Fingertips | Spencer Reid

Chapter 71

Chapter 71

2,800 words

QUESTION OF THE CHAPTER: What's your dream job?

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Thaleia observed her colleague as he slept with his head resting on the same couch Harry was sleeping in. She had been thinking about the information they had so far about the Unsub and the case when her eyes landed on the boy, and the few insignificant things that she had connected disappeared. Her mind was then filled with him and only him:

How it all started, with his mother telling her about him and falling for those things she learned about him; how she had sworn to not let harm get to him but failed; how she kept her distance so the people she lived with wouldn't find out about him; how after some time she started thinking he had been an illusion, a made-up person from her imagination and how she didn't care; how she'd write to him because it helped her cope with reality; and how, after so long, she had seen him again as a handsome man.

Finally realising that she had been staring at the boy for quite a while, Thaleia shook her head and got back to what she was doing: checking once again the things they took from the kids' rooms.

The only item that didn't make sense to the Agents were the hair ties found in Doris' bag. It was the only thing that didn't specify its owner, so they guessed those belonged to the Unsub.

Now that she thought about it, they weren't the typical hair ties. They were scrunchies.

"Bubbles" she called out to her colleague "Bubbles!" she threw the pencil case at him, finally waking him up.

"What?" he rubbed his eyes.

"Scrunchies are considered to be super lame nowadays so- why would a mother buy them for their child?" it seemed like the boy still wasn't fully conscious "Focus!"

"I just woke up, damn it- give me a second, woman!" a quick slap on the face later -courtesy of Thaleia-, he was good to go "What are you suggesting?"

"What if the Unsub is not a woman who lost a child and that traumatized her, but a woman who got traumatized when she was a child? And the things she's leaving were not for that hypothetical child but-"

"They're from when she was a kid" he finished her sentence "Most common traumatic events in childhood include loss of a parental figure or both, mistreat at home or at school-"

"Rape" Thaleia interrupted him "Rape..." she repeated under her breath reaching for the book laying on the table "Okay I thought this was just random, a mistake made by the editorial or the printing company, which happened quite often when this book was published but- maybe she did it" she handed him the text "Mr twenty-thousand words per minute, there are some letters that are in bold: tell me which ones"

Spencer read out the letters, just like she had asked him to, sitting down next to the girl so they could both look at what they had:

A, B, E, F, I, L, O, P, R, S, T and U.

"This could be over a thousand words" he said after a second.

"Then stop complaining and get to it, Bubbles" she took a piece of paper and started scribbling down what she could come up with "We're talking about a woman who had a traumatizing past, so the words have to be related to that" thankfully, they were both good with word games, and less than ten minutes later, they each had a long list.

"Profitable, bipolar, laboratories, breast, pubertal, spiteful, far, rope, rape, blur, belt, bells, boil, fear, beat, bare, brat, fat, fire, pet, torture, brutalise, abrupt" Reid read out loud "Rape, fear, torture, abrupt and brutalise make the most sense to me"