Wild Nights, Wild Nights || s.reid

25. I Should Not Fear the Foe Then...

Two days passed. Hotch, Derek, Prentiss, JJ, and Rossi all flew up to New York City to investigate the crime scenes and locations as well as to speak with Maryanne's supervisor. Despite your protests, neither you nor Preston were permitted to accompany them yourselves. Hotch wanted strictly unbiased eyes on the latest victims and for it to be under the guise of an unrelated BAU investigation.

You'd had to explain to them all what little you did know for certain from that night: you and your family had been leaving Lincoln Center after watching a performance of Handel's Messiah by the New York Philharmonic. Your family's usual driver had been ill for the past few days. Your parents had arranged for a different service to pick you up from Lincoln Center. You hadn't even glanced at the driver as you got in the car. He pointed out that there were mini water bottles in every cup holder for all of you. You'd drunk half of yours and then...

Darkness.

And you were launched into a swirling world that mixed nightmare and reality, and every time you became a little bit more lucid, you'd feel a sharp pain in your neck and get sent straight back. You were only half certain that the man who had tortured your family members was wearing a mask. Either way, you didn't know what he looked like.

You weren't sure you ever really even wanted to know.

Truthfully, the idea of walking around where Maryanne and Samantha had been propped up with the exact same MO as your family made you sick. Perhaps it was a good thing that you weren't permitted to go.

But Preston was a little less content to stay in Quantico sorting through files with you.

The two of you were sitting in the briefing room. You were running a program on your laptop that was trying to match similarities between all of the victims; it ran through work histories, past residencies, memberships to clubs or stores, and email subscriptions alike—anything that could draw a potential connection between any of them.

Besides the fact that all of the families between the initial killings and Samantha and Maryanne each were fairly well-off and had at least two children with a daughter being the oldest, there didn't seem to be much else.

Preston was searching through the ViCAP database for anything within the past fifteen years that could have been related, and you could tell that he was getting increasingly more irritated as each passing case file yielded nothing fruitful.

Neither of you had spoken about your argument, nor had either of you addressed the tension that still hung thickly in the air between you. You didn't want to broach the subject, and Preston was just as stubborn as you were.

So you were sitting in uncomfortable silence as you went about your tasks.

You looked up from your laptop when you heard footsteps approaching and saw Spencer standing in the doorway. Hotch had ordered him to stay and work from the office to help you and Preston parse through files and paperwork and databases since he'd be able to do so at a far faster rate than either of you could.

But he had been keeping his distance, too, and if he wasn't at his desk, he was with Garcia, who was running a program to slowly slip through layers of security to try and find information on whatever operation your parents were involved in.

You hadn't really spoken to Spencer much in the past two days, so you were a little surprised to see him there. "Do you need something?" you asked.

He pressed his lips together in greeting before answering, "No, uh... Garcia just wanted me to give you these—" He placed a thin folder with papers inside on top of one of the many stacks of folders and boxes you already had littering the table. "They're resumes for... all the victims."