- The manager of a high-end hotel that caters to diplomatic VIPs is found dead in the hotel's laundry. After first suspecting a connection to a prostitution ring, Holmes believes the answer lies in her treacherous past.
- Terri Purcell, manager of a luxury hotel with many diplomatic guests, has been killed there by both blow and stabbing. Sherlock works out she discretely facilitated Geoffrey Silver's call girls network, but didn't profit from it. Investigating her husband Oliver Purcell and their teenage daughter Carly, Sherlock finds it's rather about compromised national security and an ensuing family drama.—KGF Vissers
- "Elementary" - "Dirty Laundry" - Jan. 3, 2013
A woman's dead body is found clunking around in an industrial washing machine in a large hotel. It turns out she was the manager, Teri Purcell, and was universally loved by her employees and a fine humanitarian.
Sherlock, Watson and Bell go to have a chat with her husband (Mark Moses), which turns up nothing more than the fact that there was obviously some marital discord since Sherlock notes that he was sleeping on the couch. Watson also deduces that the dead woman's daughter, Carly, although now a promising athlete and scholar once had a drug problem. She gives Carly her number and tells her to call if she needs her.
A nosy neighbor points them in the direction of a man who dropped by to visit Teri all the time, Jeffrey Silver (Jake Weber). He is a businessman who runs an international charity dedicated to the eradication of land mines. Nothing untoward was going on it turns out, she was just helping with his chartiy. He also has an alibi. So the husband and potential lover are out as suspects.
When they learn that Teri had run afoul of some call girls who frequented the hotel Watson and Holmes go "whore-fishing" in the lobby and get one escort to talk. It turns out, however, that instead of running them off Teri was helping them hook up with high rolling hotel guests and monkeying with security cameras to cover for them. (Thus there was no security footage of who killed her.)
They wonder why she would do this out of the goodness of her heart and go to investigate her office for secret compartments. They find one and in it evidence that leads to a secret cache of videos of hotel rooms. At first they think she was allowing the hookers to meet with patrons in order to blackmail them but then when Sherlock overhears two French men he realizes that Teri wasn't a madam or a blackmailer: she was a deep cover Russian spy who used the hooker to lure in international diplomats and then record their conversations, not their sex lives.
It turns out her husband was also a spy so they pick him up. He rolls over fairly quickly and says the international land mine guy was their handler. It turns out that he and Teri only conceived because they were told to and were not in love, but they did love their daughter. Unfortunately, Teri wanted Carly to follow into the spy life, which Carly confessed to Watson when she called for help. But since this whole "you're actually a Russian spy" thing was news to Carly they fought about it. Carly pushed her mom and believed she killed her. But it turns out that when Jeffrey showed up to clean up the mess, Teri was still alive, so he finished her off thinking it would be better to be rid of her and mold Carly-- a U.S. citizen-- into a model spy. Carly and her dad go into the witness protection program and Jeffrey is on the hook for the murder so he won't, as he thought, be getting traded back to mother Russia. . Throughout the episode Sherlock ribbed Watson about her staying on, first saying that she clearly enjoys his work and that they should engage in a weekly salon where she helps him in exchange for light housework. Then he talks about fooling his dad into continuing to pay her. But in the end, even though she does enjoy working with him, she informs him she has gotten another job.
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