Chapter 32: 31

 

The next morning, Reed woke up with a bewildered look on his face from the uncomfortable hotel single bed and fumbled around the bedside table to find his eyes to put on. Yesterday, as a last resort, he had borrowed a little money from Brian and followed Brian Moss to settle down in the same hotel. He had no choice but to wait for his colleagues from the bau team to finish their case and come back to meet him.

His papers were in the stolen wallet and he couldn't leave New York and return to FBI headquarters in Washington without them. I wonder if the thief would have been shocked to see the FBI papers when he went through his wallet? In fact everyone who didn't know him would have been shocked to learn that he was FBI.

He ate Brian's, lived on Brian's dime, and had suspected the other man of being a fugitive from justice not long ago. Even a man as slow on the uptake as Reid was embarrassed.

After a day's contact, Reed was a little unsure of what Brian Moss was like. The information from memory plainly stated that the other man was a high-risk, antisocial personality disorder patient who had spent over a decade in a mental institution. Usually once a person diagnosed like that is in a mental institution, they never get out for the rest of their lives.

But Brian got out, and not only did he get out, he surprisingly stayed law-abiding for over two years after he got out, not even getting a ticket for parking recklessly. It was frighteningly prudent. Those were Derek Morgan's exact words.

Brian has been in a mental institution since he was five years old, and it's amazing that a sociopathic personality hasn't gone insane because of it, but actually seems to have gotten better? It's a medical miracle.

And he'd gotten out, worked for his own money while studying on his own for his high school SATs and gotten into Stanford University! Honestly, Reid just didn't understand how the other man had made it through. The fact that his mother was in a mental hospital was too much for Reed to handle. Because that kind of mental debilitation was hereditary.

"There was a clear knock on the door.

Reed froze for a moment, sat up from his bed, put on his slippers and hurriedly answered the door. There was no one else but Bryan Moss looking for him at this hour.

Sure enough, as soon as he opened the door he saw Brian, the model who had long ago finished dressing and was looking shiny.

"Hi, Red! Just waking up? I'm going to be hanging around New York today, do you want to join me?" Brian had a big smile on his face.

"...No," Red said with a coy smile, "I'll just stay at the hotel and wait for them to pick me up. I don't have my phone or money, so I'd rather not go out wandering around."

"Okay." Brian Moss shrugged, "It's actually nothing for me to invite you. Why don't I come back at lunchtime and bring you a lunch."

"Don't bother!" Ryder waved his hand back and forth. Gone was the robotic shrewdness and well-organised nature of his old days on the case; in human interaction he was a scum with a fighting chance of five. Not to mention dealing with someone like Bryan Moss.

Brian Moss struck him as too much like those high school friends he remembered who could call the shots at the drop of a hat. He was so bright and energetic and socially inclined. A popular school star type character at first glance. Reid himself, on the other hand, had been nothing more than a pathetic wretch who could read in high school.

"It's no trouble! I have to thank you for lending me one of your outfits last time!" Brian smiled already as he turned around and waved goodbye to him. "See you later, Dr. Reid!" He said and walked out a few meters away.

Reed opened his mouth, but still didn't have the good sense to pull the other man in for one more refusal, so he could only watch Brian Moss walk to the stairway. Turning around, he entered the lift.

He looked as if he was no longer affected by what had happened to David Vincent at all. Reid thought silently as he closed the door and walked back into the room. What an amazingly resilient guy, so mentally strong. And it was surprising that he couldn't see any of the character traits of a sociopathic personality in Brian at all.

He would care for people, for being so kind as to buy his dinner yesterday, and for advancing his hotel rent, and now for bringing him lunch. He has compassion and saw Brian take the leftover fries and feed them to a stray cat last night when he was back at the hotel with him.

This is a completely different personality trait from that of an anti-social personality. Was Brian just too well disguised, or...? If he didn't believe that the psychiatric hospital in Miami, which had ties to the police department, couldn't have misdiagnosed a minor for over a decade without noticing, he would have thought Brian Moss had a dual personality.

A highly dangerous sociopathic personality and a sympathetic and still kind ordinary person.

Recalling the time when they were still in charge of the David Vincent case, once the bau team arrived in the city of Pala Alto, they didn't make the slightest pause and hastily contacted the local police station to request their cooperation. The situation was so urgent because of the hostages that they didn't even have to explain anything to the police.

When the group arrived at the small flat Brian had rented, armed to the teeth, they broke down the door and entered. It made them even more worried because they didn't see anyone in that cabin. In this case, the best possibility was that Brian had been killed. They then hastily tracked down Brian's rented cart, which led them to the long-abandoned, isolated factory.

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This was thanks to the video of Brian giving out the distress signal, in which Brian's video diary recorded the name of the rental car company that he had inadvertently included when he had just come out of the airport and got the car delivered by the rental company.

They used the name of the rental car company to get the license plate number of the car Brian had rented, and then used the road surveillance cameras to finally track the car down.

When Reed was on the move with the other bau team members, they never allowed him to be at the front of the line. Maybe it was because of his stinky marksmanship, and his frail body combined with his poor fighting skills.

So he was the last person to see what Brian looked like out of the entire bau team that took part in the operation.

In the grey, abandoned factory, Brian Moss was dressed in a lady's suit, holding a bloody knife that had obviously been stabbed into the hands of David, who had fallen unconscious on the floor. Next to him, on the top of a workbench covered with several layers of cling film, a naked woman collapsed on top, breathing weakly.

There was also a boy, restrained by his arms and legs in a far corner. When he saw them enter, the boy struggled frantically.

But none of this caught Reed's attention as much as the look on Brian's face at that moment. The kind of look that was different from the tears of joy of a desperate man, Brian Moss's eyes didn't even look at the fallen man, David, who was supposedly his long-time friend and later held him hostage. It seemed that what he was celebrating had nothing at all to do with any of this.

Although even Jason Gideon didn't see anything, Reed just felt that he was glad that he hadn't turned out to be the same as David Vincent. It was a little uncanny that a sociopathic personality had the same moral values as the general public.

But Reed could empathise with that feeling because he was afraid every day that he would turn out to be as mentally debilitated as his mother, and he was also grateful every day that he could still work for the bau team and shine as a useful person.

Al had volunteered to go up with a towel and wrap it around Brian and help him out. Probably starting from the same point of guilt as himself for misunderstanding him. Seeing the women's clothes he was wearing, and the clothes that had been left on the dusty factory floor, Reid took a change of clothes of his own and gave them to him.

"Thanks." A very flat and uneventful statement.

Red remembered clearly how Brian had looked, looking like a leopard that had gotten its fur wet from the storm and was a bit of a wreck. Yes, a leopard not a kitten. At that time, he had probably not recovered from the panic of being abducted by David and still being forced to participate in the commission of the crime. He was more like the character he had written out through the mental side of his profile than he was when he saw Brian now.

A somewhat indifferent aloofness to the outside world, and very cultured.

On the other hand, what Reed didn't know was that he had been completely right about a good chunk of Brian's suspicions. Brian, however, had two personalities, a highly dangerous sociopathic personality and a normal person with the moral standards of a normal person. And the normal persona was the one that had the upper hand in Brian's psychological struggle.

But the sociopathic personality is not without influence. Brian's concern for Reed and his deliberate feeding of stray cats are in fact his deliberate pretence to confuse Reed.

Brian's two personalities, in a subtle way, merge with each other. He is dominated by his normal personality, but is influenced by his anti-social personality traits, so that although he knows he has to care for others, he forgets if he is not paying attention. Those acts of caring for people he can only do if he deliberately tells himself to do them.

Feeding stray cats was even more so. When Brian was not Brian, he did often feed the stray cats around his home with some of his own leftovers. But after becoming Brian, he hadn't done anything like that in a long time. Because Brian's antisocial personality told him that it was none of his business and he didn't have to care.

The original intention was to wait until Brian returned at noon, as he had said he would bring lunch for Red. But the bau team, showed up at the door of Reed's hotel room after he had only finished washing up and getting dressed.

Because his next case required it, Reid didn't even have time to wait for Brian to return and say thank you and goodbye to him in person. All he could do was leave a note from the hotel and drop it in through the doorway of Brian's room.

It contained his words of thanks and that he looked forward to seeing him on the set of the Survivor shoot in two months' time, and wondered if Brian would be angry with him for not saying goodbye when he returned.

The truth was, Brian wasn't going to be mad at Red for not saying goodbye. He had dragged his feet outside long enough to return to the hotel with a Chinese dish, because by his calculations, the bau people would have been here by now, taking Reed away, right?

He had gone to great lengths to disguise and camouflage himself in front of Reed, just to dispel the bau team's suspicions that he had become a potential criminal. If his disguise was easily pierced because he was confronted by Jason Gideon, the master psychological profiler on the bau team, wouldn't he have spent yesterday's night pretending for nothing?

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