When Liv faced a loss that would rewrite her entire life, she stepped away from her work. A year and a half later, she returns to the BAU in search of normalcy; so she can finally move on. On a new team, Liv is immediately thrown into the game of ca...
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"You're never gonna beat him." Prentiss laughed, watching Liv and Reid engaged in their third game of chess.
"It's true." Reid agreed. "But you do make for good practice."
Liv smiled and shook her head, ignoring the discouragement from her teammates. To be fair, she knew she wasn't going to win. She had been at the BAU for a week now, and felt like she was finally getting the dynamics of how things really worked with them. One of those dynamics was, anticipating Spencer Reid could always outsmart you. She played anyway, to entertain him, and to make the flight go by faster.
She let out a whine of frustration as Reid smugly said, "Checkmate."
They were on their way to San Francisco on a case of a friend of Hotch's. An unsub was murdering multiple homeless men, and he thought it was connected to the murder of a father and daughter. All murders occurred on the same dates every year, only once year.
"We'll be there soon guys." Hotch said as he passed them towards the drink station, giving them a heads up to wrap up their chess tournament. As he passed, his eyes hung on Liv a little bit longer than they had on Reid, and something about to put a knot in Liv's stomach. She was afraid that perhaps she had said to much in the aftermath of her and Hotch's talk the other night at the bureau, but something had changed in his stare. Her honesty, along with her diligence at her work, she believed, had finally convinced him to stop monitoring her every move to see if she was good enough. Not living under the scrutiny, she had to admit, was pretty freeing.
"What do we know about previous victims?" Rossi spoke up, ready to crack open the details of the case. His inquiry gained everyone's attention, discouraging Liv and Reid from pursuing another game of chess.
"The tenderloin district has a high concentration of drug addicts and homeless people, all the victims have been transients." Reid stated, ready as every to present what he knew.
"So this unsubs choosing easy targets that won't be missed." Morgan concluded, looking between them all. "He's not concerned with the challenge of the hunt. All these victims are part of a larger plan."
"Which he excecutes with a single gun shot wound to the head after a couple days of keeping them. He's using them for something." Liv nodded along, chess long abandoned.
'"Reid, did you find any significance to the dates?" Hotch asked.
"Nothing historical. It's got to be personal to the unsub." Reid responded. That was never a preferred outcome, it only made them that much more clueless as to why this unsub felt the need to kill in the first place.
Hotch gave everyone their orders, following it with, "No one should expect to get a lot of sleep for the next three days."
"What about Cooper's team? You said he had a theory." Rossi asked. Cooper was the friend from another team calling in the favor from Hotch, he was the one who had been watching this case for years.
