Chapter 7: The Office Hours
The BAU bullpen at ten in the morning had a rhythm all its own.
Phones rang in overlapping patterns. Keyboards clacked. Someone's coffee maker gurgled in the break room. After the intensity of Columbus, the normalcy felt almost surreal—like stepping out of a war zone into a library.
I sat at my desk, case file open in front of me, but my attention was elsewhere.
Time to see what this thing can actually do.
The system hummed quietly at the edge of my awareness, waiting. For the past week, every activation had been involuntary—the interface triggering on its own, draining Focus without my permission. If I was going to survive in this job, I needed control.
I focused on the file in front of me. A cold case from 1998—serial arsonist in Philadelphia, never caught. The details were sparse, the witness statements contradictory. Standard unsolved file.
Surface Read. Activate.
Nothing happened.
I tried again, concentrating harder. Imagining the interface responding to my will instead of its own whims.
[MANUAL ACTIVATION DETECTED]
[SURFACE READ: INITIATING...]
[WARNING: MANUAL CONTROL INCURS +50% FOCUS COST]
[FOCUS: -8]
The file seemed to sharpen. Details I'd skimmed over suddenly stood out—inconsistencies in the timeline, a witness statement that contradicted physical evidence, a pattern in the target selection that suggested personal grudge rather than pyromania.
[PROFILE FRAGMENT: UNSUB LIKELY KNEW VICTIMS PROFESSIONALLY. FIRE USED TO DESTROY EVIDENCE OF PRIOR RELATIONSHIP.]
[FOCUS: 42/50]
I released the concentration. The enhanced perception faded, leaving behind a mild headache and the taste of copper in my mouth.
Fifty percent penalty for manual activation. The system wants to run on autopilot.
That was problematic. Autopilot meant unpredictable triggers. Unpredictable triggers meant Gideon noticing things he shouldn't notice.
I filed the discovery away and closed the arson file. Baby steps.
"You look like you're solving world hunger over there."
Reid's voice pulled me back to the bullpen. He stood at the edge of my desk, two coffee cups in hand, looking uncertain about whether he was interrupting.
"Just getting familiar with the filing system." I nodded at the cold case. "Figured I'd learn how the BAU approaches unsolved work."
Reid's eyes lit up the way they always did when someone mentioned methodology.
"The cold case archives are actually fascinating from a statistical perspective. Did you know that cases solved after more than ten years have a 73% higher conviction rate than cases solved within the first two years? The extended timeline allows for more thorough evidence collection and witness corroboration."
He set one of the coffee cups on my desk.
"I brought you coffee. Garcia said you take it black, which is honestly concerning from a cardiovascular perspective, but I figured who am I to judge."
"Thanks." I took a sip. Burnt, but warm. "You drink yours with enough sugar to kill a horse."
"Sugar is a necessary fuel for cognitive function. The brain consumes approximately 20% of the body's glucose supply, which means—"
"That you'd starve without your candy habit?"
Reid paused, then smiled—a quick, surprised expression that made him look even younger than his twenty-four years.
"Something like that."
He pulled a chair over, sat down without asking. I didn't mind.
"Can I ask you something about your CID work?"
"Depends on what it is."
"Interrogation techniques. In military psychology, there's a lot of debate about the efficacy of rapport-building versus confrontational approaches. The Reid Technique—no relation—has been criticized for producing false confessions, but some practitioners argue that psychological pressure is necessary to break through denial patterns."
I leaned back in my chair.
"You want to know what actually works in the field."
"I want to know what you've seen work. Books are useful, but they're not the same as experience."
He's genuine. Not testing me, not probing for weaknesses. Just curious.
"Rapport-building," I said. "Almost always. Confrontation makes people defensive, and defensive people either shut down or start lying to protect themselves. But if you make them feel understood—even respected—they'll tell you things they didn't plan to share."
"Even war criminals?"
"Especially war criminals. Most of them don't think they're monsters. They think they're soldiers who did what was necessary. If you approach them like villains, they dig in. If you approach them like professionals discussing difficult decisions, they open up."
Reid was nodding, fingers tapping against his knee in a rhythm that probably corresponded to some mathematical pattern.
"That's consistent with research on narcissistic personality structures. The need for validation supersedes self-preservation instincts in approximately 67% of—"
"Reid."
He stopped.
"You don't have to cite statistics at me. I believe you."
Another surprised smile.
"Sorry. Force of habit. Most people don't actually want to hear the numbers."
"Most people are missing out."
We talked for another twenty minutes. Eyewitness reliability. Memory formation under trauma. The neurological basis of deception. Reid knew the theory cold; I knew how it played out in interrogation rooms and refugee camps. The conversation flowed in a way professional discussions rarely did.
He's lonely. Surrounded by people who respect his brain but don't know how to connect with him as a person.
The realization hit harder than expected. I knew what happened to Reid in this timeline—Hankel, the drugs, the spiral. I couldn't stop all of it. But maybe I could give him one more person in his corner when things got dark.
"We should do this again," I said when JJ walked past with a stack of files. "Maybe grab lunch sometime. There's a Thai place near the Academy that doesn't completely suck."
Reid's expression shifted—surprise giving way to something warmer.
"I'd like that."
He headed back to his desk, and I returned to my cold case files.
But I wasn't really reading them.
I was thinking about the cases I remembered from the show. Fisher King. Frank Breitkopf. George Foyet. They were all out there right now, doing whatever they did before they became the BAU's nightmares.
I can't hunt them yet. Don't have the resources, don't have the cover. But I can prepare.
I pulled up the filing system, started cross-referencing. Unsolved cases with specific signatures. Geographic patterns. Victim profiles that matched what I remembered.
The Fisher King left riddles. Frank collected blonde women. Foyet targeted seemingly random victims but always with the same wound pattern.
Breadcrumbs. That's all I need. Breadcrumbs to follow when the time comes.
"Well, well."
Garcia's voice made me jump. She'd appeared at my desk without warning, colorful necklaces jingling, eyes sharp behind her red-framed glasses.
"Mr. Mysterious, digging through our archives like a man on a mission."
"Just learning the system."
"Uh-huh." She perched on the edge of my desk, uninvited but not unwelcome. "I've been watching you, you know. Since Columbus."
"Watching me do what?"
"Everything. The way you talk to people. The way you don't talk to people. The way you look at rooms like you're measuring exit distances." She tilted her head. "You're very careful, Agent Mercer. Very deliberate. It's interesting."
Garcia. The heart of the team. Also sharper than most people give her credit for.
"I'm new," I said. "Careful seems smart."
"Smart, sure. But most new agents are nervous-careful. You're calculating-careful. There's a difference."
She stood, brushed imaginary lint off her skirt.
"I'm not accusing you of anything, by the way. Just letting you know—I notice things. It's kind of my superpower." She smiled, bright and genuine. "Welcome to the BAU, Mr. Mysterious. Try not to be too interesting. It makes my job harder."
She walked away before I could respond.
[PROFILE NOTE: PENELOPE GARCIA — THREAT ASSESSMENT: LOW — OBSERVATION STATUS: ELEVATED]
[RECOMMENDATION: MAINTAIN AUTHENTIC ENGAGEMENT. DECEPTION WILL BE DETECTED.]
I dismissed the notification.
She's right. I am calculating. But I'm also trying to do the right thing.
Whether those two could coexist remained to be seen.
Lunch with Morgan was simpler.
The cafeteria served sandwiches that tasted like cardboard wrapped in sadness, but Morgan made them edible through sheer force of personality.
"So the guy says to me, 'I know my rights,' and I say, 'Great, then you know you're under arrest.'" Morgan laughed at his own story, shaking his head. "Chicago PD, man. Never a dull moment."
"You miss it?"
"Sometimes. The action, you know? BAU work is more thinking, less doing. Don't get me wrong—the cases matter more here. But there's something about kicking in a door that just hits different."
I nodded, took a bite of my sandwich. Dry turkey on staler bread.
"You'll get your kicks. Marks didn't exactly go quietly."
"True." Morgan's grin faded slightly. "You handled yourself well in that basement. Not just the physical stuff—the talking. You got inside his head."
"It's what we're trained to do."
"Nah, man. There's training and there's instinct. You've got both."
He leaned back, studied me with the kind of attention that made people uncomfortable.
"Elle mentioned you were unusually calm during the takedown. No shakes, no crash. That's not normal."
Elle's been talking about me.
"Military."
"You keep saying that."
"Because it keeps being true."
Morgan held my gaze for a moment, then nodded.
"Fair enough. But if there's ever something else going on—something you can't talk about—this team has your back. That's how it works here."
If you knew what was actually going on, you'd probably shoot me.
"I appreciate that," I said. "Really."
And I meant it.
The afternoon passed in paperwork and file reviews. I kept one eye on the cold case archives, building a mental map of cases that might connect to future threats.
Then my phone buzzed.
JJ's name on the screen.
"Conference room, five minutes. New case."
I closed the Fisher King file—a murder in Virginia with a riddle left at the scene, still unsolved—and locked my desk.
The monsters of tomorrow would wait.
Today's monsters needed catching first.
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