Caged~ Criminal Minds

Rite Of Passage

Emily: "Hey, where's Hotch?"

JJ: "Budget meeting."

Morgan: "Maybe he'll get us a raise."

Rossi: "They're cutting, not raising. I just hope they don't take the coffee."

Reid: "I'd quit."

Watson: "Oh, yeah. That'll save 'em like 50 bucks a week." she jokes making the others chuckle and Reid gives them a confused look 

JJ: "He'll meet us on the plane."

Emily: "Where are we going?"

JJ: "Last night, 3 decapitated heads were found in front of a sheriff's station In the small border town of Terlingua, Texas."

Rossi: "3 victims at once?"

Reid: "Actually, they appear to be in different stages of decomposition."

JJ: "M.E. confirmed that one of the heads is a day or so old. The other 2 appear to have died a few months ago, but the wound edges suggest that they were decapitated recently."

Watson: "Dirt in their mouth, ears, and nose. At some point, these two heads were buried."

Morgan: "And then dug up."

Emily: "Ok, so why the sudden need to display them?"

Garcia: "The need may not be so sudden" she comes into the room "Mexico, in 2009 alone, 10 heads in coolers, and the people belonging to these heads were killed just hours before they were found. Result of a battle between feuding drug cartels."

Morgan: "DEA's not interested?"

JJ: "They asked us to take a look at it. Considering the different decomposition, this might not even be about drugs."

Rossi: "Then what do we have?"

Emily: "Well, the victims are two males, one female, so no gender preference. Staging the heads in front of a sheriff's station...that's aggressive."

Morgan: "All 3 victims are Hispanic."

JJ: "And unidentified. Terlingua has a large illegal population. It's made I.D.ing the victims that much harder."

Watson: "He might be trying to make some type of political statement. Volunteer border patrols do a lot of personal policing down there."

Rossi: "Groups like the Minutemen prize law and order above everything else. And those patrols serve their political agenda. Murder would be bad for their image."

Emily: "Staging the heads in front of a police station suggests that the unsub might be local. He'd have to have a knowledge about how to do something like that without being seen. So what we have is hundreds of miles of unincorporated desert and an endless supply of anonymous victims crossing the border every day."

Morgan: "It's a serial killer's perfect storm."

Emily: "A lion's work hours are only when he's hungry. Once he's satisfied, the predator and prey live peacefully together." Chuck Jones."

On The Plane

Rossi: "Explain this to me. The unsub hunts along the U.S.-Mexico border. How big is that area?"

Reid: "Over 5,000 square miles of desert."

Rossi: "He could have gone undetected for years."

Emily: "So why announce himself?"

Hotch: "Something happened recently."

Rossi: "What do we know about crime in Terlingua?"

JJ: "It's a stop-over town. Immigrants stay only 24 hours before moving on, but that also makes them narco-trafficking hubs. Outside of immigration violations, most of the arrests are drug related."