#investigation

Last chance to get in on the kickstarter for the Magnus Archives board game made by the creators of Coup, Resistance and Avalaon! Fun fact, I honestly did an early review and gave the feedback "just the right amount of harrowing." @jonnywaistcoat approved: "sufficiently wet"

When a scraggly band of folk musicians arrived to tour the UK, residents of a small Welsh town were enamored with the group’s foot-stomping shows of traditional sea shanties. Then they learned that the band’s leader, known as the Captain, ruled with an iron fist.

Issue no. 172, “Master and Commander,” is now live:

tags: spencer reid x fem reader, agent reid x forks resident reader, spencer reid x twilight, criminal minds x twilight slow burn, psychological horror (ish), unreliable perception/unreliable narrator(s), dual pov, parallel investigation, eventual vampirism word count: 4,688 character count: 28,449 prologue/case file here

—------------------

on the failure of pattern recognition

it doesn’t begin with the body.

that would imply a discrete origin, an event sufficiently bound to be observed, documented, and, with sufficient rigor, understood. bodies permit that kind, reid knows, of handling.  they yield, eventually, to pattern, to taxonomy, to the quiet arrogance of human comprehension. they shift with viewership and formulate themselves to ink on paper, to be filed and placed into a box, which will be either, a) brought to court and debated to decide the course of a life, or b) sat on a shelf, collecting a thin layer of dust atop others with a similar fate.

this, however, resists.

dr. spencer reid first registers the discrepancy in the interval between review and comprehension, when the files, otherwise unremarkable in both their structure and content, fail to stabilize under the routine repetition that comes with working a case.

–

forks, washington.

population: negligible. growth rate: stagnant. violent crime: statistically insignificant.

there is absolutely no precedent for escalation in this town. 

and yet he can’t shake the unease that flooded through him upon crossing into forks. perhaps it was something in the rainwater, collected through the soil, seeped into the tall sourwoods that loomed hauntingly overhead. uncanny, almost. 

the incidents accumulate. not in frequency - which would be legible - and not in method - which would be classifiable. 

he reads the report again, it’s terms clinical and concise, clean of any adjectives that could carelessly cradle subjectivity. 

male. twenty-seven. missing forty-eight hours prior to recovery. found three miles into woodland area, off-trail. cause-of-death: exsanguination. preliminary conclusion: large animal attack.

it’s important to see to see that reid doesn't dispute this classification. at least not immediately; not now, when he lacks concrete evidence.

he notes, instead, some of the report’s phrasing.

“consistent with.”

not confirmed. never confirmed. nor does it read as verified, supported, corroborated, proved, certified, substantiated, affirmed, or declared. 

he flips the page, the lip of the sheet nicking his thumb in a way that makes him hiss and shake his hand to his side, willing the air to sweep the sting away. there is no medical basis to efficiency of this act, just patterns in human behavior, passed on over time.

another file, this time, with a different name, a different date. the same language drizzles over, no clear basis or guarantee in its slogans. 

the pattern is not explicit, then. it doesn’t announce itself in ways that would usually earn him praise from his team. lines don’t jump out in his mind, maps don’t triangulate themselves in front of his eyes. reid feels no need to run towards a corkboard and weave together a new storyline. 

the pattern resists, which, in itself, constitutes a colder sort of data. 

he leans back slightly, eyes still fixed on the page as if distance might force the coherence he so desperately craves at this moment into place. 

it does not. and so he closes the file. 

note: do not mistake this for reid being finished. that he is not. he closes the folder because continuing, at this stage, would produce diminishing returns - an economic framework that rationalizes the disorder in his mind.

spencer knows, as he always does, as he always must, that there is something between the black ink of the lines - which have begun to dampen and bleed as they swirl with the heavy humidity of the town’s air that bleeds into the forks police department - that has not articulated itself. something darker, misaligned and disarrayed.

and until the data speaks for itself, until numbers and mathematical principles and concrete evidence jump off of the pages, he waits. 

–

the forests and their inhabitants deny reliable methods of articulation in this part of the pacific northwest.

here, it is not silent, per say, as this would suggest absence. among the trees -  feeling taller as they loom over agents in vests, ages old and knowing something they don’t, secrets coiled into the roots that threaten to break the ground’s surface. threatening reputably focused agents to stumble - it is acoustically attenuated, as though sound itself is absorbed before it can fully propagate: wind disperses without continuity, birdsong fractures mid-distance. the intrusion - the forests have made it glaringly clear that this is just that - of human movement - boots against wet soil, the low, crackling static of radio communication - fails to establish dominance over the space. 

the effect is not quiet, but contained. held back. 

reid notes this without comment, mimicking the natural restrictions of the space around him.

subjective anomalies, while inadmissible as evidence in a court of law, often precede the identification of structural irregularities. reid knows, objectively, they are not reliable, alongside hearsay, illegally seized material, and speculative testimony. 

paradoxically, they are also not irrelevant. 

– 

morgan’s voice cuts through the radio, distorted by static crackles and stinging squelch tails, but intelligible. “reid, you seeing this terrain?” “yeah,” reid replied, gaze tracking the uneven ground. his voice feels lowered in the chilled air, his sharp analyses soddened by a heavy-hanging mist. greyer, perhaps. “low foot traffic. soil composition retains impressions longer than average - if anything were to have been dragged, we’d have clearer disruption patterns.”

“meaning?” 

“meaning whatever happened here was either stationary,” reid says, “or controlled enough to avoid leaving a trace.” there’s a pause on the other end, indistinguishable in its nature from either contemplation or poor signal. 

“controlled,” morgan repeats hesitantly. “that’s not what we’re supposed to be dealing with, kid.” it isn’t.

reid crouches near the indicated site, careful not to disturb the perimeter markers. he notes the way that they’re almost ironic in their bright, yellow coloring - they’re meant to draw attention to a location, whether this be to forensics teams seeking out their evidence to collect, or for detectives to avoid leaving their designer footprints in. in a space this expansive, reid wonders if they truly make a difference at all.

the ground bears evidence of disturbance - this, spencer notes as a fact, in the rustled leaves, matted down everywhere else in the woodland from footsteps and rains repeating their cycle of compaction - but not violence. not in the conventional sense, at least. 

here, there is no scatter pattern. no defensive displacement or clear struggle. 

spencer stands again, feeling the movement in the socket of his knees. weighed down. he studies the spacing. the angles. the absence. there is always absence, reid knows. he cannot possibly gather every detail of every scene, place himself directly in the moment of the crime’s occurence. no matter how many PhDs he collects, his mind wears, and he can only calculate so much. but this? it feels… curated. 

in many ways, they are staring at a textbook scene - the body is central, the location is ideal, there are forensics teams collecting trace evidence left behind, swiping tabs in blood droplets and measuring their distance from one another. this is the issue. 

it’s as if someone had ripped a page out of saferstein’s ‘criminalistics: an introduction to forensic science,’ and completed a worksheet out of it, or recreated for a forensics 101 lab - a live staging of sorts. 

“reid,” morgan says again, quieter this time, his voice close. spencer didn’t even hear him approach. “talk to me.”

reid doesn’t look up as the words flow out of him, as if he is a computer translating code for human consumption. “there’s no evidence of predation behavior consistent with large fauna native to this region,” he says. “no tearing pattern. no feeding pattern. the body wasn’t consumed.” “then why call it an animal attack?” “because the alternative requires a level of precision that doesn’t align with known offender typologies,” reid replies, stilling in his tracks. he tilts his head in one direction. pauses. tilts it in another. pauses again. “and what - this does?” morgan’s voice is distant, confused when the path is not linear. spencer feels guilt thinking about his friend like this, but shoves it aside as he finally looks up. it’s not that morgan wasn’t “smart” - of course he was. and it’s certainly not that reid felt… superior - oh, god no. but he couldn’t deny a natural… capriciousness, for lack of a better term. 

“no,” he says with a tense shake of his head, the extension feeling heavier now than it had when he arrived.

—------------------

you register the deviation before it is technically named.

after all, forks doesn’t change. which, in many respects, is the point.

its predictability is not incidental, but maintained. you’ve noted it before as an equilibrium sustained through habit, restraint, and a collective understanding of what remains unexamined. variations occur, of course, but they tend to resolve before they accumulate. 

there is a car accident outside of the school every now and then, caused by students rushing to get off of the property they deem the seventh circle as soon as they can. forks high gathers teens into the aging gymnasium and sits them in creaking bleachers, repeating a yearly lecture on safe parking lot procedures. 

a child went missing, once. the town stirred for a bit before she was brought back home, calling in private investigators and offering casseroles of comfort to the family - which, in reality, simply served as a way for the community to clear their refrigerators. even then, the case was closed when the girl was found hours later - she had forgotten to tell her mother that she planned on sleeping over a friend’s house after school, the next town over, and her cell had died in her locker earlier that day. 

this had accumulated. 

—

you do not require proximity to confirm it. information, even diluted through repetition, like a game of telephone, retains structural integrity when the pattern is simple enough. sure, the details may get distorted from person to person - was it a dog or a frog that jumped the fence? was there a watermelon or a wastebasket on the other side? - but the basic structure of the findings remain relatively as they began.

now, it read as follows:

missing. 

found. 

animal attack.

the classification the fbi released is convenient - situated on the olympic peninsula, surrounded by nearly a million acres of national parkland, there were bound to be animals, and as such, people who got too close. curiosity killed the cat, or however the saying goes. this classification, albeit reachable, is also incorrect. less solid of a fact, but veritable. 

–

you close the book you’d been flipping the pages of absent-mindedly in your lap without marking the page. you will remember where you left off with a quick skim. you always do.

–

outside, the light is wrong. its quality is diffused beyond expectation, holding the kind of looming overcast that flattens depth perception and renders distance unreliable. you were sure the agents had added that to a manilla folder somewhere, and chalked another death up to whatever the procedural term for “clutz” was - someone had fallen on a tree’s root, unbeknownst to them, as the light rays bent in a way that yielded no other outcome but a cracked skull.

you watch the treeline not because you expect to see anything, but because you don’t. that is the point at which observation becomes necessary, you’ve noticed. it matters not what lays in plain sight, but what lurks beyond the shadows. 

there’s a shift in the environment, not visual or auditory, but in the most functional manner. it’s almost as though something has passed through recently, and the space has not yet recalibrated - something has held mother nature back, vetoed her vote in the space beyond your property line, and holds her captive as the blood is slowly sucked from her neck.

you inhale slowly, taking so long that you feel lightheaded and your nostrils begin to suction in on themselves. recalibrating. the question you’ve been trying to answer is not whether the situation is contained - this you know, for a fact once more, is not true - but whether it ever was. contained, that is.

—------------------

the house next door is empty, but not abandoned. there’s no dust accumulation or structural neglect - the usual, visible signs of maintenance erosion. the warm wood siding of the dwelling doesn’t appear rotting or spongy. the glass is not foggy or chipped, no windows are broken. the gutters have yet to rust, or gain the signs of old age resembled in flowers or sprouts and their time-consuming germination.

the house next door has been vacated, then. recently.

reid stands at the threshold, eyes scanning without entering. the door is unlocked, so there was no forced entry in the disappearance. no obvious disruptions to life as was. interruption, sure, but no dismantling. 

–

“family?” morgan asks, stepping up behind him. 

“none listed locally,” reid replies, closing a briefing and placing it carefully on the corner of a black, granite countertop. it still smelled of polish. “moved here eight months ago. limited social integration. employment history consistent, but largely isolated to the hospital.”

“neighbors?” 

“there’s one,” he says.

—------------------

you see him before he knocks. 

don’t mistake this for subtly, because that, the man surely wasn’t. you notice him precisely because he isn’t. the crimson shadows that rest in the outer creases of his eyes, underneath the large bags they carry, announce a presence. 

federal agents carry themselves with a particular kind of… discipline. it acts as an awareness of observation without the need to conceal function - everyone knows why they’re around, and lets them act accordingly. it’s clinically efficient, and obviously identifiable.

you watch, not moving from your place at your kitchen table, the worn oak scratched and the coating bearing circles of coaster-less coffee mug contact from late nights pouring over texts, days spent sat and scrolling through online articles, the extensive blue-light contact forming similar fuchsia linings around your aperture, you were sure.

the man pauses before the door, assessing. his gaze shifts, briefly, to the windows. it’s like he is a robot, noting the spacing between the structures, the line of sight one could have from inside your home, planting himself there subconsciously.

–

you stand to open the door before he knocks, a calculated breach of expectation, which you know, doubtless, he registers. 

“dr. spencer reid,” he says, producing credentials with minimal emphasis, going through a series of mechanical motions that he’d conducted dozens of times before, in your town alone. “i’m following up on your neighbor.”

you take in the identification without adjusting your posture, your eyes scanning the glossy card and the shiny, silver badge, wrapped in an authoritative black leather. “i assumed,” you reply.

a pause. one second that carries evaluation, estimation, appraisal, and analysis. 

“i’m told you may have seen him prior to his departure,” reid continues.

“i saw him leave,” you say. “if that’s what you’re asking.” “when?” 

“two days ago.”

he does not write that down. he doesn’t write any of this down. you don’t even think he has the presupposed, yellow legal pad on his person. 

“time?” 

you consider the question.

“early,” you say.

“that’s not particularly specific.” “neither is your line of inquiry.”

another pause, marginally longer now. you can tell he’s retracing the conversation, trying to crack your shell through the handful of words you’ve given him. something quieter than amusement passes through you, but it remains brief - contained and unindulged. you wonder, shortly, what role he’s assigned you in his internal schema. you wonder how disappointed he would be to find it incorrect.

“approximately,” he says now. his tone is not bored, as one would assume given your arid returns. exacting, may be the better word. levying - yes, that was it.

you allow it. “seven,” you say. “possibly earlier.” “alone?” 

“yes.” “did he indicate where he was going?” “no.” 

“was that typical?” 

“yes.” 

a pattern, for once, establishes in your interaction with the agent: question, answer. it’s so beautifully cut and dry, so preciously black and white that you forget you’re being interviewed, swept up in the simplicity of dialogue that didn’t swirl into forks’ natural greylands. 

“did he usually come back?” he says, the moment’s pattern now broken. the black and white begins to fade as his head ticks slightly, his eyes narrowing imperceptionally. 

you look at him, properly for the first time. the question is unexpected, but you do not falter. “most people do,” you say, the response sidestepping the informative, intentionally. 

agent reid, as he’d introduced himself, holds your gaze for a fraction longer than necessary. he notices that you do not look away. probably notes it in his head to scribble onto a whiteboard somewhere. maybe if you were lucky, a photo of yourself would be bound to the scene with a red string, like in the true-crime documentaries you were obsessed with, once upon time. before there was an emphasis on the true aspect of the recordings. 

“have you noticed anything unusual in the past week?” he quizzes. 

you consider smiling. “unusual is a relative designation. you’ll have to be more specific, i’m afraid.” “a deviation from routine,” he clarifies, not taking your bait. “behavioral, environmental, interpersonal.” sharp. academic. straightforward. 

you tilt your head slightly, earnest in the motion. “is that how you’re classifying this?” you ask. “a deviation?” “yes.” 

you consider him. his structure, grammatically. it’s odd… a divergence from the cops in your town, to say the least.

“no,” you say.

he waits. “for what?” “for your answer. nothing unusual.” and it’s not a lie, not entirely. but you know his eyes are watching you, taking a photograph of your physical reactions with the instantaneous closing of his lids, adding them to a mental photo album like a children’s book plotline that sat dusty on your shelves, pushed behind books overborrowed from the public library. now, the aged beams sat filled with history so jarringly adult that it almost resembled young adult fiction.

“thank you,” he says, eventually. 

you incline your head as he steps back. he doesn’t engage, and neither do you.

—------------------

reid walks away before he understands fully why he doesn’t trust the exchange. his uncertainty did resemble distrust in the conventional sense, for there wasn’t any detectable deception pattern, or microexpressions consistent with typical evasion of the truth. he couldn’t detect any linguistic markers that indicated fabrication, there wasn’t fidgeting in her posture or a stance that indicated closure of the conversation. 

her responses were consistent, efficient, controlled. almost too controlled. 

he replays the interaction. note: the interaction, not the content. after all, she answered every question. she provided no information, which, in itself, is not unusual in questioning, especially in a town like forks. people tend to be… secluded. 

the thing reid focuses on is her lack of hesitation. there was no search latency in what he asked, no cognitive lag in her processing of questions and return of response. she selected her answers, almost off of a mental list of possible replies, rather than retrieving them from the memories themselves. 

he breathes out, releasing a breath he didn’t know he was holding.

“something off?” morgan asks, tilting his head and narrowing his eyes at reid. 

he doesn’t answer immediately, instead looking back at the house. the forest green door is closed now, the pattern of the wood underneath beginning to show through the wear of the rain. there was no movement behind the windows. in fact, they were open, uncovered by the conventional dated, lace curtain cliche. the house indicated nothing of the interaction that just occurred. 

“yes,” he says, finally. simply.

“yeah?” morgan presses. 

reid hesitates here, his explanation for his unease insufficient. what was he supposed to say? that she opened the door, answered every inquiry, and waited until he had initiated finality before closing the door? “i don’t know what yet,” he sighs, the sound of the gears of his mind almost louder than the washington wind that whipped around them.

—------------------

you wait until he leaves your line of sight, a disciplined habit you’d had since you were little, unaware when it had started but unable to change your cautious behaviors. 

then, and only then, do you close the door. lock it, maintaining a habitual structure of surface politeness when a guest is present. 

as you move back to the window, you note that the agent - spencer, his first name was - is still visible at the edge of the property line, speaking to his partner. his posture has shifted since he stood on your porch step, though. he stands less formally, his badge back in his pocket, his hands in his pockets, his head down, but not relaxed. judging by the obvious tension in his shoulders, you wonder if he’d ever felt true tranquility. then again, you wouldn’t be the right person to assess what that looked like anyway. 

his head tilts slightly as he listens to the man next to him, processing his words in an unemotional, instinctive manner. 

you’d expected him to reconstruct your interaction, as every police officer, sheriff, bureaucrat, and agent before him had done. you’d anticipated him to analyze your posture, watch for shuffling, record any deviations from normality. but this new delegate was doing so to an imperceptible degree. 

so, naturally, you pick through your own behaviors - and subsequently, the academic’s adjustments - replaying the exchange scene by scene from a birdseye view.

his questions were strangely vague, purposefully leaving room for you to trip, say something you shouldn’t. the sequence, the deflection, the new sense of measurement mid-conversation. 

a cool disquiet ferments in your stomach, vining up your spine, whispering in your ear that he is closer than the should be to the structure of the truth. how inconvenient. 

your gaze shifts slowly, intuitively, toward the tree line, a natural fir boundary between poised realism and a murky mythos. the forest remains unchanged, the spruces and cedars still fixed in the soil beneath them. this is, increasingly, the problem. 

—------------------

reid returns to the site before sunset. anywhere else in the world, this position of the sun would cast a golden radiance across each surface, illuminating even the dullest of displays with an optimistic warmth. in forks, the evergreen abnormality, the airspace carries a green-ish hue, darkening the jaded shades that have seeped into every aspect of the locality. 

he stands at the edge of the marked area, the once-yellow ‘crime scene’ tape turned chartreuse, watching as the light shifts further, diffusing. 

the team has cleared out, all gone their separate ways - hotch to call jack; emily, jj, and morgan to a local diner; rossi to precinct, mumbling about needing to shine the italian leather of his boots and complaining about the township’s abundance of mud. none of them argued when reid said he wanted to take another look. none of them noted that he really didn’t need to. 

reid steps past the tape, no longer looking for evidence, but absence thereof. this time, in the green-gold light of the late-afternoon, he searched for discontinuity, anything that might resist typical classification. 

the ground is unchanged - because of course it is - but there is something new this time around. not tangible, not something that could’ve been packaged and sent back to quantico. not visible either, no need to call in a photographer or whip out his cell phone camera and snap a grainy shot. he doubted the pixels would calibrate properly through the mist that undoubtedly would’ve clung to his lens. 

a sensation, perhaps? no. not that. an… awareness. yes, that was it. an awareness that he wasn’t alone. 

reid straightens slightly, still and listening. nothing. obviously, nothing. 

he exhales. turns and stops. turns and paces. takes a tentative look back, pretends to be distracted by something else - a squirrel maybe, and returns his gaze to the scene beyond the tape. it looks the same. 

i mean, what did he think would happen? that this was an elementary game of wax museum? that when he wasn’t looking, the site would giggle under its breath and change positions, cheekily awaiting the moment his back would turn again. 

reid pressed two fingers to the space between his eyes, which constantly seemed to hold pressure these days. he’d tried sunglasses, wondering if this was a bout of migraines, a reaction to caffeine overconsumption, a bad mix of hemicrania suppressants. 

a thought - the thought - the one he’d fought daily to subdue, pushed back into the depths of his intellect, sought to cuff into an unlit edge of his mind like the subjects he dealt with daily. because they were crazy. they - the killers, the robbers, the ones who did bad - where the ones who had ‘schizophrenia’ written down in the file that followed them to lock up. 

and yet, even then, normalcy aside, reid still couldn’t help the feeling this place carried. it was wrong. so, so wrong, as though something within its structure had shifted position, not moving actively, but past moved. so there he stands, not calling for backup on the walkie that he had silenced upon entering the curtain of pine. there, he observes, stews, sinks his feet into the dampened land beneath him. 

—------------------

from the timberline, you watch him. some would call this stalking, but that would constitute a pattern of repeated, unwanted, and obsessive attention, while this was simply a one-off occasion of… noticing. 

you noticed that he was here alone. he was not supposed to be, which was data to be added to your set as far as you were concerned. 

every other investigator that came into forks relied on reinforcements for safety, for verification. fact: observation is stabilized through census. this is where the philosophical debate of the tree falling in the forest arises. if the agent were to find something groundbreaking in this moment, if the stage in front of him were to reset itself and spell out a lead, would anything come of it?

he, whoever he was, had removed that variable. interesting, you thought. very interesting. 

you noticed that he steps into the space with a deliberate precision, each movement considered and each placement overly intentional. 

you notice his idiosyncrasies in the fact that he does not retreat, but repositions when he, eventually, comes up empty of evidence. 

objectively, there is no benefit in escalation. you’d get your name in a file you were sure was already pages long. this one would leave, eventually, as they always do. the death of your neighbor would be chalked up to a mountain lion, a bear, or, if this team was feeling nuanced, a more unique species of local fauna, with a disease that causes it to feed on human flesh, but surely, given the time since the attack, would have taken the poor beasts life by now. a pamphlet on animal-spread illness would be distributed to concerned residents, and secondary-school teachers would warn their students to stay away from the forests at recess for some time. life would come as it does. vita procedit, vita manet. 

but as you continue to notice him, still standing there, still scrapping for resolve in something that refuses resolution, you briefly experience something closer to interest, which, you decide, is significantly more dangerous than any creature that may lurk beyond mapped lines. 

—------------------

reid leaves after dark, the turquoise tint to the town now twisting into a myrtle, midnight shade. the conditions have changed as night introduces erratics he cannot yet account for. 

he walks back toward the winding road, his mind still working through the same undetermined sequence; all consistent, all inadequate: 

case file.

scene. 

witness. 

he cannot prove the something he feels is here. he cannot prove its presence, not abstractly or metaphorically, or in some roundabout derivation from an equation used by mathematicians decades past. not yet. 

Per the New York Times, Jonathan Ross, who murdered Renee Good, was not taken to the hospital, according to police reports. He was taken to the Federal Building. He was NOT injured.

Per the New York Post:

ICE agent unlikely to face charges in Renee Good’s death: report