Criminal Minds

by Max Allan Collins

  "Like what?"

  ‘‘Like if you said you’d be careful not to get me pregnant, if we ever . . . you know.’’

  ‘‘Querida, I don’t joke about serious things.’’

  ‘‘Oh? Then tell me something I can believe.’’

  Benny, casual as could be, said, ‘‘You can believe I love you.’’

  Addie sat there for the longest moment, not knowing what to say. She adored hearing him finally say those words, but even the throwaway way he’d spoken them seemed to have sucked all the air out of the car.

  When the Dixie Highway veered at One-hundred-eighty-third Street, Benny turned left. They stayed off the expressways—one of the rules Benny’s mom had laid down for him being able to use the car.

  Finally finding her voice, Addie said, ‘‘You love me? Really love me?’’

  Benny didn’t hesitate. ‘‘Sure I do.’’

  ‘‘You better not be fooling.’’

  ‘‘No way, querida,’’ he said, his voice softer now. ‘‘I told you before I don’t joke about serious things. I love you.’’

  Once Benny graduated in June, he would almost certainly be drafted by a major league team, meaning he would spend the rest of the summer playing minor league ball. Addie wasn’t sure how or where she fit into that plan, but she knew two things for certain: they were going to prom together, and she was in love with Benny Mendoza.

  ‘‘I love you, too,’’ she said.

  He grinned at her and she smiled back.

  Leaning over, Benny gave her a quick kiss.

  ‘‘Drive,’’ she said, pushing him away. She wanted to pull him to her, but waiting until they weren’t driving in a rainstorm with cars all around them might be a safer plan.

  He took the right that jogged back to the Dixie Highway and once again headed south. Addie had learned a long time ago that few things ran straight in the Chicago area. Streets veering off in odd directions all over the place was an accepted part of living in the city. She still remembered, as a child, commenting about nothing being straight in the city, and her father replying, ‘‘You think the streets are something? Wait until you’re old enough to understand politics.’’

  The answer had stuck with her because it made no sense when she was six, but now, as her government class studied how things in the city worked, Addie realized what her father had meant. The streets weren’t the only things in the city that were crooked.

  They wove southeast until Benny took the short right onto Ashland that carried them south to Joe Orr Road, then right again and back west to Travers Avenue, and a left south until the right onto her street, Hutchinson Avenue.

  Technically, Addie lived on Two-hundred-seventh Street, but since she lived on the corner, Benny liked to park next to her house on the Hutchinson side. That kept her father from spying on them through the front door while they kissed good night. And kissing good night sometimes lasted a while with Addie and Benny.

  Most people, especially those from anywhere other than Chicago Heights, immediately thought ‘‘slum’’ when they were told of the suburb’s location on the south side of the city. That wasn’t true at all.

  The neighborhood where Addie lived was a multiracial middle-class neighborhood with blacktop streets, no sidewalks, and houses varying from ranches to split foyers to the new brick castles coming up when the old houses were razed.

  One of those brick monstrosities sat across the street to the east from her parents’ modest ranch with its one-car garage and flowers planted everywhere. Houses lined the south side of Two-hundred-seventh right up to where Hutchinson teed into it, then east of the intersection, on the south side, Swanson Park spread before them, an oasis of green with its soccer fields and softball diamonds.

  Benny pulled the Tiburon in alongside Addie’s house and killed the lights. They were pointed south on Hutchinson, the park visible through the pounding rain, the parking lot on its far side obscured by the downpour.

  She caught a glimpse of the clock as Benny turned off the car: 1:15. Her parents were going to be mightily pissed. Addie had wanted tonight to be the night, but there was just no way. . . .

  Benny undid his seat belt, slipped it off, leaned over and kissed her.

  The rush she felt as his tongue snaked its way into her mouth was like nothing she had ever felt before. Heat rushed from her lips to her tongue, down her throat, extending out through every fiber of her being, to burn somewhere just south of her waist.

  His arms were around her, then they were unfastening her seat belt. Next his hands were roving all over her T-shirt, leaving a wildfire trail in their wake.

  Benny’s hands were at her back now, sliding up under her shirt, soothingly cool as they met hot flesh. She wanted him to touch her everywhere at once. She felt the clasp release on her flimsy bra and then his hands were under the shirt in front, inching up, cupping, squeezing, all the time his tongue like a wild animal in her mouth.

  Control was slipping away and even though it was nearly 1:30 in the morning on a school night, her parents less than a hundred feet away (certainly not asleep and almost certainly waiting up for her), Addie was about to let Benny Mendoza get her ready for the prom. . . .

  Not like this, she told herself as she wrestled for control. Not a quickie in a Hyundai, even if it was with Benny, the man she loved. Make it perfect, her voice said in her brain, make it perfect.

  With more strength than she knew she had, Addie broke away.

  Benny’s concern was instant and sincere. ‘‘What is it, querida? What’s wrong?’’

  ‘‘I can . . . can’t,’’ she said.

  ‘‘I thought this was something you wanted.’’

  ‘‘It is,’’ she said, and, despite her best efforts, she found herself crying.

  His arms engulfed her as she wept full tilt now, sobbing into his shoulder. It felt good there, in his arms, and slowly her tears subsided.

  ‘‘Querida,’’ he soothed. ‘‘There’s plenty of time for that. I love you. We’ll wait for the right moment. No rush. I’m not going anywhere.’’

  She pulled back from him a little to look into his eyes. ‘‘You will go away . . . this summer. . . .’’

  ‘‘Addie,’’ he said, gazing at her, ‘‘that’s just one summer. We’re going to be together forever.’’

  She kissed him again, with a painful urgency. When their kiss broke, she thought she saw someone standing next to the driver’s door, outside in the rain. Oh shit, she thought. Was it her dad?

  Instinctively, she pulled away a little from Benny, who looked confused.

  The form outside the car was definitely a person. Addie saw something come up between the figure and the car, then there was a flash that caused Addie to blink. When her eyes opened, the window shattered and Benny’s left eye exploded in a pink cloud, splashing her face like rain from within the car.

  Finally, she heard the roar of the gunshot and something else, someone screaming—herself.

  As Benny’s body slumped into her, his head a broken melon, only one eye and a corner of his mouth looking like something that had been a face, Addie realized he had been right.

  They were going to be together forever.

  She saw the pistol rising again, the small black hole pointed at her face, Benny’s voice in her mind: Togetherforever, querida. That thought gave her a moment of peace as Adrienne Andrews saw the last thing she ever saw: a muzzle flash.

  April 17 Oak Park, Illinois

  Connie had not slept particularly well. She never did when her husband worked odd hours, and now she rolled over and looked at the alarm clock for the zillionth time since he’d left last night.

  Just after five, she fought the urge to just say, ‘‘Screw it,’’ and get out of bed. She could read or watch TV or something. The kids wouldn’t be up for another hour and a half.

  But she decided to give it one more chance and rolled over. Squeezing her eyes shut, Connie thought back to those early days when she and her husband had been so
happy. Though she loved her kids and knew they were easily the greatest thing she’d done in her life, she still reflected on those earlier days as the happiest of her marriage.

  Whenever she needed to calm herself, Connie went back to a day before they were married, before they were dating even.

  They were doing a photo shoot, their first together.

  She had been the ingenue, the new girl on the Michigan Avenue block, while her photographer was the hot young shooter who was already a star and in from New York to do the fashion magazine layout. Another model had gotten the cover but Connie had garnered the spot for a well-known fashion line the photographer was also shooting.

  She wore a bikini for the summer issue, though the temperature outside the old Chicago Water Tower in early March hovered just above freezing. Her photographer wore a wool turtleneck and down vest over his jeans. He looked toasty warm while she was freezing her ass off.

  Still, he was doing everything he could to keep her comfortable and happy until the rain came. After the sudden cloudburst, the two ran for his rental car parked just across Michigan Avenue on a side street while the rest of the crew tried to keep the set from getting ruined.

  He held the door for her, closed it after her, got soaked running around the car and, when he finally got in and they were out of the rain, they started laughing. He got the engine running, turned on the heater and they sat there talking for a while, then the talk turned to kissing and the kissing to serious necking, and she and the photographer moved to the back and her bikini came off and she couldn’t believe what they were doing right there off the Magnificent Mile. Steam had covered the windows, though, and they couldn’t see out. She hoped no one could see in.

  Her eyes still shut, Connie felt more relaxed than she had in days. They were about to make love in the backseat of his rental car when she went to sleep.

  She felt him climb into the bed next to her, the mattress creaking slightly as he settled in. She stirred.

  ‘‘Shhh,’’ he said, his voice soothing. ‘‘It’s not time to get up yet.’’

  He touched her shoulder and she felt herself sliding back into the backseat dream.

  She was almost completely in the dream moment when a harsh voice said, ‘‘WLS News talk 890 time is six oh five, let’s get the first on-demand traffic report from our traffic reporter Marin Ashe.’’

  Connie hit the snooze and rolled toward her husband. ‘‘How did it go?’’

  His face was pale and he was wet either from the rain or a shower she had not heard him take when he got home. She didn’t know which.

  He looked at her for a long moment, his eyes blank.

  Finally, he managed a thin smile. ‘‘Think I got some good shots.’’

  ‘‘That’s nice, dear. That’s nice.’’

  ‘‘Imitation,’’ Oscar Levant said, ‘‘is the sincerest form of plagiarism.’’

  Chapter One

  July 28 Quantico, Virginia

  For local detectives, one or more of four murder motives figure in ninety-nine percent of the homicides they encounter. These motives are, in no particular order, love, money, sex, and drugs.

  No matter the circumstance, no matter how far afield the killers’ motives seem to be, the four basics almost always pertain: love, money, sex, or drugs. Love and sex, of course, have considerable overlap, but then so do money and drugs.

  And when a crime comes up where the motive doesn’t clearly fall into those categories, that special one percent of murders that the local police cannot solve on their own, the best option remaining, in the minds of many in local law enforcement, is to bring such cases to the attention of the Behavioral Analysis Unit of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

  Just south of Washington, D.C., across the Potomac River from Maryland, the U.S. Marine Corps base at Quantico, Virginia, serves as home to dozens of Marine Corps schools, the DEA training academy, and the FBI Training and Development Division. Also nestled within the nearly four hundred acres of woods, surrounding what its inhabitants sometimes call the Facility, is the Behavioral Analysis Unit.

  Within the walls of the blandly modern, anonymous concrete buildings, the BAU consists of several multiperson, close-knit teams, the nature of whose duty often creates a strong sense of family. Supervisory Special Agent Aaron Hotchner’s team was no exception; and his profilers were due back today from a weekend off—no duty, no on-call, no anything, just some much deserved R and R.

  Rest and recreation meant, for Hotchner, reading through fitness results, budget analyses, and police reports for one day of his time off, rather than two. Other agents, both on and off his team, considered Hotchner a driven, somewhat humorless taskmaster. He considered himself only a professional with a job that required both concentration and detachment. Without the latter, burnout or even madness could be the consequence, as Aaron Hotchner was a modern-day Van Helsing tracking down real-life monsters who made the likes of Dracula or the Wolf Man seem quaint.

  This took its toll. He and Haley, his wife of eleven years, had separated last fall. Now, they were facing divorce, their marriage another victim of the monsters Hotchner pursued. The severe tension of the initial breakup had eased some, however, and he had been welcomed to her sister’s house where he spent Saturday afternoon with Haley and their son, Jack. Three now, Jack was harder to chase down than most of the UnSubs Hotchner had been after during his FBI career. They had gone to a kid-oriented pizza place for supper, as a family, if a broken one, and while Jack played, the soon to be ex-husband and -wife had talked in a guarded but not unfriendly way about where things were, currently, with how they’d gotten there undiscussed.

  After half a day with the two people on the planet he loved most, Hotchner had gotten the best night’s sleep he’d had in months. After sleeping in yesterday, he had read the Sunday paper in the kitchen, where the emptiness of the house almost overwhelmed him. He spent most of the day in his home office, going over reports, coming out only to microwave his meals and catch up on cable news.

  For many years Haley had exhibited saintlike patience with his workaholic ways, but these last several years had included an array of horrific cases that had made Hotchner only more withdrawn and had taken him away from home for days and even weeks at a time. When he’d turned down a nine-to-five job on the white-collar task force, Hotchner had finally pushed Haley too far.

  ‘‘You can’t stop all the monsters,’’ she’d said.

  ‘‘I have to try. I’ve seen what these creatures do to families. Think of our son.’’

  ‘‘No, Aaron. You think of our son. You need to put our family first, and everybody else’s family needs to go into second place.’’

  ‘‘Try to understand. Stopping these people is my way of protecting my family.’’

  ‘‘Oh, fine, wonderful. On some spiritual, metaphysical level, I’m sure that makes perfect sense. But how do you protect our family, this family, if you’re away all the time?’’

  ‘‘This is who I am, Haley. Please try to understand that.’’

  ‘‘I do understand that, Aaron. And I do love you. I do still love you. But I have to leave.’’

  And she had.

  He awoke early Monday morning, after not nearly enough sleep, eased out of bed, showered, dressed in his best navy blue suit, and came into the office.

  A tall, broad-shouldered yet slender man with dark hair and burning brown eyes, Hotchner bore the pale complexion of an indoor animal, although spending half a day outside with Jack and Haley had added a little pink to high, sharp cheekbones. His look, his demeanor, were fitting for the CEO of a Fortune 500 company, but he made considerably less, even if his responsibilities were similarly demanding.

  Seated behind a desk neatly piled with files, Hotchner sipped his coffee and checked his watch. The rest of the team would be rolling in over the next half hour.

  That Hotchner was in charge of the team went beyond his assigned role to his nature, and it was in his nature to lead by example. Pa
rt of that meant being first in (and last out) of the office, with the exception of media maven Jennifer Jareau. Consequently, he had unlocked his door a full hour before the start of shift.

  The first agent to get off the elevator and stride into the bullpen area below Hotchner’s office was Emily Prentiss. A willowy, quietly stylish brunette whose hair touched her shoulders, the thirtyish Prentiss had been a member of the BAU for over a year now. The well-connected daughter of a diplomat, with the looks of a fashion model and the intellect of a physicist, she’d served FBI tours in both St. Louis and Chicago before the FBI foisted her on Hotchner; but he had come to respect and value her—Prentiss worked hard, maintained a cool professional attitude on site, and never complained about an assignment. Further, she’d been embraced by the rest of team over time—no small thing, as she’d replaced a popular agent who’d gone over the line. As she sat at her desk, Prentiss glanced up at him through the window separating Hotchner’s office from the bullpen. When she saw him through the open venetian blinds, she nodded and smiled, just a little.

  Hotchner nodded back, did not return the smile, then looked down at the file in front of him. He worked a while.

  Next in was the team’s youngest member, Dr. Spencer Reid. Twenty-six and a five-year veteran of the BAU, the gangly Reid wore gray slacks and a blue blazer with a white shirt and a red-and-gold-striped tie, though the collar button remained unbuttoned and the knot loosened. The strap to his briefcase rode his left shoulder, the case tucked under his right arm. The overall effect of the outfit was that Reid looked like a scholarship student who was late for a chemistry class at some private prep school.

  Reid was doing better now. A sensitive young man who hid behind statistics on every subject, he had not so long ago suffered through a traumatic stretch; one of their UnSubs (unknown subjects) had taken Reid captive and subjected him to mental and physical abuse and, briefly drug dependence. The ordeal had made Reid question whether he belonged in the BAU, but Hotch and their former teammate Jason Gideon had counseled Reid and convinced him to stay—ironic, now that Gideon had suffered his own burnout and had gone off on his soul-searching way.