Elsbeth Season 2 Episode 9: Unalive and Well

Everyone in the precinct elevator is reading the New York View cover story naming Elsbeth as one of the attorneys who suppressed evidence of her former client Mark Van Ness's domestic abuse in his first divorce. Kaya runs after her and urges her to get a retraction, then discovers the reason she cannot: the story is largely true. Elsbeth's answer — that she did the best she could with the information she had at the time — leaves Kaya visibly disgusted and still hopeful.

Wagner sends Kaya, Elsbeth and Detective Smullen to the suspicious death of Cole Campbell, a young driver who appears to have suffered a fatal allergic reaction at the wheel off the Van Wyck Expressway, despite having an EpiPen in his glove compartment. He had been at the Heiwa Zen Center, a wellness retreat charging about $3,000 a day, and he was there under a false name: everyone at Heiwa knew him as Billy, though owner and retreat leader Tom called him Cole and claimed to have seen through the ruse immediately. Cole's sister June died at the retreat 15 years earlier.

June's former retreat partner and Cole's lawyer fill in the history. June was among the earliest attendees and put enormous faith in Tom's talk of natural treatments from Asia and the Amazon. When her infected gallstone worsened, Tom performed a Combo ceremony instead of sending her to the hospital, and the delay killed her. The Campbells settled privately, on the condition that Combo — what attendees call "seeing Midori" — never be administered again, with a further $2 million due if it ever was.

Cole had gone undercover to prove Tom was still doing it, and his last two calls were to a diagnostic lab and to his attorney, saying he now had all the information he needed.

Elsbeth volunteers to stay at the retreat to keep the investigation going, and she genuinely enjoys it: guided meditations, seed cycling, high-end juices, natural-fiber pajamas. She also bonds with Sheryl, Cole's former journey partner, who tells her by the campfire that her throat chakra seems blocked — at which point Elsbeth confesses the investigation, and then the thing underneath it, that she is angry and embarrassed all the time, that she made a fortune working for terrible people, that she has harmed people and cannot work out how to ask her friends for help.

Sheryl's answer is blunt: be transparently honest with the people who care about you, because hypercompetence is its own prison.

Back at the precinct, Smullen and Kaya report to Wagner and Connor: Combo did not kill Cole. He died of anaphylaxis from exposure to sesame oil. Tom also hired a private ambulance company after June's death, concealing more than a dozen medical emergencies at Heiwa, and rewrote the participant waivers to bar lawsuits. Connor, who despises the whole operation, notes that the kanji on Heiwa's website means "emptiness," not "peace.

" Elsbeth, meanwhile, is in radical unplugging and cannot be reached — and she passes out in the 104-degree hothouse after glimpsing Midori, the tree frog whose venom is the Combo. Staffer Starlight finds her and promises a B12 shot, because Tom is the only person with access to hypodermic needles.

That is the last piece. To keep from paying the $2 million penalty that Combo in Cole's system would have triggered, Tom injected mustard seed oil — in the same family as sesame — into the illicit snacks Cole kept in his car. Confronted in front of the retreat participants, he loses even Starlight, who refuses to call his lawyer and offers instead to send him positive energy in jail.

Kaya is not ready to say she is fine with the Van Ness history, but she agrees to help if Elsbeth comes clean about every detail she can legally share. Unknown to them, Wagner has already done his part, urging Captain Kershaw to reopen the baseball-bat murder that made Judge Crawford Elsbeth's enemy: no Red Sox fan worthy of the name would own a Yankees bat, Andy deserves justice, and leaving the case unsolved is bad for Homicide's statistics.

Cole did not die of Combo. The autopsy shows anaphylaxis from exposure to sesame oil, which is the detail that reframes the whole case: Tom did not need a venom to kill him, he needed a trigger that would look like an accident. Cole had spent his stay demanding the banned ceremony to prove Tom was still administering it, and had just told his lawyer and a diagnostic lab that he had everything he needed. If Combo had shown up in his toxicology, Tom owed the Campbells another $2 million under the settlement June's death produced.

The mechanism is the needles. Elsbeth learns, after collapsing in the hothouse where the tree frog Midori lives, that Tom is the only person at Heiwa with access to hypodermic needles — and mustard seed oil, which sits in the same family as sesame, injected into the illicit snacks Cole kept in his car is enough to kill a man with an EpiPen in the glove box. Tom has also been hiding the pattern: a private ambulance company retained after June's death, more than a dozen medical emergencies never reported, and rewritten waivers barring participants from suing.

Confronted in front of the retreat, he loses even his truest believer: Starlight refuses to call his lawyer and offers to send him positive energy in jail. The personal threads close more quietly. Kaya tells Elsbeth she is not ready to be fine with the Van Ness history but will help if Elsbeth tells her everything she legally can, and Wagner, unknown to both of them, has already asked Captain Kershaw to reopen the baseball-bat murder that put Judge Crawford in Elsbeth's way.