Chapter 7
Desk duty feels worse than getting shot. I am not built to sit in one place for eight hours a day. Which is why now, against orders, I am hobbling down to Garcia's office to try and help with the case the rest of the team left on a few hours ago.
I used my my key card and opened the door, not being able to sneak up on her because the crutches were loud.
"Natasha, what are you doing in here?" She asked, not even turning away from whatever she was looking up.
"Offering up my big, beautiful brain that is going to waste out in the bullpen." I sighed, sitting down in the extra seat in her office and rolling over to her. "I resorted to singing show tunes to myself to stop the ringing in my ears from the quiet."
"FIne, fine. But stay out of the view of the camera so neither of us gets in trouble."
I nodded and she hit the call button on her screen.
"What've you got Garcia?" Hotch asked, answering the video call. They were still on the plane.
"They just pulled the body of a third victim from the bottom of a lake 20 miles away from the original dump site." she said clicking around on her keyboard before pulling up pictures to show them.
"Could it be the same unsun?"
"The body is on the way to the medical examiner now, but from the branding on the forehead, it's our guy."
"Alright, thank you Garcia." he said before hanging up the phone.
"Can you pull those pictures up again Pen." I said rolling closer to the computer. She nodded and began clicking buttons, pulling up the picture from all of the crime scenes.
"They also all had their bodies drained of blood and all of their organs were missing." she shuttered.
"That doesn't make any sense." I said, looking closer at the branding on the foreheads.
"What?" Penelope asked, her voice laced with confusion.
"The draining of the blood and removing the organs is an ancient Egyptian burial ritual. They would do it before wrapping them in gauze, putting them in the sarcophagus and then sealing them in the tombs." I explained. "But the mark of the forehead in Ancient Greek, the mark of Poseidon to be exact."
"Could he be offering up the victims as a sacrifice?"
"Sacrifices to Poseidon were usually equestrian and in salt water. A human sacrifice in stagnant lake water would just piss him off."
"Maybe the unsub is getting the mythologies mixed up."
"But Greek and Egyptian? The two most commonly confused for each other are Greek and Roman because of their multiple similarities."
"Maybe they are trying to appease the Egyptian equivalent of Poseidon, and just got the symbols wrong?"
"The closest would be Hapi, the Nile God. And if that's the case that would mean out unsub just recently got into the mythology scene."
And as soon as I said that, Garcia's phone started ringing.
"What've you got for me boy wonder?" She asked, cracking her fingers, getting ready to look up whatever Spencer needed.
"Are there any Egyptian, Greek, and Roman mythology chat rooms or groups that ping to the area?"
I chuckled to myself.
"Do you want specificity between those three together or individually?" She asked him.
"All together." He said, and then began to explain everything that I had just figured out now even two minutes ago.
