Psychopathy

Chapter 10- Strategic Retreat

The Partner was more of a mystery. He was obviously skilled with computers, having set up the livestream. He must have, to some extent, enjoyed watching Ciara suffer, but if that enjoyment was to the point of sadism, they weren't sure. He didn't exactly seem to be a submissive partner, which was strange, to say the least. In almost all cases, a criminal partnership followed the dominant/submissive model. But in this case, they seemed to follow more of a passive/active model. They were both dominant personalities, but the Partner was much more uninvolved and was content with just watching the Unsub do the torturing. But they had seen that when he wanted to, the Partner could be as cruel as the Unsub. But only when he wanted to be.

The crime itself was clearly personal- they both knew Ciara, and they both had a history with her. When they had abducted her, the Unsub had stated he hadn't seen her in five years. Five years. Ciara had still been in Omaha then. According to Reid's math, she would have been nineteen or maybe even twenty at the time. What had happened then? What happened between the Unsub and Ciara? How did they know each other? What about the Partner? How did he know her? How did the two men know each other?

Those were the questions that they didn't have answers to. And it was those answers that they knew would lead them to the Unsub.

Outside of all those things, the only other evidence they had was the video of her abduction and the livestream, but those didn't quite translate well onto paper. Garcia had already taken both of those things and put them in a separate folder and on a flash drive, making sure that nothing would happen to them. In a sense, they were the most important pieces of evidence they had.

The livestream lasted a week. After the first time, the Unsub hadn't raped Ciara again, at least not on camera. But he hadn't stopped torturing her. He'd used the knife a few times, but he hadn't actually cut her. It was more a psychological instrument of torture, making sure she knew that he could cut her at any time, that he had that power over her. For the most part, the torture consisted of physical and verbal beatings.

And then, after a week, the livestream had just shut off as quickly as it had appeared. The Unsub hadn't given them any warning; in fact, he was right in the middle of a beating when it had shut off. They had waited for a day for it to come back, but it hadn't, so they had started profiling what they already had. And that was how they had spent the next week, just going back over all the details they had again and again and again.

It'd be easier if they just knew something about Ciara's past, but they didn't. They barely knew anything, and that was what frustrated Reid the most. All they needed was one thing, just one way to find out about Ciara's past, but there was nothing and no one that could give them that. There wasn't anybody who knew her better than the members of the BAU, and even they didn't know her that well. It'd be one thing if Ciara kept a journal or something along those lines, but there was nothing in any of her notebooks except scenes and outlines and character sheets for her books.

It seemed she was trying to completely erase the past. She was done with it, but it wasn't done with her. It kept a hold of her in every way it could, from nightmares to hallucinations to flashbacks and now with the Unsub and the Partner.

Even Isabel Ashe's agent, who had known her longer than all of them, didn't have anything to give them. Isabel did all of her business over emails or over the phone. If she had to be present for something, like a photoshoot for a book cover, she always did it over video call, but she never had her camera on. Isabel's agent had never even seen her. According to her, she didn't even know if Isabel's Irish accent was real or just another way to hide her identity. Reid didn't give that a second thought. He knew the accent was real.

And now it had been two weeks since she had vanished, and they didn't have a clue where she could be, or who had her. In all reality, they didn't have anything. For two weeks, Reid had spent all of his waking moments trying to find Ciara. For two weeks, his dreams had been haunted by snippets of her voice echoing from somewhere distant, distorted images of her seen through a mirror, and flashes of memories he couldn't seem to make any sense of.