The Naturals

Briggs and Locke arrive with a team of agents to collect the box as evidence. At first, everyone suspects the gift could be a prank from Lia, but she forcefully denies this. She points out that Cassie could have sent the box to herself to make sure she would be allowed on the case. Cassie denies this, and Dean comes to her defense. He tells Briggs that he agrees with Cassie’s suspicions and believes that the UNSUB may be murdering stand-ins for Cassie’s mother, Lorelai. Locke claims that because Cassie has red hair, she could be the next target. Briggs receives a call alerting him to the discovery of a new body.

A couple of days later, the lock of hair from the box is matched to the DNA of the latest victim. Contacting a potential next victim means the killer is escalating. Everyone is concerned about Cassie’s safety, but she seems to be in shock, processing it all clinically through a profiler’s eye. She figures that the killer’s gift makes her special to him, meaning he will most likely not kill her immediately. When Dean easily profiles the UNSUB and calls it a game, Michael attacks him and Dean defends himself. Dean seems to quickly feel guilty for losing control. Cassie wants to be used as bait to attract the killer, but the agents decide that she will be safer under constant watch at the house. They ask her to make a list of everyone she has been in contact with, and she wonders if the man she met by the river could be a suspect.

Over the next few days, Cassie is accompanied by someone everywhere she goes, and she quickly grows annoyed with the constant surveillance. When Lia distracts her by giving her a makeover, Cassie notices that the lipstick Lia uses on her is the exact same shade of red her mother wore.

As Cassie grapples with the memories of her mother and the bloody crime scene, she suddenly hears Sloane scream. The killer has mailed Sloane a package. When the FBI agents arrive, they bring the FBI director himself with them. Inside the package is a small gift box like the one before with Cassie’s name on it. The box contains a photo of a US senator’s daughter, Genevieve, bound and injured. Cassie deduces that the killer chose this girl as retaliation because he feels the FBI is keeping Cassie away from him, and she immediately feels guilty. The girl is alive, but they all believe he will kill her soon. Cassie and Locke persuade the director to allow Cassie to visit the crime scene and hopefully lure the killer out. She decides to also bring some of the other Naturals with her as backup.

Briggs and Locke choose Sloane and Dean to accompany Cassie. They arrive at the crime scene, a club where Genevieve was last seen. Dean and Cassie run through possible scenarios of how the UNSUB could have taken Genevieve from the club bathroom. They deduce that she was most likely drugged and quickly led out through a nearby emergency exit. Meanwhile, agents outside are scoping the scene in case a suspect stands out from the crowd. Before they all leave the bathroom, Cassie notices that some of the graffiti on the wall is written in the killer’s handwriting. She pieces together a coded message left for her. Sloane decodes the message and finds that it contains Lorelai’s name and a street name in Arlington, Virginia. Because of the connection to her mother, Cassie concludes that the UNSUB may be holding Genevieve in the dressing room of a theater on that street.

The police find a dead body at the theater, but it is not Genevieve. Cassie convinces Briggs to take her, Sloane, and Dean to the new crime scene. Once there, Cassie discovers that it looks almost exactly like her mother’s crime scene, complete with blood all over the walls and floor. Dean helps Cassie stay in the moment and not get lost in her traumatic memories. From the amount of blood and clean knife marks on the floor, they reason that the girl was killed elsewhere and positioned at the theater on purpose to make Cassie relive the moment when she found her mother’s scene. She realizes that this is truly a game the UNSUB is playing with her specifically.

Cassie is put under even heavier protection. To send away the agent in charge of watching her, Michael kisses Cassie, and she responds by kissing him back. Dean suddenly interrupts them and seems affected by catching them in the act. Cassie acknowledges that she has complicated feelings for both boys, although Dean seems to be fighting his feelings for her. He presents her with the official FBI file on her mother, which Locke secretly gave to him. Because her mother’s messy crime scene suggests the killer was emotional, while the crime scene in Arlington was methodically executed, they conclude that Lorelai’s killer is not the same UNSUB they are currently looking for.

However, the new UNSUB is obsessed with Lorelai’s case and Cassie herself. Sloane points out that the UNSUB recreated the new crime scene to include blood on the light switch, which was originally smeared by Cassie when she discovered her mother’s scene. Her mother’s killer would not have known about this blood smear since it occurred after he left; therefore, the new UNSUB must have access to the police photos. Lia also confesses that the lipstick she used for Cassie’s makeover was mysteriously left on her bed, suggesting the UNSUB was inside the house and has intimate knowledge of the Naturals program.

Cassie calls Locke from Dean’s phone, but she cannot speak openly with agents and the other Naturals in the house listening. Locke instructs her to hang up, lie about having reached her, and call her again from the bathroom. Cassie cleverly avoids lying outright or showing Michael her face to avoid being caught. In the bathroom, Locke tells Cassie that she and Briggs suspect there is a leak in the FBI and the UNSUB may be someone in the house with her. She tells Cassie to seek out Dean, grab the gun from the safe in Briggs’s study, and escape without anyone else knowing. When Michael questions her, she pretends to reject him after their kiss to mask her feelings of fear and prevent him from following her. Locke texts Dean the address for an FBI safe house, and Cassie and Dean slip away to meet her and Briggs there.

They find the safe house empty, but when the front door opens, Michael is standing there with a gun in his hand. Cassie is shocked because she believes Michael is incapable of being the killer. Dean raises his own gun and he and Michael have a standoff. When Michael sees Cassie is afraid, he explains that when he noticed she and Dean were gone, he assumed Dean had kidnapped her. He lowers his gun but is immediately shot twice. As he falls, Cassie turns to find Locke holding the gun.