DETAILS ON EPISODES OF SEASON 4 (12 x 52')
Episode 1: STAR TRUCK
A beautiful woman in her forties is found dead at the back of a jazz club, where she had been singing for the last few weeks. The club manager only knows her stage name: Julie Garland. A magnificent voice and incredible talent who apparently had no career ambition at all. The only thing that seemed to matter to her was her pianist, a young genius with wild ways who has gone missing since the singer’s death.
In their search to find the victim’s true identity, Chloe and Rocher discover that “Julie Garland” had been singing all over France for the last ten years, always gigs in small venues, and never more than a month in the same city. She had been accompanied on the piano by her shady young genius for the past two years. Could it have been a fusional relationship that ended in murder? What sort of danger could have forced this woman with such a pure voice to run away and wander about for so long?
Episode 2: PANIC
A crazy sniper terrorizes all of Paris by opening fire on crowds. The city is on red alert. After two murderous gunnings, Chloe and Rocher succeed in identifying the killer: Adrien Fontel, a former military agent of the Special Forces destroyed by what he lived through in Afghanistan.
Chloe diagnoses him as suffering from Capgras Syndrome, a psychiatric condition in which the patient believes that people around him are gradually being replaced by villainous doubles preparing to enact evil plans. Convinced he is on a mission to fight these invaders, Fontel kidnaps his own daughter, thinking he is protecting her.
With the help of Colonel Amelie Davout, Chloe succeeds in identifying the root of evil beneath his paranoia, and is able to predict the next attack. Operation arrest: high tension.
Episode 3: CROSSING PATHS
The lifeless body of Antoine Garrel is found on display in a shop window in the neighborhood, hands and feet bound, with a gagged mouth. A psychologist specialized in couple therapy, he had no lack of enemies among his clientele of cheating husbands and crabby wives.
Among his patients, one couple had just suddenly stopped therapy – and with good reason. Showing up a bit early for their session, they found Garrel in his office, in an compromising situation with his mistress. An affair the dead therapist’s wife knew nothing about.
While her team works to identify this woman, Chloe asks Hyppolite to look into the crime methods of the murder and discovers two other men had been assassinated under similar circumstances in Belgium. To the amazement of all, the investigators find evidence that the serial killer is none other than a woman suffering from postpartum depression; but Chloe has a hard time subscribing to that theory.
Episode 4: RADIO SILENCE
Chloe makes a guest appearance on a series of late-night radio shows about psychology in daily life. Among the callers, on a range between eccentric and totally nuts, is one woman who introduces herself as Caroline; in a trembling voice, she explains that she is afraid of her husband, who is becoming more and more violent. As Chloe encourages her to go to the police and talk to social services, we suddenly hear a man’s voice behind her. Caroline screams and lets the telephone fall. We hear the noise of blows and screams, then silence.
The media seize this live public crime and brandish it as a flag symbolic of the fight against domestic violence. Chloe convinces the Attorney General to open up an investigation, and the team scrambles to make best use of the scant evidence they have to find Caroline, hoping she is still alive.
But when a series of strange roadblocks stunt the investigation, they can’t help but ask themselves the uncomfortable question: does this woman really exist?
Episode 5: MISSING
Tension is at an all-time high on Skela and Chloe’s team. Two kids named Quentin (10 years) and Manon (5 years) have disappeared from their parents’ hotel room. Claire and Bastien Laffont, on vacation with their children in Paris, had left them unsupervised in the room for a few hours, to go out for a romantic lunch together.
The kidnapping alert is sent out with urgency, especially considering that sleeping pills for children are found in the room of another client of the hotel who had checked in under a false identity and left in great haste at the time when the kids disappeared. Could it have been a premeditated capture for a pedophilia ring of human trafficking? Though that hypothesis remains credible, Chloe tries to find out more about the parents’ habits; for statistics show that in this type of case, the parents themselves are often linked to the crime.
And, in fact, the Laffonts have lied. Their supposed romantic lunch was actually a consultation for Bastien with one of the best addictologists in Paris. A drug dependency that led to debts for which their children have paid the price? A pathology likely to have put their children in harm’s way? Is Bastien the only one in the relationship who has unmentionable secrets to hide?
Episode 6: CASE ALMOST CLOSED
At the end of a conference held out on an open square for members of the police force, Chloe is approached by Marianne Garnier, who begs her to investigate into the circumstances of the death of her 17-year old son Baptiste. Chloe is surprised by this request, until she learns that the high school student died 21 years ago, and if no new crime evidence is found within the next 48 hours, statutes of limitation will close the case. Every minute counts.
Working from a mysterious photo recently found by the victim’s mother, the team investigates at the prestigious boarding school where Garnier had succeeded in sending young Baptiste, despite her modest income. At the time, the home of one of the faculty had been vandalized by a group of hooded individuals, and the professor had suspected his students of doing the deed.
In the end, Chloe uncovers rumors of hazing. She decodes the way the personalities of the victims and their torturers led to initiation rites of intolerable violence, and ultimately, to the death of Baptiste.
Something seems to have gone awry in the heart of that twisted system, but the investigation is hindered by the fact the former students of the boarding school are now members of influential circles in society. To counter these pressures, as time is running out, Hyppolite agrees to contact his brother, an eminent business lawyer and former student of the school, though his relationship with him has always been rocky.
Episode 7: LOOKING BACK
The episode opens in 1945, with the discovery of the dead body of Armand Jonquet, a veteran of the French Resistance. The agent leading the investigation, Pierre Barreau (a look-alike of Thomas Rocher) finds a woman leaning over the corpse. She is Jonquet’s psychiatrist, Diane Danville (a look-alike of Chloe).
Back in the present, Chloe and Rocher investigate the murder of Pierre Vasseur, a painter who had just begun to exhibit his work in galleries. One of Vasseur’s ex-girlfriends had tried to warn him of his imminent death, informing him of the exact date according to her theory that she and the painter are reincarnations of Armand Jonquet and his wife. Rocher immediately rejects this irrational interpretation, and digs into Vasseur’s life in search of enemies on THIS plane of existence. But what he discovers surprises everyone on the team. Vasseur had been charged with plagiarism by Jonquet’s son, who accused him of copying his father’s paintings.
Episode 8: LIKE FATHER AND SON
A pregnant woman just about to give birth has been brutally attacked in a park. While she and the baby are on the brink of death, Rocher and Chloe find out that she had been in Paris for several weeks, using a false identity. Was she trying to escape the baby’s father? Chloe, who is preparing to adopt little Lili, is extremely sensitive to the mother’s predicament.
Episode 9: POSSESSION
Marie, a 25-year old young woman, is found stabbed to death on the altar of a church. Gabriel Mangin, a young repeat offender, comes forth and admits to having murdered her. When questioned, Mangin expresses his profound affection for the victim. While the investigators search for a possible motive, the young man’s behavior completely changes. He is possessed by a demon who calls himself Belial and claims to have committed the murder. Chloe sees the incident as a sign of schizophrenia, but Rocher thinks it is Mangin’s strategy to avoid serving a mandatory prison sentence. While they disagree, the case takes a new turn when investigators discover the young victim was hardly the saint she seemed to be.
Chloe, whose request to adopt little Lili has been rejected by social services, sinks into a self-destructive phase, using Garrel to drift further and further astray. Completely broken, she begins to wonder if she isn’t a bit demonic herself.
Episode 10: SMOKE AND MIRRORS
Tension is at an all-time high for Chloe and Rocher’s team, under the gun of the Police Inspector General. The police of the police looks into the Julie Lafayette case, a seemingly harmless investigation of a drug ring with dramatic consequences that have taken their toll on the investigators.
Episode 11: INTO THE LIGHT
Just as the Chief of Police brings in three young criminologists selected to participate in a hands-on internship led by Chloe Saint-Laurent, the criminal brigade receives a shocking DVD of a young woman getting her throat cut. Suffice it to say that the kids’ internship gets off to a quick start.
Episode12: OUT OF THE SHADOWS
When Chloe attends a party held by the Chief of Police, she sees a woman among the guests and passes out on the spot. And with good reason: as she reveals to Rocher upon awakening, the woman is none other than her own mother, presumed to have been beaten to death by her father 20 years previous. Despite a growing accumulation of evidence contrary to her convictions, Chloe throws herself headlong into an investigation that becomes a personal quest to retrace her mother’s troubled past.
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