Ashes and Dust (Season 2, Episode 19)
Premise: When an arsonist burns San Francisco families to death in their homes, the BAU traces him through a radical environmental group whose secretive, dying leader may be the key.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 2, Episode 19
- Unsub
- Vincent Stiles (Sean O'Bryan)
- Location
- San Francisco, California
- Starring
- Jason Gideon (Mandy Patinkin), Aaron “Hotch” Hotchner (Thomas Gibson), Derek Morgan (Shemar Moore), Spencer Reid (Matthew Gray Gubler), Emily Prentiss (Paget Brewster), Jennifer “JJ” Jareau (A.J. Cook), Penelope Garcia (Kirsten Vangsness)
- Opening quote
- “The torture of a bad conscience is the hell of a living soul.” (John Calvin, read by Hotch)
- Closing quote
- “Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.” (Mahatma Gandhi, read by Hotch)
- Guest stars
- Tom Schanley as Evan Abby, Anthony Ruivivar as Lt. Ricardo Vega, Stacy Edwards as Charlotte Cutler, Mercedes Colon as Det. Leah Castro, Angelo Custino as Liam Abby
- Director
- John Gallagher
- Writers
- Andrew Wilder
Summary
The Case
“Ashes and Dust” opens with a San Francisco teenager, Paul Cutler, waking his parents as their house burns, only to find the front door will not open. It is the second family fire in three weeks, after the Jarvis family died; both were set with kerosene at several points while everyone slept. Charlotte Cutler, the badly burned lone survivor, is told her husband and son are waiting outside; she recalls that the water stopped, the unlocked door stuck and she saw a fireman, and dies soon after. Fire lieutenant Ricardo Vega, the only first responder at both fires, offers Gideon and Morgan his own records; the agents conclude that the arsonist jammed the door from inside and stayed in protective gear to watch the family burn.
The fathers share a type: white, six feet tall, late thirties, successful. A gold Ford Taurus seen at both fires suggests a fleet car, and JJ recalls a Seattle arsonist who picked targets while driving for work. The profile describes a narcissistic underachiever, likely a traveling salesman, for whom fire works like a drug. Garcia finds both fathers’ companies on a website list of firms with leaking underground storage tanks, posted by a new local chapter of the Earth Defense Front, a group whose fires have never killed anyone. After Tom Dunleivy and his two children die trapped in their burning car, the team confronts the chapter’s leader, Evan Abby. He denies everything and barely glances at decoy bodies, and the team suspects the unsub joined the group thinking it was a club for arsonists.
Abby disbands the group at a meeting the agents photograph, and within half an hour a man fitting the victim type is killed with the same kerosene in a sudden street attack. Abby is dying of leukemia and once hid benzene leaks for developers, including one at a future elementary school. He names Vincent Stiles, a recently divorced pharmaceutical sales rep, then slips his surveillance and contacts Stiles.
The Team
Hotch tells Abby that he has a son, and later describes his own constant fear as the husband and father who is never home, waiting for the call that ends his time there.
The ending
Spoiler: Hotch reasons that Abby will burn Stiles at the benzene site and phone in the fire first. At the warehouse, Abby lights the fuel with Stiles inside, warns him that his fire suit cannot survive a benzene blaze, and makes no plan to escape himself. The fire has to be left to burn out, and Morgan holds Hotch back from going in; neither man comes out. After Abby’s funeral, Hotch gives his son, Liam, something his father left for him, saying he lost his own father young.
Why it stands out
- The fictional Earth Defense Front echoes the real Earth Liberation Front, a radical environmental group tied to arson and other property damage that the FBI calls eco-terrorists.
- Evan Abby’s name appears to nod to Edward Abbey, the environmentalist author of The Monkey Wrench Gang, a book said to have inspired the activist group Earth First!