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Chapter Text

Buffy sort of likes the cop, who is not actually a cop. His badge says F.B.I. and he tells her that he is Supervisory Special Agent Rossi from the Behavioral Analysis Unit, or B.A.U., as he claims the seat across from her.

"What's that?" Buffy asks, splitting her attention between him and the window into another room. The people standing behind it move and talk like they believe that they are invisible to her, which makes Buffy think that the window is actually supposed to look like a mirror to her, like they have on police dramas on television.

Supervisory Special Agent Rossi tells her what the B.A.U. is, what it does, and says, "I know why you do the things that you do. I know you better than you know yourself."

Hysteria and mirth bubble up within Buffy, all tinged with a healthy bit of scorn, because she is fifteen and only just beginning to know herself. How can this stranger, this old guy who has never been a Slayer or ignored by her parents or shipped off to a mental institution for telling the truth, know the innermost workings of her mind? He has never put his hand through a vampire's chest and felt the flash of heat as it disintegrates or been told that he has no choice but to hunt the forces of evil and be hunted by them in turn because there is no way out of his destiny. His life is (probably) valued by his bosses, not written off as something that will invariably be short, violent, and not worth remembering.

Merrick did not die trying to save this guy's life, despite knowing how worthless his life is (supposed to be) in the grand scheme of things. Slayers are supposed to be as fungible as autumn leaves.

But not to Merrick, Buffy thinks as she snorts then giggles. Never to Merrick.

And so Buffy laughs and laughs and laughs, her mirth echoing and distorting in the room until it becomes shrill shrieks, edging on the verge of madness.

The people behind the fake mirror shift uncomfortably and mutter words to each other that Buffy does not know like 'psychotic' and 'delusional.' When one of them says something that Buffy understands, ("Holy shit! A real life Joker!") he is ordered out of the room by a tall, dark-haired man.

That man, who is the only point of stillness and silence within that other room, is slim and handsome in an older guy sort of way. He watches Buffy with warm, brown eyes.

Buffy wishes that she could ask him what he sees.

"If you even remember what it's like to be fifteen, which I sort of doubt," Buffy says to the dark-haired man in front of her. "I doubt you have much experience about what it's like to be me."

"I remember a thing or two," Rossi says, calm and comfortable in a way that none of the others behind the window are. For a moment, his unruffled amusement reminds Buffy of Merrick's unruffled amusement at her antics. It hurts Buffy's heart. "Do you think that I don't know you because I've never been a blonde in L.A. or co-captained a cheerleading squad or won an underage beauty pageant?"

"Don't forget that I was also on the homecoming court and a member of the planning committee for the Spring Fling," Buffy says flippantly. "I bet you haven't done those things, either."

A smile flickers across Rossi's placid face and is gone as if it never was.

"I've never killed a human being, either."

"Neither have I," Buffy says firmly, her valley girl mask falling away for a moment. She hauls it back into place as quickly as possible. Buffy looks up at Rossi through her lashes and puts on her best Sexy Pouty Face. "I'm not bad. I'm just drawn that way."

"Who Framed Roger Rabbit," he says, sounding amused.

"I didn't think serious cop-types were allowed to watch movies like that," she says with a grin, her flirtation abandoned as quickly as it was picked up. She fakes a confused frown. "But then, I didn't think that you were allowed to question minors without their parents, either."

He looks surprised but all he says is, "Your parents have waved their parental rights."

"Figures," Buffy says bitterly. "I want an adult of my own, anyway. Can I have a lawyer?"

"If you want," he says evenly. "But I must warn you that a lawyer will make everything more difficult. It would be easier if you just told us what we want to know so that we can help you."

"Easier for you," Buffy snorts. "Hey, can I sue you for not getting me a lawyer when I asked for one? Or for trying to talk me out of wanting a lawyer when I asked for one? And by you, I mean you personally, the L.A. police, the F.B.I. and whoever is standing behind that window-thingy, of course. I'm going to sue all of you."

Buffy may be the quintessential valley girl but she is a red-blooded American old enough to understand the power of a litigation, real or threatened. The power of the courts does not let her down now. An attorney is assigned and someone from Child Services is appointed to her case. The F.B.I. or the police or whoever finally lets her go with no charges filed.

Buffy does not speak with Supervisory Special Agent Rossi again. But she remembers him, thinks about that outrageous statement about knowing her better than she knows herself. Buffy is not usually one for extracurricular reading but she makes an exception for one of his books, then another, and then the rest of them. And, yeah, she has to look up practically every other word but his books are interesting enough to be worth the extra effort.

Giles is super impressed by her secret interest in psychology. Xander and Willow, who are both busy with their own things, never discover her interest in it. (Considering Willow's relationship with her parents, their ignorance is probably for the best.)

SSA Rossi changes Buffy's life, if not in the way that he had intended. Buffy has no intention of ever letting him know.

Chapter Text

When the door to her interrogation room swings open, Willow startles and squeaks. Then her face goes hot with embarrassment because the man in the doorway is not all muscle-y like the guy who took Xander or quietly scary like the dark-haired man that claimed Oz. This F.B.I. agent is tall and skinny with mussed brown hair, a sharp chin, and big hands. Noticing his hands reminds Willow of something that Buffy had once said about men with large hands and her face flushes again but for different reasons.

"Sorry!" the man says as he pulls his messenger bag over his head. He fumbles his bag, drops it, and then bends down to rescue it from the dirty linoleum floor. By the time he awkwardly slides into the seat across from her, Willow is not afraid of him at all. In point of fact, she has mentally dubbed him Agent Puppy Face and intends to refer to him as such when she tells Buffy about this. (After she finishes getting back at Buffy for leaving, of course.)

"I'm Dr. Reid with the F.B.I.," says Agent Puppy Face as he digs through his bag for something. Willow, who is staring at the crown of his head, very briefly wrestles with the accuracy of his handle. She decides to stick with it since Doctor Puppy Face just does not have the same ring to it as Agent Puppy Face.

"Ah!" exclaims Agent Puppy Face, making a little happy noise as he finds a dark green folder with the F.B.I. insignia stamped onto its cover. He plops it onto the table between them and puts his messenger bag into the seat next to him. Opening it he says, "So, you're Willow Rosenberg, correct?"

"Yes," Willow says, leaning forward a tiny bit. She expects him to look up as an acknowledgement. Instead, he keeps his eyes firmly glued to the page in front of him.

My mom could write a whole series of best-sellers off of this guy, Willow decides as she gives up on eye contact and instead strains forward to sneak a peek into her file. She can just barely see an upside down picture of herself. Geez, I look terrible. I bet they took it while I was unconscious in the hospital. Would they be mad if I hacked their system and swapped it out for a better one? Fair's fair, after all.

"In your statement, you say that she did not kill the Jamaican national, Kendra Young?" he asked without ever looking up from his report.

"Correct," Willow says crisply. Agent Puppy Face startles and edges back from her, bending the top of the folder up to hide the file's contents. "Buffy would never have hurt Kendra. She loved her."

Agent Puppy Face darts a sudden, startled look toward Willow's face. His cheeks are pink and he has bags under his eyes.

Brown eyes, Willow thinks and then realizes what he must be thinking. She flushes with what feels like every drop of blood in her body and yelps, "Not like that! Like - like sisters! Or - or best friends. But not like that!"

"Are you certain?"

"Yes," Willow says firmly, hesitates, and then adds, "Even though I think that Kendra had maybe, possibly, sort of wanted to... be like that with Buffy."

"What makes you think that Kendra Young wanted a relationship with Buffy Summers?"

"Because I know a crush when I see one," Willow replies with only a tiny trace of bitterness. "But Kendra was totally in the friends-slash-sisters-slash-BFFs zone."

Willow knew what that looked like too, since she usually ended up there herself.

First with Jesse then with Xander and Buffy. No, wait, not with Buffy. That was - was a different second place. The second to Kendra in the friends-slash-sisters-slash-BFFs zone, which is like being second to Cordelia with the boys which is how I got that all confused and - and wouldn't they have been pretty together? Buffy and Kendra, not Cordelia and the boys. Or, well, maybe Buffy and Cordelia too. But Buffy was always so hung up on-

"Miss Rosenberg!"

"Sorry!" Willow yelps, jerking. Her reflection in the mirror, probably one-way glass, startles too. It is pale with wide eyes and  blown pupils. "What were we talking about?"

"In your opinion, did Miss Summers know about Miss Young's crush?"

"No, I don't think Buffy ever even noticed it," Willow replied. "Which was silly since Kendra gave her a really nice stake and that holy sword and-"

"Stake?" asked Agent Puppy Face with a frown. "Sword?"

"Oh!" Willow gasped, suddenly feeling panicked. "Like the kind that you eat at a steakhouse! With a drink with a little plastic sword in it! But I'm sure that it was a virginal drink, no alcohol at all, no sireee, bob! That's a funny saying, no sireee, bob? How do you think that Bob got all mixed up in-"

"Miss Rosenberg!" he snapped, his voice raised. Agent Puppy Face looked aggrieved.

Willow shut up.

"In your statement, you said that your attacker was a pale brunette woman with blue eyes," he reads and then looks up at her.

Willow stares back at him.

"Is that correct?" he asks, a note of annoyance in his tone.

Frowning at him, Willow says, "Yes. She was wearing a white dress from the eighteenth century. And her eyes were crazy eyes. And she hurt me, Giles, Oz, and Xander and she killed Kendra. Do you have all of that written down?"

"Most of it," Agent Puppy Face says. "That seems like a lot of physical activity for one woman."

Willow, who is helpfully waiting for Agent Puppy Face to make the appropriate notes in her file, tries to look encouraging in case he is embarrassed about his bad handwriting like Xander is.

"Was she alone?" he asks.

"Aren't you going to write the notes?" she finally asks.

"No." Off of her look he clears his throat, looks down, and makes a huge production of rearranging his stupid file. Finally he looks up at her and says, "I have an eidetic memory?"

"Big whoop. So do I. So does my boyfriend. In fact, who doesn't have one?" Willow replies and then sends a mental apology to Xander, Cordelia, and Giles. Buffy's inherent skill at all things violent, Willow suspects, is a kind of eidetic memory, except physical where hers (and Oz's and probably this guy's) are mental. (This theory, which Willow is going to prove someday, came from watching Kendra, who practiced and drilled until her every moment was crisp and precise. Kendra put as much effort into being the Slayer as Buffy puts into appearing normal.)

Feeling greatly daring, Willow taps the tip of her forefinger against the top of her shiny new F.B.I. file. "Now make the appropriate notes. I promise that I won't make fun of your handwriting."

"Wait, you have an eidetic memory, too?" Agent Puppy Face asks, finally sounding interested in something that Willow has to say. Well, too bad. He is not her mother and she does not have to discuss how her brain works with him. "Do you realize how low the probability is of two people with eidetic memories actually meeting? And then for those two people to meet a third person with the same gift?"

"It's less than the chances of two left-handed people meeting and greater than the average person's chances of meeting a killer robot."

"Have you ever actually met, or even seen, a killer robot?" he asks, the ghost of a smile twitching around his lips.

"One," Willow says distractedly. "I don't see any writing going on, mister."

"I'm not really supposed to-"

"It's my permanent record! I can give you permission to write in it if I want to. And I do want you to. Write in it, that is."

Willow makes her resolve face at him.

Agent Puppy Face sighs but he makes the appropriate notes in her file. As he writes, Willow says, "And she wasn't alone. She had minions. Ugly ones. Very fast. Make sure to write that down, too."

"Will do."

Willow decides that she likes Agent Puppy Face, even if he's a bit slow sometimes and has an unnatural bias against Buffy. She figures that she can probably sort that out before they leave the room.

She's going to try to fix it, at any rate. Buffy is not going to go to jail for something that she did not do, not on Willow's watch. No siree. She shoots an extra fierce Resolve Face at Agent Puppy Face. When he looks suitably cowed, Willow settles in to have a long talk with this silly F.B.I. agent.

Agent Puppy Face has no idea who he is messing with.

Chapter Text

When Buffy hears that Agent Rossi is going to have reading from his newest book in Los Angeles, Buffy makes the time to attend. She goes, she sits at the back of the room, and she enjoys the evening. And, okay, she maybe studies Rossi. Buffy decides that he looks good.

She is on her way back from Agent's Rossi's reading when the government goons pick her up. Buffy lets them. It just figures that the Initiative would find ways to complicate her life even after it was disgraced, disbanded, and dissolved.

She soon finds herself sitting in the passenger's seat of a rental car with a man who is old enough to be her father and maybe a little older than that. He has a large nose, deep-set black eyes, and a mouth that turns down at the corners. He introduces himself as Supervisory Special Agent Jason Gideon. Buffy recognizes the name. She has read some of his books.

"Great," Buffy groans, despite feeling a secret thrill of excitement at meeting the Jason Gideon. "I recognize you. You're from the FB.I.'s Behavioral Analysis Unit. Going to accuse me of being a serial killer again?"

In retrospect, the fact that she, the Slayer, was accused of committing Lothos' murders is amusing in an ironic sort of way. At the time, not so much.

"No," he says with a smile that never reaches his eyes. "We're here just to talk."

"Yeah, right," Buffy scoffs. "You're probably recording this or looking for a confession or whatever."

"No recordings and no confessions," Gideon says. "The nature of whatever government agency you're involved with is so secret that nothing you say will leave this car. I'm simply to talk to you, determine your mental and emotional state, and write a report that will probably be destroyed within a week of its creation. And I assure you, there will be nothing specific in my report."

"What if I don't want to talk to you?"

"That's a valid choice. I can wait as long as it takes."

Buffy considers leaving, no human could stop her if she really intended to, but she is sort of interested by this F.B.I. agent, despite herself. It still takes twenty-seven minutes for Buffy to think of something that she wants to know badly enough that she would be willing to discuss it with a stranger.

"Hey, you study brains and how they work. What do you know about brain tumors?" Buffy asks. "Like, when they press against things and- and then you do things that you maybe wouldn't've done otherwise. Are those your real feelings? Or are they just crazy bursts of electricity in your brain that make you do crazy things that would normally horrify you?"

"Is someone you know unwell?" he asks, his tone careful. Buffy snorts.

"You know my mom's in the hospital," Buffy says derisively, looking out her window. Since they are currently parked in a mostly empty parking garage, there is nothing really interesting to see. "You've probably read the stuff that I wrote on the admissions forms when I checked her in."

The agent quietly thinks about her question for a few moments then, rather than asking about Buffy's point of interest in this topic, shares what he knows about brain tumors, especially when they press against other structures within the brain. The upshot of his response, which is carefully structured and easy to follow, is that maybe Mom isn't responsible for trying to carve Dawnie up with a kitchen knife.

"She really didn't mean what she said or did toward your sister," he says and Buffy knows that he must have looked up all of that brain tumor stuff to be ready to talk to her about it, if she wanted. "She'll regret it when she's feeling better."

It is disconcerting to know that he researched her well enough to anticipate where she might want to go with this enforced discussion. She also finds it really, inappropriately flattering to know that, for once, someone went to some serious effort to prepare to talk to her. As far as Buffy knows, no one has ever taken a conversation with her so seriously.

"Maybe," Buffy allows. "But it makes me wonder if maybe there's a grain of truth in it. Not the Dawnie being evil stuff, obviously, but that maybe Dawnie's adopted or something."

"Would that matter to you?" he asks, his interest both obvious and genuine.

For once, Buffy takes the time to really think about her answer. She is always more comfortable being flippant but she feels that she might owe this guy something for researching brain tumors for her.

"No," Buffy finally decides. "She'd still be my little sister. I love her, even if sometimes I need a break from her. But it might matter to Dawnie. She's really melodramatic, sometimes."

"Was that what tonight was? A break from your sister?"

"From everyone," Buffy corrects. "I love them all but sometimes I just need a little breathing room, you know? It's nice to have things that are all your own, no sharing."

Gideon nods and Buffy gets the feeling that he really, genuinely understands in a way that none of the other Scoobies, not even Giles, really understand her need for interests outside of them.

"What did you think of Dave's reading?"

"Dave? You mean Agent Rossi?"

"Do you still think of him like that?" he asks and Buffy rolls her eyes at him. His smile is more of a smirk than anything else. "Did you enjoy it?"

"It was... interesting," Buffy admits. "He looks good. Book touring definitely agrees with him. I like his writing style and his points usually seem valid to me but there was one thing in his latest book, on the nature of good and evil, that I didn't agree with."

"Did you discuss it with him after the reading?"

"Yeah, that would've gone well," Buffy scoffs. Rolling her eyes, she says, "If he remembers me at all, it's as the Hemery High serial killer, which I'm definitely not."

"Of course you're not," Gideon agrees, his tone warm. When Buffy turns to study him, really study him because he seems to actually mean that, Gideon tilts his face towards hers and says, "I know that much just from what we've said here. The person who committed those acts would be incapable of worrying over her mother's health or her sister's feelings about potentially being adopted."

"Do you think that it might have been a woman?" Buffy asks, surprised. Lothos was many thing but he was definitely and without a doubt male.

"No, I know that it was a man," Gideon says, his tone confident. "I changed the pronouns to match you."

"Oh," Buffy says, an unnamed load lifting off of her heart. "Thanks, I guess?"

"But you knew who it was back then, didn't you? You tried to tell someone and ended up institutionalized for your troubles." At Buffy's silence, he adds, "The case is still open. Presumably, if he isn't murdering people in L.A., he's murdering them somewhere."

"He's not," Buffy says firmly and then shrugs. She turns to look out her own window. "I'm not admitting to anything but, hypothetically, imagine that you're fifteen and you can't outrun this guy, won't join him, and refuse to let him murder you. And none of your adults will help you because they're busy with their stuff and you framed your whole, crazy problem in the worst way possible and got yourself locked in an institution. Hell, you're just lucky that they didn't throw away the key."

"The fire in the gym," Gideon says, his tone surprised. "You knew that he would come for you during the dance, didn't you?"

Buffy shrugs, feeling restless, and says, "In this hypothetical, it maybe wasn't the first time he'd tried to nab you. And, after he failed a few times, he blabbered something about destiny bringing you together and how you'd make an excellent dark queen. Which was totally a world of ick, by the way. He was practically ancient and hygiene was definitely not his top priority. It wasn't even in his top ten, if you catch my drift. Anyway, you knew the way his mind worked well enough to have a pretty good idea of when push would come to shove. So, hypothetically, you signed up to help with the Spring Fling. And, if some of the decorations that you purchased were really fucking flammable, well, they were pretty and no one's supposed to smoke on school grounds, anyway, so what's the big, you know?"

"Especially not the mice," Gideon says grimly as he shifts in his seat, the leather seat creaking as he redistributes his weight. When Buffy turns around to look at him, Gideon has his wallet out and open. He is looking down at pictures of children, men, and women who are obviously not related to him, as if to remind himself of something. He suddenly looks fragile to Buffy, as if he might shatter all over the front seat of his rental car.

People that he's saved, Buffy thinks, surprised, because it had never occurred to her to take trophies.  (Taking and reusing weapons counts as recycling.) Talismans against failure or trophies? Both? He takes them just like-

"Whatever you're thinking," Gideon says, his voice the barest croak of sound. "It's probably true."

Tensing, Buffy looks up from the carefully preserved pictures in Gideon's battered wallet and into Gideon's face. In him, Buffy sees a mirror, but darkly wrought.

Giles and the Scoobies all focus on the mystically chosen protector of humanity aspects of her calling but there are other, less palatable sides to her nature. When she is away from their all too judgmental eyes, Buffy is a ruthless hunter, tracker, and slaughterer of her chosen prey. Their pain, their fear, their suffering mean nothing to her. She has force-fed vampires burning crosses, tricked them into drinking holy water, torn off their heads, and slowly killed them with pencils, all with a song in her heart and a grin on her lips. In  her own, less obvious way, Buffy is as inhuman as those that she kills. No matter what she intimates to her friends, family, lovers, Buffy enjoys her status as an apex predator. She lives for it, the same as Spike, as Adam, as this man, who hunts his own kind.

The trick to successfully living in a society is to keep her aggressions firmly pointed in the correct directions or, failing that, not end up like Faith. Buffy has found her balance and made her peace. She will never, ever deliberately kill a human. But that does not mean that she has to save them all, either. And just by looking at him in this moment, Buffy knows that this man, this Supervisory Special Agent Jason Gideon of the Behavior Analysis Unit, has found his balance and made his peace with it. He has his rituals, his chosen prey, and his trophies to hold his memories.

As Buffy idly wonders if Gideon has ever killed one of his UnSubs, Gideon's mouth curves in the barest of smiles. There is nothing pleasant in it.

"I have their pictures in frames all over my office," he says quietly. "A painting done by one of them hangs across from my desk. I keep journals of notes on these cases and what happened afterwards on my bookshelves, in plain view of anyone who would care to look. I enjoy my job and I am the best at what I do. And yet, in over thirty years, you are the first person to look into me and understand why."

"It takes one to know one," Buffy says lightly. Deliberately changing the subject to anything else, Buffy says, "Hey, have you read Agent Rossi's newest book?"

"Yes," he says, looking more there. The line of his mouth relaxes and the delicate skin around his eyes eases. Gideon closes his wallet. "Professional curiosity. And Dave's an old friend."

"Well, he seems to have this theory that everything is all part of some cosmic battle of good versus evil and, like, everything that we do counts in the ledger on one side or the other, you know? And, at the end of everything, there's going to be some huge tally and one side gets to win."

"I remember that part," Gideon says. "It was implied in the chapter about the origins of serial killers and their individual motivations. I didn't think that Dave's personal beliefs would be so obvious to someone who didn't know him well."

"Lucky guess?" Buffy says with a shrug. Gideon's answering smile is thin, polite, and entirely disbelieving. "Anyway, I think he's wrong. I don't think that whoever is in charge is wasting time with keeping notes. I think that, ultimately, fighting against the dark, evil, whatever you want to call it is pointless. It doesn't change anything and you never really win. The bad just keeps coming back and, if you're lucky, you defeat it and live to fight another day. But you do it anyway because there're things and people in this world worth fighting and maybe dying for. And, sometimes, it's fun. And I think that, at the end of everything, that's what's going to matter most."

The silence that settles between them when Buffy finishes is as delicate and lethal as falling snow.

"That's one of the most depressing thing that I've ever heard," Gideon says reflectively. "But very noble. And incredibly brave."

"Thank you?"

"If I ever come to believe that, I'll have to retire," he adds. "Immediately."

"Entirely?"

"Cold turkey."

"Maybe you could write more books and do tours," Buffy suggests, remembering those awful weeks before her eighteenth birthday. Summers were pretty dire, too. "Warm turkey's always better."

"That's a horrible metaphor," Gideon says even as he smiles.

When he changes the subject to art, Buffy is more than willing to follow his lead. After that, the conversation is mostly pleasant as they both work to avoid darker topics. When they part, Gideon promises to recommend her to the academy, any of them, really, if she ever decides to apply to one.

Buffy leaves Agent Gideon's car feeling happy and warm.

Chapter Text

After she resigns from the B.A.U., Elle transfers to the F.B.I.'s Cleveland branch for a new beginning. She likes it there. In Cleveland there is enough weirdness that Elle gets to use all of her skills, both those developed during her time at the B.A.U. and those that she used before it.

Two years after her transfer, Elle reclaims her mantle as the number one closer in her branch. In her fourth year in the Cleveland office, when she is on the cusp of keeping her title for the second year running, Elle becomes aware of two things. Firstly, that a serial killer has been operating in the city for a long time. And secondly, that a pack has taken up shop in Cleveland. The signs are subtle but, if an observer knows what to look for (and Elle does), then they are there.

For Elle, it begins when she inherits the unsolved murder of a fourteen-year-old Jane Doe from a retiring agent. The seventy-seven year old case is one that he, in turn, had inherited from a previous field agent. The other agent had taken it with him from his previous posting as a local cop. The details of the girl's murder are so bizarre, so grotesque, that two men have faithfully worked at it across the spans of their careers. Reading the case file, Elle knows that it will haunt her career, too.

Two days after her predecessor's retirement, while skimming files at a local prescient for something else entirely, Elle stumbles across a break in the cold case. Three weeks ago, another teenager named Martha White, age fifteen, was abducted from her dorm room at a local all girls boarding school. She turned up a week later, dead. The details of her murder are identical to the details in Elle's cold case save for the location of the dump site. Martha White and Jane Doe were dumped in entirely different parts of the city.

Serial killer, Elle thinks. Still active or coming out of hibernation? But, if it is the same UnSub, that person would be too old to control the victim by himself. So a longtime serial killer possibly coming out of hibernation with a helpmate, perhaps?

She wishes for Garcia's skills as a technical analyst, squashes that thought, and instead arranges for a copy to be made of Martha White's file.

After work, Elle visits Martha White's boarding school which turns out to be on Cleveland's east side in one of the live-work zones. Several old industrial buildings have been transformed into a single, massive complex around an enormous square of cleared ground. A plaque in front of the school proclaims it to be The Kendra Young Preparatory Academy.

The headmaster of the boarding school is a man named Robin Wood. A few quick words with his secretary produces an informal meeting with him about twenty minutes after her arrival.

A blonde woman named Buffy Summers sits in on it, ostensibly to take notes. Elle does not learn anything new from the headmaster but she cannot help but notice that Summers is the worst secretary that she has ever seen or heard tell of.

The next morning, Elle puts in her request for background checks of the school's personnel in connection to her cold case.

Robin Wood and all of his staff check out as having no criminal records save for the P.E. teacher, a woman named Faith Lehane. From what Elle can see of it, Lehane's record is at least as long as Elle's arm. (The parts that she cannot see have been sealed or expunged. It makes her long once again for Garcia's technical genius and flexible understanding of legalities.) All of Lehane's later crimes, including robbery, murder, and escaping prison, have been pardoned by the governor of California.

Elle begins making the necessary inquiries as to the why of Faith Lehane's pardon, working her way up the bureaucratic ladder and through the necessary red tape.

Elle is still chipping away at the mystery surrounding Martha White and the long dead Jane Doe when she catches the position of lead investigator on a bank robbery. The surveillance footage shows a squad of masked cheerleaders waiting for the bank to open. As soon as the front doors are unlocked, they go inside, flip the sign to 'Closed' again, and murder the tellers. The girls shoot the tellers, empty the tills, and break into the vault. The footage makes it look like they work together to tear the vault's door off of its hinges. They break into about six dozen safety deposit boxes, seemingly at random, and leave.

The girls' cheerleading uniforms all seem to come from a local high school. They all carry excellent firearms. And they are all blonde, the same height, and approximately the same weight. They are all wearing white skull masks with red stripes on their left sides.

Elle traces the masks to an online anime vendor out of Hong Kong and the uniforms back to a theft at a local public high school that had been brushed off as a senior prank. She looks into the weapons angle and comes up lucky with a daytime robbery and murder at a local gun shop.

A month ago, which places the event about two weeks after Martha White's body turned up in a local park, a gun shop was invaded at lunchtime. The shop's clerk was killed quickly with a single, long cut across his throat and then meticulously sliced to ribbons. (Elle is glad of that for the clerk's sake.) What must be the first few postmortem cuts showed hesitation marks but all the rest, which were made with varying levels of skill, were crisp and controlled.

Most of the shop's stock was stolen. Its inventory records, both hardcopy and soft, were destroyed. The shop's owner admitted that he stopped paying the security firm's fees about seven months ago so there was no security footage.

To Elle, looking at the pictures of the crime scene and the clerk, it feels like the timing was deliberate. The person or person involved meant to rob the place, not burgle it. He, she, or they meant to have the clerk there. The UnSub or UnSubs meant to kill him.

"And the other cuts are... what?" Elle asks herself. "Practice? Exploratory? An initiation act? And, assuming that this is where the cheerleaders got their guns from, is this a gang, a pack, or a cult? Or is it something else entirely?"

"Talking to yourself again?" asks Jones, who has the desk across from hers.

"Sometimes it helps," Elle says as he passes her a thick yellow envelope which is stamped, sealed, and marked priority inter-departmental mail. "What's this?"

"Don't know. But it was in your mailbox and since I was already in the mailroom for coffee..."

"Thanks," Elle says as she begins undoing the cords and peeling back layers of tape. The documents inside of the envelope, which are all printed on very nice, high quality paper, are basically an order from her higher ups to drop any line of investigation that involves asking too many questions about the circumstances surrounding Faith Lehane's pardon. It rankles but, since there is a mountain of evidence that the woman was in visiting a prison in New York at the approximate time of Martha White's kidnapping, Elle is willing to let it go.

Besides, the visiting cheerleading coach is looking much more interesting. Buffy Summers hit town about two weeks before Martha White's body was found. She is in a position of authority over a pool of impressionable teenagers as the school's cheerleading coach and has worked to insert herself into Elle's investigation. (By contrast, Lehane always seems to be mysteriously absent every time that Elle comes around. Lehane's violent disinterest in Elle moves her to a distant second on Elle list of suspects.)

Buffy Summers has no official criminal record but the interoffice computer system indicates that the B.A.U. has a file on her. The blurb next to the icon indicates questioning in regards to a series of unsolved murders at high schools in Los Angeles and Sunnydale as well as tangential involvement in a Jamaican national's murder. Summers is too young to be Elle's serial killer UnSub but she could certainly be the UnSub helper or apprentice. Most of the deaths surrounding Summers appear to be of teenagers, which Martha White certainly was.

Elle believes in exploring all of her options, no matter how farfetched. The B.A.U. doesn't usually allow its files to be seen by people outside of the department but Elle hopes that her old teammates will make an exception.

The cheerleading squad robs a second bank later that same day and then another a few days later. Elle is suddenly too busy to devote any of her time or mental energy to her side project. She is driving in to work when she hears about the disappearance of another teenage girl, Chastity Mars, age fifteen, almost three months after Martha White's murder. Elle cannot help but feel as if the Chastity Mars' disappearance is her fault.

I should've made the time to pursue White's murder, Elle thinks as she fishes her cell phone out. I'll do what I should've done when I noticed the links.

Elle scrapes together her courage and calls Hotch at the next red light. His cell phone goes straight to voicemail.

"Fuck it," Elle says and phones Penelope Garcia, who answers on the second ring.

"You're on the line with the Oracle of Quantico, how may I direct your call?" Garcia chirps, as energetic and perky as ever.

"Garcia?"

"Elle! How are you? Are you still in Cleveland?"

"Not good and yes, I'm still in Cleveland," Elle says and then takes a deep breath. "Garcia, I need a favor. A big one."

"Shoot."

When Elle finishes explaining about the teenage girls, Garcia says, "I'm going to have nightmares for at least a month. Thank you for that."

"Sorry. I've been trying to pull this case together by myself and it's just not working. I need help."

"You know I can't make this my number one priority since it's not an official investigation by one of my teams but I'll get it done super fast. As fast as I can, I promise." Garcia says and Elle feels a swell of affection for her friend. "What do you need me to start with?"

"I don't need everything," Elle says. "I just need enough to show that this is a real case with a real, living UnSub. If it's real, I'll do what's necessary to get the B.A.U. out here. But first, I need you to look at all of the abductions and murders in Cleveland from a period of about ten or fifteen years before the Jane Doe's murder until the present day. It doesn't matter if the cases were solved or not, just pull them all. I know that's a huge number and a lot of work but-"

"It doesn't matter," Garcia says, interrupting. "I'll do it. What do you want me to narrow it down with?"

"Narrow it down to girls between the ages of eleven and eighteen. See if any of their bodies were found and, if they were, narrow it down using the details I gave you. This UnSub's ritual seems pretty specific."

"If there are more girls or a pattern or anything, I'll find it," Garcia promises. "Oh, I'm getting another call. Bye, Elle!"

"Bye, Garcia! And thanks!"

"What are friends for?" Garcia asks cheerfully just before she hangs up.

Elle listens to the silence for several seconds, taking that in. Then, she smiles.

Elle spends the next week holding her metaphorical breath. The bank robberies taper off, either by coincidence or some hitherto unknown connection to the kidnappings and murders, and try as Elle might, she cannot find either the bank robbers or Chastity Mars.

She spends a lot of time in her favorite local police station, however, which is how she hears about the three murdered university professors.

Each professional, two men and a woman, is murdered on the campuses of three separate colleges. Like the clerk at the gun shop, they are killed with a knife. Unlike the clerk, their deaths are long, ugly, and probably quite painful. The lab confirms that the same type of knife was used in the commission of all four murders.

Elle does not know what the connection is but she knows that the four murders are connected to each other and her bank-robbing cheerleaders. And, maybe, to Buffy Summers and the cold case that she inherited.

At the end of the week, Chastity Mars' body is discovered on the front steps of her boarding school. Coincidentally, or perhaps not, she attended the same school as Martha White.

Elle goes home early, locks her apartment door, and gets miserably drunk. She cannot help but feel that she, personally, failed Chastity Mars. She knew what was happening, she saw the pattern, but she let herself get distracted by her workload and a teenage girl died, horribly.

Elle spends the early morning hours vomiting and calls in sick to work the next day. The day after that, when her hangover has abated and Elle has her head on straight again, Elle marches into headquarters, determined to crack her awful, interrelated cases, one way or another.

Even if it means seeing Hotch again.

Even if it means forcing herself to stand unbent before his scorn. She regrets nothing, save the loss of his regard, and the gap is too wide to ever be bridged by any word or sentiment of hers. Her only choice is to endure the consequences of her actions.

Two days after Chastity Mars' body was discarded on the steps of her boarding school, Elle gets awakened from a dead sleep by a phone call.

"Hello?" Elle croaks into the phone, still more asleep than awake.

"It's a case!" blurts a familiar voice. "Oh my gosh, it's a case!"

"Who is this? Garcia?"

"Don't you recognize my dulcet tones?" Garcia demands, sounding slightly affronted.

"It's... three in the morning. It's too early to recognize anyone or anything, Pen. Aren't you supposed to be sleeping, too?"

"Morgan and the others are in L.A. and they needed me to stay late to look at some stuff for them, which I did. And while those programs were running, I thought I'd finish looking into your thing and oh my gosh, you so have a big, scary case!" Garcia exclaims. "I did what you asked, Elle, and then I enlarged my time frame and went back until they stopped uploading files. Then I called people and made them look things up for me. Elle, for at least the last one hundred and fifty years one girl between the ages of thirteen and seventeen years old has disappeared every three months like clockwork from somewhere in Ohio or the surrounding states. More often than not, no one finds the corpses. But, when they do, the marks on the bodies match the marks on your two girls. Things get spottier the further back you go, of course, but there's one girl from 1852 whose murder is a dead ringer for your Jane Doe, Martha White and Chastity Mars murders. Anyway, I've sent everything that I've found to your work e-mail."

"Thanks," Elle says grimly. "And good work, Garcia. I'll call JJ in the morning."

"JJ?" asks Garcia, sounding startled. "Why JJ?"

"To get the ball rolling on this."

"Oh, no, I've got that job now. JJ's gone away and come back a profiler. So the ball's already rolling here. You've just got to talk to the locals."

"That won't be hard," Elle confides as she kicks off her blankets. The morning air is cold even through her thick socks and pajama bottoms. "We've got a pretty good relationship with them."

"I'll be waiting for their call," Garcia promises. "Night, Elle."

"Night, Garcia. Don't let them keep you up too late."

"Ha! There is no such thing as 'too late' to a woman in possession of slim jims and coffee!"

Laughing, Elle staggered out of bed and towards her bathroom. "Goodnight, Penelope."

"Sleep tight, Elle."

"Sure thing," Elle lied as she laid out her makeup. The sooner she started talking to people, the sooner the case would get solved. Those girls had waited long enough for the law to find their murderers.

Chapter Text

When they get back from the L.A. case, Hotch knows from Garcia's involuntary cues that she has already chosen the team's next assignment but she waits a few days to spring it on him. Hotch appreciates that. He needs that time to visit his son, catch up on his sleep, do his laundry and a few other chores around his little apartment, and catch up on his administrative work.

When Garcia toddles into his office on neon pink platforms, a case file clutched in her arms, and a nervous expression on her face, Hotch carefully puts his pen down and leans back in his chair.

"Don't be mad," Garcia pleads. "I know that things were tense between you when she left but this is really serious stuff. And she's the one who saw the case and made the connections and pulled the strings to --"

"She who, Garcia?" Hotch asks, even though he strongly suspects that he already knows.

"Elle," Garcia says breathlessly. "She's found a serial killer and a pack in Cleveland. The serial killer's been operating there continuously for over a century. And she says that the pack is --"

"Give me the files, Garcia," Hotch orders, resigned.

Hotch has not yet forgiven Elle for taking the law into her own hands. Even if she fooled a review board, a prosecutor, and the courts, Hotch knows the truth. He puts all of that aside in favor of doing his job.

Hotch reviews the file, approves Garcia's choice, and, rather than immediately informing her and then the rest of the team of his decision, sits back in his seat. He props his elbows on the arms of his chair, steeples his fingers together in front of his chin, and muses on Buffy Summers.

Hotch has never forgotten her.

The first time that he had set eyes on Buffy Summers, she had been small, fragile looking, and utterly, aggressively defiant. And she had been exhausted, no matter how brave a face she put on for Dave.

To Hotch, the most important moment of the interrogation had been when Dave had said, "I've never killed a man."

And Buffy Summers had replied, "Neither have I."

For a split second, her tone, expression, and body language had all been utterly sincere. She had been real. In that moment had been the key to everything. Summers had pulled her masks back into place a heartbeat later, though.

They -- he and Dave and the rest of nascent group that would someday become the first incarnation of the B.A.U. -- had missed something important. And, judging by her jagged, half-mad laughter, Buffy Summers had not only known it but also known what it was.

In the intervening years, Hotch has occasionally wondered what a teenage girl had known that a trained group of state and federal investigators had not.

A pop on her name about, oh, a little more than a decade ago had brought the B.A.U. to Sunnydale, before the entire town had become a giant sinkhole. Back then, Reid had been an agent-in-training on loan from the academy, Gideon had taken a sabbatical to teach and promote his first book, and Rossi had been in retirement. Garcia had not yet been assigned to the B.A.U. as a technical analyst so they were a group of individuals struggling to work together instead of a cohesive team, much less a family.

Buffy Summers had been accused of the murder of a Jamaican national, who turned out to be a girl of about the same age as Summers. It was not the B.A.U.'s usual sort of case, not even back then, but someone with political clout had insisted. Hotch had never found out who or even why.

What Hotch had discovered in Sunnydale was that Buffy Summers and the dead girl had been by all accounts close friends, that Summers had found the body, and that Summers had escaped police custody. When Hotch had inquired how, exactly, trained and armed officers had misplaced a single teenage girl, he had gotten blank, hostile looks and shifty, sideways glances in response.

It eventually became clear, mostly through eye witness testimony, that Kendra Young had been killed by one of the local gangs. Buffy Summers had apparently been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Back then, Sunnydale had had one of the highest murder rates in the entire country. It had not seemed like a far-fetched solution.

Hotch has always wondered what Buffy Summers would have said if they could have found her or if she would have contented herself with laughing at them again.

The last time that Hotch had seen Summers had been a few years ago in a tiny western town during that mess with the serial killer known only as Frank. Hotch has forgotten the name of the place. (Mostly, he remembers the scope of Frank's activities, wind chimes made of human ribs, and the horror of Frank's killing van.) He still has no idea when Summers had arrived in that dusty little town or why she was there or how she had ended up in that particular diner when there had been other places to eat in that town.

Hotch only knows that at one point in their conversation, Gideon had nodded at something behind Frank. When Hotch had followed Frank's line of sight, he had seen a handful of people.

Frank, who had twisted around in his seat to look at whatever Gideon had motioned towards, stared at it for a long, long time. He had only turned around to face Gideon when everyone in town's cell phones rang out with text notifications. They had all been texted pictures of the town's kidnapped children.

When Morgan and Gideon had escorted Frank out of the diner, the sheriff's husband and a blonde woman had trailed behind them. Frank had trusted Morgan and Gideon to lead him as he been half-twisted around, as if to keep an eye on the sheriff's husband... or the blonde.

"Turn around," Morgan had snapped, giving Frank's arm a hard shove. "Face what you've done."

Frank ignored Morgan until it was time to negotiate with the local authorities: the children's locations in exchange for going directly to the nearest jail and having a twenty-four hour guard. When the bemused and bloodied sheriff had agreed to his terms, Frank had tilted his head to the side, his eyes sliding towards where the mysterious blonde had been standing. When Hotch had glanced in the same direction, the blonde woman had been gone.

A few days later, Hotch had asked Morgan what had happened in that diner.

"You've got my report," Morgan said shortly. He was suddenly very tense.

"And I've read it. Is there anything that's not in your report?" Hotch had persisted. "Some little detail."

"In my report, I said that Gideon didn't seem to notice the blonde on our way in. And I didn't notice her until Gideon nodded at her but when I did notice her, she was staring daggers at Frank's back. And that's all true." Morgan hesitated then said, "What I didn't write was this: When Frank turned around... Hotch, I would've sworn that he was genuinely frightened. I know that's impossible. I know that he doesn't feel emotions like that. But Hotch... he was scared of her."

Remembering the terms of Frank's surrender, Hotch pressed his lips together and nodded.

The tension in Morgan's shoulders eased.

"And another thing, Hotch?" Morgan added, tilting his head to the side. "When he asked to go to jail, he looked towards that blonde woman. And everyone except Gideon followed his lead. Hotch, I think that he already knew who and what Frank was avoiding."

Hotch's breath escaped him in a hiss. "I think so too."

"I've asked Garcia to do what she can about identifying the woman," Morgan admitted.

"Keep me posted."

Morgan nodded.

A few weeks later, after the B.A.U. had winged its way back to Quantico from an unrelated case, Morgan had tapped on Hotch's door and announced. "Garcia's found a potential match for Gideon's blonde."

Hotch had abandoned what he was doing and followed Morgan down to their technical analyst's office.

"It's only a sixty-seven percent match," Garcia said, beginning to fret as soon as she saw them. "Because the footage from that parking lot camera was really grainy and--"

"Who was the match to?" Hotch asked impatiently.

"Buffy Summers, age 25," Garcia said proudly. Hotch's breath had caught in his throat. He had immediately recognized the name. "She's currently attending the National University of Singapore for a graduate degree in psychology as well as undergraduate degrees in Chinese language and Asian literature, which is pretty -- Hey, Hotch, are you okay?"

"Fine," he said tightly. "What was Summers doing in the states, then?"

Why did she interfere in our case?

"Search me," Garcia said cheerfully. "Do you want me to do some more digging?"

Hotch had hesitated, tempted by her offer. In the end, though, he had regretfully determined that it would be an abuse of both his power and his resources. Her involvement with the case had been tangential at best.

But it had haunted him. That exhausted child had grown up into the sort of person that terrified the likes of Frank. It grieved Hotch. Somehow, somewhere, he had failed to either stop Buffy Summers when she had been a young, relatively inexperienced offender or to prevent her from becoming a monster that even other monsters feared.

About fourteen months after the Frank case, Gideon had retired. (Reid had been crushed by what he had viewed as Gideon's abandonment of him and the team. Hotch, who had understood Gideon's motivations even if his timing had been awful, had left it to the others to comfort Reid. Mostly, Hotch had worked hard to cover both positions and hidden out in either his office or Garcia's lair.)

And now, Buffy Summers was not only back but involved in a case with a horrifyingly high mortality rate. This is Hotch's second, and perhaps only, chance to get to the bottom of things.

This time, he is going to stop Buffy Summers.

In the present, Hotch reviews Elle's case files, the previous cases involving Buffy Summers, and his personal notes on her. Hotch tries to see something that he had missed before. He fails.

Instead, he calls Garcia, arranges the conference time, and the calls to arrange for the jet. When he has a rough take off time lined up, Hotch abandons his desk and goes to get a fresh cup of coffee. Hopefully, the team's fresher eyes will see new things when they look at Buffy Summers.

Maybe I'll finally know what she was laughing about in L.A., he thinks as he walks down the hall to the conference room, cup of coffee in hand.

When Garcia briefs the others about the (supposedly) interconnecting cases in Cleveland, everyone looks skeptical about the possibility of a connection. Hotch understands. He would be skeptical himself. But, despite Elle's missteps, he trusts her eye. If Elle says that there is a connection, there probably is.

"Bank robberies?" asks Rossi, surprised. "You talked about those but I don't see how they, or the more mundane murders of three professors and a gun store clerk, tie into a hundred and fifty or so years of ritualistic abductions and murders."

"Elle swears that there's some connection between all the cases," Garcia insists.

At Elle's name, the tension in the room eases. The others look excited at the promise of a reunion with her. (Or in Rossi and Prentiss' cases mildly interested at the prospect of meeting a friend of a friend of theirs.) Rather than raining on their (undeserved) parade for Elle, Hotch leans over and mutters to Rossi, "Buffy Summers. Remember her?"

"How could I forget?" Rossi murmurs under the cover of Reid's detailed questions to Garcia regarding Elle's original search parameters. "I assume she's involved in this mess. What do we tell the others?"

"Nothing, until they've had a chance to form their own opinions off of the new information."

"New perspectives."

"Exactly."

The team skims the files and bounces ideas off of each other until Morgan says, "Hold up. Buffy Summers is a name that this office has run across before."

"Buffy Summers..." Reid mutters. "The name's familiar. Wasn't she connected to the murder of the Jamaican national, Kendra Young?"

"Yes, and tangentially," replied Garcia. "Although for awhile, she was apparently the main suspect in Kendra Young's murder. I don't know much more than that. It was before my time."

"Mine too but at the time I was on loan to the B.A.U. from the academy," Reid interjected. "Gideon -- Gideon was trying to lure me into joining the team when I graduated. Not, not that we were really much of a team back then. I interviewed her best friend, Willow Rosenberg, who swore up and down that Summers hadn't killed Kendra Young, despite the police having found her crouched over the dead girl's body and holding the murder weapon. She was literally caught red-handed."

"Who was this Kendra Young?" asked Prentiss. "Someone important, I assume."

"Important to someone but not in herself," Morgan replied. "I remember there was a lot of heat from the higher ups to find out what happened to her. As far as I know, they lost interest in the case when the locals concluded that Summers wasn't the murderer."

"She was also connected to an even earlier serial killer case centered around a high school in L.A. and the Frank investigation," Garcia said, driving the conversation back on track. "Everywhere Buffy Summers turns up, there's a body count; usually a huge one."

"Buffy Summers was fifteen in L.A.," Dave says. "She's got to be closer to thirty now but I remember her as a pretty, blonde cheerleader with the Joker's laugh. Interrogating her made my hair stand on end."

"That sounds..." Reid begins and then trails off, as if searching his enormous brain for the correct description. He settles on, "remarkably unsettling."

"It was," Rossi replies. "I thought that we had her for sure but she kept her mouth shut and lawyered up. I still don't know where we went wrong with her."

"Well, now we've got another crack at her," Hotch said grimly. "Let's get it right this time. Wheels up in three hours."

Chapter Text

Prentiss reads the files assembled by Elle Greenaway, in whose shadow she spent her first three months at the B.A.U., and then reads the department's files on Buffy Anne Summers, a girl who has never been arrested for anything but seems to be mixed up in everything going on around her.

Prentiss can relate.

Holding both sets of files in her hands, Prentiss feels like she has the bulk of the puzzle pieces but she has no idea which pieces' edges are supposed to lie against which.

The most recent robbery and murder jackets are just a few pages with a scattering of bare bone facts printed on them. There is not yet enough meat there to hang suppositions or theories on, so Prentiss turns her thoughts to Buffy Summers while she retrieves her go-bag and asks her neighbor to look after Sergio. She knows how the B.A.U. originally interpreted the girl's actions, situation, and personality but, if they had been entirely accurate, Buffy Summers would not still be walking around with an unofficial 'Person of Interest' label stuck to her folder.

Prentiss gets her affairs in order and soon finds herself on the jet. Alone, she helps herself to a bottled water from the mini-fridge, fishes a highlighter out of her briefcase, and goes through the very first Summers file again. Prentiss highlights the cold, hard facts and ignores everything else.

When she is about halfway through her project, Rossi joins her. Rossi peers over her shoulder for a few seconds then, as he moves to claim the seat across from her, he says, "Good idea. We need a fresh perspective."

Prentiss angles a quick smile in his direction and then bends her head over her work again. Across from her, Dave gets busy with his own highlighter.

One by one, the other members of the team join them on the jet. Before the pilot even turns on the jet's engine or the fasten your seatbelts sign, Reid is rattling off serial killer statistics, especially as they pertain to women, and citing famous examples of serial killers with high body counts who were never anyone's first suspect or, in some cases, ever caught. Knowing that facts comfort him, Prentiss tunes him out rather than arguing with him about the perspective of his facts. Instead, she thinks about the perspective from which they have been viewing Buffy Summers.

They assumed that Buffy Summers was the Hemery High serial killer. But what if she wasn't? What if I assume that she was a potential target... who somehow figured out that she was in danger and ran.

The thought strikes a chord within Prentiss. She digs out her folder on Buffy Summers and flips through it, skimming the highlighted portions for the relevant information.

There! The murders stop while she's running. But then why would she go back to L.A. and the serial killer? Why do people usually go back? When they've done what they needed to do or because they've found out that going on is pointless. If the UnSub was obsessed with her, he would have chased her to Virginia, China, or through the gates of Hell if necessary. So the UnSub follows her to Nevada, she somehow finds out, gives up on outrunning him, and goes home. When she gets back to Los Angeles, Summers' parents do what any parent would have done and confront her about running away. She breaks and tells then what's been going on with her and...

Prentiss flips to the appropriate portion of her file.

...and somehow ends up in a mental institution. She gets out and...

Ignoring the others, Prentiss flips a few more pages to the next highlighted portion of her file.

...burns down the school gym. The murders stop that same night. If Buffy Summers wasn't the UnSub, if she was supposed to be one of his victims, then something went badly wrong for the UnSub. Summers probably killed her would-be killer and disposed of the body in the fire.

Prentiss pauses, reviews her working theory, and wonders, But what happened between then and now? There's a huge chunk of time in her life that's unaccounted for.

Emily tunes back in to the conversation going on around her in time to take part in the in-flight meeting regarding the newest cases. They spitball ideas regarding Greenaway's murderous, bank-robbing cheerleading squad, the four non-bank-related murders that she attributes to them, and the ritualistic string of murders, which is clearly the work of a group of ritualistic serial killers. There is simply no other way that it could have continued for so long. The only questions are: How large is the group? How organized is it? And how spread out are its members?

The entire thing reminds Prentiss unpleasantly of the gypsies who picked little girls seemingly at random, murdered their families, and brainwashed them into being perfect wives to their sons. Prentiss really hopes that there is nothing like that going on this case.

Shortly before they land, Garcia pops up on Morgan's laptop and says, "Greetings! I come bearing information, my brightly-colored puppet pals!"

Prentiss can practically see Hotch mentally scheduling another 'random' drug test for Garcia. For herself, Prentiss bites the inside of her lip and watches from the corner of her eye as JJ quickly whirls toward the nearest window. Prentiss can see JJ's wide grin in her reflection.

"Some of you already know some of this stuff and I've e-mailed all of this information to all of you but bear with me and I'll give you the cliff notes version of Buffy Summers: A Life," Garcia says. Through the connection, Prentiss can hear the clickity-clack of Garcia's long, carefully manicured nails dancing over her keyboard. "Buffy Anne Summers and Dawn Marie Summers -- and yes, that is what their momma named them -- were born in Los Angeles, California to extremely wealthy parents. Buffy, the older of the two, seems to have been the queen bee at Hemery High. She was the head cheerleader on the freshman squad, won the beauty pageant, and was the homecoming queen. Then she flipped out, ran away from home, and stayed gone for a few weeks. She went home again for unknown reasons and was promptly whisked into a mental facility by her parents. Her admittance paperwork says that she was having delusions of vampires and vampire slayers."

"Garcia..." Hotch groans. "I don't suppose that you got a court order before you started reading her medical files?"

"Don't ask," Morgan advises. "It's already done."

"It's a fairly common delusion to have been specially chosen by some higher authority to rid the world of sin or, in this case, vampires," Reid adds, distracting Morgan and Hotch from the legality of Garcia's search. It would be a neat trick but Prentiss is nearly certain that he did it inadvertently. Reid is excellent at multitasking actual tasks but incapable of dividing his attention between topics.

"That same year, someone murdered a string of teenagers," Garcia continues. "The victims, thirty-two known or suspected and who knows how many unknown, all hailed from Buffy Summers' high school. All of them knew her or would have known of her."

"Also not unusual," Reid interjects. "Sociopaths are often quite charming to those around them. They're usually the last person any of their neighbors would ever suspect of their crimes. What is unusual is her gender. There aren't a lot of sociopathic serial killers that are women."

"That we know of," Prentiss interrupts, hating the gender normalization in that sentence. "Maybe they just get away with it more often since investigators are usually hung up on a statistic that can't be accurately verified. All you can say with any accuracy is that the serial killers that we catch aren't normally women."

Reid frowns but JJ and Morgan both grin at Prentiss.

"Here's a fun fact," Garcia interjects. "The corpses from the Hemery High murders, some of which vanished later for heaven knows what purposes, all turned up with bites in their throats which should remind everyone here of Buffy Summers' admittance paperwork."

"Duly noted," Hotch says. "Anything else, Garcia?"

"The mental facility seemed to find Buffy Summers about as sane as anyone else, if severely starved for parental attention, which makes sense as her parents were hip deep in a fair spectacular divorce. Two weeks after her mother sprung her from the facility, Buffy Summers burned down the Hemery High gym during the Spring Fling dance due to, and I quote, 'an electrical wiring thingy or possibly mice with cigarettes who have never smoked before and will never ever try it again.'"

Prentiss, who knows a thing or two about falsehoods, can practically feel that lie disturbing the Force. Master Yoda would deeply disapprove. On a more professional level, Prentiss admires anyone with the faculty to accept that they are a poor liar and use it to their advantage, redirecting official attention from asking the right questions or considering things too closely. It is roughly the same trick that coyotes use to lure fawns away from their mothers.

Prentiss does exactly the same thing every day.

I just need to figure out what the right questions are, Prentiss thinks. After I know the answers to those, I'll know what Summers was hiding.

"Don't tell me anyone believed that?" groans Morgan, falling for Summer's distraction with terrifying ease. Morgan has a great many strengths, both personal and professional, but he has never been on the predator side of the equation. Sometimes, his inner-fawn shines through with alarming clarity.

"Most people don't have your finely tuned sense of paranoid, my love," Garcia cheerfully replies.

"As a teenager, she was very wide-eyed and cute," Rossi puts in. "So long as you didn't make her laugh."

"Anyway," Garcia interjects, wrenching them all back on track. "Shortly after that she, her mother, and her sister move to Sunnydale, California. Their paperwork trail goes cold there. It was probably sucked down to the bottom of that enormous sinkhole with the rest of the town. The only records that I've got so far from Sunnydale are Summers' admission paperwork and her freshman grades at the Sunnydale campus of the University of California. When I looked into Summers' admittance file, her high school grades stank but her S.A.T. scores were surprisingly high. Higher than mine, at any rate. Summers' grades her freshman year were actually pretty okay. That year she had two roommates, a Kathy Newman who abruptly disappeared and a Willow Rosenberg. Kathy Newman was one of several students, mostly freshmen, who disappeared during Buffy Summers' year of college."

"Didn't anyone notice that people go missing wherever this girl goes?" asks Rossi, his tone disbelieving. "She's practically leaving a trail of corpses behind her."

"Willow Rosenberg seems to have survived their acquaintance," Garcia says. "I'll see about getting in contact with her and the sister. But, aside from her university grades and Joyce Summers' will, there's nothing until the Summers sisters went to London after Sunnydale collapsed. Hank Summers must have refused custody of his younger daughter because Buffy was listed as Dawn Summers' legal guardian. In London Buffy inherited a fabulous fortune that puts her somewhere between Smaug the Dragon and Bruce Wayne on the billionaires' list."

"Again, does no one notice the trail of dead bodies?" Morgan demands, his tone frustrated.

"Apparently not, my delicious sugar plum. Buffy used her newfound fortune to buy some real estate outside of London and in Cleveland and set up the first two branches of her schools: the Kendra Young Preparatory Academy in Cleveland and the Anyanka Jenkins Preparatory Academy in London. A few months later, the Summers sisters moved to Rome where the younger one finished high school and the older one finished college, earning undergraduate degrees in psychology, Latin, Italian language, and Italian studies."

"Making up for lost time, I see," Prentiss notes. "How'd our girl do?"

"Both sisters' grades were really good, actually. While they were in Rome, Buffy founded another academy, this time the Tara Maclay Preparatory Academy."

"All of this charity and civic mindedness sounds good on paper but let's not forget that these school cater to Summers' preferred victims," Rossi interjects. "Teenagers."

"Buffy and Dawn graduated in the same year. They went to Africa where Summers founded yet another academy, this one called the Sineya Preparatory Academy. They also went back to school at the same time, Dawn to Oxford and Buffy to Singapore."

"A falling out?" Hotch asks.

"Maybe," Garcia says, her fingers a flurry in the bottom corner of the monitor. "Maybe not. At the University of Singapore, Buffy goes for a graduate degree in psychology and two undergraduate degrees, one in Chinese language, specifically Mandarin, and the other in Asian literature."

"That seems kind of far to go for a graduate degree," Reid says while shifting nervously in his seat.

"Apparently, University of Singapore has one of the best programs in the world," Garcia replies. "While she was there, Buffy Summers opened up four more academies, one in Singapore, another in Tibet, one in Canada, and another one in Africa."

"Tibet?" Rossi demands sharply. "Why Tibet?"

"I don't know," Garcia replies.

"When you get a chance, Garcia, look into the backgrounds of all of these people that these academies are named for," Hotch orders. "And track down Buffy Summers' financials."

"Will do, fearless leader!"

"When you do, send them to me," JJ volunteers. "I'll take first crack at them."

"Sure thing. Okay, there's not much left. Buffy finished out her degrees and took both her clinical exams and a year-long internship in Singapore. Then she moved to Australia, took the boards there, and landed a job in a university clinic. She took a couple of university classes on... the Aborigines, of all things. The littler Summers, having meanwhile graduated from Oxford, joined Buffy in Australia. They shared an apartment, so probably no earlier falling out. Dawn enrolled in a master's program at the same university and is currently attending classes there and working as an adjunct professor."

"What, no academy in Australia?" Morgan asks sarcastically.

"There's apparently one in the works," Garcia replies with a bright grin. "About a month ago, Buffy Summers quit her job and came back to the U.S. The Cleveland branch's school councilor took a long paid vacation at about the same time that Buffy Summers showed up. Summers assumed the title of visiting cheerleading coach and the mantle of temporary school councilor. That was about ten days before Martha White was abducted. And that's all I've got for now."

"Keep at it," Hotch orders. "Give us everything that you can find on her."

"Gotcha. P.G., over and out!"

While the others speculate on the new information and bounce ideas off of each other, Prentiss raids her e-mail account for the file that Garcia had sent out. Using that and the highlighted portions of her files, Emily begins to draw up a tentative timeline for Buffy Summers.

She is still working on it when the jet lands.

Waiting on the tarmac are three black SUVs and three agents, one of which is a dark-haired woman with sly eyes and bright red lipstick. She reminds Prentiss of an alley cat: wild, wary, and underfed. Judging by her smile, and the warmth with which JJ, Reid, and Morgan greet her, that woman is Elle Greenaway.

Hotch, however, is cool and even distant with Greenaway, who is stiff and defiant in the face of Hotch's silent disapproval. For the first time, Prentiss wonders what the exact circumstances of Greenaway's departure from the B.A.U. were. Truth be told, Emily had never particularly cared before.

When the others finally remember to introduce them to Elle Greenaway, Prentiss and Rossi are friendly but polite.

"I knew you'd want to hit the ground running," Greenaway says to Hotch, her smile strained. "So I arranged enough resources for everyone to pair up and get to work."

"Thank you," Hotch stiffly replies. "Prentiss and Morgan, go check out the boarding school and its principal. JJ and Reid dump our things at the hotel, check in at the field office, set up our area, and liaise with the locals. Rossi and I will visit the dump sites for the last couple of ritualistic murders to get a feel for them. Any questions?"

"I'd like to swap with Reid," Prentiss says before anyone has a chance to leave on their assignments. "I'm working on a theory and access to any other files would be great."

"Okay, Reid, you go with Morgan. Prentiss, you're with JJ. When we're done with our assignments, we meet back at the field office."

When they split up and go to their vehicles, it does not escape Emily's notice that Reid and Morgan's driver is Elle. Prentiss doubts that happens by chance. She and JJ do not have an action-packed assignment and the other car will have Hotch in it.

"Hey, anything I can do to help with your project?" JJ asks after they have finished exchanging pleasantries with the agent assigned to drive them.

"That'd be great. If you'd throw any case facts you find my way, it'd be a huge help," Prentiss replies. "I want to lay everything out chronologically and see what we're dealing with."

"Will do."

JJ and the driver spend the rest of their ride discussing the climate of the field office, its relationship with the local departments, and what sort of resources will be available to her and the team. Prentiss spends it working on her timeline.