CHAPTER THREE

Morning came more quickly than John Grant would have liked, and Rachel’s knack for waking up in the early light of dawn only annoyed him further. “Are you sure you don’t want some coffee?” Rachel chirped as the two left Starbucks for the crime scene.

“Ew,” John said monotonously as he unlocked the car door.

“A simple no would suffice. Do you insist on making remarks every time I get coffee?” Rachel asked.

He sat in his car as if seriously contemplating an answer, but John ended up merely smirking in response. Rachel responded with a smirk of her own as she shook her head slightly. “Drive.”

John started up the car; they were only five minutes from Amber Cartier’s neighborhood and ten from her house. John yawned as Rachel looked blankly out of her own window. John noticed her fun expression slowly grow into a calmed one, which was soon followed by an expression of distress.

“What are you thinking about?” John asked.

Rachel drew in a breath sharply and paused before exhaling. “Things,” she answered.

“What kind of things?” John pressed.

“Don’t, John. Please,” Rachel warned sharply, but quickly regretted the tone she had taken.

“Excuse me for caring about my friend,” John said defensively. “You know, you have just about the worst mood swings.” John’s gaze shifted to hers apologetically before casting his focus back onto the road.

There was a beat, after which Rachel replied, “I was thinking about how real our jobs are. We go through the scenes, look at body after body. I just... get used to it.” She looked over at John, her eyes wet. “How scary is that?”

“You can’t blame yourself, Rach,” John tried. “It’s just... human nature.”

“What is so human about seeing horrors and not being affected by them?”

“Looks to me like you’re being affected by them.” A typically John answer. Rachel still seemed to want what qualifies as a real one. “Look,” John started, “when you were five years old and one of your older brothers told you to shut up, what did you do?”

“Well, I would either shut up or tell him that he said a bad word.”

“Exactly. And then in three years you started saying shut up. And as you got older, your vocabulary became more... adult.”

“I do not curse that much.”

“But what’s the first word that pops into your head when you stub your toe?”

“That is not too great of an analogy, John, and this is not just vocabulary.”

John sighed, defeated. “No,” he said. “It’s not.” He pulled over outside Amber Cartier’s house. John reached for Rachel’s arm as the she began to climb out of the vehicle. “I get used to it, too. I just... work the cases numbly. It becomes typical – God forbid, conventional! But eventually, some case hits me on a personal level or I have some nightmare or something, and I snap back.”

“Why do we do what we do?”

“I don’t think that’s something that can be put into words,” John reassured. “You may never be able to fully understand it. Even if you do, other people would not be able to comprehend that reason... not unless they’ve been there.”

“Why do you do it?”

John shrugged. “I like putting the bad guy away... I guess I just like playing hero.” He shrugged again. “Or maybe it’s something more than that. I feel like work is all I have sometimes, and I feel this need to make sacrifices to that other people don’t have to make their own.” John began to shift uncomfortably. “Now,” John cleared his throat, “let’s go play hero.”

The two climbed out of the car and made their way into the house. John grimaced at the eerie smells of partly-washed away blood and the chemicals used to clean it. Rachel walked slowly from room to room, and nothing but ‘normal’ could be read into everything that the profiler looked at. “Everything is so average,” Rachel acknowledged.

“Do you think it was staged? That the killer stripped away anything identifying her personality?”

“To stage the house but not the body? No, I don’t think so.”

Rachel walked throughout the kitchen and the living room before sitting down on the couch. She was not looking at a television set, but a bookcase. “This certainly doesn’t make any sense. Who doesn’t have a television in front of their couch?”

“Do you remember the Frank Parone case? That girl staged that apartment for her father, but she lived somewhere completely different.”

“She was renting an apartment, but no one buys an entire house to not live in it,” Rachel stated.

“Then there’s something we’ve missed.”

x x x

“All right, George, what do you have?” Rachel asked over the cell phone. George’s voice came through strong on the other end.

“I have got the blue prints you wanted, and according to them, the pantry should be twenty by fifteen feet, not five by fifteen. It is also labeled on the prints as a study.”

“Thanks, George.” Rachel disconnected the call and turned to John. “I think we have found her hiding place.” Rachel led John to the pantry. “George said this pantry is supposed to be twenty by fifteen feet.”

“Let’s find the rest of it.” The two began to move their hands around the shelves on the wall. “I can’t find anything,” John said.

“I think I have,” Rachel said along the right side of the wall. “Help me with this.” The two carried a large bag of cat food to the center of the room. Then they saw it: a discreet, five-by-five-foot, knob-less door.

“Wow. Wonder who did this great work,” John said. “We couldn’t have found this unless we were looking for it.

“This explains why the pantry door had been swung open. She must have been inside the room where the attacker was waiting. But why did he move the cat foot over it?”

“She probably did to keep him confined to the room.” John pulled out his phone and dialed George’s number. “George, can you look for 9-1-1 calls from this location, starting with two hours before the predicted attack time? Thanks.” John then tried to open the door, but his fingers were too big. Rachel smiled at the attempt.

“This is a woman’s job,” she said as she moved forward. John backed away several feet to allow here room. She looked over at him and smirked – one that would challenge his own – and raised her right foot to kick the door. The force of the kick caused the door to bounce off of the wall it was resting against and open, inviting the two agents inside. The two climbed inside a pitch black room. They stumbled over furniture and could not locate a light switch. Thinking quickly, John pulled out his cell phone and began to press a few buttons at a time, lighting the screen and, in turn, the area about two feet in front of him. Rachel pulled out hers and did the same.

“I can’t find a switch,” said John.

“I do not think there is one,” Rachel said, taking note of the candles on the table in front of her. “Do you have a lighter?”

“Don’t smoke.”

“Why can’t you be more like Bailey?” Rachel teased playfully. John shook his head and smiled, even though Rachel could not see it.

“Let’s go out and get flash lights,” John said finally. Rachel agreed and the two walked out to the car but as they got there, Rachel’s cell phone rang. “Hey, Bailey! We found - What? Where?” asked Rachel. Then she sighed, hanging up the phone.

“Don’t tell me there’s been another murder!” John exclaimed. After all, it had only been two days since the first.

Rachel shook her head. “There was an attempt on some poor woman by the name of Deirdre Ibarra, but three women from the neighborhood had arrived in time to stop him. Ibarra lives on Prescott Street, which is a few blocks away.”

John sighed as he climbed into the driver’s seat and started up the engine. She survived. John felt a weight lift off of his chest. When he looked at Rachel, she seemed just as relieved. As the two agents pulled to the curb a few blocks away, they found themselves mauled by news reporters. John and Rachel drilled through the mob as quickly as possible and met up with Bailey talking with the victim inside. When Bailey saw them, he introduced them quickly. “Deirdre, these are Agents Grant and Burke. Guys, this is Miss Ibarra.”

“Nice to meet you,” said Rachel, and John nodded in agreement.

Bailey excused himself and the agents, and then he turned to them, saying, “The three women who saved her live right across the street. I would like you two to interview them. Then, Rachel, come back here to interview Ibarra, and John, meet with George back at the station.”

“But Bailey,” John said, “we found a hidden room in Cartier’s pantry.”

“You can check it out with another agent when Rachel and I return. I would like to put all our information out on the table before we make any more moves.”

John nodded, and Rachel and he made their way back through the crowd toward a pink manor. But as John raised a fist to knock on the door, he paused at the sudden conversation taking place. Both he and Rachel pressed their curious ears to the door to listen in.

“Well?” the voice John recognized as Halliwell asked, frustrated, after a jingling noise could be heard a few feet from the other side of the door.

“He checks out,” a man said.

“What?!” exclaimed Halliwell. “What—? How could this be?”

“In very rare cases,” the man began to explain. “Only part of a soul is born. In Cole’s case, he was half-human. It could be – although possessing a soul – that the demon side of him prevented a piece of his soul from being conceived. This lost part somehow ends up in another being.”

“In this case, John Grant.”

“Correct. Basically what it means is that one of his parents did not have a full soul, so John received less than he was supposed to get from one of them, let’s say his dad. He got half from his mother, but less than half from his father, so that piece of soul that Cole had been denied attached itself into the missing space while John was being conceived.”

“But how come his father didn’t give him a full portion?”

“Simple: his father committed an act of murder,” the man said. “Only something so twisted as taking someone’s life can rip away some of your soul. It is the reason some murderers never regret taking someone’s life – they lost an important part of them that helped enable them to regret in the first place.”

Halliwell sighed deeply. “I guess that I had better apologize, then.”

“Demon side?” John whispered to Rachel, who looked just as skeptical and unwilling to find out.

Rachel, however, took the initiative and finally knocked on the door. There was a sudden silence inside; then few steps were heard before the door opened and a flushed Miss Halliwell stood in front of them.