Chapter Text
The atmosphere of the family room at a station could be many things: anxious and tittering; heavy and oppressive, sad in the way that made things hollow; angry and charged and on the verge of blowing up; suspicious from time to time, containing answers nobody wanted to give. JJ was horribly and intimately familiar with each and every shade. She knew the ins and outs of each, the ways they could shift and the shapes they could take, the way things blurred when grief covered guilt, the ways to find secrets buried in what were no doubt some of the worst moments of these people’s lives. It was an easy job to hate, she supposed, one she was occasionally concretely certain she hated, but never, never, one she could just leave. Somebody had to know those shades, had to know what to make of them, had to know how to turn those worst days into closure that would never fix anything but might help to patch the punctures. If that somebody had to be her then so be it.
She had Jackson next to her, trying to look small and polite in his hard-backed chair and not particularly succeeding, his eyes heavy and sorry, his expression open and honest in the way it grimaced, palms braced on his knees. Theirs was a united front; no good cop-bad cop, just people who wanted to help, who were sorry for your loss, who were looking at all the pieces and trying to put them back together.
Aaron King’s friends had been cycling in and out for the past few hours, all depressed and desperate for answers they didn’t have, none quite so willing to trust them as they would have liked. Still, JJ had to remind herself, that was to be expected. They had been warned. The deceased’s friends were, above all else, people who wanted answers, who needed help--and perhaps they’d rather it didn’t come from here, from her and Jackson and the FBI and Austin PD, but nobody else was exactly offering. So they were taking what they could get, between suspicious glances and with bated breath.
She found secrets hidden beneath their answers without searching for the tell-tale shapes of them. Found anger then sadness then something else she knew well but had never been able to give a name, found guilt in friends who had turned their backs, who had drank too much and been distracted by dancing strangers, who had left him at a bar on 4th Street--not on his own but something much too close to it--to go home with them. Guilt from people who were not at fault, guilt from people who were trying to cope and struggling, who were tousling with what-ifs she didn’t have answers to, that they’d never be able to answer. Not guilt from people who were really at fault, she noticed. Guilt covering grief and not the other way around.
At the end of the queue of them was Madeline Arlington, 23, who had found his body, who was the last to see him alive--or, at least, to admit to it--and the first to see him dead. Who hadn’t been able to get the image out of her mind, where it had cleaved straight through the booze-muddled haze with an awful, startling clarity.
“We were winding down,” she explained, pulling the cuffs of her hoodie over her hands despite it being 80 degrees, “finishing up the night in a bar after the others had left and we figured we’d both struck out for the night.” JJ tried to nod understandingly but Madeline wasn’t looking at her, gaze flitting periodically between the wall over Jackson’s left shoulder and the floor between her own feet.
“Do you remember which bar?” JJ nudged, not optimistic but desperate for anything when they had little to nothing to speak of. It was early days, she reminded herself, they had time--except, of course, they didn’t. The longer they took the more people would die.
Madeline sighed, carded unsettled fingers through unwashed hair. “Kat’s, I think. It’s where we usually end up.” She shook her head.
“Kat’s?” Jackson repeated, his voice doing something strange and worried that was enough for even Madeline to pick up on it, diverting her eyes from the path they had been following so consistently until then.
JJ looked at him, wondering as she did it if maybe this was being unprofessional or perhaps building rapport. “You know it?”
“I’ve been to Kat’s. It’s sort of tucked away, quiet for where it is.”
Madeline nodded, despondent. “It’s where we wind down,” she reaffirmed. JJ was well used to hearing remarks like these, to not correcting the tense.
“Nico and Will took me--my cousin and his fiancé,” he tacked on for Madeline’s benefit, “They aren’t club people, or even big drinkers, but they like that Kat’s is quiet but not so out of the way that they don’t feel like they’re getting involved in the community.”
Madeline swallowed drily as she took the information in, and JJ poured her a glass of water from the jug on the table beside her, which she took but did not drink. “We stuck around almost til close and I left to go to the bathroom while I waited for my Uber. Aaron didn’t tell me he was leaving with anyone but he wasn’t there when I got back so I thought maybe someone had come up to him while I was gone. But he’s usually so good at texting me addresses when he does--just in case, y’know?,” she sobbed then, cracking at the thought, at the realisation that the hypothetical worst possible outcome wasn’t so hypothetical anymore. “So I tried to call him, and then I tried again and he still didn’t answer, so I cancelled my Uber and wasted the money because I think I might’ve known something was wrong, and I looked for him.” She let out this horrible little laugh. This awful, dry, hollowed-out sound that was barely even masquerading as humour. “I found him.”
“Do you know,” JJ tried, as gently as she could manage, “roughly how much time passed between when you last saw him and then?”
Madeline shook her head, gaze back on the floor. “I wasn’t exactly sober,” said with the edge of it’s all my fault. JJ had heard a lot of that in the past couple hours. “But I don’t think it was very long.”
JJ turned to Jackson as soon as they left. She, much like the rest of the team, didn’t know very much about him, had any attempts to read him muddled through a layer (or perhaps layers, running deeper than they could even see-) of weird mystery. This was different, the way he wore worry on his face so obviously, the way he cared for his family even if there was obviously something there, some amount of the weirdness piercing through. “We don’t know that he’s staking out Kat’s specifically,” she said, because there wasn’t much else she could. “We need to speak to the others before we can be sure.”
Jackson nodded, resolute, grounded, militaristic in his usual inexplicable way. Perhaps, she considered, he had done some sort of stint in the armed forces, or perhaps some intense undercover mission, something super high-security and top-secret. Something he’d never be able to tell them--or anyone--about, but that would have changed him forever. But maybe not, because she met him when he was a teenager, before any of that could possibly have happened, and he wasn’t so different then. “They’re good at keeping themselves safe.” He tugged at his grey hairs. “They maybe don’t really look it, but neither of them are people you’d want to get on the wrong side of.”
She nodded, inclined to believe him. Part of her was tempted to make a comment about statistics, about how his family were probably safe anyway, how the odds of it happening to them were low. But that felt useless when she was looking at Jackson, who had been through the ordeal himself, who had survived a previous one of their unsubs, who had obviously--so so obviously--been through something else before that too. Jackson, who clearly defied statistics as much as understanding. “We can ask the locals about Kat’s,” she said instead, “and the other victim’s friends. We’ll figure it out. We always do.” Or, maybe not always, but almost. She wanted to believe it was enough but knew it wasn’t.
“It seems like a strange choice,” he mused, still uncomfortable, his hands balled tensely at his knees. They had a little time before Joshua Patel’s parents were scheduled to be back, to give them a second chance because they wanted their son’s murder solved--of course they did--more than anyone else, even if the investigation made them uncomfortable. “Like Madeline said, it’s small and tucked-away, comparatively quiet. If I remember correctly, they close earlier than some of the rowdier places on the street, too. If I were the unsub it wouldn’t be where I’d choose to pick up victims.” He made a face, uncomfortable at putting himself in the unsub’s shoes in any way, but willing to regardless. Willing to be the monster for a moment, just to make him real. Tangible. To make his motivations understandable even when they seemed to be no such thing.
“So maybe Kat’s was a one-off.” She followed the thought. “Or maybe he likes it as something more than a convenient hunting ground.”
Kat’s was just like Reid expected it would be: from outside little more than a sign above a door, tucked into the space between two larger establishments, where one might otherwise expect there to be an alley, a little larger on the inside, though not much, and almost empty on a weekday afternoon. The bar itself was crowded close to the wall on their left as they walked in, a few narrow tables across from it, a split level up a few stairs with more seating. The lighting was low, like they were pretending it was night inside because there wasn’t more than a small window at the back to let in the light from the afternoon.
“Cosy,” Lewis remarked, not insincerely.
Together they approached the bar, where a single employee was unloading clean glasses into their proper places, occasionally casting his eyes around at the three customers to make sure they weren’t in need of anything. “Hey guys, can I help you?” He asked, friendly enough and not giving away the fact that they definitely didn’t look like the bar’s usual patrons even though they were definitely all aware of it. He continued to fuss with the glasses as he spoke but stopped when he glanced back and found himself confronted with two FBI IDs. “Oh,” he said simply, immediately subdued. “You’re here about the murders.”
Small of a place as it was, the young couple day drinking cocktails at the table closest to the bar looked over at that. Reid pretended not to notice them. “You’re aware of them?”
A laugh entirely absent of humour. “Everyone is.”
“We have reason to suspect one of the victims was here on the night he was killed.” Lewis’ voice was soft, sympathetic, even if her words were precisely following the script they all knew like the backs of their hands. She slid a photo across the bar at him, face up, the last that had been taken of Aaron King alive, at the start of the night out that had ended with him strangled to death. He smiled in it, all white teeth and dimples in his dark skin, eyes crinkling at the corners. The photo was zoomed in on him but even so Madeline Arlington’s hair was visible at the bottom of it, his chin resting on the top of her head. He looked so happy, young and free and unworried. Reid’s job demanded he didn’t think too hard about it. His humanity insisted he do nothing but, so he tried to switch it off and, failing that, pushed it back into a corner of his mind where he could ignore it, threw a dusty old rug over it and hoped he could lose it in his mind palace where more useful things occupied all the space. “Do you recognise him?”
The bartender leaned over it, narrow frame bending at the waist. Reid watched the way he slumped. “Yeah. Yes. He was a regular. I wasn’t working the night he died and I haven’t seen him since and when I heard the news I think I assumed. But it really was him, huh?”
“Afraid so.” Lewis’ was still a simultaneously stern and sympathetic presence. Reid had never been so great at being that so took no issue in ceding the conversation to her while he looked around for anything at all of note. Not the fake plants or the way the young couple stared, not the small pride flag on the end of the bar or the lone drinker staring into his beer. Not the fingerprint-smeared mirror on the wall or the way the fake candles remained undeterred by the energy of the room. The conspicuously dark and shiny lens of a security camera positioned to take in as much as possible of the room, however, could be worth noting.
He waited for a lull, for the bar tender to run out of things to say and Lewis to run out of things to ask, before asking. “Do you have security footage?”
“I assume so? You’d have to speak to my boss about that, I have nothing to do with it, but I can hand you over his number.”
The conversation, the manner of speaking, the way to be around people and feel like something more than a conspicuously sore thumb; it was all something he had learned with age as he matured in this role, as everything changed and he had to shift to fill in the spaces the world left for him. And still, he found that no amount of practice, of memorising the muscles to move and how far to stretch them, could make his smile feel any less forced. “Thank you, we appreciate it.” And it wasn’t that it wasn’t true, just that it wasn’t enough.
“How about the others?” Lewis kept going, kept making the words sound casual, kept making people believe she cared enough to take her seriously the same way Reid had never quite managed to master. There were photos of Eric Lien and Joshua Patel too, passed over to the bartender who winced and groaned and shook his head like a dog trying to get dry.
“Oh my God.” That was a yes. “They’re really all gone?” Reid nodded. Lewis nodded too and probably did a better job at it. The bartender sighed and looked over Lewis’ shoulder, making momentary eye contact with one of the eavesdropping couple before blanching, dropping his voice, and leaving over the bar top. “Is it safe to be here?” It wasn’t quite a whisper but it was bordering on it.
Yes felt too optimistic. No felt too catastrophizing. “Austin PD is going to send officers,” wasn’t entirely an answer at all, but it was true so Reid settled for it.
The bartender winced, still looking at the photographs more often than not. “Folks aren’t gonna be thrilled about that.”
“No,” Lewis agreed, “They’ll be undercover, super subtle unless they can’t afford to be. Keeping people safe is our priority, even if they’d rather it wasn’t.”
“Should I be warning people? Going about business as usual and pretending my regulars aren’t being murdered? Pretending I’m not terrified?”
“You should be careful,” Lewis said slowly, carefully, “maybe encourage patrons to be too.” There was more that she wanted to say, Reid was sure, but it would do something irreversible to the rapport to say it and they needed someone like this, who might have seen things they didn’t realise were telling, who was willing to share what they were. She couldn’t tell him that they needed Kat’s to stay open, business as usual, because as soon as Kat’s wasn’t a viable hunting ground somewhere else would have to be, and when that happened unsubs tended to panic, to unravel further. She couldn’t tell him that it was dangerous, that they needed it to be, that they didn’t want to sacrifice anyone--wanted to catch this guy long before that became an issue they were to be confronted with--but that it might be necessary. That so long as everything happened here they could keep an eye out for it. The bartender nodded, oblivious to all of it, believing the nice FBI lady, taking her at her word because that was all he had.
“Thank you,” Reid told him, aware suddenly that he didn’t know the guy’s name.
He pressed his lips into a line, did something uncomfortable and fidgety and did not reach out to shake a hand Reid had not offered. “Cory,” he filled in. “If you call my boss let him know I gave you his number and please ask after me if you need anything else. If I can help you have to let me.”