Never Together Nor Apart

[Chapter 52]

Hotch's POV:

"I know what connects the victims," Reid rushes into the room.

Dave, the detective, Emily and I look up at him.

"I was staring at pictures of the victims and I knew there was a pattern connecting them, but I couldn't tell what it was until I broke it down mathematically. Why are we so drawn to celebrity faces? Because there's symmetry to their beauty— the eyes, the ears, the ratio of the forehead to the chin. The more balanced they are, the more appealing they are to our eye," Reid spits out quickly.

"These women aren't celebrities though," the detective says confused.

"No, but there are similarities between them, and it wasn't until I scanned their pictures and got it to the guys at Quantico that I had a full breakdown. All right, strip away eye color, hair color, and skin tone and what are we left with geometrically?" Reid clicks a button to who the photos.

"They're all slightly dystopic. The left eye is slightly lower than the right eye in all the victims," I notice the difference.

"All the noses are narrow," Emily points out.

"The forehead has the same ridge," the detective adds.

"He might not even be aware that he sees it in them. There have been studies that suggest that we pick our spouses subconsciously, based on a facial symmetry that we recognize," Reid explains.

"So consciously or unconsciously, when he recognizes it, he has to destroy it," Dave states.

"Which means he only has interest in the bodies as they relate back to him," Reid says more to himself than to us.

"Maybe... they're a reflection. Remember what he did at the end of the video?" Dave plays it to the end.

"He wiped the tear away," Emily answers.

"Another act of compassion he's not capable of. His narcissism prevents him from that," Dave exclaims.

"In the Greek myth, narcissus was so self-absorbed that he fell in love with his own reflection in the water," Reid sprouts off.

"Exactly. He finds women with the same face, he strangles them and then stares at them after they've died. But whose image does he really see?" Dave makes it clearer for us.

"His own," Reid realizes.

*time skip*

"Most of us take the internet for granted. We forget about the texts that we share or updated we put on social networks but the internet never forgets. Once it's out there, it's out forever," Emily begins.

"Now we all know about the horrific deaths that get shown on the web. The murder of a journalist. The stoning of an Iranian dissident. Those murders are immortal," Morgan further proved the point.

"And this unsub craves that same immortality," I add.

"He recognizes his face on theirs and he kills them as a way of saying, 'this is what I look like," Reid explains.

"We think this also informs his compulsion to take the bodies with him," Morgan reminds us.

"He takes them to a secondary location where we believe he preserves them, so that every time he looks at them, he sees his own ego reflected," I continue.

"Fortunately for us, this means we have a good idea of what he looks like. Based on the shape of the victims' faces, we have a rough composite sketch," JJ hands out the images.

"This unsub is an expert with computer and home networks. So look into criminal records of men with extensive computer training," Morgan takes over.