The BAU stays local to deal with a series of murders in Reston, Virginia. The three victims thus far, two men and one woman, were each violently stabbed to death either in their home or at their workplace. Their dead bodies were posed in clean clothes, with the clothes in which they were killed missing. When the team finds the missing clothes, which also had been cleaned and/or folded and put away, they know they are dealing with a female unsub. One other connection between the three victims is that they all worked in the service industry and were known to speak negatively about customers who did them wrong, leading to the supposition that the unsub was a client who had a bad encounter with each victim professionally. The team also ends up finding hair not belonging to the victim at each of the crime scenes, which gives them the idea that the unsub is pulling out her hair as a stress reliever. While working through these many pieces of evidence to locate the unsub, Rossi is facing an issue of his own, namely being followed by a young woman he initially believes to be a private investigator as she has a thick dossier on him. She ends up being Joy Struthers, a crime reporter and writer. But Rossi will eventually learn that Joy's interest in him is not as a groupie.
—Huggo