This episode of Criminal Minds opens with a woman walking into her house with her husband tied down to a chair in their bedroom. When she goes in to see why he won’t answer her she get’s knocked out from behind. As she is regaining consciousness she witnesses an eerie and disturbing scene. Her assailant has a hand saw and is proceeding to saw off her now dead husband’s hands.

The killer is later identified as a very mysterious hit man who is known to do odd extras as part of his kills. The team tracks him down through the small clues they have, primarily by the killers signature killing style: one shot to the heart and another to the head just behind the right ear.

They discover the hit man was hired by a local judge who, on hearing he had cancer and only had six months to live, decides to rectify some of the injustices that he participated in while on the bench.

He is angry that so many criminals who deserved to be in jail were let go because of technicalities of the law. He’s particularly angry at the drunk driver who ran down his wife, killing her.

The judge writes out a list of people who believes deserves justice for their crimes and hires the hit man to kill them all. A twist in the story is that the judge does include his own crimes and actually pays this hit man to murder him in the end.

As far as the Criminal Minds‘ villains go, this particularl guy is about as cunning and professional as they come. The BAU unit never even gets close to capturing this meticulous monster because he always was able to anticipate every single move they’d make, before they would even make it. The person who finally tracks him down comes as a surprise, but in retrospect it shouldn’t have been expected.

This was another top-notch episode of Criminal Minds. The writers and actors truly have the art of mystery and anticipation down to a science.