Moving Forward

Part 75

Jennifer Jareau's POV

It has been now 6 hours that Aaron is in surgery and 4 hours that Jeremy is. Emily is laid on my shoulder, asleep. Hope is sleeping in my arms, while Jaeden is sleeping in Spencer's. Zoe is sleeping in her car seat and Oliver is sleeping on the seat next to his mother, his head is laid on Emily's thighs.

"Okay. Do we have any information on Mr. Scratch?" I ask.

Penelope leans and picks out her laptop from her bag. She types a few things.

"Okay. It looks like Peter was born with an extremely high intelligence. He was a math genius. His parents ran a group home that took in several children who were waiting for adoption. During the day-care-sex-abuse hysteria of the 80s and early 90s, some of the children made claims that Peter's father, Neil, would dress himself and the other children as the Devil, causing people to believe there were child abuse and Satanic rituals occurring inside the house. At first, the claims were met with skepticism from police, but a core member of the Believe the Children movement, a psychologist named Doctor Susannah Regan, convinced them to believe them. As a result, the group home was shut down and Neil was sent to jail, where other inmates killed him for being a pedophile while the investigation was still pending. Peter eventually moved on with his life and attended Harvard University, taking the top classes for mathematics. Upon graduating, he was immediately hired by the National Security Agency, which would always hire math prodigy because it was too dangerous for them to work anywhere else. In 1992, the FBI's Lanning Report helped the BAU and other federal agencies evaluate Regan's work and debunk it. This left her credibility in ruin and forced her to go into witness protection after she began receiving numerous death threats. Realizing the closure of the group home and his father's death were all for nothing, Peter began seeking revenge against Regan and the children who were responsible for the scandal. In 2015, Peter was responsible for 6 murders, including Regan's. And this year, he's already responsible for 5 murders. In all that, I didn't count the attempts. Though, Peter didn't personally kill his victims. Peter targeted people who lived at his father's group home as children during the scandal, specifically those who testified against his father and were responsible for putting him away. After finding the victims, presumably by using his job to access the country's adoption records, he would drug them with a mixture of two powerful dissociative agents he planted into the air-ventilation systems of their homes, presumably while no one was home. These drugs caused them to hallucinate about Mr. Scratch and lash out violently at the person next to them, which would always be a loved one living in the same house. These people would be stabbed to death with knives by the drugged victims, who would then slip out of their psychotic episodes with barely any memory of what they were actually doing. Although, he didn't do that with his true target, Susannah. Yes, he did drug her. But he forced her to commit suicide," Penelope says.

"But why would he target Elle? It doesn't make any sense!" Morgan declares.

"In fact, it does... My ex-boyfriend was actually the one who started all this..." Elle answers.

"Yes, but you are not your ex-boyfriend!" Morgan adds.

"Maybe. But I'm the closest person to him and I have his son, which makes me and the BAU a perfect target."

David takes out his tablet and checks some things on it before saying:

"Peter is too psychologically unstable for the NSA to hire, why did they do so?"

"Probably because of his expertise with computers," I respond.

"Peter never liked to kill, that's why he gets the others to do it for him. His victimology is also a shared mental condition that he could exploit, which is DID," Elle declares.

"Peter is a math genius. He plans for every variable in his schemes and doesn't act out of compulsion like most serial killers. He also committed scientifically revolutionary feats by controlling Dissociative Identity Disorder and artificially creating brand-new personalities for DID patients. Such a scenario is undocumented in DID literature but is possible with the right balance of drugs and torture. To succeed with this kind of experimentation, he'd have had multiple failures," Spencer explains.

"If we know that much information about him, how come he has never been arrested?" Derek asks.

"He's sly as a fox. That's why he is still outside instead of molding in prison," Elle declares with aggressiveness in her voice.