Disclaimer: The characters and situations of Profiler are the property of Sander/Moses Productions and NBC. The characters are borrowed without permission for this story, but no copyright infringement is intended.

Part One

Detective John Grant ducked under the crime scene tape with one swift movement and followed Bailey Malone toward the house. The peaceful appearance of the neighborhood had been shattered by the sudden influx of squad cars and investigators.

The old unease settled over John, the feeling that the dead should be given more respect. His restless eyes swept the crowd that had gathered on the other side of the flimsy barrier. He was always looking for the one spectator who seemed out of place, nervous, more excited than the circumstances warranted.

Turning back to the house, he saw Bailey waiting in the doorway. "We think it's Jack again. I wanted to warn you--"

"Where's Sam?" John fought down a thread of panic. Jack was her case, more than anyone's. Why wasn't she here?

Bailey showed no sign that he had noticed John's worry. "She needed to spend some time with Chloe. She told me not to call her unless it was an emergency."

"I think Jack qualifies as an 'emergency'," snapped John.

Bailey blocked the doorway with his body, pitching his voice so low that John had to strain to hear it. "She's on her way. I figured we could do the preliminaries without her, give her a little more time with her daughter."

John knew Bailey well enough to read the expression on his face. *He thinks I'm sniping at her again.* "Look, I think it's great that she's standing up for herself. She lets everyone push her around too much. I just don't like the idea of her being *there* while we're *here*."

"She's being protected."

"They don't know this guy like we do."

"They're professionals. They can do what needs to be done."

"Fine." John wished he'd never brought it up. "Let's get on with it." He tried to move past Bailey, but the older man snagged his arm.

"That isn't what I wanted to tell you."

John turned to face him.

"It looks like Jack's been doing his homework. I think this time the message is for you."

"What do you mean?" John heard the officers on the scene moving around inside, but he couldn't see beyond the front hallway.

"He knows about Evelyn."

"My mother?" John shoved past Bailey, his jaw clenched.

The murder scene: a woman sat slumped in an easy chair in front of the TV. The room stank of vomit and excrement and a body left too long unattended. A boyish-looking police officer angled past John and left the room with his hand over his mouth.

John had long ago learned not to let the unpleasant sights and smells at crime scenes affect him, but what he saw made him feel as though his stomach had dropped a hundred stories non-stop. How had the bastard known?

He heard Bailey speaking behind him. Without turning, he said, "How the hell did he find this out?" His voice had a ragged edge; he fought to keep it under control. He closed his eyes, but the scene seemed etched on the backs of his eyelids. Middle-aged woman, platinum blond permed hair, a little on the plump side. Noxious-colored dribble down her chin, a mix of booze and pills.

Over the din of the investigation, John heard music, a soft instrumental. After a moment he recognized "Memories" from the musical Cats.

In his years with law enforcement, John had prided himself on never leaving a scene, no matter how gruesome. But this time, he felt the bile rising in his throat and knew he couldn't stand it. "Outside," he told Bailey as he brushed past. He paused only long enough to shout over his shoulder, "And turn that damn music off!"

He lost track of how long he stood with his forehead against the cool metal of the car that had brought him there. A hundred emotions waged war inside him, rage and shame primary among them. When he felt Bailey's hand on his shoulder, he shuddered away from the touch.

* * *

One look at his friend's bleak face, and Bailey cursed Jack for what seemed the millionth time. Somehow scum like Jack had a sixth sense for hitting people where it hurt the most, finding the shadows in the corners of the mind and exploiting them, twisting them.

"We're going to find him, John. We're going to bring him down. But we've all got to work together. Every little trick like this, every taunt gives us more to work with." He suppressed a small smile of satisfaction when the light rekindled in John's eyes.

"I'll have someone get in touch with Cincinnati Homicide ASAP. They've got to be keeping some sort of record on who has access to their files."

Bailey nodded. "It's a starting point. After you've made those arrangements, why don't you stay outside here. Interview the neighbors, the first officers on the scene."

John opened his mouth to argue, then shut it. After a brief pause, he said, "Sure, if you think that's best."

Bailey reached out again. "I need you working with a clear head. It looks like he's stepping this up a level. We can't afford to slip." He knew by the look on John's face that they were thinking the same thing: Sam. Chloe. Angel. Three people who could pay the ultimate price if they didn't catch Jack.

"You'll have to tell her about this."

"I can't, Bailey. Let her read the files."

"She'll get more if you help her."

"Just bring her in and let her do her funky vision thing. Leave me out of it."

Bailey knew he'd pushed as far as he could for the time being. "We'll discuss it later." He waited until John took out his cell phone, and then went back into the house.

* * *

Two plainclothes agents met Sam Waters at Sac Metro Airport four hours later. The half-hour ride to the crime scene left her feeling impatient, and she almost wished she'd taken an earlier flight. A cool autumn darkness already blanketed the city.

Bailey was waiting for her at the crime scene.

"I thought John was with you," she said as he escorted her through the array of lights the detectives had set up in the yard.

"Something came up."

Sam nodded, raising her hand in an unvoiced request for silence as she moved into the living room. Eyes wide and unblinking, she examined the scene.

"That music--"

"Was on when the police arrived. CD player on repeat."

"That's his message."

"So I guessed."

"But how did you know so quickly that it was Jack, Bailey? Was there--" she blinked and looked away "--was there another note for me?"

"I don't know. We waited for you before bringing in the black light."

"So what clued you in, Bailey? What aren't you telling me?"

Bailey shook his head, leaving Sam feeling frustrated. It wasn't like him to keep her in the dark about something this important. She shrugged it off; if she had to, she could call him on it later.

In the background she could hear him giving orders to set up for the black light as she moved around the body.

"Cause of death?" she asked Bailey when he returned to her side.

"Looks like he force-fed her prescription painkillers and vodka until she passed out. Then he waited for her to die."

"It's obvious he spent a lot of time here. The music, everything so carefully positioned." She had a flash of vision, then, the rubber-gloved hands placing the body just so. "Bailey, he had a plan here. It's like he was following a script."

"I think he was," Bailey concurred.

Sam was struck again by the feeling that there was another level to this case, one that Bailey saw and she didn't. Before she could press for more information, one of the field agents told them the black light was ready. And with the windows covered to shut out interference from outside, Bailey snapped on the equipment.

"Try the CD player first."

He did, and Sam bit her lip when the familiar lettering failed to materialize. "There's got to be something more here. He spent a *long* time here, longer than usual."

"Maybe he felt the song was enough of a message," offered Bailey.

Sam shook her head. "No, this is like his career. He has a pattern, and I don't think he can deviate from it now." She thought a little longer, begging the darkness to yield up another secret. "Wait. She's facing the TV. Try that."

She couldn't control the hissing intake of her breath when the indigo glow of the black light revealed what she'd been looking for. *I can touch them all, Sam* scrawled across the screen.

"Bailey, what's going on here? What does it mean? I know there's something you aren't telling . . . My God, Chloe? What's happened?"

Bailey stopped her as she fought blindly toward the door. "It's not Chloe, Sam. John--"

"Bailey, where is John?" A shrill note of panic echoed in her voice. Was he dead, or missing?

"John is fine . . . more or less. I sent him out because . . ." He looked away, his expression slightly guilty. "I sent him out because the message here was as much for him as for you."

"I don't understand. It's not like Coop. I mean, we're not--"

Bailey rolled his eyes at her defensiveness. "I'm not implying anything here. Who knows what the hell Jack is thinking?" Taking her arm, he guided her out of the house. "I hate doing this. I would much rather he talked to you about it."

"About *what*? Will you please stop beating around the bush? We're wasting time."

Bailey sighed again and began to speak. "When John was five, his parents divorced and his father took off. When he was seven, his mother remarried. By all accounts, it was not a happy union. The stepfather abused Evelyn--John's mother--and when John tried to protect her . . ."

Sam found herself blinking back tears at the pictures the story evoked in her mind. "Bailey, that's awful."

"It gets worse. By the time John was ten, his mother had had enough. She threatened to divorce the stepfather. A week later, John came home from school and found her dead in front of the TV."

"From an overdose of liquor and pills," guessed Sam.

"Exactly. The police ruled it a suicide and a judge sent John to live with his grandmother in Atlanta."

"And?" pressed Sam, sure there was more, another piece to the puzzle that was John Grant.

"John never thought it was suicide. From the first, he was sure his stepfather forced his mother to take the pills. He hounded the police for years, and when they wouldn't listen, he decided to make the system work for him. Buckled down in high school, graduated first in his class. Finished his bachelor's degree while he worked for the Atlanta PD. It took him a while, but he found what he was looking for, the evidence that his stepfather murdered his mother. The old man was sentenced to life in prison. And I brought John over to work on the team."

"And this?" She gestured at the house.

"Except for the music, it's staged to look like the room where John found his mother."

"Oh, God. Poor John." She suddenly felt as if she was looking at him through new eyes. Maybe she still wouldn't call him a friend, with his arrogant and flippant demeanor, but she was learning to respect his instincts, and Bailey's story had given her a new respect for his character. "I wish you'd told me before."

"I didn't have the right, Sam. What I know, I read in his file. He's never talked about it."

*Men.* thought Sam. "So now what?"

"Bailey. Sam." John slipped under the tape, carrying a cell phone and a handful of folders.

Startled by the sound of his voice, Sam and Bailey turned toward him.

He paused in mid-stride. "Why are you two looking at me like my head's about to start spinning around?" The gallows humor fell flat, leaving an expectant silence in its wake.

Sam longed to reach out to him, take a little of the burden of pain he must feel. It was a burden she was all too familiar with. Yet the stony stillness of his face brooked no intrusion. And Sam remembered the many times since she'd returned to the task force, when having a case to focus on gave her the strength to continue, some point on which to fix her mind. John could deal with his past in his own way, as long as it didn't interfere with the investigation.

* * *

John cursed inwardly when he saw the looks on Sam's and Bailey's faces. He had told her, after being asked not to. Of course the rational part of his mind reminded him that the team needed every shred of information to bring Jack down, but another part of him felt afraid. To forestall that, he got right down to business.

"I talked to an old friend in Cincinnati, and booked a flight out there for tomorrow morning. I should be able to meet you back in Atlanta before Grace finishes the autopsy."

"Great. If you need any more time, let me know." Bailey moved on.

Sam took a half step closer to John. "Do you need any help?"

"No, I don't 'need any help'." He rounded on her, his face a mask of rage. "Back off, Sam. I don't need anyone holding my hand." For a brief moment, she thought he might put his fist through the nearest car window, but with a visible effort he reined in his temper. "Sorry. Bad day." He looked around for one of the Bureau's cars, started toward it and then turned back. "I'd appreciate it if you and Bailey don't talk about this any more than you have to."

Sam nodded. "I understand."

"See you in Atlanta."

Sam watched his retreating back. He still held his broad shoulders stiffly straight, but the usual swagger in his stride was missing. He looked, she thought, very much like a ten-year-old boy trying to be brave.

* * *

*Well, that was almost a complete waste of time,* thought John as he settled into the coach-class seat of the flight from Cincinnati to Atlanta. He'd flirted with the clerk at the check-in counter until she switched him from a window seat to an aisle, but there still wasn't enough room to stretch out his legs.

He hoped the team had managed to come up with something else. Maybe Grace had turned up something in the autopsy, but the odds were slim.

Jack. The ugly face sketched from Donny's memory taunted John. "You think you're so damn smart," he growled.

"Excuse me?" squawked the woman in the seat next to him.

"Sorry. Not you." He turned away, ready to sink back into his thoughts, but his neighbor was oblivious to his dark mood.

"Are you on a business trip? Problems at work?"

"Yeah." He searched the pocket on the back of the seat, but could only find the sheet of emergency instructions and a barf bag.

"I've got this boss who's like, so demanding. I mean, I've got health problems, right? But every time I take a sick day he's all over my case about it. I mean, really. I told him about it when he hired me, but he must not have been listening. Do you ever feel like that, like no one listens to you?"

John glanced at her plump, dissatisfied face. "Yeah, sometimes."

"You're not very talkative, are you? Not that it bothers me, you know, 'cause I can just talk all day without any encouragement. But I hear that keeping your feelings in is, like, bad for your health, so why don't you go ahead and, like, tell me all about it?"

"No, thanks." He unbuckled his seatbelt and stood up, fishing around in the overhead bin for his briefcase. Once he had the files Dora had given him, he sat down again and opened them to the beginning. He already knew what they contained, but maybe if he read through them one more time, he would see something he'd missed before.

"You know," said the woman in the next seat, her voice pitching to a whine, "I don't mean to sound critical, or anything, but you're about the most unfriendly person I've ever met."

*Too bad* thought John, but he refrained from speaking since he knew his temper was already on the ragged edge.

"What are you reading that's so important?" She started to lean over his shoulder, and he slammed the file shut.

"The case file on my mother's murder."

"Oh. Oh, gosh, I'm sorry." She shrank away from him, but a floodgate had opened.

"You really want to know what I'm doing? I'm a detective with the Violent Crime Task Force. Right now we're looking for a serial killer who's already murdered twenty people, and he's threatening some of the people I care about the most. No, I am not happy. And no, I don't want to talk about it because the only thing that's going to make me feel better is watching him fry in the electric chair. Is there anything else you want to know?"

She shook her head and turned as far as she could toward the window. The silence was too little, too late for John, who found that the brief conversation had opened doors he wanted to keep closed. *The people I care about most,* he thought. *Where did that come from?*

He shoved those musings aside, turning his mind to the problem of how to catch Jack. The message with victim twenty might be a warning, telling John that he would be next.

That in itself didn't bother him. He'd been threatened before, and the possibility of dying in the line of duty was a fact he'd accepted and made his peace with long ago. He knew he could do what needed to be done, regardless of the cost. What troubled him was the thought of failing, of leaving this thing with Jack unfinished. He worried about the innocent people Jack would target. He worried about his friends on the task force, who had in a way become the family he'd lost. And Sam, who was in the most danger, emotionally if not physically. He knew that Jack enjoyed tormenting her. John left the job of comforting her to Bailey, but even so, he wasn't blind.

They'd been so close to catching him at the train station. Five minutes faster and this would be a moot point. Two people would still be alive. Sam could go back to a normal life, maybe date that cretin Cooper.

Cooper. A fragment of an idea began to coalesce in his mind. Jack took the biggest risks to get to the men Sam cared about. Maybe he could get Coop transferred from the ATF to the VCTF unit for a sting operation.

Herejected that thought almost immediately. No doubt Coop would be willing, but he was too much of a loose cannon for John's taste. George was a desk jockey, Nathan had family to worry about. And Bailey . . . thinking of Bailey, he would hate this plan.

I'll have to convince Sam first, he decided. If she agrees, then Bailey'll go along with it. He spent the rest of the flight working and reworking the plan in his mind.

* * *

Despite what he'd told Bailey when he left Sacramento, he was the last member of the team to get back to Atlanta. Grace was concluding the autopsy report when he ran down the stairs and took his place at the conference table in the command center.

The last bit of Grace's report told him what he'd expected, that she hadn't turned up any new forensic data in her examination.

"What have you got for us, John?"

He handed around copies of the information he'd brought back with him. "This is a copy of Cincinnati PD's file on my--" he swallowed down the lump in his throat "--On that other case. In the back you'll find a list of anyone who's requested these files in the past five years."

"Which is four years before you started working Jack's case, right?"

"Yeah. I figured if Jack was looking up information linked to me, it would have been more recently. And I think I was right." He flipped through the sheets of paper. "Check out page ten. Six months ago a man calling himself Bailey Malone asked to see this file."

"It wasn't me," grumbled Bailey.

"I know. I showed Dora your picture, and she said she definitely would have remembered your sexy eyes."

Laughter rippled around the table, bathing John in a wave of relief. He saw the wariness wash out of their faces. They knew about his past, and nothing important had changed.

"The bad news," he continued, "is that I showed her the sketch of Jack, too. Dora's got a good memory for faces, and she said he hadn't been in the records department when she was there."

"What about the other clerks?"

John shook his head. "No luck."

"Can she help with a sketch of this guy?" asked Bailey.

"She didn't really remember who came in claiming to be you. Just that it wasn't you, and didn't look like the sketch we have of Jack."

"And you trust her judgment?"

"Sure as the sun's gonna rise tomorrow."

Bailey nodded. "That's good enough for me. I may send you back there if nothing else turns up."

John nodded. That went without saying. In the years since Jack-of-all-Trades had appeared, every possible witness had been interviewed and re-interviewed.

Shortly after that, the meeting broke up, each person going their separate ways with a multitude of projects to work on. John followed Sam to her office, leaning on the doorjamb while she put away paperwork, waiting for her to acknowledge him. He was actually glad of the chance to organize his thoughts. The more he considered his plan, the weaker it seemed.

Sam slammed a file drawer shut and turned to him. "I really wish he'd take a sabbatical or something."

"Jack?"

"Yeah, Jack. How many cases have come in this month, where our help is an absolute, urgent necessity? Five? Six?"

John thought it over. "Seven, if you count that series of prostitutes disappearing in the Boston area."

"Okay, seven." She sank onto the sofa and ran her fingers through her hair.

John hesitated, and then joined her. "Maybe you could use some time off, Sam."

She made a show of considering, then shook her head. "You know as well as I do that we never get a real vacation. What I do for a living, what I see, it's always in my head. It's never going to go away."

He nodded. What she said was true.

"And where would I go on this mythical vacation?" she continued. "How do I protect my child? Do I take a couple plainclothes guys to Aruba with me?"

"Hey, I'd volunteer." She didn't return his smile. He sat up, leaned closer to her. "We're going to get him, Sam. I want to see this guy go down."

Sam pinched the bridge of her nose. "Listen, I've been meaning to talk to you since yesterday. That crime scene--"

"I'm sorry I snapped at you. I was way out of line."

"No, that's not it. I can understand that--he knows how to twist the knife. I'm just worried, John. Every time he kills, it's someone linked to me. A piece of me dies, because I feel I'm partly to blame."

He started to protest, but she cut him off with a quick gesture and locked eyes with him. "It would be too damn hard to face an empty chair at that table downstairs."

"I'm not going anywhere, Sam."

"John, listen to me, please."

He winced. Her voice was taking on that strangled tone, like she was close to tears. "I don't want to hear this."

"It wouldn't be forever. Just a few months, and then when things have cooled off--"

"Do you think that's going to matter? The bastard's doing everything he can to isolate you, and so far he's been too damn successful. Listen to you. You're going to hand him what he wants."

"What choice do I have? He's threatening your life."

"Yeah, so? It comes with the territory. If it wasn't him, it would be some other asshole. I'm not worried."

"John--"

"Okay, say I do leave. Then it's Bailey. Or George. Or Grace. Or Nathan. Or Angel. One by one."

"Whatever it takes."

"Do you mean that?" He took her hands, holding them tightly when she tried to pull away. "I'm sick of playing Jack's game by his rules. I think it's time we make up our own."

"I don't understand."

"We're always waiting for the next move, the next note, the next victim. We keep hoping he'll slip up so we can catch him. I think it's time we try to lure him out."

"We've already tried planting information in newspaper articles. What more can we do?"

"I was thinking more of a sting operation. Think about it. The closest we came to catching him was when you were involved with Coop. If we--"

"Absolutely not. I won't allow you to drag Coop into your harebrained schemes."

"Believe me, I have no intention of letting Coop in on this." He let go of her hands when she struggled again. "I just thought if we put on a little show for him . . ."

"What kind of a show?" She stood up and began to pace. That meant she was thinking it over, John told himself. A good sign.

"You know. Find someone to take you out a few times, make it look like he's got the hots for you. It should drive Jack completely nuts."

"It'll probably drive me completely nuts. I'm almost afraid to ask, who did you dredge up to play the part of the sitting duck?"

John grinned. "Me."

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