There’s been a running trend of OTT mystery thrillers trying to let the story play out over two parallel timelines, sometimes with mixed results. Scarpetta is a show that I’d say does this pretty well, for a change, though the excellent casting plays a massive role in that. Kay Scarpetta is the first female chief medical examiner of Virginia, and she has to battle both institutional sexism and a misogynistic serial killer who’s made a habit of murdering helpless women. Twice, 28 years apart. In the present day, it’s like the past is playing out all over again on repeat, but only Kay can see the parallels. There’s a biomedical conspiracy, Russian espionage, dead women revived by AI, and weird, toxic romances, all in this one eight-part series. So let’s get straight into this recap without any further ado.
Spoiler Alert
Why Did Kay Become a Medical Examiner?
Considering the show is already split up into two timelines, to make things easy, let’s start with Kay and Dorothy’s childhood. In 1978, a preteen Kay was in her father’s shop with him when a bunch of people came in to rob the place. Worried for his daughter’s safety, instead of just giving them the money, Kay’s father freaked out and tried to fight the man holding him at gunpoint. Before we know it, Kay’s covered in blood, and her father lies dead in front of her. Dot returned too late, only to see Kay sitting all by herself and looking at their mom crying, because she was out on a date when it all went down. We already know this is likely why Dot became obsessed with men, as an escape from the trauma of her father’s death, and at the same time, Kay was already super intelligent (hence Dot calling her a dork), so after seeing death at such a young age, she ended up choosing to make that her career.
Who does Kay work with on the original case?
28 years ago, in 1998, Kay had just become the chief medical examiner of Virginia, and she had a huge responsibility on her shoulders. For her first major case, Kay has to handle a shocking serial murder, for which she ends up collaborating with Detective Pete Marino. This is the beginning of their weird friendship, because whatever Marino says, Kay generally doesn’t agree with. At the same time, FBI Agent Benton Wesley is assigned to the case, too. So the three of them basically team up to solve this investigation. The case involves the deaths of four young women: Brenda, Patty, Cecile, and Lori. We’re brought in when Lori’s case is being investigated, and she is the first of the women to have been married, so the immediate suspect is her husband, Matt. Peterson.
Right from the start, Pete is obsessed with pinning the murders on Matt, so he spends a lot of his time interrogating the guy, but Kay is immediately certain he’s not their guy because she can see that he loved his wife. At the same time, a new woman named Maggie becomes her secretary. As soon as she shows up, it is made to look like she’s teaming up with Elvin Reddy, Kay’s rival. So, when there’s a hack of Kay’s files, she doesn’t take long to blame Maggie. However, it’s revealed later that Maggie started working for Elvin after Kay blamed her for the hack. It is likely he sabotaged her himself.
Meanwhile, back at home, Kay looks after her niece, Lucy. It’s turning out to be quite difficult, because the girl’s obsessed with computers, and even the nanny can’t handle her nerdiness. Later, we learn that Lucy earned enough money by the time she was 30 to never need to work again. Anyway, Kay has a secret weapon in Lucy, and when she learns about the hack, she tries to get her to help find out who did it. Lucy is the one who figures out that it was somebody within Kay’s office who leaked information. On the other hand, we are briefly introduced to a journalist named Abby, whom Kay is always annoyed with, given she’s constantly asking her questions. Abby’s just trying to do her job, and it’s likely that because Kay’s a woman, she thinks she might understand where she’s coming from. One night, when Lucy and Kay are out watching the “X-Files” movie, Lucy asks her if she hates Abby. This is when Kay says she doesn’t really know anything about her. Later, it is revealed that District Attorney Bill Boltz, who once asked Kay out and was rejected by her, also went out with Abby, but the date didn’t go well, and he ended up raping her. At the time, most people wouldn’t believe Abby’s side of the story, considering how powerful this man was, but Kay believes her. This is how the women start a friendship, and it’s likely why Abby decides to go after Boltz.
How do Kay and Benton get together?
Among many unresolved questions on this show, one is how and when Kay and Benton get together. They immediately form a connection when they’re working on the case together, unlike Pete and Kay. But Pete is also secretly obsessed with Kay, despite his misogynistic, conservative mindset. So much so that he even parks outside her house sometimes (creepy). Kay and Benton end up making out at her house when he comes over to talk about the case one day, and Lucy sees them before they can take things too far. But later, during their “X-Files” escapade, Lucy spots Benton with his family, i.e., his wife and daughters. It turns out Kay did know about them, but still went ahead and kissed him anyway. Much later, after the case is resolved, but she’s still reeling from the trauma, Kay decides to sleep with Benton right there in the office. After this, we never really know when they ended up getting married, but the shame on Benton’s face during the press conference makes it clear that he’s not going to wait long to make this official. I am glad they didn’t have kids, though.
Who Is The Killer In 1998?
Ultimately, Kay realizes, with the help of Dot, that the killer chooses his victims by their voices, not their appearance, which is why there’s one victim who isn’t the same race as the others. Turns out, it was the 911 operator, Roy McCorckle, who was killing the victims this whole time. Kay decides to call Pete and asks him to join her in catching the killer. She promises to wait until he shows up, but when she hears the sound of a woman screaming from inside the house, she rushes in by herself, not realizing how much danger she’s putting herself in. By the time Pete shows up, the man has tried to strangle Kay, so she’s picked up a broken plate and jammed it in his throat. To make it seem like Pete was the one who killed the man, he shoots him in the throat three times, taking the blame and binding the two of them forever.
What’s Up With Lucy?
In the present day, Lucy is a grown-up who lives with her aunt after the death of her wife, Janet. She still seems not to get along with her mum, considering she abandoned her for most of her childhood. Lucy’s unconventional behavior has always been enabled by Kay, which is why she grew up so weird. Now, Lucy talks to an AI version of her dead wife in a cottage right next to her aunt’s house. At first, Dot is very opposed to this setup, but later she ends up talking to Janet herself and realizes that the real woman actually cared about her. But more importantly, Janet tells Dot that Pete has always been in love with Kay, which leads her to start behaving very erratically in trying to stop her husband from working with her sister in the present timeline. But Kay is using Pete for credibility and influence because she needs somebody on her side at the job. Amidst all of this, Lucy meets Pete’s mentee, Blaise Fruge, but because, to her, Janet is still around, she feels like she’s cheating and decides to ignore their connection, even though she’s the reason Fruge is suspended. At some point, someone (likely Kay) deletes Janet’s AI persona, because they think it’s best for Lucy. In the end, Lucy ends up choosing herself and trying to get better by going to Matt Peterson’s healing circle.
Who Killed The Two Women In The Present Day?
The first murder in the present day is ruled to be an accident because Reddy doesn’t want any black marks on his record. But the second case shows up, and it seems identical to Kay’s first major case from back in the 90s. Kay notices the similarities and immediately starts investigating with Pete’s help, even though everybody else assumes she’s wrong. Simultaneously, Benton also returns to the FBI and is put on the second murder, too, because Gwen Hainey worked at Thor Labs, where they are trying to 3D print human organs. Gwen was a biomedical engineer, and Benton gets ahold of her boyfriend, Jinx Slater, to blame for the murder. Turns out, there was an orbital organ development unit, and Gwen was secretly selling information from it to the Russians with the help of Jared Horton.
It seems Jinx was trying to cover for his girlfriend, Gwen, and Benton uses that information to make it seem like he was helping her sell the information. Basically, Benton needs to make it look like Jinx killed Gwen so the case is resolved and it doesn’t become a national security issue. He tries to coerce Jinx into admitting he killed his girlfriend because she fell in love with Jared. He even gets him arrested for the murder. But meanwhile, he’s keeping all this a secret from Kay, who finds a connection between the two women, apart from the fact that their bodies were found in the same place and they both had blunt force trauma injuries. This bit is tricky to understand, but it has something to do with the skin grafts that both women have, but I’d rather just take this bit with a grain of salt because it seems like it’s just specifically there for Kay to connect the two women. She’s then called by the FBI to investigate the deaths of the two astronauts on the orbiter because it’s crashed in a field, and really, this part is only there for Kay to realize that Benton has been hiding things from her and that he might be in love with his new partner, Tron.
Finally, Benton asks for a divorce from Kay, because they have a really toxic relationship, and she never tells him about the cover-up with Pete. Dot mentions in passing to Benton that Kay is keeping secrets from him, planting the seed of doubt in his head. Combining that with his new little crush, it doesn’t take him long to decide to leave Kay. But additionally, we learn that he’s a psychopath himself, who was saved from becoming a murderer by his psychiatrist mother. I really think the only reason we have this part of the story is to make us feel like Benton is the killer from both timelines. It’s a great fake-out, I’m not going to lie. But it turns out the real killer is a cop named Ryan, who started working during Lori Peterson’s case. It appears that seeing the woman’s naked corpse, with all the blood around it, made him remember the violence he saw in his childhood, thanks to his uncle. Ryan watched his uncle abuse women when he was just a child, forced to flatten out a penny on the train track while he waited for his uncle to be done. I guess the dead body triggered his memories and led him to try to impress Scarpetta through his killer ways. His ultimate move was to target the doctor herself.
Lucky for him, in the ending of the show, all of Kay’s family members leave her, and she’s removed from her job too, because she’s investigating a case that was already ruled an accident. Pete can’t save her, because he gets arrested for assaulting Matt Peterson (really don’t know why the guy hates him so much), only for Lucy to bail him out. Lucy leaves for Matt’s retreat, and Dorothy gets Pete to move out of the house with her, making him choose between her and her sister. He makes the right choice, but it also leads to Kay being left alone at the most vulnerable time. Ryan shows up at the house and tries to strangle her to death, but Kay’s still got it in her. She escapes his clutches and uses the old baseball bat that she used to rage out with back in the day to hit the guy and throw him off the stairs. However, Kay is so furious because this is now the second time she’s been strangled that she takes out all her anger on the guy, smashing his skull in with the baseball bat. The show ends with someone walking in on her going ham, but we never find out who it is. In my opinion, Benton might’ve felt guilty and returned. But who do you think saw her? Do you think it was her imagination? Was it she herself, warning her to stop?
