Chapter 6

Inside Dr. Spencer Reid's shy unassuming exterior was a streak of recklessness as pronounced as that inside the heart of any Evel Knievel wannabe. When mixed with anger and cannabinoid substances, the reckless streak threatened to spontaneously combust, taking with it the museum and all the stuffed animals within the alabaster halls. Or, in less flamboyant language, it threatened to disregard the barrel of a gun pointed in its face, just as it had done many times before.

"You must be Jason's father," Reid said. "We've been looking for you all night. Where've you been? What've you been doing?"

"I've been busy," Bill smiled, "As you already know," he laughed loudly, the booming sound echoing off the high ceilings of the museum.

"Yeah," Reid laughed along with him. "You're a pretty smart guy, taking advantage of your position at the museum to steal all the artifacts."

"It's no different from how the artifacts got here in the first place," Bill remarked. "Most of them were stolen from their countries of origin during the 19th and 20th centuries. Legend has it that the Hope Diamond was stolen from the statue of a Hindu goddess in India. The blue gem was the statue's eye, one of two matching eyes. After the eye disappeared, the priests at the temple laid a curse upon all future owners of the diamond, and that's why so many of them have met unfortunate ends."

"Great story," Reid said. "My dad told me that story when I was three, when we visited the museum for the first time. When I got older and read about the Hope Diamond for myself, I was really disappointed to find that it was all a fabrication invented to jack up the price of the diamond during resale. Apparently, prospective owners enjoyed the idea of meeting their unfortunate ends at the facets of the diamond."

"Too bad about the owners, but what about you? What about your unfortunate end?" Bill asked.

"Don't be so theatrical," Reid ignored the threat. "You're not going to shoot me here. It would be too messy. Afterwards, I guess you could claim self-defense, but there's going to be an investigation anyway. My colleagues at the FBI aren't going to let it go so easily. They're going to find out all about your extracurricular activities. There's no way that you're going to get off scot-free."

"You're right," Bill agreed. "That doesn't stop me from shooting you somewhere else."

"True," Reid nodded, as if considering the possibilities. "If you could get me out of the museum, then you could drive me out to the woods and shoot me there. The woods would be an ideal place to dispose of my body. If we hike out to a really secluded spot, then my body might not be found for weeks or months. I'm sure that my colleagues at the FBI will come looking though. You'll have to come up with an elaborate explanation for why I disappeared one night at the museum while you were on duty."

"And I will," Bill answered.

"But what about the ballistics?" Reid asked. "Are you going to shoot me with your government-issued weapon? What if the forensics experts trace the bullets back to your gun and you? It's not going to look good when the guy who disappeared from the museum is found with a bullet from the security guard's gun lodged in his brain."

"There are other ways to get rid of you," Bill said. "Most other ways are more painful than getting shot."

"Sure," Reid concurred. "But none of them are quite as reliable. Take stabbing, for instance. Stabbing isn't a good way to kill someone. Besides the fact that blood spews out all over the place, stabbing is also quite unpleasant for the stabber. Can you imagine plunging a knife into someone's flesh, through their skin and fat and muscle, and twisting the blade around in their organs? As my colleague at the FBI would say, 'Icky Sticky!' And there's always the danger of accidentally stabbing yourself while you're struggling with the victim. That would spread your DNA all over the crime scene. Now, I know that I'm not the strongest guy in the world, but I doubt that you'd be able to overpower me fast enough to stab me in the throat or heart, which is what it would take to stop me from struggling. Anywhere else in the torso or the limbs or even the face, and I'm likely to get up and attack you and try to poke your eye out with your own knife. I've gotta warn you about one thing before we start. I may not look strong, but I have a very high pain tolerance. See, at my job in the FBI, I'm constantly getting tortured, so I've developed a certain metaphysical resistance to physical pain. Knife goes in, knife comes out, bullet flies through, whatever...None of these things is going to stop me in my tracks."

Bill stared speechlessly back at Reid.

"Let's move on from stabbing," Reid continued. "What other way is there to kill me? I guess you could strangle me, or at least you could try. The problem there is that I'm very gangly, and I've got very long arms. It's likely that while you've got your hands wrapped around my throat, I'll be able to get my hands wrapped around your throat. In that scenario, who's strangling who? Are you sure that you won't lose consciousness before I lose consciousness? You've also gotta consider the matter of experience. Don't misunderstand me. I'm not saying that I've had any experience strangling people with my bare hands, but the subject of strangulation is one of my fields of expertise. At work, we're constantly dealing with serial killers who strangle their victims, especially prostitutes, and I'm always trying to diagnose exactly how the victims died. Was it compression of the arteries and veins? Was it occlusion of the trachea? Was it fracture of the cervical spine? I have a lot of knowledge about strangulation. You'd be surprised how little work it takes to strangle a person, only 11 pounds of pressure applied to the throat while holding on for at least 50 seconds. Even I could do it, and I've got the BMI of a stick insect. In this area, knowledge counts more than strength. It would be easier for me to strangle you than for you to strangle me, because I know exactly where to apply the pressure. In my head, I've got the whole procedure optimized. It's like a sport to me. You know how athletes visualize their performances before their competitions? I've visualized strangulation so many times that it's permanently stuck in my brain. It's gotten to unhealthy levels of obsession. I'm almost dying to try it out on someone."

Bill backed away, running into the wall on the other side of the corridor, but keeping his weapon trained on Reid. His hands shook as he held the gun, and his finger, the one over the trigger, twitched involuntarily in time with the involuntary twitching of his face. In a different situation or with a different profile, Reid would have diagnosed the twitching as tardive dyskinesia caused by antipsychotic medications, but in this case, he attributed it to a non-medical cause. He got to the point.

"The point is, Bill," Reid said in a condescending manner, one that some people, but not he, used to speak to minimans. "The point is that you're a coward. I'm a profiler, and that's my profile of you. You're a coward who smuggles fossils out of the museum under cover of darkness. You're not a murderer. You're not brave enough to become one. That's why I'm standing here having this conversation with you. I'm not afraid of you, because I know that you don't have the courage to use your gun, just as I know that you don't have the courage to raise your son."

"Keep my kid out of this!" Bill snarled.

"It's a little too late for that, Bill," Reid said. "Your son, Jason, was the one who tased me in the restroom. Another few notches added to my pain tolerance. He's the reason that I'm here right now. I don't blame him, because he's only a kid. How old is he? 9? 10? A kid like Jason learns his behavior from his parents. In this case, he learns his behavior from his father, the only parent he's got. I don't know where his mother is, but I'm pretty sure that she's not around. Am I right, Bill?"

"She walked out on us when Jason was five," Bill said. "Ran off with her boss when he got an executive position in California."

"Is that when your problems started?" Reid asked. "See, Bill, this is what we call a 'stressor' in the field of criminal profiling. Something happens, something unexpected, and the UnSub responds with a change in behavior, often resulting in an act of violence. Did you respond with an act of violence, Bill? Did you start hitting your son?"

"No! I am not a child abuser!" Bill yelled angrily, his gun wavering in his hand as his facial muscles twitched with higher frequency.

Reid assessed the position of the gun. Paradoxically, the angrier the man got, the lower the gun got. It was the classic response of a coward hiding his cowardice behind a front of false bravado. Reid saw no reason not to continue.

"Don't be so defensive, Bill," Reid put up his hands to reassure the man. "You and your son don't fit the profile of physical or sexual abuse. You may push him around every now and then, but you don't get any pleasure out of it. You and your son fit the profile of emotional abuse. I've seen this profile before. You're the father who became the unwilling caretaker of your son after his mother left. Naturally, you resent his mother for running off with another man, but you resent her even more for leaving you alone with your son. You hadn't counted on raising your son alone. That's why you resent him as well. He's not like any of your other children, your older children by your first wife, who also ran off with another man. He takes after his mother. He's got her looks and personality and smarts, and sometimes you wonder if he's really your son at all. Even more reason to resent him. At the same time, you feel guilty for resenting your son, so you relieve your guilt by taking it out on him. If he's as worthless as you say, then your resentment is justified. You tell him that he's stupid, because he gets bad grades at school. He doesn't apply himself at school, because he doesn't need to apply himself. It's too easy for him. He doesn't turn in his assignments, but he aces every test without studying. By now, he should've skipped a couple of grades, but he hasn't, because you've never taken an interest in his schooling. You've never taken an interest in any area regarding your son. As a parent, you provide physical security, and that's it. Everything else is too much work for you, and you don't want to do it, because you're a coward who acts like a bully. The last time I saw this profile, I was trying to talk a teenaged kid out of killing himself, or killing me, or getting himself killed, or getting me killed, after he had carried out a killing spree against everyone who had bullied him in the past. That included his own father. I was lucky with Owen Savage. I don't know if I'll be so lucky with your son a few years down the line."

Bill stared speechlessly again, his face betraying his guilt. He lowered his gun until the barrel was perpendicular to the floor. He swallowed again and again, recognizing himself in the profile. He holstered his gun, now that his front of false bravado had been dismantled. Bullies, when confronted, always turned into the cowards they really were.

"You and Lou Savage, Owen's father," Reid continued. "The two of you make my father look like 'World's Best Dad'. At least my father had the strength to recognize his own weakness. He was smart enough to walk out and wash his hands of a situation that he couldn't handle. I'm beginning to see a certain wisdom in his behavior. In comparison with Owen Savage, I consider myself lucky. But not in comparison with your son. Jason's still got his whole childhood ahead of him. He's going to be fine without you. I'm relieving you of your parental duties. Isn't that what you've always wanted? The last thing you can do for your son is to open up the doors of the museum, so we can finally go home tonight. It's way past the kids' bedtime."

"Are you...Are you going to call the police?" Bill asked shakily.

"I'm a federal agent," Reid replied. "I am the police. But right now, I need to get home and make my kids dinner and tell them a bedtime story and put them to bed. You can interpret that however you want. I'll call you Monday morning about your parental rights."

"You're crazy," Bill shook his head. "What are you going to do with him? Adopt the kid yourself?"

"I don't know," Reid answered honestly. "All I know is I'm not going to stand by and see your son go down the same path as Owen Savage. I've got a chance to do something about it, so I'm going to do something about it. Go open the doors, Bill."

"Oh, I almost forgot," Reid remembered something. "I should let you know that I've got a friend at the museum, a scientist who works here. He studies birds. I know him through my old mentor Jason Gideon, who came here every year during the Super Bowl to look at the Audubon collection. I'm going to be suggesting that the scientists carry out an audit of the fossils in the museum, and I hope that they find everything in order when they do that. These scientists are really good at telling the difference between real fossils and fake fossils. You can interpret that however you want."

With that, Reid pushed open the door to the Discovery Room and backed inside, leaving the security guard trembling in the corridor. He closed and locked the door behind him, just in case. He turned to the minimans.

The sight that greeted him brought a huge smile to his face. Jack was building a pyramid of meteorites. Henry was licking a figurine of a saber-toothed cat. Jason was studying a poster of Egyptian hieroglyphs, tracing the bird-like symbols with his fingers as he digested their meanings.

Reid plopped down next to Jason on the floor. Attracted to their keeper as mantises to reproductive pheromones, the minimans gathered around and batted their mini-eyelashes. The keeper felt the warm fuzzies melting his soft chocolate center.

"Hey Jason," Reid looked the boy in the eye. "We found your dad."

"I know," Jason nodded, then looked downwards to continue his tracing of the hieroglyphs.

"Do you want to go home with your dad tonight?" Reid asked.

"No," Jason shook his head.

"Do you want to go home with me tonight?" Reid asked.

"Can I?" Jason looked up from the poster.

"Yeah," Reid nodded. "It's time for us to go home."

"Can I stay with you at your house?" Jason asked hopefully. "Like...forever?"

"I don't know, Jason, I honestly don't know," Reid answered. "I've got a job that takes me all over the country, so I don't think that I'll be able to provide physical security for you. That's the first parental duty, but not the foremost. But no matter what happens, Jason, there's only one thing that you need to know tonight. As long as I'm alive, Jason, you're going to have a hard time getting rid of me."

"Why would ever I want to get rid of you?" Jason grinned cheekily. "Uncle Spenny," he looked down shyly.

"Uncle Spenny, I'm hungry!" Jack tugged at Reid's sleeve.

"Spenny cry!" Henry continued to indulge his unhealthy obsessions.

"Let's go home," Reid suggested. "Who wants peas and carrots for dinner?"

"Me, me, me!" Jack raised his hand.

"Peas!" Henry clapped.

"Ewwwwwww," Jason scrunched up his face. "Peas and carrots are gross!"

"Nuh-uh," Jack tugged at Jason's sleeve. "Peas and carrots are totally yummy if you eat them in just the right way. Uncle Spenny's gonna show you how to eat them the right way."

"Really?" Jason stared up at Reid. "There's a right way to eat peas and carrots so they're not gross?"

"Uh...Yeah, I'll show you when we get home," Reid replied, suddenly panic-stricken by the realization that it would not be quite as easy to bullshit a ten-year-old as it was to bullshit five-year-olds and two-year-olds.

He took a moment to yawn and stretch before swooping Henry into his arms and giving Jack his hand. Jack offered Jason his hand, but Jason muttered something about "cooties" and stuffed his hands into his pockets to follow behind. The small flock, the keeper and his growing legion of minimans, exited the Discovery Room. In the corridor outside, Jason retrieved the box of arthropods from the floor. He counted them while Jack salivated with excitement and Henry reached out his fingers. Reid transferred the fingers to his face, so that Henry could poke them into his nostrils and ears instead of grabbing the arthropods to, no doubt, lick. There was no way that the arachnids were going to respond well to being licked, although the cockroaches might deploy the female-attracting hiss and the mantises were sure to go off into another mating frenzy.

Back into their habitats went thirteen cockroaches, one scorpion, fifteen scorplings, one tarantula, and five mantises. Out of the museum went the hominids. On the drive home, Jack and Henry fell asleep in the car, and Reid, as promised, told Jason all about the divide-and-conquer algorithm design paradigm in computer science. For a moment, Reid wondered if his latest actions constituted kidnapping, but the moment passed as quickly as it had come.

Dr. Spencer Reid was just finishing a 1,000,000-word treatise on the mutually beneficial relationship between hominids and arthropods when the doorbell rang. Originally, he had planned to write a treatise on the subject of parenting, but after his adventures of the previous weekend, he had changed his mind, deciding that he needed to gain more experience in the field. As with stabbing and strangling, Reid was bent upon making parenting one of his fields of expertise.

"What's up, Doc?" the doorbell sounded its default Bugs Bunny ringtone.

Reid saved his document and popped up from his armchair to answer the door. Before he could get there, Jason came running out of the bathroom to throw the door open.

"Jason!" Reid ran after the boy. "What did I tell you about answering the door? No answering the door at my apartment! Only I get to answer the door at my apartment! What if it's an UnSub?"

"But an UnSub would come after you, not me," Jason rationalized. "The probability of an UnSub appearing at the same time that Jack and Henry are scheduled to arrive is exceedingly low, although I suppose that it's not outside the realm of possibility. Statistics require a large sample size of both UnSubs and minimans, so I don't think we can draw any definitive conclusions from this one case."

Reid stood in the open doorway, listening to Jason's reasoning with his facial features frozen into an expression of unabashed glee. Finally, here was a miniman who was receptive to brainwashing. Nay, who was willing to be brainwashed through and through. Reid dreamed of creating a legion of fact-spewing analysis-geysering sweater-vest-donning minimans, but recalled, with a sigh, that not all keepers would allow him to kidnap their minimans from the museum. If he desired to collect additional minimans, then he was going to have to find a human female, and the apparition at the door was definitely not her.

It was Hotch.

"Hi Hotch!" Reid greeted his boss brightly, trying to untwist his expression of unabashed glee that was now one eyebrow-wiggle short of creepiness.

"Uh...Hi Reid," Hotch frowned slightly at the strange expressions that Reid wore on his face whenever he answered the door.

"Did you bring them?" Reid peeked eagerly into the hallway.

"I did, but before I turn them over to you, I'm going to need you to swear an oath," Hotch said solemnly. "I promised JJ that I would make you swear the oath."

"An oath? What kind of oath?" Reid wondered.

"Repeat after me," Hotch began.

"Repeat after me," Reid repeated.

"No, I mean repeat after me when you swear the oath," Hotch glared a little.

"No, I mean repeat after me when you swear the oath," Reid repeated.

"Reid, stop it! Are you doing this on purpose?"

"Reid, stop it! Are you doing this on purpose?"

"Reid, I'm serious," Hotch could barely sustain his frown, much less his glare.

"Reid, I'm serious," Reid matched his boss, word for word.

"I, Spencer Reid, swear this oath to never take the minimans out of my apartment again, unless an UnSub comes after me at my apartment, in which case I shall leave the minimans in the safety of my apartment while the UnSub chases after me with his or her weapon of choice as was his or her intention all along," Hotch recited the oath from memory.

"I, Spencer Reid, swear this oath to never take the minimans out of my apartment again, unless an UnSub comes after me at my apartment, in which case I shall leave the minimans in the safety of my apartment while the UnSub chases after me with his or her weapon of choice as was his or her intention all along," Reid swore the oath.

"OK," Hotch checked his cell phone recording of the oath. "JJ should be satisfied with this. As promised, here they are..." the minimans peeked around Hotch's legs towards their adopted keeper.

"Uncle Spenny!" Jack ran into the apartment, stooped down to the floor, and watched Jason tie Reid's shoelaces together in a complicated untanglable knot.

"Spenny cry!" Henry crawled-slithered-lumbered into the apartment with a large plastic pale-clouded yellow butterfly in his mouth.

Reid pretended to cry, balling up his fists to hold them in front of his eyes while sniffling. He hoped that the display would be enough to wean Henry off his unhealthy obsesssions once and for all. Hotch stared at the spectacle and shook his head.

"I'm going to pick Sean up from the train station," Hotch said. "He's coming back from the Hamptons today, and he's vowing never to go back there again. JJ's picking Will up from the airport. She tells me that Will has learned absolutely nothing from his experience and is already planning his next fanboating vacation in the bayou."

"What time will you be back?" Reid asked.

"Probably no later than three," Hotch said. "You only have to watch them for a couple of hours. Remember, Reid, the oath!"

"No problem, Hotch," Reid nodded. "I, Spencer Reid, swear this oath to never take the minimans out of my apartment again, unless an UnSub comes after me at my apartment, in which case I shall leave the minimans in the safety of my apartment while the UnSub chases after me with his or her weapon of choice as was his or her intention all along."

"I'll leave you to it then," Hotch backed away from the keeper, now crawling with minimans knotting up all articles of unsecured clothing. "One more thing, Reid," he added with a hint of his usual glare. "If you ever try to play your infantile little repetition game at work..." he trailed off with an unspoken threat.

Reid trembled where he stood and painted an expression of falsified, but abject, remorse onto his face. Hotch, satisfied that both the oath and the threat would be heeded, turned and walked down the hallway. At the top of the stairs, he waved back at Reid, who stuck his arm out the door to wiggle his fingers, as he was frozen in place by the belting of his legs to each other.

Reid shut the door and locked it against the UnSubs. He shoo-ed the minimans off his legs. He turned and waddled, penguin-like, to the couch while herding his small flock in front of him. He remembered the documentary "March of the Penguins", in which the emperor penguins of Antarctica, during each hatching season, traversed the distance between their feeding and breeding grounds through unbelievable hardships of cold, snow, and starvation. It was the job of the male to incubate the eggs, so that after not eating for four months and losing half of his body weight, he may present a helpless screeching chick to his beloved mate. From there, the parents would take turns shuttling food between the sea and the land, until summer warmed into fall, and the ice shelf melted to unite the feeding and breeding grounds. Each hatching season was an arduous struggle, but it was all worth it in the end, when the chicks swam free in the sea, as long as they did not immediately fall prey to the predatory fishes, birds, and mammals that abounded in the open waters.

For the rest of the afternoon, Reid fed the minimans the Fruit of the Stupid Box. Jack and Henry sat on the floor with a bowl of pea dip between them, watching Looney Tunes and crunching down upon their carrots, nostril and non-nostril. Jason, being too old to be entertained by bunnies, piggies, duckies, kitties, birdies, coyoties, roadrunnies, mousies, and Tasmanian devilies for long, scrambled to another area of the floor, where Reid had laid out a chess set. In his homemade genius-designed chess set, the pawns were cockroaches, the knights were mantises, the bishops were scorpions, the rooks were tarantulas, and the king and queen were Carcharodon megalodon and Basilosaurus cetoides, respectively.

The inaugural chess game began just after lunchtime on a Saturday afternoon. In a few hours, Reid would have to take Jason back to the foster home where he now lived after he had removed himself from the care of his abusive father. Jason would have to go back to adjusting to his new foster parents, new foster siblings, and new school, where he had finally skipped all the grades that he needed in order to apply himself to his studies. Inspite of the uncertainties in his new life, the boy knew, in his well-developed ten-year-old brain, that he would never become a pawn of the foster care system. He knew that outside the big Colonial-style house in Silver Spring, Maryland, where he received physical security, was another home where he would receive everything else that he needed. He was a miniman, fortunately too young to be a human, and he had a keeper who understood the one tenet of parenting that a crazy old uncle had once explained to his own adopted miniman.

"With great power comes great responsibility", and there was no greater power and responsibility in the world than those of keeper over miniman.

Note: The episode referred to in this chapter is "Elephant's Memory", Season 3, Episode 16.

My next Tale of Fluff will be "Decor and Decorum", starring Reid with his canon OTP hookers, written in the literary style of Jane Austen. Goes off to re-read "Pride and Prejudice", which I hated until I grew up to like it. :)