Prentiss moved left. Morgan right. Reid stayed back, calculating angles. But it was Hotch who spoke. “You lost your daughter to a flash flood, Mr. Corley. You didn’t fail her. Nature did.”
The jet was silent on the way to Florida. Even Garcia, patched through on speaker, sounded hollow. “The unsub leaves a token—a single blue plastic flamingo by each empty pool,” she reported. “He’s taunting the drought. Feeling powerful where there’s no water.” Criminal Minds - Season 6
Hotch’s jaw tightened. The irony wasn’t lost on him. The BAU was chasing a man who created voids—empty pools, missing lives—while the team itself nursed the void left by a woman Strauss had exiled to the Pentagon. Prentiss moved left
The takedown came at a deserted subdivision, a ghost neighborhood bankrupted by the recession. The unsub, a former water department employee named Corley, stood at the edge of a deep, dry concrete basin. “You don’t get it,” he screamed, holding a flare. “If I can’t fill it, no one can!” But it was Hotch who spoke
On the jet ride home, the team sat in exhausted quiet. Reid pulled out his worn copy of The Odyssey . Morgan stared out the window. Prentiss scrolled through a blank phone—no messages from JJ. Even a coded one was too risky.
“But this?” Hotch continued, stepping closer. “Draining pools, staging bodies—it doesn’t bring her back. It just leaves more empties. More families waiting by a hole in the ground.”