Criminal Minds (TV Series)

False Flag (2017)

Daniel Henney: Matt Simmons

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.

• Jennifer Jareau : Hey, Matt, a question for you. Any evidence of a break-in at your crime scene?

  Matt Simmons : Uh, hang on, JJ. Let me check. Any signs of forced entry?

  Sheriff Mike Bowman : No, sir.

  Matt Simmons : 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 into the wall. Dug it out, picked up the casing, took the gun with him.

  Jennifer Jareau : So this guy knows how to clean up after himself and how to get in and out of two houses without detection.

  Matt Simmons : [noticing something]  JJ, let me call you back.

  [hanging up, he picks up a statue and pulls a plastic card out of the base] 

  Sheriff Mike Bowman : Looks like an RFID card.

  Matt Simmons : Mm-hmm. What's it go to? That's the question.

  [after a moment of running it over a side table, he finds a hidden compartment containing a gun and its clip] 

  Matt Simmons : Huh. Well, hello.

• 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.

• Dr. Tara Lewis : Ballistics confirmed that the gun that killed Carl is the one that Doug used on himself. All the evidence points to Doug Downey as our killer, except...

  Melissa Miller : Except you don't have anything tying Doug to Bryan's drowning.

  Dr. Tara Lewis : Melissa, I've been as transparent as I can possibly be. Is there anything we've missed?

  Melissa Miller : One thing. But you didn't miss it, you covered it up. Specifically, that the sheriff made us all walk through a metal detector.

  Dr. Tara Lewis : What?

  Melissa Miller : [sardonic laugh]  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 that he was saying earlier tonight?

  Doug Downey : [flashback]  What did you put in my pocket?

  Matt Simmons : Gun! Drop it!

  Dr. Tara Lewis : [return to real time]  Melissa, that doesn't make any sense.

  Melissa Miller : 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.

  Dr. Tara Lewis : That's not what happened.

• M.E. Leslie Jackson : So let's assume Bryan Behar here died of asphyxiation from drowning. What I can't explain is this. These chemical burns on his face.

  Matt Simmons : Well, he was drowned in a bleach solution. Would that do this?

  M.E. Leslie Jackson : 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.

  Jennifer Jareau : We can. It's from "The Catcher in the Rye".

• 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.

• Melissa Miller : We were dating. That's not a crime.

  Emily Prentiss : So why hide it?

  Melissa Miller : 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.

  Emily Prentiss : 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.

  [dissolve to the legion hall] 

  Dr. Tara Lewis : So you were there and I was here.

  Emily Prentiss : Right.

  Dr. Tara Lewis : And then he was screaming at you, "I know a false flag when I see one, bitch", and then bang.

  Emily Prentiss : No, that's not right. He said all those things, but not to me. He was looking at you.

  Dr. Tara Lewis : No. No, if someone made eye contact with me and called me a bitch, I'd remember.

  Matt Simmons : Maybe he wasn't looking at either of you. He was looking between you.

  Dr. Tara Lewis : Uh... JJ, you were posted up over there for line of sight.

  Jennifer Jareau : Yeah.

  Dr. Tara Lewis : Okay, there's only one other woman in the room he would have been talking to.

• David Rossi : Anything?

  Matt Simmons : Melissa's house was spotless. Zero evidence of her involvement.

  Emily Prentiss : How are you guys doing?

  [seeing the murder board] 

  Emily Prentiss : Yikes.

  Jennifer Jareau : Yeah, every time we try to reason it out, we keep hitting different walls.

• Matt Simmons : It was right under our nose, the whole time