The Flight

Time to Investigate

Hotch sits in his office staring at the open files that lay upon his desk. For the past several hours, he sat, thinking of motive to why someone would target their jet and potentially kill them, but no new reason besides the regular 'FBI- put bad people in jail' motive.

Hotch stands and steps away from his desk and starts pacing around the small room.

Tired of being confined, he opens his office door and stands, looking at the bullpen. Hotch has stayed behind after everyone had left many times but never had felt is so lonely.

Hotch steps closer to the railing and puts his elbows on it, resting his head in his hands.

"You haven't left, have you?"

Hotch jumps slightly and turns to fund Garcia next to him, looking concerned.

"Haven't had time, stuff to do," he responds.

Garcia shakes her head in disapproval, "that could all wait until morning. You have a son at home who is waiting to see you. Plus, you look exhausted. You should go home for a few hours."

Hotch simply just nods.

"At least call Jack and sleep on your couch in your office," she says when she realizes that he isn't going to go home that easily.

"I will, thank you Garcia. You should go home too," Hotch says as he turns back towards his office door.

He gets back into his office and stands by the phone, thinking of what to say to Jack or Jessica. Shaking his head, Hotch closes the files on his desk and walks out the door again. 

He gets into the empty elevator and heads down to his car, where he gets in and heads home.

Hotch stops as he pulls up to his house and sits in the running car for a few minutes.

He turns off his car, gathers his belongings, and gets out; careful not to slam the door and walks up to the door and is about to unlock the door when his phone buzzes.

"Aaron Hotchner," he answers as he steps away from the door.

"Hotch, sorry to wake you but we got the medical examiner's report back and it's interesting. I'd like everyone to come in so we can get started on this," Cruz says on the other end of the line.

"I'll be there shortly, call everyone else in," Hotch says as he turns back towards his car and drives off once again.

When he reaches work again, he meets the rest of the team in the parking lot and they walk in together, not sure what Cruz meant by an interesting medical examiner's report.

They all gather in the elevator and head up to their floor, where Cruz is waiting with a tired but concerned look on his face.

"What did the report tell us?' Morgan asks as they all step out of the elevator and walk with Cruz to the conference room.

They reach the room, which was just like they left it, files spread out everywhere and chairs scattered around the room, and sit.

Cruz hands to everyone, a new file which held the reason why they were there at the break of dawn.

"Well it verifies that one pilot did indeed kill the other while in flight. The ME put the time of death of Doug about 60 minutes into the flight and Marty's 45 minutes later," Cruz reads from the paper.

"So Marty killed Doug... Why?" JJ asks.

"They flew us for years, they've been partners for years." Morgan states.

"What changed? What made Marty snap and kill Doug and ruin the jet?" Garcia asks.

The team sits in silent momentarily, as they all wrap their minds around the death of both of their pilots and the fact that one of them killed the other mid-flight and crashed the plane, and as the looks of it, purposely.