'Patience' Recap: Season 2 Episode 3

Patience airs Sundays at 7:00 pm and is available to stream. Recap the previous episode.
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Patience has proven her worth to Frankie, who asks her to accompany the team of detectives to their latest homicide case. Ben Jarrett was a lawyer who seemingly had little life outside his work. He was celebrating the closure of a big corporate merger when a gunshot shattered a window. Everyone turned to gawk at the hole and the dead magpie underneath, and was then even more surprised to turn back and see Ben with a gunshot in his chest. 

Even though all the witnesses say they only heard one gunshot, Patience insists there were two – the angle is impossible for a single shot to have shattered the window and hit Ben. That means the second shot, which killed Ben, came from inside the room. Ballistics confirms this, but no one in the room had gunpowder residue on them.

The magpie provides a clue. It is the calling card of an infamous international art and jewelry thief known as the Magpie. On Interpol’s list of Magpie suspects is the behavioral psychologist Guy Delton – and he is also on the list of visitors to the building where Ben was shot the morning of the murder.

Under questioning, Guy says he was at the building to meet a publisher, but was left waiting until an assistant finally came out and told him the meeting was cancelled. Except the publisher doesn’t have an office in that building and said they have never been in touch with Guy.

Thinking he might be the killer, Frankie decides to try to turn Guy’s ego against him and ask him to “consult” on the case, hoping he will be desperate to reveal his cleverness in planning the confounding murder. Jake worries that Guy will be able to outfox Frankie.

And he does, taking off his handcuffs without anyone but Patience noticing while he walks through the murder scene, explaining that no shots were heard, despite what the witnesses said. There were two shots from a silenced gun: first at the window, where the noise of shattering glass made the witnesses think they heard a gunshot, and then at Ben while everyone was distracted. 

The York police are trying to improve their public image, in part through a more exciting social media presence. The communications manager Zinzi is pushing Baxter to post more often – and takes her own initiative when she overhears that the Magpie might be involved in a murder, posting about it herself. The story blows up, to Baxter’s annoyance. He chastises Zinzi, who agrees that she made a mistake. Something else still seems to be bothering her.

Patience suspects that the Magpie didn’t kill Ben – Ben was the Magpie. He was arrested as a teenager for pickpocketing, despite his deft handiwork. His travels line up perfectly with all of the Magpie’s thefts. But there’s no paper trail of the wealth he should have acquired from them.

He did frequently use an escort service, always requesting the same woman, Amber, to spend time with him on dates. They grew close; she says Ben had recently been wanting to travel less and spend more time on things he loved, like going to the antiques center in York and magic.

Ben spent time in a juvenile detention center where there was a well-publicized program led by the TV performer Jay Presto to teach the residents magic, so Frankie and Patience go to speak to Jay at the magic museum he now runs. Patience sees through all the tricks on display there, but Frankie is enthralled – she loved Jay’s TV show in the ’80s. After a session with her autism support group, Patience realizes that she just sees things differently than Frankie, who might enjoy the illusions and not want to understand them. Patience apologizes to Frankie.

Jay tells the women that Ben was a protege during the program, but he hasn’t seen him for years. 

The detectives realize that Amber, the escort, was at the building where Ben was shot during his murder. She admits that she didn’t tell the police because she thought it looked bad – but her visit had nothing to do with Ben. An anonymous client paid for her to go there and pose as a publisher’s assistant and then tell Guy the meeting was cancelled.

Patience notices another extraneous person at the building in CCTV footage. While five forensic team members entered in their coveralls, a sixth one was with them as they left.

Although the email is encrypted, Patience and Frankie notice that the anonymous client who paid Amber to humiliate Guy called her “sweetie pie” – something Jay called both of them. 

The detectives search the magic museum and find a gun with a silencer. But then the lights go out and Jay disappears. They follow him into a hall of mirrors, where Patience helps Frankie catch him from behind. 

At the police station, Jay explains that he and Ben were the Magpie together – even if Ben did all the dangerous legwork while Jay just laundered the money, Jay insists that he was the mastermind behind each theft. But Ben thought he could do it on his own, and broke into Jay’s museum and took some valuable diamonds he had stolen as the Magpie. Jay then paid someone to mug Ben and take his keys – Patience has already turned up this crime report – and searched Ben’s house himself, but couldn’t find the diamonds.

So he decided to kill Ben and frame Guy, knowing that Guy was on the list of suspects who could be the Magpie. Frankie uses the same trick she tried on Guy, this time successfully, playing on Jay’s ego to get him to confess to all his meticulous planning and how clever he was in the murder. He posed as a member of the catering staff, planted the magpie, shot the window, and then shot Ben, making sure the lawyer saw his murderer – even if he didn’t notice him earlier when he served him champagne, a failure of his attention to Jay’s teachings. Jay then waited in the building and left with the forensics team.

But where are the diamonds Ben took? Knowing of Ben’s love of the antique center, Patience goes there with Elliot, whom she will now admit she is dating. She spots a stuffed bird that’s not a magpie above a magpie nest, and Elliot explains that it’s a bird that thieves from magpies. They look in the nest and find the diamonds hidden there. 

Elliot has offered to go with Patience to the address left for her by her mother in a case file, but Patience isn’t sure she wants to know what’s there. She eventually decides to go and agrees to be accompanied by Elliot. They meet a woman at the rural house who says Patience’s mom lived there for a time and left. She has since died, many years ago – a fact Patience did not know. She also left a locket for Patience, with a photo of both herself and Patience inside. Upset, Patience quickly leaves. 

She looks up her mother’s death certificate. When Elliot asks if she’ll ever wear the locket, she says that she’s not sure she will ever be able to forgive her mother for leaving.