ELEMENTARY Recap: Snow Angels

We start with a security guard listening to news report of severe storm warning when he hears a lady yell for help, he goes to help her and she is faking. She shoots him; pulls off her blonde wig and two other guys come in and drag his body behind the guard station. He isn’t dead though and he rolls over and shoots at them.

At Sherlock’s house Joan comes in to find a Ms. Hudson waiting for Sherlock. She is crying, and is a little bit of a mess. Ms. Hudson is an expert in Ancient Greek apparently and she has consulted with Sherlock on quite a few cases. Sherlock tells Watson Ms. Hudson is a muse, consistently in the company of powerful men in crisis. Can’t finish your novel, can’t figure out your latest design, etc…
Eventually the men figure out Ms. Hudson is actually a Mr. but as Sherlock puts it, “life is complicated”.
The last year Ms. Hudson was a “kept women” but now that the arrangement is over she needed a place to stay for a few days.

Just then Gregson calls regarding a homicide. It’s the guard from the beginning of the episode, Frank Dempson. Nobody saw anything and the security footage is gone. It looks like he actually did shoot one of the robbers though as there is a sizable blood pool and a bullet in the wall.
The robbers stole the newest phone set to release the next day. They got all of the floor models and about 200 from storage. Sherlock deduces one of the robbers was a woman plus two accomplices and a driver. While in the building the power for most of the city goes out.
They head to the precinct where FIMA is giving out assignments so they can prepare before the storm mentioned earlier hits.
Detective Bell is on Rapid Response but he did make a few calls to the company that makes the phones. Due to the power outage they aren’t able to track the GPS on the phones. Sherlock browses Instagram though and finds people posting about how they got the new phone a day early. He has a lead.
From the pictures Sherlock tracks the phones to a homeless man in the park selling the phones; he has a huge line of people until Sherlock shows up and shuts it down. The homeless man says he found the stolen phones at a bakery. He heard something in the alley where he sleeps, looked in the dumpster and found a box with all the phones. Sherlock tells him he should be selling the phones for more than he is and gives him some money so he can get a room for the night. He figures if the killers didn’t care about the phones, why should they.
Besides the phones were a distraction for whatever the robbers really wanted to steal. They head back to the building where the robbery took place. After some looking around they find that there was a lock picked on the 12th floor and then the lock picked to an architectural firm office. Watson is about to pick the lock to the firm when an employee opens it. The guy says nothing has been stolen, but Sherlock finds an empty drawer. They stole blueprints.

Back at the apartment Joan is trying to start a fire when Ms. Hudson comes in. She helps Joan with the fire and opens up about her “ex”. He keeps calling her, he said he made a mistake and wants her back. But Ms. Hudson doesn’t feel like being Pretty Woman’d anymore. The ex even shows up at the apartment promising to leave his wife because he loves Ms. Hudson. Joan lets him in a goes upstairs to check on Sherlock. He has the electrical schematics that would correspond with the missing blueprints but he has no leads yet.

The next morning Sherlock figures out what building the thieves intended to hit, he wakes up Joan by throwing clothes at her and informing her to put on layers, it’s a blizzard out there and it is cold.
The thieves are going to hit a branch of the Federal Reserve in E. Rutherford, NJ, with the storm as a cover since most security will be out helping the city’s residents.
Sherlock has no way of contacting the police though because he has no cell service, no landline, etc…So they are going to have to stop the robbery themselves. They head out in the blizzard.
Sherlock and Watson come across a snow plow. They talk the driver into letting them into the cab so they can warm up and call the police on her radio. Sherlock leaves a message with the precinct about his plans to stop the robbery. Sherlock commandeers the vehicle in the name of the NYPD but when that doesn’t work he pays the driver to take them to NJ.

Bell meanwhile is checking hospitals for gunshot victims in his spare time from Rapid Response. He finds a woman that says she was stabbed in the abdomen. The woman says she was stabbed by a mugger, but Bell finds a blonde hair on her coat – matching the wig from the women who shot the security guard. Bell asks her what was worse, getting shot or letting her friend stab her to cover up the bullet wound. He takes her into custody.
Bell is at the precinct with the women robber when Captain Gregson comes into the interrogation room with Sherlock’s message about the impending robbery.

Sherlock and Watson are in the Federal Reserve facility being told they can’t get onto the main floor of the building, everything there is handling electronically; people aren’t allowed on the floor. There is absolutely no way to get into the vault directly. Sherlock asks to see the shredding facility where they find bundles of shredded bills – but it’s just paper, not cotton like currency. Whatever was shredded there this morning wasn’t money.
The thieves used the blueprints they stole to gain access, mess with the security feed, shred paper to switch out with the real currency and make away with $33 million.
If Sherlock and Watson hadn’t have gotten there the shredded bills would have ended up in a landfill and no one would have ever known about the robbery.
Now they have to find the robbers before they disappear with their millions.
Sherlock finds where they entered and left the building. H is actually impressed with their plan. If they hadn’t have killed anyone he might let them get away with it.
Then he finds some tire tracks and deduces they got their getaway in an ambulance. Something people would expect to be on the road in a storm. They are going to get their snow plow driving friend to follow the tracks.

Back at the precinct Gregson and Bell are still with the suspect. They have figure out her real identity thanks to a satellite phone call to Interpol, and are laying out all the facts for her. She is pretty calm and says they will never find her husband (who is pulling off the job). Just then Sherlock gets through on the radio and tells Gregson what they are up to and Gregson and Bell tell them about the women they have in custody. There was a call or two on the woman’s phone to the director of operations at a horse track. Sherlock thinks that is how they are going to launder the money since the track is a huge cash business. Sherlock and Watson meet up with Bell outside the director’s house. Just then an ambulance pulls up to the director’s house. Bell opens the ambulance and it is empty. The EMT’s say they got a non-emergency call to that address, turns out they were a diversion.

The snowplow driver takes Holmes and Watson back to their house; she offers to be their snow plow for hire whenever they need one.
They get in the house to find Ms. Hudson has cleaned everything. Joan is overjoyed and even Sherlock can’t complain since Ms. Hudson arranged everything in such a methodical manner.

Sherlock lays out a city map on the floor and adds all of the roadblocks and road closures to it. He makes Clyde the turtle the ambulance. He figures the thieves found out they were on to them so they called in the fake distress call to the director’s house and took their stolen money elsewhere. He talks it out with Joan and thinks he figured out how.

The next morning they head to the precinct and recreate the map for Gregson but with colored tape as checkpoints and roadblocks and a stapler and not a turtle as the ambulance. Sherlock has Watson read the log from yesterday – as she is reading different incidents where checkpoints and roadblocks were left unmanned for calls that turned out to be false Sherlock pulls the tape off of the map showing the route the ambulance with the cash must have taken.
Gregson says the robbers must have had a high level person on the inside helping them. Sherlock turns towards the woman from FIMA who is in the precinct coordinating the storm response teams.

Bell goes back to the interrogation room to talk to the women robber. He tells her they have evidence of gunshot residue on her hand so she is going away for the murder of the security guard. Suddenly the lights flicker off for a moment and there is shouting from the hall. Gregson pops his head in to tell Bell they need help; someone was stabbed in a holding cell. They leave the woman robber alone in interrogation while Sherlock and Watson watch from the other side of the two way mirror. We then get to see the shouting and riot sounds are really just the cops banging things around and yelling. It’s quite a production.
The lady from FIMA does exactly what they thought she would do, she uses the chaos to get the woman out of interrogation and as soon as she is in the stairwell Bell is there to arrest them.

Back in the loft the next day Watson tells Sherlock the woman robber gave up her partners and the money was found.
There is a honk from outside and the snow plow is there to pick up Ms. Hudson and take her to her cousin. The roads are a bit dicey. As she leaves Ms. Hudson says she will see them Tuesday, Sherlock has hired her to clean the flat once a week.

Elementary airs Thursday 10/9c on CBS