𝐓𝐀𝐈𝐍𝐓𝐄𝐃 𝐋𝐎𝐕𝐄- 𝐒𝐏𝐄𝐍𝐂𝐄𝐑 𝐑𝐄𝐈𝐃

𝐓𝐄𝐍

𝐌𝐀𝐋𝐋𝐎𝐑𝐘 𝐇𝐀𝐋𝐄 𝐇𝐀𝐃 𝐁𝐀𝐑𝐄𝐋𝐘 𝐒𝐋𝐄𝐏𝐓 𝐈𝐍 𝐖𝐄𝐄𝐊𝐒. Since this case had fallen into the BAU's lap, she had been a nervous wreck. When she was seventeen and fled that town, she hadn't expected that she'd ever have to re-visit it. She might not have been there physically, but it felt like she had been re-living through it all over again. Mallory willed herself to feel something whenever she saw those crime scene photos, but no matter how hard she tried, she couldn't make herself see those men as victims. Because they had hurt her, and probably more women after her as well.

Mallory couldn't help but wonder if that made her a monster. Because she was able to look at photos like these and not feel any sympathy at all. It was a scary revelation for her when she realized that she in fact was capable of looking at a tragedy and feeling nothing at all. Mallory had no interest in apprehending this unsub, if she was being honest. She was only curious as to who had done it in the first place. She wanted to come face to face with the man who had killed her attackers. She wanted to know what had happened that prompted such violent kills, such rage. While Mallory had never murdered everyone, she understood the loss of control, the anger, all too well.

The only difference between her and this killer was that Mallory channelled that anger into putting monsters like Jackson and his friends away. This unsub took a much more... violent approach. Some people would argue that boys like Corey and Jackson deserved to rot for the rest of their lives. While Mallory would typically agree, she knew that no consequences would come to them. Not when their families had money to spend on posh lawyers that would bail them out of any inconvenience.

"There goes my breakfast," Emily sighed. On top of a local case they had been working on, their Maple Crest killer had given them another body. And they were still no closer to finding out who did it. "This one is... something else," she grimaced.

"This feels like overkill," Rossi remarked. "Something must have triggered him, because the level of rage is significantly higher than what we've seen in the other bodies."

"Overkill would be sloppy," Reid pointed out. "He's getting more gruesome, yes, but look at these cuts," he emphasized, pointing to the crime scene photo of Jackson, where half of his chest was removed from his body, his hands cut clean off. "They're meticulous, like the unsub took the time to inflict as much pain as possible. He wants to prolong the torture for as long as possible. The nature of the cuts could suggest a background in medicine, perhaps even a coroner"

"Forensics said it looked like he was tortured for roughly six hours," Hotch reported, tossing a file on the table. "And so far, all of the kills we've seen have been spaced out by a month exactly. This kill was a week early. We need to find out why."

"He could be devolving," JJ suggested. "Maybe he needs to kill more frequently to fulfill the fantasy. One month might be too long for him, so he might start dropping more bodies."

"Where did Garcia say the wife was?" Emily questioned. Mallory wasn't a profiler, so she didn't do what the rest of them did. Her job was talking to the media, and that was it. She'd only gotten the position when JJ decided to transition from media to profiling, which left the highly coveted spot in the BAU open for her. Surprisingly, Hotch took a liking to Mallory, or saw something in her that no one else had, and he'd hired her. And she was good at her job. She didn't feel the passion for it like the rest of the people in the room, but she was comfortable. Mallory would never say it aloud, but sometimes she thought about leaving. But after leaving home at such a young age, she never had anything to call her own. She couldn't fathom leaving her life and starting all over again.

"She received an anonymous phone call telling her to get out of the house and to take her daughter with her," Reid recalled.

"Why send them away?" Derek mused, leaning back in his seat. "The unsub could have easily killed all three of them. So why would he spare them?"