The Mysteries of Laura Episode 1.11 The Mystery of the Frozen Foodie

Everyone's gathered at Calligan's for team bonding night, which entails an extremely competitive game of darts. It's Jake and Billy vs. Laura and Meredith. At stake: the losers will be the winners' "bitches" for a week. But Laura has a plan: Max has been watering down her drinks all night... or has he?

The next morning, a frozen corpse is discovered at a waste transfer station, and the only thing a very hungover Laura has going for her is winning last night's darts game. It turns out the guy was frozen after he died, cause of death: carbon dioxide poisoning. And all he has on his person is a distinctive lighter. Max comes up with a hit off a fingerprint on the lighter belonging to blue-haired bad girl Salina Barnes, who has a rap sheet for petty theft and is at her Sexaholics Anonymous meeting right now. Salina identifies the frozen dead guy as fellow sexaholic and chef Peter Hill, who worked at a trendy restaurant named Allemande, owned by high-strung chef J.T. Thompson and his wife Carmen. J.T. seems none too bothered that Peter's body may have been picked up with the restaurant garbage last night, since he's dealing with a broken freezer and has taken delivery of 200 pounds of dry ice. Laura points out that dry ice is frozen carbon dioxide and investigation of the walk-in freezer indicates scratch marks on the inside; someone must have locked Peter inside. Laura immediately closes the restaurant - it's now a crime scene. When she discovers one of the line cooks, Tony Abbott, never clocked out last night, she orders J.T. to find him.

Luckily, Max is able to triangulate a location on Tony, who spies Laura's Volvo and takes off in his food truck. Using some deft maneuvers, Laura forces Tony to the curb, and is surprised to discover that he's pretty damn sexy. Tony has a credible alibi: he left work early to drive the food truck to a Brooklyn club and Peter offered to clock out for him. Tony rushes off to work at Allemande, then shows up at the precinct to apologize to Laura with a fancy raspberry tart. Meredith interrupts to report her findings after interviewing Allemande's staff: the only person who had a bad relationship with Peter was J.T. They had an argument about tablecloths last night - red ones - and red fibers were found all over Peter's clothes. Oddly, when Meredith was leaving Allemande, J.T. was prepping a bag of laundry, which to Laura, seems way below his pay grade, a fact Tony confirms. Billy and Meredith rush to the laundry and it's not long before Jake and Billy are interrogating J.T. One of the tablecloths is covered in Peter's DNA... J.T. admits Peter was dead when he found him locked in the freezer in the morning, and yes, he put him in the trash. So why didn't he call the cops? J.T. claims he was merely protecting his restaurant's reputation. However he does recall that Peter had a stormy relationship with a woman - a woman with bright blue hair.

Laura has to admit, she likes J.T.'s wife Carmen, who insists he didn't kill Peter, since he was at home asleep with her when Peter died. Just as the couple heads out, Laura gets a text from Tony, who offers to cook dinner - an actual date! Meanwhile, Billy and Meredith head to the public library to question Salina, who was dating Peter - until he got too obsessive and she broke it off. Billy theorizes that Peter may have become obsessed with someone new, so Laura subpoenas his phone records.

That night, sexy chef Tony hand cranks pasta while Laura pours the wine. His recipe has a secret aphrodisiacal ingredient: ghost pepper extract. An amazing meal is followed by heavy flirtation and finished off with an intensely deep kiss - which is interrupted by Jake, who was hoping to have a date night of his own. When Laura lays into Jake for ruining her first pre-divorce date, Tony politely retreats. Laura's furious that Jake used his emergency key at 10:00 p.m., but Jake explains they got a break in the case and he went all the way to the Bronx to pick up her favorite pizza. Besides, he thought that all the attention he'd been languishing on her after losing the darts bet was paying off. As if talking to a small child, Laura tells Jake that if he's interested in fixing their relationship, he might want to ask himself why she decided to become a single mother... then it's on to business. Peter's phone records include several calls to Trent Hawthorn, a major Long Island pot grower. Could Peter have found a way to finance the dream of opening his own restaurant with drugs? Billy and Meredith coordinate a raid on the pot farm in the morning, but they've got it all wrong. After serving up some healthy treats, Trent explains he traded in his pot business for organic farming last year. He was going into business with Peter until the chef pulled out a couple of weeks prior and returned Trent's $100,000 investment - which makes no sense to Billy, since Peter never had more than $3,000 in his bank account.

After some legwork, Max tells Laura that Peter kept a separate bank account under a business name. Also, award-winning restaurant critic Judith Hanson was paying Peter $500 a week to eat at the restaurant she was about to review. Could Judith have lost her sense of taste? Laura sends Max and Meredith to find Judith at Rocco DiSpirito's new restaurant with a plan to test her taste buds. Max drops a ton of ghost pepper extract into her dish and when there's no reaction, Meredith pulls out her cuffs. Back at the station, Judith admits that when Peter discovered she had lost her ability to taste, she hired him to help save her career. He also told her that he found the perfect place for his restaurant, at the corner of Houston and MacDougal. But the landlord tells Billy and Meredith that Peter leased a different unit - a one-bedroom apartment that includes a furnished nursery. Peter said he and his girlfriend were expecting their first child. Billy sends Laura to follow up with Tony, who claims Peter never mentioned anything about a girlfriend or a baby. Things heat up when Tony gives Laura an amazing slice of cake, mentioning in passing that Carmen switched from fresh to pasteurized eggs - which prompts Laura's eyes to widen. She shuts down the make-out session... for now.

Laura bursts into Allemande's kitchen in the middle of service. Carmen's pregnant, she's got all the signs - not drinking, swollen feet and she stopped dying her hair - that's why she switched from fresh to pasteurized eggs! Carmen admits to having an affair with Peter, which was going great until Peter got obsessed, insisting she should just walk away from J.T. He was threatening to tell J.T. everything, so that's why Carmen locked him in the freezer and watched him suffocate. After Carmen's hauled off in cuffs, Laura stops by the food truck to thank Tony for helping her break the case. Still working the bet, Meredith grabs Billy - they're going to celebrate by painting her kitchen and binge watching Downtown Abbey - even though Laura called the whole thing off. Jake intercepts Laura and her cake to return her house key. She's right; there are no quick fixes for their relationship, and she deserves some privacy until he can convince her to give him another chance.