The veteran crime drama continues its 14th season. This week, the murder of a con man leads　detectives to one of his victims, a dedicated doctor who treats terminally ill children. In court, McCoy struggles to prove that the motive for the murder was revenge and not insanity.

When Gideon Blake keels over in a restaurant, Briscoe and Green are surprised to discover that somebody laced his bottle of hot sauce with cyanide. Blake was due to have lunch with Dr Bethany Allison, a paediatric oncologist who was interviewing him for a book about bereavement. Dr Allison reveals that Blake offered a form of grief counselling through seances, and charged a great deal of money for “communicating” with dead relatives.

Green is under few illusions about the motive for the killing. “Blake rips off widows by claiming to contact their dead husbands – he’s a con man. Con men piss people off,” he says. The cops learn that Blake also went by the name of Lee Mapes and was wanted by the FBI for large-scale real-estate fraud. Mapes’s racket was to convince rich people – often doctors – to invest in bogus property. It transpires that one of his victims was Dr Allison, who lost $500,000 in a property scam. “That could make someone mad enough to kill,” Briscoe remarks.

Dr Allison claims she had no idea that Blake was the man who stole her money, as she never met him and the deal was handled by her lawyer. But the case against her builds when the detectives find she had access to cyanide through her hospital lab, and a search warrant reveals a dead squirrel in her rubbish bin. The squirrel, which had been pestering Dr Allison’s plants, was poisoned by the same cyanide that killed Blake. The paediatrician is arrested for murder, but her lawyer successfully asks for the squirrel to be ruled inadmissible on the grounds the warrant did not cover the garbage can.
McCoy’s case hinges on convincing the jury that Dr Allison had sufficient motive for killing Blake, but as Branch points out, “on paper this woman looks like the next best thing to Mother Teresa”.

Allison has dedicated her life to treating children with advanced cancer, the vast majority of whom die in her care. However, McCoy gains an advantage when he finds a witness who says she was the person who alerted Allison to Blake’s true identity. The witness claims Allison asked her not to report it to the police until she had dealt with the matter. Two days later, Blake was murdered.

But the case takes a new turn when Dr Allison changes her story and starts claiming that she too can communicate with the dead, including Blake. “I spoke to Gideon this morning and he thanked me,” she says. Allison now says she poisoned Blake simply to spare him from a life in jail for his scams. An enraged McCoy claims she is putting on an act, and, after assessing her, Dr Skoda is inclined to agree. “Unfortunately, this woman is smart enough and sympathetic enough to just maybe get away with it,” he warns.

In court, the defence argues that the paediatrician’s emotionally draining job may have damaged her to such an extent that she could only lash out when she learnt of Blake’s identity. It is a line of argument that finds some favour with Southerlyn and Branch. “Banging her head against the futility of dying children everyday for years may have knocked a few screws loose,” Branch says.

McCoy, meanwhile, is determined to prove that Dr Allison is not insane. But when the accused takes
the stand to answer for her crime, even the hard-nosed McCoy finds himself wondering if compassion might not be the best response.

Saturday March 15 at 10:10pm on five