Criminal Minds 1410: Flesh and Blood

In yet another SAW-type opening, we find a guy hanging from the ceiling of a torture dungeon, with a bag over his head! A killer shows up with the baseball bat and murders him! Based on the victim's statements, he's probably a murderer.

Then we cut to Emily, who's making dinner for FBI Guy! She doesn't like how the dinner is turning out, though, so she calls Joe for advice! Turns out she was using cooking wine instead of drinking wine! He's a snob, you see, and cares about that sort of stuff. This gets into her head, though, and suggests they order a pizza instead!

This is why you don't listen to cooking snobs, people. Your tomato sauce will taste fine if you use cooking wine.

The date goes fine until it's interrupted by a phone call! It seems that the latest guy was a lawyer - as was the previous victim! Was he a mob lawyer? Because he sure talked like a scumbag! Both men where smashed to death with baseball bats and then had their hearts cut out. Ick! The team divvies up duties to go and look for info on the killer - who's local, as most of their killers seem to be these days.

Seriously, they do not fly a ton. Does their new, lower budget mean they can't pull the jet set out of mothballs very often?

Then it's over to the killer, who makes a fancy storage case for the victim's heart! Just like that guy did back at the start of Season 3! Wait, has he been sprung from prison? No, wait, he was dying and wanted to find a replacement mother for his son, right? So he can't be the killer.

Garcia's already got good lead for them - the last place the victim was scene was at his law office two days before the body turned up. But Garcia has found footage from the parking lot of that building - in it, a woman runs up to him and asks him for a ride, and then gets into his car! But can Penelope's Big Brother facial recognition technology figure out who she is?

Then it's over to the park, where the lady pulls the exact same story about her dead car on a jogger! I guess he's not suspicious because she's pretty, but if a woman came up to me complaining of a dead car and wanted neither jumper cables nor a phone to call a tow truck, but instead a ride to an apartment, I'd be very suspicious! Obviously, he gives her the ride.

At the morgue, the ME tells them that the men were beaten within an inch of their lives, but it was the heart removal that finally did them in! Then things get even stranger when we discover that the victims' ribs were broken with a hammer and chisel, just like in that 3rd season episode! This makes the team assume that the woman on the tape has an associate, because she's obviously not strong enough to smash ribs on her own. This is idiocy, of course - if you have a chisel and a hammer, the ribs are getting smashed. Anyone can manage it, your strength level will just determine how long it takes.

So... with the killer from that episode long dead, who could this copycat be? He had a son who was like 10 or 11, so he'd be murdering age now. Didn't he also have a wife who abandoned him and the son when he got sick? She could also be the killer, I suppose. But why is this lady working with one of those two people?

Then again, it's possible that this has nothing to do with that case from Season 3 where Eddie Cibrian was killing people, and the chisel extractions and bespoke heart storage containers are just a complete coincidence.

I'd say it's weird that no one mentions the connection, but the two people at the Morgue are Joe and Aisha - she arrived 8 years after that case, and Joe got there like 3 episodes later, so it's not unreasonable that they wouldn't be familiar with it.

At the new dump site Matt and Eric don't find any evidence of value. They do reveal that the bodies were dumped almost exactly 3 miles south-west of their abduction sites, which might be significant. Except, you know, they don't know where the men were abducted from. They just know where they were seen last. Yes, this guy was probably abducted by the woman who got into his car, but that's not a confirmed fact, and they have no idea what happened with the first victim.

Then it's over to the torture dungeon, where we see that the killer is, in fact, a young white guy, so I'm guessing Eddie's son is the most likely suspect? But why is he killing all of these people?

At base, the team has been able to identify the woman from the parking lot, and it turns out that it's not the woman from the park at all, just one that looks a lot like her! Their assumption? The killer is hiring sex workers to lure the men into traps, and then killing them so they won't talk! But why is Eddie's son killing these men? The first two were lawyers... was one or both of them involved in his father's case? I remember Eddie kept the women for a couple of days because he was testing them out as mothers. Is that why the son keeps these guys?

Actually, wait, I may be going crazy, did Eddie even live in Virginia? Where was that one set? Also, if this is related, the team should have noticed it by now - Emily and JJ were both on the team during that case, and while Reid's off teaching again, the two of them should have noticed the similarities between the crimes.

The team rushes to the latest dump site - will anyone comment on how weird it is that the killer's ritual has gone from keeping them 48 hours to keeping the new guy for just three? The new victim is a financial manager! JJ finally remembers the Eddie case - although not entirely. Just a strange sense of deja vu. I don't know why it's not Emily who thinks of it, though - she's the one who actually went into the garage, saw the hearts, and was threatened with a chisel. You'd think that would have stuck in her mind.

At the office, we find out that sex worker from the video isn't dead after all! She (and the park sex worker) explain that a guy named Eddie (cute!) hired her to play a prank on his dad's friend. So Eddie's son is, in fact, getting revenge for people who slighted his father in some way!

Garcia finds a connection between the victims! A woman who worked for the financial manager died under suspicious circumstances, and the two other people who've been killed were among those who were witnesses to his alibi on the night the woman disappeared! In a cute note, the interview transcript we see includes a reference to the Brett Kavanaugh hearings:

That's right, this guy also knew Squee! Although he spelled it Squi.

The team decides it's time for a profile! The killer must be trying to avenge the dead woman, but for some reason he started with the witnesses who gave him an alibi rather than the man who was investigated for the crime! That's a weird choice.

Joe and Aisha go to talk to the dead woman's mother - Penelope Ann Miller! Who I'll call Ann to avoid confusion! Apparently she was a psychiatrist of some reknown, so I'm going to assume that she's Eddie's son's psychiatrist, and she put him up to murdering the guys she holds responsible for her daughter's death. Whether she literally asked him to or just implied heavily that he should do it by talking to him about her grief, she's probably at the 'heart' of this.

Also, the killer's got to being bankrolled by someone - he's already spent 20K on this project, and that's just on the sex workers. Who knows how much the rent on that torture basement is?

They interview Ann about the killer, and she claims not to recognize the picture. She's openly happy that the guys are getting killed, though, because she's sure the banker killed her daughter, and the cops are covering it up!

Ann isn't any help, but Garcia hacks into her client list, and discovers that the various first name on it is Eddie's son! JJ makes the connection - it turns out those crimes were in Milwaukee, and the killer moved at some point! Oh, and Eddie only died in prison last year - apparently his cancer took longer to do him in than he thought it would, and there was no reason to go on a killing spree!

We cut over to the killer, murdering the next guy. Weird that no one is talking about the fact that he's speeding up his timeline so drastically.

Back at the office, Emily announces that she checked in on the killer a few times after Eddie went to prison, but then didn't bother doing that any more after he was adopted by people in Mayland. That's right - they moved closer to where Emily was, and that made Emily less likely to be interested in helping out! You've got issues, Emily.

They find out about the new victim, and it's another banker from the dead guy's firm! Weird that even though they knew the pattern of the killings 24 hours ago they didn't go to the guy's firm and his widow and give them a heads up about the fact that everyone at the guy's bachelor party was on a death list. Also, presumably the Baltimore police have that list of alibi witnesses as well, so that could have spend things along. The team's sloppiness is the only reason this latest guy died, is what I'm saying.

Aisha and Joe interrogate Ann, but her lawyer keeps them from getting anything. Ann does say something weird, though - that's it's possible the killer is murdering people because of genetics, and for no other reason! Can they use that to discredit her to him later on in the episode?

Garcia finds the latest sex worker ad that the killer posts, and locks it so they can be the only one to answer it! Then they send an FBI agent to meet the killer at a public park. This is a fairly solid plan, actually. It doesn't work, though, because the killer has been tipped off by Ann that the FBI is on to him! So he calls the bait up and asks to speak to Emily, who he remembers from back in the day!

Emily talks to him on the phone, and half-apologizes for cutting him loose all of those years ago. Yeah, all of these killings are kind of on you, lady. Then the guy says he was destined to be a killer, like Dexter, but Emily says that's just something Ann said to get him to murder for her! This leads to a foot chase, followed by the killer getting away!

The team locks down the final victims on the party list, and wonder what the killer's next move might be. Emily notes that she told him that Ann was a liar who manipulated him into murdering people for her - maybe check in on her?

For the record, it takes her like five hours to have this idea. Does she want Ann to get killed?

Anyhoo, the team goes to check on Ann but he's already been abducted. Luckily, based on the science of magic, the team's geographic profile has confirmed what the killer's comfort zone is!

Yeah, that's not really possible, though? Because all of the guys were kidnapped relatively close to where they worked, and then their bodies were dumped a set distance away. But the geographic profile suggests that they should look at a tiny town on a peninsula leading on the bay? That's not how anything works, team. Also, in an attempt to cheat, we see the big map with the locations on it, but then when it's time for the zoom in, they move to a different map, hoping we won't notice that the place they decide to look is well to the east of every other point of data on the map.

The geographic profile doesn't really matter, though - the torture dungeon is owned by Ann's uncle. The team rushes over there while the killer menaces Ann, and then Emily tries to talk him out of killing her! Ann confesses to her crimes, hoping it will save her life, and it works!

THE END

Back at the office, Emily laments that she wasn't able to help the killer more, back when he needed it! She keeps talking about how she wasn't able to look out for him, but that's not actually true, is it? Like, you could have checked in on him during the four more years you lived in Virginia, and then kept in touch long-distance once you moved to London. You just didn't. Maybe that was because of your tsuris over the Liam Doyle's son situation, but in any event, no one was stopping you from helping.

She goes for another date with the FBI Guy! She admits to being emotionally closed-off!

1 - Was profiling in any way helpful in solving the crime?

Nope! There was a direct connection between all of the criminals.

2 - Could the crime have been solved just as easily using conventional police methods given the known facts of the case?

It was solved via traditional means.

So, on a scale of 1 (Dirty Harry) to 10 (Tony Hill), How Useful Was Profiling in Solving the Crime?

1/10 - Here's the thing - there's no way this guy should have been able to abduct Ann. They knew that she was putting him up to the crimes. They had to assume the two were in some kind of contact, since the killer had tens of thousands of dollars to throw around with no visible means of support or employment. There's no reason to think that this woman wouldn't have been under strict surveillance in the hopes of catching them when they got in touch with one another.

The show tries to explain this by having Ann's lawyer say that he'll sue them if they start tailing her without good cause, but the team never listens to lawyers, and they also had good cause. So yeah, the whole ending of the episode makes no sense!