I loved the point-of-view shot that began this episode. Was I the only one who felt as if I was the girl coming out of the elevator? The blurred vision, the stumbling around, and the bloody hand reaching out to ring the bell in the hotel lobby felt real to me.
Anyway, our mystery girl is Brooke Hollworth. As she collapses and says “Please Help Us,” I’m think one of to things: 1) She is completely delusional and has suffered a concussion, causing her to be unaware of what she is actually saying, or 2) There is a second victim we are unaware of. Turns out number 2 was the correct assumption. Flack and Stella notice blood drops leading out from the elevator so they decide to take the elevator up to each floor until they figure out where the trail originated from. They are lead to a room where they find a man laying dead on the floor covered in blood. Next to him is a bed with a pile of money on it. You know what this means – this was definitely NOT a robbery gone bad! They notice the door was obviously forced open and also find a ski mask that was left in the room and is presumed to belong to our killer.
Back at lab, Hawkes determines that our male victim was a street dancer due to the various injuries on his body – injuries that are inconsistent with his cause of death. He also does not find a bullet in the wound that killed him. Instead, he finds some sort of metallic powder that he sends to the lab for testing. After further investigating Hawkes’ assumption that our victim was a street dancer, we learn that his name was Jesse Lewis and he had recently won $10,000 in a dance competition. That sure explains the load of money on the bed in his hotel room. Flack and Mac decide to go to a competition and talk to the guy who placed second to Jesse in the competition, figuring he had a very good motive for murder. The guy admits that he wasn’t a fan of Jesse, but insists he didn’t kill him. He was merely upset because he claims Jesse stole one his moves that was sure to win him the competition. Flack isn’t really buying the guy’s story and arrests him.
Stella heads to the hospital to check on Brooke. When she gets there, a man named Nick Emerson is there sitting with her. Stella tells Brooke that they have a man in custody that they believe may have been responsible for Jesse’s death and her attack. Because they found the ski mask in the room, they believe that Brooke may have gotten a look at the face of the guy who did it. They bring the man in but Brooke cannot remember at all. She is suffering from a stage 5 concussion, which makes remembering anything nearly impossible at that point. Danny and Flack learn that Jesse had been robbed not too long ago by a man named Al Santiago. They decide to pay Santiago a visit and bring him in for questioning. While interrogating him, we learn that the reason he was never arrested for the burglary was because Jesse couldn’t give a positive identification of Santiago.
The results from the test Hawkes ran on the mysterious metallic powder found in the victim’s wound lead Mac to a weapons facility firing range in Brooklyn. The powder is actually simulated ammunition – ammunition that is used for training law enforcement. Mac heads to this location and learns that Jesse was actually a student in one of the classes that is taught using the same simulated ammunition he was killed with. They decide to question Nick Emerson, the guy who was at the hospital with Brooke, hoping that he will be able to help them trace Jesse’s steps the night he was murdered. Nick tells them of how the three of them (him, Jesse, and Brooke) were so excited about Jesse’s win at the competition that they went to the hotel to celebrate. When Stella takes Brooke back to the crime scene to try to remember more of what happened, Brooke can’t remember much about her attacker but does know for a fact that Nick did not come back to the hotel room with them that night.
Further DNA testing shows that the hair on the ski mask and the fingerprint on a vase in room both matched that of Nick Emerson. It doesn’t take long before Nick admits to killing Jesse. The twist is that he swear Jesse asked him to do it. Turns out that when Jesse was robbed the first time by Santiago, Brooke was with him. Jesse was unable to protect her from being groped by Santiago and felt terrible about it. He asked Nick to stage a second robbery so that he could redeem himself and properly save Brooke. He had stolen some of the simulated ammunition from one of his classes and gave it to Nick. The problem is that Nick held the gun so close to Jesse that the simulated ammunition is what actually ended up killing him. Brooke can’t believe Jesse would do something that extreme to protect her. In order to make sure Jesse did not die in vain, she makes a positive identification of Al Santiago as the guy who robbed them the first time and he is put in jail.
