Rachel McKendrick was born in the heart of New York City, at the Downtown Hospital in Lower Manhattan. Her father, James, was an NYPD cop. Her mother was a trauma center nurse, who eventually left hospital work to become the attending nurse at a neighborhood clinic in TriBeCa. The young family settled there in the early-70's simply because the rents were cheaper there than most everywhere else in Manhattan at the time. As a result, Rachel spent much of her childhood surrounded by artists and creative types, despite the fact that neither of her parents, creative though both of them were outside of work, would ever have called themselves artists.
Her childhood was actually fairly idyllic for the time and place. She was allowed to simply be a kid. There were no major crises or horrible events beyond the usual traumas of childhood to scar her at all. Her parents loved her and loved each other very much. This isn't to say there wasn't conflict on occasion. It simply means it never lasted for very long and never drove a wedge in any of their relationships. She learned to dance, she learned to sing, she learned to play the piano… all from nearby neighbors living in the same old walk-up apartment building. Sure, none of those things would develop into any sort of professional ambition, but they would always remain escapist pastimes to help her blow off steam.
All of this, of course, turned out to be a very good thing, since, by the time Rachel hit puberty, it was pretty clear the girl had inherited her mother's psychic ability of clairvoyance. At first, it manifested itself as nothing more than bad dreams, nightmares that woke the child in the middle of the night and sent her running into her parents' bedroom. Accompanied as they often were, however, by debilitating migraines brought on primarily by Rachel's attempts to resist the visions, it didn't take Liz, Rachel's mother, long to figure out what was actually going on. After all, she, like her mother and grandmother before her, shared the same gift. She knew from firsthand experience the only way to stop the headaches was to accept the visions.
Over the course of her adolescence, then, Rachel learned to do just that. In the long run, she was lucky. Her mother was there to teach her the ropes and keep her from going over the deep end as a result of what she saw. The rules, she learned, were simple: Tell no one outside of the family about the gift or any of the visions she saw… but otherwise do whatever she could to ensure the worst of what she saw never came to pass.
Of course, just because the rules were simple, didn't mean they were easy. The better Rachel learned to handle her visions, the sharper they became. They were always brief, never immediately clear in meaning — no matter how vivid the images she saw — and inevitably bad. Indeed, she often grumbled to her mother about the fact she never got to see happy things like weddings or romance. It was always depressing things like funerals or events that usually led to funerals. So much so, in fact, that she started referring to her visions as VOIDs: an abbreviation of the phrase 'Visions Of Impending Doom'.
And doing something constructive about those VOIDs wasn't always easy. True, the urgency of the VOIDs grew as she did. As a young teen, she certainly wasn't being asked to chase down murderers or serial killers. But she'd see accidents waiting to happen. And she had no doubt it was because she was supposed to do something to help prevent them whenever she could. Trying to explain, sometimes, how she just happened to end up in the right place at the right time could sometimes be problematic, especially when it became enough of a pattern that teachers wondered if she was perhaps causing the accidents. Though they ultimately gave up on that idea, it quickly taught Rachel the need for discretion not only in what she said, but what she did as well. Further, she had to come up with some way to explain to her teachers why she occasionally 'spaced out' in class. Eventually, thanks to her mother's medical background, she was labelled as being epileptic and subject to petit mal seizures. Thus, nothing more was said about any of it.
However, as she matured, the VOIDs got commensurately more graphic. On some level, she was fortunate. At least in the beginning. Over the years, James, her father, had come to believe in the truth and accuracy of his wife's visions. He was often able to use his influence and position on the force to help rectify the situations Liz saw. Thus, when Rachel started doing the same thing, he was unsurprised — if somewhat dismayed — that his daughter developed the same talent. For a while, he was able to cover for her, too. All that changed, however, the day Rachel had a VOID about him.
She was in phys. ed. class, at the time, in her senior year. The VOID smacked her upside the back of the head like a runaway freight train slamming into a pile of bricks. She saw her father gunned down in the Bowery, while he was on a stakeout. The VOID was so vivid that, when he collapsed in her vision, she collapsed on the playing field. The school thought she was having a seizure and called her mother almost immediately. But, Liz was already on her way. She'd had the very same vision herself.
Unfortunately, this wasn't a VOID Rachel or Liz were meant to fix. It was simply one they each saw on account of their closeness to James. Indeed, they saw his last moments at the very same time he was actually living them. So, there was absolutely nothing they could do.
It was the first time Rachel discovered that not everyone in her visions were meant to be saved. And it didn't at all make her happy.
Coming out of that experience, Rachel determined to follow in her father's footsteps, to become a cop. It was her mother that suggested she look into psychology and profiling instead of straight law enforcement. "In your visions," she told her daughter, "you most often see things from the perpetrator's point of view. Psychology's the easier way to disguise it." Rachel couldn't deny the logic in that statement. And it wasn't like she wasn't interested in psychology already. So, it was an easy shift.
She worked hard through university, becoming highly driven and tightly focused. Thus, she earned top marks and graduated in the top 10% of her class. She went on to police college, juggling that with her Masters degree, but ended up being recruited into the FBI rather than the NYPD. She accepted the federal recruitment offer mainly because they were willing to shoulder a lot bigger percentage of the costs of earning her Doctorate. And it gave her a lot greater ability to pursue and resolve any VOIDs that smacked into her.
Of course, all of that studying and training left her with very, very little time for a social life. Now, realistically, this didn't actually bother her very much. She'd become rather solitary over time, thanks to her gift. True, it's not like she had VOIDs every day, or even every week, for that matter. Once or twice a month was fairly average. But, it was a huge secret to keep and an even harder burden to carry, regardless. And it wasn't like she had anyone beyond her mother that she could share it with who would actually understand and not think she was crazy. Indeed, going into law enforcement, the last thing she needed was to be labelled as 'crazy' in any way. In fact, she even had the 'epilepsy' diagnosis softened so that it ceased to be any threat as an impediment to her goals. She was friendly enough with her peers on the job, to be sure. They all considered her quite likeable, if a little quiet. Theirs was a brothers-and-sisters-in-arms camaraderie typical of most any law enforcement team or military unit. Everyone more or less shared the same attitude and focus.
Still, without a lot of extra social outlets, it wasn't so much of a surprise, then, that a quiet romance developed between her and another agent by the name of Owen Matthews. Matthews had joined the Bureau three or four years earlier than she had. And, neither of them were in the other's direct chain of command. Matthews was an active field agent, while Rachel was a departmental and task force specialist that was tapped by field operations only as needed. They met when he was trying to track a serial killer across states… one she'd encountered in a particularly disturbing VOID. He was impressed with how accurate her descriptions not only of the crime scene, but the killer's motives had turned out to be. (By this time, she was a pro and navigating the tricky waters of revealing enough to be believable, but not enough to be suspect.) By the time she'd formally earned her doctorate, the pair had married — though, for some reason, she kept her maiden name.
Turns out that was was fairly smart decision.
Although the marriage ultimately lasted just under 7 years, by the time year 5 rolled around, Rachel knew they were in for a rocky road… and it had nothing at all to do with her clairvoyance. She was a psychologist. She could see the warning signs. She just didn't pay them any attention, at first. Human nature. In fact, it would take another 18 months before she was forced to confront her husband's infidelity. And, ironically, the only reason she did actually was because she was clairvoyant.
Upon shaking the hand of another agent, a woman, upon first meeting her at an investigation, Rachel had a VOID that showed that woman entwined with Owen in a very compromising position. It shook her. She didn't openly confront him about it until the investigation was over. But, by then, the damage was done. Sure, he apologized. He swore it would never happen again; it was nothing more than the stress of the job and the fact his investigations were keeping him on the road so much, away from her. In the end, though, the fact that she had seen the infidelity, and not just heard about it or figured it out through circumstantial evidence, made it impossible for Rachel to live with it. So, she filed for divorce.
During the final months of the settlement process, Rachel decided it was time for a change of scenery. The fact is, throughout everything, she'd never been a morose or depressed sort of person. And she had no intention of becoming so, now. She had always liked her job, always felt like there was some purpose in it, always felt accomplished when a perp was arrested and put away. She even enjoyed the challenge of hunt. No, the VOIDs weren't fun, but they were useful. They helped her do the job, so she didn't resent them in any way. And, honestly, she had been happy with Owen. Even during the rocky period… right up until the moment she saw him in Christine's bed. She'd been raised to be a scrapper, well-grounded and down-to-earth. There was little room for wallowing in pity. Whenever you get knocked down, she'd been taught, you get back up, dust yourself off, and move on. Thus, when she saw an opportunity to move down to the Houston office, she took it.
As it happened, throughout her 50's, Rachel's mother had developed a stomach disorder. Her doctors in NYC referred her to a medical team down at UT Southwestern, in Dallas, and recommended she seek treatment there. They had the best facilities in the country to deal with it. Consequently, a handful of years earlier, Liz had moved from NY to TX in order to be closer to adequate treatment centers. The disorder was chronic, but not terminal. Not with proper treatment, certainly. And, much to her surprise, she enjoyed the South. Dallas wasn't nearly as parochial or stereotypically 'western' as she'd feared it might be. It certainly wasn't NYC, but the people were friendly enough and the city cosmopolitain enough that she didn't feel grossly out-of-place. Thus, she settled in quite well, there.
So, knowing she had family in the area, Rachel applied for a transfer to the Houston office. She got it. She didn't stay there very long, however. Shortly after her arrival in the city, she was offered a secondment to the Dallas PD as a criminal profiler and forensics psychologist. The Bureau would still have priority access to her, should they need her, but she'd otherwise be working out of the central Dallas precinct with local law enforcement personnel. Given it put her closer to her mother, something she rather enjoyed, Rachel was more than happy to seize the opportunity.
And, as it turned out, her first day in Dallas would be one to celebrate. As the movers hauled the last of her boxes up the elevator and into her new condo, her lawyer called her to tell her the divorce was finalized. Life was looking up again.
