12E14 - Collision Course

Prentiss remains at the prison on Reid watch, the BAU certain that his plight the work of Mr. Scratch. The FBI as an organization has abandoned him, they not providing him with legal support as he was out of the country without their knowledge and as he was on personal business. As such, Prentiss wants to provide him with the legal services of someone that she trusts, and hopefully will thus act on Reid's best interest. That lawyer is an old friend named Fiona Duncan, who ultimately does take Reid's case after meeting with him. She admits that they will have an uphill battle based on the amount of circumstantial evidence against him, and that he himself cannot remember what happened as he was drugged at the time. In the process, Reid may have to make some difficult decisions. Meanwhile, the rest of the team heads off on their next case, which takes them to Bradenton, Florida, where in two separate incidents in exactly the same spot, two drivers, in the exact same late modeled car, ran over a pedestrian, in one case the pedestrian who was killed. Traffic camera footage shows that the car did not swerve to try and avoid hitting the pedestrian. As the team's initial thought is that the vehicles' computer systems were hacked, Rossi, who is heading this case in Prentiss' place, asks Garcia to accompany them so that she can provide her expertise. The interview with one of the drivers indeed does show that someone was able to assume remote control of the vehicle, with Garcia believing the unsub watching the incident by hacking into the traffic camera system. Subsequent vehicle/pedestrian incidents of a similar nature lead the team to believe that the first two cases were the unsub testing his skills, the later victims surrogates for the person or persons he is ultimately trying to kill. While the profilers work toward finding out where the unsub will strike next by trying to determine who his target(s) is/are, Garcia may be the one to have the ultimate showdown with the unsub in testing who has the greater computer hacking skills.