Minnow and the Shark (Season 1, Episode 6)
Premise: A grocery chain executive is found dead in what looks like a suicide, and the hired killer behind it leads the detectives to a secret price-fixing deal between her company and a rival bakery.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 1, Episode 6
- Starring
- DS Henry Graff (Aden Young), DS Frankie Bateman (Kathleen Munroe), Insp. Vivienne Holness (Karen Robinson), DCA Theo Forrester (K.C. Collins), Mark Yohannes (Araya Mengesha), Dr. Lucy Da Silva (Nicola Correia-Damude)
- Guest stars
- Brian Markinson as Douglas Hill, Rachael Ancheril as Nadia Betts, James Cade as Sean Grierson, Fiona Highet as Zoe Vaughn, Ryan Blakely as Clayton
- Director
- Rachel Leiterman
- Writers
- Aubrey Nealon
Summary
The Case
“Minnow and the Shark” opens with a man on the phone assuring an impatient client that a job will be done soon. Nadia Betts, CEO of the grocery giant Best Betts, shoots a folksy commercial and is mobbed by protesters. That night her chief operating officer, Zoe Vaughn, leaves her family for a late “work thing” and is ambushed before reaching a diner. She is found dead at a lakeside lookout, pills scattered around her, but her hands are folded oddly, and the autopsy finds an injection of the animal sedative acepromazine and tablets forced down her throat after she passed out.
A waitress remembers a man called Clayton waiting at the diner for someone who never came. The killer’s stolen car leads to nearby vet clinics and to worker Vicki, who sold the drug to Sean Grierson. Arrested with $150,000 in his apartment, Grierson calls it a contract job from a client he never met. Clayton turns out to be a private investigator Vaughn had called about tailing a “prominent citizen.” The calls to Grierson came from a payphone, and cameras place Douglas Hill, owner of the country’s largest commercial bakery, there both times.
Photos on Vaughn’s new camera show figures painted on a graffiti wall on Lakeshore. Its layers reveal years of coded price moves: Hill Breads and Best Betts have been raising bread prices in step, a $40 million scheme. Hill denies it, but pricing clerk Trevor Moore says some prices were changed at the very top, and a board member reveals the board wanted Vaughn to replace Betts. In a tense call, Betts tells “Doug” that Vaughn was coming after them. Betts’s security chief, Brandon, who served at Petawawa with Grierson’s cousin, admits he passed on Grierson’s number after Betts asked for someone to scare off a man bothering her daughter.
The Interrogation
Forrester gathers Betts, Hill and their lawyers and offers immunity on the price-fixing to only one of them; Betts’s side moves to take it and blames Vaughn. The detectives then turn to Hill: Vaughn was building a case to oust Betts, not him, and the citizen her investigator was to follow was Betts herself. Betts, they say, supplied his motive, his killer and the $150,000, and phone and car data will place him where Grierson was paid. Told that Betts turned him into the kind of businessman he hates, Hill cracks and says the idea, the hitman and the money were all hers. Both are arrested for Vaughn’s murder.
The ending
Spoiler: Both protest as they are led away. Afterward, one of the partners dismisses both companies’ cheerful slogans in a single bitter line.
Suspects’ fates: Nadia Betts, arrested; Sean Grierson, arrested; Douglas Hill, arrested.
Why it stands out
- Lindsay Owen Pierre is credited as Detective Will Hastings, a role he plays again in “Three Points.”
- Toronto places named in the dialogue include Pearson airport, Fiesta Farms, Dundas Street, Rosedale and the Lakeshore.
- The painted-over wall prompts a reference to Picasso’s The Blue Room, a canvas that hid an earlier painting beneath it.