Shadow Unit

Agents

Supervisory Special Agent Stephen Reyes, Ph.D.

Age 49

If Shadow Unit were acknowledged as a Unit in FBI hierarchy, he'd be Unit Chief. As it is, he's officially Agent In Charge.

Reyes is intuitive, driven, obsessive. He's a master manipulator, with the best of intentions, a brilliant profiler who'll do anything to win. His definition of winning requires bringing the host in alive.

Reyes wants to make the forensics of the anomaly as precise--or more so--as the BAU's serial crime classifications.

At the University of Illinois, he studied sociology and criminal psych. He reads mystery fiction for entertainment, pointing out that it's too divorced from reality to be a busman's holiday.

He's written papers that suggest the larger and scarier picture--hinting at the anomaly--for use by law enforcement. This makes the Bureau very nervous, but he's convinced them that law enforcement has to have guidelines so they can know when to call the unit in.

A small group of nutcases out there know about Reyes and think he's onto whatever their freaky obsession is--aliens, government conspiracy, HAARP, telepaths, angels waging war from heaven. They mostly annoy the crap out of Reyes, in as much as he notices them at all; he's not interested in playing Fox Mulder to anyone's Lone Gunmen.

He's from Chicago, and a Cubs fan. He's been divorced three times, and isn't going to try it again ("It's like baseball," he says. "Three strikes, and you're out.") His parents were Afro-Cuban, musicians who left Cuba before the revolution. Reyes's mother was a popular singer until she decided to stabilize the family income by becoming a music teacher. His father continued to work as a drummer; his nightclub hours meant that he didn't see much of his son. He died of lung cancer at 50. Reyes's mother still lives in Chicago.

Reyes was raised Catholic, but has rejected it, and says, "The great thing about apostasy is that you don't buy all the shit, but you still own it."