counting stars | criminal minds [discontinued]

1 9 | D I S T R A C T E D

[5.1]

"as long as i get to play iron man"

If anyone on the team thought that they'd get a good night's rest after the Turner case, they were wrong. Not four hours after returning home, JJ called them all back in on an emergency. They all trudged back to work on very little sleep. Reggie, who had already been awake for the day, told her a funny story about Luke over the phone to keep Florence awake during her skateboard ride to work — she probably would've closed her eyes and rolled into traffic if not.

While the team went straight to the crime scene, Florence joined Garcia in their office. For once in her life, she held a can of Pepsi in her hand instead of a cherry Capri Sun in hopes that it would wake her up. Once she arrived, Garcia filled her in on the case.

The unsub had written a letter to a doctor, claiming that he planned to kill his son. Doctor Barton obviously kept his son hidden, so the unsub was killing one person for every day the kid was kept safe. It was the second victim in two days now. After checking out the recent crime scene, they went to talk to Doctor Barton and his son, Jeffrey.

The only problem was that Jeffrey overheard them talking about the case and decided to go to school. It was a brave, but stupid attempt to save other lives. While half the team went to the school to protect him, Reid and Prentiss stayed back with Doctor Barton to go over suspects. That was where Garcia and Florence came in. Florence was in charge of doing background checks and Garcia covered all of Doctor Barton's past surgeries. It was a big order to fill and would take some time. Garcia called Reid in hopes that he could narrow her search parameters more.

"This guy's a trauma surgeon working a major Metropolitan area," she explained to him. "We are talking thousands of surgeries."

"Confine it to the last six months," Reid suggested.

"That's still hundreds."

"I know."

"Ok, do you want biological information or full medical charts?" she asked.

"Can you get the full medical charts?" Reid asked.

"What kind of dumb question is that, Boy Genius?" Florence asked from across the room.

Garcia grinned. "Agreed. You'll have them in seconds."

"Hey, Garcia?" Reid asked before she hung up.

"Yes, my love?"

"Has Hotch checked in with you?"

Florence looked up from her screen, worried about him. It was very unlike Hotch to not show up. In fact, Florence was almost sure it had never even happened.

"He's not with you?" Garcia asked, surprised as well.

"He's probably on his way. Uh, thanks for everything. Bye."