- A brilliant mathematician is shot and killed by a clown, and the team discovers that he was working on a priceless code-breaking device.
- Unemployed math genius and social cripple Noah Valiquette (32) is shot in a park by a clown who cuts off his right index finger. Suspects abound due to a fake circus movie audition. After his widow reports the house ransacked, it appears the finger was the key to a safe, but the robber failed to realize the treasure was a locker-room key, hidden in a cheap chess piece. It was a universal code hacker, ordered by Noah's partner, Tolman Bunting, from Noah, a Dutchman and closed psych ward patient Oliver McDaniel, who escapes once told about the key.—KGF Vissers
- When a man is murdered by a clown, the CBI team assumes the investigation. Soon they learn that the victim is Noah Valiquette and had the index finger cut off. Patrick and Lisbon interview the widow, the waitress Daphne, and his brother Ralph, and also learn that Noah was an unemployed brilliant mathematician that was working in a project for Tolman Bunting. Their further investigation shows that Noah was working in a code-breaking device. When his house is trashed, Patrick finds his finger used to open a safe. Patrick also finds a key hidden in a chess game. The CBI team uses this key to attract the attention of the killer.—Claudio Carvalho, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
- A man walks into a closed park, nervous and walking away for something. Behind him, an arm that appears to belong to a clown shuts the gate. The man looks around for a way out but is then gunned down...by a clown, who then snips off one off the man's index finger.
The CBI team hits the scene. The victim is Noah Valequette. Witness have told them about the clown. Lisbon wonders why they were called in. The local officer shows them who they picked up based on the description -- a whole streetful of clowns.
There was a casting call for clowns for a movie, suggesting they come in costume.
Patrick Jane is sure the other clowns are a smokescreen and the real killer clown is gone.
At the victim's house, they meet with his wife, Daphne, and brother. They learn he had trouble addressing crowds and was a math genius.
He was publishing papers but not bringing in much money. Daphne was supporting them as a waitress. She says he had started daytrading recently but she didn't think it was going well.
His brother says Noah was terrified of clowns.
Jane sees a chessboard with a complex game going. They learn it was with a guy named Tolman Bunting.
Rigsby tells Lisbon that Bunting owns a store near the coffee house where Noah went every day.
Lisbon and Jane meet with Bunting (Fisher Stevens), who tells them he met Noah when Noah contacted him with some corrections to his puzzle book. They had a regular chess game and played over the Internet or by phone.
Jane mentions chess to Bunting and is challenged to a game. They start playing entirely with verbal directions.
Bunting tells them that Noah wanted to bet on their last game, which he'd never done before, but Bunting declined.
Jane and Bunting trade a few more moves aloud.
Back at the office, Cho passes Jane a message with Bunting's next move.
Van Pelt has found no record of day trading on Noah's computer. Instead she's found a bunch of files with what seem like random numbers and letters, which he routinely emailed to a "BeastSlayer" email address.
Lisbon gets a call from a freaked out Daphne saying someone's in her house. They arrive and find her outside, saying the door was opened. They check it out. No one is inside, but the house has been ransacked and the carpet in the bedroom has been ripped back to reveal a high tech floor safe. Lisbon finds the key under the bed: Noah's finger.
Inside they find a chessboard, comic book and same papers. Daphne says she didn't know about the safe.
Jane makes himself some tea in their kitchen and takes note of how everything is neatly organized.
Lisbon gets a report that "BeastSlayer' is registered to someone named Alec Mosca who lives 15 miles away.
Jane looks at the stuff from the safe. The Spider-Man comic is worth something. But the chess set is a cheap one. Jane shakes each piece and hears one rattling. He opens it and finds a key to locker 42.
Cho and Rigsby knock on Mosca's door. He puts them off, saying he needs to get dressed. They bust in when he doesn't come back. He puts his hands up and tells them to just take his $14,000 in cash to Mike to make up for his bet.
He's never heard of CBI. "We're like the FBI only more conveniently located," Cho explains.
Back at HQ, Alec says he knows Noah from the coffee house. He says Noah offered to give analysis on his picks for a 10 percent cut. The emails were his code. The picks all hit until three weeks ago, when they all were wrong. He said he had a problem and couldn't focus.
They assume he had an intellectual problem, one he might have talked about with Bunting. They visit him again and Jane makes his next chess move. The same watchful, serious looking Asian woman is there. Jane assesses her and then points something that looks like a gun covered with a handkerchief at Bunting. The Asian woman draws, so does Lisbon.
When everyone calms down and puts their guns away, Bunting explains why he has an armed body guard by taking them into his secret back room full of computers and nerds working on high tech codes. He runs a computer security business.
At first he doesn't want to tell them what Noah was up to, but he tells them Noah was working on a "universal hack," a device to decode any encryption. He offered three different people $2 million for whoever could do it first.
Three weeks ago, Noah called and said he'd done it but worried about it falling into the wrong hands. Bunting didn't believe him. Jane tells him about the locker key.
One of the other people building a device was in Amsterdam and the other was Oliver McDaniel. He's local, but Bunting's sure he didn't do it.
Cut to Lisbon and Jane meeting with a young man in a heavily secured mental hospital. He attacked his father, who he explains is a "cyber clone sent by the galactic overlords."
He and Noah met in grad school. He knew Noah was afraid of clowns. He doesn't like Jane playing with his wave noise machine. He asks Lisbon for a massage and scarfs down Spaghetti-Os from the can. He says he convinced his doctors to let him work on building the device as therapy but if Noah was working on one he was a hypocrite, he didn't want to do anything that would hurt anyone.
Jane asks Oliver about about the locker key but he points out he's a mental patient and couldn't have known anything.
They're not even out the door when the alarm for an inmate escape goes off. Oliver is gone.
Back at CBI Rigsby says Oliver made a keypass using guard's info then tripped the alarm and hid in guard's locker room before escaping. They find Oliver has been pretty much coming and going as he pleased using the guard's card.
Jane asks Van Pelt for recommendations for a resort by the ocean.
Cut to Jane walking into a fancy resort.
Rigsby finds the guard's credit card was used to buy a plane ticket to Brazil. Lisbon's about to head to the airport when Jane calls.
Lisbon joins Jane at the resort. Jane reminds her about Oliver asking her for a massage and the sound machine set to waves. Plus, room 644 has ordered six cans of Spaghetti-os.
But Jane doesn't want to arrest him yet because he thinks Oliver knows where the device is.
They follow him and Jane texts his latest chess move to Bunting.
The team watches him walk into an amusement park but from a distance they can only watch as a man lunges at Oliver and whacks him on the head. He slumps to the ground and Cho and Rigsby follow the man into a room of storage lockers. They stop a hooded man opening one but he runs past them and gets away.
From outside, Jane watches them run out. He goes to investigate and finds locker 42 busted open and empty. But the key doesn't fit it.
Back outside, the man jumps off the pier and runs down the beach, with Cho in pursuit. Lisbon comes around and cuts the man off. Cho tackles him and they see it's Bunting.
Back up with the lockers, Jane counts four over and two down. The key fits.
Back at HQ, Bunting is claiming he was there by coincidence.
When Lisbon leaves to take a call from the attorney general, he gives her his next chess move for Jane.
In another interview room, Oliver holds an ice pack to his head. He says he and Noah used to go to the pier in grad school and he recognized the key. He wanted the money to build his bunker for the intergalactic war. He says the morning Noah was killed he was at the all-you-can-eat buffet at his favorite strip club.
Lisbon has been told by the AG to drop all charges on Bunting. She's stumped on how to get him.
Jane visits Oliver with a proposition and a can of Spaghetti-os.
Jane drops by Bunting's store with his next chess move and Noah's machine, saying he's there to return it. He wants the money to go to Noah's heirs. They bring in Daphne and Noah's brother and tell them about the $2 million. Both deny having seen the machine. Jane suggests they test it on Lisbon's encrypted personnel file.
It doesn't seem to work.
The brother is confused and Daphne surreptitiously flips a switch on the machine and asks Bunting to try it again. It appears to be working and then a message repeats on the screen: "My wife killed me."
Daphne pulls the plug and feigns ignorance. Jane tells her he had Oliver change the settings so it wouldn't work, but she knew how to change them back. She watched Noah work and was upset when he changed his mind about handing it over. So she decided to play on his fear and get him to open in the safe, but the device wasn't in there.
Back at HQ, she says she thought their life would be like "A Beautiful Mind," but it was days of silence and no sex when he's thinking, which was all the time. She waitressed 50 hours a week so they could eat.
She was upset when he wouldn't turn it over, saying she didn't understand the implications.
She's under arrest.
Jane tells Lisbon he figured out it was her very late. The kitchen was unsearched because it was her domain, she knew the device wasn't there.
Bunting is in the office, waiting to make another chess move, to pin Jane's queen. But he's also there to collect the device. Jane hands it over, saying he had "a little fiddle with it." He gives Bunting a box of broken bits. Bunting gets up in a huff, saying Jane will be hearing from his attorneys, and Jane responds with his next chess move, forcing check mate in three moves. "I win," Jane says.
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