“I’m sorry,” Himes said, “that I couldn’t arrange to see you folks yesterday.”
Hotchner said, “We wanted to get right out to the crime scenes.”
Detective Tovar, anxious, asked Hotch, “How did that go, anyway?”
“We’ll save that for the meeting,” Hotchner said, with just enough of a smile to make that seem less a dismissal.
Prentiss could tell from the detective’s expression that he didn’t like the tone of that.
Himes said, “I’ve got you set up in a conference room on the second floor.”
“Sounds fine,” Hotchner said.
“And if you need anything,” the SAIC said, “my office is on the eleventh floor.”
“Thanks.”
The team followed Himes through the large atrium lobby to a bank of elevators, then rode with him to the second floor. As the doors eased open, they found a young man waiting for them. He was tall, thin, wore glasses and his straight brown hair was parted on the side. To Prentiss, he looked less like an FBI agent and more like a CPA, one barely older than Reid. Behind him, cubicles with busy agents spread out across the floor.
The team filed out of the elevator, Himes remaining inside.
“This is Special Agent Brian Kohler,” Himes said, holding a button down to keep the elevator door open. “If you need anything, he’s your man.”
“Thank you,” Hotchner said.
“Brian, show the team to conference room B, will you?”
“Yes, sir,” Kohler said, his voice effervescent with youthful enthusiasm.
Prentiss was hoping this wasn’t Kohler’s first day on the job.…
Himes, in the elevator, released the button, and gave them a going away smile. “Don’t forget, eleventh floor.”
The doors whispered shut and he was gone. Prentiss knew and liked Himes, but her sense was that he’d just rolled out a very tiny red carpet and disappeared. The promise of support from this field office did not fill her with confidence.
With Hotchner at the fore, they followed the young agent down the hall until he led them into a conference room on the left side of the corridor.
“Will there be anything else?” Kohler asked.
He might have been a bellboy fishing for a tip.
“No,” Hotchner said.
Prentiss covered for her boss with, “Thank you. Appreciate it.”
“Not at all!” the young agent said, and he, too, disappeared. Enthusiastically disappeared, but disappeared.
The room was dominated by a teardrop-shaped table surrounded by a dozen chairs. A white board on one wall, bulletin boards along another one, and a video screen on a third made this an instant home away from home. Windows filled two-thirds of the fourth wall, the view toward the lake. Rossi slanted the blinds, making seeing out hard but allowing light to filter in.
Jareau started filling the bulletin board with crime scene photos. While Reid set up his laptop, Morgan made three columns on the white board and labeled each with the name of the killer being copied.
Prentiss set up her laptop, too, using it to establish contact with the team’s digital intelligence officer, Penelope Garcia, back in Quantico. Blonde, pleasantly plump, with dark-framed glasses and a thrift-shop chic fashion sense, Garcia was just a little less quirky than a David Lynch movie, but also a brilliant technician who had frequently come through for them.
“Garcia,” Prentiss said.
“Hey,” the perky computer expert said, her image on the laptop screen lighting up with her infectious smile.
“Anything?”
“I’m still digging, especially on trying to identify the victim in the barrel. Unfortunately, there are enough missing people in that part of the world to make it tricky, particularly without something more from the Cook County coroner.”
“Stay on it,” Prentiss said.
“It’s what I do,” Garcia said, ever chipper in the face of mountains of work.
Prentiss looked up as Hotchner said, “All right, we’ve settled in—now let’s get started.”
Taking seats around the table, surrounded by the evidence of the killings of the monster they were hunting, the team hunkered down.
Hotchner began by explaining that the Wauconda PD would not be joining the task force.
“You gotta be kidding me,” Tovar said, rolling his eyes. “If they didn’t want in, why would Denson give me those crime scene photos?”
Morgan said, “It’s the bad company you keep.”
The short Hispanic detective blinked at that. "Huh?"
A mirthless grin settled on Hotchner’s face. “What Morgan means is… sharing information with another cop isn’t the same thing as taking it to the FBI. Some law enforcement agencies see us as Big Brother marching in to take over… and take credit.”
Tovar shifted in his seat. “Maybe if I talkedto him ..."
Shaking his head, Hotchner said, “I wouldn’t bother. They don’t believe we can help them, and that’s their choice.”
Lorenzon said, “It’s a stupid choice.” The athletic-looking African-American cop shifted in his seat, a look of disgust on his trimly bearded face. “A rinkydink piddling outfit like Wauconda, turning down first-string help like the BAU? Crazy.”
But Tovar sighed and shrugged. His eyes were on Hotchner. “Tate’s probably right that the Wauconda PD is foolish not to accept outside help. But, truthfully? I don’t know for sure what the BAU can do to help us with this mess. I just know we need help, and Tate knowing Morgan here, well, that’s how we came to call on you.”
“Understood,” Hotchner said. “So let’s get on the same page, shall we?… Why can we help? Because of one simple truth: behavior reveals personality. The more we know about an UnSub’s personality, the easier it is to apprehend him.”
“To a street cop,” Tovar said, “this all sounds like guesswork mixed in with mumbo jumbo. No offense meant.”
“None taken,” Hotchner said with a nod. “For all the talk that what we do is new, behavioral science has been around for over a hundred years—in fiction, at least, if not in reality.”
“Fiction?” Lorenzon asked. “Aren’t we in the fact business?”
Reid joined in. “In 1841, Edgar Allan Poe’s protagonist, C. Auguste Dupin, in the short story, ‘The Murders In The Rue Morgue,’ was a behavioral analyst, even if he wasn’t called that. Poe wrote, ‘Deprived of ordinary resources, the analyst throws himself into the spirit of his opponent, identifies himself therewith, and not infrequently sees thus, at a glance, the sole methods by which he may seduce into error or hurry into miscalculation.’ That’s essentially what we do.”
Lorenzon’s eyes went to his friend Morgan. “What the hell?”
Morgan flashed his killer smile. “We think like they think. And sometimes, knowinghow they think, we can make them screw up… so we can catch them.”
“After Poe,” Hotchner said, “Sir Arthur Conan Doyle created Sherlock Holmes, who was not only one of the first crime scene investigators, but also a behavioral analyst. And as for fact over fiction, Doyle based Holmes on Dr. Joseph Bell’s diagnostic techniques, and later Doyle used these very methods himself in a number of pioneering criminal investigations.”
Interested despite himself, Tovar asked, “So, when did profiling come into the realworld?”
“How old are you?” Hotchner asked.
Tovar gave him an odd look. “Sixty-one, why?”
“You may be old enough to remember. Lorenzon, you’re way too young to recall the mad bomber, aren’t you?”
Lorenzon blinked. “Mad bomber?”
“George Metesky. In New York, from 1940 until his arrest in 1957, Metesky operated as the so-called ‘Mad Bomber.’ ”
Reid picked right up from his boss. “Metesky planted over thirty devices, some of which exploded, some of which did not. The important thing, from our perspective? Is that the police couldn’t catch him. Even though he sent bragging letters, and they had entire bombs to examine—in the cases of those that did not go off—traditional law enforcement could not seem to solve the crimes. Finally, in desperation, they went to a psychiatrist— Dr. James A. Brussel— and gave him the case files.”