- Tension between Captain Raydor and Major Crimes escalates as Chief Pope asks Brenda to discretely investigate the abuse of one of Raydor's detectives. Meanwhile, Fritz has news that could change his and Brenda's life together.
- Assistant Chief Pope calls in Brenda and the team on a delicate matter when Captain Sharon Raydor believes one of her detectives, Ally Moore, is the victim of spousal abuse. She had seen bruises on Moore's arm and neck, to which Moore couldn't give a logical explanation and refuses to file a complaint. Brenda interviews her but, in the absence of a complaint, hesitates to call in the husband, and that proves fateful. That night, Moore places a 911 call seeking help. Patrol Sgt. Ryan Dunn responds to the call and shoots Moore's husband dead. As Brenda begins to sift through the evidence, she realizes that there is far more going on than meets the eye. At home, meanwhile, Fritz has been particularly grumpy and out of sorts lately and with good reason: he's been offered a promotion which would mean a return to Washington D.C.—garykmcd
- Pope calls in Brenda to address a delicate internal matter with discretion. One of Capt. Raydor's detectives, Ally Moore, was spotted with evidence of spousal abuse but won't file charges. Initially asked to look into it discreetly, Brenda soon finds Pope in a towering rage, aimed specifically her way, for not moving aggressively enough before the case of abuse turned into a homicide with Ally injured and her husband Shawn shot dead. While Pope reacts with fire, Sharon reacts with glacial ice towards Brenda, both blaming her unrelentingly for the unfortunate outcome; however, as Major Crimes looks into it, testimonies don't match up, prompting Brenda to ferret out the real story. As she does, Pope, still livid, reveals a secret held by Fritz that explains both Fritz' recent sourness and Pope's towering rage.—statmanjeff
- Brenda warms to Joel the kitty, finding the tiny ball of adorable in the middle of the hallway. A very grouchy Frtiz can tell when Brenda came home by the trail of stuff she left. She thinks he seems "extra upset" by the mess.
She's waiting for an answer when her phones rings. He leaves in a huff.
Brenda arrives in Chief Pope's office to find Captain Sharon Raydor (Mary McDonnell) waiting as well. Oh, goody.
She has a delicate situation involving one of her detectives in the Force Investigation Division. They want her promise of confidentiality.
She explains that her Detective Ally Moore has been acting erratic lately and this morning Raydor noticed bruises on her. Raydor thinks she's being abused, but can't look into it herself.
Pope wants Major Crimes to discretely look into it. Brenda bristles at investigating without Moore filing a complaint, but Pope prods.
Brenda gets the team on. Moore's name is not to be mentioned outside the office. Her husband is Shawn Moore, unemployed from construction for months.
Gabriel brings Ally Moore in, telling her they have an overlapping investigation. She's nervous talking to Brenda. Brenda asks her how things are at home. She guesses that Raydor called Brenda.
Brenda wants to see her arms. She has clear hand prints on the back of her arms and neck. She says she fell. She wants to leave her husband out of it.
Brenda wants her to get pictures taken of her bruises and tells her not doing so will count as insubordination.
Raydor comes by and sees the pictures on the wall, but is upset Brenda hasn't talked to Moore's husband. She thinks they're not taking it seriously.
Back home, Brenda finds a note from Fritz saying he needed a meeting.
Brenda comes in to work and, despite Provenza's best efforts to warn her, walks into a very ticked off Pope.
Shawn Moore is dead. An officer responded to a 911 at the Moore's overnight and arrived to have Shawn Moore fire at him with Ally's gun. He fired back. Ally's alive. But Raydor and Pope both think Shawn Moore's death and the risk to the responding officer are Brenda's fault.
She tries to remind Pope that they insisted on discretion and that Ally Moore wouldn't press charges.
The team hears Pope ream her in her office, telling her she didn't move aggressively. He accuses her of not interviewing the husband only because Raydor suggested it. He's yelling by the time he finishes telling her that they'll work the abuse case until he's satisfied they did everything to prevent the murder.
The team hits the scene and finds a smug Raydor there to greet them.
Ally Moore called 911 from in the bathroom, but her husband busted down the door and dragged her, bashing her face against the wall.
Shawn Moore fired at Sgt. Dunn when he arrived, but missed. Then Dunn hit Moore twice as he came at the officer. Brenda wants to talk to Dunn, but Raydor would rather eat glass that allow it. So Brenda orders her to make him available to a third party.
And so Commander Taylor chats with Sgt. Dunn and his rep. He didn't know the LAPD was investigating Ally Moore as the victim of domestic abuse, but he offers that whoever was looking into that apparently "dropped the ball."
Brenda winces in the observation room.
Dunn says he got there in three minutes after the call. He heard screaming from outside, kicked in the door and saw a man pointing a gun at a woman on the ground. Shawn Moore fired at him and he fired twice. He says Ally Moore kept screaming at him for killing her husband.
Taylor wonders why she kept her gun in the house if she was afraid of her husband. Sgt. Dunn says Ally told him she kept it there for protection because she was being abused.
Brenda doesn't argue when Raydor says the interview is damaging to her case.
Over Chinese take out at home, Brenda babbles about the case while Fritz seems to be annoyed by just about everything she says, especially about Pope was yelling at her for ignoring the husband. "I would never ignore the husband," Brenda says to her husband, who seems to feel ignored.
He blithely suggests she quit if it's so horrible. Then he points out that since she came home all she's talked about is her job and Chinese food, never asking about him. Brenda tries to recover, but it's too late. Fritz says he's going to bed and asks her to make sure to clean up. Brenda is baffled.
At the office, Gabriel reports that they found no witnesses to the abuse among the neighbors.
Flynn says that for Dunn's story about talking to Ally Moore to be true, he would have had to be there for four minutes by himself, but back up arrived in two.
The lab report says Shawn Moore was hit in the spine and the brain, so he couldn't have been advancing when Dunn fired at him. He was either instantly paralyzed or instantly dead.
Ally Moore waits in the interview room while Raydor and Brenda argue in the hall over who gets to talk to her. Commander Taylor suggests they go together.
Raydor immediately takes her detective's hand and comforts her. Raydor feeds Moore answers to describe the night's events until Brenda cuts her off.
Moore tells the story in her own words, and it matches Dunn's.
Brenda asks how her husband got her gun. She says he knew where she kept it. In her car. Raydor flinches as she knows her detective's statement contradicts Dunn's.
Out in the hall, the two women quickly agree that Dunn and Ally Moore must have known each other.
And then it's time for some more Pope yelling as he gets the news. He wants proof.
Raydor comes in with the files on Dunn's first officer involved shooting three years ago. One of the detectives on the case was Ally Moore.
Tao compares the bullets Dunn fired three years ago and those from Shawn Moore's shooting. They're not the same. But the bullet Moore fired at Dunn is a match from the earlier shooting.
The bullet fired at Sargent Dunn came from his own gun.
They don't have the ballistics from Moore's gun yet.
Pope checks in and tells Brenda he thinks she's going to miss all this when she moves to DC. He knows about Fritz's promotion. Brenda, it seems, does not.
Fritz has been offered command of the FBI's critical response team. He admits being bitter that she didn't discuss it with him.
Brenda wonders aloud why Fritz would keep it from her. Pope says he apparently didn't want her to know so he kept it hidden. A case-related light bulb goes off for Brenda.
Brenda wants Moore and Dunn to meet her at the morgue. She plans to do what she should have done yesterday: find out what Shawn Moore has to tell her.
In the morgue, Raydor watches at Brenda thanks Ally for coming by to make the identification. Both Raydor and Brenda watch Ally as Dunn comes in and they pretend not to know each other.
Raydor reminds Dunn that Detective Moore worked his case. And Brenda mentions that the way Dunn parked perfectly in front of the Moore's house even though it was night and he supposedly didn't know where it was shows he'd been there before. Moore tells Dunn not to say anything.
The coroner punches metal rods in the bullet holes in Shawn Moore, showing his arms were raised when he was hit. Then they mention the bullets, explaining how Ally Moore and Dunn could have swapped out the barrels of their guns to stage the scene after Dunn got there to find Ally Moore had already killed her husband.
Dunn says Ally was defending herself and that's when Brenda forces Ally to bare her arm bruises again. They hold up the hand of dead Shawn Moore and it's clear his fingers are much bigger than her bruises. This appears to be news to Dunn.
Brenda says Moore made them herself.
Raydor facetiously commends Moore for playing the textbook victim so well, except for failing to conceal her injuries. But she needed Raydor to notice them.
Dunn doesn't understand why she'd do that so Raydor explains: to gain his sympathy, and his gun.
Brenda asks him if he conspired with Ally to kill Shawn Moore. He walks into the hall and is confronted by the team. He waives his rights and says Ally told him her husband was abusing her and asked him to be close to the house that night.
He realizes staging the scene was her idea. He says the only reason he helped was because of her banged up face -- which she did to herself.
Later, Brenda gets a late night visit in her office from Captain Raydor, bringing juicy news of Ally's motive. They had an interest-only mortgage and were going to lose their home, unless one of them died and the mortgage insurance kicked in.
"I would also like to say," says Raydor, "that I am fully aware that at the beginning of this investigation I was a total bitch."
"I would say it was more toward the middle... and the end," Brenda says.
But Raydor still thinks if Brenda had talked to the husband he might be still alive. Brenda acknowledges that she has a point and allows she might have resisted doing so because Raydor was pushing for it.
Both women suggest they try to play nice in the future, but they agree that they just don't like each other. They say super polite good byes.
Brenda arrives home to find Fritz cleaning the fridge. She brought Cuban food. She asks him about the promotion.
He lists all the negatives to show why it wasn't a viable option, but says someday he might get an offer they'd have to talk about. He says maybe he was irritable because he didn't know what she'd pick between him and her career.
By way of answer, she kisses him. Her phone rings. She chooses between him and her career by taking off her shirt. The phone continues to ring as he carries her into the bedroom.
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