Eros

Chapter 12- Lost and Found

Mike left the station after hugging Lynn, once more apologizing about keeping her family history a secret. She smiled sadly, and returned to the room with the BAU, sitting down at the table, and wondering how it could have gone so wrong just because Harriet had decided to live the rest of her life having a child, unaccompanied and unattached. Hotchner sat next to her, and she was welcome for his company as always, but she felt as though a distance had grown between them. She was no longer the strapping young deputy she had felt like at the beginning of this case... she had become a victim, and one rule of law enforcement is to never get too close to a victim or someone in one of your cases. Maybe this was the source of the distance she felt from him.

"With John's death, he didn't spend so much time with the body... was that to return to the lodge?" Rossi turned to Hotchner, "You say someone evaded you in the forest? Why would he return?"

"Maybe he wanted to watch Lynn from a distance, watch her find John but accidentally made us aware of his presence," Prentiss answered for him.

"But why kill John at all? What made him choose which adult to shoot if Harriet isn't always represented in the female? He managed to keep them quiet-" Rossi started until Prentiss spoke up.

"Stay quiet, or I kill you" Prentiss acted, pointing a finger gun at Lynn and Hotchner, sitting across from them.

"How would a normal couple act under the duress?" Morgan asked, observing the roleplay.

They sat in silence.

"Kill me," Lynn answered, stoically, causing Hotchner to look over at her with a sliver of worry in his eyes.

"What?"

"It's reasonable that if someone were with the one they loved, they would offer themselves up to the unsub. 'Kill me, do whatever you want with me, but don't touch my partner.' Something like that," she stared into his dark eyes, unable to pull away.

"So he'd kill whoever offered to die?" Rossi asked.

Spencer folded his hands together against the table, "That doesn't make sense if we remember that Harriet left him. Why torture the one left behind, the one he connects with? It seems unlikely that he hates himself- he most likely is the opposite, full of himself, self-confidant according to how he's performed so far."

"Maybe it's a trick," Prentiss realized, and the team all nodded in agreement, the same thought passing through their minds.

"A trick?" Lynn asked.

"He figures out which one is willing to leave the other- the Harriet, since she's the one who left him and replaced him with a child. This was his stressor. He wants the person who chooses to die, who chooses to leave the other, which decides who he tortures for him."

Rossi stood and pointed at the old picture of Daniel on the beach and the close-up of the bullet hole in his head.

"The first death is so impersonal, distant- he doesn't care if the surrogate victim playing his part suffers at all... all his rage is in the second death. He starts at the lower torso of the victim-"

"Where a woman might keep her child," Lynn gasped and lifted her hand to her mouth.

"And brings it up the body from that point. He's envisioning killing Harriet as if she were still alive and pregnant with..." he turned to Lynn, who sat up straight in her chair, stiff as a rock, "...you."

She shot up from her seat.

"I need to find Kevin. He needs to know."

"Hurry back," Hotch stated, and the team started looking through the last box together, in hopes of finding any pictures of Harriet and her secret ex-turned-unsub.