Body of Proof - "Cold Blooded"

Body of Proof 2.14: “Cold Blooded”

“We can do this any way you want or not at all. But I just wanted to give you this.”
- James Cranston

This week we find ourselves in a restaurant before opening with a young woman just getting in on her shift. She shocks herself on a live wire in the kitchen and when she looks up and into the big walk-in freezer, she sees a dead body. Megan shows up to the scene to find out the dead body is a guy named Joe and he owned the restaurant. She and Peter head in to the scene and Megan tells Peter to take lots of photos because once they get the body out of the cold it will decompose quickly. There are obvious signs of blunt force trauma to the head and he was alive when he was put in the freezer because he was curled in the fetal position. Megan accompanies the body back to the lab where they’ve got the autopsy room at a balmy 38 degrees. They’ll need to let the body thaw out over the next 48 hours but they can still do some x-rays. Back at the scene, Bud’s found an industrial sized meat tenderizer but it’s been through the dish washer. Peter (at Bud’s prompting) checks for blood outside the freezer and they find footprints leading out of the restaurant and up a set of stairs to an apartment where they find a man, Henry, (Robert Picardo, aka The Doctor from Star Trek: Voyager) hurriedly trying to scrub blood off his shoes.

Unfortunately it doesn’t look like Henry is going to be an easy conviction. Megan thinks he has early stage Alzheimer’s and that even if he was guilty, he likely wouldn’t remember the crime at all. Ethan matches the meat tenderizer from the restaurant to the head wound on Joe and makes a little snarky comment to Peter about Dani (he really needs to move on and grow up) but then notices something actually pertinent to the case. A single blood drop on Joe’s pants and it might be from the killer. Speaking of Dani, she catches Peter as he’s leaving the office to go meet Henry’s son and daughter-in-law at the police station. She spots the letter from the adoption hunting agency from earlier this season and we find out that Peter’s biological father lives only a couple miles away. Dani urges him to call but he says he’s not ready yet. Megan meets with Joe’s wife briefly to find out that Joe had taken on more of the financial aspects of the business since Henry’s diagnosis but that he let Henry stay on to keep Henry happy.

Henry’s son isn’t too pleased that his father is being accused of murder. His wife shares with Peter that he’s still looking for his father but his father’s long gone. She also shares that she saw Henry throw a chair at his son. It looks like the daughter-in-law’s comment is enough to push Peter to call his biological father. Unfortunately we cut away to the next day at the lab when Curtis tracks Megan down with the blood drop results. It belongs to an African American female and I’m guessing Megan is going to look at the worker who found Joe as she fits the description. Bud and Peter head over to talk to Delia but she says she cut her finger Sunday night and Joe patched her up. She also tells them that Henry’s son didn’t want to come back to the restaurant. During the conversation, Bud gets a call with information about the print near the live wire. It belonged to a young woman (who I swear is Rachel from Alphas) and so he goes to meet with her. She tried to buy out the restaurant to turn it into a franchise but Joe turned her down.

Back at the lab, Megan and Kate are continuing the autopsy and things are getting confusing. Given the frostbite and fetal position they thought cause of death was hypothermia but they also find signs that he may have died of asphyxiation. Time to head back to the crime scene and she drags Ethan and Curtis along for the ride. They figure out that Joe was sitting up for a while based on the blood pooling around his waist and the only way for that to happen while he was unconscious is if the killer held him up. They think the killer dragged Joe into the freezer and stayed there because Henry showed up and he was waiting for Henry to leave.

Meanwhile, Peter meets his birth father, James Cranston. He starts to tell Peter about his mother (Katie) who died the day after Peter was born but it’s clear Peter isn’t ready for all the connection. I feel for Peter. I really do. He’s been struggling with this for a long time. At least James seems like a nice guy. Megan and Bud talk to Henry again and he gets frustrated by the fact he can’t remember (though he does say he saw his dead wife running from the scene). Ethan lets Megan know that the trace Kate found on Joe’s hand earlier is toner and it matches ink from a franchise spec found in the dumpster. So back to the franchise lady. She says she never gave the specs to Joe. But she did give them to Henry’s son because he thought he could convince his uncle to buy in. So now we get to visit Anthony again. He denies killing his uncle and says he never went to the restaurant that night. Before Bud can get much farther, Anthony says the magic words (“I want a lawyer”).

Megan and Ethan are doing the autopsy now that Joe has thawed out and Megan finds a piece of what looks like sausage covered in bacteria in Joe’s lung. They deduce he was eating when struck over the head and the killer covered Joe’s mouth to keep him quiet so he wouldn’t draw Henry’s attention. Ethan sends the food to the lab to hopefully identify the bacteria. They may be closer to their killer. Megan drops off the report about the bacteria with Kate and says she wants to test Henry because he might not have Alzheimer’s. Kate isn’t thrilled with the idea, especially since Anthony is their prime suspect. And Kate is not wrong. Joe’s wife refuses to give Megan consent to send Henry for an MRI. And later that day, Kate storms in to tell Megan that Henry overdosed on his meds trying to remember who killed Joe.

Megan shows up at the hospital and as she’s looking at Henry to figure out what happened to him, his ER doctor shows up with the results of the CT scan. Henry doesn’t have Alzheimer’s. He has a condition where excess spinal fluid builds up and it is treatable. Meanwhile, Peter shows Dani the photo of his mother and Ethan interrupts a little make out sessions with good news. He identified the bacteria and it was found most often in compost. Turns out it was Anthony’s wife Karen who killed Joe. She wanted him to sell the restaurant so they could all have their own lives. She didn’t know that he wasn’t dead when she left him in the freezer. Joe’s wife finally gets some closure and so does the rest of the family. The draining of the excess fluid was enough to return Henry to normal. And it looks like Peter isn’t going to give up on trying to connect with his birth father.