18.2

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" Happy families are all alike. Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. "

— Leo Tolstoy


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18.2 ; GUILT.


QUARTER TO EIGHT THE next morning, Caroline had just started on her third cup of coffee when Spencer's voice cut through her morning grogginess. 

"Here's a question—" The young doctor's finger, still covered in a crime scene glove, tapped the spine of the notebook in his lap. "If a tree falls in the forest, does it make a sound if there's nobody there to hear it?"

Caroline leaned her head against the back of the chair she was sitting in and let out a soft groan. Even if she had gotten eight hours of sleep instead of four, it was too early for quantum hypotheticals. 

Sometime after two in the morning, a local deputy had found Finnegan's dead body under a pile of leaves. The M.E. had ruled his death as one of natural causes—a heart attack. Had said that his heart had most likely given out while setting up a bear trap. The old man's body had gone undiscovered for a week while the coyotes gnawed at him. 

Well, mostly undiscovered. Someone had to hide the body under the leaves.

Which left their main suspect dead before the second and third murders had even happened. So, all the team had to go on now was who has been living in the dead man's house. The team—with the exception of JJ, who was still fielding calls at the police station—had spent the rest of the early morning sifting through Finnegan's things. 

It wasn't exactly back to square one, but it sure did feel like it.

Morgan paused his search of a nearby bookshelf as he glanced at Reid over his shoulder. "What the hell are you readin' over there?"

"I was just thinking," he replied, the look on his face becoming more thoughtful. 

"Well, the unsub found Finnegan's corpse in a lightly traveled part of the woods and no one else knew." Morgan gestured to the empty, dusty house around them. "So he was able to use the house, and no one was the wiser."

"Actually, I was referring to Finnegan's wife," Spencer said.

Caroline sat up a little straighter, pressing her elbows into the tops of her knees as she took another tentative sip of her coffee. "What are you talking about?"

"She was rumored missing, perhaps killed fifty years ago. When, in actuality, she left Finnegan for another man. He writes about it in his journals." Spencer nodded to the old notebook in his lap. "How he would look out the window on a daily basis to see if she would come home. She never did. He never recovered. He ended up turning into a recluse that people in town misunderstood."

1 | 𝐖𝐇𝐈𝐓𝐄 𝐍𝐎𝐈𝐒𝐄  ⭃  Spencer ReidWhere stories live. Discover now