Killer Queen

Chapter 3

     "Hey, Spence? Have you ever heard of a paranoid schizophrenic psychiatric patient who held five passengers hostage in a train car in Texas?" Logan asked, looking up from her filing.

"Yeah, happened a few years ago. I was there." Spencer looked back down at his work, failing to conceal Logan's mother's diary.

"Schizophrenia is where the person can't tell the difference between reality and imagination, right?"

Spencer nodded. "Yeah, in a short description."

Logan glanced at the diary. "You know, if you didn't want me to know that you were looking through my mom's diary, you could have just told me not to look. I might be a teenager, but I'm a lot more respectful than most people think."

He looked up at her. "Okay, please don't look at my work."

She grinned, looking back at him. "Have you ever gone on a date? I mean, I could see the appeal, the only problem would be your lack of self-confidence." Spencer looked offended and Logan held up her hand. "I didn't mean that as criticism. I'm just saying, you seem like you're just waiting for everyone to just automatically tell you that you have no place anywhere or no right to anything."

Spencer stared at her, almost as if studying her right back. "It's...because I'm used to it. Now you...you seem like you speak from experience."

Logan laughed. "That's because it is experience. I lived with five disrespectful, easily angered, white men who didn't really care about anyone else's opinions or existence. A therapist would have helped me a lot better than my stuffed animals did."

"Did they abuse you?" Reid wondered. "You speak about them in a distasteful way."

"Yeah, you don't need to be a profiler to figure that out," she chuckled softly to herself, going back to her work. Spencer frowned at her not answering his question. He almost spoke again, until JJ came up to him quickly.

"We've got a case," she said. "Ocean Springs, Mississippi."

Spencer sprang up and so did Logan. JJ handed Spencer a file as Derek and Emily walked up to them as well. Logan sat on the desk she had been sitting at with her legs crossed.

"Crucifixion in Mississippi," Hotchner's voice called out, joining the group with his own file in his hands.

"Yikes," Derek said.

Hotch sighed. "Yes, yikes is right. Wheels up in ten." The team dispersed and Logan got up to follow them, but Hotchner stopped her. "We need to talk."

"What do you mean?"

"You can't come on the mission with us." Logan looked at him with wide eyes. "You're a kid. I can't bring you on a case like this."

Logan stared back with fire in her face. "I'm coming. I can help. Plus, I don't have anywhere else to go. I have to come with you."

Even though he didn't want to admit it, the teenager made a good point. Hotch wanted to keep an eye on her, and she had already told them how smart she really was. Logan could have been another brilliant mind to help them. Hotch held the bridge of his nose to try and prevent the headache that he knew was coming.

"Fine. But there will be rules that you follow. Do not come into contact with anyone other than the team and anyone I want you to meet. Do not touch any weapons or technology. If I tell you to do something, you do it. Understand?"

Logan looked up and nodded. "Yeah, alright, geez. Don't need to be so menacing, I got your point." She grabbed her bag and followed the team out of the BAU. "I really hope you're not always like this. It's a big mood killer."

As Hotch followed the teenager out, he shook his head with a faint smile on his face. This kid's gonna get me killed one day.

~~~

"Loren Valdez, 25, found crucified on a cross near her house. Her husband went looking for her after she went missing from coming home from work. She's a psychologist, practically the purest soul. She doesn't even have any parking tickets in her file." Derek passed some of the photos in the file over to Logan for her to look at.

"What do we know about crucifixion?" JJ wondered.

Spencer, as if he had trained for the question, started to talk almost immediately. "Crucifixion was a method of punishment that the Romans used to kill people that they believed and knew broke the law. Most adults only know about this if they're religious, which it is mentioned and is a large part of a lot of religions, such as Christianity and Catholicism."

Logan shifted in her chair, twisting one of her rings. "How does that help us, then?"

"It could mean that our killer is religious, but we don't know everything," Morgan explained. "There were five other cases like this. Two men, the other three women. Perfect records, it's like they were the perfect human beings for our unsub to target."

"Maybe they thought that their victims were hiding something, that their records were too good to be true," suggested Logan.

Hotch looked up at the team. "Or maybe they knew how practically perfect they were."

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Yay, chapter 3! Please let me know what you think, because I need the motivation. Thank you and I will update soon!