counting stars | criminal minds [discontinued]

1 8 | C A N A D A

[4.25; 4.26]

"i wanna lose and go bother hotch"

It was fairly early in the morning when JJ called everyone to the briefing room for a new case. She started off by showing them security tapes. The footage showed a man using his car to drive into the guard shack at the Canadian border crossing. When he got out of the car, they handcuffed him. Then he claimed to have killed ten people and instructed them to call the FBI.

"His name's William Hightower," JJ told them when the video ended. "He claims over the past month, he's picked ten people off the streets of Detroit, killed them, dumped their bodies across the border in Canada."

"Has he given up the dumpsite?" Prentiss asked.

"He said he'll only talk to the FBI," she said.

"Do we have confirmation these people are even missing?" Reid asked.

"Two were reported missing by family months ago, but they all appear to be transients," JJ explained. "We're having a hard time finding any information on them."

"Garcia? Florence?"

"Like a bloodhound, sir," Garcia said, getting up.

"Woof woof," Florence added before following her to their office.

"Please never bark at me ever again," Rossi called after her.

Florence and Garcia got to work, finding all they could about the ten victims — of which there wasn't much. Though the plot thickened when the team arrived and interviewed Hightower. According to him, he wasn't a murderer. Someone else was taking these people, including his sister who hadn't been on the initial victim list and killing them. He pulled his stunt at the border to get the FBI involved.

After that, Hotch had Florence and Garcia look into multiple border crossings as well as track where the last phone call from Hightower's sister had been called from — which had been in Canada. When they had their results, they called him back.

"Go ahead, Garcia," he said.

"Good news and bad news," she started off. "I've got IDs on multiple border crosses for the dates in question. Trouble is, I've got hundreds, and as far as I can tell, if your license doesn't ping for any prior felonies, you're pretty much gonna pass go and collect two-hundred Canadian dollars."

"She's right," Officer Bedwell said. "Busiest cross in North America. Lot of commercial traffic, trucks mostly. Stop and searches would cause too many delays."

"So he's got virtually free passage," Rossi said.

"And once he crosses, there's nothing but woods to hide whatever he's doing," Reid added.

William Hightower ended up being released into FBI custody in order to help with the investigation. While Garcia looked over more crime reports, Florence tried to help JJ with notifying the victim's families by actually finding the families. It proved to be very difficult though considering that she didn't even have last names for a lot of them. Thankfully though, Garcia was not as empty-handed on her end.