MID90s ━ aaron hotchner

four: LIVING SOMEONE ELSE'S LIFE.

"Her name was Tanya Hill," JJ gestures to the screen as she speaks, voice confident. Beside her, Ryne can see Penelope shrink a little. She had learned that the gory stuff freaked the technical analyst out very much, and Garcia had covered what she had coined her own lair in a series of bobble heads, colour and furry pens, toys and decorations to make it feel homely and less murderous and empty, like most federal buildings felt more often than not. "She was twenty nine. A bartender, found two days ago in Edgewood, New Mexico. She's the fifth woman in over six months to be found dead in a ditch off the I-40 and I-25."

Ryne glances down at the file JJ had given her, looking through the other four victims' lives and how they'd ended up. Once again, boiled down to no more than a statistic — these women had goals probably, dreams, just like Ryne had for so long. Yet, they'd ended up in a ditch on the side of the road, all because another person could not value human life.

"All were manually strangled. None were sexually assaulted," Hotch notes. Despite it being early in the day, he's wearing a suit like always and there's a red tie wrapped around his neck. Ryne glances down at her much more casual dress shirt and pants, and pulls at the sleeves of her dark denim jacket, feeling a little underdressed next to Hotch.

Morgan raises an eyebrow, not looking up from his paper. "Well, maybe the act of strangulation is what gets him off."

"Where were they abducted from?"

"All over." JJ takes a seat next to Ryne, crossing her legs. Today, her bangs are pinned back so Ryne can see her face more clearly, and the ring on her finger she had cited as Henry's birthstone twinkles wildly underneath the dimly lit, trashy conference room lights.

"Well, they're not just crossing state lines. These cities are hundreds of miles apart," Morgan notes.

"Whoever's killing these women is mobile. It takes a lot to travel across states even in the timeline of six months without being noticed," Ryne squints her eyes at the images on the screen, looking for any specific things that could point to a place of victimology or a MO.

"That's a lot of bodies." Rossi states. "Why has it taken so long to be invited?"

"We haven't," Hotch states. His face reminds Ryne of a never moving windmill — pursed lips, dead eyes, almost as though this job had sucked the life out of him. He's intimidating and gives off the vibe that he's definitely not into small talk (or any talk at all) so Ryne leaves him alone most of the time in the past weeks, only speaking if need be to her boss. "We found this on the HSK database."

"Well," Morgan mutters. "A lot of police departments won't want this problem."

"The geographic profile shows that only one of them has it," Reid squints his eyes at the map, darting them around. His hair is a mess, but tucked behind his ears, and Ryne's learned lately that he figures things out before anybody else, often unable to explain them at first because his brain works at such a rapid rate that most of the rest of them cannot catch up to. Ryne is slightly proud to admit that her brain easily understands almost everything Reid says, though she would never admit it or make it known to anybody — that would be just one more block to connect her straight back to Katherine Berkeley. "They just don't know it yet."

"How do you know that?"

"Because he has a comfort zone," Reid gets up, approaching the map. "Based on the direction he was heading when he dumped the bodies, all five cases point to our unsub heading to Edgewood, New Mexico."