11E08 - Awake

While Reid is in Las Vegas attending to his mother, the rest of the team is on heightened alert with discovery that Garcia is the intended target of the Dirty Dozen, with four of those hit men known to be after her. If the situation gets to a certain worse case scenario point, Garcia may be forced to go into the witness protection program. Regardless, the BAU still has cases on which to work. The latest case takes the team to Phoenix, Arizona, where two men have been abducted, one who was later found murdered, seemingly held captive for an extended length of time, and tortured extensively before murdered. Besides gender and residence, the two men seemingly have no connection. Based on other evidence coming to light, the team believes the men were random targets. That conclusion is also based on they believing that the men were picking up a hitchhiker in distress along a section of Highway 10, therefore being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Based on the abductions seemingly happening in the middle of the night and because of something JJ is going through in her own life, she believes that the unsub is dealing with an issue pertaining to sleep, and trying to keep his victims awake through high doses of caffeine. They come to the conclusion that the unsub has a personal connection to that stretch of highway that has caused whatever mental break he has suffered to abduct these men in the middle of the night.