Criminal Minds Series Rewrite: Season One

A Real Rain: Final Part

There are no cars outside of the apartment building he's in, but that doesn't mean he's not home.

"Marvin Doyle. FBI. Open up!" Gideon yells.

When there is no response, Gideon gives the silent okay for the officer to break down the door. As soon as he does, you and your whole team rush inside with your guns drawn.

"Clear!" Hotch clears out the left room.

You move down to the right of the hallway, halting in your tracks when you see what's in the living room. All of his windows are covered with tinfoil, and if you're right, then behind that is foam to act as a soundproof barrier. Your guess is that it helps keep the voices out, but you know that it doesn't if he keeps killing.

"He's gonna keep the voices out. He sound-proofed the entire place," Gideon says as he approaches the window.

He peels back the foil and foam, and you can hear the sirens from down below. New York is always filled with police sirens, so this is nothing new. As soon as he puts it back, the noises stop. You look around the apartment to see if you can't find any valuable clues that might help you. You approach a table and spot a check for $250,000 on it.

"Here is a life insurance check for $250,000. It's two years old. He didn't cash it," you frown.

"He won't accept blood money," Gideon says.

"Here's a box full of flint knives. There's got to be a hundred of them," Hotch says, bringing a box out of the closet.

The tiny flint knives are stacked on top of each other, filling the box to the brim. If you hadn't caught him, then he would have killed at least a hundred more people. Who knows if this is his only box of flint knives?

"Hey guys, come take a look at this," Derek calls from one of the back rooms. You and your team head back there to see what he found. He's crouching over an old machine, one with buttons that looks like it's a typewriter. "It's a stenography machine. Look at the keys. They're all worn out."

"It's like he was trying to transcribe the voices in his head and he couldn't keep up," you say.

There are pages everywhere that were used for that machine, all posted on the wall or anywhere that he could fit them. They don't have actual words on them, just pages and pages of symbols. Along with pages of symbols, there are a ton of boxes piled up, no doubt filled with case files. There have to be at least seventy-five or so boxes. That's a lot of people to have to go through and try to avenge.

"Looks like hieroglyphics," you say.

"It's called steno. It's basically a phonetic series of syllables. No court reporter takes notes the same way so no one can translate them but the reporter himself," Spencer informs.

"He's getting paid overtime to study potential victims. He knows we're onto him. He's racing us now."

"Someone in these boxes is targeted to die," Gideon states. "We need to get inside his head and figure out who so we can stop him. Let's go. Start fishing."

You sigh and grab a box closest to you. Luckily, you can connect with each of these cases because they have every single detail in here about what they did, who the person is, and if they are guilty or not. So, for a person like you, this shouldn't take too long as you'll automatically know which ones you can discard and which ones might be a potential victim.

Your fingers rifle through the files quickly, passing by the ones you know are a waste of time. You take out each file, open it, read the first page, and then discard it when you know it's not the one is targeted.