Dean is displeased when Agent Locke changes Cassie’s first lesson from a likely classroom exercise into a field trip. Locke has Dean drive her SUV to Westside Mall while Cassie sits in the back and silently profiles Dean’s careful driving, tension, Southern accent, and refusal to engage with her.

At the mall food court, Locke asks Cassie to profile a woman in a purple fleece. Cassie reads the woman as a graduate student, likely in medical school, from an affluent background, a runner, unmarried but in a serious relationship, and used to pushing herself. When Locke challenges the student conclusion, Dean unexpectedly supports Cassie by explaining that the woman does not treat other young adults as peers, showing that Dean and Cassie are reaching the same conclusions in similar ways.

Dean becomes more curious about Cassie’s reasoning, asking why she chose medical school and why she believes the woman has a boyfriend. Cassie admits some details aloud but withholds that she inferred the boyfriend partly because the woman never looked at Dean, whom Cassie thinks an unattached woman would have noticed. The exchange creates a brief moment of mutual recognition between Cassie and Dean despite his earlier coldness.

After hours of exercises inside the mall, Locke moves the lesson to the parking lot and asks Cassie to profile the owner of a white Acura. Cassie struggles because she is used to reading people, not objects, so Locke explains that real FBI profiling often begins with physical evidence rather than a face. Cassie pieces together that the driver was in a hurry, has no young children, likely was not there for food, and may not know the mall well or may be heading to a nearby store.

Locke corrects Cassie for using the word “they,” and Dean explains that pronouns keep a profiler outside the subject’s mind. Locke gives the official term, Unknown Subject or UNSUB, while Dean says the unofficial method is to use “I” if Cassie wants to climb inside someone’s head. Cassie recoils because entering a killer’s mindset reminds her of her mother’s bloody dressing room, and Dean bluntly says that if she cannot do it, she may be better off at home. Locke then offers Cassie another approach: to address the UNSUB as “you.”