Old Version of Pushing your buttons

Chapter 8

   Hotch enters the conference room once again, now Vel and Emily no where insight. Confusion appearing on his face, Morgan takes the chance to fill him in on what happened while he was gone.

   "Emily and Vel went to visit Ruth to see if they could get more information from her." Hotch nods, pushing his jacket from his hips, putting his hands in place of it.

    "Call Garcia and have her get all the information she can on Sean Martinez, Ruth's ex boyfriend. He's worth looking into, the Chief is getting us more suspects." Morgan pulls out his phone to call Garcia, Hotch's confidence faltering, unnoticed.

   "Hello, I'm Emily Prentiss, this is Vel Walker. We are with the FBI working the case of the missing cheerleaders; do you mind if we speak to your daughter?" Mrs. Dawson moves to the side before calling up to her daughter, studying in her room trying to take her mind off of the state of her missing friends.

   "These agents are from the FBI, they would like to speak to you about the girls."

    "Do you mind if we talk in my room?" Ruth asks pushing back tears.

   "Of course not, whatever makes you comfortable."

   "Thank you. It's just this way." She leads them to her room and steps in, closing the door behind them, with a soft click.

    The walls are a light pink, very close to white, decorated with pictures of her friends, posters for popular TV shows, and even a little section full of cheerleading medals and trinkets. She had a full side bed, pushed to the right side of the room, her white desk parallel to it on the left, covered in makeup, papers and a mirror. Her laundry basket was slightly over spilling, the sheets a mess and some signs of snacking.

  "Sorry for the mess, my room is usually perfect, but cleaning just... Hasn't been on my mind." She sits down on her bed, gaze averted while Emily steps forward, sitting with her.

  "Don't worry about it, we understand. You must be feeling very strange right now, and you have every right to feel that way. We just wanted to check up on how you were feeling, maybe if anything strange has happened that might help us?"

   She locked eyes with Emily, not speaking but wanting to say something. She felt that this whole thing was her fault- knew that it was even; but if she explained it they would just brush her off like the officers did, saying she needs to get over her ex, and that information isn't helpful. Vel notices and pulls up her rolling desk chair, sitting similar to Emily.

   "We were told that you believe your ex boyfriend may have a role in this?" Vel asks, quietly as if speaking too loud will scare Ruth.

   "The officers told me that I was wrong and it was someone else." Ruth gives a shrug, hoping they will take her word, but she can soon see they aren't going to drop it.

  "Listen Ruth, any information could help us solve this case a lot faster. If you have reasoning to believe it was your ex, then agent Walker and I want to hear about it. You are a smart young lady, you aren't going to accuse someone off a whim, you have a reason to believe it's him. I know you do." Ruth shifts on her bed, pulling her legs to rest under her, finally caving and explaining.

   "I used to date this guy, Sean. He was pretty normal, but didn't really have many friends, just took to himself. Well we had English three together last year and ended up having to partner for a project and we just clicked I guess. He started eating lunch with us- my cheerleading friends and our other friends - and he grew really close with them too, eventually we started dating. It was going well but then something happened to him, I guess when he started hanging out with us he didn't care for his grades as much so they started to slip. His parents were always hard asses about it so he had to start studying again, paying attention in class and not hanging out anymore. I mean he would come out every so often and try to go to the home games but he started to drift." Ruth started to get emotional, her eyes welling and hand shaking. " And um, there ended up being a new exchange student, who was going into our senior year with us, Sean and I had been dating eight months but we were really distant at the time. I ended up having a class with the exchange student and we were studying one night and um.. I uh.. I cheated on Sean." By now she was crying and sniffling, Vel grabbing her a tissue from the desk.