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myheartrevealedocs · 4 years

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Untouchable- Ch 3: The Fox (S1E7)

Summary: A Spencer Reid x OC fanfic that retells select episodes, starting in season 1, from the point of view of Lydia Ambers, a forensic scientist.

Warnings: lots of murder, including the murder of young children, swearing

Ch 2 | Ch 4

~ ~ ~

“First case. Are you ready?”

Lydia glanced at Gideon, an eyebrow raising in the process. “Shouldn’t I be? I’ve done two months of preparedness training. And I’m not exactly out in the field.”

He chuckled. “You’re a crime scene investigator. Is that not ‘out in the field’ enough?”

“I just mean: I’m not facing down the bad guys, I don’t carry a gun, I sit and look for fingerprints. Not much to get the adrenaline pumping.”

When she said that, his face turned to a serious one. “I don’t know about that. This case is bad.”

She followed him into a conference room and he nodded for her to sit at a circular table, while he opened a case file and started to pin pictures on the wall. And he wasn’t lying. They were gruesome.

Lydia was accustomed to, if not entirely comfortable with, looking at some horrifying scenes, but it was rare that children were involved in something so violent.

A family, all killed in a dark room. The scene was a bloody one, almost all of them looking to have been stabbed except the father, who was shot through the head.

Elle was the first to join them and greet Lydia, before swiftly disappearing to grab the others on the team and start the case debriefing. Lydia did her best to assess their willingness on her joining the team as each one entered and shook her hand. Morgan seemed genuinely happy to have her and JJ was automatically polite. Reid, however, was harder to… read. He gave her a curt nod and a, ‘Nice to see you again,’ before sitting down.

Gideon and JJ went back and forth describing the case: the Crawford family had been found in their basement. It was set up to look like the father had stabbed his entire family before shooting himself. Which would mean the unsub was dead. However, they had a similar case from a month ago.

Scratch similar. The exact same case from a month ago. Every detail. Including the assumption that their killer was dead in the house.

And a bonus was the fact that both families were supposed to go on vacation five days before their bodies were discovered, but they’d only been dead for 24 hours.

It was the perfect set up, Lydia realized. She didn’t know what someone would want a whole family for, but this unsub knew how to trap them all at a time when no one would go knocking on their door.

She tried to keep up with them as they spoke, but she was overwhelmed fairly fast. As Morgan and Gideon went over organized and disorganized contributors, JJ introduced a suspect into the pool. A man named Eric Miller, who’s ex-wife and children were part of the first family that was killed and who was just picked up by police after a month of being off the grid… with his kids’s blood on his jacket.

The physical evidence was fairly damning. And he disappeared for a whole month. That didn’t exactly play into his favor. Lucky for her, deciding whether or not he killed them wasn’t her job. She just had to find more evidence.

“Was any of his DNA found at the Crawford house?” Morgan asked.

“No.” Gideon was immersed in the photos he had. He didn’t look up even as he was talking. Lydia was curious what he planned to find in the pictures, but didn’t wish to disturb his thoughts.

“Did he know the Crawfords?” Reid continued.

“If he does, he’s not saying. In fact, he hasn’t said a word since his arrest,” JJ finished, leaning back in her seat. “Uh, the Arlington PD has asked us to interview him,” she told Gideon.

Reid finally picked out Miller’s mugshot and made a sound of disbelief. “If anyone could apply overwhelming force, he’s your man,” he said, catching a small laugh from JJ.

“I want you to find out,” Gideon told him. “Talk to him.”

His demeanor changed almost immediately. “Y-you want me to… talk to him?”

“Yeah. You’ve done interviews before with other agents running point. You can go solo.”

The boy looked at the other faces at the table nervously. Lydia actually enjoyed seeing it from someone so prideful, but she repressed a smile. He didn’t deserve teasing right now, he honestly looked terrified to conduct this interview alone.

“Morgan, Ambers, the Crawford house is a fresh crime scene. Once the Crawfords were brought down to the basement, they must have known their fate.”

~ ~ ~

Lydia’s eyes traced the walls of the stairwell as Gideon led them down to the basement. She wanted to see some signs of distress: a fight or scuffle. But not only were they clean, they were lined with perfectly straight mementos: picture frames, a wreath, two tennis rackets, etc. The family all walked down willingly.

But how do you control an entire family? Who alone has that much power?

“M.E. said they were all killed down here,” Gideon explained.

In the center of the blue carpet was a perfect red circle, which Morgan walked around and towards a separate smear on the washing machine.

“Sam was found here, Emily over there. So… I’m the unsub. How did I do it?”

Morgan flipped through the photos of the bodies, nodding at Gideon’s words. Lydia watched their process, knowing that if she was probably going to investigate quite a few scenes with them like this.

“Well, I had to bring ‘em down here first.”

“How?” Gideon prompted.

He shrugged, his eyes looking between the spots where the bodies were found. “I had a gun.”

“Ok. Use a gun to force them down here. What next?”

“Stab ‘em.”

“Who first?”

“The strongest,” Morgan said. “The father.” He held a photo next to the washing machine. It showed Chris Crawford laying against the machine awkwardly.

Lydia shook her head. “Chris Crawford wasn’t stabbed. He was shot.” She pointed at the smear. “The blood trail there follows his head as he slumped down and died. And there was no other blood on him or around him.”

“Okay.” Morgan rearranged the details in his mind. “Shoot the father, and then stab the mother.” In her photo, Allison Crawford was pale faced, blood dripping from her mouth down her neck and into her gold hair. The unsub had left her in the center of the room.

“How you gonna keep the kids from running away?” Gideon asked

Morgan thought about it a moment. “Restraints. Can’t aim a gun at them and stab the mother at the same time.”

“No restraints were found on the victims.”

“Because I took them with me,” he argued.

“No ligature marks were found.”

This threw Morgan for a loop. He flipped through all the photos in his folder, looking up at the locations in each photo.

“Let’s go upstairs,” Gideon offered. “See how they lived.”

Lydia took one final look at each of the blood pools on the floor. A five year old boy and eight year old girl. Had they really sat there and watched someone kill their parents in the middle of their basement?

~ ~ ~

“The yard is overgrown,” Gideon observed. “And like the roof, Chris Crawford’s car is in need of maintenance, but Allison Crawford’s SUV is in pristine condition.”

“Says here that Allison drove the kids to school. If they were educated privately, maybe the car was just an attempt to show the other parents wealth,” Morgan reasoned.

Lydia sighed. “Adds up to the rest of the house.”

“Rest of the house?” Gideon asked.

She gestured to the living room table. “These magazines are clearly placed. No one finishes reading a magazine and then places it into a perfect fan shape so that the title is showing. They’re designer names. And I don’t see any other magazines in the house, so likely, they were trying to fake subscriptions to high end magazines they don’t have.”

Gideon smirked. “Expensive furniture and a plasma screen TV. Behind the curtains: water damage,” he said, adding to Lydia’s statement. “Allison spent money on the things her friends could see and neglected those they couldn’t.”

“You saw the water damage,” Lydia argued, and Morgan went to confirm the accusation.

“The Crawford’s lived beyond their means,” Gideon continued, ignoring her comment.

“So, where’d the extra cash come from?” Morgan demanded.

“Get Garcia to check their financial status,” he instructed and disappeared into the kitchen.

Morgan nodded for Lydia to follow Gideon as he turned on his phone to make a call.

“Emily,” Gideon whispered, pulling a painting off the refrigerator, then turning it towards her. It was a house, painted entirely black. At the bottom, signed in sloppy, capital letters was the Crawford’s daughter’s name, Emily. “This painting is of this house. Strange that, for a child, it has no color. Has lines, dimensions, but no color.”

“Was there any indication that Emily had some kind of mental disability?”

Gideon’s brow furrowed. “No. Why?”

Lydia waved away his confusion with a flick of her hand. “Nothing. It would just explain her dedication to realism over classic, childish fun. I can search her room for anything else to indicate she would paint something like that?”

Gideon nodded and she left, jogging upstairs and immediately finding a door with Emily’s name on it.

The room was more than enough evidence that the painting downstairs was not typical of Emily. If her bright personality didn’t shine through her colorfully decorated walls and sparkly clothing, her collection of paintings did. This girl obviously had many different colored paints and she used them.

Lydia sifted through a couple of pictures on her desk until shouting from downstairs distracted her.

“Help me! Help! Please! HELP ME!!! No! NO!!! Please, no!”

Lydia could feel her heart pounding in her chest as she leapt down the stairs and found Gideon shrieking out of a window, a very startled Morgan watching him.

“NOOOOO!”

Morgan glanced at Lydia when she fumbled into the room, but he didn’t look concerned for Gideon. If he was, he likely would have interrupted this far sooner. But he definitely didn’t know what was going on.

His yells only lasted about a minute, before he went completely silent, not moving from his spot in front of the window. The other two held their breath in anticipation of an explanation, but he stayed there until a light came on in the house across the street. Then another. A dog down the street erupted into howls at the disturbance.

That’s when he turned around. “Why didn’t anyone hear them scream?”

Morgan looked out the window once more, to see the concerned neighbors rushing outside or opening their windows. And just like that, Gideon was off again to another part of the house.

“Shit,” Lydia mumbled. “I guess that’s one way to make a point.”

~ ~ ~

Before she knew it, she was back at headquarters. The case was close enough that they set up their evidence boards in the conference room so they didn’t have to impose on a police station. Hopefully she’d stay there for the rest of the case, knowing that she’d only be asked to leave again if another crime scene appeared. But, she was at a loss right now with what little evidence she had. A kid’s painting that didn’t match the others? And proof that someone was able to control and keep silent a whole family of four in their house for four days? She had no clue how this all formed into a profile that Gideon claimed he’d already started.

“I believe the unsub had control over this family,” he started. Everyone except Hotch, who was in Garcia’s office trying to make sense of the false wealth lead, sat around the round table, watching Gideon piece together his theory. “He may have separated each family member. He tells the mother, ‘If you scream, I’ll kill your children.’ He tells the children, ‘If you cry, I’ll kill mommy.’

“The suspect found a way of restraining them without leaving marks. Based on lividity, the M.E. estimates that the father was the last to die.”

“Which means he witnessed the whole thing,” Morgan added. “If the unsub did spend time with both families, he must’ve known he had the time to spend with ‘em.”

“‘Cause he knew they were going on vacation,” Reid reasoned.

“Look at travel agents, relatives, work colleagues, contract workers, children’s tutors-” Gideon was interrupted by Hotch’s voice over the intercom in the center of the conference room.

“Gideon, we’ve been looking into the Crawford financials.”

Garcia’s voice stepped in to explain. “Allison Crawford spent way more money than Chris could afford. They were in major debt.”

“And Chris Crawford wrote a number of checks for a series of visits to a therapist.”

This wasn’t surprising news, although it didn’t give them anything. There still wasn’t any shady business in either household.

“Allison had two cell phone accounts… one of them billed to a separate address in southeast Washington, D.C.”

Everyone perked up, quickly taking note of this new discovery.

“Did you get that?” Hotch asked.

“Yeah, I got it,” Gideon sighed. “Ambers, stay here. The rest of you, let’s go.”

~ ~ ~

When the team got back, they were taking a man in for questioning. Lydia followed them to the interrogation room hesitantly. Gideon had said that they were looking for a smaller man in stature and this guy was anything but. He was awkward and nervous, sitting with Gideon and Morgan while the rest of the team looked on from the other side of the double-sided mirror.

As she watched the interrogation go down, Lydia took mental notes of everything she could on this man:

Frank Fielding. Unconfrontational. Attached to the painting Gideon was holding. Right-handed. Sweaty. Manic-depressive. On medication. Nervous stutter. Guilty conscious. Calls Allison Crawford ‘Ally’...

‘Cause he was her brother.

Lydia could see Gideon and Morgan losing their assurance that this was their guy as Frank started to cry over the loss of his sister. His sadness then turned to anger and he started to blame Chris for killing his family.

“The rule was-- I was never supposed to go to the house,” Frank explained. “That was the only rule.”

Allison Crawford used money her husband didn’t have and was embarrassed by her mentally ill brother. That gave two men in her life motive, but not enough to kill a different family.

He explained how Chris hated him and how his phone was cut off and that was the reason for his visit. That led to another small burst of anger. He began banging his fists against the table and Gideon moved away.

“There’s no way this guy could’ve gotten into the house without a key,” Elle reasoned, shoulder-to-shoulder with Hotch, directly in front of the glass. She was right. He was tall, large, and clumsy. Not exactly prime ninja material. “Knowing how Chris Crawford felt about his brother-in-law, do you see him having one?”

“No,” the unit chief replied.

They sat there for a few more minutes, listening to Frank explain his visit to the Crawford house and seeing his sister and a stranger at the table. As he spoke the words out loud, he seemed to figure out what they were all thinking. This stranger was the unsub.

Gideon and Morgan tried to calm him, but Frank started to freak at the thought, banging his fists against his head and shouting. They were quick to jump into action, pushing him against the wall and holding back his hands. Hotch, Elle, and Reid all ran in to help, but Lydia stayed behind, just staring at the prescription pill bottles he had discarded across the table.

She hated those things.

~ ~ ~

“He’s been looking at those pictures all morning,” Elle mumbled over her cup of coffee, in reference to Gideon. Morgan was just hanging up a call and Reid was at his desk, looking over something.

“Well, I sure hope he sees a connection,” Morgan replied. “‘Cause I’ve checked doctors, lawyers, travel agents, tutors, contract workers. I’ve got nothing.”

“Why target those families?” Elle asked.

Hotch walked past as she said this, his nose in a file. “Well, to know that, we have to know how.”

“All right,” Morgan started, pulling the attention of the whole team. “We know organized killers are often skilled workers with above-average intelligence. High birth status. And in most cases, male. In the workplace, he’s socially confident. And with women, sexually confident. Every offense is preplanned. Targeting the victim is almost as pleasurable as the actual kill. These guys they’re… they’re meticulous. It’s a compulsion. Everything has to have its proper place.”

He was winding up, beginning to pace around the bullpen as he formulated his profile.

“They do exhaustive amounts of research on their victims. They watch their every move, every last detail is observed. Everything has to be written ever so neatly in a book or possibly a journal. Like, when the kids are coming home from school and when daddy’ll be home. Playtime. Suppertime. Bathtime. Bedtime. Plan the work… work the plan. This is the way that he maintains control.

“He takes great pride in his job. I think the workplace has to be the connection.”

Hotch looked like he wanted to say something, but for the first time that morning, Gideon emerged from the conference room, holding up the two paintings from Emily that he’d collected.

“Both are by Emily. Painted months apart. This one… is full of color, life,” he explained, holding up the framed photo from Frank Fielding’s house. “The one I found at Emily’s house has lines, dimensions. No color. Ambers, you said you saw other ones in her room?”

Lydia’s eyebrows knit together. “Yeah. She had all sorts of paintings: fields, trees, stick figures, other kid stuff. I think the only color she didn’t use was black.”

He nodded, assuring her that she was confirming his thinking. “I believe Emily was coerced to paint this. It’s a point of view. It is his point of view. This is where the killer stood and just watched the family.”

“What does he get out of making them paint the house?” Lydia asked, but she was interrupted by Hotch dropping his wedding ring onto Elle’s desk.

They all stared for a moment as it spun, fell flat, and Hotch put it back onto his finger. “Each of the dead husbands was missing his wedding ring. This is the unsub’s trophy. He targets a family because he lost his own, and for a few days, he gets to play daddy.”

“And he can do whatever he wants because no one’s gonna come looking because they’re supposed to be on vacation,” Morgan continued.

“Ambers, I want you to go to forensics and have them check the inside of Chris Crawford’s clothing,” Gideon instructed. “The suspect may have worn the father’s clothes, too. Complete the fantasy.”

She nodded.

“So, why kill them?” Elle asked.

“Because the fantasy can’t last,” Gideon reasoned.

“Do we know anything that actually helps us identify this bastard?” she demanded.

Lydia could tell she was getting more frustrated by the minute. She wondered briefly if Elle was naturally impatient.

“Wait a minute,” Morgan mumbled. “Chris Crawford worked for the I.R.S. and… Reese Miller was a secretary at the GAO.”

Elle sat forward. “That makes them both government employees.”

The team was already halfway out of their seats. Gideon reminded Lydia to head to forensics as soon as possible, before grabbing a file and leading the team to the elevator.

~ ~ ~

“Hey Garcia,” Lydia called as she walked into her office. “I just got off the phone with Gideon. He…” she paused, startled to find another presence in the room. “Dr. Reid, I’m sorry.”

He somehow seemed just as shocked to see her there. “Oh… hey, Lydia.”

The fear in his eyes made her suspect that she had walked in on something, but Garcia was completely unaffected. “What’s up with Gideon?” she asked, pulling Lydia’s attention back to her.

“Right. Both the Crawford’s and Reese Miller were seeing a therapist. He thinks that might be the connection.”

She nodded and began typing at a furious rate.

“Any luck in forensics?” Reid inquired.

Lydia shook her head. “No foreign DNA was found on the clothing in evidence. My guess is he washed everything before he left.”

“Here we are. The Crawfords made 12 weekly payments to the Applewood Family Medical Center,” Garcia interrupted.

“What about the Millers?” Reid asked, leaning over her shoulder to get a good look at the screen.

“No, nothing here.”

“How about pharmaceuticals? Nobody gets therapy these days without a healthy dose of medication.”

“What are you implying, Reid?”

“That everyone is medicated.”

Garcia stopped and looked up at the boy, shocked. “Did you just make a joke?”

“No,” he replied. “I meant statistics. They- They show that-”

She laughed and cut him off. “Reid, next time, just say yes, okay?”

He glanced at Lydia, like she might be able to explain it to him and she couldn’t hide the grin creeping on her face. He was somewhat of a goofball. Far different from the silent, stoic figure that she’d met in Santa Cruz.

“Now, medication normally requires reimbursement from the HMO, and since she works for the government, like you and I, we share the same healthcare provider.”

Reid raised an eyebrow. “Are you hacking into the government’s HMO database? Is that legal?”

“‘Course not. We’ll all go to prison, you’ll be someone’s bitch, and Lydia will become a hustler.”

“Oh, hell yes!” Lydia cried and he grimaced.

“Really?”

But Garcia was already onto the next topic. “Oh. Right there. Good call, Reid,” she complimented as a new page popped up on her screen. “Mrs. Reese Miller-- Diazepam.”

“Who prescribed the meds?” he asked.

“Dr. R. Howard at the Applewood Family Center. Let’s find out what he looks like. Here we go.” She did some more typing and a photo of a ginger woman popped up on the screen. “... Dr. Howard isn’t a he.”

“That doesn’t add up. She fits the description, but Fielding said he saw a man.” Lydia pulled out her phone and dialed Gideon’s number right away. “Hey Gideon? Yeah, Garcia’s got a Dr. Rachel Howard at the Applewood Family Medical Center? Small woman, orange hair, and she prescribed Reese Miller anxiety meds. It’s the same facility that the Crawfords went to family therapy at.”

He made a sound of understanding and hung up.

“Oh, Lydia?” Garcia started again. “I sent an email to an administrator at a nearby university about you starting online courses.”

“What?!” She leapt forward and ran to the girl’s side. “You didn’t have to do that! What did you say?”

“I told them I’d hack their site and frame them for stealing from their students if they didn’t admit you immediately,” she joked.

Lydia rolled her eyes. “Oh great. Thanks, Garcia.”

“No, silly! I just told them how brilliant you are and your plan to transfer to online classes while you worked for the FBI and I sent them your transcript-”

“Garcia! Where’d you even get that?”

“I thought you’d already graduated, Lydia,” Spencer spoke up.

She shrugged. “I got my undergraduate, but I had already applied to start getting my master’s degree when Gideon offered me this job. I guess experience might mean I don’t need it anymore, but I didn’t want to just drop out of school, so Garcia was helping me try and transfer to an online school so I could continue my education.”

“Do you plan to get a PhD?” he inquired.

Garcia gasped, suddenly. “Oo, you totally should. Then we’ll have another ‘Dr.’ on the team to compete with boy genius.”

Lydia laughed. “I’m not sure I could survive that. And I’m not sure anyone could compete with boy genius. I wouldn’t know what to do with it. I mean, people with a doctorate tend to become college professors and do extensive research in their fields… I just want to look over crime scenes and work in a lab. The master’s degree was truly just to help me widen my options… and because I didn’t have anywhere else to go after graduation.”

“You know, a lot of agents become professors after they retire,” Reid explained.

“Not an agent-” Lydia tried to argue, but Garcia was getting excited again.

“Oo! Oo! Dr. Ambers! Tell me that’s not the coolest name!” she exclaimed.

Lydia smiled at her and Reid was suddenly reminded of something that happened back in California, when they had met.

“Hey, you didn’t flinch.”

Lydia raised an eyebrow at him. “What?”

“You have everyone call you Lydia. Because when Gideon called you ‘Miss’, you reacted badly. But you didn’t flinch when she called you Dr. Ambers.”

Lydia was speechless. She had never liked to be called by her last name, she knew that much to be true, but he was right, she hadn’t minded the new title. And now that she was thinking about it, the first few times Gideon called her ‘Ambers’, she’d been unsure, but she’d started to answer to it without hesitation.

But how had Reid noticed? She’d barely noticed.

“You don’t like to be called Miss Ambers?” Garcia interrupted her thoughts, causing her to startle. “Oh, you’re right, Reid. She did flinch.”

“I don’t-” she started to complain, but stopped herself. “Listen, I don’t think changing my title is reason enough to get a PhD. And I don’t have the money. My student debt is crazy and if I don’t get a full time job as soon as I get my master’s, there’s no way I’ll pay it off.”

“Oh, I can help you cut down the amount of time it takes. I had 3 PhDs by the time I was 21.”

Lydia turned on Reid with a look of utter shock. “Three? Three?! Reid, I know you’ve got your memory going for you, but that doesn’t even sound possible.”

He smiled, his lip curling in as if to hide his satisfaction. She could see a small blush grace his cheeks. “It is possible. For you, too. I’d be happy to help you get your doctorate… if that’s what you want.”

Lydia glanced between the two before her. They both seemed extremely excited by the prospect, which she couldn’t deny would be an awesome thing to accomplish. But time and money weren’t exactly things she could spare.

“I’ll consider it,” she agreed.

~ ~ ~

A little while later, Gideon sent Lydia on another errand, calling her to tell her to go to the medical center herself and help Hotch search for the trophies of the suspect they had taken into custody: Karl Arnold.

A CSI team had searched Karl’s house, and decided it was clear, which meant he likely kept his trophies in his office. And since Lydia was supposed to be the team expert on searching for things out of place, she hopped into one of the team's SUVs and drove herself to meet up with Hotch.

He was already well on his way through the office when she got there, every drawer and box open and many miscellaneous objects lying around. He started throwing books off a bookshelf and she ran over to join him.

He was starting to get really frustrated. He was muttering to himself, wondering how hard the crime scene investigators had searched the house, because there was clearly nothing here. Once all the shelves had been clear, he stepped back, still huffing.

Lydia eyes searched for other places around the room that could fit the missing wedding rings and quickly shushed Hotch, holding up her hands to make her point. He looked somewhat surprised at her command, but did as she said, and she went to work, knocking on the wall along each shelf. It had almost gotten too high for her to reach when a hollow knock could be heard.

She ran her fingers along the edges, searching for a lip or hinge that might open up to the other side. The top board seemed weakest, so she dug her nails into the top and yanked it free. With that one out of the way, the two below it were far easier to pull the nails from the wall and Hotch was quick to step in front of her and assess the items he’d hidden.

There was a tangle of belts, a stack of black, hardcover books, and a metal container, colored brightly, like an old music box.

Hotch went for this, pulling it down from the shelf and opening it carefully. While he did this, Lydia looked over the books. Each one was labeled with a name, but the horrifying bit was the amount that he had collected.

The team had assumed that he picked his victims one at a time, did his research, then killed them, but he had so many families hidden here. Lydia wondered how long he might have been stalking these people without their knowledge, but Hotch brought the box to her attention.

She turned and felt sick. The container he was holding had eight wedding rings in it, all masculine. She flipped around to look at the journals again and was overwhelmed by the realization that these weren’t families he was stalking, he’d already killed them.

He’d been doing this for far longer than they’d suspected.

“Congrats,” Hotch said. It was the first time he’d spoken to her since she got there. “You just solved your first case.”

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