Hong Kong light show.
Madeleine Stowe returns as Raines’ therapist and tries to make sense of what he tells her. Laurie Metcalf from Roseanne guest stars as the bag lady, who is this week’s victim.
From a seemingly innocuous crime, Raines unravels a financial scheme designed to work through insider trading to profit people.
Warning: Spoilers ahead.
//***************Spoilers*Ahead***************************
Raines is having problem sleeping because he is thinking too much about things and the past.
Sleep eludes him.
They say that if you go without sleep long enough, you will die.
Raines to himself.
The victim is a bag lady, shot in an alley not too far from the beach.
Raines is making the rounds around the homeless shelters. The managers tells him about the relationship the vic had with Mickey Rousseau, sounds like a co-dependent one. Anyways, he gets violent when he’s drunk and he’s drunk most of the time.
Thanks to a tip of a homeless guy, Raines finds out the vic’s name; Alice Prody. She worked at a motel cleaning it up 2 years ago. Looking through the records, Raines finds that the vic was a friend of Sal Martinez, the owner of an auto-body shop down the street.
Sal Martinez used to see her for sex and a good time, this was a few years ago. He saw her last week when she wanted to apply for social security insurance. But they said that she didn’t apply because she had some money in a bank account.
The bag lady went to see the bank, but they just dismissed her because she didn’t have a PIN number or the bank account number; they thought that she was trying to rip them off. The manager says that he thought that she was doing some low tech identity theft.
But Raines wonders who stole whose identity.
At the apartment of the person masquerading as Alice Brody, he finds letters from an investment company, so they subpoena the records.
He goes to his therapist and she makes him imagine her in front of him.
They find Mickey Rousseau and they ask him a few questions. He has been off the street for 2 years. Raines learns that her family died in a car crash.
Thanks to Officer Carolyn’s womanly attributes, they get the information on the stock market accounts very quickly. It turns out that the operations of the account were all in micro-capital companies; buying 500-800 shares of stock in small companies and selling them the next day. This account was special, because they were making money each time.
The manager of the company remembers that he received phone calls about all of these companies after some of his clients watched the same TV show of Mick Treger. It turns out that the account was making money because they were buying the stocks before Treger made his recommendations on this TV show. It is what they call the Treger bounce, shares of the companies that he singles out go up a little every time.
The TV show presenter used to run a large investment firm and left after rumors of insider trading surfaced. This leads him to find Jason Kitman, a graphic artist at the show who also receives the list of companies that Treger will recommend.
Kitman is living large, larger than the means of his employment. He says that he inherited some money.
A deputy is flying in to identify Alice. Raines finds out that the deputy is actually her son and that there was no accident; Alice deserted her family.
Raines gets word that Kitman is trying to leave town, but a search of his apartment only reveals that he is dead. After questioning the neighbor, Raines discovers that Wigman, the dog, didn’t bark when Kitman was shot, at around 2:30 AM last night.
He takes the dog and brings it to the shelter where the manager identifies the dog, without knowing that he was with the police. The manager tells Raines that they had been working together. Kitman had been following the manager after they learnt that Brody had asked about her bank account.
He shot Brody. Last night, Kitman wouldn’t return her phone calls, so she went over his place to find him packing; a gun was there. He told her that she wasn’t any better than the homeless lady. She picked up the gun and shot him, trying to make it look like a suicide.
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