 Aaron  Hotch  gets a visit from his brother Sean Hotchner, who intends to abandon the plan to study law, like their late dad and Aaron. Five students aged 19 are found horribly murdered in a vacant house in Terra Mesa, New Mexico, unbound, skinned alive, one impaled alive: traditional Indian torture methods. The team quickly suspects it must be the collective work of a  pack . First they consider the local reservation policeman Benjamin Blackwood s son John, a teacher noted for Indian activism, who proves his tracker skills on the murder site and concludes it was not real Indians as no tribe practiced all these methods; he accepts to act as consultant. As the killers were probably not Indian but wanted it to appear so, next suspects are the heavily armed ADU, founded by local businessman Roy Minton, mainly recruiting from construction, to fight the Indian land claims. A fingerprint belongs to a sixth student, Ingrid Greisen; her parents say they didn t even know she was missing as she lived totally apart. After father Peter Greisen follows the team s advice to call for Ingrid s release on TV, the kidnappers phone: two ex-cons, who surrender and show the van she s in, after a promise nothing is told to dad, who would have paid them to kidnap his daughter without hurting her; they know nothing about the murders. Ingrid stopped following courses over a year ago- Hotch finds Peter hired a de-programmer and concludes Ingrid had to be kidnapped because she was in a cult sect. The hunt for the cult is on after Ingrid tells what she learned inside about the self-proclaimed  Apaches  lead by  Grandfather ...