"Katie? Katie Cole." I smiled when I saw the friendly face at my door.

"They told me I'd find you here." She walked into my apartment.

"Who told you? I'll kill 'em." I used the couch as a support to get up and went over to her. "It is so damn nice to see you again." I carefully hugged her.

"I heard you got shot. Twice." She pulled away from me but kept her arms around me.

"One in the leg, and the other in the abdomen." I lifted up my shirt to show her the stitches on my stomach.

"Battle wounds. You know how much I respect that." She patted my shoulder. "Alright, we've got a case, so we gotta get going to the BAU." She grabbed my badge and guns for me.

"How'd you know it's my first day back?" I furrowed my brows before taking my things from her.

"Lucky guess." She shrugged her shoulders. "Here's some coffee." She poured some from the coffee pot into one of my many thermoses.

"That's okay. My, uh, friend always brings me a cup." I watched my words carefully.

"Boyfriend?" She looked back at me.

"No, no. Just a friend." I clarified as we headed out. To tell you the truth, today wasn't technically my first day back. I had about two weeks left on medical leave, but I was bored out of my mind at my place. Derek always came over to check up on me, but that's about it.

"I always wanted to meet her." I overheard Derek's voice as we walked into the conference room. Everyone's back was turned to us since they were facing the monitor.

"Really? I heard she's a bitch." Katie joked as the two of us walked in. Well, she walked in, I stumbled in.

"Nobody ever called you that, Katie." Gideon didn't even need to turn around to know it was her.

"Everything alright?" Derek quickly got out of his chair when he saw me.

"Yeah, yeah, I was just bored, and Katie dragged me out of the apartment. By the way, thank you." I smiled at her. Derek pulled out his chair and me sit down.

"What are you doing back so early?" Aaron turned to me.

"It's my first day back. Did you already forget about me or something?" I crossed my arms over my chest.

"The first time I ever saw him, he appeared in a series of photos. I named him Peter." Katie stared at the screen that had an auction countdown...for a little boy. "Now he's being auctioned off when that clock runs to zero." She went up to Aaron and Gideon at the front of the room.

"Auctioned." JJ shook her head in disbelief.

"His face isn't pixelated." Gideon pointed out.

"'Cause the UnSub's confident that we're not going to be able to identify him in time." Aaron justified.

"What about the site itself? Can't we just track its origin?" JJ furrowed her brows.

"It's routed through a proxy server in Belarus. Even if that government was friendly, Peter'd be gone before we finished the paperwork." Katie glanced back at her.

"We don't need to worry about the paperwork. We have Garcia." JJ got up.

"Better get on that, will you?" Gideon instructed her.

"Yes, sir." She headed towards the door. "Good to have you back." She squeezed my shoulder on the way out.

"So, what happened a year ago, Katie?" Aaron asked her to elaborate.

"We cross-referenced the images of the boy. We talked to known offenders nationwide. We narrowed the location down to the eastern United States. We had some suspects in, but the trail went cold. Until today." She explained.

"With all due respect, Ms. Cole, how is this time going to be any different?" Derek rested his hands on the back of my chair. Well, the one he was sitting in earlier.

"We have a starting point." Katie looked back at him.

"The location where the image was first discovered." Aaron slowly paced by the table.

"A chat room—hosted by an independent web company in Cleveland, Ohio. And this time, I am bringing you all in with me." Katie mentioned.

"Finally. I have been waiting for some action." I got up from the chair.

"Have you been cleared for the field by your primary care physician?" Aaron raised an eyebrow at me.

"Maybe I can help with the behind-the-scenes work." I sat back down in defeat.

"Take her back to her apartment, Morgan." Aaron ordered him.

"It'd be my pleasure." Derek was about to help me out of the chair.

"No. I brought her here." Katie cut in, making everyone look at her. "She's the only one out of all of you who's specialized in abduction and child cases." She backed me up.

"I've been stuck in my apartment for four and a half months. Can you blame me for wanting to leave just two weeks early?" I faced my brother.

"No field work at all." He pointed a finger at me.

"Unless necessary." I squinted my eyes at him. Soon, we were up in the plane where there was a lot of turbulence. Katie had a burning hatred for turbulence.

"The image was uploaded to one of our CAC undercovers fishing in a chat room. We try to monitor as many of them as we can, pretending to be children, pedophiles, whatever works on that site." She detailed to us.

"Did you run forensic linguistics on the chat log? There might be something to Hugz speech patterns." Aaron proposed to her.

"It doesn't really work that way with internet talk." We hit some more turbulence, making Katie grip onto the leather seats for support.

"Fear of flying? Length, deep-rooted issues of control?" Gideon teased her.

"I...think better on my feet." She answered. "Most of the talk is abbreviated text. LOL, laughing out loud. IMHO, in my humble opinion. FTF, face to face." She listed out some examples. "Pedophiles can be divided into two categories—" More turbulence.

"Situational and preferential." Aaron took over for her. "Situational offenders rarely seek out children, but they'll take advantage of a situation when presented with it, whereas preferential offenders actively target children by age group, hair color...they'll seek out jobs which give them as much access to children as possible." He described the two types.

"They often trawl around residential neighborhoods, hijacking home wireless systems and communicating with children often outside the very house the child is in. Or they simply use a wireless coffee shop to find, locate, and arrange a meeting. And it's growing. It's growing as fast as the internet. They're getting smarter and smarter, and all the security in the world can't stop them from coming through our doors. Hell, the monsters are already in our homes." Katie held up her laptop.

"If he's had this kid for over a year, it makes him preferential." Aaron categorized.

"Definitely." Katie agreed with him.

"So, then why is he selling him?" Derek asked just as another round of turbulence hit.

"He's probably losing interest." I slowly stood up, but Derek pulled me back down. "Peter could be growing out of our UnSub's preferences. Preferential offenders typically have really specific characteristics in their victims." I sent Derek a small glare.

"And if he can't sell him?" Derek looked up at me.

"He isn't going to just let him go." Gideon broke the depressing silence.

"Hotch?" JJ and Garcia came through on video call.

"Yeah." Aaron sat down on the armrest of my chair since the laptop was right in front of me.

"Yeah, I was thinking, shouldn't we release Peter's picture to the media?" JJ proposed the idea.

"No. No, no." Katie cut in. "If this UnSub thinks we're on to him, he may make a run for it and dispose of the boy." She disagreed with her.

"Shouldn't we assume he does know?" Gideon furrowed his brows.

"As I said, we intercepted the image as part of an undercover operation. These predators have a fairly closed society. The way they run these sites give them the expectation of anonymity." Katie explained to them.

"Right." Gideon whispered and closed his eyes for a moment.

"Have Reid and Elle check the live feed. Not just the boy, but everything around him, including the room. See if we missed anything." Aaron ordered them.

"Yeah. Okay." Garcia and JJ replied before hanging up.

"Elle's back? And I didn't get to see her?" I huffed and sank back in my seat. The entire team headed up to the floor of the chatroom vendor.

"FBI. We have a warrant to search these premises. Stop what you're doing right now." Derek announced to the workers while holding up a physical copy of the warrant.

"Somebody tell us who owns this place." I leaned my weight on the desk in front of me.

"That'd be me." A young guy stood up in his own office.

"I want access to your chatroom database." Katie demanded.

"This is so typical. You feds just can't help yourselves. You gotta pollute the truest form of free expression ever invented." Dan Ash, the owner of this place, complained about us to us.

"Agent Morgan, please select a chatroom of your choice. You are a twelve-year-old girl named Suzie." I glanced back at him.

"What are you doing?" Ash came up to stand behind me while Derek worked on another computer.

"Fishing." Katie and I answered at the same time.

"You know, I've got rights, and so do my clients." He countered. Derek posted the message, and the computer just started dinging with the number of messages he was receiving.

"Know what that sound is?" I got out of my chair. "Pedophiles who want to hook up with Suzy, a twelve-year-old girl." I faced him.

"You let them run everything through SSL connections from proxy servers in offshore countries." Katie handled the logistics and schematics.

"So they can't be identified?" Derek looked over at us.

"Not in twelve and a half hours." Katie shook her head.

"Hey, I'm just a middleman here, okay? What can I do?" Ash offered us his help.

"There's a little boy for sale on one of your sites. 'What can I do' just isn't good enough." Gideon told him about the whole reason we were here. JJ called Gideon a bit later to inform him of another child being held by the same screen name, Hugz. This time, they were able to get ahold of the address, and that's where we were headed.

"Stay in the car, okay?" Derek ordered me.

"I am perfectly capable of helping, alright?" I shot back.

"Geez, you two sound like an old married couple." Katie spoke up from the back. As soon as Aaron stopped the car, everyone got out, excluding me. I had an earwig in so I could listen to them.

"Suparna, we need you in here. It's clear." Aaron said to me.

"Finally." I muttered to myself and ran out of the vehicle. Just as I stepped into the house, the team was heading downstairs, taking off their vests.

"The father's been in jail for the last eight months. In that time, Kevin's been selling the only thing he's got, which is himself." Aaron summarized for me.

"Just like a street hustler." Derek sat down on the steps.

"Only now the street is the internet." Katie let out a heavy sigh.

"And his client base spans that globe." Gideon mentioned.

"Well, this kid definitely uploaded Peter's video to the chatroom 'cause it's still on his computer." Derek said.

"But not the live feed." Aaron countered.

"Did he mention how he got access to the video?" I placed my hands on my hips.

"He said it, uh, came from one of his clients. It was a shared file. They'd gone around these chat groups." Aaron explained to me.

"It's possible. Buyers and sellers routine. They trade files because the act in itself is an illegal act, which proves they're not the police." Katie traced the pattern.

"Come on. Let's try to get some more out of him." I was the first to go upstairs.

"Kid, the boy whose video you've been sending around to all the chatrooms, he's gonna be sold from one pedophile to another." Derek told him.

"Boo-hoo." Kevin replied.

"These are dummy logs." Katie couldn't get into them. "What's the password to get me into the real transcripts of your sessions?" She asked him.

"You're the FBI. You figure it out." He spat out.

"Look, Kevin, it may not look like it right now, but we're trying to help you, okay?" I glanced back at him.

"Help me? What I do is consensual. No one's getting hurt." He argued.

"Come on, Kevin, what's the password? Your birthday? Your favorite band?" Katie tried to get it out of him.

"Kevin, this is prostitution." Derek looked down at him.

"But I'm a minor. I don't even really know what I'm doing. Plus I never leave this room, so no one, no one ever touches me." He played the innocent victim.

"Anymore. Your father's been beating you since you can remember. First, it was when he was drunk on the weekend. Then he was always drunk. You never knew why he was hurting you...why he was so angry. At night you'd cry yourself to sleep, hoping someone would come and save you. No one ever came." Gideon detailed the kid's life story.

"You have the chance to be the one who saves someone, Kevin. You can be the one who answers him, the one who stops his pain. You can't get to your father, but you can get to the guy who's hurting this boy." It didn't take a genius to know that my brother hit one of Kevin's soft spots. There was a brief moment of silence.

"Move." He said to me and Katie, so we moved aside. "This backs up all my transcripts." The screen name for the guy who sent me the file is Mehtevas." He scrolled to the bottom of the chat logs.

"How long has Mehtevas been a client of yours?" Katie posed to him.

"Like six months." He answered unsurely.

"Do you know where he's located?" I looked up at him.

"He's a local. He's always asking to meet with me, but I don't do that." He replied.

"Does he know where you are?" Aaron spoke up.

"Just the city." He shrugged his shoulders.

"How do you contact him?" My brother continued.

"He contacts me." Kevin turned away from us.

"Come on, Kevin. You don't just sit around here waiting for these guys to look you up. That's no way to run a business." Derek crossed his arms over his chest.

"Right now, you're the only person who can help us find Peter." Katie pointed at him.

"What do you want me to do?" He stared down at Katie.

"Ask him for a face-to-face." She answered.

"No. No way. I don't do that. I've never been out of this room." Kevin shook his head profusely.

"It'll be fine. He won't lay a finger on you. We'll right there, Kevin, the whole time. I promise you." Aaron said.

"Won't he be suspicious if I suddenly want to meet with him?" I'm starting to like this kid.

"He's a need driven offender, Kevin. If you offer to meet with him, he won't be able to resist. He can't help himself." Gideon detailed to him. The bastard's a principal at an elementary school.

"I'm taking Kevin to the Alexandria field office. I'll be back ASAP." I said to my brother while holding the door open for Kevin to get in.

"Take it easy, alright? You still have two weeks left on medical leave, and no one is going to say anything or judge you if you want to rest, okay?" Aaron assured me.

"Make sure that son of a bitch gets what he deserves." Was all I said before getting into the driver's seat. "And keep an eye on Derek. Don't let him kill the guy before me." I drove off. After getting Kevin settled in the field office, I turned on the radio news.

"The FBI's crime control unit and local authorities have arrested Mark Twain Elementary School Principal Howard Rawlings today in what sources say is a sting operation targeting what may be one of the largest pedophile rings this country has ever seen." It was a news report on the case we were working on right now. I grabbed my phone and immediately dialed Derek's number. "Both agencies have declined to comment on the arrest at this time or give any details of the case, but it is rumored to be connected to the investigation of a child pornography ring..." He finally picked up the phone.

"What's up, Suparna?" Derek asked me.

"I'm listening to a live feed right now of the arrest of Rawlings, Derek. There's news reporters probably all around the school." I let him now. "Derek, the UnSub's probably watching it right now, too." I added.

"My God. That's why the site went down. He knows." I heard Katie say. Garcia and JJ found out Peter was wearing a Tadpoles shirt, which is some sort of boy scout troop. They even found the troop unit and location.

"She's sure about this, right?" I picked Elle, Spencer, and Derek up from the elementary school.

"If Garcia says that Tadpoles shirt came from a unit in Mount Pleasant, then I gotta believe her." Derek answered.

"She better be. Mount Pleasant is sixty miles away, and there's only two hours left on the auction clock." Spencer mentioned, making me speed up a bit.

"But if the UnSub knows we're trying to get him, he may just lessen the amount of time we have to find Peter." I said to them.

"Feeling alright?" Derek placed a hand on my shoulder.

"Uh, yeah. Why wouldn't I be?" I stared out onto the road in front of us.

"You're knuckles are turning white from how hard you're gripping on to the steering wheel." Elle answered.

"Do you know how much I missed that smart mouth of yours?" I smiled back at her. Aaron, Katie, and Gideon went to the local school while Derek, Elle, Spencer, and I visited the church affiliated with the Tadpoles troop.

"Recognize him?" Derek handed Reverend Jackson Harris a picture.

"I can't say that I do." He looked down at it.

"But you're certain that the shirt came from this unit of the Tadpoles, right?" Elle asked him in hope.

"It disbanded six months ago, before I took over the congregation." He answered.

"How come?" I furrowed my brows.

"I was told there wasn't enough interest. Only a few boys participated." Harris sat down on one of the couches.

"Do you have the records of those who did participate?" Spencer posed to him.

"How could anyone do this to a child?" Harris shook his head in disbelief.

"We need to find this boy. The records." Elle reiterated to him.

"I'm sorry. I don't think so." He looked up at us. "Wait. There may be a photo of the Tadpoles." He walked out of the room. "This may be what you're looking for." Harris came back to us.

"Yeah. That's him right there." Derek pointed at a young boy in the picture. "Is there a name, address, anything?" Derek passed the picture frame to me.

"As I said, there are no records left. The church was run pretty sloppily until I took over." He let out a sigh.

"Let me see that." Elle took ahold of the frame. She took out the back, revealing some writing on the back of the photo. "His name's Charlie." She identified. We met up with Katie, Gideon, and Aaron.

"The name the school has is Charlie Sparks." Aaron started off.

"No Sparks in any of the phone directories." Gideon added.

"Garcia can't even find a Sparks within a hundred miles for the last ten years." Derek leaned against the SUV.

"Probably not his real name anyway." Elle paced around the road.

"The school said he may have moved away." Aaron late out a sigh.

"Guys, there isn't a lot of time left." I checked my watch.

Maybe we're looking at this the wrong way." Spencer stated.

"What do you mean?" Elle turned to him.

"The behavior, it's odd, right? The UnSub apparently listed this kid in school and the Tadpoles until about a year ago. At that point, he had pictures of him online in a regular looking room. But now he's in a prison-like room with no windows, no doors. He's completely hidden." Spencer listed out the unusual traits.

"Preferential pedophiles don't change overnight." Katie started to catch on.

"So, what happened a year ago to make him change his behavior so much?" Aaron questioned.

"Fear." Gideon looked up from the ground "Katie almost caught him. You probably talked to him. The UnSub's in your records." He said to her. Then, almost all of our watches started to beep.

"Guys, we just ran out of time." Derek informed us.

"I never really had a good suspect. I only did some general interviews with child offenders on the East Coast." Katie pressed her phone against her ear. "Amanda? Hey, uh, I need you to pull all of the original files on Peter's case. Somewhere in my office. Try my desk. I need the names of everyone I interviewed." She said to the woman on the other side.

"Have her call Penelope Garcia at the BAU. She'll be able to tell us if we can cross any off." Derek told her.

"You got it? Thanks." Katie hung up the phone. Garcia called Derek with information on the men Katie talked to.

"Alright, guys. Listen up. We might have something." Derek came back to us. "Twelve men were interviewed. Eight are back in prison, one is dead. One lives in California, and two have last known addresses within ten minutes of us—a Patrick Forest and a Michael Earlson." He gave us two names.

"Patrick Forest isn't smart enough to put this all together." Katie disagreed.

"What about Michael Earlson?" Aaron questioned her.

"Definitely." She answered. We saw an SUV pull out of Michael Earlson's address, meaning he was delivering the boy to the highest bidder.

"Where the hell do you think you're going?" I tackled him onto the hood of our vehicle. "Don't you even think about moving!" I yelled at him.

"Take it easy, Suparna. Take it easy." Derek took over and stuffed him into the smaller car. Katie and Aaron went to the trunk of the SUV and got Charlie out. We got Michael Earlson into an interrogation room.

"Peter's real name is Dustin Powers." Katie came into the backroom. "He abducted him in Newark, New Jersey when he was one." She glared at him through the glass window.

"Son of a bitch..." I cursed under my breath.

"Sometimes it seems there's no punishment enough." Gideon stepped out of the room.

"JJ traced his mother. She's on her way." Derek and I walked out as well. Gideon and Katie brought in the mother to talk to Dustin. "Need anything? Coffee? Water?" He followed behind me as I headed towards my car.

"Derek, you don't need to worry about me, okay? It's sweet and all, but it makes me feel weak." I placed my hand on the side of his face.

"But I like worrying about you. Gives me something to do and think about other than the job." He held my hand and kissed the top of it.

"Are you coming over again tonight? I was thinking about making some lasagna." I took out my car keys.

"For you and lasagna? Definitely." He gave me a cheeky smile.