Criminal Minds Series Rewrite: Season Four

52 Pick Up: Part One

"The minute people fall in love, they become liars." - Harlan Ellison

Spencer has been trying to complete the last puzzle in his puzzle book for the past two minutes. His record is just over 2 minutes while it would have taken everyone else much longer. He writes in the last part, and you stop the stopwatch on your phone.

"Record?"

"Two minutes and thirty seconds."

"Damn," he chuckles. "I'll do better next time. I just need a new puzzle book."

"You're cute, you know that?" you chuckle and get up.

"Cute?"

"The cutest."

Since JJ is still out on maternity leave, Jordan Todd is presenting the case. Everyone meets in the briefing room, and as soon as Hotch comes in, Jordan begins the meeting. She puts a picture of a woman on the screen along with a few crime scene photos.

"This is Vanessa Holden, age twenty-five. Last Friday night, she was clubbing with her sister. A white male, roughly her age, picked her up and they left the club at one in the morning. They went back to her place, he forced her on her hands and knees, and he cut her open just below the stomach."

"The gutting causes the intestines to spill out. You can survive for a few hours, actually even days."

"Postmortem indicates that he slit her throat at five in the morning."

"So, he disemboweled her but didn't kill her for four hours? He could be a sexual sadist," you say.

"Yeah, I thought so, too, but I found two priors from a year ago--prostitutes in motel rooms."

"Okay. Keep running with it. Why do you think this is the same unsub?" Derek asks, and everyone looks at Jordan.

"In Vanessa Holden's apartment, the following was discovered: bleach, ammonia, and trash bags in a triangular pattern. Exactly a year ago, the same thing was discovered in motel rooms."

"It means he's cleaning up. He might be trying to hide his tracks. It could be a sign of remorse."

"But there's one other commonality between both sets of murders. Bleach and ammonia were found under the victim's fingernails."

"He's making them clean up their own murder," Hoch realizes. "It's the same unsub. Wheels up in twenty."

This is the kind of case you can't dwell on, so everyone meets at the plane in ten minutes.

"So, if the unsub changed the victimology, does that make him organized or disorganized?" Emily starts off the discussion.

"Well, the prostitutes point one way, the club goes another."

"The triangular arrangement of the cleaning supplies is interesting," Spencer says with the photos in his hands. "It could be obsessive-compulsive, so he could have been institutionalized."

"We're missing something here," Rossi says. "This guy started with prostitutes, took a year off, came back, and killed a socialite with no forced entry or coercion of any kind. So, how does our unsub go from the loser of the year to Don Juan?"

"Actually, as Byron interpreted him, Don Juan was an ironic reversal of sex roles. And when--" As Spencer is talking, you smile subconsciously at his rambling. However, Hotch isn't feeling the same way. Spencer sees the look he's giving him, and he immediately shuts up. "Th--that's about it."

"Something must have happened between the last prostitute and Vanessa Holden making him change his victimology."

"Could the unsub have known Vanessa?" Jordan asks.