But that's because I don't really want to know. Anyway," his tone turned serious, "I've been meaning to ask you for a favor, which you shouldn't feel pressured to do if you don't want to."
"Sure, Hotch, anything," Reid leaned forwards in his chair.
"It's come to my attention that Garcia is not an ideal fit for the case screening job," Hotch explained. "First of all, she maintains a natural aversion to the cases. I don't blame her for that at all. But the real issue is that she's becoming stressed out with the sheer amount of material that she has to wade through on a daily basis. She still has her duties as a technical analyst, which is a full-time job in and of itself. I was thinking that with your reading speed and special skills, that you'd be an ideal fit for the case screening job, if you're willing to take it. Normally, I would've gone ahead and hired another media liaison, but Section Chief Erin Strauss has recently cut out that portion of our budget. Apparently, a smaller annual requisition enhances her reputation in the eyes of the executive branch. I was hoping that the two of us could work together to help her realize her dream of becoming the FBI Director."
"Sure, Hotch," Reid brightened visibly. "I can take over the case screening job. No problem! I can start on the case files right away. I know there's a huge backlog in JJ's office. How about I start going through the case files today so I can have a new case ready to go by Monday?"
"You wouldn't want to handle the media too, would you, Reid?" Hotch smiled at the poorly contained excitement. "Maybe you'd like to conduct a few three-hour-long press conferences? Answer reporters' questions for 30 minutes a pop? Make the reporters wish that they had never asked the questions? Make the reporters wish that they had never become reporters? You can have that job too, if you want it."
"You're making fun of me, Hotch," Reid declared.
"I know," Hotch nodded sagely, "And I know that I shouldn't do it. We unit chiefs should never lower our inscrutable monotonous facades."
"I didn't mean that..." Reid started, but stopped when he noticed Hotch's lowered facade.
"I really appreciate this, Reid," Hotch said. "To be honest, this takes a ton of weight off my shoulders. Since JJ left, I've been staying late every night, helping Garcia with the case screening. Garcia's been staying late too, working on the case screening software, but it appears that in this area at least, computer programs won't be supplanting human brains anytime soon."
"No problem, Hotch. I'm glad to help," Reid said. "Case screening will help me focus my mind back on the cases and away from other projects and ideas. And you'll get to spend more time with Jack. And Garcia will get to spend more time with Kevin."
"Good, I'm sure that Kevin Lynch is flattered that you're taking an interest in his personal relationships," Hotch snarked warmly. "It's almost ten, Reid. Isn't it time for you to be punching in at your new job?"
"Oh right!" Reid jumped up from his chair. "I'd better get started right away! I'll be in JJ's office if you need me," he exited Hotch's office, throwing the door open, traipsing through the wide opening, and slamming the door shut behind him. "Sorry about that!" he jerked the door open to apologize for slamming the door shut. "I'll be really busy for the rest of the day, so I'll see you on Monday morning for the case briefing."
"Perfect," Hotch replied in his usual monotone. "I'll let Garcia know that she's off the hook. I have a feeling that she'll be secretly pleased, or knowing Garcia, that she'll be openly delighted."
Reid nodded, smiled, waved, and backed out of the office. In the corridor outside, he heaved a deep breath. The dreaded meeting with Hotch had gone extraordinarily well. In the BAU, faster than a speeding bullet from the barrel of God's Will, the balance of power had shifted.
Before he punched in at his new job, where he was his own boss, Reid decided to do his old boss a favor. He decided to solve the latest case in cerebro. He closed the blinds in JJ's office, turned on the desk lamp, and picked up the case file for 'Evil Twin, Eviler Twin'.
The first detail that struck him was the birthdates, plural, of the twin brothers. The older brother had been born on December 31, 1984 at 11:55 PM. The younger brother had been born on January 1, 1985 at 12:12 AM. On their own, the birthdates were insignificant, but taken together, they implied a specific dynamic for the relationship between the twin brothers.
Contrary to his initial conjectures, the brothers did not constitute a twin pair. They constituted a dominant-submissive pair. The older brother was the dominant, but the younger brother was the killer.
Growing up, the older brother had always bragged that he was older, a whole year older, as evidenced by his birth year in comparison to his brother's. Among children, older was better, and so was bigger, which the older brother had also claimed over the younger. Reid could see it in family photos. The older brother had always been an inch or so taller than the younger brother, until the year the twins had graduated from high school, when the younger brother had finally caught up. As adults, the twins were the same height, having both maxed out their height potential at 6'4".
As a kid, Reid had always been younger and smaller than all the other kids. He understood what it was like to be younger and smaller. Kids who were younger and smaller were constantly picked on by the older bigger kids, even if the older bigger kids were only minutes older and millimeters bigger than the younger smaller kids. Age and size set the foundation for the pecking order in miniature dystopian societies. In such a society, the younger smaller brother had naturally assumed the submissive role, fueled as he was by his inadequacy in the face of his older bigger twin. The brothers were twins, so the younger smaller brother must have wondered why he had been doomed to be younger, born in a whole other year, and why he had been doomed to be smaller, always a little too short to beat his brother in a footrace or a little too light to beat his brother in a wrestling match.
Over the years, an inferiority complex had set in and built up. The younger brother had maintained a harmless submissive facade while his frustration had seethed just below the surface. A year ago, when his parents had retired and moved away, he had lowered his facade. Freed from the rigid sheltered environment of his childhood, he had given in to his desires. He had possessed the emotional intent, but not the intellectual motive, to kill. One crime had led to another, until the only reason that he killed was to satisfy the desire to kill. When the older brother had found out about the murders, he had naturally assumed the dominant role, protecting his twin by obfuscating their identities at their favorite hangout. The older brother had always been the smarter one. He had always gotten better grades at school, which was why Hotch and Rossi had suspected him over his twin. Hotch and Rossi had failed to think outside the box. Outside the box, the only way to bring down the brothers was to goad the submissive killer into implicating the dominant obstructor. In dominant-submissive pairs, when the partners were arrested, it was always the submissive who implicated the dominant and the dominant who protected the submissive. Of course, loyalty between criminals only went so far, so the partnership would eventually break down, and each would eventually implicate the other.
Reid rolled his chair back from the desk, savoring the symphony that had composed itself behind his eyes. He checked his watch. It was half past twelve, and Hotch had already gone out for lunch.
Reid leaned back in his chair and put his feet up on the desk. He couldn't wait for Hotch to get back, so he could rush into Hotch's office to explain his chain of reasoning, spewing out factoids and details without conscious inhibition, the itty bitty crumbs convincing Hotch that he had solved the case. He would explain that the twins were a dominant-submissive pair in which the dominant and the submissive represented the intellectual fugue and the emotional fantasia. Hotch would stare, but Reid would go on to explain that the twins suffered from the opposite of dissociative identity disorder. They were two bodies, one identity, with the two separate parts of the one identity residing in the two separate bodies. One was the dominant, and one was the submissive. One was the intellectual, and one was the emotional. One was the obstructor, and one was the killer. Hotch would glare, but his eyes would soften and light up as he processed the information through his slow creaky mind. He would smile when he realized that Reid had snatched success from the jaws of failure. Like Gideon, Hotch maintained a bad habit, believing as he did in happy endings.
Reid spun around and around in his chair as he counted down the minutes to the end of the lunch hour. In his mind, he explored new ideas in the context of new projects. He wondered about obstructors and killers. Could one identity in one body alternate between the roles - sometimes an obstructor and sometimes a killer? Garcia had said that obstructors and killers were the same. Obstructing, in a dark office filled with potential cases, cleared the way for killing, in a dark alley filled with potential victims. Killing, in the form of unburied bodies, needed obstructing, in the form of buried cases. Could obstructor and killer merge into one, as could intellectual and emotional, dominant and submissive, motive and intent? Could one identity in one body alternate between the roles - sometimes a killer and sometimes an obstructor? Could the identity be a savior as well, granting life and death where it saw fit to grant them? Would the granting of life, in the form of crimes solved, make up for the granting of death, in the form of crimes committed? Most importantly, could the identity avoid paying a price - the question for which there was no answer?
At 1:11 PM, before he left JJ's office to knock on Hotch's door, Reid checked the number of bullets in Tobias Hankel's revolver. The id and the ego shook hands in the absence of the super-ego, which had wandered off in search of its own happy endings. The id and the ego agreed on one point.
Even though it had come to this, trios, in a loaded-unloaded pair, were still beautiful.
Master Post