- "Is there anything hotter than a man scaling another man's dead cuticles?"
- — Grace has a very particular taste in men
Grace Larsen is a mortician who approaches Karen with an irregularity she encountered during her embalming of apparent bus victim Bob White. She says he was missing an ear, yet strangely Woody made no mention of this in his autopsy report. As Karen reprimands Woody, it comes out that he and Grace briefly dated while in forensics school. Since she has kept her credentials up, Karen hires Grace on as a consultant to work together with Woody and find Bob's real cause of death.
Grace suggests they start by investigating Bob's stomach contents. After trading insults for a while, Woody concedes and they discover that Bob last dined at Phat Thai Jones. There Shawn, Gus and Whip Chatterly learn from Singh that Bob was allergic to alcohol, which suddenly makes his .31 blood alcohol level quite hard to explain. Woody and Grace realize that Bob must have been injected with the alcohol, and after a short search find an injection site between two of Bob's toes.
After they find paint under Bob's fingernails and all the other evidence also seems to point to Whip, Whip is found dead in his car in an apparent suicide, alongside a confession to the murder. However, Shawn and Gus dig deeper when they hear a car door slam in a missed call from Whip and discover that Grace is Bob's real killer when they see her on CCTV footage in Whip's bookstore, recognizing her from her ear-touching tic. She used Whip's books on murder for research on how to kill Bob, and on the fateful night she slipped sleeping pills into Whip's coffee before taking his car and stamp. She drove around town stamping various surfaces to give the impression Whip was stalking Bob before murdering him. When the time was right, she also killed Whip and left a "suicide note" that made it seem like he wanted to be immortalized as a murderer.
Meanwhile, Woody and Grace have been acting more and more romantic towards each other and are about to celebrate solving the case when Woody finds a metal capsule containing book fragments inside Whip's esophagus. When Woody says he'll have the fragments dusted for fingerprints, Grace pulls a gun on him and doesn't allow him to take Shawn's call. She explains that she killed Bob, pinned the murder on Whip and cut off Bob's ear post-autopsy to muscle in on the investigation and hopefully take over Woody's job, since she was sick of being a mortician and no one would hire her as a coroner even though she applied "for every opening in crime pathology this side of the Gulf of Mexico". She says that Bob was the perfect mark, even going as far as claiming his death was "kind of a mercy killing", and that her idea of pinning it on Whip was "epic", although, as she laments, he turned out to be smarter than she gave gim credit for ("Crafty, like a little fox"). Ignoring Woody's pleas to spare his life, Grace is about to shoot him when Juliet bursts in with a posse of officers to arrest her.
Trivia[]
- Her career as a mortician lasted for 25 years.
- Just like Woody, Grace enjoys both Jerry Garcia and Cherry Garcia.