- During a visit to a hospital's morgue to do some experiments, Holmes deduces that a terminally ill patient has been murdered. Is this an isolated incident or is there an "Angel of Death" operating in the hospital?
- Holmes is intrigued by the high mortality rate at a hospital. So he goes there and discovers that several patients who died may have been euthanised. So he and Watson investigate and discover that someone is killing anyone who might be terminal and/or in great pain. But they discover that one of them doesn't fit the mold. So they assume the killer is escalating. And Watson runs into a doctor she worked with and notices that doctor could be making a mistake.—rcs0411@yahoo.com
- During 'routine' morgue research, Sherlock discovers that several corpses are the victims of a serial killer who cleverly disguises his murders as euthanasia by poison. Captain Toby Gregson once more saves Holmes' bacon after his clumsy crude methods. Watson's surgical expertise comes in handy but encountering a former colleague sets her to thinking.—KGF Vissers
- "Elementary" - "Lesser Evils" - Nov. 1, 2012
Holmes is choking a man. The twist of course is that he's already dead. As is his wont Holmes is hanging out in the morgue in a hospital doing research on dead people who donated their bodies to science. Watson is also hanging out but not so comfortable. Holmes surmises that it's not the dead people per se but being back in the hospital setting. She says she's fine but they better motor if they want to get to an exhibit at the Met that they're attending.
Holmes is good to go until he notices something on one of the bodies. A small mark on the thumb leads him to conclude that the man died of murder, not cardiac arrest. He posits that someone gave him epinephrine which mimicked a heart attack. Watson tries to protest but puts the clues together herself with her doctor brain and concurs. The man died that day so they head to his room to check out any evidence that might be there. A janitor is inside cleaning up. Holmes unceremoniously kicks him out and bars the door so he can look for clues. He finds an important one. Lipstick on one of the two coffee cups in the room, which means the dead man had a visitor.
Before they can follow up they're hauled into the hospital administrator's office with Gregson who wants Holmes to apologize. If he does the hospital will cooperate with the investigation. They meet the head of surgery Dr. Baldwin during this exchange-- a big, handsome dude-- who clearly doesn't like the puny little cranky admin guy. They also run into an old colleague of Watson's, a doctor named Carrie who wonders if Watson is applying for a position at the hospital. Watson explains she's out of medicine. Carrie says she thought her suspension was only a few months. Watson says it was but she's pursuing other stuff now.
Free of the hospital Holmes and Watson trace the cup back to the coffee shop where the pervy barista remembers the hot blonde-- and also hits on Watson. They track the blonde down at her job in a fancy cosmetics store and she explains the dead man was a neighbor who was terminally ill that she was kind to in the final months of his life, talking to him and reading to him since he'd lost his sight. She has an alibi but says she did once hear a doctor tallking to him late at night.
They leave and Holmes posits the theory that the hospital has an "angel of mercy," someone killing terminally ill patients.
They go to Dr. Baldwin who says he will help pressure the administrator into giving Holmes the records he needs to continue to investigate this theory.
Holmes and Watson narrow it down to 9 victims out of 73 cardiac arrests. They have 23 suspects who had access to the patients.
Watson goes to talk to her friend Carrie for help while Holmes does the interviews.
At the hospital Holmes apologizes to the janitor in the elevator for kicking him out of the room. The janitor says no problem but then hits every button on the elevator before he gets out.
Sherlock goes to talk to Dr. Baldwin as his first suspect because 3 of the 9 patients were his. Holmes has also uncovered that Baldwin is on probation and one strike away from getting canned because even though he is brilliant and good he takes on risky maneuvers and patients. In addition to an alibi for the most recent murder Baldwin also points out that his favorite kind of patient is the unconscious kind and he's not really interested in whether they're suffering or not. In other word he's too indifferent to be the angel of death.
Watson's friend gets an emergency call while she's with her and asks her to come along for the ride. The patient is a 12 year old soccer player with a torn ACL. Watson notices funky markings on her toes and thinks it's endocarditis and asks Carrie to run some tests before surgery because if she's right, surgery could be dangerous.
Holmes and Detective Bell conduct interviews including one with a jumpy surgical resident. Bell tries the soft touch but Holmes undermines him and lets the guy go, deducing he's not their killer.
Holmes and Watson debrief and he admits he has no leads. Holmes also points out that Watson let him believe that she was no longer a doctor and she clearly had some issue with her friend. Watson says she let her license expire and she lost touch with hospital friends when she lost her patient. Carrie texts that the soccer patient is fine but Watson is still unsure. Holmes tells her not to accept this, and to go with her gut. He then notices the car of the jumpy surgical resident still in the parking lot after he'd complained in his interview that he'd been working round the clock and just wanted to go home.
In the hospital, the jumpy resident grabs a syringe and enters a patient's room. He's not their guy though. Turns out he's been stealing morphine. Even still, they catch him in the act which is good. But Holmes is mad that he didn't realize the guy was an addict.
As they go over more hospital records Watson notices that one victim wasn't terminal, a young female patient. Gregson calls and says the druggie doctor is talking and offering to help. At the precinct he explains that one night when he was stealing drugs from a patient a doctor came and he hid in the bathroom. He overheard the doctor talking to a terminal patient. Holmes goes to investigate again.
Watson goes to her friend Carrie again to ask for more tests for soccer girl. Carrie says she's overstepping and she and Watson fight about it.
They notice one of the victims was not a native English speaker and was in fact Ukrainian and likely needed to be spoken to in that language. No doctors at the hospital speak it but someone does: the janitor. It turns out he was a doctor in the Ukraine. After being confronted with the evidence, he confesses saying "I freed them." He maintains, however, that the woman that Holmes is saying wasn't terminal in fact was, that she had cancer. They walk out and Gregson congratulates him on his good work. Holmes is bothered though, he thinks the janitor is telling the truth about the woman.
At home Holmes looks over the janitor's very meticulous notes.
Watson's friend Carrie shows up. It turns out Watson was right, the girl had endocarditis. And how did they find this out? It turns out that SOMEONE ordered a test on the girl's chart. That someone was not Carrie. Watson feebly points out that one of their old professors said it was better to be lucky than good and that Carrie was lucky. Still, Carrie is mad. Watson says she knows what it's like not to be lucky. Carrie says that Watson was a good friend but a better doctor and leaves. Holmes compliments Watson on her catch.
The next day they bring Dr. Baldwin back to the station. They say they've discovered that someone else knew about the angel of mercy and that someone is him. They lay out the evidence: Baldwin left a clamp in the dead woman's chest. This would've been his third strike. So he conspired to make her a target for the angel by falsely claiming she had cancer on her chart and turning down her pain medication to make her feel the pain that the angel was attracted to stopping. After she died, he took the cancer results out of her charts. The only problem is the janitor, in order to take his meticulous notes, took pictures of the charts and they have Baldwin's signature on the doctored charts. Busted.
At home Holmes tells Watson that he liked seeing her in her former element and that Carrie was right, she was a good doctor. Watson concedes that she had her moments. He wonders if she thinks she might give it a go again. Unlikely. She heads up to her bedroom and looks at photos of her friends and colleagues in the hospital during her doctor days... and deletes them from her computer.
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