memento vivere - supernatural & criminal minds

chapter 5

Chapter 5
Charown

Jude listened to Spencer as they walked through the chemistry building. He was trying to explain some multi-layered scientific theory, but for all her attempts to comprehend it, he may as well have been speaking Greek. The fire the day before had been set in the office of a teacher, Mr. Wallace, whom Gideon had risked his life in an attempt to save. Jude and Spencer had arrived on the scene in time to see Morgan strong-arm Gideon from the building, both of them coated in ash.

That evening, Gideon was approached by a chemistry student - Jeremy - who claimed he and his classmates knew how the fire had been set. This time, the accelerant was placed in a lightbulb that caught fire when the professor flicked the switch. Since Jude and Spencer were the youngest, Hotch asked them to join him. He also asked Spencer to do the talking - the terror on his face when he’d turned to Jude would have been funny had her nerves not spiked with his.

There were only a handful of students in the lab when they entered, all with their faces pressed to notebooks or microscopes. Spencer cleared his throat. “Hi- hi, guys. Uh, my name’s Doctor Spencer Reid.” He looked nervously at Jude and she gave him a thumbs up from behind Hotch’s back. “I’m a, uh…agent with the BAU, the Behavioral Analysis Unit of the FBI, which, um…it used to be called the BSU, the Behavioral Science Unit, but not anymore. They changed it to the BAU. It’s- it’s part of the NCAVC, the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime, which is also a part of this thing called the CIRG, the Critical Incident Response Group-” 

“What he’s getting at is one of you approached one of our agents and said you could help,” Jude took over, moving in front of Spencer like a shield. “The last fire was set using a lightbulb like this,” she took the one Hotch had brought as an example, “and we’d like to know your thoughts.”

“May I?” one of the students held out his hand and Jude passed him the bulb. From his eagerness to speak and the shaggy brown hair Gideon had described him as having, Jude knew this was Jeremy. “See this?” He tapped the glass by the wires. “Drill a hole in the side, fill it with gasoline or whatever’s good and flammable. Turn the light on, boom.”

“This stuff’s all over the internet,” a brunette girl with bangs piped up from the back, fiddling with the cross pendant around her neck. “Wanna know how to make a molotov cocktail that sets itself on fire? Potassium, sulfur, and normal sugar,” she listed, counting the items on her fingers. “Sugar…sugar, which is-”

“Not exactly plutonium,” Jeremy cut back in. “You could get this stuff anywhere.”

***

“Karen. I do this for Karen.” Jude shuffled closer to the speaker and gestured for Morgan to turn the volume up. The audio clip was from a recording on the tip line they’d set up and had come from the phone in the office next to Wallace’s five minutes before the fire started. “Karen. I do this for Karen.”

Their group was in an empty office huddled around a small desk with a speaker and computer. Jude had a paper plate with a half-eaten sandwich in one hand and a can of soda in the other. They’d been working nearly all day and had reached the point where Hotch began forcing them to eat. Jude listened to the recording of the staticky male voice one more time and asked “Do we know if this tape is clean? It sounds like there could be a filter.”

“Get Garcia on it,” Hotch nodded. Jude borrowed Morgan’s computer while Hotch delivered the rest of their orders and the team filed out of the room. Once they left her line of sight, she slid the plate and can into the trash. She knew she should eat more, but the smell of singed flesh seemed embedded in her nose.