Elsbeth Season 2 Episode 12: Foiled Again

Lawrence Grey runs OutMatch, a college-admissions company that has long succeeded at getting entitled rich kids into the Ivy League and only the Ivy League. One of his long-ago clients, Ethan Brooks, has become director of admissions and fencing coach at the pretend-Ivy Baden University, and he is so full of resentment over the life Lawrence pushed him into that he has left Lawrence's congratulatory fruit-and-cheese basket untouched and vows never to admit an OutMatch client. Lawrence learns from his assistant that Baden's early-action decisions were a bloodbath for OutMatch applicants.

Since there are only seven schools in the Ivy League, that closes off a great deal of business.

Lawrence kills Ethan using what he knows about him. Ethan has severe allergy-triggered asthma from cat dander, and it was Lawrence's guidance that steered him toward fencing in the first place, both to ease the asthma and to make his applications stand out. Lawrence challenges Ethan to a fencing match to settle their differences, lines the inside of Ethan's helmet with dander from his own cat, and uses a zip tie so Ethan cannot remove the helmet to reach his inhaler when the attack comes.

He then opens a window and uses catnip from his cat's favourite toy to entice Baden's Instagram-famous Quad Cat into the fencing gym.

The misdirection does not hold. Elsbeth, Kaya and Detective Donnelly learn that Quad Cat is named for having four toes on all of her paws rather than only the back ones, and that she is hypoallergenic, so she could not have triggered the fatal attack; her distinctive paw prints at the scene, along with the absence of ordinary cat paw prints, rule out an unexpected feline encounter. Lawrence, who was working with a client on campus that night and knew exactly what Ethan planned to do to his business, becomes a viable suspect and claims his fluffy cat Veritas died some time ago.

Elsbeth, who is allergic to cats and sneezes around him, stays skeptical.

The case runs alongside Elsbeth's worries about her hands-off parenting of Teddy: whether she should have hired a college-admissions consultant for him, whether he should have gone somewhere more prestigious than the University of Illinois, and whether he failed to launch. She has in fact hired Lawrence for a brief consultation on making her prospective future grandchildren likelier candidates for highly competitive colleges, and their conversations expose him as a snob with a narrow view of what education is for.

When Teddy learns that Captain Wagner helped him land his highly competitive job, he correctly assumes his mother told Wagner about it first and storms out of the party Elsbeth is throwing to celebrate Kaya finishing the last of her required undergraduate courses.

Lawrence's daughter Mandy is in the aimless nineteenth month of a gap year, sceptical of accomplishments for their own sake and of the idea that her parents would take the credit. When Veritas is involved she is extremely motivated, and helping take down her father - who killed Ethan and lied to her about Veritas being dead when the cat was at a no-kill shelter - is the icing on the cake. Roy, whom Teddy had been keeping away from his mother, gives Elsbeth the idea of telling Mandy that Veritas could be alive on a nice farm or in a good shelter.

Teddy then comes to the precinct to apologise, parking Roy in an interrogation room to wait, and Elsbeth and Roy get along well enough to power an 83-minute conversation. With the case closed, Elsbeth hears that Mark Van Ness is being taken to the cleaners in his divorce - and seconds later Judge Crawford pulls up, invites her into his car, and insinuates that the reopened murder case will put Delia under minute scrutiny.

Lawrence's plan depended on a cat being blamed, and it fails on the cat's own biology. Quad Cat is hypoallergenic, so she could not have triggered Ethan's fatal asthma attack, and she has four toes on all four paws; her distinctive prints are at the scene while ordinary cat prints are absent. What killed Ethan was the dander Lawrence put inside his helmet, combined with a zip tie that made the helmet impossible to remove so that the inhaler stayed out of reach.

The last piece is Veritas. Lawrence told everyone, including his daughter, that the cat was dead; Roy's suggestion that Veritas could be alive at a farm or shelter gives Elsbeth the lever on Mandy, who then helps take her father down.

Unresolved inside the episode: Judge Crawford's appearance is left hanging - he insinuates that Elsbeth wriggled out of trouble on the Van Ness case, suggests she has ethics violations, and warns that the reopened murder case will put Delia under minute scrutiny, while Elsbeth wonders why a judge of his experience made so many basic errors. His threat is not answered in this episode.