The Stranger

Adam drives to Tripp’s office and knocks on the door. Tripp once worked for his family’s sporting goods store, and when it folded under bigger competition, he got a job with a big ad agency before opening his own business.

When Tripp answers the door, Adam confronts him about speaking to Corinne on the phone. Tripp invites Adam to walk to a nearby coffee shop where they can talk, and Adam notices that he doesn’t look like his usual confident self. Adam reveals that he knows from their phone records that Corinne called Tripp. Tripp explains that they spoke about the stolen money, and Corinne asked for more time to replace it, but he didn’t grant her request. Adam wishes that Tripp would’ve told him sooner, but Corinne didn’t want Adam to know. Tripp doesn’t think that Corinne intended to steal so much; it’s more likely that small withdrawals snowballed into her using the team account for larger personal payments. Adam firmly believes that Corinne would never steal, and he asks Tripp to give her a few more days to clear her name.

The county police take over Hiedi’s homicide case and immediately zero in on Marty as a suspect. While they investigate Marty, Johanna investigates Heidi’s weekly girls’ lunch, which could produce some clues. She speaks to the three women who went to lunch with Heidi, but none of them noticed anything strange.

As she questions the women, Johanna’s mind wanders to her memories of Heidi, like when she comforted Johanna after her miscarriage. Just as she thinks the whole excursion is a waste of time, one of the women says that she saw Heidi talking to a couple in the parking lot. Johanna gets a DVD copy of the restaurant’s security footage to watch. She sees the couple approach Heidi and speak with her for a suspiciously long time, and when Heidi gets into her car, she cries. Johanna captures the license plate of the couple’s car and asks Norbert to look it up.

When Adam arrives home, Thomas again asks about his mother since he’s becoming scared. He understands why Corinne might need space from Adam, but as a mother, she would never cut her sons off without an explanation. Adam tries to evade the question and offers surface-level comfort, but Thomas grows angry and leaves to hang out with his friend.

Adam again considers calling the police, but instead, he looks deeper into Corinne’s call history. He sees nothing unusual, so he casts his search back to when Corinne went on Fake-A-Pregnancy.com. He finds her usual patterns of calls and texts, but he also sees one call that worries him.

Adam meets with his former colleague Sally Perryman in a bar. He asks about work, but Sally wants him to cut to the chase. He asks if Corinne ever called her, which she confirms.

Corinne called two years ago to ask why Adam was at her house, and Sally said they were working on a case. Adam realizes that Corinne saw his location through the tracking app during a period when he and Sally were obsessed with a case and almost got involved with each other. Sally didn’t tell Corinne how close they became, but she sensed Corinne’s suspicions. Adam wants to say more, but he leaves.

The stranger enters his group’s home base. One of the members, Eduardo, runs their internet through multiple VPNs to hide their location. Eduardo updates the stranger, whose name is Chris Taylor, that Dan Molino paid the blackmail money. Two other members, Gabrielle and Merton, sit at computers. Chris started the group with Eduardo with the goal of making money by “righting wrongs.”

Chris tells the group that he’s worried about Ingrid. They traveled separately and didn’t communicate, like they normally do to cover their tracks, but she didn’t show up to the football arena and never returned the rental car. Eduardo patches a call through several international wires, but instead of Ingrid, a man answers the phone. The group realizes that they’re compromised.

Adam recalls the case that he and Sally worked on together, which involved protecting a local diner from a road-widening project. Adam and Sally spent every waking moment working on the case, often at her house, and though they almost became physical, they never crossed that line. Sally got a new job two months later, and their dealings together ended.

At home, Adam looks through the file on Ingrid that Rinsky put together. He calls her cell phone and leaves a message and then looks her up on Facebook. He remembers when he and Corinne first made their Facebook profiles to reconnect with old friends. Adam thought that everyone looked so happy, but Corinne knew the pictures didn’t tell the whole story.

Adam scrolls through Ingrid’s profile, looking at her posts and photos in hope of finding the stranger. He spends hours looking at her friends and friends-of-friends, cross-referencing their listed careers with the website host of Fake-A-Pregnancy.com, Downing Place.

After hours, Adam finds one woman, Gabrielle Dunbar, who has three friends who work at Downing Place. In one of Gabrielle’s group pictures from a holiday party, Adam sees the stranger in the corner of the photo.

Johanna takes her two dogs for a late-night walk, as she’s been having trouble sleeping. Her husband’s incessant snoring is one factor, but Johanna also keeps having dreams about Heidi that leave her waking in a panic.

Johanna receives an urgent call from Norbert. He tells her that something awful happened to the owner of the car on the surveillance video, Ingrid Prisby.

Adam calls Andy and forwards him Gabrielle’s group photo to investigate. Andy calls back an hour later with Gabrielle’s new address, which is only 30 minutes away. Before Adam leaves, he hears Ryan crying in his room. He sits with his son, who misses his mother, and Adam finally admits that he doesn’t know where she is. Thomas stands in the doorway, and Adam realizes that Corinne would never willingly leave her boys.

Then, they hear a car door slam and see Chief Gilman and another officer exiting a county police vehicle. Adam immediately assumes that they’re going to notify him of Corinne’s death. He and the children meet Gilman down at the door. He asks Adam to answer some questions at the station, but he assures him and the boys that it doesn’t have anything to do with Corinne.

Kuntz wakes up in the hospital room’s chair. A nurse takes Robby’s vitals, Barb returns, and Kuntz leaves for work. He takes a taxi to his boss Larry Powers’s apartment. Larry’s wife, Laurie, directs Kuntz to the study, where he finds Larry crying and drinking.

Larry has received an email from Kimberly saying that her mother was murdered, and he knows it was Kuntz who did it. Larry’s adultery with Kimberly threatens the morality clause in the company’s financial contracts. Larry orders Kuntz not to hurt Kimberly, but Kuntz already decided not to since it would draw too many connections between Heidi’s murder and his most recent kill, Ingrid.

Kuntz figures that the blackmailers discovered Larry’s identity through his credit card. Heidi told Kuntz about the Red Lobster security cameras before he killed her, and he tracked Ingrid down from the license plate on the tape. Larry begs Kuntz to hurt no one else, but Kuntz quips that everything he’s done has been to clean up the hurt that Larry did to his wife. Kuntz orders Larry to pull himself together.

Thomas and Ryan say goodbye to their father, and he gets into the back of the police car. Instead of the Cedarfield station, they drive to the county station in Newark. Len leads Adam to an interrogation room and leaves him there to wait. Johanna arrives, introduces herself, and shows Adam a picture of Ingrid. She knows that Adam paid for Ingrid’s license-plate number and ran a background search, but Adam asserts that he never met her. Johanna then shows Adam a picture of Heidi, whom he doesn’t know at all. She presses him about Corinne’s whereabouts, but Adam refuses to talk unless she tells him what she’s questioning him about.

Annoyed by Adam’s evasions, Johanna shows him pictures from Heidi’s and Ingrid’s murder scenes. Ingrid was tortured before she was shot. Johanna lays out the current timeline of events, from Ingrid and the stranger approaching Adam and Heidi to both women turning up dead. She asks rapid-fire questions about Adam’s recent conversations around the neighborhood, and she suggests that Adam could’ve sent Corinne’s text to himself to throw the police off his trail.

Adam reminds himself to be careful. He decides to stick to his original plan of finding Gabrielle and leaves the police station since he’s there voluntarily. He urges Johanna to look for Ingrid’s partner, who is the actual connection between the crimes.

Adam rings the doorbell of Gabrielle’s house, introduces himself, and hands over his business card. He claims to be an inheritance lawyer looking for a man, and he shows her the picture of the stranger. Gabrielle denies knowing him, but she looks spooked and asks Adam to leave. Adam pleads with her, admitting that his wife is missing. He says that he won’t stop looking, and Gabrielle threatens to call the police.

Inside, Gabrielle paces and tries to calm herself with deep breaths. She calls her ex-husband and sets up a time to drop off their two children in the morning. She curses her involvement with Chris’s group, which she always knew was dangerous. She curls up on her bed and cries before packing. She pulls out a gun and emails a photo of Adam’s card to Chris with the message “HE KNOWS” (297).

Adam watches Thomas’s lacrosse practice from behind the bleachers at Cedarfield High School. He thinks back to Tripp’s speech about them living the dream, but he realizes how fragile that dream is. When Thomas spots him, Adam offers to drive him home, and he texts Ryan the same offer.

When both boys are in the car, Adam explains that the police are going to help look for their mother. They see Johanna sitting on their front step when they pull into the driveway. She introduces herself to the children and says that she’s not on official police business. As the boys unload their gear, Johanna quietly informs Adam that the police found Corinne’s car.

Johanna and Adam talk while he makes dinner. She’s no longer on the case since the county police found out that she traveled to Cedarfield. The police found Corinne’s car at an airport hotel nearby, which doesn’t make sense to Adam.

He shows Johanna the phone-tracking app and tells her the whole story from the beginning. He’s now sure that Corinne faked her pregnancy, like the stranger said. Adam was going through a midlife crisis and liked the attention from Sally, and Corinne must have thought he was going to leave her. After speaking with Sally, Corinne faked the pregnancy out of desperation to get Adam’s attention back.

Johanna doesn’t understand why Adam feels so guilty since, by his own admission, he and Sally did nothing wrong. Adam’s guilt lies in the fact that he didn’t tell Corinne where he was when he stayed late at work, which contributed to her worry. Johanna thinks that’s no excuse for Corinne to spy on him. Corinne’s fake pregnancy helped Adam remember what was important in his life, and he pushes back against Johanna’s belief that Corinne did something unforgivable. Adam asserts that he still loves Corinne and can’t imagine his life without her. Johanna doesn’t know what the stranger told Heidi, or if he asked for money, but she knows who to ask.

Chris reads the email from Gabrielle and wonders how such a simple case became so complex. Usually, they discover a secret on their own and blackmail the perpetrator; either the person pays the money or the secret is revealed. In Adam’s case, an investigation firm hired them to approach Adam with Corinne’s secret, so it should have been safe. Chris was hesitant to accept for-hire cases because they don’t offer the secret keeper a chance to make the right decision, but Eduardo figured it was reliable money.

Chris knows the pain that secrets can cause, as he learned at 16 that the man who raised him wasn’t his biological father. After an accident, Chris’s father couldn’t donate blood to Chris, and Chris’s mother confessed that Chris was the product of a one-night stand. Chris’s father tried to resume his role, but he eventually left. Chris got a job at Downing Park working for websites like Fake-A-Pregnancy.com, and he soon realized that such sites went against his morals. Rather than taking down the system, Chris decided to form a small group who could attack secrets on an individual level. Some members wanted the operation to be completely anonymous, but Chris insisted that there had to be a face-to-face element. With Adam now coming for them, Chris must protect a secret of his own.