Caution to the Wind

Chapter 15

A case in the Roswell truther community gets personal for Tara, and Emily has to walk the line between supervising her agent and comforting her girlfriend. Follows S13E9, "False Flag."

Tara was back at the BAU after a long three weeks in Bridgewater, and oh, man, was it good to be back. She'd missed the team; she'd missed the work; she'd missed her house and her own bed and being in a place that didn't make her wonder why anyone in their right mind would choose to live there. Most of all, though, she'd missed Emily, and now that she was back, she was determined to make up for the time they'd been apart. Emily had already promised never to send her away on assignment again—being down an agent was hard enough; being down an agent while also separated from her girlfriend for three weeks was torture. She was still down an agent now with Spencer on his sabbatical, but at least she had Tara now, and they wouldn't have to be apart while the team worked their next case.

"It's time to get out our tin foil hats, my fine furry friends," Garcia said, "Because we are on our way to Roswell, New Mexico, a.k.a. Ground Zero for conspiracy theorists because of a certain alien crash—I mean, weather balloon."

"The sheriff there has had two suspicious deaths over the last 48 hours," Emily said, "Both victims were members of the truther movement."

"Yes, which is a group of conspiracy theorists who share their out-there beliefs online with each other—no judgment here," Garcia continued, "Let's look at our first victim, Brian Behar. He believed that the fluoride they put in our drinking water is a mind-control agent meant to keep us docile. He died by drowning. 'People drown all the time,' you say; I say, 'not in their own aquariums.'"

"So the M.O. matches the conspiracy," Matt said, "Is that a coincidence or a choice?"

"That depends on victim number two," Rossi replied.

"Uh-huh, that's Carl Lee," Garcia nodded, "He's a JFK conspiracy nut who was shot once in the throat."

"As anyone who saw the Zapruder film knows, that's where the first bullet struck Kennedy," JJ said.

"Carl Lee we can definitively classify as a homicide," Luke said, "But the drowning death—that could have another explanation."

"That's why we'll be treating this as an equivocal death investigation," Emily replied, "Wheels up in 20."

The team boarded the jet for Roswell, but as soon as they were in the air, Penelope called in with an interesting discovery.

"It looks like our two victims were talking via encrypted texts," she said, "It took a while to break, and their conversation was short, but its content made my perfectly shaped eyebrows go, 'Hmm?' Carl says to Brian, 'I think I'm close to finding out who it is,' to which Brian says, 'Maybe we should go to the police,' and Carl says, 'What good would that do?'"

"Well that could be motive," Matt said, "Whatever Carl was close to finding could have killed him and Brian."

"At first glance, yeah," Luke replied, "But we're talking about conspiracy theorists here, and a lot of them suffer from association fallacy. Let's say you thought Lyndon Johnson had JFK killed in order to escalate the war in Vietnam—"

"That's ridiculous," Rossi muttered, "Everybody knows that—"

"No, no!" Emily stopped him, "We're not getting into that again. Go ahead, Luke."

"Uh, my point is that if you thought the government could do that, then you'd likely believe that they brought down the Towers on 9/11," Luke said, "Pretty soon you're down that rabbit hole, and you see everything as a plot."