Cryptic

Emily dumped the contents of her go-bag into the laundry hamper and went back downstairs to find Reid surveying her Christmas tree like Spock inspecting an alien life form. "At a loose estimate, you're going to spend less than three hundred hours at home this month," he told her. "With your sleeping habits, around one hundred thirty of those hours will be spent sleeping."

"Only on nights you don't stay over." He was a night owl, and she'd woken up more than once to an empty spot in the bed and her boyfriend downstairs, reading. "And if this is leading up to a question about why I decorated, let me remind you that job or no job, some people like to do more for Christmas than putting out a porcelain Santa."

"What's wrong with my Santa?"

"Nothing. It's an excellent Santa. But I like to put up a tree. Wreaths. Christmas cards, even." She dumped out the plastic bag of mail she'd gotten from the post office on her way home. The pile was bigger than usual because they'd had a sharp turnaround, two cases back to back.

"Do you actually write Christmas cards?" he asked as she sorted through the contents, dumping obvious ads in the trash, putting bills back in the mail holder on the wall, and making a small stack of Christmas cards.

"I have extremely good intentions," she sighed. She held up a card. "From Great-Aunt Ethel. It'll have a Nativity scene on the front, and inside, a Bible verse and five dollars."

"Five whole dollars. Wow."

"Yeah." She sent him an alluring look. "Treat me right, I might spring for dinner. And this one's from my cousin Bernadette. Feel that?"

"Thick."

"Six pages about how Kayleigh is doing in ballet."

"Is she with a professional company?"

"She's six. An only, late-life child. There will be pictures. Possibly a YouTube link." She laughed at his face and picked up the next one. "Hey, this one's for you."

"Me?"

"Yeah, but it's my address."

They looked at each other. They'd never even talked about moving in together-they both liked their own space too much. Their relationship, while an open secret among the team, was pretty much a regular secret everywhere else. Anyone out there who would know that they could get ahold of Reid by sending something to Emily would also know how to send something to him directly.

"There's no return label," she said. "You realize this is exactly like something the team would get in a file folder, right on top of the crime scene pictures of convulsed bodies."

His brows quirked, and he took the envelope out of her hand. She shook her head.

He studied the envelope, and the look of interest slid away from his face. "Never mind," he said, dropping it in the trash can. "It's nothing."

"What?" She picked it up again. "How do you know?"

"I just do," he said curtly.

"Okay, now I know there's more to the story. You always explain."

"It's junk mail, okay? Toss it."

"It's handwritten. Nobody hand-writes junk mail. And besides, how could junk mail possibly come here for you?"

He crossed his arms and set his jaw.

She studied his face. Then she turned the envelope over in her fingers several times. The handwriting was angular and spiky, all caps. The envelope was plain, medium-weight, no fancy embossing. Someone who didn't go much for embellishments. Somebody whose handwriting he knew. Someone who could put that look on his face.

"It's from Gideon, isn't it," she said.

His eyes flickered away, then back. "No."

"You're in contact with him?"

"No."

"Has he sent you things before?"

He shifted in his chair.

"How many times?"

"Once or twice," he muttered.

"What did you do with them?"

"Threw them away."

"Did you read them first?"

"No."

She slid her finger under the flap and tore it open.

"Hey! Opening someone else's mail without their consent is a federal offense."

"So arrest me," she told him, unfolding the sheets she found inside. "But I warn you, I'm armed." She read, while he restlessly sorted the remainder of her mail. "Wow."

He struggled visibly to look disinterested. "What?" he asked, his voice faux-careless.

"This . . . may be the dullest letter I've ever read. It's completely banal." She looked up. "I think this is in code."

The flicker of interest was infinitesimal, but she'd played too much poker with him over the years to miss it.

"Are you hungry?" He went to the drawer where her takeout menus lived and scooped out a handful.

"Spencer," she said, and he looked up. She only called him Spencer when she really wanted him to hear her. "Put your daddy issues to rest for a moment and think."

"I think I'm justified in my 'daddy issues,' considering that this is one of the father figures who prompted them."

"Think like a profiler, would you? He sent this to me, addressed to you. Why?"

He looked at the ceiling. "Because he knew you'd want me to read it."

"And he encrypted it."

"To pique my curiosity, yes, I know."

"Right. So, genius, what would you conclude about a man who went to such lengths to send you a letter?"

He turned away. "What about Thai?"

She contemplated strangulation briefly. "You're lucky you're cute," she muttered, and raised her voice. "The last time we ordered from that place, I was up all night. Let's do pizza instead."

She put the letter in the middle of the table, where he couldn't miss it.


Although he was basically easy-going, when you hit Spencer Reid's core of stubborn, you hit it hard. The letter from Gideon sat on the table all through pizza that night, all through the next few days off, and in fact, clear through Christmas.

When he came over, his eyes would flicker over to it every once in awhile, but that was the extent of his acknowledgment. He didn't pick it up, he didn't talk about it. It was in the way, like elephants in the room tend to be, but Emily refused to move it. She would have taken heart if she'd thought he'd read it, even once, because then the contents would be filed away in his massive brain and he could take it out and examine it at any time. But the paper never deviated from its original position on the table by so much as a fraction of an inch.

He did, however, want them to go to his place a lot more. She hoped that meant it was preying on his mind.

They caught a case just before New Year's, and didn't get back into DC until nine o'clock New Year's Eve. It had been a nasty one-men found in basements with their skin stripped off, flayed alive. When they'd caught the butcher (quite literally; he'd worked at Al's Meats for twenty years), he had the skins stretched out and drying on frames in his back bedroom.

Even Morgan's suggestion of going out for New Year's was half-hearted, and he seemed relieved when nobody took him up on it. Although they'd been up into the wee hours of the morning, Emily hadn't been able to sleep on the plane, so she barely put up a fight when Reid held his hand out for her keys. She sat in the front seat and found herself floating on the surface of sleep, dipping in and out of dreams smeared with murder.

Every time she opened her eyes, though, she saw his face, lit up green by the dash, the street lights outside flickering yellow every so often, hands at a precise ten and two on her wheel. She smiled to herself and closed her eyes again.

She woke up fully when the car stopped, and found that the car smelled like Italian. Specifically, the Italian place around the corner from her house that they both liked. "Hey, when did that happen?"

"I called from Quantico and asked them to have it ready," he told her.

She opened the bag he handed her and took a breath. "Eggplant parmigiana," she sighed. "When was the last time I told you I loved you?"

He kissed her. "This morning. 9:32 am, right before the raid."

The food woke her up more, and she turned on the TV, clicking through the channels to find the Times Square festivities. She wrinkled her nose at the plastic-looking host and muted him. The crowd heaved silently, all silly glasses and crazy hats while the neon lights glittered around them, wildly excited for a new beginning.

She turned to say something and found him holding the letter, reading it. Her mouth fell open.

He looked up and put it down, fast.

"So," she said. "What kind of code is he using?"

"A cipher, actually," he said. His eyes sparked with interest briefly. "An tough one." Then his expression closed down and he turned away from the letter deliberately. "What are you watching?"

She crossed the kitchen, pulled a legal pad and a pencil out of a drawer, and silently handed them to him.

He screwed up his face like a child being forced to eat steamed broccoli, but his eyes wandered over to the letter again.

"Go on," she said.

He took the pencil and flipped it between his dexterous magician's fingers. "I wonder if - " He flipped pages on the legal pad until he found a fresh one and started scribbling.

She grinned at him, diving deep into a puzzle he'd finally decided to tackle. She danced her fingers over his shoulder blades, making him twitch but not distracting him in the least, and went back to the couch to watch the rest of the New Year's Eve party in Times Square.


She got up off the couch at midnight and went over to get a kiss, but it took several minutes to attract his attention and then the moment was gone. "Just wanted to see how it was going," she said instead.

"It's a rare cipher," he told her. "I tried about four different versions before I found one that started making sense."

"So what does he say?"

He looked down at the legal pad, then handed it to her.

Dear Spencer,

I know you probably haven't read the other letters I sent. If you are reading this, then Emily succeeded in changing your mind. I read your last paper. The section on remorse behavior as demonstrated by sexual predators was particularly intriguing. It sounds as if you are doing well. I hope that is the case. C4.

Emily contemplated all the different kinds of encryption that were possible in the world, only some of which could be solved with ciphers.

She also wondered how Gideon had known about them. Of course, he was a profiler. You didn't stop being a profiler because you'd turned in your gun and badge, or even because you'd gone home for the day. Could be he was in contact with someone else. Could be he'd just predicted the trajectory of their relationship, long before they'd been anything besides friends.

"Sounds like he's been thinking about you," she said.

"Mmm."

"Okay, this I don't get," she said. "C4? Like the explosive?"

"Like the chess move," he said. "It's the English Opening."

"If he wants to play chess by mail, why didn't he put a return address?"

"He did. He's in New Mexico."

She flapped the envelope at him. "Strangely enough, I'd already used my razor-sharp FBI skills to learn that from the postmark. What does he expect you to do, send it general delivery?"

"No, his address is in the second code. Under the first one."

"Under - " Of course there was another code under the first one, she realized. It was Gideon, to Reid. Only Jason Gideon would send a layer cake of encryption to say what other people would just write down. She handed him the decrypted letter. "You going to write him back?"

He frowned down at the paper, then dropped it. "I don't know. You think I should." It was a statement, not a question.

"I just thought you should read it." She tilted her head to look into his face. "But from the sounds of it, you think you should write back."

He twisted up his mouth. "I don't know what to say."

She touched his face, tracing her fingers along his jaw. "Think about it. You're good at that."


She woke up again when he got in bed. "Hey," she mumbled.

"Did I wake you?"

"Yeah. It's okay."

She closed her eyes again, but he said, "Emily."

She rolled over to face him. In the dark, his face was a pale smear on the pillows.

"I wrote him back."

"What'd you say?"

He found her hand under the covers and squeezed it. "That I'm happy. Oh, and E5."

She smiled. "What time is it?"

"Three fifty-nine." He propped himself up on his elbow and squinted at her alarm clock. "No. Four, exactly."

"Which means it's midnight in Hawaii or somewhere, right?"

"Alaska."

"Whatever. Kiss me, Dr. Reid."

He leaned down and kissed her, lips soft and warm. "Happy New Year, Emily," he whispered against her mouth, breath brushing across her skin.

"Happy New Year."