This began here with a meme; it takes part after Rix’s guest fic here (and click “next” for the second part.)
It continued here, here, here, and here.

There was a point in most cases where the pieces just fell into place, one after another after another.

They’d reached that point with this one, finally, and instead of the adrenaline surge he usually felt, Derek Morgan was feeling nothing but dread.

“I hate cases like this.”

“If she truly killed him in self-defense, then it’s unlikely that the Bureau or the local police will…” Spencer kept going. Derek tuned out.

This was worse than finding the killer who’d done so to save her own life. That sucked back enough. This was finding someone who’d had the wherewithal to kill a monster. And that could lead to any number of horrible places.

Where it led, this time, was to a convenience store surveillance camera, and from there to a local canvas. From there, they ended up talking to a very nice woman who started out with truth and then started lying.

The girl was Penny. Yes, she’d been visiting; she was a school friend of the woman’s daughter, Kath. Yes, she was back in school now, along with Kath.

And then a brick wall. They were in boarding school. They would be back for Christmas break. The woman didn’t even seem to notice that she wasn’t passing on other information, such as where the school was or had Penny had some trouble. She just kept politely answering questions that weren’t quite what they were asking.

Reid was getting frustrated. Hotch was getting angry. And Morgan could smell magic all over this case.

But before he needed to start fighting fire with fire, Penelope Garcia worked her own version of magic.

“Found ’em! Or, I should say, I found a shell. And I have to say, this is probably the most interesting shell I’ve ever found. I mean, there are students who have graduated with high honors from this… shell. And they’re going to places like Yale and Harvard. So, either they’re ghosts, their credentials are ghosts, or something very hinky is going on with this shell.”

Morgan wasn’t ready to rule out any of those possibilities.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/787290.html. You can comment here or there.