Unknown- A Criminal Minds Fanfic

Chapter 43- Casey Mitchelson

I was being dragged through my nightmare again for the hundredth time, struggling to recall how I died.  For some reason it seemed vitally important, as if it could stop the man from murdering me.  Suddenly a tinny jingle lurched through the four-walled stone room and then I was jerked away from the darkness to the crack of light seeping under my closed and locked bedroom door.  It was early Saturday morning, day six of my seclusion, and my phone was going off.

Strange, the only phone call I'd gotten this entire time was Reid's yesterday, and since it didn't have the foreboding Unknown on caller ID, I wrestled my arm free of the blankets, wincing from the movement because of the gash on my shoulder, to answer it.

"Hello?" I asked groggily, still half-buried in the blankets.

"Agent McDowell, there's a pick-up waiting outside for you.  You have ten minutes," Strauss's no-nonsense tone immediately shook all sleepiness out of me. 

There was one reason I would be moved on such short notice.  I was in danger.

"Copy that," I answered, immediately reverting into field-work mode as I shoved the blankets aside with one hand, flipping the phone closed with the other as I quickly slid out of bed. 

I grabbed my gun and wallet off the night table, pulling the small bag out from under the bed and adding the few toiletries scattered about the bathroom to the bag where I had also thrown the phone and my wallet and gun.  I pulled jeans on and shoved my feet into my boots, sans socks, scooping up my jacket on the way out the side door.

In seconds I was in the backseat of a nondescript sedan, staring at the back of the two heads of an agent I didn't recognize and Strauss.

"Did you find him or did he find me?" I asked immediately.

The car pulled away from the curb and the agent in the front seat started driving down the street that was as gray as the lightening dawn.

Strauss turned to look at me, her face virtually expressionless but still somehow radiating an air of pissed-offedness.

"Agent Reid compromised your alibi.  You're being transferred to California on a deep cover assignment and will not have contact with anyone from the BAU until further notice," she answered succinctly.

Before I could stop myself, I asked, "Is he suspended?  Cause I convinced him to show it to me, he wasn't going to."  Technically it wasn't a lie, but lucky for me Strauss wasn't a profiler.

Not so lucky though considering she didn't seem to care whose fault it was, and even if she did, it's not like I'd get a straight answer.

Instead she repeated, "You are not allowed to have contact with anyone from the BAU.  Especially Agent Reid.  The nature of your relationship is dangerous to the safety of everyone involved, including your own team."

She still hadn't answered either of my questions, but I asked another one, though flatly: "So I get to move all the way across the country?"

"Yes."

I sighed and dropped back in the seat, glancing out the tinted windows at the farms, fields, and forests whizzing past.

The rest of the day was a blur, but I was too numb to care.  Though I had pestered Strauss about it, she wouldn't tell me a thing about their search for my stalker other than that they hadn't found him yet, so moving across the country via two cars, a stop at another safe house to completely strip me of my identity, and then a plane ride to California did nothing to reassure me Matthew Lewis wasn't lurking around a corner to finally finish the job.

Another cab ride got me to my 'new' apartment in Sacramento where I met with the landlord.  After scribbling my name on the lease, he handed over the key and Casey Mitchelson, small town girl looking to make it big in Cali, was now the new resident of apartment 2B.

The next day I got a job at a strip club--I was not one of the performers, just one of the waitresses, but the best cover was always something anyone who actually knew you would deem impossible for you to do--and SA Charlie McDowell of the BAU was no more.

The reason I got a job at this particular strip club in a shitty part of town was because the FBI was trying to bust a sex trafficking ring.  Intel claimed it was run by the owner of this particular club as well as the owners of various other sketchy joints in the immediate vicinity.  The best way in was through, so there I was pretending to be a naïve blond.  Literally, they'd cut and dyed my hair, bought me some cheap make-up, and a whole new small wardrobe suitable for an innocent country girl, complete with cutesy blouses and hand-me-down jeans. 

I had to resist the urge to puke in my mouth every time I got dressed in the morning, but hey, at least I was living again.  Someone else's life, but that was better than what my own could currently offer me. 

One week later, I had discovered two things.  Creepy sleazeballs gave me their number a lot more often now that I was blond and living in a not-all-Hollywood-and-sunshine part of California, and there was maybe two people on the entire staff at the strip club that I could reasonably trust.  One was Steve, the ex-biker gang bartender with an affinity for his three-legged cat Tippy and threatening to beat the living daylights out of any guy who even so much as looked at Casey Mitchelson wrong.  The other was Bambi, one of the regular performers who was actually a single mom named Danielle.  She wasn't much older than me but had a six-year-old son whom she loved to death.

Not that any of those things helped me in trying to uncover a sex trafficking ring, but it was better than nothing.  The first step to a deep cover op was to make allies, gain people's trust so they don't think you're actually spying on them.  Or at least that's what the textbook said, since this was only my second undercover operation since I'd started my law enforcement career.  The hard part was that what worked in theory almost never worked in execution.