The Boss' Niece (Spencer Reid)

50. "Single" for a night

"Exactly." JJ nodded.

"So how does our unsub go from loser of the year to Don Juan?" Rossi put down his file, asking a legitimate question.

"Actually, as Byron interpreted him, Don Juan was an ironic reversal of sex roles. And when-" Spencer went to continue, but everyone except me glared at him, basically asking him to stop talking.

"-that's about it." Spencer stopped, realising that maybe now wasn't the right time to be rambling. I almost scoffed at the team. They had a genius sitting right in front of them, yet, when he wanted to express his knowledge and help the team with his information, he was almost always shut down.

"Something must have happened between the last prostitute and Vanessa Holden making him change his victimology." Hotch exhaled.

"Could the unsub have known Vanessa?" I asked, confused.

"It's unlikely. Sexual sadists attack anonymously. They have to sever a personal connection and see their victims as objects to perpetrate this level of torture. We have to build two profiles." Morgan explained, exhaling.

"One for the unsub who killed prostitutes, one for the unsub who goes to clubs." I rolled my eyes, wishing for an easier case right about now.

"We've never done that before." Emily shook her head in surprise.

"Cassidy is right. The victimology is so different, we'll treat them as separate unsubs and see what overlaps." Hotch nodded.

"Reid and Cassidy, work up a geographic profile, focus on locations of the murders. Prentiss and Rossi, concentrate on the prostitute." Hotch started.

"JJ, Morgan, and I will go deal with Vanessa Holden." Hotch instructed the team.

———

Apart from a sketch of the unsub, we had nothing. No DNA, nothing. It was frustrating. The eye witness statements were all over the place. There were so many witnesses that not one single statement made sense or matched.

"So you have a sketch?" Spencer asked as Detective Harding handed us a rough sketch of the man.

"It's a little vague." Spencer chuckled.

"That's because of this guy's other countermeasure. Take a look. So this guy right here, that's our killer." Detective Harding pointed to the man on the security footage walking up to the victim and her sister.

"It looks like a Fedora." I furrowed my eyebrows in confusion.

"So he's drawing attention to his face while simultaneously obscuring it." Detective Harding exhaled.

"It's called peacocking. The adornment of some sort of flashy affect to sort of try to distract witnesses." Spencer explained. With no one else here to shut him up or prevent him from talking, he was free to ramble on about the relevant topic, and he was clearly happy to do so. I couldn't believe that the handsome genius in front of me was actually my fiancée.

With barely any evidence to go on, I seriously hoped that Hotch, JJ and Morgan were having better luck interviewing Vanessa's family.

———

The team and I sat in the conference room of the station, trying to identify the sudden change in M.O.

"Now, Vanessa Holden's apartment was in the Peachtree district, where there's a lot of big money. Based on the geography, he isn't just changing his victimology, he's changed his whole tax bracket." Rossi explained, leaning back.