- When a nurse Watson used to work with asks for her help finding their missing acquaintance, the woman's trail leads Watson and Holmes to another person who has disappeared. Also, Sherlock struggles with his sobriety when he finds the recovery process monotonous.
- In his brownstone, Holmes meets with his AA sponsor, and car alarm mentor, Alfredo, who presents him with a 360 degree talking car alarm he can't crack.
A woman named Shauna Milias comes knocking to hire Joan. Inside she tells Holmes and Kitty about her missing coworker Marissa Ledbetter, who disappeared a week ago. The cops think Marissa might have owed money to bad people.
At the station, Kitty gives Watson the file. It include a $150,000 payment from a Luxembourg-based company called Purgatorium from a month ago.
They get a text from Holmes summoning them to a dumpster behind a bar. It's near the bodega where Marissa last used her credit card and people reported a bad smell coming from it a few days ago. Holmes clips the padlock and climbs in. He finds Marissa dead inside.
Later at the morgue, ME Hawes tells them Marissa was beaten and strangled. She had a handwritten note of prescription dosages in her pocket. She had DNA belonging to Christopher Jacoby under her nails. Detective Bell recognizes the name. He's missing, too.
Bell and Watson meet with Chris' wife. He lied and told her he was going out of town with friends, but she insists he wasn't cheating and wouldn't kill anyone.
One of Watson's Irregulars, a teen named Mason, finds Chris on surveillance. He looks homeless and like he's living in Central Park.
At the spot where Chris was caught on camera, Watson and Holmes find a musician who recognizes him. She says he seems damaged.
They poke around and find him sleeping in the woods. Except when they roll him over, it turns out his throat is cut.
Holmes finds a spiral notebook buried nearby full of Chris' incoherent rantings. It describes a delusional version of killing Marissa.
Holmes finds a $150,000 payment from Purgatorium to Chris as well.
The next day the ME tells them Chris suffered recent, severe brain damage. There was a chemical in his system the ME can't ID. Marissa was deeply in debt and Chris had recently lost his job. Holmes thinks Marissa was the nurse overseeing an illegal drug trial that went horribly awry.
Marissa's dosage note listed five dosages -- meaning Chris was one of five people receiving it.
Holmes and Bell take the case to Captain Gregson, wanting to find the other participants and trace them back to the company running the trial.
Back at the brownstone, Holmes has the hacker group Everyone looking into other people who received recent payments from Purgatorium -- in exchange he has to write an essay about why Bella should have ended up with Jacob instead of Edward.
The next day, he has the four other participants. One, Spencer, is already dead. There are missing person complaints for two of the others and the third, Lou Carlisle, hasn't shown up for work in a week. Spencer made it to a hospital and told a doctor he'd been alive longer than his 34 years, much like Chris Jacoby's journal rantings.
Holmes thinks the experimental drug EZM 77 dealt with time dilation, making a person believe time lasted longer than it did.
Kitty tracks down Lou Carlisle and finds he's still alive. They visit the bar where he works and learn he was in debt following his mom's cancer. Kitty, Watson and Holmes head to Lou's mother's vacant apartment and find him trying to escape down the fire escape. He offers to talk if they keep him safe.
At the station, they figure Lou got the smallest dosage since he's still semi-functioning. His hand is balled into a fist.
He doesn't know who administered the study, but says he was supposed to get $150,000 a year if he kept quiet. He responded to an ad online.
The trial was in an office, where he spent the night. A couple days later, his hand started seizing up. He emailed for help and people started following him.
He describes a 40 year old black man who was in charge.
Back at the brownstone with a sketch of the man, Holmes ignores a text from Alfredo summoning him to a meeting. Joan lets herself in, worried about Holmes missing meetings. He's going through the annual reports of the big pharma companies that could have made the drug and found a photo of Dr. Dwyer Kirke, a neurochemist, that matches the sketch.
The police are following up Kirke, but Holmes has more excuses for not going to the meeting. Finally, he admits that he's essentially getting bored with maintaining his sobriety. He agrees to talk to Alfredo, and assures her he won't be relapsing.
Joan wakes up in the morning to Holmes blaring reveille on a bugle. The cops found vials of EZM 77 in Kirke's apartment, but not the doctor.
Holmes and Watson meet Detective Bell at Kirke's aunt's nursing home. He's been to all her PT sessions and she has another in 20 minutes. When he shows up, Bell arrests him without incident.
In interrogation, Kirke is resigned but insistent. He wants assurances that his work will be published once he's in prison. He's encouraged by some of the results. He's willing to take responsibility for the deaths, but won't tell them about the trial funding. Holmes thinks he's protecting a person, not a backer.
Later at Holmes' brownstone, he shows Alfredo how he rigged a cell phone to emit an EMP that would silence the alarm.
Holmes tells Alfredo he'll start going to meetings again.
Watson calls Holmes and he tells her he knows who funded Kirke's illegal trial. They head to the home of Jack Connaughton, an elderly man who uses a cane. Connaughton's company funded a scholarship that sent Dr. Kirke to a private school and gave his aunt a stipend to raise him. Joan suggests Connaughton called Kirke when he learned he was dying of pulmonary hypertension, a diagnosis he's told no one else about. Holmes suggests Connaughton was looking for a way to extend the time he had left.
Connaughton refuses to talk.
Watson suggests they talk to Connaughton's nurse, Brett Won. They show him all the murders tied to the study. He tells them about seeing a Purgatorium business card in Connaughton's safe and hearing Connaughton talk to two nameless men from Purgatorium and telling them the men from the study had to be dealt with.
Everyone heads to Connaughton's to arrest him. They find him comatose in bed, with his eyelids twitching. He took a dose of EZM 77.
Watson offers to come stay with Holmes for awhile if it'll help with his sobriety. He says his mood will pass.
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