Criminal Minds (TV Series)

False Flag (2017)

Adam Rodriguez: Luke Alvez

Photos 

Quotes 

• Melissa Miller : What's going on? Who are you?

  Emily Prentiss : I'm SSA Emily Prentiss of the BAU. Melissa, you're gonna want to take a seat.

  Melissa Miller : Oh, god. Someone died, didn't they?

  Emily Prentiss : What makes you say that?

  Melissa Miller : You guys have had me waiting in here for hours while your team tracked down Bob Orci. What happened?

  Emily Prentiss : Are you recording this? You should.

  [Melissa turns her recorder on] 

  Emily Prentiss : Agents Simmons and Alvez landed at Bob Orci's at 3:37 a.m. They were very surprised by what they found.

  [the scene flashes back to the previous scene] 

  Luke Alvez : FBI!

  Matt Simmons : Oh, my god.

  Emily Prentiss : Hey, guys, meet Bob Orci. Weapons down, please.

• Emily Prentiss : We have to make an arrest or release all the truthers from custody. Give me the version that makes the most sense.

  Jennifer Jareau : Okay, well, Doug was holding the gun that killed Carl, but there is nothing behaviorally that points to him being a killer.

  Luke Alvez : 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.

  [he continues in voiceover with flashbacks under] 

  Luke Alvez : 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, 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 "Aha! I'll turn this to my advantage. I'll frame my boyfriend, who is the most likely suspect if they put this together." 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 profile, and then he panics.

  Doug Downey : What did you put in my pocket?

  Matt Simmons : Gun! Drop it!

  Luke Alvez : 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.

  Doug Downey : I know a false flag when I see one. You bitch!

  [return to real time] 

  Emily Prentiss : That's the version that makes the most sense. Even if I buy it, a D.A. won't. We need more, guys.

  Matt Simmons : Well, the only thing that's left is the bullet and the casing. But she could have dumped that anywhere.

• Emily Prentiss : 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.

  David Rossi : An unwitting accomplice.

  Jennifer Jareau : 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.

  Matt Simmons : After Carl Lee's murder, Melissa approached one of you and she told you that the U.S. government was gonna frame both Bryan and Carl's murder on the truthers. Right on cue, we showed up.

  Luke Alvez : So she gave you a box or bag, told you not to look inside, said it was all part of our cover-up.

  Dr. Tara Lewis : 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 are not the murderers. She is.

  Emily Prentiss : Did anyone accept something like this from her?

  [silence; after a moment, Tara notices Gary confer with his lawyer] 

  Gary Hiles : [stepping forward]  I did. It's... it's at my house.

• Luke Alvez : Garcia, have we confirmed that this truther's even legit?

  Penelope 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.

  Matt Simmons : 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.

  Emily Prentiss : It's another reason not to do this.

  Jennifer Jareau : 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?

  Luke Alvez : Unsubs like to insert themselves into the investigation. Profile skews male, but she could be a partner.

  Dr. Tara Lewis : Okay, 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.

  Emily Prentiss : But if we're wrong, she's going to post her podcast. Then what? Then we're the next example of fake news.

• Penelope 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.

  Emily Prentiss : The sheriff there has had two suspicious deaths over the last forty-eight hours. Both victims were members of the truther movement.

  Penelope Garcia : Yes, which is a group of conspiracy theorists who share their out-there beliefs online with each other. No judgment here. Uh, let's look at our fist victim, Bryan Behar. He believed that the flouride 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".

  Matt Simmons : So the M.O. matches his conspiracy. Is that a coincidence or a choice?

  David Rossi : That depends on victim number two.

  Penelope Garcia : Uh-huh. That's Carl Lee. He's a JFK conspiracy nut who was shot once in the throat.

  Jennifer Jareau : As anyone who saw the Zapruder film knows, that's where the first bullet struck Kennedy.

  Luke Alvez : Carl Lee we can definitively classify as a homicide, but the drowning death, that could have another explanation.

  Emily Prentiss : That's why we'll be treating this as an equivocal death investigation. Wheels up in twenty.

• Penelope 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 "Hmm?". Carl says to Bryan "I think I'm getting close to finding out who it is", to which Bryan says "Maybe we should go the police", and Carl says "What good would that do?".

  Matt Simmons : Well, that could be motive. Whatever Carl was close to finding could have killed him and Bryan.

  Luke Alvez : 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.

  David Rossi : That's ridiculous. Everybody knows that...

  Emily Prentiss : No, no. We're not getting into that again. Go ahead, Luke.

  Luke Alvez : Uh... my point is that if you thought the government could do that, then you were likely to 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.

  Jennifer Jareau : So maybe these guys weren't into anything. Maybe they just talked themselves into a group delusion.

  Emily Prentiss : Okay, 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.

  Matt Simmons : Chicago Mob, right? Killed JFK.

  David Rossi : He gets it!

  Emily Prentiss : No, don't get him started, Matt. Next he'll be showing you YouTube clips.

• Luke Alvez : This glass is three-quarters of an inch thick, and that's sturdy. If you wanted to drown someone in an aquarium, that would do the trick.

  Jennifer Jareau : Yeah, they said there was a bleach solution in the water, so he was probably cleaning it and his earbuds were in.

  Luke Alvez : 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.

• Matt Simmons : So, we went through Carl's meticulous log of his hardware, and the missing gun that should be here 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.

  Jennifer Jareau : And that would explain why there was no forced entry at Bryan's, either.

  Luke Alvez : So when Carl said "I'm close to finding out who it is", he wasn't talking about some secret cabal, he was talking about a friend.

  Emily Prentiss : Someone he was willing to call the cops on. We should bring all the truthers in for questioning.

  Dr. Tara Lewis : 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.

  Emily Prentiss : Oh, that's risky.

  Dr. Tara Lewis : But worth it. Either one of the truthers points us to the unsub... or he shows up himself.

• Jennifer Jareau : No, that's not right.

  Luke Alvez : What do you mean it's not right? It's right here.

  [as they pass through the metal detector, Emily and Tara notice it doesn't go off] 

  Jennifer Jareau : No, that's not what I saw.

  Emily Prentiss : Did that just...?

  Dr. Tara Lewis : Yeah. Yeah, it did.

  Sheriff Mike Bowman : What is it?

  [Tara walks through the metal detector, which doesn't beep] 

  Sheriff Mike Bowman : How in the world could that happen?

  Dr. Tara Lewis : I think I might know.

• Melissa Miller : Where's Dr. Lewis?

  Jennifer Jareau : I'm SSA Jareau. I'm here to talk to you about your favorite book, "Catcher in the Rye".

  Melissa Miller : I get it. You're rotating agents now, wearing me down so I can't see your lies. Is that the game?

  Jennifer Jareau : Well, I just had some information Agent Lewis didn't, but if you don't want to hear it...

  Melissa Miller : [stopping her as she turns to leave]  Oh, no. I want to hear.

  Jennifer Jareau : [sitting down]  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, "Catcher in the Rye" is the local book club selection this month. And did you know that there are two actual...

  Luke Alvez : [the scene dissolves into a flashback at the metal detector]  ... brick and mortar bookstores in Roswell? But one of the owners was happy to give me a copy. What page is it?

  Jennifer Jareau : Uh, 76. That's what was on Carl.

  Luke Alvez : Okay, here it is. It, uh, it starts mid-sentence. "Don't see how he could like a phony book like that and still like the one by Ring Lardner."

  Jennifer Jareau : No, that's not right.

  Luke Alvez : What... what do you mean that's not right? I have it right here.

  Jennifer Jareau : That's not what I saw.

  Emily Prentiss : Did that just...?

  Jennifer Jareau : Yeah, see, this... this page 76 is different. The page on Carl's throat was annotated. The publisher bolded terms and phrases for emphasis.

  Luke Alvez : Well, that would throw the whole layout of the book off. I mean, your page 76 wouldn't look like this one.

  Jennifer Jareau : Okay, so 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.

• Penelope Garcia : The devil's in the pitchforky little details, my friends. I-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 "Behold a Pale Horse", "Protocols of the Elders of Zion", "Mein Kampf".

  Jennifer Jareau : Books the truthers love.

  Emily Prentiss : 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.

  Luke Alvez : I'm on it. Garcia, can you help me out with an address?

  Penelope Garcia : Yeah, I'm... 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 thing to a physical address I can get you is...

  Melissa Miller : [the scene dissolves to the interrogation room]  Route 3, Greenwood Way?

  Jennifer Jareau : You know him?

  Melissa Miller : By reputation. He's not a truther. He's an anarchist. He's dangerous.

  Jennifer Jareau : How dangerous?

  Melissa Miller : He has fertilizer lining his place as an explosive.

  Jennifer Jareau : [jumping out of her chair and opening the door]  Prentiss!

  Melissa Miller : Wait. That far out in the desert, there's no cell service. You're not gonna reach them by phone.

• Luke Alvez : Is that ANFO, Matt?

  Matt Simmons : Yeah.

  [cautiously approaching a house, they open the front door] 

  Luke Alvez : FBI!

  Matt Simmons : Oh, my god.

• Dr. Tara Lewis : It all started with Carl's text. "I'm close to finding out who it is." He was talking about Melissa, as in "I'm close to finding out who she's cheating with."

  Jennifer Jareau : She was cheating with Doug?

  Dr. Tara Lewis : Yes. And when she found out Carl was onto her, she killed him.

  David Rossi : Whoa. Slow down there, partner.

  Dr. Tara Lewis : 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...

  [seeing them all looking at her] 

  Dr. Tara Lewis : What? Why is everybody staring at me?

  Jennifer Jareau : Tara, I want to believe that. An arrest would relieve a lot of tension on this case, but...

  Luke Alvez : But we don't have the evidence, and without the evidence, we're no better than the truthers.