The Mentalist Recap: Crime Scenes Can Be Deadly

The CBI is called in for a case at a Biochemical facility. There’s only one problem: the victim whose death they’ve investigating isn’t dead yet.

Alicia Seberg, a scientist, goes into work as usual. She uses the facility’s retinal scan to enter the special area where she, her husband, and three other scientists work. However, once she gets inside the enclosed space, she notices something alarming. A canister of the deadly virus that they have been working with has been opened in that room that she’s in.

Alicia quickly tells her other partners so that they will not become exposed as well, but there’s nothing that she can do for herself. In a few hours she’ll be dead. So she does that only thing that she can think of. She calls Patrick Jane at the CBI.

When Jane and Lisbon arrive, the people at the CDCA are not treating the situation like a crime scene since Alicia is not actually dead yet and no one can prove that she’s been murdered.

Jane and Lisbon go to talk to her to get the whole story. They quickly learn that it would have been basically impossible for someone to leave the canister out and open on purpose, so the act was intentional and also very specifically targeted towards her.

Jane and Lisbon question her husband as well as the three other scientists working with them. They learn that Alicia was having an affair with Dr. Kaseem who also worked at the facility. But when they confront Alicia and her husband about this affair, neither of them seems concerned, claiming that they have a very open relationship and that they have both been with other people.

While on a video chat with her daughter, Alicia collapses and dies. The need to find the killer becomes even more urgent.

Jane and Lisbon are running into problems questioning possible suspects because the CDCA agents are claiming that they are in control of the case, and their methods of interrogation are not yielding good results.

Jane, in an attempt to get away from people bossing him around, visits the crime scene which is being decontaminated. He comes across a shocking and disturbing discovery. The retinal eye scans don’t actually work. Anyone could have gotten in to commit the crime.

This problem is linked back to the head of security who realized a mistake by the contractor but didn’t report it. The security has been down for months, but this is ultimately not as important as it seems because everyone believed the retinal scans to still be working properly.

Frustrated by the way things are going, Jane decides to take matters into his own hands. When they learn that Lilith, a member of the scientific team, has been hiding information from her past, Jane finds the perfect scapegoat. Even though he believes her to be totally innocent, he plays off the fact that she had a restraining order against her in the past and that she had a crush on Alicia’s husband.

Jane questions her and then basically tells her to flee the building via an untraceable route. This makes her look even guiltier. While everyone else deals with Lilith’s disappearance, an even more pressing matter emerges.

Another canister of the virus/disease if found opened in the facility, so everyone inside is now exposed. They must all stay in the building and wait to die in order to contain the disease.

Now if you thought that the whole facility really was exposed, shame on you for underestimating the trickery of Patrick Jane. After Lisbon gets through saying her last goodbye to Cho on the phone, Jane reveals that it was all a big plan on his part.

Lisbon does not seem as amused as Jane thought she would be. However, his logic was that the real killer would have the antidote in his or her system after opening the initial canister. Therefore, the killer would have to try to escape the building because it would look suspicious if someone was still alive when everyone else had died.

Though she sees his logic, Lisbon punches Jane in the face just as a CDCA agent comes running around the corner to say that Griffin, one of the lab partners, has fled the premises. However, Rigsby and Cho are waiting for him outside.

After questioning Griffin, they find out that he had been selling the dangerous disease on the black market for large sums of money. When it actually had to be accounted for, he panicked and realized that in order to make up for what he’d sold, he’d have to open a whole canister, killing Alicia in the process.