Laughter rippled through the room. She let it play out before advancing to the next picture. The smile left her lips, as she watched the collective grimace overtake the room.
“And some of you have only seen me as a victim in a case file.”
The image on the screen was of Rainey’s badly beaten body. Her eyes were swollen shut, her face nearly entirely black with bruising, her lips distended and bleeding, her chest and torso lined with stitches in a Y-incision pattern. Finger marks were prominent on her neck. Her wrists and ankles showed bruising from the bindings.
The earlier image of SSA Bell reappeared beside a close up of Rainey’s battered face.
“I’m here today to explain how I went from agent to victim. It is my hope that what you learn from my mistakes will help prevent similar ones in the future.”
Rainey changed the image to a photo of Representative JW Wilson seated in front of the flag and seal of the state of North Carolina.
“This is my attacker. Before he was a lawyer and state official, he was my neighborhood friend, a guy I grew up with, played hooky with, and got into some teenaged shenanigans with.”
The image changed to one of JW and Rainey from their high school yearbook. Sports trophies surrounded them as they smiled for the camera, an arm draped around each other’s shoulders.
“We lost touch after high school. I became a behavioral analyst with the BAU. JW, in addition to his political aspirations, married a beautiful woman, had a successful legal career, and became a serial rapist and murderer. I would not knowingly see him again until he walked into my business a little more than a year after he raped and almost killed me. He would nearly kill me again before I saw through his façade.”
Danny took his place at a podium a few feet away from Rainey.
“Former Agent Bell is not the only one who made mistakes on this case. I made them as an agent and an analyst.”
“We both did,” Rainey added.
She exchanged a nod with Danny, an acceptance of their mutual complicities in the events leading up to her abduction. Rainey never blamed Danny for what happened. He was hard enough on himself. She knew they were both there to bury demons. She pushed the remote button, bringing up headlines from newspapers about the Y-Man murders.
Danny turned back to the audience. “For those of you unfamiliar with the case file, we were looking for an organized UNSUB—an intelligent, affluent male the media dubbed the Y-Man for the signature eviscerating wounds on his victims. The killer had the means to abduct high-end call girls from business establishments frequented by wealthy, powerful men. He planned carefully and used forensic countermeasures to prevent his identification through trace evidence. He did not want the bodies found. Three were recovered before he improved his concealment techniques. He was learning and escalating. He dumped the first bodies in Lake Johnston. We recommended a stakeout of the bridge he was traveling in the early morning hours.”
The image on the screen switched to the parking lot of the boathouse, where Rainey’s nightmares had begun.
“On May twenty-eighth, 2009, SSA McNally and I were watching the north entrance of the Advent Ferry Bridge, where we believed the UNSUB was accessing the lake for body disposal. We also thought he might come back to relive some elements of his fantasy. Local law enforcement had added patrols in the area. Agent McNally and I were there to experience what the UNSUB saw, the traffic patterns, the patrols, the way the shadows fell, in an effort to more clearly understand his methods. We were grasping for ways to get out in front of this guy. This type of killer needed to be forced into deviating from his plan. We needed him to make a mistake.” Rainey paused and then added, “But a mistake had already been made—by me.”
Danny interjected, “This is where Rainey and I disagree. I do not believe the sole responsibility for this error is hers. It belongs to the Bureau and her teammates as well. I bear a particular burden here.”
“Wherever the responsibility lies,” Rainey said, “there is a lesson to be learned. My father had been murdered eighteen days prior to the stakeout. His murderer was arrested just four days previous to the evening in question. My frustrations and anger had no outlet when it was discovered my father’s death was the result of a random drive-by shooting, involving a fourteen-year-old trying to earn his way into a gang. I was distracted and should not have been in the field. My emotions were all over the place, and I let them take me out of the car and away from my stakeout partner. My preoccupations gave the UNSUB the opportunity to abduct me.”
“Rainey’s colleagues, including me, assumed what she needed was work to relieve her grief over the murder of her father. If an agent’s head is not in the game, we don't allow him or her in the field, but Rainey hid her mental distress quite well.”
Rainey nodded in agreement, adding, “Honest self-reporting is more important than feeling as if you must return to work after a trauma or loss. Whether you believe it will distract you from the pain of grief or that you may be perceived as weak if more time is needed, neither is a sufficient reason. Supervisors and agents alike need to take a frank look at mental state before a mistake such as mine is made in the future. Distraction can be deadly.”
She let a grin creep to her lips. “I also learned to monitor the food intake of the person I’m going to be sharing a car with for unknown hours. I think my friend here learned that there is such a thing as too many collards with hot pepper vinegar.”
A few chuckles rippled through the tense room, as Rainey changed the image on the screen to a photo of the old office. She read aloud from the sign over the door, “Billy Bell’s Bail and Bait. This is where I went to recuperate, my father’s business, which he left to me. The UNSUB went dormant. I had taken medical leave after the minimum Bureau required therapy appointments and escaped to North Carolina. The safe place I ran to happened to be very near my abduction site. Instead of the mental health help I needed, I turned to alcohol to silence the nightmares, my second mistake.
Rainey took a breath. The next part was hard to admit. “My third mistake was spending the time I should have been healing in a constant state of hyper-vigilance. I knew he was watching me. I could feel him. Paranoia? We’ll never know exactly when JW Wilson re-engaged with me, but we do know he stalked me for some time before making the initial contact. His plan was extensive and took months to execute. In retrospect, I went home because I wanted him to find me. I never processed my father’s death, the anger merely rolled into the baggage from my own assault. My extended family saw the self-destructive behavior and warned of the brick wall I was running at full steam. I was accused of having a death wish. What I had was a vengeance wish, and if that brought death, so be it. I needed help, but again I refused it when offered.”
Danny expounded, “I kept an eye on Rainey. I had a Bureau psychologist contact her and against medical advice, she rejected further treatment. She abandoned the Bureau support system and also refused to investigate her recollections of the assault. Although heavily drugged and unconscious during much of the attack, as it would turn out, she retained more memories than she was able or willing to recall. By using alcohol to dull the nightmares, Rainey was also preventing her brain from processing the information it stored for her there.”
“With all my training and experience working with assault victims, I ignored the advice I had always given, ‘Talk to someone.’ I work with victims now. I spend a great deal of time encouraging them to take advantage of the help available. Above all else, I’ve learned as a victim that silencing the self-blaming voices in my head was most important. What I’m doing here today is an important part of that process.”
Rainey pressed the button on the remote again. The image changed to that of the handsome couple, Representative and Mrs. JW Wilson, at a Republican fundraiser. She glanced over her shoulder at the picture, before continuing.
“In July of 2010, a little over a year after the assault, Representative Wilson asked me to investigate what appeared to be the stalking of his wife.”
Rainey couldn’t prevent the smile from curling her lips.
“Katie Meyers Wilson, as some of the agents who responded can attest, turned out to be a handful.”
The familiar faces on the front row, her former team members of the BAU, smiled and nodded.
“I’ll explain more about that in a bit,” she said, suppressing a grin and continuing, “My attacker reengaged shortly after I began shadowing Katie Wilson. Once aware of his involvement in the stalking case, I contacted the BAU. I moved into the Wilson’s home for a few days. Because I had not done the work of evaluating my assault, I had repressed what little I did remember. I could no longer trust my instincts or intuition, which were clouded by lack of sleep, alcohol abuse, and the fear of reliving too much.
My body began to tell me things I chose to ignore or did not comprehend on a conscious level. When I was in JW Wilson’s presence, I was nervous and unsettled. His cologne made me ill. I grew more and more uncomfortable around him as time went on. I attributed my behavior to the fact that I was struggling with an attraction to his wife, the woman I was hired to protect. Not only was I processing a heretofore unexplored element of my sexuality, I found myself in an ethical dilemma, while being hunted by a serial killer.”
Danny interrupted. “To Rainey’s credit, she did try to distance herself from Mrs. Wilson and turned her safety over to us after we arrived. We had a plan to draw out the killer, putting a target squarely on Rainey’s back. She returned to her home and waited for his next move.” He chuckled a bit. “But as hard as we tried, we couldn’t keep Mrs. Wilson away from Rainey. The attraction, it seems, was mutual.”
The next picture appeared on the screen, one of Katie wearing a bathing suit and asleep in a lawn chair. Some appreciative murmuring came from the room.
“This is a photo JW gave me. His wife’s stalker supposedly took it. I don’t want to call our mutual attraction a mistake, but in reality,” Rainey explained, “it was a significant diversion of my attention. I think you can see why.”
Understanding chuckles filled the room.
The laughter subsided before she changed to an image showing only JW Wilson’s eyes and continued, “The situation allowed me to excuse the warning signs my psyche was sending. The attraction was evident to everyone around us, including JW Wilson. He used it against me. He abducted Katie and used her as a lure to pull me in. It worked.”
“Again, against my advice, Rainey made her next mistake and this one is all on her. She engaged with the UNSUB on her own. I will give her points for leaving us breadcrumbs that enabled us to find her, but she broke the protocol she had been trained to follow.”
This time it was Rainey who interrupted. “We disagree here. I made a judgment call that I stand by. The UNSUB gave me little choice but to follow his instructions. It was my training that allowed me to get close to him. I was able to rescue Katie and avoid us both becoming his next murder victims. Katie was heavily drugged during her entire abduction. She has had no notable recall in the years following. The event remains a black hole for her. She could not help us identify her abductor and I never saw more than his shadow. He abandoned his plan to kill us when he heard the sirens closing in on our location.”
“Now, just to be clear,” Danny said, “we, the BAU members on site, interviewed JW Wilson. His behavior was questionable from the start. He fit our profile, but we allowed his prior relationship with Rainey to influence our assessment. We assumed it was someone in his social circle. We suggested that to Mr. Wilson, and like the consummate organized killer, he had a plan to hand us a suspect and deflect attention from himself. He was one step ahead of us the entire time. I allowed him to drive away from his wife’s abduction site and we’re quite sure now, Katie was in the trunk of his car.”
The image on the screen changed to a photo of a man who looked a lot like JW, smiling for the photographer, and dressed in blue scrubs.
Rainey explained the image. “Dr. John Taylor, a local veterinarian and another former high school classmate of mine, fit our assessment of the UNSUB to a tee. He became a suspect, was questioned, and released under surveillance. JW Wilson had tied Dr. Taylor to the crimes with circumstantial and physical evidence. Had he gone to trial, it’s very likely Taylor would have been convicted. JW couldn’t take that chance though, so he orchestrated our suspect’s apparent flight from justice. As I’ve said, JW’s plan was longstanding and extensive. He’d given his exit strategy quite a bit of thought. What he did not plan on was leaving his wife nor me alive. I would realize only recently why my death was vital to his plan.”
“We’ve had ample time to analyze JW Wilson’s final attempt to murder his wife and his old friend. We concluded he was just that arrogant and confident he would not be caught. JW believed Dr. Taylor would be blamed and he could move forward without the worry of either of his victims recovering memories.”
Rainey changed the image. A photo of the cottage she once called home appeared. The big bay window was shattered where Mackie had tossed JW through it and off the balcony. A large hole had been blasted in the wall beside the window, where she and Katie had made their escape.
Rainey informed the audience. “This is my former home, where JW found Katie and me together. His wife had planned to leave him before I met her. My appearance on the scene simply sped up the process. Mrs. Meyers had her own reasons for disliking her husband. JW drugged and killed two agents that day and nearly killed my oldest friend. Fortunately, my friend was large enough to survive the attempted overdose. And unfortunately for JW, I did recover a memory in time to spoil his plans. I was standing beside him when the veil he hid behind lifted. I knew in an instant who he really was. He saw me see him and the gunfight that ensued concluded in his death. Katie ended his life with a shotgun blast to his chest. Had JW Wilson not come to my home that day, I believed I never would have identified him as the serial rapist and murderer that he was. But he knew something I did not and the story doesn’t end there.”