Title: Three Widows
Directed by: Patrick Cady
Written by: Shaz Bennett
Air Date: April 17, 2020
Previous: Good People on Both Sides
Next: Part of the Deal
Guest Starring: Mimi Rogers, Julie Ann Emery, Kristen Ariza, Linda Park
"Three Widows" is the 3rd episode of the sixth season of Bosch.
The coroner reports that Ben Craver has been dead for 36 hours, which rules out both Waylon and Heather Strout. It is however possible that Travis Strout killed Craver before getting back home, although Bosch points out the tight window. In any case, there's no evidence connecting Travis Strout's widow Heather to anything, so she's released.
The cops stake out Heather Strout and see Charlie Dax passing her a gun. Bosch and Edgar tail Dax to his place of work, a landscaping business. When Dax sees them he runs for it, but Edgar chases him down and arrests him.
Meanwhile, some patrolmen have found a body lying on the street with strange burns on his body. Edgar and Bosch observe that the man, a homeless immigrant from El Salvador, looks like he's been exposed to a high dosage of radiation. A receipt leads them to a recycling center which leads to the man's dwelling place, a broken-down VW van. They find the "pig" outside, and inside, they find the pellets of cesium.
With that, the terrorism angle is basically finished and the FBI regards the case as closed, with Travis Strout being the murderer of Stanley Kent. But it doesn't sit right with Harry, who wonders why the sovereigns would go to all that trouble to steal cesium only to throw it away. Edgar suggests that maybe Stanley Kent didn't take the cesium to the rendezvous (in fact he didn't, as the first episode of the season showed), but Bosch still can't figure why the bad guys left Alicia Kent alive. He decides to start fresh and reexamine the evidence.
Bosch, examining the calls on Stanley Kent's phone one at a time, finds a call to a private investigator named George Langworthy. Langworthy has some interesting news: Stanley Kent was his client, and Stanley suspected his wife of cheating on him. Langworthy tells Bosch that there were some mysterious calls from Alicia Kent to a burner phone but he never found any direct evidence that she was having an affair.
Meanwhile, Honey Chandler confronts the lawyer who made a cushy plea deal for her client, a deal that that put Chandler's client Dante Crow in jail.
Edgar meets up with Agent Charlie Hovan of the DEA, who has a CI, a Jamaican. The CI, Winston, tells them that Marcos and Arias were in fact on Jacques Avril's payroll. What neither Edgar or Hovan know is that Winston was one of the two shooters who killed Marcos and Arias.
Tropes:
- Binocular Shot: What is shown onscreen when Edgar, with the binoculars, watches Charlie Dax pass Heather a gun.
- The Bus Came Back: Mayor Hector Ramos makes his only appearance of the season. Apparently he is not running for reelection.
- Chekhov's Gunman: An establishing shot at the Craver murder scene shows a crime scene cleanup guy leaning up against a work van that says "Postmortem Cleaners". That is Roger Dillon, who will prove crucial to the solution of the Daisy Clayton case several episodes down the road.
- Creator Cameo: Producer/writer Tom Bernardo is one of the FBI agents stuffing Charlie Dax into a van.
- The Dandy: After they find the cesium, Bosch laughs about how Edgar had to give up his fancy tailored suit and his $400 shoes.
- Idiosyncratic Wipe: A camera stationed in the hallway shows Bosch and Edgar, in a conference room, looking at the Stanley Kent file again. A cop passes in front of the camera—and the cop acts as a wipe. After he passes by the camera shows Bosch alone in the room.
- The Illegal: The "pig" with the cesium is found not with the sovereigns, but in a broken-down van used as a home for an illegal from El Salvador, who is found dead on the streets of radiation exposure.
- The Informant: Hovan does not know that his CI, Winston, is one of the murderers that Jerry Edgar is trying to catch.
- It's A Small Net After All: A search for "George Langworthy" reveals the private investigator as the third result on the page.
- Jitter Cam: Used as Edgar is chasing Charlie Dax on foot through rows of potted trees at the landscaping business.
