✓ | sick of losing soulmates [SPENCER REID]

7.5

7.5
( breakeven. )

☆ ★ ☆

iris

"He said one will die every two hours, not all five in ten," Rossi says, eyes wide. "When he said ten hours, I just assumed..." He trails off, hopeless, dejected. But what he'd thought, had been the same thing Iris had assumed, so she rubs his shoulder and sends him a sympathetic smile. The last thing she wants, is for the man to believe all of this is on him; she knows what guilt can do to you, the havoc it can reap.

"It's a chess game to him," Spencer says, somewhat kindly, somewhat analytically, like the comment counts as both reassurance and a deduction about the professor's personality. "He's two moves ahead."

"Let's not get diverted," Hotch says. He swallows, moving a few sheets around on the round table he sits at beside Garcia, the rest of them standing — aside from Morgan and Jordan, who are away looking at the crime scene. "How we doing with the seven missing women?"

And so they begin to work, with Rossi hopping between the interrogation room and the round table room, while the rest go over every single missing-women case that fits their profile.

"Margaret Peters, another Gloucester point," Hotch says, nodding toward Iris, who, like she has been doing for the past hour, marks Gloucester again on the map with a thumbtack, feeling with a purse of her lips and a twinge of her heart like she's no better than an unsub, reducing a woman gone missing, a woman killed, to nothing. Nothing but a thumbtack to make a location, that is. "Disappeared in 2006 on her way to work. Last seen at the coffee shop she went to every morning."

"That's number six," Spencer says. "We need one more."

"Uh, Lindsay Connor," Emily says, reading from a file at the top of her whole pile of folders. "She was last seen when she stepped out to have a cigarette while having a blown tire fixed."

"Doesn't sound like something routine," Spencer says.

"He couldn't have predicted it," Iris says. "She's unrelated." Saying that, impossibly, feels worse than pressing thumbtacks to a map does. It's so... Dismissive.

"Lisa McDaniel, Saluda, went missing early 2008 while on her daily jog," Hotch says.

"Oh, she fits," Emily says, and Iris nods as she marks yet another place on the map. It's the third point, the third girl to go missing — well, to be taken by the professor, that is — in Saluda.

"That's seven — including Kaylee, that makes eight," says Spencer.

On the screen in the wall, Garcia loads up the images of the eight selected women, and instantly every pair of eyes in the room widen. Each of them are practically identical; not just in the fact that they're all smiling for the camera, big and wide and teeth flashing, but their hair, their eyes, even their facial structure — it's all identical. Aside from a few differences, like the shapes of noses, the curve of their eyebrows, the way they wear their hair, the squareness of their jaws, they're each perfectly the same. And, more importantly, they're all incredibly pretty. The type of girls that, when Iris sees them on the street, she feels a mixture of attraction and insecurity.