The Mysteries of Laura Episode 1.17 The Mystery of the Intoxicated Intern

Blindfolded and hands bound, a young woman kneels in a circle of candles, surrounded by five masked figures. The figures make a dramatic exit, leaving the girl alone in an abandoned warehouse. Desperate to escape, she wiggles her hands free, pulls the covering off her face, stands up... and suddenly drops dead.

Laura rushes her twins off to school with Alicia and gets right down to business... boyfriend business that is. She whips off her old robe, trades her slippers in for some heels, rubs a magazine perfume sample all over herself and voilà - she's ready for her 8 a.m. date with Tony. Her man arrives with food, of course, but considering they haven't seen each other in two weeks, breakfast can wait. They can't keep their hands off each other, and just as they are about to take it upstairs... Alicia barges back into the house. Awkward. Once she leaves again, Tony and Laura pick up right where they left off, ignoring Laura's ringing cell phone. Moments later, Alicia interrupts once again, this time to announce Billy's on the phone. Frustrated, Laura snatches the phone from Alicia and tells her partner that unless it's about a dead body, she's going to have to call him back. It's about a dead body...

... an 18-year-old's dead body, specifically, known as Jane Doe, for now. Laura meets Billy and Reynaldo at a "cult-y" Soho warehouse and they fill her in. Cause of death is unknown, but it seems to be internal, since there are no gun, knife or rope wounds on the body. But the words "cellulite" and "hairy legs" are Magic-Markered on the body, with a circle around Jane Doe's boot-shaped birthmark. Laura takes a closer look at the crime scene: body-shaming, Pottery Barn candles, Ugg boot prints - this isn't the work of a cult, it's a sorority. Looks like a case of hazing gone bad. There's a chalk-drawn Omega symbol on the ground and a train ticket to Brookville in Jane Doe's shoe. Meredith and Frankie, a former sorority girl herself, head to Syosett University in Brookville and arrive at the Omega Delta Kappa sorority house, where they find a bunch of "Ugg enthusiasts" cleaning the house with bras in their mouths. Feeling like a foreigner, Meredith enters with Frankie right behind her and meets the Pledgemaster, Sloane, and another sorority sister, Maya. The detectives show them a picture from the crime scene, and the girls are shocked to see Jane Doe, whom they know as Caroline Adams. Before Sloane and Maya can divulge any information, their alumni advisor, Michelle Kelly, interrupts, shutting down any talk pertaining to hazing and demanding the detectives leave if they don't have a warrant. She seems more concerned with the sorority's reputation than the dead pledge. Just when Meredith can't hold in her anger anymore, Frankie offers her condolences and leaves the house. Meredith thinks Frankie's soft for backing down, but the softie's smart. Within seconds, Maya runs out of the house, wanting to talk.

At the precinct, Laura sits with Maya, who shares a little more about Caroline. She was sweet, pretty, smart - she even had an internship at an Internet start-up company. Maya is hesitant to talk about last night, but finally spills: it was Fright Night Mission, the final step before initiation. The sisters get a pledge drunk and drop her somewhere random, leaving her to get back with no money or phone. Usually it's somewhere close to campus, but Sloane was harder on Caroline than on any other pledge, so she decided to leave Caroline in the city - which is why Maya left Caroline the train ticket, just in case. Caroline was a legacy - her mom was also an Omega - so Sloane couldn't kick her out. Instead, she needed to make Caroline quit. Or worse...

Laura's certain the Omegas are responsible for Caroline's death. After all, healthy 18-year-olds don't just drop dead. The only odd thing in Caroline's medical records is an allergy to oak trees. Cause of death is listed as a catastrophic drop in blood pressure, which is consistent with alcohol poisoning. But Caroline's blood alcohol level was only a 1.2 - not high enough to kill her, unless she was on something stronger. While Reynaldo runs a Level 2 tox screen, Max looks through Sloane's texts and finds some not-so-sisterly messages about Caroline: "I swear that bitch will never be an Omega," "Caroline will quit if I have to punt the cow myself," "Caroline is filth. Do I have to handle this?" Except Sloane didn't send them, she received them. From none other than her advisor, Michelle. Meredith and Frankie return to the Omega house - just in time for initiation - to arrest Michelle and bring her to the station. During interrogation, Michelle refuses to drop the grown-up mean girl act until Laura brings up the fact that Caroline's mom was Michelle's Pledgemaster back in the day, and she treated Michelle like crap. So did Michelle decide to take revenge on Caroline? Michelle insists she did not drug Caroline, but Laura's not convinced.

Meanwhile, Tony stops by Laura's house to talk to Alicia. After buttering her up, he asks if she can babysit the twins this weekend so he can take Laura to the Berkshires for some alone time. She agrees, and he asks for one more favor: keep it a secret! So of course, Alicia calls Laura right away and gives her a heads-up so Laura has time to get a Sicilian wax and do Kegels. Laura gets back to work, and Frankie has an update: Caroline had high levels of Nymexus in her system, a blood pressure medicine that turns deadly when mixed with alcohol. It doesn't seem like Caroline voluntarily took the medicine, considering her final tweet was "Mission tonight. #SorryLiver." Anyone who saw her tweet knew she was planning to drink, so all the killer had to do was slip Caroline the drug and let time do the rest of the work. The tox report indicates Caroline took the Nymexus between 10 a.m. and noon, which is when she was downtown at her internship at Palster, the biggest tech start-up in New York, which hooks up potential friends based on a compatibility score.

Laura and in-house nerd, Meredith, check out Palster, which turns out to be the hippest office ever, with Millennials goofing around and having fun all over the place. These tech geniuses have everything at their fingertips: laundry service, car service, on-site yoga and even daily gourmet coffee delivery. They meet the co-founders of the company, super neat, charismatic Clay Bergman and geeky, unorganized Harry Rice, who both look young enough to be college students themselves. They appear to be polar opposites, but they have a 96% compatibility rating - the highest ever. The CEOs seem saddened by Caroline's death, but don't have much information, since they were in Boston for a road show for their impending IPO. Laura asks for a list everyone who was in the building yesterday and an introduction to Caroline's co-workers. In comes Linda, who runs the internship program and sat directly next to Caroline. Meredith retrieves Caroline's cup from the trash and keeps it as evidence. Linda raves about Caroline, "I wish I had been as cute, smart and popular at her age," but claims Caroline and her fellow intern, Ben Lee, argued about an app they were developing together, "Dog-gone Right," like Uber for pets. If Ben sold the app at Tech Fest and Caroline wasn't in the picture, Ben wouldn't have to share the money. Laura goes undercover as an investor and attends Tech Fest to find Ben. As soon as a young man starts talking about a transportation app for dogs, she knows she's found her guy. She flashes her badge, and Ben bolts. Billy chases him, but Ben's quick. No one's quicker than Laura, though, who tips over a janitor's bucket and spills water all over the floor. Ben slips, and Billy cuffs him.

During the interrogation at the precinct, Ben's reluctant to talk... until Jake mentions he could be facing life in prison. "For a basketball game," Ben asks, bewildered. "That seems a bit dramatic." Ben elaborates: on Sunday night, he hacked into Madison Square Garden's computer system and slowed the game clock so the Knicks had more time to score. They lost regardless. Jake commends Ben on his confession, but tells him they brought him here because he murdered Caroline. Now Ben is really shocked - Caroline was his friend, why would he ever kill her? Yes, they argued, but that's part of the creative process! Caroline was helping with Ben's app; she even wrote to Silicon Hallie, an anonymous tech blogger, to put Ben on her radar. Besides, Caroline definitely didn't need Ben's money; she already had a six-figure job offer at Google.

The team reads Silicon Hallie's blog for themselves, which turns out to be not totally tech-related. She also keeps an online diary of her steamy affair with a married CEO - "Lingering at my thighs, he told me he loved my birthmark. I always hated that little boot - 'til now." Wait - Caroline had a boot-shaped birthmark! Caroline didn't write to Silicon Hallie, she was Silicon Hallie. And Clay Bergman, one of Palster's CEOs, is married. Clay can't be the murderer, because he and Harry were in Boston, but his suspicious wife, Jessica Bergman, visited the office that day. Next stop: rich wife central, better known as spin class. Laura arrives at a fancy gym and chooses the stationary bike right next to Jessica, who happens to be a doctor and is definitely aware of the dangers of mixing blood pressure medicine and alcohol. Undercover Laura mentions she just caught her husband cheating on her, and Jessica sympathizes, saying she recently went through the same thing, but she took care of it "for good." That's enough for Laura to flash her badge, arrest Jessica and bring her in.

In the interrogation room, Laura lays it all out: Just as Clay is about to become a billionaire, he starts sleeping with his intern, and thanks to their prenup, Jessica would get nothing if he left her - which is why she killed Caroline. But Jessica insists she's innocent. Clay ended the affair - in fact, he even terminated the prenup to show his commitment to his marriage. Jessica reads over Silicon Hallie's blog entries and claims they're fictional stories. Clay was with Jessica, not Caroline, on New Year's Eve. Why would Caroline make up stuff if the blog was anonymous? After forensics uses plagiarism detection software to compare the blog entries to Caroline's emails, it's clear Caroline wasn't the voice behind Silicon Hallie at all. But if the writer wasn't Caroline herself, it had to be someone who knows almost everything about her. Suddenly, Laura's famous gut starts tingling - Linda, the intern coordinator! She had only overly flattering things to say about Caroline, and she did point the detectives toward Ben.

Meredith and Frankie go to Palster, only to discover Linda's already cleared her computer's memory and fled to Grand Central Station. Billy and Laura race to the station, but there are trains leaving every minute... Billy has an idea: intern Ben can hack into Grand Central's system from the precinct and stop all the trains from leaving. Jake promises if he succeeds, they'll forget about the Knicks incident. Ben clears the train station's schedule effortlessly, but Laura and Billy only have five minutes before the backup system kicks in. How will they ever know where Linda's headed in time? Laura remembers a framed Bills ticket stub on Linda's desk, and "nobody in the universe roots for the Bills unless they're somehow connected to Buffalo." They rush to Track 5, where Linda's already sitting on the train. It looks like there's been a change in her itinerary... Billy cuffs her and the only place she's going now is to jail.

Linda may have wiped her work computer, but she didn't get to her laptop before the detectives. Just as they suspected, she's been posting as Silicon Hallie. Linda tries to explain: she and Caroline became close friends right away, and Caroline shared every little detail about her affair with Clay. They were perfect together, a 98% match. Fascinated by Caroline's stories, Linda blogged about them and it became addicting. But once Caroline figured out the blogs were about her, she cut Linda out of her life. Which is why the initial posts were accurate, and the recent ones were not. So did Linda kill Caroline in order to keep Silicon Hallie's identity a secret? Completely defensive, Linda insists she could never murder Caroline, and the only reason she was trying to skip town was because she thought she would be in danger once the blog was connected to Caroline's death. Linda also tells the detectives that Caroline turned down the job offer at Google the day before she died. Turning down the job of a lifetime seems completely irrational, and what's more irrational than anything else? Love. Maybe Clay wanted to get rid of Caroline, so he hooked her up with the Google job, but Carolina was so in love with him, she turned it down, which meant he had to take more extreme measures to remove her. It's not a foolproof theory, since Clay and Harry were in Boston, but Laura's determined to fill in the missing pieces.

Laura, Frankie and Meredith return to the swanky start-up, just in time for the company's pre-IPO party. Clay and Harry both seem wasted, which is a little insensitive, considering one of their employees just died. The detectives pull Clay to the side, who reassures them Caroline's death "has touched the entire Palster family." Family? Interesting way to refer to your mistress. Clay admits he and Caroline were extremely compatible, but they mutually decided they were best as colleagues. He adds she was brilliant, "I wanted all her ideas for Palster," and he definitely wasn't trying to ship her off to California. So maybe someone else with close ties to Google was? A jealous partner, perhaps? Laura glances over at Harry, who's stumbling all over the place. She takes a sip of Harry's drink and notices it's all puree, no tequila. Harry is only pretending to be drunk, maybe because he takes a medicine that's lethal when mixed with alcohol... like Nymexus.

Harry seems like the strongest suspect yet, but there's still that Boston trip in the way. As always, Laura has a plan. While she confirms with the Google HR lady that Harry did indeed land the job for Caroline, Meredith and Frankie bring Harry to his office. Committed to pretending he's drunk, Harry stumbles in, but Laura tells him to drop the act. She knows he felt threatened by Caroline, so he'd stop at nothing to make her disappear. He scoffs at the idea - he and Clay are a near perfect match - but once again, Laura calls his bluff. Their compatibility is a con. In reality, Clay was already choosing Caroline's ideas over Harry's, and it was freaking Harry out. Harry read Caroline's Twitter feed, knew she was going to be drinking and slipped some Nymexus tablets into her coffee when he stopped at the café on his way to the airport. Gourmet coffee delivery - one of Palster's many perks. Laura even has a barista on FaceTime who confirms Harry came in around 8 a.m. to check the whole order. The team returns to the Second Precinct, happy to finally be free of Palster. But the company did get one thing right... Billy and Meredith are a 96% match. They're going to be friends forever! Yay, friends, just friends... just what Meredith wants. Not.

Later that night, Laura sits in her kitchen, frustrated - in seven hours she has to return to work. Stupid Jake, putting her on the weekend shift when he knew she had plans with Tony. Suddenly, there's a knock on the door. Speak of the devil - Tony's at her door with champagne to celebrate her closed case. But Laura doesn't really feel like celebrating: between their busy schedules and Jake, when will they ever find the perfect moment to be together? Tony shuts her up with a kiss; right now seems like the perfect moment to him. They head upstairs to her room. Who needs the Berkshires when you have an empty house?