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Bell has completed his rehab, and he is once again handling cases on his own. He asks Watson to track down a witness who has decided she doesn't want to testify, and she handles it entirely without Holmes's participation. The witness is hiding out at the home of her old teacher, and she doesn't want to testify because she's pregnant and she's worried about getting shot to death by a murderous drug dealer.
In the main plot (you can tell it's the main plot because Sherlock Holmes is in it), a researcher named Barry Granger has been killed by having helium pumped into the bathroom where he's taking a shower. Then his body was staged to look like a suicide, but Gregson saw through that right away, so he called in the consulting detectives and told the rest of the police force to take the rest of the week off. There was a fake suicide note that referenced a mysterious letter-writer named "Adam Peer" who claimed that Granger faked his results. Granger was working on a breathalyzer that sensed cancer, and it was called "The Hound" as a way to sort of justify the strained pun in the episode title.
The investigation starts with Granger's boss, Hank Prince. His business was put in danger by the allegation that Granger's research wasn't genuine, and then it was put in danger when Granger died. And he's got an alibi: he was with his girlfriend, rather than the wife he's divorcing. So he's off the hook. , Holmes tracks down a woman that was seen arguing with Granger, and she turns out to be with the Mossad. Before she vanishes, she gives Holmes a thumb drive with all the emails that Adam Peer ever sent. There's a brief red herring, and then it turns out that Adam Peer was really two people. And one of them was Barry Granger!
So the Adam Peer that accused Granger of phony results wasn't really Adam Peer. The new theory is that Barry Granger was killed to damage Hank Prince. Then Hank's wife is found murdered with Prince's gun to the body. Hank claims that he couldn't possibly have done it because he wouldn't leave his gun there. This convinces people for maybe five minutes, but then Holmes concludes that Hank's latest alibi is dependent on a taxi driver being easily distracted. So Hank killed Granger because he wanted to lower his stock price just long enough to keep his wife from getting a lot of money in the divorce, but then the price rebounded too early and he had to kill her.
When Bell goes to the house of the heroic teacher, he's decided that his witness doesn't need to testify. But the teacher is angry at what's become of his neighborhood, and he wants to take a stand. First, he offers to commit perjury to get the testimony into court. But when Bell rejects this, the teacher goes out and shoots the drug dealer to death and he gets shot dead in return. This bums Bell out and he doesn't want to go in to his "Welcome Back" party. Instead, he and Holmes go to a nearby coffee shop, which I think sounds like more fun anyway.
Want more? The full recap starts right below!We open in the police station, where Bell has a paint can shaker on his desk. The idea is that it's part of some ribbing he's been receiving for finishing his rehab for his hand shaking. It's not the best joke, but I respect the guys on the force for actually going to a hardware store to buy the equipment. Bell wants Watson to help him with a case, in which a drug dealer named Quame Martenz shot and killed someone. I would have spelled it "Kwame," but I'm trusting the closed-captioning on this. Take it up with them. He had a great witness named Nicole Watkins, but she vanished and will no longer will be a witness, so Bell thinks she was threatened and he'd like Holmes and Watson to find her. Watson takes the case, of course. Also, there's a party being thrown to welcome Bell back to the ranks of Detectives without career-threatening hand tremors, and that's going to turn into a thing later in the episode. So watch for that.
In a lab somewhere, a man walks in and says hello to a mouse named Sherman. If I worked in a lab, I would have trouble not giving names to the animals, which would then make me very sad. I don't think I should work in a lab, is what I'm saying. Then goes to his desk and takes something out of a duffel bag before going to take a shower in the bathroom. There's a bathroom with a shower right to his desk? I may have to rethink my position on working in a lab. As he takes his shower, go blurry and he staggers a little. He calls out, "Who's there?" in a strangely high-pitched voice. He sees a patch on the ceiling and rubber tubes coming under the door. In his squeaky voice, he says, "Please stop. I don't want to die." Then he lies down on the floor and dies.
The police are on the scene, along with Holmes and Watson. Gregson gives the lowdown. The dead man is Dr. Barry Granger. Although we last saw him dead in the shower, he's now at his desk with a bag over his head and tubes going from the bag to an air tank. And there's a suicide note, in which he says "It's all true." Watson says it's a reasonable suicide technique, since labs sometimes have helium, and it replaces the oxygen in your lungs. But, as Holmes notes, it's probably not suicide, because why would Holmes and Watson even be involved? Gregson says there are sweaty running clothes in the bag and the shower is wet. Holmes goes to the bathroom (I mean he walks to the room called "the bathroom," not that he just pees all over the crime scene) and spots something at the bottom of the door. There's residue of tape sealing the door up. Watson brings him some powder, and it reveals the shadows left by the rubber tubes. Holmes agrees that Granger was murdered by helium being pumped through three hoses under the doorway: "He was dried, clothed, and staged."
And then the murderer -- who went through a crazy amount of preparation -- forgot to dry off the shower itself. I guess it's a good thing Granger didn't fall in such a way that he hit his head or anything, huh? Okay, enough nitpicking. There aren't any security videos in the lab because it's confidential. But Gregson will pull the video from the rest of the building in case it turns up something relevant. Watson wants to know what the note meant by "It's all true," and a lab tech explains that a journal reader said that Granger's results were faked. But the tech doesn't know what he's allowed to say about their work. He's not even comfortable saying what was in the published article, so Holmes asks who had him sign the NDA, as a way of getting to the boss.
The boss is Hank Prince. I learned that later in the episode and came back in time to put that information in this paragraph. Hank is devastated by Granger's death, and he's also screwed in a professional sense. Holmes is holding the device that Granger was running trials on -- an experimental breathalyzer that detects cancer. The breathalyzer is called "The Hound," allegedly because there are dogs that can smell cancer cells (which is true), but really to justify the episode title ("The Hound of the Cancer Cells"). The accusation of faked results meant that investors were pulling out, putting the business in jeopardy. Holmes asks about Hank's whereabouts at the time of the murder. Hank insists that Barry didn't fake anything, and since the suicide note would have legitimized the accusation, this murder just hurts him even more. That doesn't answer the question. He closes the door to his office, then says he spent the night at his girlfriend's, which is awkward because he's in the middle of a divorce. His wife's lawyers, he says, would have a field day. And without Barry, how will he dig his company out of this hole? His girlfriend is Sloan Teller and he hands over the phone number. His only request is that they not tell his wife.
Police station. Hank Prince's girlfriend backed up his alibi, and Holmes agrees with the idea that Hank would rather have Barry around. The tipster who accused Granger of faking results used a pseudonym, calling himself "Adam Peer," or "A peer." He apparently did that a lot, picking apart studies and forcing retractions by sending letters to journals. Watson notes that he seems a bit like Holmes, who is happy to accept that. In his opinion, Peer is a fellow detective with a good track record for inciting retractions. Watson is thinking about ways to find Nicole Watkins, who had a favorite teacher. Then she tries to bring up the subject of Bell's party, but Holmes cuts her off. Security video from the hallway shows that Granger argued with an unidentified woman two nights ago. Holmes checks Granger's cell phone to determine that he called someone named "Dalit Zirin" a lot, including a call one hour before this argument.
They meet Dalit at the travel agency where she works. She says she went to college with Granger, where he had a thing for her. He looked her up last month unexpectedly. Holmes notices some security cameras and suspicious locks and employees who are watching him. He ends the discussion with abrupt condolences.
Outside, Watson says she spotted all that and they agree Dalit was lying. Holmes thinks it's some sort of smuggling operation, and it's probably full of concealed weapons. Holmes texts Gregson for reinforcements while Watson goes to the home of Manny Rose, the teacher with whom Nicole Watkins was close.
Manny Rose has newspaper clippings of his students on his walls, which shows that he's one of those inspiring inner-school teachers you hear about. He says he helps his students by believing in them and helping them stay alive. Nicole is here, but he recommends against Watson using the words "police" or "testify." Watson knocks on the door to say she's with Marcus, which is what she calls Bell when they want to remind us that he's a person. Nicole is angry at Rose for saying where she was, but he tells her, "Miss Watson found you all by herself." Watson says Bell just wants to make sure she's okay. Nicole doesn't want to testify because she's afraid. And she's pregnant, which is why she doesn't trust police protection.
Holmes receives Watson's text about the situation (about which he has shown no interest at all) and immediately gets a call from Gregson, saying the travel agency was completely cleared out. Holmes says Zirin doesn't exist. He ends the call when his doorbell rings, and Ms. Zirin is there. She says she's Mossad, but Granger wasn't Mossad business: "Let me in and I'll tell you who I think killed him."
Holmes lets her in. Obviously. How do you turn down a line like that? She says she met Barry at Columbia, and she's here because she cares about him. Also because she wants to redirect his prying away from whatever the Mossad was up to, although she assures him that it was nothing the American government would frown on or is aware of. Barry contacted her because he wanted her to locate Adam Peer. He knew she was with the Mossad because they were in a relationship when she was recruited. But she said no. And now that he's dead, she hacked the servers at the journals. She gives Holmes a thumbdrive with the emails. Her unit's being reassigned, and she'd like Holmes to take care of this.
Bell and Watson. Nicole does know who the father of her baby is, and it's her boyfriend. Glad we got that out of the way. And she wants to have a future, which she thinks won't happen if she goes around testifying against the kind of drug dealer who murders people on the street. Bell is surprised that she's staying with Manny Rose, who's famous. He was a history teacher at Rooker High, and he once chased off some goons with a baseball bat. You get the idea. Bell seems impressed that Nicole even knows the famous Manny Rose.
The morning, Holmes is studying the Peer emails. Watson starts to bring up the party, but Holmes cuts her off again to muse about Zirin. This time, Watson calls him on it. He says he's not going to the party. Sherlock points out that it will be in a bar, which would be bad for him. That's not why he doesn't want to go, of course. He's been to bars several times and it never triggered a relapse. He then claims that this party is something for the police, which he is not one. And the injury that sidelined Bell was his fault, so he feels he shouldn't be there at Bell's return.
Holmes has learned that Peer uses "Onion Routing," which uses a series of hosts to encrypt the message so no single layer knows where the message is going. The first time that Peer wrote to a journal to object to a study was the famous Toproxefin case, which Watson conveniently knows all about. It was a painkiller that got rejected because researchers phonied up the results. The manufacturer was Merrill-Grand and they paid a huge fine. At the time, there was a researcher on the Merrill-Grand staff who tried to warn higher-ups, and serial anythings start close to home. So that's the new target.
Holmes and Watson speak to Miss Buckner of Merrill-Grand. She says it wasn't purposeful fraud so much as selective deafness. She was in charge of new projects at the time, and the whistle-blower was Lawrence Cranford, who quit and dropped out of sight. They did consider that he might be Adam Peer, but he was off the grid by the time the letters showed up in journals. And when the drug was killed, they dropped the whole issue. She offers to give them their files on Lawrence Cranford.
Bell is at Rose's. He says a local park looks nicer now. Quame (which I still think is probably "Kwame") Martenz is a bad dude who sells crack and heroin while using kids as runners. There's a baseball bat on the wall, but it's a gift from a kid, rather than being the bat he threatened those goons with. He tells Bell that Nicole will come around. But that's not why Bell came. He wanted to back off and tell Nicole the DA's office will do the best they can without her testimony. Rose says Martenz killed a boy, so Nicole needs to testify. Bell is called away.
Watson comes home with one of those paper targets you shoot at. Holmes says Lawrence Cranford drove to Mexico after quitting, and he eventually died while surfing, so he's eliminated. The target is the one that Bell was shooting at his requalification test. Holmes has a collage of potential Adam Peers, but he's eliminated everyone at the company. Cranford only told "a handful of higher-ups at the company," all of whom rejected his warnings. But his letters suggested that someone tried to do the right thing.
Holmes and Watson ambush Miss Buckner and accuse her of being Adam Peer. She headed a panel on profit margins, but she left it off her resume. And she wanted to stop the drug that Cranford objected to. And she's the one that called off the search for Adam Peer. She says, "You're only half right. Because I'm only half of Adam Peer." The other half was Barry Granger. Adam Peer did not kill Adam Granger.
In the interrogation room, Miss Buckner says the email that Peer sent that alleged problems with the Hound didn't come from them, so someone hijacked their pseudonym. She and Barry originally came up with Adam Peer to expose Toproxefin. Then Barry noticed some duplicate photos in another study, they used the name again and then they started actively looking for things. When Granger died, she didn't want to reveal herself because it wouldn't look good if Adam Peer worked at a rival drug company. Granger wouldn't even come forward when "Peer" first accused him. She does have an alibi for the murder; she was coming off a red-eye from San Francisco with numerous coworkers. Holmes wants to discredit the email from not-Peer.
Holmes and Watson walk to the elevator and throw around some theories. What if the ultimate target wasn't Granger, but the Hound itself? Could it have been corporate espionage to shut down the project, thus giving some competitor an advantage?
Back to Hank Prince. He's surprised that Barry Granger was Adam Peer, even if he wasn't the Adam Peer that sent the letter about the Hound. The Hound did have plenty of competition, and he prepares a list for Holmes and Watson.
Manny Rose is at the police station to talk to Bell. He told Nicole that testifying was the right thing to do, but she left to stay with family upstate. He now wants to testify in her place, because he knows every aspect of her story. He's prepared to perjure himself. Bell is not accepting that for a second, since it's illegal, unethical and it wouldn't even be all that convincing to come forward with a new witness right when the old witness vanished. He thinks Rose has done plenty to help the community, but Rose asks, "How much have I done?" Rooker High is still bad, as is the neighborhood. And Martenz shot that boy. Rose says, "I have poured my life's blood into the neighborhood. Never did anything but the right thing." Bell says he got beaten up when he was twelve, but he didn't end up in any gang and neither did a lot of kids. Because of Rose. He sends Rose home, promising that he'll get Martenz either this time or the .
Brownstone. Holmes is looking at Bell's shooting gallery target. Watson says the most obvious competitors for the Hound are Radner Science. Suddenly, the topic changes! Holmes is considering attending Bell's party: "He deserves to be fêted." I hope you noticed the fancy accent I put in fête. Holmes doesn't want to distract Bell from his celebration and he muses, "Misanthropy was so easy, Watson. Elegant. I miss it sometimes." Gregson calls to say that Hank Prince is at the station. His estranged wife was shot dead a few nights ago with Hank's gun, so he's under arrest.
Interrogation room. Prince insists that he would never hurt his wife. Although Gregson points out that she had a restraining order against him, and she said that he said he wouldn't let her get a dime. Prince's alibi is that he was with Sloan Teller in a cab, but Gregson is skeptical, because his girlfriend was also his alibi for the other murder. Prince thinks he might have a taxi receipt on his counter at home. He thinks someone's trying to frame him. He claims that he'd never be stupid enough to kill his wife with his own gun and then leave it there, which strikes me as a circular argument. If it's something that would make people less likely to suspect him, it's exactly what he would do. He decides he wants a lawyer, which I think is probably a good idea when you've been arrested on suspicion of murder.
Out in the hall, Gregson kind of agrees about the gun. Maybe someone is setting him up after all, so Gregson is sending a team to the house to look for the taxi receipt. So Holmes is going to try to figure out who would try to hurt Hank Prince.
The morning, Holmes opens windows in Watson's bedroom while she's still asleep. He does this sort of thing a lot, and I don't find it amusing. Her bedroom is her place. Plus, I hate when people wake me up. While Watson stays in bed, Holmes delivers the news. The cabbie identified both Sloan and Hank, so Hank's out of custody. Holmes was actually listening when Watson mentioned Radner Science, and he spent the night reading the autobiography of the CEO, Charles "Call me Chuck" Hammond. Radner was a year behind the Hound, so maybe they wanted to slow down their competition. Holmes throws clothes on Watson's bed, and she considers getting up. I think she should consider some sort of laser-based security system to warn her when Holmes is about to barge into her room.
Holmes and Watson confront Hammond at a restaurant, and he just asks, "Are you joking about this?" He denies being in a weird cloak-and-dagger world where you murder people to damage competing companies. If Hank Prince's startup were important, he'd just buy it, because that's what rich people do. He explains, "We put the words Radner Science on the side of his Hound and nobody's happier than me." Satisfied that he's spent enough time talking to the peasants, he returns to breakfast. Holmes announces that Hank Prince is the new suspect.
Hank and his lawyer sit in the police meeting room, looking at chairs across the table. The chairs have pieces of paper with the faces of Hank and Sloan on them. Holmes walks in with a file showing that Price's firm would make him rich if the Hound works. Watson chimes in and they tag-team the explanation. According to them, Prince's original plan was to make the Hound look like a fraud to crash the stock price until after the divorce. Presumably he hoped the initial letter to the journal would do it, but then he had to kill Granger to make it stick. But when the suicide story fell apart, the price rebounded too quickly, so he killed his wife to keep from sharing the money. And he framed himself, possibly because he's seen Witness for the Prosecution and thought that would actually work. The lawyer points out that Sloan and the cab driver confirmed his alibi. Gregson doesn't care about the girlfriend confirming his alibi. Holmes demonstrates that a taxi window just shows the other passenger, a hot blonde that might well draw the attention of a cab driver. They checked her computer and found that she'd been on TrueRomantix.com, looking for guys that look enough like Hank to stand up to a cab driver's vague memory. And when they confronted her, she flipped on Hank.
It's not a bad scheme, but it bothers me that Hank's alibi for the first murder was his girlfriend. If his wife found out about that, weren't her lawyers going to take him to the cleaners? That seems like a sloppy detail for someone who was so determined to cheat her out of money that he was willing to set up that ridiculous helium-based murder.
Bell gets a call at his desk and has to go down to the morgue. Manny Rose is dead. He walked up to Martenz and shot him in the street, which resulted in Rose being shot in return. The morgue attendant (or he might be a doctor. I forget. Sorry about that) asks, "Did you know him?" Bell says, "Only the legend."
That night, Bell's party is in full swing in a bar. He stands on the sidewalk outside, and he doesn't look like he wants to go in. Holmes walks up. Now both of them are outside, not going inside. Holmes jokes about this not being much of a party. Bell says, "I worked my off to get back. Really back." Everyone's expecting him to be happy, but he's had a bad, bad day. Holmes says there's a price for "the work we do." Bell says he isn't ready to go inside, and Holmes says, "Well don't. Not yet." It's interesting to see him being empathetic, and yet entirely in-character. Holmes invites Bell to hang out at the coffee shop across the street, saying, "They'll still be here when you're ready." That's exactly what Bell wanted to hear, so off they go.