'reflections'

act one.

chapter three: teenage einstein

"Once we accept our limits, we can go beyond them"
Albert Einstein

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THE NEXT MORNING, THE KITCHEN FILLED WITH A MIX OF CHATTER. it was Cassie's first full day with the Naturals, also meaning that her first profiling lesson with Dean and Agent Locke was after breakfast.

"How was your first night?" Vienna asks, sitting down on Cassie's left, Sloane on her right.

"It was pretty good."

"Sloane didn't cause you too much trouble?"

Sloane shot her a look, which Vienna chose to ignore.

"No, she was actually very nice. Though she did keep me up late with her statistics." Cassie answers Vienna.

Sloane's face flushed red. "Sorry." The mumble hardly escaped her lips.

"No, no. It was just fine." Cassie smiles.

"Little do you know, Colorado, that Vienna is the exact same way with historical, psychology, and book facts." Michael says, sitting down next to Vienna, eyes fixated on Cassie.

"You know you love it." Vienna smirks.

"Maybe I do." Michael replies.

"There's cereal in the cabinet and eggs in the fridge." Judd walks over to them, a folded newspaper between his hands. "I'm making a grocery run at 9:30. If any of you have any requests, speak now or forever hold your peace."

"No requests." Cassie was the first to answer.

"Low maintenance." Judd comments.

"I try." Cassie shrugs.

Vienna, on the other hand, had other ideas.

"More pancake mix, pretty please."

"Oh god, your pancake addiction is almost as bad as your coffee addiction." Michael snarks.

"So judgmental this morning."

"I'm not passing judgement, just merely stating facts."

Vienna says nothing, but takes a bite of her cheerios.

"You actually find what I said was funny, but you want me to think that I pissed you off." Michael studied her features.

"At what point in our friendship are you going to stop analyzing my face?"

"I won't stop until the day that you die, Vi."

Meanwhile, Cassie was staring blankly at her Cheerios, stirring the soaked oats aggressively with her spoon.

"Whatever those Cheerio's did to you, I'm sure they're incredibly sorry." Michael cuts in.

"What?" Cassie looks up at him, confusion filling her eyes.

"You've been stirring them into submission for the whole time Vienna and I have been talking. Spoon violence, is what it is. What's going on?"

Cassie pauses, setting her spoon down gently, causing the spoon to clink against the bowl. "I can't stop profiling people. I profiled Lia to be messy, and I'm not actually sure if she is, or if that's just what I thought she was like. I wish I could stop profiling sometimes and just fit in. And I hope that Agent Locke isn't too hard on me because I still honestly have no idea what I'm doing."

Michael was good at reading emotions, but he was not as good at helping people when they're feeling those emotions, at least not in the most rational way possible. And especially not people that he just met formally the previous night.

Vienna, however, was better at knowing how people are feeling, and how to handle these situations. She learned this from her psychology books, or from her compassionate nature. Michael looked at her, as if telling her with his eyes to cheer Cassie up. "Cassie, this is only your first lesson. I've known  Agent Locke for two years, and she is the sweetest, and so understanding. She's also very good at what she does, and she wants you to be good too. Same with Dean. You're going to be just fine, believe me."

Cassie smiles at Vienna "thanks Vienna. Dean, he just doesn't seem to like me much."

"Dean was like that with everyone." Michael says. "He's a tough egg to crack. Sometimes I'm still convinced he doesn't like me."

"Really?" Cassie's eyes fill with concern.

"He's halfway joking." Vienna reassured the redhead in front of her.

Just then, Lia entered the room, the door swinging behind her. "So Cassie, are you ready for your first lesson of How to Crawl into the Skulls of Bad Guys 101?" She asks, her head disappearing into the freezer momentarily, then returning with a carton of mint chocolate chip ice cream.

"I'm ready." Cassie answers, a newfound confidence in her voice, presumably because of Vienna's pep talk.

Lia sat opposite Cassie, though she averted her eyes from Lia as she opened her ice cream carton.

To an outsider, it may seem strange for Lia to be having such a food at this hour, but Lia was crazy for ice cream.

"Cassie was born ready." Michael stated. "And besides, whatever Locke has planned for her cannot be worse than watching foreign language films without the subtitles,"

Both Vienna and Cassie stifle laughter at this. "Is that what they had you doing your first day?" Cassie questions.

"That." Michael steals a cheerio from Vienna's bowl, causing her to send him a look of annoyance. "Is what they had me doing my first month here. I had to study their facial expressions, posture, culture-specific details...."

"Poor baby." Lia coos mockingly at Michael. "I've been here almost three years and the only thing that they've taught me is that psychopaths are good liars, and FBI agents are extraordinarily bad ones."

"Have you met many?" Cassie asks.

"FBI agents?" Lia asks, almost innocently so, knowing very well that Cassie wasn't referring to FBI agents.

"Psychopaths." Cassie gives her a look.

"The FBI has us tucked away in a nice little neighborhood in a pretty old house. Briggs isn't going to let us tag along to prison interviews where we may actually be able to do something," Vienna answers. She did love being with the Naturals, she did wished that she could work on active cases. Though, she had done her fair share of sneaking around and snooping in active case files, though she hadn't been caught quite yet, shockingly.

Michael continued Vienna's previous statement. "The Bureau has tapes, reels, transcripts, things that they can't solve. Cold cases. And for the amount of cold cases, there are also cases that they have already solved."

"What's the point in that?"

"So that the Bureau can tell that we're as good as Briggs claimed we are. Even if we get the same answer as them. They want to know why we came to that conclusion. Why we can do it and they can't." Lia says.

"They don't just want to train us." Michael says. "They don't want to use us. They want to be us."

"Oh, yes, absolutely." A new voice speaks from the doorway. "Because deep down in the pit of my heart, all I really want to be is Michael Townsend."

Agent Locke strolls into the kitchen, a comfortable look on her features. "Briggs left a hefty case file for you three." She looks to Michael, Lia, and Vienna. "They're in the study. There's no real leads on the case, but we both decided that you were ready for the challenge. Briggs is running a simulation with Sloane today in the basement, and I'm going to spend my day attempting to catch Cassie up on what Dean and I have been doing for years." She heaves a larger-than-life sigh. "Most definitely not as glamorous as being a seventeen year old boy with parental issues and a slightly concerning dependency on hair gel, but c'est la vie."

Michael reached up to scratch the side of his face and, oh so subtly, flipped off Agent Locke in the process.

"Lacey Locke, everybody." Vienna says in a mock-announcer voice. Locke grins and ruffles Vienna's light brown waves, then moved her eyes to Lia's clothing.

"Hey, I thought Judd had a strict no-lingerie-in-the-kitchen rule?"

Lia glanced down at her pajamas momentarily, then back up to Locke, shrugging slightly.

This is what everyone in the program loved about Agent Locke. She wasn't as uptight as the typical FBI agent stereotype, she was able to make jokes, and was able to form bonds with most of the Naturals.

"Alright, you three. Why don't you go up to the study." She prompts.

"Kicking us out, are you?" Michael clutches his chest in false-offense.

Locke raised an eyebrow, smile tugging at her red-lined lips. "Get to work."

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THE WORDS ON THE PAGE OF THE COLD CASE FILE nearly engulfed Vienna whole. Though her reading was interrupted by Lia and Michael's loud entrance to the study. Vienna was typically the first one to arrive to assigned case work, and Michael and Lia were typically later than she would like. But, they had made pretty good time today.

"You're both late." She observes, her voice incredibly flat.

"Fashionably late." Lia corrects.

"Yes, Lia did in fact decide to put proper clothes on for our work today." Michael says.

"Michael, what were you doing during the twenty minutes that Lia took to get ready? You look exactly like you did at breakfast."

"I was...doing things. Very important things."

"I'm sure you were." Vienna hums, closing the case file.

"You've already finished reading?" Lia asks.

"Mhm." Vienna nods. She had an elevated reading speed, along with her eidetic memory. She wasn't an extraordinarily fast reader by any means, but she was faster than average.

Without another word, she stood up and walked to the white board, beginning to write the information down with her favorite purple marker.

Their case that they had been assigned was a string of murders in a small town in Idaho. All of the women killed were between the ages of 23 to 32, and they all worked with children to some degree. They all had blonde hair, too. There were four women in total, the oldest and final victim was fresh out of her pediatric residency, aged 32 when she was killed, and the youngest was a daycare worker.

And the other two were teachers, though both different grade levels and different schools.

The 23 year old worked in a daycare a few short minutes from the local high school, the one that she had graduated from five years ago.
Her name was Brooke Walsh, and Vienna attached her smiling photo to the whiteboard with a magnet, writing her information below. She had been single at the time of her murder, so Vienna had ruled out any partners.

The next oldest, and first victim, was Shelia Arnold, a second grade teacher at the age of 25. She was engaged to a man who was marginally older than her, Drew Walter, who was an orthopedic surgeon at the local hospital at the time of her murder.

The next victim was Angelica Willis, a high school English teacher, aged 29 at the time of the murder, with no spouse or partner.

The final victim was the pediatric resident, Elizabeth Keeton, who was single just like most of the victims had been. She had been taken from the parking lot leaving her workplace, and found in a ditch eight days later.

"The first victims were two years apart in age." Michael begins. "But then the jump from 25 to 29 is four years, doubled the gap first time around. Then the last victims were three years apart in age. No consistent pattern."

Vienna shook her head. "They're all related to kids in some way."

"How will that help?" Lia asks.

"Most killers have similar victimology. Ted Bundy killed women resembling an ex girlfriend who rejected him. Every single woman he killed resembled her in some way. Maybe this UNSUB had a kid that died in a hospital by an accident of a blonde doctor or something and was using these women as a vice."

"UNSUB...?" Lia and Michael look at her with confusion in their eyes.

it was then when Vienna realized that Lia and Michael weren't familiar with names used in profiling. Though Vienna wasn't a profiler herself, she had read plenty of books on it, and knew how to do it, though she wouldn't ever be as good as Dean or Cassie.

"UNSUB, unknown subject. It's a profiling term."

"How is it that you know half of the things you know?" Lia looks at her in shock.

Vienna merely shrugs.

"She's like a teenage Einstein or something." Michael says. "We probably wouldn't be able to solve these cases we do without her."

Vienna smiles slightly, her cheeks tinting a bit pink at Michael's words. She did contribute quite a bit to solving cold cases, though she had never solved one entirely on her own. Briggs said that pretty soon, she would probably be presented with a cold case to solve entirely on her own.

Lia looks from Michael and Vienna for a moment, but decided agaisnt making a comment on Vienna's tomato-red face. "Anyway." She cuts in. "One of the women was dating a surgical resident. And one of three victims was a surgical resident. Do you think those two had something going on?"

Vienna considers this. "Maybe. Let me look what hospitals they worked for at the time." She sat back down at the table which her laptop was plugged in, and typed in the names of the pediatric resident, Elizabeth Keeton. It took Vienna a bit to find the records, even though she had gotten good at sleuthing around and finding records such as these.

Elizebeth had been assigned to work at a children's hospital, Laymon's Children Hospital. And the fiancé of Shelia Arnold, Drew Walters, was employed at the general hospital at the time, which was called Raymond Memorial Hospital. Though, after his fiancé was murdered, he transferred to another city.

"He transferred right after his fiancé died?Seems a bit fishy to me." Michael says, looking over Vienna's shoulder.

"Maybe he needed an escape. I mean, the whole partner killing the other isn't a stretch. Maybe he knew people would figure it out."

"We can't put this guy down as a suspect just because you guys think that he's fishy. We need more reason." Vienna clicks her pen anxiously.

"Well obviously." Michael says. "How do we get more though?"

"You tell me. You've been here longer than I have."

Michael rolls his eyes. "You're saying that you're smarter than I am, aren't you?"

"Maybe." Vienna looks back to her laptop. "You're the emotion reader here."

"Yeah I'm an emotion reader, but I'm practically useless when it comes to case files, same with Lia."

"Speak for yourself, Michael. I've come up with plenty good ideas." Lia retorts.

"Well, did Briggs leave any tapes of interviews with potential suspects?" Michael asked.

"No. There's no leads on this case."

"NO LEADS? How do they expect us to do it all on our own?"

Vienna scowls at Michael. "We've done it before. This one's just....a bit harder."

"See? Even you're unsure of where to go from here."

Vienna didn't argue with his analysis of the worry on her face. "We'll figure it out."

There was a moment of silence, then Lia spoke again. "Where did the fiancé of the teacher go to work after she died?"

"The next town over." Vienna reads his working history quickly. "But it doesn't show any employment record after 2017, which is when the last victim was killed six years ago."

"He was too young to retire, isn't he?" Michael asks.

"He was considerably older than Shelia was, he was 40 when she was 25. 40 isn't old enough to retire though."

"Oh." Lia says. "When did they start dating?"

"No idea. If Sloane was here she'd be able to help, she's way better with technology than I am."

"Why don't we go get her?" Michael says.

"She's with Briggs."

"Oh right." Michael frowns. "Does it say what he did after 2017 though?"

Vienna was the one frowning now. "It looks like he went off the grid. Oh...wait...."

"What?" Lia and Michael both perk up.

"He quit his job on August 17th, 2017. No records after that." Vienna sighs, slouching in her chair.

"Guys, August 17th was two days after Elizabeth was found in that ditch." Vienna says, recalling the date on which Elizabeth's body was found by a jogger.

"Maybe it was him, and he knew the authorities were catching up to him." Lia theorized.

"How would he know that? Were there fingerprints on any of the bodies?" Michael asks.

"No, it was completely clean." Vienna says. "If it was him, that would make sense. Doctors know how to keep things clean. The MO was the same on all the women, one carefully, evenly cut to their throats, and that was it. No overkill. He knows what he's doing. Except Elizabeth's body." Vienna grabs her picture out the thick file.

Her body was the complete opposite of clean. She had three stabs to her chest, the fatal wounds. There was blood crusted in her hairline and slashes on both her arms and legs.

"Maybe he was angry at her, or he's slipping, losing his edge. Because this is so sloppy that it may not even be the same killer." Michael says.

"It definitely is, though. It all lines up. The blonde hair, working with children. It makes no sense as to why he would target women working with children though." Vienna says. "Because if it is this Drew Walters guy, he didn't have any kids with Shelia."

"With Shelia." Lia says. "Maybe he was cheating on Shelia with another woman, and had a secret kid."

Vienna purses her lips in deep thought, then something occurred to her. "The daycare worker had an abortion right before she was killed. The high school English teacher was pregnant when she died. The only one who hadn't been pregnant was Drew's wife, Shelia."

"What about Elizabeth?" Michael asks.

"She had just given birth. To a little boy named Devon." Vienna clicked a few buttons, and pretty soon, the son of Elizabeth's birth certificate was in front of her. "Devon Walters."

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cam's notes!!

Bit of a cliffhanger ;)

This case will be pretty quick, though they'll get more complex the more I write! Please let me know what you think of it so far!

Don't forget to comment and vote, I love reading all of your comments<3

See you in the next chapter!!