LIKE A GIRL ｡ CRIMINAL MINDS

THIRTY ONE

"He even got in in writing," Spencer noted, looking over the note Shaunessy  had received a decade earlier. 

"He won," JJ piped up. "Why start killing again?"

"Because the only person who knew he'd won, the person he made the deal with, just died," Daisy responded, her eyes not straying from the papers in front of her. 

"Narcissistic killers need other people to recognise their power. That's why they contact the media," Rossi finished Daisy's thought. 

"So how did he stop for ten years?" Emily hummed, looking around the team. 

Spencer reached for the book he'd set on the table. "In Night of the Reaper, the author suggests he had been arrested for an unrelated crime or died. Perhaps he's trying to correct that misconception."

"What has he been doing all this time?" JJ inquired, looking over at the doctor. 

"Planning what he would do if he started killing again," Hotch answered, his eyes hard with the anger he'd hidden away since he thought the case had ended.  

★☆

"George Foyet, twenty-eight, was the ninth victim and the only one to survive the Reaper," Hotch brought up images onto the television screen of said man. His identification photo, as well as pictures from after the attack. 

Daisy swallowed at the sight of the dozens of sewn up cuts strewn across Foyet's body. The poor man. Rossi seemed to agree. "Not for lack of trying."

"Amanda Bertrand, nineteen, his date for the evening, was not as lucky," Hotch then showed pictures of the young woman's battered corpse inside what must have been Foyet's car. Daisy grimaced, both at age difference between the two victims and the sight of her mutilated body. "He likes to attack them inside or near their cars, at night, on poorly lit, less populated roads."

"Foyet said he approached them pretending to be a lost tourist," Sergeant O'Mara continued, also having worked the original case. "In the hospital, we put Foyet with a sketch artist."

Daisy looked up at the drawing that appeared next. It wasn't much to go on. 

"The Reaper always uses some sort of ruse to get close to and spend time with his victims," Hotch finished. 

"The eye, as he depicts it, appears to be the eye of providence," Spencer pointed to the Reaper's signature, a red eye in a triangle with several lines emerging from each end. "A symbol adopted by the U.S government and incorporated into the Great Seal in seventeen-eighty-two with the words, 'annuit coeptis' inscribed beneath. That's Latin for 'providence' or fate 'has favoured our undertakings'. The Reaper seems to see himself as the personification of fate."

"So, how did Foyet survive?" Daisy asked, nodding to the gruesome images of his injuries. "Surely the Reaper knew the right places. Did he miss?"

Spencer tapped a button on the keyboard, bringing up an audio recording. 

"Nine-one-one, what's your emergency?"

"I just murdered two more."

"Excuse me, sir, did you say you murdered someone?"

"Victims eight and nine, by a silver Toyota on Riverton past the Tyson Quarry."

"That call was made from a pay phone about a mile from the crime scene," Spencer explained once it had finished. "EMTs arrived fifteen minutes later. Bertrand was D.O.A, Foyet barely breathing."

"So, the Reaper made one of these calls after each of his killings, telling the police where to find the bodies," Emily concluded. 

"Until this one, the ninth," Hotch said. "If he hadn't made this call, Foyet wouldn't have been found in time. The call saved him."