Law enforcement officers are more likely to commit suicide than civilians …
Summary: An AFT agent is killed and Don’s team investigates whether she was murdered or if she committed suicide.
Original air date: April 21, 2006 (US)
Teleplay by : Robery Port
Story by: Robert Port and Mark Llewellyn
Directed by: Stephen Gyllenhaal
Opening numbers:
738,00: Law enforcment officers
54,000: Domestic disputes
400: Suicides
1: Job
Family Concepts: (character development)
- Don picks up Robin Brooks (AUSA) at a firing range
- Don knew Nikki Davis in New Mexico; they dated, he left her.
- Larry: It leads me back to those stars. When one dies and disappears, the whole cluster feels the loss.
ATF agent Nikki Davis is found dead in her room, it’s an apparent suicide as she is killed with her service weapon; pain killers and anti-depressants are also found in her system. Don, who knew Nikki when he was in New Mexico, refuses to turn the case over to the ATF for investigation, it’s within the prevue of the FBI and the FBI will investigate. Interviews with Nikki’s ATF team reveals they have been working on a series of bank robberies and that she had hurt herself a year before but never took the time to recover, hence she was in some pain all the time as a result. She was also having marital issues as her husband had done something to “back her into a corner”.
Don can’t believe Nikki would kill herself and asks Charlie to look at the case just to be sure. Charlie tries to quantify Nikki’s life and decides she was a good person and a good agent, while she may be depressed there is no reason for her to commit suicide, she should have been able to cope with whatever problems she is having. David also finds that Nikki’s husband is not in Texas on a gun smuggling case as his office thought, but instead is in Mexico putting a lot of charges on his credit cards. Don goes back to Nikki’s house to look around and is discovered by Nikki’s husband, Richard. Richard informs Don Nikki had cancer and he was in Mexico buying experimental drugs to treat it.
Meanwhile, Charlie, Larry and David try to recreate the scene of Nikki’s death after discovering a recording of the gun shot that killed her. After several tests, Charlie concludes the room is missing something since the recreation is not producing an identical acoustic match to the recording. Charlie informs Don there had to have been a second person in the room when Nikki died.
Megan looks into Nikki’s cases some more and finds a snitch in a biker gang that had been informing on his crew to the ATF, Megan and David also find out that while the crew was under surveillance, they did not rob a bank as the informer had told Nikki they would, they had been tipped off. Don’s team goes to the informer’s house to find out more information, but instead find him dead in the kitchen and Richard dead in the back yard. David figures Richard was following the same trail as the FBI and was in the wrong place at the wrong time when the informer’s gang found him and killed him for talking to the ATF.
While looking over the forensic files of Nikki’s death, Charlie sees that DNA evidence was collected but didn’t match anyone. Charlie offers to take the sample results and run it against a DNA database at CalSci to see if he can find a racial match that might help narrow the field.
Charlie’s results lead to three racial matches, not specific people, but origin points that could help identify who was in Nikki’s room when she died. One of the racial matches is similar to Agent Rho, one of the members of Nikki’s ATF team. Don concludes that at least some of Nikki’s team are behind the bank robberies she had been investigating and the problem is made worse when Richard sold guns to the people involved to help defray medical costs. Agent Rho is nowhere to be found and Don thinks they are robbing another bank. Somehow Don’s team learns the location of the robbery and are in time to catch Rho as his group tries to escape after robbing an armored car.
Charlie tells Alan he’s worried about Don as he has dropped off the family radar; he had used behavioral model he used to determine Nikki was not suicidal and applied it to Don’s life. Charlie concludes that Don would not commit suicide due to work stress as he too has a lot of positives in his life mainly a close tie to his family. While Don is not with Charlie and Alan, he has taken some advice given by his father to try and make a relationship work and is found at the home of Robin Brooks, an AUSA he’d talked to at the firing range.