By Montykins
It's the one-year anniversary of Holmes's sobriety, and he's being a baby about getting his chip. Both Watson and Alfredo encourage him to accept it, but it turns out it's really only been 364 days, because he relapsed on his first day in rehab. And he feels terrible about it.
This week's case involves blackmail. A few years ago, someone slipped roofies to teenage girls and raped them. And after he went to jail, the families found out it had been recorded on video, with a warning that if anyone goes to the police, there's an accomplice that will release the tapes. Holmes quickly establishes who the blackmailer is, and he slips inside his house. And then he sees the blackmailer get killed, so now he's on the track of a murderer. And he has to find him before the accomplice releases everything!
The first step, of course, is the rapist. But he appears to be just another victim of the blackmailer, who stumbled upon the videos in a foreclosed storage unit. So that goes nowhere. By studying the blackmailer's files, Holmes determines that the accomplice is codenamed "Henry 8," but he doesn't know what that means. Alfredo stakes out the blackmailer's house, and that leads them to a sketchy lawyer in cowboy boots. The lawyer admits that he occasionally funnelled information to the blackmailer and gives up all of his files.
After more study, Holmes links the blackmailer to a man who makes a living by suing people for not being adequately prepared for enormously fat patrons. But he's hidden behind a pseudonym, which allows some screentime to be spent on meeting the man who killed the blackmailer. He's another father of a girl who got raped. With that out of the way, Holmes locates the fat accomplice. He's dead already!
The solution is that the blackmailer was killed by someone who had savagely beaten him a few months earlier. Then he cut his assailant into the action, so he had to kill his old partner. Then his new partner killed him. It all makes sense now!