-MAD WOMAN-
eight!

time moves in one direction,
memory in another
- william gibson

now - 6x11!

Emily and Wren had been attempting to come up with the best approach so that Rossi would agree to let Ashley finish her remedial training with the team. Hotch had already reluctantly signed on but he wasn't going to trust her very much for a while, and the women assumed the same could be said about Rossi.

Being outnumbered by men was a bit frustrating to Wren, Emily, and Penelope. It was only a small reason why they missed JJ so much but a reason nonetheless. The female perspective was essential for almost every case they worked and the more women they could have on the team, the better in Wren's opinion. Even if their presence was temporary.

After knocking on Rossi's slightly open door, the two women entered the man's office. "Hey, could we get a minute?"

He nodded and Emily spoke next. "Agent Seaver has requested her remedial training be here."

"She was only cleared for one case," Rossi reminded them.

"Yeah, well, that didn't end the way she'd hoped it would," Wren brought up.

"I'd say."

"She made a mistake," Emily continued. "But she remained calm under pressure."

"She just wants to prove herself and she thinks she can do that here," Wren said.

"Hotch isn't here to supervise her."

"We were thinking that we could be her training agents," she admitted.

"He signed off?" Rossi asked.

"Via email, but we know you have a history with her," Emily told him.

He looked at the pair and the serious looks on their faces for a moment before speaking. The suggestion wasn't something he would've agreed to if anyone else had proposed it to him, but since it was these two, he felt a bit more comfortable agreeing. "Don't make me regret this."

"You won't."

"Thank you," Emily said quickly after Wren. The two women went to leave his office but ran into Chief Strauss on their way out. Emily acknowledged her quickly. "Ma'am."

"Agent Prentiss," Strauss said with a curt nod. "Agent Spader if you would stay behind a moment."

The agent in question exchanged a look with Emily before they parted ways. "I'll go tell Ashley," Emily told her and Wren nodded. The brunette followed Strauss back into Rossi's office. The two older agents talked about Hotch's leave of absence for a minute or two. After a moment, Strauss handed Wren the file in her hands, letting her look through it while the blonde continued to chat with Rossi.

"That's the only thing that's pending," Strauss said to Rossi, speaking about the file in Wren's hands. Once the brunette had a solid glance at everything, she handed it over to the man.

"Donald Sanderson," he read from the file. "That was twenty years ago."

"Twenty-five, actually," Wren corrected him and he glanced up at her for a brief moment before looking back down at the words. 

"He's up for parole," Strauss informed the pair. "They've asked us to do a risk assessment."

"Well, I can't do it. Not with Aaron gone," Rossi stated.

"Well, who can?" the section chief asked and both Rossi and Wren shared a confused look with each other. Why was she in here if Strauss didn't plan on sending her?

Rossi looked over at Wren for a moment before picking up his phone and pressing one of the speed dials. "Morgan, can you come in here?" Once he got a response from the man, Rossi looked over at Strauss. "He and Spader can go if you didn't have other plans for her."

"No, that's fine," Strauss agreed.

"Are you good with that?" Rossi asked Wren.

"Of course," she nodded.

"Well, the two of you will have to meet him today. The parole board hearing is tomorrow," the blonde said.

"Now, what was his story?"

"Um, he claimed that junkies broke into his home and attacked his family while he was asleep on the couch downstairs," Wren explained, only to get looks from the other two. "What?"

"How old were you when this case happened?" The man in front of her asked.

"Seven," she stated.

"Why do you know this?"

"I've had to read a lot of confessions, interrogation transcripts, and statements over the years," she told him. "Some of them stick out."

"Anyway, she's right. That's what he claimed," Strauss moved the conversation forward. "He and his son survived. Frankly, I don't understand how parole is even a consideration."

"Well, he's eligible. They're overcrowded," Rossi brought up.

"Yes, but the physical evidence was shocking," she replied. "Who could possibly believe he would be innocent?"

"That's not our job. All we need to see is how 25 years has changed his life."

Morgan approached the office and was definitely not expecting to see Strauss sitting in there with Wren and Rossi. He greeted the section chief quietly before talking to the other two.

"Is everything alright?" He asked.

"I need you and Spader to take a trip," Rossi told him as he handed the file over.

"Who's this?" Derek questioned, opening the file and looking at the pictures on the first page.

"Don Sanderson. He's been in Petersburg half his life and he's up for parole."

"It appears he's become a model prisoner," Strauss added on and Morgan looked over at her.

"You don't sound convinced," he said.

"I don't know how someone who kills his wife and daughter can be rehabilitated," she replied.

"Alright, well, let me go get my stuff, and then we can head out," Morgan told Wren, who nodded and stood up, following him out of the room.

Morgan walked off to his office and Wren went to her desk to grab her blazer and bag. After explaining where she was going to Prentiss and Reid, she met up with Morgan at the elevators.

✦✧✦

After meeting with Donald Sanderson, Wren and Derek were ready to pull an all-nighter at the BAU to consider all points of view. They worked in the roundtable room, placing pictures up on the corkboard and listing the timeline on the whiteboard. They eventually emptied the box of files that the BAU had on the original case. Occasionally, one of them would pick a side of the case to fight for so the other would find reasons to argue it. Sanderson was genuine, that much Wren and Derek agreed on. And while physical signs pointed to him killing his wife and daughter, everything about his behavior didn't. He showed signs of being a good man doing the best with the life he was given.

They just didn't want to be wrong. 

The next morning, the pair attended the parole hearing, trying to split up as much of their talking points as they could. Having two federal agents vouch for him seemed to be enough for the board to appeal Don Sanderson's parole. After the hearing, Spader and Morgan went back to work. She couldn't say the same for Derek, but Wren spent that whole workday hoping they had made the right decision. She really wanted to trust her gut on this one.

But of course, like almost every choice the BAU seemed to make recently, this too came back to bite Wren in the ass.

She was sitting in Garcia's office two days later going through potential cases for the team when Morgan came in with a look on his face that told her something was wrong. Hearing the news that Sanderson had killed someone felt as if somebody was laughing in her face.

The team rushed to the crime scene, and both Morgan and Spader were silent the entire drive. She could tell Derek was pissed, and rightfully so. Wren, on the other hand, was pushing down the anger. Right now all she felt was guilt and confusion. 

Attempting to read the now bruised and bloody face of Donald Sanderson was a difficult feat. And Wren's head was in too many places at the moment to get a good interpretation. Part of her was waiting for Morgan to yell at her. To tell her it was her fault since that's what she thought.

If she hadn't fought him so hard on the fact that Sanderson had been reformed, this wouldn't have happened. If she agreed that the physical evidence was too much and was further proof he would do it again, he wouldn't have been released. If she didn't believe in the benefit of the doubt, they wouldn't be standing here right now.

"Spader, what did we do?" Morgan muttered to her as the pair stood in front of the patrol car with Sanderson inside it.

Wren sighed and ran a hand through her hair. "I don't know, Morgan."

"I mean, do we really think he did this?" He asked.

"Innocent until proven guilty?" She offered only for him to shake his head. "Yeah, that doesn't apply here at all. We don't even know why he was here."

"I'm gonna call Strauss and see if we can take him into custody," he told her and she nodded. As he walked away, Wren looked back at Sanderson to see him staring at the seat in front of him with a blank expression. This was one of those moments when she wondered what it would be like to read minds. What was he thinking about? How were his thoughts going to help them figure this out?

Before long, Derek got off the phone and told Rossi that Sanderson was coming back to the BAU with them. Once they had him in the SUV, Spader, Rossi, Morgan, and Sanderson headed off.

"You woke up a free man and decided to kill Tom Wittman," Rossi said from the passenger seat to Sanderson. They hadn't been driving long and Wren was just waiting for someone else to start the conversation. "You gotta help us out here. It doesn't look good for you."

"It wasn't supposed to be like that," Sanderson replied.

"Then how was it supposed to be?" Wren asked him, sitting in the seat next to him. She was almost annoyed with his response.

"He came at me," he told her.

"I get it that you don't trust anyone right now, but these two are the reason that you're free," Rossi reminded him. 

A beat of silence occurred within the vehicle before Morgan pulled over to the side of the road, despite Rossi and Wren telling him not to. He put the car in park and turned to look at Sanderson.

"Did you find your son?" Morgan inquired.

"No."

"Did you even look?"

He didn't say anything but before too much time could pass, Wren spoke up. "Morgan, let's go," she requested. The two agents met eyes for a moment. This wasn't the place for the interrogation and they weren't going to get anything out of him yet. Morgan sighed as he nodded and turned to look at the road again.

✧✦✧

"Alright, Spader, how are we playing this?" Morgan asked the interrogations specialist as he entered the observation room with the case file in hand. They had returned to the BAU about an hour ago and left him in the interrogation room until the rest of the team arrived. She was staring at the man on the other side of the window completely bewildered by the events that had occurred. "Spader."

"Sorry, I was in my head," she apologized, turning to him. "I think the best way to get any information from him at all is to play on his feelings and connections. He's made a connection with both of us in a small way so making him feel as though he's betrayed us could get us something."

"So, just act hurt?"

"No, you should go in incredibly pissed off," Wren told him. He stared at her, waiting for a sign to show that she was joking but it never appeared. "You're angry. I'm angry. Let some of that out on him. Use your anger to evoke a reaction. Guilt him into talking.

Morgan nodded and headed towards the door that connected them to the interrogation room. He entered the room that held Sanderson and slammed the door behind him. Wren took a seat on top of the table behind her and watched as her coworker threw the case file onto the table before Sanderson.

To say Wren was frustrated would have been an understatement, but this was one of those times she was glad her emotions were never plastered on her face. Sometimes the emotionless interrogation works, but here it wouldn't, and she knew that Derek needed to let some of his frustrations out.

Wren watched as he and Sanderson talked, Morgan not taking any of the vague denials that Sanderson was giving him.  He needed to talk to them because currently, none of what had happened made sense. Everything he said didn't connect any dots or help his side of the case whatsoever. And to be honest, all Wren wanted to do was reverse the clock 72 hours so this never happened at all.

He wasn't a killer. Sanderson was very insistent on that fact. However, everything pointed to him being one. He could say he wasn't a killer all he wanted but Morgan and Spader had a dead body, Sanderson's fingerprints on the murder weapon, him being at the scene when law enforcement arrived, and all of it happening 51 hours out on parole.

They were finally getting somewhere when he started talking about what he would to do the man who killed his wife and daughter. The anger he felt towards the person who he believed did this showed the truth behind his words. As he spoke about how he was connected to the man he had just killed, a thought occurred to Wren. After a beat of silence within both rooms, the interrogation specialist got off the table and entered the room with Morgan and Sanderson.

"Why wasn't Tom Wittman's name mentioned at your trial?" She asked the man with blood on his clothes.

He looked at her for a moment before answering. "I didn't even know it until years later." He sighed and leaned forward a bit. "Agents, what I saw and what happened, that couldn't have been random."

"So what did you do? Just look at every single person that knew your family?" Morgan questioned.

"Yeah."

"How? Not once did you ask for access to your case," Wren reminded him as she leaned against the wall behind Derek.

"All of it was my memory," he told them, watching as Morgan furrowed his brows and Spader raised hers in disbelief. "I walked through that night a million times. Tommy was just a kid then, 18, 19. He worked at the corner market and brought our groceries home. He and his friend- they would look for any reason to be near my wife. I didn't like that. Carrie told him and he stopped coming by."

"So Tom felt abandoned by your wife and angry at you, so he acted out," Morgan assumed.

"Yeah, you see, except that night he said- he said, 'that's enough.' See it's like he had actual boundaries," Sanderson explained.

"That's how you narrowed this all down?" Wren asked. "To someone who wanted to be closer to your wife than they could be?"

"Yeah," he said. He truly believed that everything he said was the truth and what had to have happened, Wren could see it on his face. "Tom- Tom, he was just- he was just- he was a figure in the dark. And then I heard his voice and that was familiar. It took me a long time to place it. Anyway, a few years later, I called the market and tried to find his full name. Thomas Gregory Wittman. I had internet privileges once a week and I found his address."

"And then what?"

"A few days later, that heroin was planted in my cell," he continued, causing Wren to sigh. "I lost my privileges."

"So Tom Wittman was the only link that you had to figure out who was in your house that night?" Morgan prompted.

Sanderson nodded. "And now I'm back to nothing."

"No, you're not," Wren stated. "Well, not yet at least."

✦✧✦

Taking Sanderson back to his house proved to be extremely helpful. Getting more details on the woman who was there with the two men helped Garcia find a possible suspect and just like that, Prentiss, Morgan, and Spader were off to talk to her.

Entering the apartment, the trio found the place torn apart due to a struggle of some kind. They found the woman they were looking for laying on the ground, bleeding out of her neck. Wren called for backup and EMTs to their location as Morgan went chasing after the man that attacked her.

Unfortunately, the woman died before the EMTs arrived, so Wren and Emily went to help the D.C. detective catch up on what they'd learned. Morgan returned with nothing on the man, but now the team understood another piece of the puzzle now.

As the CSU worked around the apartment, so did the profilers. They knew the unsub had torn the place apart looking for something but he obviously failed to find it. Emily found a VHS on top of the kitchen drawers and the trio was on their way back to the BAU again, hoping that Garcia would find a VCR so they would watch what was on the tape. 

The three people in the video all had very different motives, it seemed. Watching the tape, the profilers determined that Tom Wittman was there to play out a small part of his revenge fantasy. Mary Rutka, the woman they had just found, appeared to be along for the ride. As for their current unsub, he was jealous of the Sanderson family. He wanted to make them suffer.

With the rest of the team's help, Morgan and Spader were able to narrow down their potential suspects to James Stanworth, a local businessman who was running for Congress. However, with a politician of any kind, they knew that the fight to get Strauss to approve the arrest was going to be harder than actually arresting him.

The politics around arresting James Stanworth was all Strauss seemed to care about and that was what pissed Wren off the most. After the day she and Derek were having, Strauss deciding that her career mattered more than a man getting justice for his family was what put Wren over the edge. 

"We can't arrest this man," Rossi said to the section chief as he watched her argue with two of his agents. "That's what you mean. Don't pull any punches now, Erin."

His words seemed to irk Strauss and that just made Wren's day. She didn't care how much the blonde thought she was better than the BAU or how much Strauss regretted signing her over to them. The moments when one of them got under Strauss's skin were some of the best moments Wren had ever had with the woman.

"You don't understand what the politics are, do you, Dave?" Strauss asked Rossi, walking up to him. "You never have."

"No, I do," he told her. "I just don't care."

"Strauss, with all due respect, Don Sanderson is innocent and the killer is still out there," Wren spoke up, watching as the blonde turned to face her and Morgan again.

"It might just be James Stanworth," Morgan added.

"You don't have enough proof," she stated in a way that was meant to shut them up.

"We've arrested people with a lot less!" Wren exclaimed. "God, get off your high horse and see things from a perspective that isn't yours or the people you work for."

There was a beat of silence as Strauss took in the words Wren had said. She should've known this day was coming. Wren was like a ticking time bomb when it came to the things she wanted to say to Strauss. This was only the beginning of arguments between the pair if the blonde kept pushing her buttons.

"The BAU functions without both of you," Strauss said. "Do not push it."

Well, unfortunately for her, that's exactly what they did. After meeting with the team in the BAU room, Prentiss, Rossi, Morgan, and Spader went to James Stanworth's fundraiser with the D.C. detective. They entered the building as Stanworth had finished speaking and the crowd was applauding. Wren was fine with Morgan doing most of the talking and she was more than happy to see the detective arrest Stanworth. Back at the BAU, Don Sanderson shook Derek's hand and gave Wren a hug in thanks. 

✧✦✧

The next day, Garcia had found Sanderson's son and Wren helped put together a meeting between the two. She and Derek accompanied the man to the park where he was going to see his son for the first time in 25 years.

As the two agents stood and watched the family members be reunited, Wren could only feel a sense of pride. "We did that," she muttered to her coworker, who glanced over at her with a smile.

"We did," he agreed.

"Man, who was going to tell me that arresting a politician was going to feel as good as it did?" Wren asked him as Derek laughed. "I mean, come on, the look on his face when Emily said 'we found the tape' was absolutely priceless. Add that to the look on Strauss's when she found out we were right and you have the movie I want to be played at my funeral."

"Those moments do not get old," Derek replied. "C'mon, let's go back to work."

"God, we never get a moment of peace," she whined jokingly, following him back to the car.

"Hey, you signed up for this job," he reminded her.

"Um, no, you and Rossi requested my assistance while Hotch was on leave," she corrected, pointing a finger at him. "After that, the team was practically begging Strauss to sign me over. Oh! Hey, remember when you hated me?"

"You're never going to let that go are you?" Morgan groaned as Wren only grinned at him.

"Nope, I think I'll hang that over your head for a little while longer," Wren said.

"Well, what about Rossi? Why isn't he getting this treatment? Or Hotch? They didn't like you at the beginning either," he pointed out and she simply shrugged, getting into the passenger seat.

"Seeing as I got shot for Hotch and I'm his son's favorite non-biological aunt, I think he gets a pass. And Rossi warmed up to me a lot quicker than you did," she explained. "So you're stuck with me guilt-tripping you until I see fit."

"Great," he sighed, sarcastically.

"At least you love me now."

"I tolerate you."

"Bully!"

"Shut up, Birdie."