Work Text:
“He’s not cracking.”
Rossi folded his arms. Scratched his chin and squinted at the unsub through the one-sided interrogation window.
“We profiled him as a grandiose narcissist.” Morgan flipped through what they’d written down. “There’s no way he’s not dying to brag about all his kills now that he’s been brought in.”
“So why isn’t he talking?” Hotch frowned.
“Maybe he wants an admirer,” Emily offered, walking over to join them at the interrogation view window.
“Already tried that.” Rossi shook his head. “Made it like I wanted to write all about him for my next book. Niente, kiddos.”
“If not that, then what?” Emily challenged.
“He wants someone to appreciate what he’s done.”
Reid stood close enough to the interrogation window for his breath to fog on the glass, eyes flicking over their unsub, marking every tell, noting the way he tried to project calm and control even when sat alone in the interrogation cell.
He caught Emily’s raised eyebrow in the reflection.
“How is that any different from an admirer?” she asked dryly.
He turned around.
“An admirer can be an aficionado from afar. Grandiose narcissists want to dominate the social dynamic, and there’s only so much satisfaction one can get from that with someone so distant.”
“He was a teacher at one point, right?” JJ asked. “Maybe he wants a pupil.”
Reid pointed at JJ. “Exactly.”
“Hotch,” he said, turning to the Unit Chief. “Can I try something?”
Dark eyes swept over him, cool, assessing. “What are you thinking?”
Reid smiled, but it didn’t sit quite right on his face. “Well, I’ve always been a good student.”
Hotch raised an eyebrow.
It went unspoken that if the unsub was looking to dominate the interaction, Reid was the least intimidating male on the team. And with the unsub’s sexist tendencies, he’d never see Emily or JJ as viable “pupils.”
“Go ahead,” Hotch said.
Reid dipped his head, licked his lips. “Can I see the file, Derek?”
“Sure thing, pretty boy.”
Derek tossed the file to him, and Reid almost fumbled it all to the floor. As it was, he barely managed to clutch all the papers trying to scatter from falling to the floor. It took a moment to reorganize the papers from their half-fallen-out positions.
“Are we sure it’s a good idea to send him in?” Rossi muttered, and Reid’s ears burned.
“Reid’s handled worse before,” Hotch said. The unwavering support straightened Spencer’s spine, and he nodded in gratitude to his unit chief.
Here goes nothing.
The air that whooshed against him as he entered the interrogation room was cold and stale. They really needed to upgrade the ventilation in here. Reid adjusted his collar, already sweating despite the chill.
“Oh, great, they’re sending in a toenail tweezer now. We’re really scraping the bottom of the barrel, aren’t we?”
Reid gave a tight-lipped smile and sat down. He arranged the file on the table, took the recording device they’d been using from his messenger bag and set it between them on the table, out of reach of the unsub’s cuffed hands.
He cleared his throat. “You remember what Agent Rossi told you about your rights?”
The unsub scoffed. “Yeah, sure.”
“And you understand you can stop at any time?”
“Doesn’t seem like y’all will let me.”
“You do have the right to remain silent if you so choose.”
“I don’t think you know how this works, punk. The old guys in suits could tell ya that. Pretty sure you’re supposed to want to get me to talk.”
Reid perked up exaggeratedly. “So you want to talk?”
“Hell no, I ain’t telling you a thing, sticks. Just letting you know, you suck at your job.”
Reid visibly deflated. “I am one of the youngest on the team,” he worried, wringing his hands before visibly stopping himself.
The unsub scoffed. “Pathetic. Where was that cute blond when they brought me in?” He grinned. “Maybe I could tell her all about what I like to get up to.”
All of Reid’s uncertainty and hesitancy evaporated like ethyl acetate, his blood boiling at the thought of JJ anywhere near the man. He figured now was as good a time as any to start flipping the script.
“Let’s talk about you instead,” he said coldly.
“Ooh, looks like we found a sore subject. She your girlfriend, tweezers?”
Reid leaned over and flipped off the recording device. The blinking red light stalled and went dark.
Outside the interrogation room, Morgan pursed his lips. “Easy, kid. What are you up to?”
Back inside the interrogation room, Reid was running rapid-fire calculations. He’d have to play this very carefully. It was a delicate balance, shaking the unsub up and challenging his perceptions while also giving him the illusion of control and dominance.
Reid leaned over the table with a carefully controlled expression and hissed. “She’s mine is what she is, so back off.”
JJ choked on her own spittle. “What did he just say?”
The other team members looked at her. She glared at Morgan, for lack of a better victim in sight.
He held up his hands. “Hey, I don’t know what he’s planning. Let’s just see where he goes with it.”
“Don’t like sharing?” the unsub taunted. “That’s alright, neither did the husbands of the other ones.”
“Dammit, Reid, why’d you turn off the recorder,” Emily said. “That’s practically a confession.”
Hotch held up a hand to forestall her barging into the room. “I don’t agree with it either, but if we go in there now, he’ll clam up. We can still get useful information out of this.”
“Not a husband, and not sharing, no,” Reid fired back, and sent a silent apology JJ’s way. Then he locked down those feelings and channeled every twenty-to-thirty-year-old white male unsub he’d encountered into righteous, repressed fury.
“You do not get to interfere with my plans for her.”
The unsub raised an eyebrow and looked him up and down.
“Plans, huh? Now I find that hard to believe.”
“What do you know about it,” Reid spat, and tried to ignore the roiling mess in his gut. “You’re on the other side of the table with handcuffs on, and you think you can teach me?”
The unsub growled and yanked his hands to throw a punch at Reid before the handcuffs swiftly put a stop to that.
“Yeah, actually. I could teach you more than a thing or two, you overgrown toothpick.”
Reid sat back in his chair, arms crossed. “Oh, yeah? Prove it.”
“Oh, he’s good,” Rossi chuckled.
Almost as if he could sense the sentiment outside the interrogation room, the unsub’s mouth snapped shut mid-inspiration of breath. He shook his head with a sharp smile.
“Nice try.”
Reid dismissed him out of hand.
“Fine, don’t tell me. I’ve already been doing fine on my own with the prostitutes.”
Now it was Morgan’s turn to choke on air.
“The hell?”
Unbidden, the image of Reid and Hotch returning from attempted witness interviews appeared in his mind’s eye.
“Well, Reid got propositioned by every prostitute we talked to, but we didn’t find anybody who thinks they’d seen the unsub.”
He shook his head vigorously to clear it.
The scene in the interrogation room was doing little to restore the earth to its proper rotation. If anything, it was wildly spinning off its axis.
“Prostitutes are easy, nobody ever even notices they’re missing,” Reid said, like it was the most natural thing in the world and not a total contradiction to all the times they’ve been called in on cases where prostitutes had been killed.
“Yeah, and that’s where you could learn a thing or two if you want to get slim legs out there. Married, higher-class women require a different caliber. Especially law enforcement.”
“Like Angela Banks?” Reid challenged. “Hardly any ‘caliber’ required there. She hadn’t gotten her locks replaced yet after that break-in gone wrong. You didn’t even need to pick it or anything. The door was practically wide open, her husband away on a business trip.”
“Yeah, well, who do you think engineered that, huh?”
Reid raised an unimpressed eyebrow and derived an inordinate amount of satisfaction from playing dumb. “You arranged a business trip?”
“No, you idiot, I was the one who staged a break-in to make it easier the next time!”
Reid forced a mildly impressed look. “Smart.”
The unsub preened. Leaned back in his chair, ran a black tongue over his teeth with a grin. Spencer valiantly recited statistics on the aurora borealis to himself to avoid thinking about the unshed dead skin cells and overgrown papillae trapping bacteria, food, and other substances on the man’s tongue.
“It sounds like you know what you’re doing,” he said, allowing a hint of admiration to enter his tone, before letting it slide towards skepticism. “But I doubt you’d be any help to me, where, you know,” Spencer licked his lips and glanced at the door, praying JJ had left and was not watching this, “where she’s concerned.”
The note of skepticism cinched it. Ego both stoked and challenged, the unsub leaned forward, and Spencer matched him for it, maintaining eye contact while surreptitiously folding his hands over the recording device and reactivating it.
The unsub’s eyes gleamed. “Now, you probably couldn’t pull jack shit off, but if I had my way with her, here’s what I’d do…”
Outside the interrogation room, Rossi watched with a mildly impressed expression as the unsub spilled his guts to the kid. It was mildly disturbing to see the look of rapt attention on Reid’s face as he listened to the monster recount all his kills, with tips for future improvement—and looking like he was trying his best to absorb all the details and commit it to memory. The only consolation was that part was obviously an act, seeing as the kid had no need to “try” to remember anything at all.
Half an hour later, Reid exited the interrogation room to varying degrees of shock, admiration, and mildly disturbed looks.
He looked down at the floor and fiddled with the folder, trying not to bend it in his nervousness.
“So, uh, he confessed,” he said, though it came out sounding more like a question.
“More than confessed, I’d say,” Morgan whistled. “That was a level of detail I don’t ever want to remember. But it’ll be good for the court, I guess.”
“I don’t know whether to slap you or say well done,” JJ said, half-jokingly. Reid turned a bright shade of red, words tripping over themselves in their haste to get out.
“You know I didn’t mean any of that, right? It’s just that, statistically speaking, 70% of serial killer victims are women and the majority of those are white, and victims aged 18-24 are often the most vulnerable to violent crime, which you could certainly pass for, and you fit the unsub’s victimology and he’d already zeroed in on you so I thought to establish a rapport that might be the easiest route, although I hadn’t expected it initially and had planned on taking a different route, but I totally understand if you’re disgusted with me, I’m disgusted with myself and—”
“Reid,” she said, a small smile flitting across her face. “It’s okay. You did what you needed to do. Let’s just hope you don’t need to do anything like that again.”
Reid nodded vigorously.
“Good job,” Hotch said, and the short praise seemed to visibly reinflate Reid. “Next time, don’t turn off the recorder.”
“I’m not sure if it would have worked if I’d kept it on…”
“Then next time, find another way.”
His lips thinned, and he nodded duly. “Yes, sir.”
From someone else, it might have been more of a reprimand. From Hotch, it communicated his confidence that Reid could find a better way.
And he would. Next time.
If there was a next time.
It’s not like Reid connecting with unsubs was going to become a regular occurrence, right?