memento vivere - supernatural & criminal minds

chapter 1

Chapter 1
Disconnect

“Jude?”

“Jesus-” Jude recoiled as a hand brushed her shoulder. Her book tumbled to the floor and she slipped her headphones around her neck. “Noise-canceling headphones, Spencer,” she reminded him, spinning her chair around. “You gotta approach from the front, we’ve been over this.”

“Sorry,” Spencer stooped to collect her book - The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde. “Guess I should know better after James-”

“Not that again,” Jude snatched the book back, tucking it and the headphones into her bag. “I still feel bad about it.” James Thompson was in the same graduating class of the FBI academy as Jude and Spencer. He’d made the mistake of tapping her on the shoulder in the library and had War and Peace thrown at him with such force that he’d needed six stitches in his forehead. It had been a hard copy.

“Given the fact that he still has a scar, I’m pretty sure James has regrets too. But-” he cut her off, holding up a new case file, “we have other things to worry about right now. I’m bringing this to Gideon, you wanna come with?”

Jude’s brow furrowed and she stood, adjusting the strap of her bag. “Gideon’s on this one? I thought he was still on leave.”

“This is only for consultation. I bring cases to him every once in a while if we need a second opinion. Although I think they’ll be wanting an assessment of him soon enough.” Spencer opened the bullpen door and let Jude out first. 

They took the elevator to the classroom floors where Gideon was giving a lecture on behavioral analysis. He’d spent most of the last six months there following a controversial incident with Boston Shrapnel Bomber Adrian Bale. Gideon had sent six agents into a warehouse with an armed bomb. They and the hostages were all killed. 

“So what’s the case, where are we headed?”

Spencer passed her the file and she flipped through it as they navigated the hallways. “Seattle, Washington. Four assaults and strangulations in the past four months.” He steered her by the elbow so she didn’t crash into the wall. “All four women were kidnapped and held for seven days before the killer dumped their bodies. This is it.” Jude stopped outside the classroom door and passed the file back to Spencer. She waited against the wall while the door clicked shut behind him, turning the crime scene photos over in her mind. The victims were all young women in their early twenties, strangled by hand until the killer switched to a belt on victim two - trading intimacy for control, Jude assumed.

“Wesson.” Jude’s posture straightened and her hands clasped behind her back. It was her instinctive response, after her time at the academy, to a voice of authority - in this case, Gideon’s voice.

“Sir,” she nodded, her lips pressed into a thin smile. He returned it and directed the junior agents toward his office.

“They’re calling him the Seattle Strangler,” Spencer said. “Four victims in four months. He keeps them alive for seven days.” Jude slowed her pace slightly, leaning around Spencer’s back to get a look at Gideon. She’d only been in the BAU for half a year when he was put on leave and hadn’t had nearly as much time as she would have liked working beside him. He was one of the BAU’s founding members and a legend in the FBI. Jude was sure he’d seen things she didn’t want to imagine - she often had to remind herself that it was also the other way around.

Spencer pointed to the contraption around the victim’s neck. “The handle serves as a crank.” 

“Allowing him to control the rate of suffocation,” Gideon responded as casually as if he’d commented on the weather. He was an expert in death, which was both incredibly morbid and extremely admirable. People rarely committed to a job like theirs for as long as he had. They either retired or died - the job took a part of them either way. Jude had seen that happen to her father. His job and hers weren’t all that different.