The Atlanta field office requests the BAU's assistance in a case with two victims thus far, both stabbed multiple times to death, both victims found bound in different truck stop rest rooms, one outside of Chattanooga and one outside of Birmingham, posed post-mortem, both victims missing their left ear, with the murders probably taking place elsewhere as concluded by the lack of blood at the scenes. The wounds indicate indecisiveness and inexperience in the act of killing, while the posed bodies in highly public locales indicates the exact opposite of experience in the act, leading to the competing theories that there are two people working together, or one person who has long fantasized about what he is doing and is only now being able to act upon those fantasies. One victim is a homeless John Doe, while the other is a well regarded schoolteacher. When a third victim emerges with a slightly different M.O. in that she was killed at the disposal site, the team knows that the victims are targeted and not random, that there is only one unsub who was removed from his family at a young age and is now getting revenge on those associated with the family court and welfare system, but that the unsub is being fed information by someone in the generation above his on who to target. When the team believes they have discovered the identities of both the unsub and his older information provider, the latter who may not know what he's doing, the question becomes whether the older partner will give up the other in the pairing.