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CHAPTER EIGHT: HUMAN NATURE ( aka 03x09: penelope )
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DALLIS WAS READY AND waiting for a fight. Four days had passed since the night she would forever be trying to forget. Her nightmares had lessened in intensity, allowing her to come out of the woods with Garcia well into her recovery. Still, the team hadn't ceased their search for her shooter. Hotch wasn't joking when he said they wouldn't work another case until they knew he was no longer walking free. Every file that passed JJ's desk in the interlude was immediately rejected. Did it please the higher-ups? Of course not. Did they give a shit? No.
Dallis had thrown herself into the thick of it (that is, after she assured her frantic family who had gone out of their minds when she failed to return their calls.) On the fourth day, she was at the office bright and early. Her white button-down shirt was freshly ironed and tucked into the waist of a navy blue pencil skirt that hugged her hips. Her heels tapped against the floor like sharpened blades ready to strike James Colby Baylor to pieces. Her hair was tied back from her face in a half-up, half-down wave of curls that complimented the makeup she'd painted on to precision.
Gone was the woman drowning. Dallis Cohen was back.
"He knows enough to use legal terminology, but he's not actually a working lawyer," Reid and Morgan were in the middle of explaining to the team everything they'd been working through with Garcia.
Piece by piece, as the morphine faded, they had recovered more of her memory of James Colby Baylor, bringing them closer to discovering his real identity. He claimed he was a lawyer, he flashed around a fake Rolex and impressed her with his knowledge of wine, but he didn't truly understand the person he was embodying. He missed one key detail. City attorneys didn't try murder cases.
"I think we're looking at someone who failed out of law school or didn't pass the bar," Morgan added.
"Did Garcia say if he gave any details about the cases he was supposedly working on?"
Reid shook his head at JJ. "No specifics."
"If he failed out of the system, it could explain why he's got a working vocabulary and not much more," Hotch said from where he stood in front of their whiteboard.
It seemed strange putting Garcia's face up there surrounded by pictures of brutal crime scenes and a rough sketch of an attempted murderer. She looked out of place, but didn't every victim?
"It could also explain his anger," Emily said from the chair beside Dallis. "Even in his lie, he rails against other people's incompetence."
"Well, he's clearly a narcissist," Rossi scoffed, listing off one-by-one, "The clothes, the watch, the subtle hints at where he went to school. He's faking humility when he's saying New Haven and Cambridge instead of Yale and Harvard."
