Scarpetta Recap ‘Pete’: ‘To create life where there is none’

Scarpetta Season 1 Episode 4

This is the third episode in a row that Scarpetta opened with a scene from the past of one of the main characters. First, it was Kay, then Dorothy, and now Pete Marino, who was raised by a pacifist father who taught him to turn the other cheek. His mother, on the other hand, wanted him to toughen up, and it was her lesson that he brought with him when he returned to the street outside their home with a stick and proceeded to beat the boy who had previously given him a black eye. 

Pete grew up on the side of the angels, and despite all the good that he did, despite his innate sense of justice, there remained this tough guy hotheaded bully within him, so much so that Kay often had to correct him. When present day Marino, via Lucy’s sleuthing, found out that Matt Petersen indeed knew Gwen Hainey, he left his wife Dorothy in the fancy restaurant where she had been trying to get his attention, drove straight to his farm, and ended up beating him up, opening himself to possible criminal charges. A retired detective would of course know better. But, as young Kay once exasperatedly said, Marino was both an imbecile and a genius. For good or ill, he was often guided by emotion, which at times turned into a loss of temper. Yet, as the show has taken pains to illustrate, all their disagreements and book-learned doctor/ street cop differences aside, Marino has been for decades the one consistent person on Kay’s corner.  

How did Matt explain his meeting with Gwen? Well, he claimed he read an article about the work Thor Labs has been doing about artificial organs. Then, one night at a bar, he saw Gwen and recognised her as the bioengineer from the article. What he wanted to know from her was whether what they were working on as disclosed in the article was indeed possible. Matt wanted to bring his wife Lori back to life. Lucy, who arrived at the farm with Fruge to try and stop Marino from doing what he did to Matt, was the only one in that group who understood what Matt said. ‘To create life where there is none’, was how Lucy explained it, a woman who so grieved the loss of her wife that she has been spending the past year with an AI version of her. A miniseries with a tighter script would focus on Lucy as she works as an investigator whilst navigating the pitfalls of grief with AI Janet. The characters are great, but four episodes in, and I feel like what prevents the show from soaring is that it tries to do too much. I now have two potentially independent shows in my head, a young Scarpetta period mystery, and a modern, more tech-focused Lucy miniseries. 

AI Janet proved helpful when she casually mentioned that another woman died in Daingerfield about six months ago, a female jogger named Cammie Ramada. The death was ruled accidental. According to Fruge, Cammie had a seizure whilst jogging, fell, and hit her head. Kay was aghast. So six months prior to Gwen’s murder, another woman with a head wound died in the same place?

When Kay learned that Reddy showed up on the night of the autopsy with a bunch of FBI agents, that pretty much sealed the deal for Kay that something was terribly wrong with Cammie’s autopsy. The doctor who performed the autopsy, Debbie Kaminsky, initially rebuffed Kay’s effort to talk about the case, but she eventually relented. There was a jurisdictional issue on where Cammie’s body was found, but Reddy somehow managed to have the body transferred to their lab. He walked in with the FBI whilst the autopsy was ongoing, and declared that it was an accident, that Cammie slipped whilst jogging. He would not even allow Debbie to submit the DNA into CODIS. Debbie also remembered something interesting about that night at the crime scene; though Reddy claimed his wife was in the car with him, the woman Debbie saw looked like Maggie. Kay’s response to the idea that Maggie was involved in whatever corrupt thing Reddy did that night was to tell Maggie that they were reopening the Cammie Ramada case.  

Back in 1998, someone seemed to be after Kay. A lab tech named Wingo found four slides inside the fridge that did not contain Kay’s initials. The Lori Petersen evidence had already been sent to New York. If these slides were from the case, then the chain of evidence may have been broken. It did not matter that one of his snitches found a jumpsuit with the same glittery substance found in the victims, that also matched the substance on Matt’s makeup remover that he used on the night Lori died. The case would get thrown out, along with every case Kay has worked on.

Kay knew that someone was doing this to her to put her credibility at stake. The extra labels she printed when processing the evidence had disappeared from her locked desk. When she asked a tech named Betty to examine the slides, it was Reddy she and Marino found in the trace lab. Reddy mentioned there was chatter about mishandled evidence. Marino claimed the slides were from him, a personal favour that he asked. Reddy did not look like he bought it, but it was nice nonetheless to watch Marino defend Kay.

Marino also asked Benton to come and help, which angered Kay. She snapped that she did not even know if she could trust Marino. When the wayward evidence was examined for fingerprints, only Kay’s prints were found. They also emitted the same glittery thing as the trace left by the killer.

Kay calmed down enough to tell Marino and Benton that she suspected the in-office chatter was coming from her secretary Maggie. But when Boltz arrived and announced that he would pretty much act the babysitter, Kay grabbed the baseball bat in her office and let her frustration lose on a skull and some bones in the lab.

Benton – after notably ignoring Kay’s confession that she developed feelings for a co-worker – taught Kay a breathing technique that calmed her down, and gently walked her through her day. Kay realised that there was something she did that day that she did not usually do – she washed her hands in the bathroom downstairs. Kay, Benton, and Marino headed to the bathroom, and Marino used the soap, then Kay held a UV lamp over his hands. This was the source of the glittery substance. With every wash, the glittering increased. They considered that the killer could have OCD and was obsessively washing his hands, or that he had a metabolic disorder that created the odour Matt had mentioned, and he washed often to try and mask the smell. Now that they knew what they were looking for, they could trace the soap whilst Kay figured out what kind of metabolic disease the killer may have. 

Humans are complicated. I can buy that Kay wanted to return to her old job, and figured it was a good idea to be around for her grieving niece as well. I am struggling with how Kay’s decision to return has been presented so far, from the selfless act of a loving aunt to what now seems to be either a duty or ego driven move. As she told Debbie, she came back because ever since she left, the office has been run like garbage. I see a path that would make these duelling motivations make sense dramatically, and I look forward to seeing how the show handles this in the back four episodes. The episode end looked promising, with Kay summoned by the FBI and finding her husband on the scene. Kay, Marino, and Benton were a team when they were young. Now, Kay and Marino were investigating whilst Benton was off with the FBI. How much have husband and wife shared? How much have they kept secret? We have some idea, and the fallout next episode should be very interesting. 

Rating: B

Strays

🔬Dorothy’s reaction to the bomb AI Janet dropped about Marino being in love with Kay was to be overly affectionate with both her husband and her sister.

🔬Dorothy, maybe let your husband have his burger? Marino looked ill at ease at that fancy restaurant Dorothy took him too. She told him that they had a room for after lunch, and that they also had a new Airbnb. Dorothy’s efforts were for nil; when Lucy called with proof that Matt Petersen knew Gwen, Marino was off. 

🔬Wingo was (or acted) hurt that Kay suspected him of planting the evidence on the fridge. 

🔬According to Kay, Boltz asked her out and she turned him down hmm.

🔬Benton still had Jinx Slater in that truck. He told him they knew he and Gwen were selling information to the Russians. He showed him Gwen’s texts with someone named Gary Mitchell. Jinx still denied that he killed her and claimed that he was trying to protect her. He hacked Thor Labs because Gwen would leave digital trails that he would then go in and obscure so she would not get caught.

Episode Title: Pete

Episode Writer: Ahmadu Garba

Episode Director: Charlotte Brandstrom

Original Release Date: March 11, 2026

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