memento vivere - supernatural & criminal minds

chapter 6

Chapter 6
Trial By Fire

“I know why the profiles never fit.” Jude, Hotch, and Gideon were in the tight office surrounded by crime scene photos and empty coffee cups when Spencer barged in. “The fires thus far have been completely task-oriented.”

“So once they’re set, the unsub is done?” Hotch asked, setting down the photos from the first crime scene.

“That would explain why the unsub still set the fire in Matthew Rowland’s room even though he couldn’t watch it happen,” Jude pointed out, standing to stretch her legs.

Spencer nodded. “Exactly. The unsub is not a classical serial arsonist, he’s someone who uses fire because of a completely different disorder. It’s an extreme manifestation of OCD, obsessive-compulsive disorder. He does everything in threes, and if I’m right, he’ll have to kill again.”

“There’s a specific type of OCD for religious or moral obsessions, it’s called scrupulosity,” Jude recalled as they followed Spencer back to the surveillance office. “If he’s consumed by an obsessive fear of committing sin, that could create so much anxiety that he’s compelled to do something to ease it.”

Spencer logged into his laptop and pulled up the video of Matthew Rowland. “Remember the night of the three fires? We saw the doorknob turning against the lock.” He pressed play and they watched a zoomed-in clip of the knob turning three times. “But he isn’t trying to get in, he’s compelled to turn the doorknob three times.”

“Well, what about the other fires?” Gideon asked. Like all of them, he was exhausted and agitated, but he’d been nursing a headache for the better part of an hour. Despite Jude and Hotch’s best efforts to get him to drink water, he ignored them. They weren’t even sure he’d eaten anything all day. “The first ones were single fires. If the unsub had OCD, shouldn’t they have all been in threes?”

“They were in threes,” Spencer said. “In a trinity of threes. The first fire occurred on March third at three o’clock.”

“Three p.m. Third day. Third month,” Gideon listed. 

“If we think about it religiously, it’s the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit,” Jude added.

“Right,” Spencer nodded, “and it’s that convergence of threes that causes the overwhelming anxiety. He eases it by performing the compulsion.”

“What about the other fires?” Hotch asked. “Professor Wallace?” Jude’s attention slipped away as the men continued to talk, bringing her back to the chemistry lab. She remembered the girl with the cross necklace, the Molotov cocktail with three ingredients, and the way she’d seemed compelled to repeat the word sugar three times. “Wesson?” Hotch tapped on the table to get her attention. “What is it?”

“I think I know who the unsub is.”

***

Jude hopped from the campus security’s golf cart and jogged to meet Elle and Morgan, who were waiting for her to enter Clara Hayes’s apartment. The more she, Hotch, and Spencer had unraveled about the girl - she turned her ring at intervals of three; she and her three classmates were doing a project on the three-body problem - assured her that they had their unsub. 

Campus security entered Clara’s apartment first, weapons raised, but there was no one inside. The walls were entirely covered with book pages, notes, and artwork relating to fire and its religious connotations. Instead of lamps, the apartment was lit with dozens of candles that cast the space and the people in it in an eerie yellow hue.

“‘A fire is kindled in my anger,’” Elle read from the wall, “‘and shall burn into the lowest hell.’ Deuteronomy.” Jude walked further into the room, casting her eyes across Clara’s desk. Several different copies of the Holy Bible were stacked on it, some open with passages underlined. She moved past the stove, which was ringed with candles, and saw a sketch on the wall that she recognized. It showed a skeletal, cloaked ferryman leading two shadowy souls down a river.

“‘I do this for Charon,’” she thought aloud. “It might be Charon, not charown. In Greek mythology, he’s the ferryman that brings the dead to the underworld.”

“Wesson,” Morgan called her over. “Did you read Paradise Lost in college?” She nodded, standing on her toes to see the page he indicated. It was an entire passage from the epic poem copied down in Clara’s own handwriting. “‘Moloch, horrid king, besmeared with blood of human sacrifice and parents’ tears.’”

“Moloch was the demon sun god of the Canaanites,” Jude remembered, scanning the walls for an image of him. “Here.” She pointed to an image of a goat-like man with a fire at his feet, his hands raised in prayer. “His followers would sacrifice their children to him by burning them alive.”

“Guys,” Elle joined them, holding out her phone. “Text from Hotch. When Clara was sixteen, she survived a house fire. Her mother Ellen called it a miracle and said ‘My daughter was tested by God. He tested my child and she came through blessed.’ And look at their house number.” On the fence beside the Hayes family’s torched home were the numbers 333. “God tested her with fire, and now when three threes show up around another person, God tells her to test them.”

Jude and Elle continued to sift through Clara’s belongings while Morgan sat on the phone with the rest of the team. Her desk was covered with half-singed objects and its drawers were filled with empty matchboxes and lighters. At the back of the room, there was a small alcove hidden with a beaded curtain. Jude pushed it aside and immediately called for Elle; Morgan hung up and followed her.

The shelves were stocked with Molotov cocktails, candles, road flares, and chemicals. Morgan cursed quietly and re-dialed Hotch. From the garbled clips of Hotch’s voice Jude could hear, she got their orders to evacuate and seal the building. She relayed the message to campus security and they left, pulling fire alarms on every floor as they went.

Half an hour later, the campus grounds were flooded with students, but none of them was Clara Hayes. Jude stayed on the phone with Spencer while she made her rounds through the buildings - Morgan and Elle had been sent on the same mission. Every slamming door sounded like an explosion, every shuffling leaf like the striking of a match.

Spencer’s voice was a dull hum in her ears. All she could see were the pictures in Clara’s room, the burnt Winchester house, and Mary’s lonely gravestone, the images all flashing in her mind wreathed with flame. Jude realized she didn’t want to find Clara Hayes. She hadn’t known how afraid she was of fire until she was faced with it. She didn’t want to know what it felt like to burn.

***

“Hey.” Jude tugged her sleeve down as Hotch took the seat across from her on the jet. She’d been tracing the tattoo on her arm, her eyes slipping out of focus so that it became little more than a dark blob. It wasn’t like she had to hide her tattoo from Hotch - the entire team had seen it - but she wanted to separate its past from her present as much as possible. As far as the team knew, she’d gotten it during a rebellious phase in her teens. “Are you okay? It seems like this case took a lot out of you.” He kept his voice quiet since Morgan was asleep on the bench behind Jude.

“I’m fine,” Jude tried to smile, wrapping her sweater tighter around her. “Just not a huge fan of fire.”

“I can’t fault you for that,” Hotch shrugged. He’d been the one to take down Clara Hayes. Jude hoped she’d be put in a psychiatric hospital instead of a prison; she was too young to be punished for something she could barely control. “You did a great job these past few days, though. We wouldn’t have worked out the theology connections half as fast if you weren’t there.”

Jude raised an eyebrow. “Wasn’t Spencer on this case, or was I hallucinating?”

“I’m serious, Wesson. You do great work on this team.” Hotch’s tone was soft but stern, as if he was ordering her to believe him. She smiled and thanked him, which seemed to appease him enough to leave and tell her to get some rest. 

But every time she closed her eyelids, the black expanse behind them swam with fire. She got no sleep that night, or the next.