"But what use is it to be safe if you aren't living?" Isabel just stared at the fountain, into the water that suddenly looked very deep. Fountains were supposed to be shallow, but this one looked as if it didn't have a bottom. It looked as if Isabel could just dive in and keep sinking forever, and ever, and ever. Her friend had a point, but it was a point that Isabel was choosing to ignore. But her words did make Isabel wonder. What was the point of living in general? What was the point of keeping on when the events of the past were crawling just beneath her skin?
In that moment, she decided to find out if the fountain was as bottomless as it looked.
She took a step to the fountain, ignoring her friend's question of what she was doing. It didn't take her long to be right at the edge of the fountain, a few paces away from her friend. From this closer angle, the water most certainly looked endless. All she could see at the bottom was darkness, although she wasn't sure if that was because it was endless or the bottom of the fountain was just dark. But she was about to find out. She stepped up onto the ledge of the fountain, before turning around and facing her friend, who had a look that was part confusion, part concern.
"Isabel? What are you doing?"
"What's the point of living when the past keeps threatening to drag me down? What's the point when all I can feel the past crawling in my skin, calling me back to it? When all I can feel is pain and darkness and loneliness? When all I can feel is the empty spot in my soul and the chaos in my mind and the pain in my heart?" Isabel ranted, before looking back into the water.
"Isabel..."
"I don't want to feel anything anymore." Before her friend could even stop her, she let herself fall backwards into the water.
The first thing she noticed was how unbelievably cold the water felt. It was like little daggers were trying to pierce her skin. But she didn't try and stop it. She didn't even try and swim up towards the surface. She just closed her eyes and let herself sink lower and lower. The second thing she noticed was that the water was endless. She could feel her lungs beginning to scream for air, and she knew that if she just inhaled a breath full of water, this would be all over sooner. So that's what she did. She just opened her mouth and breathed in a lungful of water. Her eyes flew open when she didn't automatically start to drown.
She was breathing.
She was breathing underwater. She also realized that she could see perfectly rather than the slight blur that occurred whenever she had opened her eyes underwater before. She looked at her legs, wondering if she had turned into a mermaid like some stupid fairy tale she used to tell the orphan children back in Circia. But, no, she still had legs. So she just sunk lower and lower, seeing perfectly and breathing just fine. But that was when she realized.
The lower she went, the less she could feel. At first, she just couldn't feel the coldness of the water pricking her skin. Then, once she couldn't feel anything external, she stopped feeling on the inside, too. Her breath hitched when she realized she couldn't feel anything at all anymore. She had wanted this, but now that she had it, she realized how awful it was. She didn't want this anymore. But then it got worse. The darkness had surrounded her, making her unable to see anything. Her ears seemed to have quit working, so she couldn't hear anything. Not even her own breathing.
She was suspended in emptiness, and suddenly, she started to panic. She just wanted to drown. Even the pain of drowning would be better than the nothingness she was feeling right then. But she couldn't drown. She just kept breathing the water. There was nothing to tell her that she was even real anymore. She tried pinching herself, she tried hitting herself, she tried everything she could to just feel something, to just have some proof of her existence. But nothing worked, so she just sat there in her sea of nothingness.
Maybe she had actually died, and maybe she hadn't. All she knew was that she had let herself be dragged down to the depths of hell. After all, that's what this place had to be.
But worse than the emptiness was how dreadfully alone Isabel was.
*******************
Ciara grabbed all of her paperwork and her go-bag and practically ran to the round table room after JJ had told them to be there in five minutes. If they had to be there so soon, that meant the case had to be urgent. Probably a child abduction. Although, to be honest, she really hoped it wasn't. At times her mind still reminded her of the failure that was the case in Sisters, even though that was back in January. She didn't like to think about it, even if she knew they'd be back someday. But today was not that day.
Akilah and Morgan were already in the round table room when Ciara got there, and Reid came in just behind her. Ciara sat down next to Akilah and Reid sat next to her, and Ciara asked Reid if he knew anything about the case. He admitted that he didn't, but he could feel the same urgency in JJ's voice that Ciara had. It didn't take long for Rossi and Prentiss to get in the room and sat down, and Hotch and JJ came in just a minute behind them. Huh. They all actually had gotten into the briefing room in five minutes. Well, actually, it had only been four minutes and twenty-one seconds. Ciara was impressed.
"Why all the urgency, JJ? Is there a child abduction?" Akilah asked, and JJ didn't answer right away, instead clicking her little remote to bring up a picture of a family of four. There was a mother, a father, and two children. The son looked like he was about seventeen or eighteen, and the daughter, who was looking up at her father and smiling, looked to be maybe fifteen. Although Ciara, also being quite baby-faced, knew it was probably the other way around. Although the picture was strange. Everyone except for the daughter was staring straight ahead, while the daughter looked at the father, hiding the left side of her face.
"This is the Whittle family. The parents are May and Brent, both aged 38, the son is Dylan, aged 15, and the daughter is Katelynn, aged 17," JJ explained. So Ciara was right about the kids' ages. "They live outside of the small community of Sinclair, Wyoming, population 433. Last night, someone broke into the Whittle household and murdered May, Brent, and Dylan."
"Who found them?" Rossi asked.
"And what happened to Kate-lynn?" Ciara asked, although she didn't think anyone heard her question.
"They were found by their neighbors, Kathy and Frederick Edwards, who live about a mile down the road," JJ explained, before pulling up a picture of an elderly black couple that Ciara assumed were the neighbors. "Because of their age, they can't take care of everything around their farm by themselves, and all of their children and grandchildren live in Cheyenne, 126 miles away. So they paid Dylan to come over twice a day and take care of the things they can't. Kathy said that Dylan showed up every morning at 7 A.M., so when 9 A.M. rolled around and he hadn't shown up, they went over to check on him."
"And they found him dead?" Akilah finished.
"The door was unlocked, which apparently isn't uncommon in Sinclair-"
"It rarely is in small towns like those. There's a sense of both trust and naivety in sleepy communities. They trust the people around them and are usually naive enough to believe that nothing like this could happen in their small little town," Ciara explained. Nobody had ever locked their doors in her hometown, even after Mandy and Randy Harmon had gone on their killing spree.
"Go on, JJ," Hotch said, and JJ nodded.
"When Kathy and Frederick entered the house, they mentioned that it smelled a lot like a kill room just a few hours after a slaughter. That was when they found Dylan's mutilated body," JJ explained.
"Mutilated?" Reid asked, and JJ nodded, and with the click of her remote, a picture of Dylan's dead body filling the screen. Ciara looked around and saw several pairs of eyes go wide with surprise, and she couldn't blame them. There was one long, deep gash across Dylan's neck, but that was the tamest thing about the picture. There were many (and Ciara meant many) deep gashes crisscrossing Dylan's face and torso, almost making him unrecognizable. But that was when Ciara saw something that disturbed her.
"Someone else is noticing the gaping hole in his chest, right?" Akilah asked, and JJ nodded, clicking to another picture, this one taken from above Dylan's body. And immediately, Ciara saw what was missing. And judging by everyone's gasps, they saw it, too. "Did... did the Unsub really take out his...?"
"Unfortunately, yes. And even worse-" JJ started.
"What could be worse?" Morgan asked.
"This. Police haven't found it, meaning the Unsub probably took it with him," Hotch answered.
"I don't even wanna think about what he's doing with that," Ciara said, before shaking her head. "Well, there's obviously a lot of anger here. Someone doesn't mutilate a body like this unless they are truly enraged at whoever they are mutilating."
"I agree. Was the mutilation ante- or postmortem?" Reid asked.
"The ME said that it was done postmortem. The Unsub slit his throat and then went on to mutilate the body," JJ answered.
"That's effective. He can't scream for help or wake up anyone else in the house if he's dead. That, and it's possible he was reigning in his anger until he actually killed Dylan, and then he just lost control," Akilah suggested.
"What does the rest of the family look like?" Rossi asked, and JJ pulled up a picture of May and Brent Whittle. "He would have had to slit their throats in quick succession to not wake the other up."
"Or possibly two Unsubs?" Morgan wondered.
"ME said that the gashes on May and Brent's throats were identical and most likely made by the same knife," JJ told him.
"Look at the parents. Dylan's face and torso were covered in gashes. Only May's face is covered, and the Unsub only made a few on Brent's. Either he was growing tired, or he just didn't feel as much anger towards them," Prentiss observed.
"But we all agree that there had to be some anger here. Which means that this wasn't random. First of all, they were out in the country, so he had to know where they live. The Whit-tles knew the Unsub," Ciara added.
"Okay, and what about Katelynn?" Rossi asked.
"That's the thing. Katelynn is nowhere to be found." Immediately, everyone looked up at JJ, not having expected that.
"Well, that leaves us with three options. Either the Unsub killed the rest of the family and then took Katelynn, or Katelynn saw the Unsub, ran off, and is now in hiding, or-" Morgan started.
"Or Katelynn killed her family and ran off," Akilah finished.
"Police don't think it was Katelynn who did it, due to the state of her room," JJ said, before bringing up some more pictures. There were several bloodstains on the floor of Katelynn's room, but that wasn't what took Ciara's attention. What took her attention was the large bloodstain on the girl's bed and the scratches on the wooden headboard. Something about the stain and the scratches looked eerily familiar, but, just like all unwanted memories, Ciara kicked it back down into the depths of her brain. And, for once, it actually worked.
"So one option is that he injured Katelynn and then took her with him. He could have done this to weaken her so she couldn't fight back, or maybe to prove to her that he wasn't to be messed with," Prentiss stated.
"Another is that he did kill Kate-lynn and, for reasons I don't want to think about, took her body with him," Ciara continued.
"Are there any fingerprints or DNA or anything of the Unsub's?" Reid asked, and JJ shook her head.
"The police are still looking, but so far they haven't found any fingerprints, and the blood samples they sent to Cheyenne to be tested don't have any results. The only thing they've found that could possibly be the Unsub's is this," JJ said, before pulling up a picture of a bloody handprint. "Katelynn is small in stature, so they are pretty sure the handprint is too big to be hers. They're still trying to lift fingerprints from it, but so far have had no luck. They think they'll get more info from the blood sample they took from it."
"Well, we've got an Unsub on the loose and a young girl to find. Wheels up in fifteen," Hotch said, and immediately everyone got on their feet. Both because Hotch was right and there was no time to lose, and because they knew that Ciara would never let it go if they weren't on the jet in fifteen minutes. She still reminded them of the time they were late getting on the jet, even though it had been Strauss's fault. That was her first case with the BAU. Even Ciara, whose internal clock had never let her down, was surprised sometimes by how quickly time flew.
They got on the jet in six minutes and were in the air in fourteen. Ciara didn't have to chide them for not being on time. Not this time, anyway. Once in the air, Ciara pulled out the case file, looking over the contents of it yet again. As she looked through all the pictures, she again looked at the family picture. The posing really bothered Ciara, and she wondered if that was somehow important in the case. Why was Katelynn the only one not looking forward? Was it just bad timing? Had the photographer just accidentally snapped the picture when she was looking away, and the Whittles had just kept it as it was?
Or were they purposely trying to hide her face?
And if they were trying to hide her face, then why? Ciara had a feeling that things in the Whittle family were not as picturesque as this image made them seem. So was it completely bogus to think that maybe Katelynn had murdered the rest of her family? Maybe she had just planted the blood in her room to deflect suspicion. But something told Ciara that wasn't it. She had a feeling that Katelynn wasn't responsible for the death of her family. Not directly, at least. The Unsub had taken Katelynn, so she had to feed into his fantasy somehow. The question was, how?
"Alright, guys, I've just got the results of the blood tests from the lab in Cheyenne." Ciara looked up when she heard Garcia's voice, seeing her face on one of the screens. She hadn't even known that Garcia had called.
"And?" Hotch asked.
"The blood on Katelynn's bed is absolutely hers. The blood on the floor, however, is a mixture of the rest of her family," Garcia answered. "Now, as for the bloody handprint, which I really don't like looking at, it's mainly Katelynn's blood, but there are traces of the rest of her family, as well. Oh, and they weren't able to lift any fingerprints from it. So far, there's nothing that they can connect to the Unsub."
"Thanks, Baby Girl," Morgan said, but as soon as he had, he looked over at Akilah, who tried to shrug as inconspicuously as possible. Huh. Ciara had never actually thought about that. Did Akilah care about the way Morgan and Garcia acted around one another? Akilah, though she wouldn't admit it, could get extremely jealous sometimes. Ciara would have to talk to her about that. "So, the Unsub is obviously organized."
"I wouldn't say 'obviously'," Rossi countered.
"Think about it. He only mutilated the bodies after they were already dead. He was able to murder and mutilate three people, and the only person he possibly woke up was Katelynn. He was able to complete his mission without leaving behind a trace, he was able to leave behind no evidence as to who he is. And he was able to get in and out almost completely undetected. The only person who possibly knows who did this is-"
"Kate-lynn," Ciara finished for Prentiss.
"Katelynn is the wild card. He could have easily murdered the entire family. But he didn't. He, as far as we know, left Katelynn alive," Akilah said.
"But why did he leave her alive? And why did he take her?" Reid asked.
"Maybe she woke up and saw what was happening, so he took her as a way to make sure she didn't go to the police," JJ suggested.
"Or maybe she's the reason he killed the family in the first place," Ciara said, and everyone looked at her, nonverbally asking her to elaborate. "Well, maybe it's just the author in me trying to come up with stories, but perhaps they were lovers and her family didn't approve so she had him kill her family and they ran off. Maybe he's obsessed with her and killed her family to prove to her what he could do, and then took her. Maybe he was going to kill her, too, but then something happened that changed his mind."
"But why all the rage towards Dylan in particular? There's so much anger here, and almost all of it is directed towards Dylan. Why?" Rossi wondered. Ciara again looked at the family picture, the picture that was giving her such bad vibes.
"I think we can all agree that Katelynn is the key. We just have to figure out how she and the Unsub are connected. When we land, I want JJ and Prentiss to connect with the local police and start on victimology. Morgan and Akilah, talk to Kathy and Frederick, as well as any other neighbors that are willing to talk. Reid, Rossi, Ciara, and I will go to the scene and see what we can find. It's a big property, we'll need as many people as we can get to search it. Everyone clear?" Hotch asked, and everyone nodded.
"Clear as cellophane, sir," Akilah responded. The edges of Ciara's mouth pricked up at the phrase before she shifted her focus back down to that damn photo. There was a mystery lying in that photo, and she was going to figure it out. She had to.
A girl's life depended on it.
So, okay, we've got a lot of dramatic irony going on here, don't we? That's one of my favorite parts of Criminal Minds, to be honest. Gotta love the whole "I know something that the characters don't" trope. So, anyway, what do you think is wrong with the picture that Ciara can't get over? And how is Katelynn doing? All of these and more will be answered in the coming chapters. We're going on a ride. Well, that's all I got for today, so... BYE!
"Anger is a territorial child in a dirty party dress and scuffed patent leather shoes looking for something to break." -Rachel Wiley