S16E8 - “Forget Me Knots”
After finding the man he believes to be Sicarius, Rossi brings footage from Tawny’s hardware store to Garcia, but there’s no way to run facial recognition on it. When Rossi keeps pushing Garcia to do more, she calls him out and he apologizes, saying that he knows she didn’t sleep well last night. Of course, this was true since she was up having steamy nerd sex with Tyler, but Rossi notices because she is on her third cup of tea of the day, something she historically only does when she didn’t sleep well the night before. Though they can’t identify him on tape, Rossi notices Sicarius reaching for his pocket multiple times and says “He’s not reaching for his wallet. He already paid. He’s done it twice. What the hell is he up to?”
Then we cut to Elias Voit in Indio, California, which (for the geographically impaired) is just north of Coachella. He’s watching as a female real estate agent named Ramona who looks similar to his wife Sydney gets out of her car and walks into her office. He then calls her and introduces himself as Lee. Clearly, he had contacted her before and he asks if she was available for a walkthrough of a property. They plan to meet later that afternoon.
Now the Jareau-LaMontagne household is getting ready for school and work. Michael and Henry head off to the bus and JJ and Will check in with each other about the Sicarius case and then about WIll’s most recent tests. At this point, Henry comes back in the house having forgotten a textbook, but Will and JJ don’t hear him as Will lets JJ know that the doctor called and said his (platelet) levels have stabilized and he didn’t need any more tests for six months. Obviously, they hadn’t told Henry about any of this.
Now back to California and Elias is meeting with Ramona. They bond over their kids. Elias shows her a pic of his daughters and Ramona says she has a boy and a girl. Elias is posing as a father looking for a new house for his family and says that Indio is the change of scenery they’re looking for, but that the house seems a little small. He asks for something bigger and with a workspace, if possible. Ramona offers to drive him to another listing with a view of the mountains. Next thing she knows, Ramona is waking up strapped to a chair in one of Elias’s storage containers. He tells her that he has killed 61 people and he offers her a chance to live by helping him save his marriage.
Back at Quantico, Emily looking milfy as usual and is visited by Captain Paul Ballard from Raleigh, who discovered Cyrus LeBrun (aka Elias’s uncle) who died of kidney failure last week. His cabin had traces of DNA of several victims including Maria Jones, who was the victim in the Sylvio Herrera case from the previous weeks. Ballard said it is possible that Lebrun evolved into Sicarius, and he is requesting the BAU to look into it even though the case is closed.
Tara and Luke determine that the victims don’t really fit the Sicarius profile, but Garcia finds out that Cyrus took custody of his nephew Lee after his parents were killed in an apartment fire on Second Street. They’ve now put it together that Lee is probably Sicarius given that Lee was the name that was used with Tyler’s sister before she went missing. After Garcia doesn’t make any snarky quips at Luke, he concludes that she must be getting some.
Back at the LaMontagne household, Henry asks JJ if Will is okay and when she avoids the answer, Henry says he wants to know what’s going on. JJ assures him that Will is okay, but when he goes up to his bedroom, he searches for the name of the Doctor that he had overheard in the conversation that morning and discovers that she is an oncologist.
Back at the storage container, Elias tries some roleplay shit with Ramona to play out him coming back home and telling Sydney the truth about who he is and how he’s tortured and killed people and liked it and now the FBI is on to him. He also says that he really thinks that he can change, but only if he has her and the girls. Elias says he doesn’t want to hurt his kids and Ramona tells him that if he wants her to stay, he’ll have to earn it. He then has Ramona call her husband to let him know that she’s not in any danger and left because she just needed a break. Basically, Elias just wants to make sure that the police aren’t looking for Ramona.
Luke and Tara are reviewing the file from the fire in which Elias’s parents died and based on the report, they believe that the reason Cyrus took the boy in is that Cyrus knew that Elias had killed his own parents. Penelope comes to let them know that the Indio police just informed them that Ramona Havener is missing and she fits Sicarius victimology perfectly. Even though the case is technically closed, Emily sends Rossi, Tara, and Luke to California to investigate.
Now we cut to a middle-aged man sitting on bleachers at a park when he gets an encrypted text from Elias telling him it was time to get back to work. He answers Elias’s call and tells him he isn’t like the others because he follows the rules. Elias says he knows that, which is why he has a new kit for him. While the BAU is mid-flight, Penelope informs them that the Indio police just updated the case saying that Ramona’s husband got a call from her saying she was okay so they reclassified it as a domestic squabble and closed the case.
However, Ramona has still not come home The team decides it’s still best to keep investigating until she does come home. Mid-call, Ramona’s car is located abandoned in a parking lot. Elias tells Ramona that she is going home because she has given him what he needed, and he drugs her as a precaution. Instead, he leaves her body in a car for the new unsub to come and pick up.
While talking with Ramona’s husband, Rossi has a revelation when the husband ignores a phone call from his mother-in-law. He calls Penelope right away and tells her that Sicarius was ignoring a phone call that night and so she mines through call records from the closest cell tower that were made on the day the footage was taken. In particular, Rossi tells her to search for calls that were made from the Pacific Northwest because they had deduced previously that Sicarius lived near the original storage container that was discovered in Yakima. Before they hang up, they have kind of a cute moment and avoid getting under each other’s skin as they’ve done in the past.
On a group call, Emily and JJ tell the team that the two remaining kill kits were acid and strangulation and they had already found a user named “forget me knots”, which is a play on the fact that Indio has a forget-me-nots flower festival combined with that their kill method is strangulation. They are apparently incel-leaning with a compulsion to squeeze the life out of any woman he deems to be too high and mighty. JJ says that in his messages, the user also refers to previous crimes that were committed. The local Indio detective that’s working the case is reminded of a man named Arthur Kiel who tried to hang his grandmother in her backyard. He was convicted of second-degree attempted murder and has been out on parole for five years.
Meanwhile, Arthur is listening to the police scanner while tying up Ramona and hears the missing person call for her. He immediately calls Elias is like “wtf bro you gave me damaged goods”. Elias tells him to get rid of her and leave town for a while. Arthur then finishes setting up Ramona’s noose and leaves as the BAU is arriving at his home. Luke sees him pulling up to his house and the police corner him. Arthur gets out of the car and starts running, which always ends super well for criminals when it’s Luke Alvez chasing after you.
Arthur gets caught at a dead end and starts shooting as Rossi and Luke arrive in their SUV. Rossi tries to talk him out of shooting himself and he almost does it too. But then Arthur raises the gun again to shoot at Rossi and instead, Rossi shoots him twice in the chest and he dies at the scene. Meanwhile, they don’t know where Ramona is and she is slowly suffocating.
Penelope eventually finds that Arthur’s grandparents owned an industrial fabrication company that went out of business and the building was condemned last year and has been sitting empty. By the time Tara and Luke arrive, Ramona is unconscious and does not have a heartbeat when they untie her. After performing CPR, Luke gets her breathing again and it appears she is going to be alright. When Tara comes to see her at the hospital, Ramona remembers the threat that Elias made against her husband and children and says she never saw his face.
However, Penelope calls Rossi with a list of numbers from the PNW that called near the hardware store in Chattanooga the day Sicarius was seen in the footage. Apparently, there were a ton of callers, but it’s better than what they had before I suppose. However, without Ramona’s cooperation, they still don’t have enough for Emily to go to the AG to reopen the case. Rossi decides that he is going to go door to door with the people who may have called Sicarius that day.
Back at JJ’s house, she and Will finally talk with Henry and apologize for not telling him that Will was getting tested for a possible cancer diagnosis. Henry also has been keeping a bat under his bed for protection against Sicarius, because he knows that JJ has been investigating and thinks that Sicarius may come for them. He asks for JJ to tell him something about the case so that he doesn’t have to keep imagining the worst. It’s really wholesome and also crazy that this boy is an actual teenager now like we’ve literally watched him grow up and that is so crazy but anyway it seems like all the LaMontagnes and Jareaus are feeling a lot better even with all the crazy shit that has happened recently.
Finally, Elias calls Sydney for the first time since leaving ten days ago. She questions if he is ever going to come home and he asks to come home, promising to tell her everything and not keep secrets from her anymore. She says she wasn’t the one who told him to go, so he is going to be home by tonight. After they hang up, the doorbell rings at the Voit household and David Rossi is at the door asking Sydney if he can ask her a few questions. And that’s the end.