THE FINDER: “Bullets”

Last week in the series premiere of The Finder, we had our initial introduction to Walter Sherman and his friends, and enough back story to get us started. This week’s episode expands on Walter’s gift and what drives him.

The episode opens with Walter and Leo at the Ends of the Earth bar with a visiting prison warden who wants their help in saving Eddie Ross, a cop convicted of killing his partner over a woman 20 years previously. The man is scheduled to be executed the next day. Walter and Leo visit Ross in prison to hear his story. He insists he was walking away from his partner, Glenn Hogan, when he heard the gun shot. There were two shots, the one that killed Hogan and the one the one Ross fired at the other assailant. The bullet that killed Hogan wasn’t found. If they can find it, they may be able to stay the execution. Leo tells Ross that if he’s lying to him, he’s going to bring him back to life so they can electrocute him again.

Upon returning to the Ends of the Earth, Walter and Leo find someone behind the bar making his own change from the tip jar. He’s a psychologist with the FBI, Dr. Sweet, and he’s there to evaluate Walter’s competency as a consultant to federal agencies. Walter starts stripping off his suit while the guy talks, revealing his casual attire underneath. It will take a miracle to convince this doctor that Walter isn’t crazy.

Leo explains to Isabel that if Walter passes they can work together legally, and Walter can get paid. If Walter fails, he and Isabel can’t work together at all. Problems with chain of evidence and such, etc., it’s frowned upon. Willa interrupts their discussions to announce she’s going to a party. She met a boy at the beach, Kevin, and even though she told him about her troubled past he likes her anyway. Leo knows him, and notes he’s from a wealthy family, which prompts Walter to ponder whether Kevin is a target. Isabel thinks they should be taking advantage of the visiting shrink to find out if Willa is really a sociopath. The shrink is anxious to get started so he can finish and get back to Washington, so he hits the road with Walter and Leo as they start their investigation.

The first stop is a bar to interview a former Internal Affairs agent who made the arrest, Coleman, and as an added bonus they get to interview a couple of former detectives that Miami Vice was based on, Bronski and Fontana. Walter has one question, how could a couple of old cops like them afford to buy that club, and what does the former IA guy drinking for free have to do with it.

Next they search for bullets. The crime scene was a swamp twenty years ago, but it’s now a mini storage facility. Back at the bar Walter sets up his models to reenact the crime. With Dr. Sweet’s assistance, they come to the conclusion the bullet could have traveled as far as a quarter mile. Walter has Isabel accompany him on that search. While they search the parking lot with a metal detector, Coleman shows up. He had also had a relationship with the woman in the middle of the love triangle, Gloria, and he tells them she disappeared within days of the murder. He doesn’t have a photo of her, but he has a cassette of her singing which he gives Walter.

Walter goes back to the bar and immerses himself in music, speakers covering the patio outside the bar, until he finally can separate the sounds and figure out what recording has her voice on it. She has a different name now, but he’s sure it’s her. They manage to locate her singing in a nightclub. Leo approaches her, while the shrink continues to question Walter and test his sanity. Walter still isn’t doing well in that regard. When Leo returns with Gloria in tow, she tells them she never slept with Hogan, and if Eddie killed him it was for some other reason. Something she says leads Walter to deduce she was an informant. Hogan was investigating crooked cops and she was passing him information. After he was killed she fled to France and only returned to the US two years ago. She loved Eddie Ross and never got over him.

Ross is thrilled to hear Walter has talked to Gloria and that she’s still in love with him. Walter wants to know if Eddie had his gun out during the confrontation with Hogan because of Gloria, or because Hogan was going to rat him out to Internal Affairs. Ross admits having taken cash from a cocaine bust, but insists he didn’t shoot Hogan. All he can really think about is that Gloria still loves him.

Dr. Sweets wants to know what happens if Walter doesn’t find what he’s looking for. Walter says that won’t happen because he’d die before he couldn’t find something. Sweets notes that that is not exactly normal. He wants to hypnotize Walter, but Walter doesn’t believe he’s the kind of guy who can be hypnotized, so of course he goes right out. He talks about the accident that caused his brain damage. He’s in Afghanistan. Problem is, he was supposed to be in Iraq. He’s looking for a stolen humvee, and finds it. He hears clapping, and sees a flamenco dancer clapping her hands. Walter hijacked the hypnosis, much to the astonishment of Dr. Sweets. He bids him goodnight, he has a bullet to find the next morning.

Walter, Leo and Sweets return to the mini storage units. Walter realizes the bullet came from a different direction than Eddie thought because the echo off his truck distorted the sound. The clapping he heard while under hypnosis helped him figure it out. He changes trajectory and manages to locate a bullet hole in a very old billboard near the mini storage units.

Isabel runs ballistics on the bullet found in the billboard. It was definitely not fired from Ross’s service revolver, other than that the tests are inconclusive. It did match a bullet used in another murder, a veterinarian who was killed the next day. Walter wonders if perhaps the bullet Ross fired at the shooter didn’t miss. If you fire a at cop and end up being shot in return, you can’t exactly go to a hospital because it will be checked. The shooter likely went to the veterinarian for medical help, then killed him to cover his tracks.

Willa enjoys a day playing beach volleyball with her new friend Kevin, but a girl named Carmella pulls a mean girls routine on her. In retaliation, when Willa leaves the beach she does so with Carmella’s convertible. Kevin catches her and wants to go with her, and doesn’t seem to mind that he’d be an accessory. Kevin drives for a while, but his speeding makes Willa very nervous. She is on probation, after all.

When Sweets checks in on Walter, he’s busy examining guns and ammo. He thinks they’ve been looking for the wrong gun. He thinks the shooter misled police by using casings intended for a different gun. He thinks the shooter used a .357 loaded with .38 caliber ammo. Time to go back to the Miami Vice cops in the club, and check their guns. They don’t have .357’s and never did, that was something Internal Affairs would carry. It just so happens they have one…Coleman. Walter tells Coleman he’s figured out why he takes so many painkillers. He still has Ross’s bullet inside him. Coleman pulls a gun and a Miami Vice shootout ensues, with Walter keeping his head low. When one of the vice guys is knocked out, he takes his gun, calls out to Coleman and tells him all they have is circumstantial evidence that he killed Hogan, but if he kills him it’s definite. Coleman doesn’t care, he finds Walter annoying. The sound of sirens approach, Coleman puts his gun down and says he’s walking away, Walter can shoot him in the back if he wants but he doesn’t think he has the stones. Sweets, hiding under the bar, tells Walter not to shoot him in the back. Walter aims and pulls the trigger.

In Walter’s jail cell, Leo reads him the riot act for shooting a retired cop in the back with a gun he stole from another cop. Sweets reiterates that he shot an unarmed man as he walked away. Walter explains that he did it because Coleman was favoring one side as he walked away, he suspected he still had that bullet in his ass, so that’s where he shot him. They will have to find the first bullet when they dig out Walter’s bullet.

Kevin wrecks the car that he and Willa stole. He’s panicked and blames it on her, then asks her who will the cops believe? He abandons her there and walks away. After he’s gone, Willa pulls out his wallet that she had lifted sometime during their adventure, removes the cash, and throws the wallet into the car before walking away. Score one for Willa!

Isabel reports that two bullets were found in Coleman’s butt, one from Ross’s weapon the other from the gun Walter fired. Walter is satisfied, his work is done. Sweets wonders why Coleman killed Hogan, Isabel bets it was because of Gloria, but Walter just doesn’t care. He only wants to find things.

Gloria greets Eddie when he’s released from jail. Twenty years ago Coleman had caught the Miami Vice agents pocketing cash from drug busts, Gloria found out and told Hogan. Hogan went to IA and told Coleman. He knew Bronski and Fontana would flip on him, so he killed Hogan to keep his part in it quiet.

Back at the bar, Willa returns from her adventure and asks Dr. Sweets if Walter passed the insanity test. He didn’t. Isabel walks in just after the verdict is rendered and learns the bad news, but points out that the test doesn’t matter. All that matters is what the doctor puts in his report. Sweets feels he has no insight into what makes Walter want to find things. With this, Walter takes him aside and tells him what happened to him in Iraq. He was searching for a bomb maker, but the bomb maker found him first. The explosion killed six good men, and he woke up a changed man. When he sets out to find something now, he either finds it or he dies trying. The doctor absorbs these words.

When Leo invites Sweets to stay for breakfast, he takes his leave, anxious to return home. Isabel stops him and asks what he’s going to do. He will sign off on Walter for six months. She is overjoyed and rushes back to her friends as Dr. Sweets takes one last look at them all, then turns and leaves.

So we learned what drives Walter’s compulsion to find things this week, and it makes his behavior more understandable. The writers continue to expand and establish the characters and bring them to life. Last week we learned a bit about Willa, this week Walter. Hopefully more about Leo and Isabel are on the horizon.