"Morgan, before we get started with our latest body, did you learn anything from interviewing Tom Hayes' wife?" Hotch said, striding into their makeshift conference room.
"Not a great deal, no. Apparently he was a stand-up family guy in a happy marriage. The only real bump in the road was a gambling problem- he had a habit of betting more than he could pay. They had men banging on their door at night demanding money, Miss Nokes did say that the night time visits stopped after Mr Hayes' disappearance. Unfortunately that still doesn't tell us whether he left by choice or by force."
"Have we got an ID on the body the Coastguard dredged out of the harbor?" Hotch directed his question towards Garcia.
"Solving two mysteries with one body, no wait, make that three mysteries" replied Garcia from the laptop screen, "Our latest victim-cum-unsub-cum-serial rapist was one Oleg Svinsky. Thanks to a crystal clear headshot of our deceased creepo, I got a hit on facial rec. Results on the DNA taken from the post-mortem SAE kit done on the female victim came back from the lab- it was a match to Mr Svinsky."
"Garcia, you said serial rapist?" Blake queried.
"Ah yes, tragic but true my friends. The DNA from the SAE kit also matched DNA filed as evidence in a double rape case from 1 year ago."
"How was he walking around a free man, did they never identify him?" said Rossi in disbelief.
"Here's where it gets weird, he was convicted but never served time. He was sentenced to 15 years in prison but there are no records of an Oleg Svinsky in any correctional facilities on the East Coast. I can expand my search but given that he is dead on a slab in the morgue instead of chilling in a cell in MCI I'd say he never went to prison."
"How is that possible?" demanded Hotch
"I have no idea, there's nothing in his file to even give me a clue. But it gets even weirder my crime-fighting friends. We already heard the name Oleg Svinsky on the footage taken from the Coastguard vessel, leaving us with two somewhat disturbing questions: 1) what kind of criminal is so confident that he correctly identifies himself to a law enforcement officer in the minutes following a body dump? and 2) why, when I searched that name through every possible database, did I not get a hit until I had a decent image of his face?"
The team sat in silence. There were very few possible answers to this, the most innocent, and coincidentally, most unlikely, of these was a simple technical glitch combined with a particularly stupid unsub. But they all knew that was highly improbable.
"While you're all mulling over that puzzle, I'll add a few more gallons of water to your now flooding fountain of knowledge. And yet more questions to your riddle-box. I've been through the dirtbag's even dirtier Internet history with a fine toothcomb and came across a curious website. You remember that delightfully innocent trading card game, Ghost Traders?"
The profilers gave a round of nods.
"Change but a single letter of the original URL you find with a simple Google search and boy does the game change. Switching out the final 'r' of trader with the Cyrillic letter 'г', leads you to a mirror site. It looks identical to the genuine website but has one minute difference.
Please, my darlings, bow down to my genius, and Mr Svinsky's stupidity and/or laziness. I had one of the Boston PD lab techs- a very talented young man I might add- clone our sleezebag's phone and wire me a virtual copy. Accessing the site via the phone's memory, I noticed a glaring anomaly: two very long numbers saved into the search bar. Here is the bow down part: the numbers are coordinates to a single pixel making up the mirror site. And, embedded in that single pixel? A gateway into a whole new world of disturbing."
