They shouldn’t be dead but they are …
Summary: Several deaths by seemingly natural causes leads the FBI into an investigation of election fraud.
Original air date: March 9, 2007 (US)
Written by: Cheryl Heuton and Nicolas Falacci
Directed by: Steve Boyum
Opening numbers:
58: Counties
53: Districts
25,090: Precincts
1: Candidate
Family Concepts (character development):
- Charlie has known Rachel Lawton since grad school
- Charlie has become inured to death working for Don
- Colby plays darts
- Megan is ordered to take an assignment for the Department of Justice
- First use of Oswald explanation
- Oswald: This is gonna be tough.
Charlie: The best problems always are. - Alan: So now I’ve got two jaded, world-weary sons.
Don: Yeah, and this one’s got a shrink to prove it. - Don: Great another one [genius].
Alan: Well we can always use more.
Don: Are you kidding! They’re taking over here.
Alan: You’re right.
Charlie is confronted by an old friend Rachel Lawton who seems scared and hands Charlie a list of names. She tells him the people listed are people she’s worked with and are now dead and she fears she will be next; she’s trusting Charlie because she knows him and she knows his relationship to Don. Charlie offers to take Rachel to Don the next day, but before he can she dies.
Charlie tells Don and Alan about Rachel’s conspiracy idea; Don isn’t ruling it out but he needs more to go on before he can take any steps. The preliminary autopsy for Rachel shows she had high levels of alcohol and pain killers in her system, a more detailed autopsy reveals she actually died of asphyxiation. Colby and David go through her effects and find a flash drive. Megan also finds three of the people on Rachel’s list worked for the same man J Everett Tuttle at various companies Tuttle owns. With this information the FBI starts investigating the deaths of the other people on the list.
Charlie recruits Oswald Kittner to help him with the statistical analysis of the case. Charlie wants to get Oswald enrolled at CalSci in a special program to help him learn the skills to have a career in math. Looking at the files on the flash drive recovered from Rachel’s watch Charlie and Millie discover the data, whatever it is, is false. Charlie and Oswald start looking at various things the data could be describing and get their break when Megan discovers all five of the people on the list worked on a political campaign for Jason Brasher, a campaign funded by Tuttle.
Armed with this additional evidence, Don and Howard Meeks confront Brasher, but realize he doesn’t know what’s going on. They also try to find other people who were part of the conspiracy to testify to Tuttle fixing the election but their potential witnesses keep turning up dead. Charlie works out who would have to be involved to make the plot work and are also potentially still alive, his results lead the FBI to two additional people: Austin Parker and Jane Aliano. Parker is killed by a car bomb immediately after talking to David and Colby, but Jane is found alive and willing to testify.
Charlie finds the evidence to prove Jane’s computer code was installed on the motherboards of several polling machines. When they talk to Cliff Dawkins, the owner of the company that makes the machines, he doesn’t give up Tuttle, but takes the fall for the whole conspiracy, including the murders on himself. Don and Meeks know Tuttle is behind the whole thing, and Don confronts Tuttle to tell him the FBI will prove what he did. Tuttle brushes off the threat. Both Don and Meeks are shocked to find their entire investigation is front page news in LA. It seems Charlie sent a paper to a political science journal detailing his research, the journal then leaked the story to the LA press.
After working the case, Oswald is more enthused about CalSci and announces he will be enrolling. Megan gets a phone call from the director ordering her to take an assignment with the Department of Justice, an assignment Megan doesn’t want.