Criminal Minds s13e09 Episode Script
False Flag
1 The unknown subject we're looking for is a male, most likely in his 20s, based on the two victims so far.
But before we go any further, we need to be clear.
Age is the most difficult variable to predict.
He could be in his 40s.
A very fit 40s.
So our point is, the profile is a guide only.
It's an investigative tool, and we need to stress that.
All we have is a series of deductions, but one of those deductions is that the unsub knew his victims personally.
Which is why we're delivering the profile to you, because you also knew the victims.
So, our goal is not to make you uncomfortable or suspicious.
Normally we wouldn't even give the profile this early, but you are our best chance at discovering the identity of Yes? I have a question for Agent Rossi.
Go ahead.
Why did your last book Suck so bad? [LAUGHTER.]
Uh well, we're not gonna talk about that now.
Really? That's all I want to talk about.
I mean, you even consider that Tommy Yates was a patsy? Look, we get it, ok? You have no reason to trust us.
We're the FBI, and you are the official community of the Roswell, New Mexico, truthers.
Thanks for not calling us conspiracy theorists.
Well, we know you don't like that term.
While we don't agree with your opinions, a lot of people do.
Like how September 11th was an inside job, or how vapor trails from jets are poisonous, or how lizard people are secretly running the government.
Ah-ah-ah! Confirmation from the FBI.
You all heard it.
No, no, see that's specifically not what I was Ok.
We need your help to stop a killer who is hiding in this group.
That's why we are having this here in this Legion Hall and not at the police station.
We don't want you to feel surveilled What did you put in my pocket?! Gun! Drop it! [SHOUTING, SCREAMING.]
Drop it! PRENTISS: All right, everybody calm down.
What's your name? I'm Emily.
Emily Prentiss.
It says right here.
The reason I'm asking is so we can have a conversation.
[BREATHING HARD.]
Doug.
I'm Doug.
Great, Doug.
Let's just take a second.
Let's think through the logic of this.
I i didn't do any of this! We're not saying you did, but you are making things worse with that gun.
The reason we asked you here, the only reason, is to listen.
That's all.
Ok? So just listen.
Listen.
Put the gun down.
I know a false flag when I see one.
- You bitch! - No! [GUNSHOT.]
GARCIA: âOnce you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.
â Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
[DOOR OPENS.]
Can I go home now? No.
We're holding you and your friends for 24 hours.
You're all persons of interest in a murder investigation.
Murder? What, Doug killed himself.
True.
But there are still two other victims to account for.
Now, normally when there's a public suicide, it's because the suspect is the serial killer and he's killed himself out of guilt.
But we can't prove that yet, so, our investigation is still open.
He said this whole thing was a false flag, which means he thought you were trying to frame him.
I know what a false flag is.
The FBI doesn't frame people.
What, not anymore? You know, all of your friends have lawyered up.
Called us Nazis, or both.
But you haven't.
So? So that tells me you want to get to the bottom of this just as much as we do.
Do you know what a podcast is? I do.
Well, I have one.
So if we're actually gonna do this, you give me back my phone and I record our conversation for my podcast, 'cause I'm not talking to you without documenting everything.
You want this on the record? Of course.
I want this on the record.
Otherwise I'm lawyering up with all my friends.
So what do you say? PRENTISS: The answer's no.
I think we should consider it.
No.
She will control the audio.
She can twist your words, edit them to make the bureau look bad.
We already look bad.
The brass is gonna want to know how and why Doug killed himself in front of us.
Yeah, and that's my ass, but I'm not making this situation worse than it already is.
Garcia, have we confirmed that this truther's even legit? GARCIA: Of course I've confirmed that, and she is.
Melissa Miller has a pretty popular truther podcast, especially around Roswell.
She promotes all kinds of conspiracies, but her cause celebre is staged shootings.
So she thinks the reason we have gun violence, it's been faked by the government as a pretext to revoke the second amendment.
Nice.
It's another reason not to do this.
Or it's the exact reason to do this.
What was tonight, other than a staged shooting, and why is she the only one willing to cooperate? Unsubs like to insert themselves into the investigation.
Profile skews male, but she could be a partner.
Ok, then, if she isn't involved, I can get her to talk.
I'm a forensic psychologist.
I'm trained to outwit and outsmart clinical psychopaths far more dangerous than her.
But if we're wrong, she's going to post her podcast.
Then what? Then we're the next example of fake news.
Look, everybody, give us a second.
You, too, Garcia.
We don't just have egg on our face, we have blood on our hands.
It's not like these conspiracy theorists are gonna be quiet.
I am aware of that.
I need options.
We're out of them.
The profile says it's a truther, and only one of them is talking to us.
We have to throw a Hail Mary.
[CELL PHONE DINGS.]
Say something.
We need to make sure the levels are good.
I'm Dr.
Tara Lewis of the BAU No.
Say something interesting.
Tell me how you really feel about truthers.
My audience could use a sense of the FBI's bias against us.
I got my Ph.
D.
by taking a theory, testing it, and then proving my results.
Now, proving my results means that I take those results and I turn them over to other scientists to see if they can replicate them.
And if they can't, then my theory was wrong.
See, that's science.
A consensus of evidence that we call truth.
What you do is different.
Oh, no, it's not.
Yes, it is.
Because your theories are unprovable.
Give me one.
Uh, President Obama wasn't born here.
He was born in Kenya.
Perfect.
That's perfect.
So, I show you his long-form birth certificate, and then you would respond that it's been faked because that's how deep the conspiracy goes.
And then that becomes your argument against any evidence that I provide.
It's a cognitive trick that keeps you from having to admit that life is messy.
It's random.
Not everything fits the easy explanation that a conspiracy gives you.
All right, then.
Well, let's talk about the murders.
When did you first hear about them? Yesterday.
When we were invited in.
GARCIA: It's time to get out our tinfoil hats, my fine furry friends, because we are on our way to Roswell, New Mexico, aka, ground zero of conspiracy theorists because of a certain alien crash i mean weather balloon.
The sheriff there has had two suspicious deaths over the last 48 hours.
Both victims were members of the truther movement.
Yes, which is a group of conspiracy theorists who share their out-there beliefs online with each other.
No judgment here.
Let's look at our first victim Bryan Behar.
He believed that the fluoride they put in our drinking water is a mind-control agent meant to keep us docile.
He died by drowning.
People drown all the time, you say.
I say not in their own aquariums.
So the M.
O.
matches his conspiracy.
Is that a coincidence or a choice? That depends on victim number two.
Uh-huh.
That's Carl Lee.
He's a JFK conspiracy nut who was shot once in the throat.
As anyone who saw the Zapruder film knows, that's where the first bullet struck Kennedy.
Carl Lee we can definitively classify as a homicide, but the drowning death that could have another explanation.
That's why we'll be treating this as an equivocal death investigation.
Wheels up in 20.
Back up.
What was that term you used? Equivocal something? An equivocal death investigation.
It's an investigation where we consider all options.
It could be a murder, but it could also be a suicide or an accident or even natural causes.
Are you saying these murders weren't murder? Is that the FBI's official position? I'm saying we let clues guide us to a deduction.
We don't jump to conclusions.
But as we were flying here, our technical analyst uncovered something unusual.
Right.
Your technical analyst.
That would be Penelope Garcia? Yeah.
I looked up your whole team before coming in here.
Why did you do that? Because I'm a naturally suspicious person who wanted to get a feel for your methods.
Specifically the illegal surveillance that the FBI is willing to resort to to frame innocent men and women.
As I said, the FBI doesn't frame anyone, and we certainly don't do anything illegal.
Well, I guess that depends on what Garcia found and how she found it.
So what did she find? GARCIA: It looks like our two victims were talking via encrypted texts.
It took a while to break, and their conversation was short, but its content made my perfectly shaped eyebrows go, âHmm?â Carl says to Bryan, âI think I'm close to finding out who it is.
â to which Bryan says, âMaybe we should go to the police.
â and Carl says, âWhat good would that do?â Well, that could be motive.
Whatever Carl was close to finding could have killed him and Bryan.
At first glance, yeah.
But we're talking about conspiracy theorists here, and a lot of them suffer from association fallacy.
Let's say you thought Lyndon Johnson had JFK killed in order to escalate the war in Vietnam.
Ok, stop right there.
What? You guys have a jet? Yes.
A jet.
Yes.
Black helicopters surveilling the American people.
No, no, that's ridiculous.
But a little branch of the FBI has its own private jet.
Ok, one, I never said the FBI doesn't have black helicopters.
And, two, when people are being murdered, we have to respond quickly.
[SCOFFS.]
A jet.
I can't even.
Sorry.
Where were we? Let's say you thought Lyndon Johnson had JFK killed in order to escalate the war in Vietnam.
That's ridiculous.
Everybody knows that PRENTISS: No, no.
We're not getting into that again.
Go ahead, Luke.
Uh, my point is, that if you thought the government could do that, then you were likely believe that they'd brought down the towers on 9-11.
Pretty soon you're down that rabbit hole and you see everything as a plot.
So maybe these guys weren't into anything.
Maybe they just talked themselves into a group delusion.
Ok, we should investigate that when we land.
And since the police are mentioned so prominently on the text, they might know what the victims were looking into.
The Chicago mob, right? Killed JFK.
He gets it.
No.
Don't get him started, Matt.
Next, he'll be showing you YouTube clips.
So I'm sure when you flew in, they showed you Carl and Bryan's police record.
They did.
And what we saw were 4 years of reports that both men were convinced someone was watching them.
But despite his best efforts, Sheriff Bowman was never able to find any evidence of stalking.
Oh, yeah.
'Cause he tried really hard.
You know what was much more interesting was what we found when we walked the crime scenes.
The glass is 3/4 of an inch thick and that's sturdy.
If you wanted to drown someone in an aquarium, that would do the trick.
They said there was a bleach solution in the water, so he was probably cleaning it and his ear buds were in.
Make it easy to sneak up on Bryan.
Unsub wouldn't have had to work too hard.
Bryan was startled.
He took in water and bleach, and he was asphyxiated before he knew what was happening.
How did the unsub get in here? Hey, Matt, a question for you.
Any evidence of a break-in at your crime scene? Hang on, JJ.
Let me check.
Any signs of forced entry? No, sir.
No, none here either.
What I am seeing is an unsub who covers up his tracks.
It looks like he shot Carl in the throat Bullet was a through and through.
Came out the other side of Carl's neck and went in the wall.
Dug it out, picked up the casing, took the gun with him.
So this guy knows how to clean up after himself and how to get in and out of two houses without detection.
JJ, let me call you back.
Looks like an RFID card.
Mm-hmm.
What's it go to? That's the question.
Huh.
Well, hello.
Huh.
That gun's missing.
Well, it means the unsub's no mastermind.
It's been right under our nose the whole time.
So we went through Carl's meticulous log of his hardware, and the missing gun should be here.
It is a Bodyguard 380.
Now, if the unsub found this in a secret compartment, then he knows Carl, probably very well.
And based on the fortress that Carl lived in, it'd probably be another truther.
No one else could get that close.
And that would explain why there was no forced entry at Bryan's either.
So when Carl said, âI'm close to finding out who it is,â he wasn't talking about some secret cabal, he was talking about a friend.
PRENTISS: Someone he was willing to call the cops on.
We should bring all the truthers in for questioning.
No, no, that won't work.
They won't cooperate under coercion.
Look, I say we lay all our cards out on the table.
Let's deliver our profile to them.
Oh, that's risky.
But worth it.
Either one of the truthers points us to the unsub Or he shows up himself.
And that brings us up to tonight.
Ballistics confirmed that the gun that killed Carl was the one that Doug used on himself.
All the evidence points to Doug Downey as our killer, except Except you don't have anything tying Doug to Bryan's drowning.
Melissa, I've been as transparent as I can possibly be.
Is there anything we've missed? [SIGHS.]
One thing.
But you didn't miss it, you covered it up.
Specifically, that the sheriff made us all walk through a metal detector.
What? Don't pretend you didn't know that.
And don't pretend you don't know why.
Someone in law enforcement planted a gun on Doug.
Because what was it that he was saying earlier tonight? What did you put in my pocket?! Gun! Drop it! [SHOUTING.]
MeliSSA, that doesn't make any sense.
You tell me what's more believable A missing gun in a wacky compartment or the police planted a Bodyguard 380, a very popular firearm in law enforcement, on Doug.
Then, they call their friends all the way in Quantico and you guys get on your fancy jet and come out here to make sure that the cover-up's complete.
That's not what happened.
Am I your unsub? Yes or no? You are a person of interest, just like every other truther in this building tonight.
That's a yes.
Which is why I'm recording all of this, to show the world exactly how far the FBI is willing to go to cover up the truth.
Ok.
Let's take a moment.
I think we've gotten off track.
No, no.
No, we're, uh, we're right where we need to be.
See, I wanted the brilliant science of behavioral profiling to provide an answer for all this.
I really did.
But right now, from where I'm sitting, this crazy conspiracy theorist is the only one making any sense.
Guys, hold up.
- Can we plug this in somewhere? - Yes, ma'am.
So this is the metal detector you had at the legion hall? - Mm-hmm.
- And you made all - the truthers walk through it.
- Yep.
And then after that you brought it back here to the police stations, you haven't touched it since? Sheriff, why didn't you tell us you were gonna do that? You told us you didn't want to spook the truthers.
You also told us the killer might show up, so this was for our protection.
Can you tell me I was wrong? No, sheriff, you weren't wrong, but it does beg the bigger question.
How the hell did Doug get a gun through that thing? I was hoping you could answer that, you all being the geniuses with this investigation.
JJ: No, that's not right.
ALVEZ: What do you mean it's not right? It says it right here.
No, that's not what I saw.
Did that just LEWIS: Yeah.
Yeah, it did.
What is it? [BEEP.]
How in the world could that happen? - I think I might know.
- MELISSA: Bullcrap.
Bull crap.
You know, I would use stronger language, but I don't want this podcast to get an âexplicitâ rating.
Well, it's the truth.
Metal detectors require precise calibration.
Otherwise, they're susceptible to all kinds of interference.
Photocopiers, Bluetooth, even fluorescent lighting.
The sheriff was in such a hurry to get it set up down at the Legion Hall that he assumed it would work the same way it always had, but it didn't.
I still don't buy it.
Do you know why? Why what? Why you don't buy it.
I can tell you.
[EXHALES.]
It's called proportionality bias.
You see, it's our natural human instinct to assume that big events have big causes.
We don't want to believe that a lone gunman killed JFK with a rifle he bought for 19.
99, or that hijackers brought down 4 planes using only box cutters.
I mean, there has to be a better explanation.
We need an answer that's more satisfying, but sometimes it just isn't.
You know? Machines break down.
Systems don't work.
Life is messy.
It's random.
Fine.
Let's just test your version, shall we? Let's.
You're saying that Doug snuck a gun through a metal detector, a metal detector he would have no way of knowing was broken.
Is that your story? Well, why don't you tell me a better one.
Not my job.
What my audience wants to hear, however, is how well your team does yours.
All right, well, while Agent Prentiss and I were figuring out the mystery of the malfunctioning metal detector, agents Jareau and Simmons headed to the morgue.
So let's presume Bryan Behar here died of asphyxiation from drowning.
What I can't explain is this.
These chemical burns on his face.
Well, he was drowned in a bleach solution.
Would that do this? No.
This looks like some form of aerosolized toxin, but damned if I could tell you what kind.
And that's still not the oddest thing I've seen today.
Mr.
Carl Lee, shot in the throat, but covering his wound, this doozy.
The blood matches Mr.
Lee.
Myoglobin on the blood says he was alive when it happened, and only his prints are on it.
Obviously it's from a book, but I can't tell which one.
We can.
It's from âThe Catcher in the Rye.
â Wow.
Does that mean something to you? [SCOFFS.]
Of course that means something to me.
âThe Catcher in the Ryeâ has been linked to multiple killers since it was first published.
And when Mark David Chapman shot John Lennon, he said, âread 'Catcher in the Rye.
' that's my statement.
â it was found on John Hinckley's bookshelf after he shot Reagan.
Oswald, Manson, Robert Bardo, they were all obsessed with it.
It was the original brainwashing tool of the United States Government.
I wouldn't call it that.
Of course you wouldn't.
Because then you'd have to admit how sophisticated the whole-scale duping of this nation has become.
I'm not following you.
Aurora, Orlando, Sandy Hook.
The United States Government shot up a bunch of empty buildings and then gathered everything up and traded it amongst themselves because that's how plausible deniability works.
Sandy Hook was staged? Sandy Hook was staged the worst.
All those actors they threw in front of cameras to be grieving parents.
I was screaming at my television set, âYou're lying!â and if they would lie about that, then they would absolutely lie about a metal detector.
So let me make one thing clear moving forward.
When I say they, I mean you.
Give me one second.
[INDISTINCT CHATTER.]
- Son of a - [SCREAMING, BANGING.]
What the hell kind of outfit you running here, agent? You want to talk about it? No.
It's ok to tap out if you want.
No.
Emily, I can do this.
Has she said anything that points to her involvement in the murders? Have you gotten any answers out of her? Maybe it's time to change up the strategy.
Where's Dr.
Lewis? I'm SSA Jareau.
I'm here to talk to you about your favorite book, âCatcher in the Rye.
â [LAUGHS.]
I get it.
You're rotating agents now, wearing me down so I can't see your lies.
Is that the game? I just had some information Agent Lewis didn't, but if you don't want to hear it Oh, no, I want to hear it.
[DING.]
So after we found such a prominent clue on Carl, we wanted to study the original text, so we got a copy of the book.
Apparently, âCatcher in the Ryeâ is the local book club selection this month.
And did you know that there are two actual ALVEZ: Brick and mortar bookstores in Roswell? But one of the owners was happy to give me a copy.
What page is it? Uh, 76.
That's what was on Carl.
Ok, here it is.
It, uh, it starts mid-sentence.
âDon't see how he could like a phony book like that and still like the one by Ring Lardner.
â No, that's not right.
What do you mean, it's not right? I have it right here.
That's not what I saw.
PRENTISS: Did that just Yeah, see, this page 76 is different.
The page on Carl's throat was annotated.
The publisher bolded terms and phrases for emphasis.
Well, that would throw the whole layout of the book off and then your page 76 wouldn't look like this one.
Ok, there are two editions of the book.
That's common.
But maybe it's not the page that's important.
Maybe it's the edition.
The devil's in the pitchforky little details, my friends.
I matched the formatting of the text on poor doomed Carl to a local publisher.
He goes by the name of Bob Orci.
He writes conspiracy-related commentary for books like âBehold a Pale Horse,â âProtocols of the Elders of Zion,â âMein Kampf.
â books the truthers love.
Right now we need as much evidence as possible to prove that Doug is our unsub.
If he bought the book we found on Carl, it strengthens our case.
Luke, you and Matt, bring in this publisher.
I'm on it.
Garcia, can you help me out with an address? Yeah, I'm working on the physical address of Mr.
Orci as we speak.
The thing is, he lives so far out there that it's not a place where there are street numbers on the houses, so the closest single physical address I can get you is Route 3, Greenwood Way? You know him? By reputation.
He's not a truther.
He's an anarchist.
He's dangerous.
How dangerous? He has fertilizer lining his place as an explosive.
Prentiss! Wait.
That far out in the desert, there's no cell service.
You're not gonna reach them by phone.
[COYOTE HOWLING.]
ALVEZ: Is that ANFO, Matt? Yeah.
FBI! Oh, my God.
[DOOR OPENS.]
What's going on? Who are you? I'm SSA Emily Prentiss of the BAU.
Melissa, you're gonna want to take a seat.
Oh, God, someone died, didn't they? What makes you say that? You guys have had me waiting in here for hours while your team tracked down Bob Orci.
What happened? Are you recording this? You should.
[DING.]
Agents Simmons and Alvez landed at Bob Orci's at 3:37 A.
M.
The were very surprised by what they found.
FBI! Oh, my God.
Hey, guys, meet Bob Orci.
Weapons down, please.
You were saying Wait.
So you got there before them.
- How? - By helicopter.
Not the Bureau's helicopter.
This one belongs to the police force.
What? There's been a push.
Police forces across the country have been purchasing military-grade hardware.
Yeah.
Like grenade launchers and tanks.
Roswell doesn't need a tank.
It needs a helicopter.
People get lost in the desert.
Sometimes an FBI agent like me needs to get to a cabin in the middle of nowhere as fast as possible.
Based on your warning, the sheriff and I landed a mile away and we came up with a plan.
FBI! Hands up, now! Now! Wh-what?! What is Hands on your head.
Get on your knees.
Where's the fertilizer, Bob? The fertili Uh, it's It's under the tarp over there.
- Check it out.
- Yes, sir.
Uh No, that's, uh, my my organic tomatoes need special soil, and and Th-that's my vitamin supplements are in those barrels.
No, wait, wait, wait, wait.
No, please.
Please.
I i swear to you, I will surrender everything.
Just please don't kill me.
Organic tomatoes.
Yeah.
ANFO stands for ammonium nitrate fuel oil.
Fuel oil.
You can't grow anything with it.
We pointed that out to Bob.
He said that must be why his tomatoes kept dying.
We searched the whole compound anyway.
There was no bomb.
But Bob Orci had quite the story to tell.
It's all an act.
I'm no hermit.
Yeah, I I tell these truthers that I'm some kind of holy fool and they buy all my stuff.
By âstuff,â you mean your books? No, the books are a loss-leader.
But the vitamin supplements, oh, oh, my God, I've made so much money off the vitamin supplements.
So, âCatcher in the Ryeâ" is just the latest in a long line of crap.
Well, the book itself isn't.
And J.
D.
Salinger is a genius.
Didn't your read my commentary, read my notes, annotations? I tried.
You lost me when you tried to connect Holden Caulfield to the Bilderberg Group.
There is no connection.
All you gotta do to fool these morons is to ask a question that starts with, âIsn't it interesting?â like like Like, isn't it interesting that Holden Caulfield and Bilderberg Group both have 15 letters.
Yeah.
And then you tag that with âWow! Wake up, sheeple,â you just sold a thousand copies.
We think the killer might have bought one of your commentaries.
Who'd you sell to in Roswell? The book group is reading âCatcher in the Ryeâ" next month, so all I was trying to do is capitalize on that.
And only one guy seemed to show any interest.
- [DOOR BANGS OPEN.]
- FBI! Oh, my God.
Hey, guys, meet Bob Orci.
Weapons down, please.
You were saying Carl Lee.
The guy's name was Carl Lee.
So it was Carl's copy.
Doug didn't bring it with him? Why would Doug put page 76 over Carl's throat? He didn't.
Only Carl's fingerprints and DNA were on that page.
Doug never touched it.
You've lost me.
Ever been shot before? People do weird things when they're shot.
[GUNSHOT.]
[GROANS.]
PRENTISS: Carl was slipping into shock, meaning he had some vague awareness that he was gonna die and his brain was short-circuiting.
So that clue that seemed so important 4 hours ago, it means nothing.
Life is messy, random.
That's why I sent Agent Jareau back to the first crime scene.
We needed to take a look at it again without any preconceptions.
And when she saw the cleaning supplies, she had an idea.
Specifically, what happens when you're not careful how you clean your aquarium? So she had Garcia do some research.
So let's talk about weird science.
There are certain types of coral that when they come into contact with bleach, release something called a palytoxin.
So the coral, it, like, emits this aerosol and then that aerosol causes the throat and the lungs to close and the eyes and the skin to burn.
Well, that's the mystery chemical weapon the M.
E.
couldn't place.
So let's play this out.
He pours in the bleach, coral spits out its toxin, and mother nature does the rest.
[GASPING.]
It's not murder.
It's an accident.
We're veering dangerously close to bullcrap territory.
We could call it murder.
If the profile was Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection, we could arrest the piece of coral, I guess.
Or, we could just accept that life is Messy, random.
Yeah.
Until it's not.
What does that mean? Well, that seemingly unimportant book, there was one additional detail Bob Orci told us about that I forgot to mention.
No, I I didn't forget.
I was holding back for dramatic effect.
Carl Lee.
His name was Carl Lee.
And the reason that sticks out is because he asked me to write a dedication on the inside cover of the book.
It's something I add for an extra 20 bucks.
You know? And sometimes I use the wild man font and the truthers all go, âOh, wow, look, he actually wrote stuff in my book.
â Tara, we have something.
Found it, Emily.
What does it say? âTo my darling Melissa, love always, Carl.
â We were dating.
That's not a crime.
So why hide it? The truther community is small, and we're gossipy.
Also, we're already convinced agents like you are watching us.
So Carl and I covered our tracks.
So well, in fact, that the great and powerful Garcia is not going to find them.
I believe you.
Which is why we had to rely on old-fashioned profiling to figure out this next part.
And it started with a question you asked first.
Why would Doug kill himself for no reason? So, we reconstructed Doug's suicide to see what we missed.
- So you were there and I was here.
- Right.
And then he was screaming at you, âI know a false flag when I see one, bitch.
â and then bang.
No, that's not right.
He said all those things, but not to me.
He was looking at you.
No, no.
If someone made eye contact with me and called me a bitch, I'd remember.
Maybe he wasn't looking at either of you.
He was looking between you.
Uh JJ, you were posted up over there - for line of sight.
- Yeah.
Ok, there's only one one other woman in the room he would have been talking to.
The reason we asked you here, the only reason, is to listen.
That's all.
So just listen.
Listen.
Put the gun down.
I know a false flag when I see one.
- You bitch! - [GUNSHOT.]
It all started with Carl's text.
âI'm close to finding out who it is.
â He was talking about Melissa, as in, âI'm close to finding out who she's cheating with.
â she was cheating with Doug? Yes.
And when she found out Carl was onto her, she killed him.
Whoa.
Slow down there, partner.
Think about it.
It's the oldest motivation in the book Sex.
Melissa is cunning and manipulative, and she is a psychopath, and a good one.
I mean, she sat there while I laid out this entire case, she did not tip a thing.
Now, Doug's prints were on the gun because of the suicide, but with Carl, Melissa could have used gloves, and What? Why is everybody staring at me? Tara, I want to believe that.
An arrest would relieve a lot of tension on this case, but But we don't have the evidence, and without the evidence, we're no better than the truthers.
No better than the truthers.
Melissa Thinks that Sandy Hook was staged.
I was there That day, and I counseled those parents, and I saw I saw those kids.
So the day that I lose to someone like her That's the day that I quit.
It's biased thinking, and if we allow it to color our profile and the arrest falls apart, we'll be a stain on the Bureau.
Ok, so what, we just We just back off on Melissa? No.
We back up our profile.
You have a theory, Tara.
Now prove your results.
Now, once we're inside Melissa's house, what are we looking for? Well, maybe she cleaned up Carl Lee's crime scene.
The gun's accounted for, but the missing bullet and casing aren't.
Great start.
What else? I admit my bias, out loud, because I wasn't able to see what was right in front of me the whole time.
I thought anyone who believed in conspiracy theories had to be deluded.
There was no way they could outsmart me.
And I was wrong.
There is a conspiracy in this case.
And you are at the center of it.
So, allow me to be clear from this point forward.
I'm going to give you one chance to tell the truth, one.
Keep in mind we are already searching your place.
If you lie, if you hold back in any way, I will know about it, and I will nail you for it, all the way to a life sentence.
Wow.
What's the point of this? I guess there's just one last thing to say before I invoke my right to an attorney.
Good luck.
- ROSSI: Anything? - Melissa's house was spotless.
Zero evidence of her involvement.
How are you guys doing? Yikes.
Yeah, every time we try to reason it out, we keep hitting different walls.
We have to make an arrest or release all the truthers from custody.
Give me the version that makes the most sense.
Ok, well, Doug was holding the gun that killed Carl, but there is nothing behaviorally that points to him being a killer.
And Melissa's the undiagnosed psychopath, and Carl was figuring out that she was cheating.
And as his girlfriend, she would know where he hid his guns, and so we We're thinking this.
Carl and Melissa were fighting.
Psychopaths aren't known for their small egos or impulse control, and so Melissa got angry and she waits for Carl to turn his back, - Carl! - And then bang.
So she cleans up as best as she could, but now she has to hide what she did.
So we asked the truthers to listen to our profile, and she thought, âA-ha! I'll turn this to my advantage.
âI'll frame my boyfriend, who is the most likely suspect if they put this together.
â so she slips the gun into Doug's pocket.
And Doug walks through without incident because the metal detector is broken.
He doesn't notice the gun in his pocket until midway through our profiling and he panics.
What did you put in my pocket?! Gun! Drop it! He assumes, like all truthers, that no one in the government is gonna believe him, so his last words aren't to us, but to Melissa.
I know a false flag when I see one.
- You bitch! - [GUNSHOT.]
That's the version that makes the most sense.
Even if I buy it, a D.
A.
won't.
We need more, guys.
Well, the only thing that's left is the bullet and the casing.
But she could have dumped that anywhere.
No, that's not the only thing.
The podcast.
She she had us right where she wanted.
She could have posted the audio of our conversation to prove we were trying to cover this up, but instead she deleted it.
Which she only would have done if she had revealed herself somehow.
She didn't say anything incriminating when I talked to her.
Me neither.
Then it was me.
She let something slip, something she doesn't want me to remember.
So, what? Aurora, Orlando, Sandy Hook.
The United States Government shot up a bunch of empty buildings and then gathered everything up and traded it amongst themselves, because that's how plausible deniability works.
[EXHALES.]
She traded it.
Traded what? The bullet and the shell casing.
She took the evidence and she gave it to someone else.
And you know this because Think about a conspiracy theory like a pathology.
What disgusts her, what she fears most in other people, that's the action she'll copy to justify her own belief system.
So who has the bullet? Who else? The unsub we've been looking for is Melissa Miller, and we think she's made one of you an accomplice to her murder of Carl Lee.
ROSSI: An unwitting accomplice.
We aren't keeping you in custody.
Anyone who wants to leave can, and everyone that wanted representation has a lawyer present.
All we want is for you to listen to our theory.
After Carl Lee's murder, Melissa approached one of you and she told you that the U.
S.
Government was going to frame both Bryan and Carl's murder on the truthers.
Right on cue, we showed up.
So, she gave you a box or bag, told you not to look inside, said it was all part of our cover-up.
What she gave you was material evidence of Carl's murder.
Now, you can think what you want of us, we are not here to frame anyone.
We're not the murderers.
She is.
Did anyone accept something like this from her? I did.
It's it's at my house.
You know what that is, Melissa? That is a magic bullet.
Stand up.
Melissa Miller, you are under arrest for the murder of Carl Lee.
You have the right to remain silent.
You have the right to an attorney.
So we faked ourselves on the ending and breathe in their lies while the water brings no cleansing just reflects strangers' eyes LEWIS: âEveryone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.
â Daniel Patrick Moynihan.
Truth was too hard to mention
But before we go any further, we need to be clear.
Age is the most difficult variable to predict.
He could be in his 40s.
A very fit 40s.
So our point is, the profile is a guide only.
It's an investigative tool, and we need to stress that.
All we have is a series of deductions, but one of those deductions is that the unsub knew his victims personally.
Which is why we're delivering the profile to you, because you also knew the victims.
So, our goal is not to make you uncomfortable or suspicious.
Normally we wouldn't even give the profile this early, but you are our best chance at discovering the identity of Yes? I have a question for Agent Rossi.
Go ahead.
Why did your last book Suck so bad? [LAUGHTER.]
Uh well, we're not gonna talk about that now.
Really? That's all I want to talk about.
I mean, you even consider that Tommy Yates was a patsy? Look, we get it, ok? You have no reason to trust us.
We're the FBI, and you are the official community of the Roswell, New Mexico, truthers.
Thanks for not calling us conspiracy theorists.
Well, we know you don't like that term.
While we don't agree with your opinions, a lot of people do.
Like how September 11th was an inside job, or how vapor trails from jets are poisonous, or how lizard people are secretly running the government.
Ah-ah-ah! Confirmation from the FBI.
You all heard it.
No, no, see that's specifically not what I was Ok.
We need your help to stop a killer who is hiding in this group.
That's why we are having this here in this Legion Hall and not at the police station.
We don't want you to feel surveilled What did you put in my pocket?! Gun! Drop it! [SHOUTING, SCREAMING.]
Drop it! PRENTISS: All right, everybody calm down.
What's your name? I'm Emily.
Emily Prentiss.
It says right here.
The reason I'm asking is so we can have a conversation.
[BREATHING HARD.]
Doug.
I'm Doug.
Great, Doug.
Let's just take a second.
Let's think through the logic of this.
I i didn't do any of this! We're not saying you did, but you are making things worse with that gun.
The reason we asked you here, the only reason, is to listen.
That's all.
Ok? So just listen.
Listen.
Put the gun down.
I know a false flag when I see one.
- You bitch! - No! [GUNSHOT.]
GARCIA: âOnce you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.
â Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
[DOOR OPENS.]
Can I go home now? No.
We're holding you and your friends for 24 hours.
You're all persons of interest in a murder investigation.
Murder? What, Doug killed himself.
True.
But there are still two other victims to account for.
Now, normally when there's a public suicide, it's because the suspect is the serial killer and he's killed himself out of guilt.
But we can't prove that yet, so, our investigation is still open.
He said this whole thing was a false flag, which means he thought you were trying to frame him.
I know what a false flag is.
The FBI doesn't frame people.
What, not anymore? You know, all of your friends have lawyered up.
Called us Nazis, or both.
But you haven't.
So? So that tells me you want to get to the bottom of this just as much as we do.
Do you know what a podcast is? I do.
Well, I have one.
So if we're actually gonna do this, you give me back my phone and I record our conversation for my podcast, 'cause I'm not talking to you without documenting everything.
You want this on the record? Of course.
I want this on the record.
Otherwise I'm lawyering up with all my friends.
So what do you say? PRENTISS: The answer's no.
I think we should consider it.
No.
She will control the audio.
She can twist your words, edit them to make the bureau look bad.
We already look bad.
The brass is gonna want to know how and why Doug killed himself in front of us.
Yeah, and that's my ass, but I'm not making this situation worse than it already is.
Garcia, have we confirmed that this truther's even legit? GARCIA: Of course I've confirmed that, and she is.
Melissa Miller has a pretty popular truther podcast, especially around Roswell.
She promotes all kinds of conspiracies, but her cause celebre is staged shootings.
So she thinks the reason we have gun violence, it's been faked by the government as a pretext to revoke the second amendment.
Nice.
It's another reason not to do this.
Or it's the exact reason to do this.
What was tonight, other than a staged shooting, and why is she the only one willing to cooperate? Unsubs like to insert themselves into the investigation.
Profile skews male, but she could be a partner.
Ok, then, if she isn't involved, I can get her to talk.
I'm a forensic psychologist.
I'm trained to outwit and outsmart clinical psychopaths far more dangerous than her.
But if we're wrong, she's going to post her podcast.
Then what? Then we're the next example of fake news.
Look, everybody, give us a second.
You, too, Garcia.
We don't just have egg on our face, we have blood on our hands.
It's not like these conspiracy theorists are gonna be quiet.
I am aware of that.
I need options.
We're out of them.
The profile says it's a truther, and only one of them is talking to us.
We have to throw a Hail Mary.
[CELL PHONE DINGS.]
Say something.
We need to make sure the levels are good.
I'm Dr.
Tara Lewis of the BAU No.
Say something interesting.
Tell me how you really feel about truthers.
My audience could use a sense of the FBI's bias against us.
I got my Ph.
D.
by taking a theory, testing it, and then proving my results.
Now, proving my results means that I take those results and I turn them over to other scientists to see if they can replicate them.
And if they can't, then my theory was wrong.
See, that's science.
A consensus of evidence that we call truth.
What you do is different.
Oh, no, it's not.
Yes, it is.
Because your theories are unprovable.
Give me one.
Uh, President Obama wasn't born here.
He was born in Kenya.
Perfect.
That's perfect.
So, I show you his long-form birth certificate, and then you would respond that it's been faked because that's how deep the conspiracy goes.
And then that becomes your argument against any evidence that I provide.
It's a cognitive trick that keeps you from having to admit that life is messy.
It's random.
Not everything fits the easy explanation that a conspiracy gives you.
All right, then.
Well, let's talk about the murders.
When did you first hear about them? Yesterday.
When we were invited in.
GARCIA: It's time to get out our tinfoil hats, my fine furry friends, because we are on our way to Roswell, New Mexico, aka, ground zero of conspiracy theorists because of a certain alien crash i mean weather balloon.
The sheriff there has had two suspicious deaths over the last 48 hours.
Both victims were members of the truther movement.
Yes, which is a group of conspiracy theorists who share their out-there beliefs online with each other.
No judgment here.
Let's look at our first victim Bryan Behar.
He believed that the fluoride they put in our drinking water is a mind-control agent meant to keep us docile.
He died by drowning.
People drown all the time, you say.
I say not in their own aquariums.
So the M.
O.
matches his conspiracy.
Is that a coincidence or a choice? That depends on victim number two.
Uh-huh.
That's Carl Lee.
He's a JFK conspiracy nut who was shot once in the throat.
As anyone who saw the Zapruder film knows, that's where the first bullet struck Kennedy.
Carl Lee we can definitively classify as a homicide, but the drowning death that could have another explanation.
That's why we'll be treating this as an equivocal death investigation.
Wheels up in 20.
Back up.
What was that term you used? Equivocal something? An equivocal death investigation.
It's an investigation where we consider all options.
It could be a murder, but it could also be a suicide or an accident or even natural causes.
Are you saying these murders weren't murder? Is that the FBI's official position? I'm saying we let clues guide us to a deduction.
We don't jump to conclusions.
But as we were flying here, our technical analyst uncovered something unusual.
Right.
Your technical analyst.
That would be Penelope Garcia? Yeah.
I looked up your whole team before coming in here.
Why did you do that? Because I'm a naturally suspicious person who wanted to get a feel for your methods.
Specifically the illegal surveillance that the FBI is willing to resort to to frame innocent men and women.
As I said, the FBI doesn't frame anyone, and we certainly don't do anything illegal.
Well, I guess that depends on what Garcia found and how she found it.
So what did she find? GARCIA: It looks like our two victims were talking via encrypted texts.
It took a while to break, and their conversation was short, but its content made my perfectly shaped eyebrows go, âHmm?â Carl says to Bryan, âI think I'm close to finding out who it is.
â to which Bryan says, âMaybe we should go to the police.
â and Carl says, âWhat good would that do?â Well, that could be motive.
Whatever Carl was close to finding could have killed him and Bryan.
At first glance, yeah.
But we're talking about conspiracy theorists here, and a lot of them suffer from association fallacy.
Let's say you thought Lyndon Johnson had JFK killed in order to escalate the war in Vietnam.
Ok, stop right there.
What? You guys have a jet? Yes.
A jet.
Yes.
Black helicopters surveilling the American people.
No, no, that's ridiculous.
But a little branch of the FBI has its own private jet.
Ok, one, I never said the FBI doesn't have black helicopters.
And, two, when people are being murdered, we have to respond quickly.
[SCOFFS.]
A jet.
I can't even.
Sorry.
Where were we? Let's say you thought Lyndon Johnson had JFK killed in order to escalate the war in Vietnam.
That's ridiculous.
Everybody knows that PRENTISS: No, no.
We're not getting into that again.
Go ahead, Luke.
Uh, my point is, that if you thought the government could do that, then you were likely believe that they'd brought down the towers on 9-11.
Pretty soon you're down that rabbit hole and you see everything as a plot.
So maybe these guys weren't into anything.
Maybe they just talked themselves into a group delusion.
Ok, we should investigate that when we land.
And since the police are mentioned so prominently on the text, they might know what the victims were looking into.
The Chicago mob, right? Killed JFK.
He gets it.
No.
Don't get him started, Matt.
Next, he'll be showing you YouTube clips.
So I'm sure when you flew in, they showed you Carl and Bryan's police record.
They did.
And what we saw were 4 years of reports that both men were convinced someone was watching them.
But despite his best efforts, Sheriff Bowman was never able to find any evidence of stalking.
Oh, yeah.
'Cause he tried really hard.
You know what was much more interesting was what we found when we walked the crime scenes.
The glass is 3/4 of an inch thick and that's sturdy.
If you wanted to drown someone in an aquarium, that would do the trick.
They said there was a bleach solution in the water, so he was probably cleaning it and his ear buds were in.
Make it easy to sneak up on Bryan.
Unsub wouldn't have had to work too hard.
Bryan was startled.
He took in water and bleach, and he was asphyxiated before he knew what was happening.
How did the unsub get in here? Hey, Matt, a question for you.
Any evidence of a break-in at your crime scene? Hang on, JJ.
Let me check.
Any signs of forced entry? No, sir.
No, none here either.
What I am seeing is an unsub who covers up his tracks.
It looks like he shot Carl in the throat Bullet was a through and through.
Came out the other side of Carl's neck and went in the wall.
Dug it out, picked up the casing, took the gun with him.
So this guy knows how to clean up after himself and how to get in and out of two houses without detection.
JJ, let me call you back.
Looks like an RFID card.
Mm-hmm.
What's it go to? That's the question.
Huh.
Well, hello.
Huh.
That gun's missing.
Well, it means the unsub's no mastermind.
It's been right under our nose the whole time.
So we went through Carl's meticulous log of his hardware, and the missing gun should be here.
It is a Bodyguard 380.
Now, if the unsub found this in a secret compartment, then he knows Carl, probably very well.
And based on the fortress that Carl lived in, it'd probably be another truther.
No one else could get that close.
And that would explain why there was no forced entry at Bryan's either.
So when Carl said, âI'm close to finding out who it is,â he wasn't talking about some secret cabal, he was talking about a friend.
PRENTISS: Someone he was willing to call the cops on.
We should bring all the truthers in for questioning.
No, no, that won't work.
They won't cooperate under coercion.
Look, I say we lay all our cards out on the table.
Let's deliver our profile to them.
Oh, that's risky.
But worth it.
Either one of the truthers points us to the unsub Or he shows up himself.
And that brings us up to tonight.
Ballistics confirmed that the gun that killed Carl was the one that Doug used on himself.
All the evidence points to Doug Downey as our killer, except Except you don't have anything tying Doug to Bryan's drowning.
Melissa, I've been as transparent as I can possibly be.
Is there anything we've missed? [SIGHS.]
One thing.
But you didn't miss it, you covered it up.
Specifically, that the sheriff made us all walk through a metal detector.
What? Don't pretend you didn't know that.
And don't pretend you don't know why.
Someone in law enforcement planted a gun on Doug.
Because what was it that he was saying earlier tonight? What did you put in my pocket?! Gun! Drop it! [SHOUTING.]
MeliSSA, that doesn't make any sense.
You tell me what's more believable A missing gun in a wacky compartment or the police planted a Bodyguard 380, a very popular firearm in law enforcement, on Doug.
Then, they call their friends all the way in Quantico and you guys get on your fancy jet and come out here to make sure that the cover-up's complete.
That's not what happened.
Am I your unsub? Yes or no? You are a person of interest, just like every other truther in this building tonight.
That's a yes.
Which is why I'm recording all of this, to show the world exactly how far the FBI is willing to go to cover up the truth.
Ok.
Let's take a moment.
I think we've gotten off track.
No, no.
No, we're, uh, we're right where we need to be.
See, I wanted the brilliant science of behavioral profiling to provide an answer for all this.
I really did.
But right now, from where I'm sitting, this crazy conspiracy theorist is the only one making any sense.
Guys, hold up.
- Can we plug this in somewhere? - Yes, ma'am.
So this is the metal detector you had at the legion hall? - Mm-hmm.
- And you made all - the truthers walk through it.
- Yep.
And then after that you brought it back here to the police stations, you haven't touched it since? Sheriff, why didn't you tell us you were gonna do that? You told us you didn't want to spook the truthers.
You also told us the killer might show up, so this was for our protection.
Can you tell me I was wrong? No, sheriff, you weren't wrong, but it does beg the bigger question.
How the hell did Doug get a gun through that thing? I was hoping you could answer that, you all being the geniuses with this investigation.
JJ: No, that's not right.
ALVEZ: What do you mean it's not right? It says it right here.
No, that's not what I saw.
Did that just LEWIS: Yeah.
Yeah, it did.
What is it? [BEEP.]
How in the world could that happen? - I think I might know.
- MELISSA: Bullcrap.
Bull crap.
You know, I would use stronger language, but I don't want this podcast to get an âexplicitâ rating.
Well, it's the truth.
Metal detectors require precise calibration.
Otherwise, they're susceptible to all kinds of interference.
Photocopiers, Bluetooth, even fluorescent lighting.
The sheriff was in such a hurry to get it set up down at the Legion Hall that he assumed it would work the same way it always had, but it didn't.
I still don't buy it.
Do you know why? Why what? Why you don't buy it.
I can tell you.
[EXHALES.]
It's called proportionality bias.
You see, it's our natural human instinct to assume that big events have big causes.
We don't want to believe that a lone gunman killed JFK with a rifle he bought for 19.
99, or that hijackers brought down 4 planes using only box cutters.
I mean, there has to be a better explanation.
We need an answer that's more satisfying, but sometimes it just isn't.
You know? Machines break down.
Systems don't work.
Life is messy.
It's random.
Fine.
Let's just test your version, shall we? Let's.
You're saying that Doug snuck a gun through a metal detector, a metal detector he would have no way of knowing was broken.
Is that your story? Well, why don't you tell me a better one.
Not my job.
What my audience wants to hear, however, is how well your team does yours.
All right, well, while Agent Prentiss and I were figuring out the mystery of the malfunctioning metal detector, agents Jareau and Simmons headed to the morgue.
So let's presume Bryan Behar here died of asphyxiation from drowning.
What I can't explain is this.
These chemical burns on his face.
Well, he was drowned in a bleach solution.
Would that do this? No.
This looks like some form of aerosolized toxin, but damned if I could tell you what kind.
And that's still not the oddest thing I've seen today.
Mr.
Carl Lee, shot in the throat, but covering his wound, this doozy.
The blood matches Mr.
Lee.
Myoglobin on the blood says he was alive when it happened, and only his prints are on it.
Obviously it's from a book, but I can't tell which one.
We can.
It's from âThe Catcher in the Rye.
â Wow.
Does that mean something to you? [SCOFFS.]
Of course that means something to me.
âThe Catcher in the Ryeâ has been linked to multiple killers since it was first published.
And when Mark David Chapman shot John Lennon, he said, âread 'Catcher in the Rye.
' that's my statement.
â it was found on John Hinckley's bookshelf after he shot Reagan.
Oswald, Manson, Robert Bardo, they were all obsessed with it.
It was the original brainwashing tool of the United States Government.
I wouldn't call it that.
Of course you wouldn't.
Because then you'd have to admit how sophisticated the whole-scale duping of this nation has become.
I'm not following you.
Aurora, Orlando, Sandy Hook.
The United States Government shot up a bunch of empty buildings and then gathered everything up and traded it amongst themselves because that's how plausible deniability works.
Sandy Hook was staged? Sandy Hook was staged the worst.
All those actors they threw in front of cameras to be grieving parents.
I was screaming at my television set, âYou're lying!â and if they would lie about that, then they would absolutely lie about a metal detector.
So let me make one thing clear moving forward.
When I say they, I mean you.
Give me one second.
[INDISTINCT CHATTER.]
- Son of a - [SCREAMING, BANGING.]
What the hell kind of outfit you running here, agent? You want to talk about it? No.
It's ok to tap out if you want.
No.
Emily, I can do this.
Has she said anything that points to her involvement in the murders? Have you gotten any answers out of her? Maybe it's time to change up the strategy.
Where's Dr.
Lewis? I'm SSA Jareau.
I'm here to talk to you about your favorite book, âCatcher in the Rye.
â [LAUGHS.]
I get it.
You're rotating agents now, wearing me down so I can't see your lies.
Is that the game? I just had some information Agent Lewis didn't, but if you don't want to hear it Oh, no, I want to hear it.
[DING.]
So after we found such a prominent clue on Carl, we wanted to study the original text, so we got a copy of the book.
Apparently, âCatcher in the Ryeâ is the local book club selection this month.
And did you know that there are two actual ALVEZ: Brick and mortar bookstores in Roswell? But one of the owners was happy to give me a copy.
What page is it? Uh, 76.
That's what was on Carl.
Ok, here it is.
It, uh, it starts mid-sentence.
âDon't see how he could like a phony book like that and still like the one by Ring Lardner.
â No, that's not right.
What do you mean, it's not right? I have it right here.
That's not what I saw.
PRENTISS: Did that just Yeah, see, this page 76 is different.
The page on Carl's throat was annotated.
The publisher bolded terms and phrases for emphasis.
Well, that would throw the whole layout of the book off and then your page 76 wouldn't look like this one.
Ok, there are two editions of the book.
That's common.
But maybe it's not the page that's important.
Maybe it's the edition.
The devil's in the pitchforky little details, my friends.
I matched the formatting of the text on poor doomed Carl to a local publisher.
He goes by the name of Bob Orci.
He writes conspiracy-related commentary for books like âBehold a Pale Horse,â âProtocols of the Elders of Zion,â âMein Kampf.
â books the truthers love.
Right now we need as much evidence as possible to prove that Doug is our unsub.
If he bought the book we found on Carl, it strengthens our case.
Luke, you and Matt, bring in this publisher.
I'm on it.
Garcia, can you help me out with an address? Yeah, I'm working on the physical address of Mr.
Orci as we speak.
The thing is, he lives so far out there that it's not a place where there are street numbers on the houses, so the closest single physical address I can get you is Route 3, Greenwood Way? You know him? By reputation.
He's not a truther.
He's an anarchist.
He's dangerous.
How dangerous? He has fertilizer lining his place as an explosive.
Prentiss! Wait.
That far out in the desert, there's no cell service.
You're not gonna reach them by phone.
[COYOTE HOWLING.]
ALVEZ: Is that ANFO, Matt? Yeah.
FBI! Oh, my God.
[DOOR OPENS.]
What's going on? Who are you? I'm SSA Emily Prentiss of the BAU.
Melissa, you're gonna want to take a seat.
Oh, God, someone died, didn't they? What makes you say that? You guys have had me waiting in here for hours while your team tracked down Bob Orci.
What happened? Are you recording this? You should.
[DING.]
Agents Simmons and Alvez landed at Bob Orci's at 3:37 A.
M.
The were very surprised by what they found.
FBI! Oh, my God.
Hey, guys, meet Bob Orci.
Weapons down, please.
You were saying Wait.
So you got there before them.
- How? - By helicopter.
Not the Bureau's helicopter.
This one belongs to the police force.
What? There's been a push.
Police forces across the country have been purchasing military-grade hardware.
Yeah.
Like grenade launchers and tanks.
Roswell doesn't need a tank.
It needs a helicopter.
People get lost in the desert.
Sometimes an FBI agent like me needs to get to a cabin in the middle of nowhere as fast as possible.
Based on your warning, the sheriff and I landed a mile away and we came up with a plan.
FBI! Hands up, now! Now! Wh-what?! What is Hands on your head.
Get on your knees.
Where's the fertilizer, Bob? The fertili Uh, it's It's under the tarp over there.
- Check it out.
- Yes, sir.
Uh No, that's, uh, my my organic tomatoes need special soil, and and Th-that's my vitamin supplements are in those barrels.
No, wait, wait, wait, wait.
No, please.
Please.
I i swear to you, I will surrender everything.
Just please don't kill me.
Organic tomatoes.
Yeah.
ANFO stands for ammonium nitrate fuel oil.
Fuel oil.
You can't grow anything with it.
We pointed that out to Bob.
He said that must be why his tomatoes kept dying.
We searched the whole compound anyway.
There was no bomb.
But Bob Orci had quite the story to tell.
It's all an act.
I'm no hermit.
Yeah, I I tell these truthers that I'm some kind of holy fool and they buy all my stuff.
By âstuff,â you mean your books? No, the books are a loss-leader.
But the vitamin supplements, oh, oh, my God, I've made so much money off the vitamin supplements.
So, âCatcher in the Ryeâ" is just the latest in a long line of crap.
Well, the book itself isn't.
And J.
D.
Salinger is a genius.
Didn't your read my commentary, read my notes, annotations? I tried.
You lost me when you tried to connect Holden Caulfield to the Bilderberg Group.
There is no connection.
All you gotta do to fool these morons is to ask a question that starts with, âIsn't it interesting?â like like Like, isn't it interesting that Holden Caulfield and Bilderberg Group both have 15 letters.
Yeah.
And then you tag that with âWow! Wake up, sheeple,â you just sold a thousand copies.
We think the killer might have bought one of your commentaries.
Who'd you sell to in Roswell? The book group is reading âCatcher in the Ryeâ" next month, so all I was trying to do is capitalize on that.
And only one guy seemed to show any interest.
- [DOOR BANGS OPEN.]
- FBI! Oh, my God.
Hey, guys, meet Bob Orci.
Weapons down, please.
You were saying Carl Lee.
The guy's name was Carl Lee.
So it was Carl's copy.
Doug didn't bring it with him? Why would Doug put page 76 over Carl's throat? He didn't.
Only Carl's fingerprints and DNA were on that page.
Doug never touched it.
You've lost me.
Ever been shot before? People do weird things when they're shot.
[GUNSHOT.]
[GROANS.]
PRENTISS: Carl was slipping into shock, meaning he had some vague awareness that he was gonna die and his brain was short-circuiting.
So that clue that seemed so important 4 hours ago, it means nothing.
Life is messy, random.
That's why I sent Agent Jareau back to the first crime scene.
We needed to take a look at it again without any preconceptions.
And when she saw the cleaning supplies, she had an idea.
Specifically, what happens when you're not careful how you clean your aquarium? So she had Garcia do some research.
So let's talk about weird science.
There are certain types of coral that when they come into contact with bleach, release something called a palytoxin.
So the coral, it, like, emits this aerosol and then that aerosol causes the throat and the lungs to close and the eyes and the skin to burn.
Well, that's the mystery chemical weapon the M.
E.
couldn't place.
So let's play this out.
He pours in the bleach, coral spits out its toxin, and mother nature does the rest.
[GASPING.]
It's not murder.
It's an accident.
We're veering dangerously close to bullcrap territory.
We could call it murder.
If the profile was Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection, we could arrest the piece of coral, I guess.
Or, we could just accept that life is Messy, random.
Yeah.
Until it's not.
What does that mean? Well, that seemingly unimportant book, there was one additional detail Bob Orci told us about that I forgot to mention.
No, I I didn't forget.
I was holding back for dramatic effect.
Carl Lee.
His name was Carl Lee.
And the reason that sticks out is because he asked me to write a dedication on the inside cover of the book.
It's something I add for an extra 20 bucks.
You know? And sometimes I use the wild man font and the truthers all go, âOh, wow, look, he actually wrote stuff in my book.
â Tara, we have something.
Found it, Emily.
What does it say? âTo my darling Melissa, love always, Carl.
â We were dating.
That's not a crime.
So why hide it? The truther community is small, and we're gossipy.
Also, we're already convinced agents like you are watching us.
So Carl and I covered our tracks.
So well, in fact, that the great and powerful Garcia is not going to find them.
I believe you.
Which is why we had to rely on old-fashioned profiling to figure out this next part.
And it started with a question you asked first.
Why would Doug kill himself for no reason? So, we reconstructed Doug's suicide to see what we missed.
- So you were there and I was here.
- Right.
And then he was screaming at you, âI know a false flag when I see one, bitch.
â and then bang.
No, that's not right.
He said all those things, but not to me.
He was looking at you.
No, no.
If someone made eye contact with me and called me a bitch, I'd remember.
Maybe he wasn't looking at either of you.
He was looking between you.
Uh JJ, you were posted up over there - for line of sight.
- Yeah.
Ok, there's only one one other woman in the room he would have been talking to.
The reason we asked you here, the only reason, is to listen.
That's all.
So just listen.
Listen.
Put the gun down.
I know a false flag when I see one.
- You bitch! - [GUNSHOT.]
It all started with Carl's text.
âI'm close to finding out who it is.
â He was talking about Melissa, as in, âI'm close to finding out who she's cheating with.
â she was cheating with Doug? Yes.
And when she found out Carl was onto her, she killed him.
Whoa.
Slow down there, partner.
Think about it.
It's the oldest motivation in the book Sex.
Melissa is cunning and manipulative, and she is a psychopath, and a good one.
I mean, she sat there while I laid out this entire case, she did not tip a thing.
Now, Doug's prints were on the gun because of the suicide, but with Carl, Melissa could have used gloves, and What? Why is everybody staring at me? Tara, I want to believe that.
An arrest would relieve a lot of tension on this case, but But we don't have the evidence, and without the evidence, we're no better than the truthers.
No better than the truthers.
Melissa Thinks that Sandy Hook was staged.
I was there That day, and I counseled those parents, and I saw I saw those kids.
So the day that I lose to someone like her That's the day that I quit.
It's biased thinking, and if we allow it to color our profile and the arrest falls apart, we'll be a stain on the Bureau.
Ok, so what, we just We just back off on Melissa? No.
We back up our profile.
You have a theory, Tara.
Now prove your results.
Now, once we're inside Melissa's house, what are we looking for? Well, maybe she cleaned up Carl Lee's crime scene.
The gun's accounted for, but the missing bullet and casing aren't.
Great start.
What else? I admit my bias, out loud, because I wasn't able to see what was right in front of me the whole time.
I thought anyone who believed in conspiracy theories had to be deluded.
There was no way they could outsmart me.
And I was wrong.
There is a conspiracy in this case.
And you are at the center of it.
So, allow me to be clear from this point forward.
I'm going to give you one chance to tell the truth, one.
Keep in mind we are already searching your place.
If you lie, if you hold back in any way, I will know about it, and I will nail you for it, all the way to a life sentence.
Wow.
What's the point of this? I guess there's just one last thing to say before I invoke my right to an attorney.
Good luck.
- ROSSI: Anything? - Melissa's house was spotless.
Zero evidence of her involvement.
How are you guys doing? Yikes.
Yeah, every time we try to reason it out, we keep hitting different walls.
We have to make an arrest or release all the truthers from custody.
Give me the version that makes the most sense.
Ok, well, Doug was holding the gun that killed Carl, but there is nothing behaviorally that points to him being a killer.
And Melissa's the undiagnosed psychopath, and Carl was figuring out that she was cheating.
And as his girlfriend, she would know where he hid his guns, and so we We're thinking this.
Carl and Melissa were fighting.
Psychopaths aren't known for their small egos or impulse control, and so Melissa got angry and she waits for Carl to turn his back, - Carl! - And then bang.
So she cleans up as best as she could, but now she has to hide what she did.
So we asked the truthers to listen to our profile, and she thought, âA-ha! I'll turn this to my advantage.
âI'll frame my boyfriend, who is the most likely suspect if they put this together.
â so she slips the gun into Doug's pocket.
And Doug walks through without incident because the metal detector is broken.
He doesn't notice the gun in his pocket until midway through our profiling and he panics.
What did you put in my pocket?! Gun! Drop it! He assumes, like all truthers, that no one in the government is gonna believe him, so his last words aren't to us, but to Melissa.
I know a false flag when I see one.
- You bitch! - [GUNSHOT.]
That's the version that makes the most sense.
Even if I buy it, a D.
A.
won't.
We need more, guys.
Well, the only thing that's left is the bullet and the casing.
But she could have dumped that anywhere.
No, that's not the only thing.
The podcast.
She she had us right where she wanted.
She could have posted the audio of our conversation to prove we were trying to cover this up, but instead she deleted it.
Which she only would have done if she had revealed herself somehow.
She didn't say anything incriminating when I talked to her.
Me neither.
Then it was me.
She let something slip, something she doesn't want me to remember.
So, what? Aurora, Orlando, Sandy Hook.
The United States Government shot up a bunch of empty buildings and then gathered everything up and traded it amongst themselves, because that's how plausible deniability works.
[EXHALES.]
She traded it.
Traded what? The bullet and the shell casing.
She took the evidence and she gave it to someone else.
And you know this because Think about a conspiracy theory like a pathology.
What disgusts her, what she fears most in other people, that's the action she'll copy to justify her own belief system.
So who has the bullet? Who else? The unsub we've been looking for is Melissa Miller, and we think she's made one of you an accomplice to her murder of Carl Lee.
ROSSI: An unwitting accomplice.
We aren't keeping you in custody.
Anyone who wants to leave can, and everyone that wanted representation has a lawyer present.
All we want is for you to listen to our theory.
After Carl Lee's murder, Melissa approached one of you and she told you that the U.
S.
Government was going to frame both Bryan and Carl's murder on the truthers.
Right on cue, we showed up.
So, she gave you a box or bag, told you not to look inside, said it was all part of our cover-up.
What she gave you was material evidence of Carl's murder.
Now, you can think what you want of us, we are not here to frame anyone.
We're not the murderers.
She is.
Did anyone accept something like this from her? I did.
It's it's at my house.
You know what that is, Melissa? That is a magic bullet.
Stand up.
Melissa Miller, you are under arrest for the murder of Carl Lee.
You have the right to remain silent.
You have the right to an attorney.
So we faked ourselves on the ending and breathe in their lies while the water brings no cleansing just reflects strangers' eyes LEWIS: âEveryone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.
â Daniel Patrick Moynihan.
Truth was too hard to mention