His Undercover Lover

Chapter Seven

Chapter Seven

“But we’re not getting anywhere,” Derek said into his phone. Penelope listened to Derek’s side of the conversation, missing her tech job. Even when she was in another city to the team, she felt much more like a team member than she didn’t right now.

Today marked ten days since she had come to New York and still, they had no viable leads. The only people that she saw more than once, were always in the same place. Even the young man who they had spotted twice on their street, turned out to live nearby and there was nothing suspicious in his background.

They had also run checks on every man they had identified but none jumped out as suspects, although a few did fit some parts of the profile.

Still, running all over the city, even with the divine Derek Morgan, was quickly becoming old. She also couldn’t shake the thought that if she was the analyst digging up the dirt on these guys, she would have found something.

She knew that wasn’t logical, and she knew that she had been looking for leads for nine days before she was asked to act as bait, but the lack of results was starting to get to her and she was even questioning her own work.

As well as putting in an hour or two on the computers each afternoon, when they visited HQ, she also tried to put in a few hours when they got home, which had the added benefit of freeing Derek up so that he could go for a run. She felt a little bad that he was lumbered with being her protector and that she was keeping him from his regular routines but by staying in the apartment for two hours (and promising faithfully not to open the door to anyone) Derek was free to do what he wanted for a little while.

Her laptop in the apartment was hooked into the FBI computers, so although it wasn’t anywhere near as good as her setup at Quantico, it was enough to work with.

“Okay, we’ll be there in thirty.”

She turned away from the laptop as he hung up the phone.

“Hotch wants us downtown for a meeting,” he explained.

“I’m kind of in the middle of a search,” she explained.

He hesitated for a moment. “You can continue that while we meet, can’t you?”

"I suppose, but if i stay here, i promise not to answer the door."

Derek hesitated. "We've been here ten days, Penelope, I'd really rather not leave you alone right now, for any reason."

She didnt want to cause him any more worries, so she smiled. “No problemo, daddy-o.”

He smiled. “I’ll get your coat.”

***

“We’re getting nowhere fast,” Hotch said, his exasperation was mirrored by the rest of the team.

They were all seated around the conference table, save for Penelope, who was seated at the bank computers, digging up background information on the various men she had encountered in New York.

“We’re missing something,” Rossi added, his gaze focused on the victim’s photographs, where they were taped to the whiteboard.

“Okay, well we’ve been over the profile a dozen times, so let’s go over the victimology again,” Blake suggested. “Maybe we’ll find something we missed.”

“All right,” Hotch went to the board, where the victim’s pictures were displayed. “The first victim was Kelly Anderson, 27 years old and she worked as a supervisor at OrkTech. She-”

They went through each victim, one by one, with Reid reciting most of the data from memory. At the same time, Penelope went through her programs, to see if they had found anything new about each victim.