White Rabbit - A Criminal Minds Fic

Eight

"Is this Alice girl a victim, a witness, or what?"

The team bar Dr Reid were gathered around the round table they used for briefings as Aaron went through the details that himself, Reid and Garcia had managed to garner between them.

"We're not sure. All we know is she bought us the file with the first eight bodies and that she's been giving us information. From what she's revealed so far it appears that when she and Rebecca Olson ran away from Rebecca's home, it was to some sort of retreat or compound that is went by the name 'Wonderland'. Alice left there after four and a half years and has been living with her sister for the five years since. She believes Rebecca Olson is still there."

"So what do Marnie and Lewis Goldstein have to do with it?" Agent Jareau piped up.

"Yeah, I remember those names from the news reports in the eighties, but why are they important now" Agent Rossi looked at Aaron, confused as to why these two names were involved. The rest of the room didn't recognise the names.

"Marnie Goldstein is the daughter of James and Julianne Goldstein, they owned a large clothing manufacturering factory in the seventies and eighties and became quite wealthy from it. In 1980, their sixteen year old daughter came across a naked, injured and confused boy wandering the streets outside their home. The boy was taken into hospital whilst the authorities tried to find out who he was. Marnie would visit him each day and became quite attached to him. When the authorities couldn't establish his identity and nobody came forward to claim him, Marnie convinced her parents to foster him."

Aaron glanced around the room to check the team were still with him.

"The boy stayed with the family for six years and then both the boy, who had name himself Lewis at this point, disappeared with Marnie in toe. When doctors examined him originally, they estimated him to be around twelve years old, so when they left he was around eighteen and Marnie twenty two. When the family were interviewed about the disappearance, strange stories about Lewis came out. The boy claimed that he was from the future, from 2040 to be exact, and that he'd been sent back in time to assemble a select group of people to prepare for when the world falls in 2035." Hotch was reading directly from interview transcripts now.

"So the kid was crazy then." Morgan commented.

"Marnies parents thought so at first, but she was their only daughter and she'd become so attached to him that they didn't want to upset her. He was only a kid, they'd said. What harm could he do, he'd obviously been through some traumatic experiences. But, then he started telling them about events that would happen to prove himself to them and then those events did happen."

"What sort of events are we talking here?" JJ asked.

Agent Hotchner listed them, and the team looked around at each other.

"How specific was he exactly?"

"In some cases, not very. But in others, he was date specific. The Goldsteins claimed Lewis told them about these events months before they happened and they wrote them down. When these things started to happen, they panicked, thinking he was somehow involved. They talked about throwing him out on the streets but Marnie overheard and threatened to kill herself if they did. So they allowed him to stay. Two days after the six year anniversary of when they'd found him, Marnie and Lewis both disappeared."

"Ran away, you mean?" Derek pointed out.

"Ran away with no trace or any clues pointing to where they'd gone. Nothing at all. The family spent a lot of money on search parties and campaigns to help find their daughter, but no one ever came forward with any new information. They simply upped and left, and were never heard off again."

"So why are the important now?" Rossi asked, spreading copies of the folder that Hotch had given him out on the table in front of him.

"We asked Alice for a name, a name of the people who ran Wonderland. And she gave the names Lewis and Marnie. We don't know it's definitely them, but she says Wonderland had been established in 1986, that's the year they went missing. And all of these bodies have been found either at the edge of the Bluedove National Park, or in the surrounding counties. The Goldsteins lived in Kent County, it's around forty miles away from the National Park."

"So you're thinking that Wonderland was some kind of cult then, that Lewis and Marnie set up somewhere in that National Park. That's a huge area." JJ tapped her pen on the table, thinking.

"A very large area indeed. People go missing in that Park and are never heard from or seen again." Garcia spoke, the first time she'd done so all morning.

"So what else do we have here, this is all very intriguing but what do we actually have."

"Alice presented Reid with a folder containing eight victims, all people she claims to have known. She told us that the group had a symbol, a rabbit. The members had it branded into their lower neck either in the form of an actual tattoo or in some cases an actual branding." Hotch pointed to the photo of Alices rabbit that he'd blown up. "Alice implied that we should do a search from 1990 onwards for bodies found with this marking, or with an injury where the marking would be. Garcia found 38 cases in total. All found within the Bluedove surrounding area, all with various markings to the neck and all since 1990."

"So we've got ourselves another Manson Family or something." Derek looked at his colleagues.

"Or something."