Inside the Cook County Jail, an inmate is running through the prison in an attempt to escape. As guards attempt to apprehend him, he runs toward a storage closet in the laundry room but then he is shocked and horrified when he another inmate’s dead body falls on him. Cooper and Nick arrive at the jail where Detective Carl Brenner meets them. They walk past inmates who are banged up, including one who is bleeding from a cheek wound, and they see the inmate, Denny Morrison, who had the freak out when he refused to take a flu shot.
The victim is Bruce Grady, who wasn’t working in the laundry room, but was assigned to another floor. Nick sees a stab wound on his body and the detective notes everyone has enemies in the jail, so finding the killer will be tough.
Finlay arrives to help Nick as Dave examines the body. He tells them Grady has been dead for three hours and he shows signs of having defended himself and there’s residue on his hands. Finlay looks around and spots the same residue inside a laundry cart from the medical module where Grady was housed. Since there is no blood, they figure he was killed down in the laundry room.
Morgan and Greg go to the medical cells where Morgan teases Greg when he worries about being around germs after his quarantine. They go in Grady’s cell, which is clean. He has a photo of his daughter on the wall and his art work matches residue on his hands. Under the mattress on the bed, Morgan finds Grady’s case file. Greg finds a triangle shaped piece of paper, which inmates use to pass notes. The note he found is a threatening letter.
Nick and Cooper talk to the guard in charge of the laundry department. He tells them Wilbur Tandy was in charge of swapping linens from the medical module while he had been down getting supplies with other inmates who worked in the laundry room.
Detective Brenner and Nick talk to Tandy, who is reluctant to talk to them because he doesn’t want to end up killed like Grady. But he does tell them he got a kite note to bring Grady to the laundry room. Grady got in the cart, but he was having trouble due to being drugged up. Nick asks for a DNA sample to eliminate him as a suspect.
Finlay tells Cooper she found out that whenever Grady was arrested, the charges were reduced. She looked into cases where he was a witness to other inmate cases and found out he was a star witness in the case of a man named Lincoln Mayfield. He was recently brought to the County jail.
Nick looks in Mayfield’s jail cell and finds a knife with blood on it hidden beneath the top bunk in his cell. But when questioned, Mayfield refuses to talk to Nick and says he can talk to his lawyer.
At the lab, Ecklie gives Cooper the case file on Mayfield, who is not talking. Ecklie talks about the case, in which Mayfield was known as the Snakeback Assassin. He was suspected in gang related killings, including a pregnant woman who was caught in the middle of things. Grady was put in as a jail informant since the DA never had enough to charge him. Cooper looks at his phone and finds out Mayfield wants to talk to them after all.
Mayfield talks to Nick and admits that he did send Grady down so he could tell him to take back the lies, claiming he never told Grady information that could put him away. He also admits to shanking Grady, but that what he had done wouldn’t be enough to actually kill him. He insists that he needed Grady alive and that it could hurt him now that Grady is gone.
In the lab, Hodges smells dark liquid when Greg comes in. He tells Greg that the medication Greg found wasn’t actually medicine, but jail alcohol. Greg figures that the reason Grady was out of it was because he had been drunk.
In autopsy, Robbins is examining Grady’s liver, which is covered in cirrhosis, as Finlay comes in. The stab would Grady had wasn’t deep enough to kill him and he had hemorrhaging in his eyes. The cause of death was strangulation and Finlay realizes Mayfield was probably being truthful.
Morgan and Greg are examining Grady’s items to see if they can find any contraband. As Greg talks about how people get creative in finding ways to smuggle drugs, Morgan finds something inside the case file Grady had. It’s a small recording device she saw at the forensic convention, and that it wasn’t available to law enforcement yet. The vendor had told her one agency would test the prototype.
Cooper goes to the FBI to talk to Agent Parker. He tells Parker about finding the device, but he won’t tell Cooper anything. Cooper tells him that the inmate he is investigating could have killed him. But when Parker says it may not be an inmate they are focusing on, Cooper realizes the FBI is investigating a guard.
Ecklie is having it out with Parker over his refusal to divulge information about the case he is investigating. Parker refuses to tell them who they are investigating in case of a leak and tells them they can work parallel until their cases happen to run into one another. Cooper promises to tell Ecklie if the murderer is a guard.
Morgan goes to talk to Henry, who tells her all the blood in the laundry room was Grady’s and the DNA on the blade came back to both Mayfield and Grady. The DNA swabs on Grady’s neck did not come back to an inmate, meaning a guard killed him.
Finlay tells Nick that Grady wasn’t drunk enough to be staggering around and he had his prescription medication in his body, including one that’s not prescribed called Terbinafine The drug is not accessible inside the prison and when Nick looks up information on the drug, he sees that it can cause confusion and an “unsteady gait,” plus death had been reported for people who had cirrhosis. Finlay tells him Officer Woo was the guard on duty, but he was conveniently away.
Finlay interviews Woo, who still stands by being at the docks during the time of the murder. When Finlay brings up large amounts of money being put into his account, especially since his wife doesn’t work, she tells him the inmates all talked about how he would let the inmates do what they wanted. He admits Mayfield had two thousand dollars delivered to him if he got the laundry room empty. When Finlay accuses him of the murder, he insists he didn’t do it so she asks for a DNA sample.
Morgan goes to see Greg about the recording device. He tells her that based on what level the decibel was set on the device, the FBI would not have been able to hear Officer Woo talking during his shift in the laundry room because interference form background noise was too loud.
Nick tells Finlay what Greg and Morgan found out. She agrees, especially since Woo’s DNA is not a match on the DNA from Grady’s neck. Finlay was spending her time looking for Grady’s connections to any cops. She finds out that Grady is connected to Detective Brenner and that Brenner had been the cop assigned to the Mayfield case. They figure Brenner must have given Grady information on Mayfield in order to get him to testify. Nick decides to look up Brenner’s personnel file to find out what medication he is on and sure enough, it’s Terbinafine.
Cooper tells Ecklie their suspicions about Brenner. He would give informants information on inmates he wanted to frame. Ecklie asks if he was there when Grady was killed and Cooper tells him he had been conducting a line up further down from the laundry room. Ecklie wants to interrogate him.
As Brenner is being taken to interrogation, Parker is upset that Ecklie’s case could derail his. Ecklie offers for them to work together but informs him if he wants a shot at Brenner to wait until he completes his interrogation.
Ecklie interrogates Brenner, who insists he did nothing wrong and that the criminals he put away were guilty. Ecklie brings up the medication and Brenner admits to doing that, most likely to make him sick so he couldn’t testify at Mayfield’s retrial. But when confronted with the murder, Brenner refuses to talk, asking for a union rep. Ecklie tells him he needs a lawyer.
In the hall, Cooper meets up with Ecklie and tells him he doesn’t think Brenner knew about the FBI investigation. He worries he may not be able to get a DNA sample, but then Cooper realizes he still has a business card Brenner gave him when they first met at the prison.
Henry comes to Cooper’s office and tells him that they got a match to an inmate named Pete McCrone, an inmate who was only in on a misdemeanor so his DNA was only received when Finlay interviewed him. McCrone was the one who was bleeding from a punch to the fact earlier in the episode. Finlay comes in and tells Cooper that McCrone was a victim of Grady’s in a sexual assault case that got reduced to malicious malice.
Nick interviews McCrone, who tells him about being molested when Grady was a janitor at his elementary school. He was ready to testify but then Grady took a plea deal. McCrone was in the laundry room when he heard Grady’s voice while Mayfield was threatening him, so he went to confront him. When Grady saw him, he made a remark about knowing he would end up in jail. McCrone tells him he was in jail for child endangerment, since he left his toddler in the crib to get his wife out of a bar. When he asks Nick if he can help, Nick is unable to do anything because he killed someone.
Nick is in the locker room when Cooper comes in. He is despondent and tells Cooper that Pete recognized Grady’s voice. He admits the case hit closer to home than he wanted and when Cooper asks if he wants to talk, Nick tells him he wants to forget (his own molestation at the hands of a babysitter). Cooper tells him that sometimes their jobs are bound to end up competing with their personal lives and Nick admits he would have done the same thing that Pete did. Cooper laments on the fact that Pete was stuck in jail because of paperwork and now he is in there for murder, and how his life is now ruined. Nick tells him it was ruined “a long time ago.”
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