CHAPTER FOUR - Complications

For a split second, Hotch blanked completely on what to say. The unsub in his mind had rapidly evolved from a kidnapper to a possible family annihilator. He immediately discarded the beginnings of a profile he had started forming for the unsub after interviewing Elizabeth Cooper. Now they were dealing with a completely different kind of monster.

"Here's a list of the coordinates where they found Isaac's body… Hotch?" JJ asked, searching his face for some sort of reaction. "What do you need?"

"You and Dave get Neal and Davis away from Mrs. Green and set her up somewhere where we can talk to her alone. They're smothering her and we won't get anything useful from her if they scare her too badly," Hotch said. "I'll call Prentiss and Morgan and redirect them to the new crime scene."

JJ nodded and moved to start talking to Mrs. Green.

Reid emerged from the office where he had set up the evidence board and had been pouring over the paper files he had decided were relevant to the case. "Hotch, there's something I think you should - "

"Has JJ told you what happened?" Hotch interrupted. He was sure what Reid wanted to say was important, but he had to deal with the immediate development first before he could devote any time to Reid's theory.

Reid nodded. He looked a little put out at being interrupted.

"I need you to get started on a geographical profile for this unsub, especially now that we have three crime scenes and two dump sites."

The expression on Reid's face clearly showed that he would rather start sharing whatever new theory he was exploring, but something in Hotch's harsher than usual tone must have tipped him off that it was not the time to be arguing because he hurried back into the office without comment for once.

Once Reid was taken care of, Hotch pulled his phone out of his pocket and speed dialed Morgan. When the call finally went through, the connection was so poor he could barely make out Morgan's voice on the other end.

"Yeah Hotch… 's up?"

"Isaac Cooper's body was just found about three quarters of a mile away from the first crime scene, and now Sadie's father is missing. I need you and Prentiss to go check it out." He rattled off the coordinates that JJ had just given him.

If Morgan responded, Hotch couldn't make it out before the phone signal gave out and the call disconnected. He quickly masked his frustration at the terrible reception in the isolated Idaho town and slipped the phone back into his pocket. If Morgan hadn't understood him or heard the coordinates, they might waste another hour while he and Prentiss drove back to the station, and unfortunately their case had suddenly become significantly more time sensitive.

A badly muffled sob called his attention back to the crying woman sitting on a small lumpy couch in the corner of the station. JJ was seated next to her, rubbing her back soothingly and murmuring some comforting words. Rossi had directed the two police officers away from Catherine and was asking them about how their files on Rosewood's citizens were organized.

Hotch grabbed a chair from the unoccupied desk and pulled it up next to the distraught mother.

"Mrs. Green, my name is SSA Aaron Hotchner. I'm the agent in charge of the investigation into your daughter's disappearance."

As soon as he mentioned Sadie, Catherine seemed to choke on her next sob. JJ handed her a tissue from a box positioned next to the couch on the ground. "First my Sadie, and now… and now this…!"

She blew her nose forcefully.

"And what exactly is 'this', Mrs. Green?" Hotch asked.

"Eric - he was supposed to meet me for lunch at Ellie's. When he d-didn't show up at noon like he said he would, I thought that he might still be at work on the Richardson's farm. I called him… I called him twice and he didn't pick up. Sometimes he doesn't get a signal out there, so I didn't think anything was wrong… oh god!" She bend forward and grabbed her knees like she might faint.

Hotch and JJ reacted immediately and reached forward to catch her. From the other side of the station, Rossi, Davis, and Neal turned away from the teetering piles of files they were pouring over. Hotch gestured at Rossi that everything was okay while JJ helped Catherine collect herself.

"Are you alright?"

Catherine sniffed and rubbed her fingers underneath her eyes to wipe away the smeared mascara staining her skin. "I'm… I'm sorry, it just hit me that I might never see my little girl or my husband ever again."

"We are doing everything in our power to make sure that's not the case," Hotch said. He shushed the little voice in his head that told him the chances of finding both Sadie and Eric alive were shrinking every minute.

JJ made eye contact with him. It was clear that she was thinking the same thing but was trying not to give anything away.

"But what about that other family? That poor girl died, she was shot to death…"

"Mrs. Green, don't think about that right now," JJ interrupted.

Hotch nodded in agreement. "For now, focus on what you can tell us about Sadie's and Eric's disappearances."

Catherine stiffened and seemed to try to get her trembling bottom lip under control. "Well, like I said, I thought Eric was just late or his phone wasn't working, so I decided to go back home. Once I got there, though, I saw… I saw… " She blew her nose again as more tears welled up in her eyes.

JJ took Catherine's hand gently. "What did you see, Mrs. Green?"

"The door had been forced open. There were splinters where the lock was broken. A-and on the porch, someone had left a photo o-of Sadie, but she was chained up in a dark room. There w-was blood in her hair, and she looked so… so scared!" She broke off with a wail and fell forward into JJ's waiting arms.

Hotch's steely expression masked the warning bells going off in his head. Breaking and entering was a large departure from the unsub's previous M.O., as well as the photo being left on the porch. He had a sick hunch that the entire case had just escalated in severity very quickly.

"Was there anything unusual in the house?" Hotch asked the weepy woman.

"No," Catherine gasped out. "I came here as soon as I realized that Eric wasn't at home, and his truck was s-still in the driveway."

Hotch nodded. "You did the right thing by coming to us right away, Catherine," he tried to say gently, without betraying the sinking feeling in his gut.

Catherine didn't seem to notice his words, she was so far gone in her own grief. Hotch turned around and gestured for Rossi to come back over.

He fished around in his pockets for the keys to the SUV. "JJ, why don't you and Dave take Mrs. Green back home. Bring a camera and some evidence bags to take a look at the scene and the photo, but I have a feeling you won't find much. Once Morgan and Prentiss make it back, we can actually start putting this whole thing together."

JJ took the keys from his outstretched hand and nodded quietly, all the while keeping a firm grip around Catherine's quivering shoulders.

Reid was on the brink of physically slamming his head down onto the table out of frustration. The Rosewood police force had the worst filing "system" he had ever had the misfortune of encountering. It had actually taken him several minutes to decipher the complex arrangement, and he was quite literally an expert on decoding cryptic messages, to the point that he was faster than the average computer in some cases. Officer Olson had designed the organization style, and it was clear that he was the only one that truly understood it. Files were stacked in teetering piles on top of cabinets and stuffed messily inside in what seemed like a random pattern. Eventually Reid figured out that files were grouped together first by type of infraction, and then alphabetically by the victim's father's last name, and then placed in piles depending on what decade they were originally filed in, even if follow up investigations had occurred recently.

The stacks of paper spread all across the table contained every scrap of information Reid had found that related to the Cooper and Green families in any way, shape, or form imaginable. It had taken him the entire morning to comb through the incredibly messy drawers and the folders on the ground to find every mention of any member of the Cooper's and Green's immediate and extended families in the past two and a half decades. Reid grudgingly admitted that, even if Olson's organization style was bizarre, no one could accuse him of not being thorough. Every violation of the law for the past seventy years was accounted for, and the decades preceding that were relatively well-documented as well.

"Wonderboy? You still there?"

Reid shook his head to clear away his intrusive thoughts. "Yeah, Garcia, let's go over everything we've found so far one more time."

On the other end of the line, Garcia groaned loudly. "So are we going with 'third thousand time's the charm' then?"

"Actually it's only been seven times, and theoretically each time should feel shorter since your brain has already had time to process the main information once. New details should stand out to us clearly."

"Yeah. Theoretically being the key word in that sentence."

"Garcia… "

A deep, put-upon sigh came from the phone. "Okay, my mildly fanatical friend, let's do this one more time. The Cooper family has lived in Rosewood for-freaking-ever, like since the town was founded in 1906 forever. Josiah Cooper and his family were some of the original settlers, and they've lived on the same cattle farm basically since then, judging by the first tax records I can find. I'm pretty sure the eldest son inherited it whenever someone died? Yeah, from what I can tell from these wills I found, the farm was passed from Josiah to his son Josiah Jr., and then to his son Samuel and finally to Isaac Cooper."

Reid shuffled around the top layer of folders that contained more recent information to get to the older papers underneath. "There's a couple of charges filed against one of Samuel's brothers back in the seventies. Public indecency, loitering, that sort of thing."

"Is there even anything to do in Rosewood besides standing around naked for fun?"

Reid snorted, but pressed on. "And further back, Josiah Jr. was accused of letting his cattle graze on his neighbor's land, which might have caused some tension between the two families for a while."

"Like… enough tension to murder a six year old girl sixty years later?" Garcia's frown was almost audible from Virginia.

Reid automatically shook his head. "No, it looks like Josiah paid the neighbor a fine for damages and trespassing."

"Rosewood seriously fined cows for trespassing in the fifties?"

"Apparently. And that's about all I've found out so far about the Cooper family that might provoke an unsub, unless someone is really angry about a speeding ticket Isaac got in 2003." Reid closed up the folders he had opened and carefully stacked them in a neat pile on the left side of the table that he mentally labeled the "done" pile. "Okay, on to Elizabeth Cooper's side of the family."

"Okey dokey, Elizabeth Cooper's maiden name is Groves, and she definitely has a more raunchy history than her husband and his family that has been in the cattle ranch business for literally a hundred years. So, her family showed up in Rosewood about ten years after the Coopers when her great-great grandfather Duane build some little cabin near Hayden Lake where he, his wife, and their seven children lived. They lived like fifteenish miles away from the main town, which probably would have been less of a problem if Duane hadn't been a carpenter who had to trek that whole way carrying chairs or whatever to sell. I guess business wasn't very good, even after he built his house, because I can't find any mention of him anywhere after September in 1927 when his last advertisement ran in the newspaper."

"I've got a rap sheet for Duane's son William," Reid interjected. "Record keeping back then was spotty at best, but even so, people took notice when someone was locked up for assaulting other people in drunken rages in the middle of town multiple times."

"I'm guessing William was bad for business because the family moved away after that. There's no more record of them in Idaho after that. I found a house that they moved to in Utah, and I guess the next generation really turned it around because there's no more records of unprovoked violent attacks. Elizabeth's grandparents and her parents seem like real saints. They volunteered in the community, taught Sunday School classes. They even worked as foster parents for a while before they died."

"And we didn't find anything about the kids they fostered?"

"There's zip, mi amigo. Everyone seems pretty well adjusted."

Reid sighed. He knew, of course, that there wouldn't be anything. He and Garcia had gone over Elizabeth and Isaac's life stories multiple times now, and nothing seemed to suggest that anyone would want to kill Becca and Isaac Cooper.

"So after that, Elizabeth moved back to Rosewood and married Isaac?"

Garcia's nails clicked on the keyboard as she pulled up screens on her computers back in Quantico. "Yeeeeep… I don't see any employment records before she marries Isaac and gives birth to Becca."

"There has to be a reason why Elizabeth is still alive while her husband and daughter were kidnapped and murdered."

"I know, boy genius, but so far she looks pretty normal even if her family's roots in Rosewood are a little sketch. Maybe there's some info on the Greens that can help us. They're a really new family by Rosewood standards and I'm getting someone from Montana where they used to live to send me some of the juicier gossip as soon as they get the chance."

"Okay, okay."

"So that's about it I guess from my end. There basically isn't any significant connection between the families historically speaking, for now. I'll let you know if any of that new info sprouts up cool similarities between them as soon as it shows up."

"...Alright, thanks Garcia."

"Any time, mon cheri. Penelope out."

Reid pressed the end call button and settled back into his chair. The new silence in the room almost seemed oppressive in the tiny, enclosed space that felt more like a closet than an office. He swiveled around to stare at the crime scene photos tacked onto the board and the fistful of white flowers clutched in Becca Cooper's cold hands.

An incredibly annoying feeling told him that he was missing something glaringly obvious about this case. He just couldn't figure out what.

A cold draft of wind that snuck underneath the ancient wooden door made the paper on the floor rustle gently. If the man had still been in the house, he might have instinctively grabbed it to stop it from being blown up against window.

If anyone had passed by at that moment, they would have seen a child's red crayon drawing of a family peering out into the forest, though it wasn't a family one would normally picture. The father and the daughter's faces had been completely scribbled out. The mother's circular head had a deep frown instead of a smile. There was no brother in the picture.

No one knew about the empty cabin there in the freezing woods by the lake. No one saw Sadie Green's picture.