Premeditated Chapter 7
"In the field of observation, chance favors the prepared mind."
Louis Pasteur was right. Reid concurred with his fellow scientist. Killing the strawberry blonde prostitute had been the first step towards solving the case.
Reid laid out ten photos of dead prostitutes on his desk. He arranged them in order of their deaths. Brunette, blonde, brunette, blonde, brunette, blonde, brunette, blonde, brunette, blonde.
Frowning, he gathered up the glossy papers and started over. He separated the blondes and brunettes into two piles. He arranged the brunettes in order of their deaths, their photos taking up all the space from one end of the desk to the other. Beneath them, he arranged the blondes in order, their photos traversing the strip of desk closest to where he sat in his chair. He moved the last brunette, the ninth victim, along with the last blonde, the tenth victim, a few inches to the right, where the photos ran up against the blinds that shut everyone out from the secrets within his office.
Laid out before him, the crime scene photos convinced Reid that the next victim would be neither blonde or brunette. The next victim would be a redhead. The reasoning was extraordinarily straightforward.
Human hair color was determined by two types of the dark pigment melanin - eumelanin and pheomelanin. Eumelanin itself came in two types - brown and black - determining whether a person had brown or black hair, respectively. Black hair, like that of Aaron Hotchner, David Rossi, Derek Morgan, and Emily Prentiss, was irrelevant to the case. Brown hair, like that of Spencer Reid, and blonde hair, like that of Jennifer Jareau, were integral. Reid was not sure how Penelope Garcia fit into the inequality, because he was not sure about her natural hair color. Neither the peroxide blonde of yesteryear or the henna orange of present times was convincing as a natural human hair color.
Among the blondes and brunettes, people with a lot of brown eumelanin had dark brown hair, people with a little brown eumelanin had light blonde hair, and there was a continuous spectrum of brown and blonde shades between the two extremes. Pheomelanin entered the equation as the pigment responsible for red hair. Regardless of hair color, all humans produced pheomelanin. The only factor that varied was the amount.
Red hair, the shade normally and sometimes derogatorily referred to as ginger, had high levels of pheomelanin and low levels of brown eumelanin. Strawberry blonde hair had moderate levels of pheomelanin and low levels of brown eumelanin. On the brown side of the spectrum, the equivalent of strawberry blonde was chestnut brown, a shade with moderate levels of pheomelanin and high levels of brown eumelanin. That was the hair color of the ninth victim, the one whose hair color reflected that of the tenth victim, whom Reid had killed, not because he had planned to kill her, but because by chance, she had been there when his mind had been prepared.
Killing the strawberry blonde prostitute had been the first step towards solving the case, because the act had essentially cornered the UnSub. The first victim, a brunette, had medium brown hair. The second victim, a blonde, had medium blonde hair. They had been textbook examples of blonde and brunette. From there, the UnSub had chosen victims with successively increasing amounts of pheomelanin in their hair. None of the victims had counted as redheads, because the pheomelanin occurred in only a small proportion of their hair follicles, the ones that created attractive reddish highlights in their blonde or brown hair. Having progressed from medium brown to chestnut brown and from medium blonde to strawberry blonde, the UnSub had reached the red hair boundary from both sides of the spectrum. He had run out of blondes and brunettes to kill. If he wished to maintain the integrity of his crimes, then he would have to turn his attention to redheads. As everyone knew, red hair was the rarest human hair color, so prostitutes with red hair constituted the smallest pool of potential victims. Among the pimps of DC, there was one, Ginger Ale, who specialized in prostitutes with naturally red hair.
"Ginger Ale?" Rossi narrowed his eyes, one more than the other, until his eyes appeared even more uneven than usual. "Let me get this straight, Reid. You're suggesting that we contact this pimp, Ginger Ale, to warn him about the UnSub, so he can protect his redheaded prostitutes by taking them off the streets."
"Yes," Reid nodded eagerly.
Rossi glanced sideways at Hotch, who stood like an Easter Island statue in the open doorway of Rossi's office.
"Hotch?" Reid turned to his boss.
"It's not a bad idea," Hotch considered, tapping his finger against his chin as he assumed the pimp's perspective. "For a pimp, each and every prostitute is a valuable commodity. It takes time for him to build a stable of prostitutes, and it takes effort for him to maintain them. A prostitute who becomes dissatisfied with her pimp can switch to a different pimp, so pimps are constantly at risk of losing their prostitutes to one another."
"Right," Reid said. "I had Garcia dig up some background information on Ginger Ale. His real name is Ryan Jonas. He's 27 years old. He became a pimp after he lost his job as a security guard at a hotel. He's only been operating in the sex industry for a year, so he's still considered a wannabe in the pimp hierarchy. Under the threat of an UnSub specifically targeting redheads, he might be willing to take his prostitutes off the streets, even if it means losing money for awhile. He needs to protect his assets. If the UnSub kills several of his prostitutes, then the remainder will switch pimps to distance themselves from the group. They may even move out of the DC area altogether. His whole enterprise would come crashing down. He can't take that risk."
"Why not just arrest the prostitutes directly?" Rossi asked. "Why not warn them directly? Why go to the trouble of warning the pimp?"
"Because it'll take time for local law enforcement to track down and arrest the prostitutes," Hotch replied. "And I doubt that the prostitutes would heed our warnings. However, they may heed the warnings of their pimp. He'd be losing money by taking them off the streets, so warnings, coming from him, would carry greater weight and would alert them to the severity of the situation. As for the pimp, we can't arrest him. As soon as the pimp is arrested, the prostitutes will switch to different pimps, spreading themselves out all over the DC area and making our investigation that much harder."
"It's better to keep the majority of the potential victims within one specific red light district than to spread them out among all of the areas," Reid explained. "The Metropolitan Police Department can increase patrols within a limited area. We can focus in on one area as well. If the prostitutes refuse to stop work, then at least we can use the victimology to tail the prostitutes and hunt down the UnSub that way. If they do stop work, then we can lure the UnSub out of hiding, as he becomes more and more desperate to find an appropriate victim. I think we should approach the pimp with our proposal as soon as possible."
"As soon as we find him," Rossi pondered the specifics of tracking down a pimp. "Pimps tend to stay away from law enforcement, but we may be able to get a message to him through his bottom girl, his secretary of sorts."
"It'll have to be discrete," Reid said. "If the information about the UnSub leaks out, then the prostitutes will disperse. We need to keep them in one place to have a chance at catching the UnSub. We've got very few leads in this case, not even enough to build a barebones profile at this point."
"I'll speak to Morgan when he and Prentiss get back from canvassing the crime scenes," Hotch decided. "He's got undercover experience from his days in the Chicago police force. He understands all the practical aspects of dealing with common criminals. Dave, why don't you work with Morgan on the negotiation with the pimp?"
"Good thinking," Rossi agreed. "I've got personal experience with organized crime, even if we're only dealing with a wannabe pimp."
"What should I do?" Reid asked expectantly. "Should I work on the negotiation as well?"
"No, no, no," Hotch shook his head emphatically. "No way, not a chance. You're going to continue doing what you've been doing in your office - making observations that everyone else has missed, coming up with valuable insights for the rest of us. Bring them to me or to Dave, if I'm not around. I don't want you out on the streets, especially not around pimps or any other agents of organized crime."
"Definitely not," Rossi snickered. "Imagine what they'd do to him if they got their hands on him..."
"Sorry, Reid," Hotch apologized. "We need your brain on this case and all future cases, so we can't risk putting the rest of you into danger."
"You're much too precious, Reid. You're our jiggling mass of gray matter," Rossi chuckled and smiled, almost fondly, at Reid.
Reid nodded without saying a word. With a blank neutral expression on his face, he conveyed acceptance and understanding. It was convincing. Hotch adjourned the discussion to attend an unwelcome meeting with Section Chief Erin Strauss. Reid followed him out of Rossi's office and walked briskly down the corridor to his own office, where he calmly closed and locked the door.
In his office, with the door locked and the blinds closed, he flung a folder of crime scene photos at the opposite wall. The photos exploded out of the folder, flying all over the room before drifting to the floor. Reid folded his arms across his chest. He stared at the dead prostitutes in the photos, their hair, being dead even in life, the only thing about them that remained the same after their deaths. He inhaled as deeply and slowly as possible. He exhaled just as slowly. No small white clouds leaped out of his lungs to frolick in the stillness. The breathing didn't help. Even after multiple attempts to calm himself and clear his head, Reid was still so angry that he could have killed someone.
On Monday evening, after work, Reid visited the red light district of the redheaded prostitutes, looking for the one who fit the victimology. In the few hours since the meeting with Hotch and Rossi, he had refined his analysis of hair pigmentation. The UnSub had run out of blondes and brunettes to kill, so he would have to kill redheads just within the red hair boundary on both the blonde and brunette sides of the spectrum. The last victim had been a blonde, so the next victim would be a redhead at the boundary of redhead and brunette. Reid needed to find a prostitute with high levels of pheomelanin and high levels of brown eumelanin. The shade he was looking for, as he ambled down the sidewalk in the misty drizzle, was auburn.
"How's it going?" a prostitute approached him from a sheltered spot in front of a boarded-up glass door.
"No, thanks," Reid muttered as he walked past her.
She was a blonde, but she didn't look like JJ at all. He didn't find her particularly attractive, but he supposed that some men would.
"Whatever," the prostitute tossed her hair as she strutted back to her spot.
Reid continued down the street, ignoring every prostitute who approached him, eventually learning to keep his eyes trained forwards to prevent them from approaching him at all. None of them fit the victimology. He passed by a couple of redheads. One had vivid orange curls, which looked natural. The other had deep burgundy waves, which looked fake. If the burgundy color had been a little less red and a little more brown, then it could have passed as auburn, but it would still have come out of a bottle, and that would have eliminated it from the UnSub's consideration.
At 9 PM, after two hours of wandering the streets, Reid was hungry. He hadn't eaten anything since lunch, which had consisted of ham-and-cheese sandwiches wolfed down during an intense examination of color swatches. Lunch had taken place before the meeting with Hotch and Rossi. Reid was glad that he had eaten lunch earlier than usual, inspite of the fact that the sustenance had worn off earlier as well. He doubted that he could have eaten lunch after the meeting. Ham and cheese did not mix well with bubbles of boiling rage.
Reid stopped when the sidewalk reached a deadend. Before him was a wide gravel path, and beyond the gravel was a set of railroad tracks. The tracks were fenced off on the far side, but they were perfectly accessible on the near side. Reid turned right onto the gravel path, kicking up a few small stones as he walked over the rough ground parallel to the tracks. He fumbled for a candy bar in his messenger bag. He paused, next to the windowless concrete wall of a dilapidated warehouse, to tear open the candy wrapper. Before he could rip it open, he spotted her - a pale sliver of leg, a paler curve of neck, a flyaway wisp of reddish hair poking out from under a woolly winter hat.
Reid looked again. She was the one who fit the victimology. He approached her.
"Hi," Reid wiggled his fingers in the direction of the prostitute.
"Not working tonight," the prostitute dismissed him, deftly lighting a cigarette with one hand as she waved him off with the other.
"Six minutes," Reid pointed at the cigarette.
"What?" the prostitute took a puff.
"Six minutes," Reid repeated. "It's just something I used to say to my mom to get her to quit smoking. A cigarette takes six minutes off your life, so every time she'd light one, I'd say, 'It's six minutes less that I get to spend with you.'"
"Cute," the prostitute exhaled a puff of smoke. "Still not working tonight."
"Not even for a hundred dollars an hour?" Reid coaxed the prostitute.
"No," the prostitute rejected his offer.
"Well..." Reid considered a different tactic. "Can you take your hat off for a minute?" he gestured at her head. "You've got really pretty hair. It's auburn, isn't it? It's a shame for you to hide it under that ugly winter hat."
"No, I'm not taking off my hat," the prostitute rolled her eyes, without a hint of JJ in her expression. "I told you, I'm not working tonight, so leave me alone, OK?"
"Why aren't you working tonight?" Reid asked. "Don't you want to make a hundred dollars an hour? That's twice as much as you'd normally make. I'll give you twenty dollars if you take your hat off. That's one second of work at a prorated $72,000 per hour. Here," he reached into his wallet, grabbed one of the twenties that the other prostitute had given back to him, and held it out towards her hand.
"I said no!" the prostitute pulled her hand away from the money. "What the Hell is wrong with you? Why don't you fuck off?"
"I'll leave you alone if you take your hat off," Reid persisted. "Just take your hat off for one second. That's all I'm asking."
"Fine!" the prostitute ripped her hat off, utterly exasperated by his obsessive tenacity. "Happy?" she shook her hair out until some of the strands fell over her face. "Fetish freak," she started to put her hat back on.
"You should grow your hair out," Reid grabbed a fistful of hair before she could put her hat back on. "You look nice this way, but you could be a real beauty if you had long wavy auburn hair," he peered closely at the strands. "It's natural, right? Your color? It didn't come out of a bottle?" he examined the strands under the beam of a Maglite. "It goes really well with your hazel eyes," he let go and stepped back.
"Yeah, it's natural," the prostitute stared up at him, more annoyed than ever, now that he had touched her hair. "Look, I took my hat off. I let you touch my hair, even though you totally freak me out. I'm not even going to take your money. Would you just leave me alone already?"
"Oh, I freak you out? Is that a problem?" Reid stepped forward, grabbed the prostitute by the shoulders, and shoved her against the wall of the building. "You should've taken the money when I offered it," he snatched the cigarette out of her fingers, dropped it onto the gravel, and ground it out under his shoe. "Who are you to reject a hundred dollars an hour? You're a filthy disgusting whore. You make me sick."
"Let go of me!" the prostitute struggled to escape his grasp, twisting her body away from him, trying to get her feet into position to kick him in the shins.
"I wouldn't," Reid drew his revolver and pressed the barrel against her upper abdomen, where her diaphragm directed the heaving of her breasts through her flimsy lacy top.
The prostitute gasped at the gun, staring, wide-eyed, as she realized the severity of the situation. She gazed into Reid's eyes, his eyes the same color as her eyes, both pairs of hazel eyes a deep reddish brown away from the glare of the streetlamps.
"Please..." the prostitute murmured. "Please don't kill me," she whimpered, cringing every time she breathed as her abdomen contacted the barrel of the gun.
"I didn't come here to kill you," Reid lifted the gun away from her body. "I came here to warn you," he holstered the weapon.
"Warn me? What are you talking about?" the prostitute sniffled.
"I came here to warn you about the UnSub," Reid wiped away a tear from the inner corner of her right eye, from the corner opposite the one where he had brushed away the eyelash of the other prostitute.
"UnSub?" the prostitute glanced both ways, hoping to distract him with conversation as she plotted her escape.
"The UnSub," Reid said. "The unknown subject...That's what we call criminal perpetrators in the FBI. I've been working on a case that involves an UnSub who kills prostitutes. He kills them according to their hair colors. Just today, I had a big breakthrough on the case. I won't bore you with the details. You wouldn't be interested in the details, but the breakthrough told me that the UnSub would be targeting a prostitute with auburn hair. That's why I came all the way down here to warn you about him."
"You're...You're in the FBI?" the prostitute asked cautiously, as if she wanted to trust the man who had threatened to shoot her.
"Yes, I'm an FBI agent," Reid nodded. "I'm a profiler. I figure out how criminals think. I catch them according to how they think. That's why I killed the previous prostitute, the tenth victim. I figured that the UnSub would want to...would have to kill a prostitute with strawberry blonde hair after he killed the prostitute with chestnut brown hair. It just so happened that she looked exactly like JJ. Normally, I would never hurt JJ or anyone who reminded me of her, but this time, for the case, you know..." he trailed off, waiting for the prostitute to give him her approval.
"Who's JJ?" the prostitute focused in upon the name of the woman that Reid would never hurt.
"Someone who doesn't look like you," Reid replied. "The other prostitute, the one who looked like JJ, told me that JJ wasn't right for me, that I'd find someone better, that there were plenty of fish in the sea. Do you think it's true? What she told me?"
"Yeah," the prostitute nodded hastily. "It's totally true. She was right. There are plenty of other..."
"But these others..." Reid cut her off. "You, the other prostitute...They're just not..." he cut himself off, sighing in frustration.
"Do you have a picture of her?" the prostitute asked. "Do you have a picture of JJ? If you show me a picture of her, then I can help you find someone who looks like her. Maybe you just haven't found the right one who looks like her. I'm not the one, but I know a lot of people around here. I've got a lot of friends. I bet one of them looks like JJ. If you show me a picture, then I can..."
"I don't carry around pictures of JJ," Reid interrupted her. "That would be too risky. What if JJ finds out that I carry around pictures of her? Wouldn't that creep her out? I don't want to creep her out. JJ gets easily creeped out. Did you know that she even gets creeped out by poetry? I read her a poem once, a ballad. You can find it if you type 'death' into a search engine. It was a conversation between Death and a Lady. I read the Death parts, because the UnSub only wrote the Death parts onto the mirror. The Lady never answered back. 'My name is Death, have you not heard of me?' And a different stanza on the plane. Everyone thought I was crazy to know it, but that was back when they still liked me, so it was OK for them to make fun of me. 'Take leave of all your carnal vain delight, I'm come to summon you away this night!' Eventually, I figured out that JJ found the poems creepy, so I stopped reading them and agreed with her. I said they were creepy too, even though I thought they were pretty cool," he smiled at the memory.
The prostitute smiled back, a tiny fake close-mouthed smile that did nothing to light up her face. Reid stepped back a few inches, giving her the few inches of freedom that she needed to get her feet into position.
"Tell me about your pimp," Reid changed the subject. "Ginger Ale, right? Ryan Jonas? I know, because of your hair. Tell me about him."
"What do you want to know?" the prostitute glanced to her left and his right, calculating the amount of distance that she could cover in her high heels after she kicked him in the shins and kneed him in the crotch.
"How many hookers does he have?" Reid asked.
"Um...Gimme a second to count them," she counted on her fingers as she muttered names under her breath. "...Sheila, Alex, Tonya, Michelle, Felicia..." she double-checked the total. "I think...Eight or nine?"
"And who's the reddest of you all?" Reid reached forward to twirl a strand of her hair around his index finger.
"Definitely Felicia," the prostitute answered. "She's got bright orange hair. She's a real ginger, and it's all natural too."
"Of course, all natural, just like your clients demand," Reid said. "People have a lot of different fetishes. Hair color is one of the most common. Tell me more about Felicia. Does she work this area? Does her hair have any blonde highlights in it? I think that's what the UnSub is looking for next, after auburn. Chestnut is like brown with red highlights, while auburn is like red with brown highlights. Strawberry is like blonde with red highlights, so it would make sense if he were looking for red with blonde highlights next. That would be called ginger, high pheomelanin and low eumelanin. I guess we could call it titian to make it sound more romantic."
"Yeah, I guess," the prostitute agreed. "Titian...That does sound a lot better than ginger."
"Your pimp, Ginger Ale," Reid returned to his original train of thought. "Is he dangerous?"
"Not really," the prostitute replied. "He's better than most. He's pretty nice, as long as he gets his money on time."
"So he doesn't do anything to keep you in line?" Reid inquired.
"No, he never lays a finger on us," the prostitute shook her head. "That's why I switched to him from my other guy. That other guy used to get drunk and push us all around. And he didn't give us any perks either."
"Perks?" Reid inquired further. "What kind of perks? Like drugs?"
"Yeah, whatever kind we want," the prostitute answered. "Really good quality too, but I don't do any of the hard stuff."
"Is your pimp also a drug dealer?" Reid continued. "Drug dealers can be quite dangerous. I know. It's good that you're getting drugs from your pimp. You don't want to get involved with drug dealers. They're a lot more dangerous than pimps. Am I right? Are pimps more dangerous, or are drug dealers more dangerous?"
"Definitely drug dealers," the prostitute said. "Pimps aren't that dangerous at all. My guy only runs a small operation."
"What would he do if he met me?" Reid asked intently, searching her eyes for an answer that would convince him that his boss had been right to hold him back.
"Well, you're an FBI agent, so he'd probably run away," the prostitute gave the wrong answer.
"Yeah," Reid considered for a moment, imagining a pimp, dressed in a classic pimp outfit with a pimp cane that looked like Herbert, running away from him.
He laughed until he snorted. He reached for his credentials.
"FBI!" he flashed his credentials at the prostitute, who, having been distracted by the conversation, forgot her fear and laughed along with him.
"You're funny," she laughed again, her laugh much more genuine than her earlier smile.
"I'm funny? You think I'm funny?" Reid slapped her in the face, grabbed her shoulder-length auburn hair, and pulled downwards until her grimace was directed at the cloudy night sky.
As with the other prostitute, he slammed her head against the wall, careful not to slam it so hard that she would suffer a tonic-clonic seizure. He wrapped one hand around her neck while pulling her hair downwards with the other.
"You know who else thinks I'm funny?" Reid whispered softly, as if sharing sensitive gossip about a friend or colleague. "Everyone at work thinks I'm funny. One of them...No, two of them...refer to me as a 'jiggling mass of gray matter'. They say this to my face. So far, two of them have said it, but I bet that the rest of them think it every time they see me or hear me or speak to me or talk about me behind my back. That's what they call me behind my back."
"Please..." the prostitute begged through a slightly constricted throat. "Please let me go...I'll do anything you want!"
"And then there's my boss," Reid sighed bitterly. "My boss doesn't use that term for me. He's way too professional. He thinks of me differently. To him, there's my brain, and there's the rest of me. The rest of me needs to be protected, kept safe at all times, so my brain can do his job for him. I don't know what his own brain is for! All I know is I'm not supposed to leave the office or the police station or the SUV. Forget about canvassing the streets or negotiating with pimps or going on a raid every once in awhile. I have to stay behind and think. I'm tired of thinking. I want to do something! Why can't someone else think for a change? Are they that stupid? Maybe they are. Can you believe that no one who looked at the crime scene photos figured out the pattern of hair pigmentation? What were they all staring at all this time? Don't they have eyes? Are they all colorblind? They're the ones who should stay behind. I'm the one who should be out in the field. There could be crucial evidence in the field that all these blind people would miss. You know what's wrong with them? Their minds are not prepared! They look with their eyes, but not with their brains! The information from the visual channel doesn't get processed through the anterior regions of the cerebral cortex. It goes through the visual cortex at the back of the brain. It needs to go through the front of the brain. That's the part that we use to think. In that part, anything is possible. Anything goes! You can let yourself think whatever you want. Whatever happens, you can think about it however you want. Up there, you can create your very own reality. I think it's pretty cool! What about you? What do you think?"
"I think it's cool too," the prostitute gulped against his hand.
"JJ would think that it was creepy," Reid said. "Why does she get creeped out so easily? Afraid of the woods, afraid of the mind...It doesn't make sense. I'm only afraid of the dark, but I've been working on it. I used to be afraid of women too, especially after my failed date with JJ, but I got over it. Spending time with women like you has helped me get over it even more. I find that I have a special rapport with prostitutes. I find that I can talk about things with you that I would never talk about with anyone else, not even JJ, especially not JJ. You've really helped me tonight. You're going to help me some more. After they find you, after I lay you out on the ground with your hair fanned out beneath your head, your pimp is going to have to take all his other hookers off the streets. After he loses you, he won't take the risk of losing another one. Morgan and Rossi won't even have to pressure him. There won't be any negotiating to speak of! All the other hookers will be safe. The UnSub will prowl the streets every night, getting more and more desperate as he looks for the woman with the titian hair, but he won't find her before we find him. We're going to catch him and make him pay for those nine women that he killed."
"Please don't kill me," the prostitute cried, her tears soaking through his woven gloves.
"I'm sorry," Reid shook his head. "Here, let me give you a hug first," he pulled her towards him, keeping one hand wrapped around her neck as he swayed with her in his arms. "See? We're cuddling, and you're pretty. That's what women like. Cuddling, and men telling them that they're pretty. You're pretty," he wrapped both hands around her neck and pressed his fingers into her firm resisting flesh.
He held on, applying pressure evenly over the whole surface of the neck as she choked and spit up from her mouth. He watched her face contort itself into an ugly bug-eyed fish-mouthed grimace of pain. She tried to kick him, but he side-stepped her feeble blows. When she flicked on her cigarette lighter to burn him, he took one hand off her throat and used it to strike her, hard and repeatedly, in the abdomen until she was subdued. She gasped silently, threatening to double over until he wrapped both hands over her throat to steady her against the wall. She gasped until she lost consciousness. He held on, hearing a small pop as the bone at the front of her throat, the hyoid bone that was the only unarticulated bone in the human body, broke away from its supporting muscles. He realized that he had pressed too hard, so he let go. She crumpled to the ground in a small unresisting heap. He lifted her up, bodily, into his arms. She was petite and skinny, so she was light, even lighter than the frail old man of his dreams. He walked a few steps towards the railroad tracks and laid her gently upon the gravel path. He placed her hands, left over right, on top of her bruised abdomen. He probed her neck, tracing the ligature marks, and reached behind her head to lift out her hair. In the darkness, he couldn't tell exactly what color her hair was, so he shone his Maglite to make sure that it was still auburn. It was. He fanned it out beneath her head. He backed away a few steps, comparing her position on the ground with the position in the crime scene photos. Satisfied, he turned away, just as the lights of an Amtrak train approached from the distance. On the way back to the street, he stopped briefly in front of the warehouse to pick up the candy bar that he had dropped. He tore open the wrapper and bit into the chocolate caramel biscuit. He finished the two biscuit fingers before he headed towards the Metro station. He was tired, but no longer hungry or angry.
Tonight, Reid would sleep well, even without the aid of Tylenol. There would be no waking up a mere half hour after he had fallen asleep. He would sleep through the night, so he could be refreshed and ready to present the profile in the morning.
The profile was clear. The first prostitute, the blonde, had been right and wrong. As the prostitute had said, there were plenty of fish in the sea, but as the UnSub knew, he did not want any of them. He wanted her, and he would always hold onto her, no matter how many colorful lures baited him to let go of her.
Once again, Reid savored the symphony behind his eyes. He understood the UnSub, through the silent mouthed words of a lady who had struggled in death.
"JJ...JJ," the second prostitute, the redhead, had mouthed. "I'm JJ...I'm her...It's me, JJ..."
Reid couldn't wait to get home, go to sleep, wake up, and go to work. Now that he understood the UnSub, he couldn't wait to catch him and make him pay for the eleven women that he had killed. He couldn't wait for all this to happen, even as he empathized with the UnSub. To the UnSub, each crime had been an act of love unrequited, and the stressor behind all the crimes had been the unbearable pain of her departure.
Master Post