#thatswhatfriendsarefor

A/N: Sorry this one took so long, I’ve been getting more hours at work and hitting serious writer’s block with chapter 5 but that is coming as well. I am going to preface this chapter by saying that there will be references to rape and non-consensual sex from this chapter onward. You have been warned. Tagging all the usual suspects: @illegalcerebral @reid-effect @dontshootmespence @stunudo @ultrarebelheart  

Chapter 4: In Too Deep

 Seeing Spence with Becca’s daughter reminded JJ of the day almost six years earlier when he’d admitted to her that he wanted children. In order to give them a little bit of privacy, she stepped out of the room and called Garcia.

 “Hey, how’s Reid doing?”

 JJ honestly didn’t know how to answer that at the moment. “It’s a lot to deal with. He just lost a friend and gained a child all in one day, but he’ll be alright, we just need to be there for him. Speaking of which, did digging a little deeper into the past few years of Rebecca’s life reveal anything?” She asked.

 “Yes. As you know, because of all the cash withdrawals her finances didn’t tell me a whole lot, but I did figure out what her new apartment building had that her old one didn’t.”

 “Which was?”

 “A bus stop. She didn’t have a car, but she did have a bus pass, and there was a stop literally less than twenty feet from her front door. I can also confirm that she used her pass to take the bus from the stop outside her apartment to the church where she left the baby on the night that she died. In fact, the records of where and when that bus pass was used have actually revealed a lot. She also went to the local courthouse. I was originally looking into that because I was wondering if she had ever filed a restraining order against anyone, and indeed she did. A little over nine months ago she filed a restraining order against one Peter Bailman.”

 “Ex-Boyfriend?” JJ asked.

 “I’m not sure but I doubt it, Mr. Bailman has a bunch of citations for bar fights, petty theft, sexual harassment charges, and she’s not the first woman to file a restraining order against this sleazeball.”

 “Wow, yeah, the way Reid talks about her I doubt she’d date someone like that. Hey, there’s actually one more thing we need to know Garcia.”

 “Name it.”

 “We need to know if Rebecca ever notarized a will. We still don’t know how she died, but the letter she left with the baby suggests that she knew she was dying so it’s possible that had time to make some formal arrangements before that happened. The baby’s case manager thinks it would help speed up the process of Reid being granted guardianship if Rebecca made her wishes clear in a will of some kind.”

 “That might take me a minute since she wouldn’t need to see a judge to do that, but I’ll get back to you,” Garcia replied, and the call ended.

 Spencer came out of Ms. Frankfort’s office a few minutes later, looking like a child whose puppy had just been hit by a car. Even after fifteen minutes, he was clearly already attached.

 “Was that Garcia?” He asked.

 “Yeah, she dug a little deeper into Rebecca’s life like we asked her to.

 “And?”

 “Does the name Peter Bailman ring a bell?”

 “Yeah. He lived in our neighborhood growing up, why?”

 “Garcia found a restraining order that Rebecca filed against him about nine months ago. Spence, is there any chance at all that he’s the father?”

 Reid shook his head ‘no’ before JJ even finished asking. “There’s no way. Rebecca hated him. We both did. He was older than us, I actually graduated with him, and when he wasn’t beating me up for the fun of it he was harassing her. Whenever Becca talked about him, which wasn’t much, she’d call him a ‘prick’. Believe me, there’s a higher probability of an asteroid with a surface area the size of Texas hitting the earth in the next five minutes than Rebecca sleeping with Peter Bailman.”

 “Well, something must’ve happened between them around that time for her to take out that restraining order. I think we need to talk to her friends at the university.” JJ suggested.

 “Let’s go.”

 As soon as they arrived on campus, they went to talk to the Dean of the Art Department, who told them that Becca’s closest friend from work had been a woman named Amanda Chambers, who also taught the graphic design classes and they were most likely to find her eating lunch in her office.

 When they got there, they found Professor Chambers sitting on top of her desk spooning what looked like chocolate pudding from a plastic cup into her mouth. She was tiny, skinny and shorter than JJ with long blonde hair and large hazel eyes. When she saw them waiting outside her door she hopped off her desk to let them in.

 “Hello?” She asked.

 “Hi, I’m Spencer, this is my friend JJ, we would like to talk to you about Becca Thompson.” He explained.

 “You knew her too,” She observed. “Most people who didn’t know her usually used her full name. She’d answer to it but once you knew her it was Becca.”

 “I know, I’ve known her since we were kids.” He replied.

 “Oh, you’re that Spencer…” She replied with a wry smile. Reid noticed that her eyes darted up and to the side like she was remembering everything Becca had ever told her about him. “It’s nice to finally meet the legend in person.” She said as she jumped back onto her desk.

 “We were hoping you could help us fill in some of the gaps in her last year of life, there’s a lot about what happened to her that doesn’t make sense to us.” JJ cut in.

 “I don’t know a whole lot,” Amanda warned. “I had my suspicions but she never came out and said anything so I don’t know how much of it I was right about.”

 “What did you suspect?” Reid asked.

 “Well, nine months ago, she called me early in the morning, like super early, I think it was around four AM. She said she was sick and asked if I could cover her classes for the day. I could tell something was wrong, but she didn’t seem sick. It was more like she was shaken like something really bad had happened and it scared her. I agreed. When she came back to work the next day, she was limping, and she had marks on her wrists, like rope burns and I’m positive I saw a matching mark on one of her ankles. I asked her what happened, and she just said that she didn’t want to talk about it.”

 JJ turned to Reid. “Do you think maybe her mom hurt her again?”

 He shook his head. “No, every time Becca’s mom hurt her it was impulsive, this sounds like there was more planning to it than that, her mom wouldn’t have taken the time to tie her up.” He explained. Then he turned back to Amanda. “What happened next?”

 I noticed over the next month or so that she started getting sick, there were days where she would throw up two or three times. Eventually I asked her if she knew what was wrong and she said that nothing was, that she was pregnant.” Amanda paused, as though gathering the resolve to tell them what else she knew. “I think, I think whoever hurt her that night raped her. I think that, that’s how she got pregnant.”

 Reid was incensed, he had to withdraw within himself to maintain the outward appearance of calm. If Amanda was correct, then the restraining order against Peter suddenly made sense as well. No wonder she didn’t want anyone to know who the father of her child is… He thought bitterly to himself. He hoped desperately that he never saw the likes of Peter Bailman again, because the next time he did, he wasn’t sure what he’d be capable of.

 “Is there more?” JJ asked, seeing the tears in Amanda’s eyes and carotid artery pulsating in her neck that Reid had been too absorbed by his own thoughts to notice.

 “Yes,” she admitted. “It gets worse. About seven months ago, I started noticing that she was coming into work with bruises, and knowing her, and knowing what I know about her family I assumed it was because if her mom at first. But then one day she tripped over the laptop cart in her classroom, and within a couple of hours, she had a massive bruise on her leg. It went all the way from her knee to her ankle. I was worried about her so I made her go to the ER. They kept her for observation overnight and ran some blood tests. When she got back to work after that she claimed they didn’t find anything wrong, but she kept bruising really easily and despite being pregnant she was losing weight instead of gaining it. Becca wasn’t a small person, she just wasn’t built that way but by the time she resigned, aside from her pregnancy starting to show, she was skin and bone. I still don’t know what, but I’m positive there was something else wrong with her, something she didn’t want anyone to know about.” She told them.

 “Not even me…” Reid realized. This was insane, Becca had been in deeper trouble than he’d thought possible. Why hadn’t she said anything? Why hadn’t she asked for help while he could have still given it? He couldn’t take it anymore, he left the office without a word, letting the door close loudly behind him.

 “Excuse us,” JJ said as she followed Reid out.

 He was pacing back and forth along the stretch of hallway between Amanda’s office and the one next door.

 “Spence?”

 “If I ever see that creep again you’re going to have to keep me away from him.” He told her, more as a statement of fact than a threat.

 “Reid, you told me that she never would have slept with him, and she didn’t, not willingly anyway. If he did hurt her, we can prove it. We can track him down, we can prove with DNA that he fathered Rebecca’s daughter.”

 “No. No, we can’t… we can’t even let him know that she exists. JJ if he is the father, then he would have parental rights over her. If we’re right, and anyone else finds out, the only way we could stop the courts from giving him custody is if we got him locked up.”

 “You don’t think he’d be convicted?”

 “No. Becca’s dead, she can’t testify. All matching his DNA to her baby would prove is that he had sex with her. The assault was months ago. Any injuries she sustained, as a result, would’ve healed by now and any drugs he may or may not have used would be long out of her system. There’d be no hard evidence that it wasn’t consensual. The restraining order could be used to show that Becca was afraid of him, but a good defense attorney could defeat that argument pretty easily in court. Garcia didn’t find any evidence that Becca reported the assault, but, as far as I knew she wasn’t afraid of him, so why not admit that he hurt her? Why take out a restraining order? The only reason the Becca I know would have let him get away with something like that would be to protect her baby, to make sure that he never knew she existed. I think our best shot at keeping that little girl safe is to make sure it stays that way.”

 “Ok… but that’s not the only thing that’s bugging you is it?”

 “No, it’s what Amanda told us about the last few months before Becca resigned, that combined with her letting saying that she knew she was dying makes me think there’s still something we’re missing.”

 “Do you have any idea what?”

 “A few, none of them good. From sounds of it her life was one nightmare after another for almost a year, but she never said a word. Why didn’t she come to me? I would’ve helped her.”