Digital Lipstick (Season 2, Episode 2)
Premise: Toronto detectives link a hacker’s stabbing in the PATH to a dating site for cheaters, a judge’s suicide and a popular pastor’s secret alias.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 2, Episode 2
- 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
- Rachelle Lefevre as Ellen Stewart, Joris Jarsky as Nathan Renslow, Sarah Podemski as Roxanne Renslow, Daniela Sandiford as Josie Bennett, Steven McCarthy as Aaron Smith
- Director
- David Wellington
- Writers
- Jillian Locke
Summary
The Case
“Digital Lipstick” begins with Ellen Stewart, founder of Scarlett Riley, a dating service for people cheating on their partners, defending the business before it goes public. After learning that someone has refused a payoff, she phones Justice Simon Mackie, who writes down a name. Hospital worker Josie Bennett gets a call from her best friend, IT security expert Dina Patesh, saying she has found him. Dina is stabbed while waiting in a health kiosk in the PATH, and staff take her for asleep.
The killer used a subclavian thrust, a knife strike favoured in mob hits, but missed with the first blow. Mackie is found dead the same day, an apparent carbon monoxide suicide with Dina’s name in his pocket. He had tried to have her sealed impaired-driving case moved to his courtroom, and his smashed laptop holds explicit photos he sent women on the site. A hidden virtual machine on Dina’s work computer holds a ransom note: she had taken the data of 35 million users and demanded that Stewart close the site. Stewart, who has an alibi, denies telling Mackie. Dina had turned down a $500,000 wire from a company owned by Nathan Renslow, pastor of Evolution Church and an old friend of Stewart’s, who claims he went on only a few chaste dates.
A production order lets the team look up just 10 names on the user list, and one is Josie’s. She says a user called Don Juan 423 raped her after a blindfolded meeting, then vanished from the app, and that another woman, Fiona, reported the same man to police. Dina hacked the site to identify him. Tech chief Taj Azad reveals that the company’s lawyer, Aaron Smith, used his login.
The Interrogation
Aaron, who once defended a former soldier in a subclavian-thrust killing, admits he altered the Don Juan 423 handle to shield its owner: Nathan, whom he knows through the church. Forrester warns that the rape cases are too thin to win, so the detectives target the alibi Nathan’s wife, Roxanne, gave him. At the church, they confront the couple; Nathan insists the women consented and calls their attempts to remove the blindfold a broken deal. Roxanne then admits he reached the church at two, an hour after Dina was killed, and had begged her to stay quiet.
The ending
Spoiler: The detectives walk Nathan out through the congregation, his hands behind his back, as he publicly acknowledges his need for redemption and members call out that they will pray for him. He never admits to Dina’s murder on screen, and nothing further is said about Stewart’s call to Mackie.
Suspect’s fate: Nathan Renslow, arrested.
Why it stands out
- Before deciding Dina was targeted, the team compares the killing to the real Toronto case of Rohinie Bisesar, the so-called Shoppers stabber.
- The title comes from Stewart’s pitch that on her platform, the digital lipstick on a user’s collar stays secret.