Catherine Bicks is a patient at the UCSB Medical Center, where she is being treated for cirrhosis and awaiting a donor liver. When the three patients ahead of her on the transplant list (Lucy Friedman, Veronica Miller and Peter Hodges) all die under mysterious circumstances, Catherine is the most obvious suspect, especially because she also matches Declan Rand's profile of a woman in her thirties. Declan also says that Catherine likely used sociopathic rationalization to justify the killings to herself, keeping in mind that she had her whole life still before her, unlike her victims.
When the gang visits her at her home, Lassiter startles her by pulling a gun as she tries to grab her passport from her purse. She claims she has been in Geneva, Switzerland for the last two and a half weeks to visit her liver specialist, and Lassiter has no choice but to apologize to her when the stamp on her passport corroborates her story. However, they believe this stamp to be a phony (which also explains why she refused police protection) once they find out that the sketch artist had produced her likeness based on the description of a witness who claims to have seen Catherine switch out Lucy's insect repellent.
The gang go back to her house, but unfortunately she flew the coop an hour ago. Declan theorizes that she suffers from a major depersonalization disorder (DPD), explaining that she is probably detached from her mental and emotional process and is not driven by fear. He therefore suspects her next move will be logical more than anything. When someone spots her walking through a parking garage, the gang arrives to find Declan haunching over her dead body, with her head showing signs of blunt force trauma. He's arrested and put into custody, but since Shawn knows he didn't do it he consults with him. Declan says that Catherine somehow looked even healthier than before, which puts Shawn on the right path and leads him to Woody. Woody confirms Shawn's suspicions that Catherine was actually the model of health and applied make-up under her eyes to appear sick. Puzzled by how someone with a healthy liver could get put on the transplant list, Shawn remembers the picture he saw at Catherine's house and asks Woody whether she was right- or left-handed. When Woody states she was right-handed, Shawn knows for certain that the woman in the picture, who is about to throw a softball left-handed, could not have been Catherine.
Shawn gets the gang back together and takes them to the apartment complex above the parking garage, where they find Maddie Bicks, Catherine's twin sister who does really suffer from cirrhosis. However, she wasn't eligible for a transplant because she's an alcoholic, so the sisters' plan was for Maddie to use Catherine's ID and be put on the list that way. Unfortunately Maddie started growing impatient and decided to kill the three people above her during Catherine's trip to Switzerland. When Catherine found out about this and threatened to go to the police, Maddie went into a rage and accidentally killed her sister by pushing her into a wall. Gus mentions that Maddie must have suffered from impaired judgment, since one of the side effects of severe liver failure is psychosis. It is therefore safe to assume that Maddie was institutionalized rather than incarcerated.
Trivia[]
- Although the transplant list gives her address as 2810 Peacock Drive, the gang turns up at a house numbered 2832.