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AFTER ATLAS returned home, Stella feels back to normal. Any residual guilt has faded and she's fully prepared to get back to work. The call for a case comes just after Stella enters the office after dropping Atlas off, a case down in California. They've been called to investigate the body of a young girl, one of two girls who recently went missing.
The entire team goes to the dump site, knowing that it will be more productive in the long run, especially since the crime scene has yet to be processed fully, including crime scene photos and written up reports. So as the light retreats from the California skies, the team are making their way towards a dead body in Chula Vista. As soon as they're introduced to Payton, the man who had reached out immediately, Hotch begins quick-firing questions.
"Have you ID'd the body?" he asks, wondering, like the rest of his team, if this is one of missing girls. If it is, that majorly increases the significance of the case, because they would still have a girl out there, a girl who may be barrelling towards the same fate as this one.
"It's a girl," Payton answers as they start moving quickly towards the small crowd that has gathered. A couple of new vans sit on the road and there are people taking pictures and shooting footage as the team speaks.
"One of the missing girls?" Hotch attempts to clarify.
"All I can tell you right now is it's a girl," Payton repeats.
"Did you draw up a list of those involved in the search?" Derek asks as they duck under the police tape that draws a line between the reporters and the active crime scene. They'd requested a few things prior to their arrival— a list of people involved in the search, lists of people with priors that could be an indicator of homicidal tendencies, etc.— and they are all hoping to find some leads from those lists, Stella especially.
"You're gonna find the parents of the girls on that list," he says as a uniformed officer holds up the tape for them.
Stella grimaces. "Please tell me they didn't discover the body," she says, pulling her hair back and securing it with a hair tie, tucking the loose pieces behind her ears.
"No, as soon as our dogs caught her scent, we kept them away from the scene," Payton recounts. Stella nods, grateful that they didn't have to see what could potentially be their daughter in such a way.
Payton stops at the top of a small, freshly dug ditch across a grassy areas just off of the road.
"She's been missing eighteen hours?" Spencer checks.
"That's correct. We found the body five hours ago."
The state of this poor girl's body is like nothing Stella has ever seen before, but it doesn't phase her in the way she thought it would. Hours of going over case files, each with a collection of pictures of crap like this helps to build up a tougher skin. Will she absolutely remember this for a long time? Yes. Will she let the gruesome nature of the scene hinder her work? Absolutely not.
