The fifth season of the crime drama spin-off focusing on an elite group of New York cops continues. In this week’s instalment, a dead woman is found behind a dumpster, leading detectives to suspect the work of drug smugglers.

When two children witness the body of a woman being dumped behind a bin, Detectives Mike Logan (Chris Noth) and Carolyn Barek (Annabella Sciorra) are called to the scene. The postmortem reveals that the victim has opiates in her system and is missing her digestive tract, leading Logan to conclude that she was being used as a drug mule. Her gut had most likely been packed full of heroin balloons that her employers needed to remove in a hurry. To have any hope of tracking down her killers, the detectives must first uncover the woman’s identity. They narrow their search by using the immigration database and quickly find a match.

The victim is Kerri Livanski, a medical student who had just flown back from Guatemala –a major trading route for Colombian heroin. During an interview with Kerri’s parents, the investigation takes a new turn when Barek notices that Kerri’s father has some odd eating habits. She learns that he suffers from a medical condition that prevents him from swallowing large pieces of food – a disorder from which Kerri also suffered. Anything bigger than a peanut would be a choking hazard, so there is no way that Kerri would have been able to swallow heroin pellets.

Finding themselves back to square one, Logan and Barek search Kerri’s bedroom and find a brochure from Best Face Forward, a charity that performs plastic surgery in Guatemala to correct facial deformities. Dr Christine Ansel, the surgeon who carries out all the operations for the organisation, reveals that Kerri had done some volunteer work for them. Barek becomes dubious about the charity’s integrity when he speaks with nurse aide Antonio –a man living in great luxury despite his evidently meagre wage.

With no clear answers about who killed Kerri, the detectives must fly to Guatemala to hunt down a lead. At the clinic where Kerri volunteered, the lid is completely blown off Dr Ansel’s story – she has never performed a single operation there. She makes regular donations to the organisation but has only visited the hospital once. Despite this, her passport shows that she has visited the country many times. Dr Ansel seems to be a phoney – but how did Kerri’s involvement result in her death?

To uncover the truth, Logan and Barek investigate the financial records of Best Face Forward and learn that Dr Ansel was receiving donations from wealthy benefactors via the Frederick Foundation – a body she set up in memory of her brother who died at a young age. This new information leads the detectives to suspect embezzlement. But several things just do not add up. It was medically impossible for Kerri to be a drug mule, so why was her stomach sliced open and emptied? Her parents claimed that she never touched illegal drugs, so how did opiates get into her bloodstream? When it is revealed that Dr Ansel suffers from a mysterious eye disease, her aptitude as a surgeon is also called into question – yet her patients report perfect results. Following a baffling trail of clues that stretches from New York to Central America, Logan and Barek set out to uncover the secret that Ansel is harbouring.

Tuesday 26th February at 11:00pm on five