Veronica goes to see Piz, who is fairing poorly after his fight with Logan. Piz assures Veronica that he has nothing to do with any kind of video. Wallace attempts to get out of the room to have words with Logan, but Veronica can stop him before he can do anything. Someone does drop in on Logan, however; Parker stops by his suite to dump him over his extreme reaction to something that doesn’t involve him. Parker passes Veronica on the way to the elevator on the verge of tears and Veronica also lets him have it by cutting him out of her life entirely for good. After giving him the axe, she makes Dick show her the original e-mail (which he forwarded to his entire address book) which was originated from Chip Diller.

She heads to campus on the warpath and finds Chip at a table in the food court. She vows revenge on him when he won’t tell her who sent him the original e-mail and storms off. Chip chases her down, clearly terrified of what could happen to him, and tells her that Domonick Desante sent him the e-mail. He’s less forthcoming with information, so she goes to work on her revenge. That night he finds his credit cards drained, his car on blocks (thanks to Weevil) and Veronica in his room kicking him when he’s down. He finally bends under her will and gives up Gorya Sorokin, who also isn’t impressed by her badass routine. He won’t admit to planting the camera but she plants a bug in his room before she leaves.

That night, she hears him barking orders to some “mystery pledges” although there aren’t any fraternities that do late Spring rushes. She catches several of them picking up their instructions the next day from a Hearst Free-Press newspaper machine, including Wallace. He runs to class, claiming innocence, and is given an envelope with his name on it by one of his professors. He meets with Veronica at her home to tell her what the deal is; he’s being inducted into the “Skull & Bones” of Hearst, known as “The Castle.” The letter proves to him that the Castle hid a camera in his room and has been keeping him under surveillance. He agrees to keep going with the rush process and to carry a special camera-pen to take photos of the secret society members’ faces when he can. He also hands over an expose on the group written by an old campus enemy of Veronica’s: Nish.

Nish explains to Veronica that the group was started by William Randolph Hearst, who was a Yale Skull & Bones member himself. Those who are admitted are up and coming freshmen who are making a mark on campus. Nish puts it as “wealthy men making other like minded men wealthy,” with particular emphasis on “men.” No one knows who the members are and no one knows exactly what they do.

In a parking lot across town, a car drives up to Wallace and pops its trunk. He gets in and Veronica tails the mystery mobile to the place where he’s dropped off at. Wallace is administered instructions to go to storage unit 499, strip to his underwear, put on a collar and sit in the chair in front of a video camera. The disembodied voice tells him that if he lies to them, then one of his “brothers” will “pay the price.” It then tells him to explain what happened to Rashard Rucker. He’s also asked what he was carrying in his pocket. He said it was a pen and heard a scream when the voice recognized his lie. He clammed up after that and was told to go, Veronica picked him up and they went back to her home where he informed her that the voice called him “2400″ once. Wallace tells her that the pledge is probably Josh Groban.

Veronica follows Josh, who was picked up in a limo and driven to a mansion that has the curtains obscuring the front windows. She hops a fence to get into the back and take pictures of those in the meeting place. She crawls through a dog door to get inside the mansion and finds herself face to face with a massive painting of her murdered best friend, Lily Kane. She hears voices and ducks behind a curtain, just in time to witness two men (including Jake Kane) burning a CD with what appears to be the confessions from the pledges. They leave and Veronica examines the laptop, but not before seeing a big portrait of former boyfriend Duncan Kane.

The next morning, Keith investigates the crime scene Veronica left behind. She stole the hard drive out of the laptop, which was made easy due to the lack of security in the home. He sees the thread caught from Veronica’s dog door entrance and asks the neighbors about if he can take a look at his backyard security footage. This camera footage clearly captures a petite girl hopping his fence to gain access to the Kane estate. The security for Pemberton Estates, the gated community, consists of a former deputy fired in the underage drinking sting who is unwilling to cooperate.

While Keith investigates, Veronica meets with Mac to try and crack the encryption on Jake Kane’s hard drive. She explains that using her computer, it would take 20 years to crack the password but does have the idea of using a more powerful computer at Hearst. Veronica, Weevil and Mac gain access to the physics supercomputer after everything is locked up at night. The three start cracking the drive and Veronica goes home to find her room in shambles and her very upset father. She contemplates telling him what happened, but doesn’t want to confess to what happened to her. She leaves to spend the night with Mac.

The next morning, while Keith is being interviewed, Jake Kane storms the building shouting about how Veronica is the culprit in the crime. The county prosecutor is also with him, asking for the DVR which he confiscated for evidence. Keith tells him to come back with a judge’s order and erases the hard drive using a magnetized speaker from another piece of evidence. While he makes desperate measures to help his daughter, Veronica and Mac finally crack the hard drive and discover every member of The Castle since it was created, plus transcribed confessions, including video and audio from up to 30 years.

In Mac’s dorm room, Veronica listens to Gorya Sorokin’s confession, which involves his father and uncle coming up to a house in the mountains to hack up corpses and dispose of the evidence. She decides to let him keep his secret, but hands over names of every Castle member to Nish. In the food court, Logan sees Gorya disrespect Veronica and admit to planting the camera and takes him out, even though he’s connected to the mob.

Now that she has all of the secrets she needs from the drive, Veronica returns it to Jake Kane and proves that she knows what’s on it by rattling off a few confessions. She asks that he leave her father out of this, but it’s too late. Charges are being filed against him for destruction of evidence.

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He calls Veronica to help him out because he has no idea how he would commit the fraud they’re accusing him of. He claims that he was an easy target and the kids must have remembered him from Veronica’s criminology class.

Veronica takes the case and gets information from the bursar on how the ID card machine works. While getting a rundown of how the system functions, she also gets some unsolicited information from the human-resources representative who tells her that he thought Weevil’s workman’s comp filing was bogus. The bursar points Veronica in the direction of a food court worker who kept a list of the suspicious names, which were all famous philosophers and mathematicians. “Sylvia Plath” and “Honus Wagner” were both caught and the others stopped paying with their fake cards. Veronica next interviews Abigail Montgomery and “Honus Wagner,” who both claim to have met Weevil in the history building’s basement at 1:00. Weevil doesn’t have an alibi and deputies found an identical ID card machine in the locker next to his at Hearst. Keith suggests that he talk with his public defender because he won’t be getting a better deal.

But, Veronica is not yet out. She talks with the engineering professor about how the identification cards actually work and how difficult it would be to write new information on them without the bursar’s computer. He refers him to Leon, who is “part vampire” and won’t be in the lab until nightfall. She winds up being further bogged down when Keith tells her that Weevil’s fingerprints (and only his) are all over the box. She goes to talk with Leon, but all of his research materials have been stolen.

The next morning, Keith and Vinnie sit down at the KRFF radio where Keith is slaughtered on the air by irate college students still unhappy over his crackdown on college drinking. On the other side of campus, in the library, Wallace catches his stalker in the act and discovers that the mystery man has kept a whole dossier on him including pictures, schedules and sports stats. The man taps him on the shoulder and invites him into “The Castle,” a secret society. While Keith is being thrashed on air, Veronica and Weevil retrace his steps to see if he could have possibly touched the box without knowing it. They arrive in a room where he fixed the sink and find one of Veronica’s criminology classmates. She takes a picture of the woman in order to get a picture of a ski trip photo featuring two people who fingered Weevil as the fraud, Leon and the criminology girl.

With that mystery almost entirely behind her, Veronica accompanies Wallace, Piz and Mac to the beach where he’s going to test his mechanical engineering final— a functioning model plane that works in both the air and water. They wind up meeting with Logan and Dick, who are both acting oddly out of character. Dick is still distraught over his brother’s death and Logan is doing what he can to give Piz crap for being with Veronica instead of him. The two are saved from further torment when Wallace gets the plane working again, allowing them to slip away.

Back at the library, Veronica discovers more and more ties between Hearst, the Aspen frauds and the ID card company in Marietta, GA. One of those frauds happens to be the child of the CEO of that very company. Veronica’s sleuthing is interrupted by Patrick Nickerson and Abigail Montgomery, who escort her into a room full of people behind a large table. She takes a seat, tells them what she’s figured out and prepares to call her father when they offer to make her “one of us.” They offer her an ID card that has unlimited cash on it, allowing her to skate through college without having to pay for anything ever again. Of course, she recorded this whole conversation as proof of their fraud and tells them that if charges against Weevil aren’t dropped soon, she’ll go to the cops with her evidence. They turn themselves in (despite her “evidence” being cut off by the cheap answering machine) and Weevil gets off free… but not before he makes off with that third pre-programmed machine.

In Logan’s apartment, Dick discovers a video of Veronica and Piz having sex on the internet. Logan doesn’t take too kindly to people videotaping his former girlfriends having sex and he assaults Piz in his radio booth the next morning. He comes to the Mars Investigations office to alert her to the video.

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After finishing her exam, Veronica makes her way through the sprawling job fair to meet Piz in the radio booth at the tail end of his interview with Apollo Bukenya. After which, he informs Veronica that he’ll be moving to New York for 12 weeks to do an internship, but she doesn’t have quite the troubled response he expected from her. She returns to the Mars Investigations office to gloat to her father about surpassing his score (she didn’t, he scored a 97 and she scored 95) and receives her first case as a legal P.I., to prove that Apollo Bukenya is the son of a man who called the office.

Veronica takes this opportunity to Wallace, who explains to her that he just wants a cut of Apollo’s fame and fortune but she isn’t so certain that this cynical viewpoint is accurate. Kizza Oneko, the alleged father, sent her a PDF file containing a letter written by a woman who he claims is Apollo’s mother and she’s faced with getting a sample of her handwriting without tipping off Apollo to what’s going on. She tracks him down to a class and poses as a reporter for the Hearst Free-Press to get some time with him. During Veronica’s interview with Apollo, he showed her a copy of a shopping list given to him by his mother before he was abducted. It matches up perfectly with the PDF letter.

Meanwhile, Keith tracks down the burglar to Tommy Shaw, who has connections with the Fitzpatricks. Also, Logan is subjected to meeting Parker’s parents, who are crazed germophobes that don’t care much for him at all. But, Parker doesn’t want to spend the summer with her parents. When she realizes that she’s got nowhere to go, Logan offers her his suite at the Neptune Grande because he’ll be in South America with Dick for most of the summer. She doesn’t take this news lightly as it appears to be an indictment against their relationship. Parker is forced to go to Veronica with these problems because Mac has fallen into “the black hole of new love,” which she may have been ejected from due to Max’s revelation that he doesn’t go to class and will likely be expelled.

While waiting for Kizza’s next phone call, Veronica has another one of Piz’s “where are we” questions sprung on her. He tells her that he was offered a far less glamorous internship with a local Neptune radio station. She tells him to go with whatever will get him to his destination career, which again isn’t quite what he was looking for from her. Veronica gets the call and tells Kizza to get on the next plane to California, which is subsequently followed by a call from Apollo who asks her to meet him in the library. She’s been caught red-handed by the editor of the Free-Press.

Keith meets with Liam in his office, who insinuates that he won’t be sheriff for long because of his connection with Kendall Casablancas’ death and the money that never made it back to Liam. He also suggests that the crime wave won’t let up until he gets his money and that someone more sympathetic to his cause will get the job instead.

Veronica is forced into confrontation with a displeased Apollo, who tells her that Kizza could have easily forged the shopping list because it had been published in the past. Veronica assures him that there are ways to prove paternity with a blood test, but Apollo is not interested in this. After being shut down completely by Apollo, he goes missing and Veronica is forced to track him down through a variety of sources before Kizza arrives. She gets some leads, but most of them have nothing for her except for Zeke Molinda, the African Student Alliance head who claims that Apollo didn’t write Soldier of Fortune and that he was never conscripted.

Wallace tells her that she shouldn’t do anything because his book, true or not, is helping a real organization fighting a real problem. She’s told by Apollo’s girlfriend Olympia that he’s ready to talk with her about his father and that she should stop by his dorm. Veronica walks in on him arguing with someone over the phone about “pulling the plug” and leaves to pick up his laundry, leaving Veronica ample time to discover that he was talking with Silver Pictures, who had optioned his book for a movie. Veronica takes this news to Kizza with the warning about finding financial security which will not exist. Kizza insists that he has no interest in Apollo’s finances, but doesn’t show up for the blood test.

Back at the sheriff’s department, Keith accuses Vinnie Van Lowe of colluding with the Fitzpatricks against homes using the Safehouse security systems to manufacture a crime wave that would put him in power. Vinnie admits it with his body language but tells Keith that he can’t prove it. The law does get one mark to their credit though, as Richard Casablancas, Sr. has returned to Neptune to turn himself back in (much to the chagrin of Dick, whose South American surf trip has been wrecked by this turn of events).

An hour passes at Mars Investigations and Apollo is convinced that the man is not showing up. He explains to her that the whole situation with his fraud was a ruse. He cooked the scheme up to separate those who he can trust apart from those that he can’t and Veronica was simply playing a part in the hoax. He gets up to leave but Veronica gets a car from her father, who has Kizza locked up for driving a rental car with stolen tags. Veronica and Apollo meet with Kizza at the sheriff’s department and Kizza has knowledge of Apollo’s mother that he could not know without being who he claims to be. Veronica leaves the two to talk and, across town, Wallace signs up to volunteer with the Invisible Children.

Meanwhile, Logan’s trip gets called off by Dick even though he hates being with his father and feels personally responsible for everything his brother did. Finally, Veronica gets her internship with the FBI.

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She leaves and tells her father about Veronica, who asks her to go home so that he can take care of the business. Just as they’re talking, several people dressed in black in a yellow truck drive by and shoot them all with paintball guns. Even though the license plate was removed, Veronica caught a glimpse of a bumper sticker indicating that the owner has a student at Neptune Middle School. She goes forward on the investigation.

Meanwhile, across town, an incredibly drunk man is sent packing by the bartender and is struck by a car in a hit-and-run. Keith arrives on the scene to talk with the bartender, who sold alcohol to a minor with an obvious fake ID. He implies that the bartender shares some of the blame for why the kid won’t be able to walk anymore. He gets information from Veronica that all of the campus-area bars are lax on making sure they aren’t serving underage drinkers and decides to crack down on them, much to the dismay of the deputies.

The next day, Veronica pays a visit to the honors class at Neptune Middle under the ruse of doing a survey for her criminology class. The poll asks students (including a particularly obnoxious one who doesn’t believe a girl could be in the FBI) first if they or a family member own B.B. or pellet guns, then if someone they know owns a paintball gun. When the numbers don’t narrow down to one person, she asks who has a “big yellow pick-up truck,” which tips off the teacher that the poll might not be quite what she expected. Veronica follows the one hand, a young Arab boy, to his home where she finds the truck and a couple of kids playing video games. She sneaks in, grabs a gun and shoots both the TV and the boy from the classroom. She confronts him, but he says that they had nothing to do with the vandalism. He shows her a video of the night before and their assault of everyone, not just Arabs. She accepts their defense and puts them to work on cleaning up their carnage. While they clean, Veronica sets up hidden cameras at Babylon Gardens to catch the real perpetrators.

Back to the bar crawl, none of the deputies issued any citations, which Keith finds highly suspect considering the information Veronica gave him. While he’s questioning them, Veronica watches the surveillance video for Babylon Gardens and finds one suspicious guy skulking about with a shirt reading “Sneed Batmen.” She tries to get Mac to help her with the phrase, but winds up getting roped into agreeing to go to Parker’s birthday party. She goes off to get reinforcements from Piz and Wallace, but just as they agree to be her wingmen, she spots the Sneed Batmen shirt and runs off. She gets the name “Jason Cohen” from a member of the softball team.

Jason Cohen lives at the Zeta Epsilon house, a Jewish fraternity. When Veronica pulls up, she sees a flash go off in the trees and, with the aid of her binoculars, a man in the tree next to a window. A woman screams, he stumbles out of the tree, hops on his bike and rides away. When two people open the door, Veronica finds Jason and Amira. Amira explains that the man in the tree was Nasir, a man who she was arranged to marry, but she’s more interested in her Jewish boyfriend Jason. Nasir hopes to take the pictures to her father and have her disowned as retribution. There’s only two one-hour photo places in town that are open so late, so Veronica goes to the closest one.

At the drug store, Veronica poses as Nasir’s girlfriend to pick the photographs up before he can get them. She walks away with the full photographs, but Nasir does manage to come away with a couple of the half-developed proofs. Her father only needs half of the picture to decide that this is why they have been targeted and that the vandals must be from either the Jewish or Arab communities.

Meanwhile, across town, Wallace is trying to get Piz into the game, so to speak, by being hustled by a woman playing pool in a bar. As this is going on, Keith is in the back office of “The Brig” with a particularly hostile bartender who suggests that if the police don’t back off of his customers, he’s not going to buy an especially high number of police raffle tickets this year. He turns this threat into a bribe, but Keith isn’t in the mood for the bartender’s insinuations and finds Wallace and Piz drinking at the bar. They hand over their IDs, which were made for them by Veronica.

The next morning, Keith confronts his daughter about Wallace and Piz (even though he does give something of a backhanded compliment, saying that her fakes were leagues better than any of the others he confiscated). She broods for a moment but is called into service by Sabirah, whose restaurant has been vandalized again. Veronica caught the offender’s face on camera plus he took the Arabic scroll with a tracer stitched inside, making him easier to find. She discovers the scroll in a trash can and the perpetrator driving a beat up van. He starts shouting about the restaurant being a terrorist front, but his wheelchair bound brother tries to calm him down. The source of his vitriol is a political cartoon showing soldiers going into Iraq and coming out in coffins, which was apparently being handed out by Nasir at the mall. Veronica goes back to Babylon Gardens and explains the situation; Derrick’s brother was shot in Iraq and the flier set him off. Instead of pressing charges, Rashad asks to meet the vandal.

Keith isn’t quite done with Wallace and Piz yet, however. He comes to their dorm room (which has been adorned with the cover of the latest Lampoon, showing a cartoon Keith yelling at two students with their faces pasted over the cartoon bodies) and hands them two obviously fake IDs, featuring Jon Bon Jovi and The Notorious B.I.G. as the pictures. He sends them to the campus bars and has them drink non-alcoholic beer at the bar when the lazy deputy from before does a random check. He barely looks at any of them, only stopping briefly at Wallace and Piz, before ending his search and leaving. In the morning, Keith fires the deputies who didn’t bother to check IDs.

The Krimanis are taken by Veronica to meet Derrick at his home so that the two can engage in a dialogue instead of carting him off to prison in retaliation. Despite an impassioned speech, Derrick doesn’t care what he has to say, but he decides not to report him to the police after all. He also decides that perhaps Amira can date a Jewish boy and that he doesn’t need to support Nasir anymore. Because the cartoon pissed him off, he calls INS on Nasir and has him deported due to his expired student visa.

With all of the investigations at a close, Veronica has no choice but to face Parker’s party. She shares an elevator with Dick and winds up trying to calm her nerves with a flask of whatever alcohol Dick had on him. She struggles with digging in and preparing for battle as a single person at the party, but winds up dismissed by both Mac and Wallace. But, Dick winds up worse for wear and gets stuck in the ice machine room by the girls he was trying to nail from MySpace. Veronica tries to use Piz as a “break glass in case of emergency” go-to guy, Wallace informs her that Piz does, in fact, have a thing for her and she needs to put him out of his misery already. She tries to break them off as “just friends” on the balcony, but he kisses her before she can get the rest out. He starts to leave and, just when she catches and kisses him, the elevator doors open and Logan sees the entire thing.

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Mindy’s promise for testimony leads Keith and his deputies to arrest Landry at Hearst. He’s brought in for questioning and is told that Mindy flipped on him. Landry adds on to Mindy’s memories of the night which hold devastating consequences for her if he were to divorce her, as he threatened in Landry’s recounting of the events. When faced with the bloody clothes, Landry says that it must be Mindy who is trying to frame him because he was on his way home alone at the time of the murder. He has no alibi except for a mystery brunette who bummed cigarettes from him at a convenience store. Keith recommends that Landry get a good lawyer, because he has an impressive case against him. Later that day, Tim comes to see Landry and asks that he find who planted the bug on his phone and to find “that needle in the haystack.”

Tim tries to search the Mars Investigations office for the bug that was taken off of Landry’s phone, but he’s an incompetent burglar and is quickly caught by Veronica, who was at the office late. Tim asks for her help because he’s not good in the field and has no idea what to do about finding out if Mindy really framed him. At 3AM, Veronica and Tim head to the convenience store to question the clerk, but he doesn’t give any solid help and says that the surveillance camera is just for show. Just when all hope is thought to be lost, two strippers walk in, one of which fitting Landry’s description but neither of them smoke. They suggest that Tim and Veronica come back tomorrow because Tory smokes like a “big ol’ slutty chimney.”

The next day Mindy gets presumably a large life insurance check and uses it to purchase a yacht. Keith gets a call from the district attorney to tell him that she’s missing, presumably vanished in her large boat. That night, Veronica and Tim return to the convenience store to question Tory. one of the strippers who comes by the store recognizes Landry from his picture and says that he did give her a cigarette that night two months ago. She is enough to get Landry out of jail and the investigation refocuses on Mindy. Veronica and Tim search for and find a CD of burned phone calls off Landry’s phone. They discover the phone call from that night as well as Landry giving a poor reference to Pepperdine for Tim the next day. After bringing the CD to her father, she’s informed that Landry has skipped town as well. He surfaces on the boat which Mindy bought that night.

Now faced with the possibility of Landry being Mindy’s partner in the dean’s murder, Veronica has been thumbing through all of Landry’s calls until she finds one which refers to a place called “Papa’s Cabin.” Tim offers to get her into Landry’s house because he still has a key. Tim finds a disposable cell phone in his garbage and Veronica coerces the man on the end of the last dialed phone to give up his address. The two detectives follow the address to J.D. Sansone and his mother, the stripper with the brown hair who alibied Landry. She’s not actually a stripper, however, she was being blackmailed by Landry. If she didn’t show up at the store at 3AM, he would revoke her son’s probation using his powers on the juvenile court board. The two also bring Keith information on “Papa’s Cabin,” but while they’re trying to figure out what state Landry’s grandfather lives in, Keith makes a PlanetZowie search and finds a resort in Cabo San Lucas which was frequented by Ernest Hemingway.

In Mexico, Keith tracks down the resort and finds a boat off shore, which Keith and the Mexican federales board and find Landry babbling about how Mindy framed him. The two fought when he came about the boat and his hit her, causing her to fall overboard. He claims that he looked but couldn’t find her in the dark water. Somewhere in the distance, O’Dell’s corpse has washed up on the shore.

With Landry arrested, Hearst returns to somewhat normal. Tim asks Veronica to be his teaching assistant now that he’s been handed all of Landry’s classes. In class later, a student pushes Tim to talk about what happened with Landry, causing him to go off on the tangent about what happened. While he’s recollecting the events of the murder, Veronica realizes that something doesn’t add up. She asks Tim, in class, when Landry could have possibly called his blackmail subject if he was arrested and kept in jail without any time between class and the sheriff’s department. Veronica works out that Tim is the actual culprit in the crime when she discovers a bug in her own phone. Tim is arrested, he confesses to the murder and Landry will be tried for manslaughter in the death of Mindy O’Dell.

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While Veronica rots in jail, Keith questions the dean’s secretary about what happened on the day of his death. She mentions that Mel Stoltz came in without an appointment and agitated Cyrus. He also ran out of Xanax, an anti-depressant, that day and didn’t pick up the prescription himself. Upon returning to his office, Keith is confronted by Hank Landry, who discovered a bug on his phone and demands that both he and Veronica stop investigating the case because they’re starting to piss him off. Keith, undeterred, comes back to the sheriff’s department and brings what information that he managed to pick up to Lamb, including the fact that Mindy O’Dell picked up the anti-depressants and must have delivered them. Surprisingly, Lamb actually follows up on Keith’s information.

While at the sheriff’s office, Keith stops by Veronica’s cell and she assures him that she wasn’t the one who planted the bug. Keith leaves and passes Logan in the hall, who’s going to see his jailbird ex-girlfriend. She asks him to deliver a wireless card to Mac if he’s on his way back to campus. Back at Hearst, Weevil points a deputy towards the dean’s old computer in storage and Logan delivers the card. He tries to get out quickly, but is roped into some unnamed scheme involving Mac and her boyfriend.

Eventually, Veronica is let out of prison and dropped off at her apartment, but is intercepted by the fugitive Josh, who knocked out Mason and stuffed him in the trunk of his own car. Josh shows her the gun that he believes Mason used to kill his dad, but she informs him that the gun is a 22 caliber pistol and his dad was shot by a 45. He demands that she help him get out of the country by making him a fake ID and she agrees. He runs off and she lets Mason go, but he still insists that he saw Josh with his father at the place where the coach was killed. Back at home, Veronica informs her father on what happened and he shows her pictures of the coach apparently having an affair, which were taken by Vinnie Van Lowe. His new theory about the case is that the husband of the woman the coach was with is the actual killer.

Meanwhile, the task that Logan has been set to with Mac and Parker is a Valentine’s Day scavenger hunt. Their first task involves demonstrating a page out of the Kama Sutra called “Congress of the Cow.” The four also wind up having to buy “Super Titan” condoms and making balloon animals out of them. Their final clue lies in the middle of the ocean, but because Bronson can’t swim Parker and Logan are forced to swim out to the clue. When they bring it back to food court at Hearst, they’re declared third place, much to their chagrin.

Though the four are pursuing their complicated scavenger hunt, Veronica is still at work on the Dean’s case. She realizes that everything in the time frame shifts an hour because of a Clippers game. When they bring this information to Lamb, he dismisses it entirely although it clears Mindy. Sachs informs him that the prints they lifted off the computer belong to Steve Batando, Mindy’s ex-husband. Veronica assumes that the second man who as arguing in Landry’s hotel suite must have been Batando. They bring Batando in for questioning, but he lawyers up quickly. Cliff winds up being the public defender of choice and, in a bigger turn of events, Batando was arrested outside of Neptune jurisdiction so any information given is inadmissible.

Across town, Keith talks with the woman who was supposedly having an affair with him. She explains that she’s a neurologist and Coach Barry was afflicted with a terminal disease which would have caused a great deal of suffering. He looks into Barry’s life insurance policy and discovers that if the coach were to die in an accident, the family would have been paid $5 million. Keith believes that Mrs. Barry may have hired someone to kill her. Keith confronts Barry’s wife while Josh gets into his safe deposit box at the bank with the aid of Veronica’s fake ID. Faced with being discovered, Kathleen takes a Colt 45 pistol out of a hiding place with the apparent intent to shoot Keith, but he quickly gains the upper hand and brings her in for arrest. At the bank, Josh discovers a CD hidden with the coins in the safe deposit box. Kathleen explains that she just wanted to give him the gun so that they could test for gunpowder residue.

The sheriff gets another call from the O’Dell house about a breaking and entering in progress. He and Sachs arrive on the scene, hoping that they can catch Batando in the act and take him in for questioning again. Lamb enters the house, and sneaks up the stairs where he heard shouting. He continues sweeping through the house while Keith drives up to the house and opens fire on a mirror positioned across form him in the hall, thinking that it’s Batando with a gun. Batando hits Lamb from behind with a baseball bat twice before being shot by Sachs. Keith comes upstairs and tells Sachs to call for an ambulance, but the sheriff and Batando are already badly wounded by the time he gets there.

During the siege on the O’Dell house, Veronica and Josh are inspecting the CD that he found in his safe deposit box. Coach Barry explains that he was responsible for his death and the life insurance policy. They see Coach Yeager in the background and realize that he’s the one who Mason saw that night and the one who killed the coach. Josh flees to Mexico after hearing this, with the intention of staying away until the life insurance claim statute of limitations runs out. Veronica shows Keith the CD when he gets home to quell his rage over her helping Josh flee the country.

After watching the CD, Keith gets a call from the county commissioner, who informs him that Lamb died and he’s been appointed as the new sheriff. He brings Mindy O’Dell back in for questioning now that they have the evidence that Weevil and his boss found in the boiler room that’s splattered with the dean’s blood. The shirt found is monogrammed with Hank Landry’s initials.

Watch Veronica Mars

• Watch Veronica Mars Episode 20: The Bitch is Back
• Watch Veronica Mars Episode 19: Weevils Wobble But They Dont Go Down
• Watch Veronica Mars Episode 18: I Know What Youll Do Next Summer
• Watch Veronica Mars Episode 16: Un-American Graffiti
• Watch Veronica Mars Episode 15: Papas Cabin

Stoltz indeed hated Barry because he hadn’t led the school anywhere near a championship in years and hated him enough that he shows no remorse for the dead, but he claims to have been on his private plane at the time of the murder. Veronica, on the other hand, pays Weevil off so that he can get her some face time with the PCH leader these days. While those two investigate the murder, Logan is stuck with the little sister of Dick’s date. Dick and the girl left him to babysit while they go on a whirlwind date that somehow put them in Las Vegas. They also, according to Dick, wind up getting married while there.

Across town the PCHers show up at Veronica’s meeting place and Arturo, the new leader, explains that not only is the car not worth their time or effort, they prefer to carjack through intimidation rather than homicide. Though this avenue didn’t pan out, Mason has come to the sheriff to finger Josh as the one who was arguing with the coach before his death. This leads the sheriff to make an arrest. Veronica sets off with renewed energy to clear his name while Keith meets with Mindy O’Dell to get out of the case. Keith found a call to Hank Landry at 1AM, the night of the dean’s death and believes that he’s being played by the two. She claims that she called him from the lobby asking what brand of toothpaste he used, which is corroborated by Landry despite how unlikely that sounds. When checking up on this with a third source, the hotel security, he discovers that someone did check the car out of valet parking in the middle of the night during the time span of the killing.

Veronica is sent to the hotel to talk with her friend at the check-in desk, who tells her that “Rory Finch” hasn’t been to the hotel since December 10th. The desk clerk sets her up with the guy who works the graveyard room service shift, Jeff Ratner. Ratner leads her to the door where he delivered the food, but tells her that when he got there, two men were arguing. He came back later and delivered the food to a woman without any questions. The two set off for the elevator, where they meet Logan and Heather. Despite his best efforts to silence her, Heather spills about how much Logan loves Veronica and they should get back together. Logan gets off at the next stop and yells at her for being delusional.

In class the next day, Landry tells Veronica that she meets the FBI’s qualifications for an internship and gives her the folder with her application. In it includes a gushing letter of recommendation from the dean. While she tells her father about the news, Logan gets a call from Dick, who needs a divorce lawyer. His ex-wife to be tells Logan that the girl’s bubbliness is a recent change that came from their father walking out on the family. Logan takes her out for ice cream as an apology and gets back in time to meet Heather’s sister and let them leave. At Hearst, Logan finally returns to class where the professor isn’t too happy to see him. But Veronica is less lucky when she’s arrested during class for aiding and abetting the escape of Josh, although she only brought him cookies hidden in a book.

Watch Veronica Mars

• Watch Veronica Mars Episode 20: The Bitch is Back
• Watch Veronica Mars Episode 19: Weevils Wobble But They Dont Go Down
• Watch Veronica Mars Episode 18: I Know What Youll Do Next Summer
• Watch Veronica Mars Episode 16: Un-American Graffiti
• Watch Veronica Mars Episode 15: Papas Cabin

Before investigating the women’s clinic lead, Veronica stops into the Reverend Capistrano’s television studio to seek his advice about her made-up pregnancy. He relates her story to his own daughter’s and seems devastated by the loss of her baby. Veronica also comes to the conclusion that it would be highly difficult to acquire the drug and sneak it out of the women’s clinic after talking with one of the clinic’s doctors. She switches focus to the Dean, but Anthony gives her the same kind of unhelpful answers that he gave Tim but as she’s leaving he mentions that when he got home he turned on Space Ghost. She goes home (after a small diversion to have Madison’s car stolen and crushed by Weevil) to give the new lead to her father, but her find is interrupted by a letter addressed to Keith showing Veronica leaving the women’s clinic.

Veronica explains to her father that she went there for a case and decides that it might be a good idea to check out the “Good Word Press” offices to see if they have more pictures like that. Before they can get a good look at the picture, one of the men from the studio appears and blows their cover. However, Veronica managed to spot Nadia in one of the photo books. Dick doesn’t offer up much information, but Veronica manages to track down Nadia the hard way. Nadia tells her that she gave Dick a fake name after they made out while she was drunk at a party.

Meanwhile, Mindy O’Dell calls Keith because someone has intruded in her house. The intruder is Mindy’s ex-husband Steve Batando, looking to steal some things from Mindy’s house because she stopped making payments to him and on the car. He turns tail and leaves when Mindy’s older son ignores his existence entirely. Mindy asks Keith to stay a bit to calm her nerves, so he checks out the Volvo while she’s not looking. Caked underneath one of the windshield wipers, he finds some egg residue.

Switching back to Bonnie’s problem, Veronica expresses her severe distrust of the ministry CFO and asks Bonnie if she could get her into his office for snooping. Bonnie agrees to help her out, but when Veronica shows up at her door, she meets the reverend there as well. Inside, Veronica notices a pregnancy book with one of the Good Word Press bookmarks stuck in it. Veronica accuses Tim, but Phillise was the one who gave her the book and slipped her the drug. Bonnie lashes out at her roommate, but is calmed by her father who tells her that anger will make her a worse person. Veronica takes this message to heart by not going through with the revenge on Madison.

Watch Veronica Mars

• Watch Veronica Mars Episode 20: The Bitch is Back
• Watch Veronica Mars Episode 19: Weevils Wobble But They Dont Go Down
• Watch Veronica Mars Episode 18: I Know What Youll Do Next Summer
• Watch Veronica Mars Episode 16: Un-American Graffiti
• Watch Veronica Mars Episode 15: Papas Cabin

Veronica explains to Max that Chelsea is a hooker hired by Max’s friends to try and loosen him up by getting him to lose her identity. She also explains that she was coached by them and the moment that Max had with her probably wasn’t legitimate. Max still insists that Veronica find his hooker, despite the facts. Veronica is told by Max’s friends that they hired her off of an escort search engine, but Chelsea has apparently changed her working name since the Comic-Con adventure. They narrow the search down to two from thousands thanks to the memory of Max’s roommates, but they aren’t sure which of the two it is. So, Veronica hires both to come to Logan’s apartment. The two meet Max there after an awkward conversation about how many prostitutes Logan has been with, but the two finalists don’t show up until late that night. The first to appear is “Lisette,” who isn’t the girl in question. They pay her, she goes on her way and is quickly replaced with “Fiona,” who is the girl that Max is looking for.

“Fiona” explains that he name is really Wendy and that she really was upset over leaving Max. Eventually they’re interrupted by Madison, who shows up just to be kind of a bitch. The next morning, Keith puts on his old sheriff’s uniform in order to question Claire and Fern in their apartment. Keith says that he thinks that they egged the dean’s office while they were out egging various campus hot spots and intimidates them into giving her up, until Nish slinks out of the back and blows his cover. She claims to have been egging the dean’s car at the time Claire and Fern were egging his window.

Meanwhile, Veronica is hired by Max for a second time, this time to help Wendy disappear so that she can cleanly get out of the prostitution game. Veronica agrees, but as this is happening, a battered woman appears at Logan’s door looking for Wendy. She’s forced to go back to her pimp for fear of her co-worker getting beaten again. Max goes into a depressed stupor that he’s knocked out of when Veronica realizes that there’s purple make-up on the towel and Max was duped out of $1000. At this point, Veronica changes her plan of action to seeking revenge in Max’s name. She blackmails a judge, who’s one of Wendy’s most frequent clients. This gets rid of Max and allows Veronica and Logan some alone time, which brings back the hooker question. He also admits that he may have blacked out in Mexico and was with a girl who “meant less than nothing” to him while they were separated.

The next day Max and Veronica go to the bus terminal to pick up their loot, but they only find a note threatening Wendy and demanding that they get into a limo parked outside. Inside the limo are “Mr. Happyfists” and Wendy’s “agent,” the woman who turned up with bruises from before. Max offers to pay Wendy’s $10,000 that she owes the pimp in order to free her from the game. Despite Veronica’s protests and better judgment, Max’s decision turns out to be one that he doesn’t regret when Wendy is waiting for him in his dorm. Unfortunately, Max has a hard time coping with his new girlfriend’s days as a stripper, especially when his roommate asks her if she’s strip at their friend’s bachelor party. He’s led to ask her if she really left her information at the hotel after he dropped her at their airport. She admits that she didn’t and he has a harder time at accepting this. She winds up leaving him after this incident because of his inability to reconcile her former job and tells him that she’ll pay him back. She later sent him a package with a thousand vertically folded $1 bills.

After all of the hooker drama, Veronica decides to take her advice and get some sexy lingerie, but she meets Madison there where she admits to being the girl who meant less than nothing to him while they were separated.

Watch Veronica Mars

• Watch Veronica Mars Episode 20: The Bitch is Back
• Watch Veronica Mars Episode 19: Weevils Wobble But They Dont Go Down
• Watch Veronica Mars Episode 18: I Know What Youll Do Next Summer
• Watch Veronica Mars Episode 16: Un-American Graffiti
• Watch Veronica Mars Episode 15: Papas Cabin

Later that day, O’Dell stops by Piz’s radio show to take him up on his standing offer to “defend himself” on the airwaves. During the program about what to do about the recently vacated Greek Row, O’Dell explains to the student body that the Greek system would be retained because one of the votes was considered a conflict of interests. Because of his decision, his car is egged and nearly destroyed by a bunch of angry feminists in Lilith House. He makes it to his office unscathed, where Keith tells him that his wife’s assistant is gay so he has nothing to worry about. What he does have to worry about is an ad in the classified section of the newspaper saying that the next rape will occur at the Pi Sig party. Veronica suggests to the Dean, later on in the afternoon, that he require the Pi Sigs to make a special coaster that detects GHB available at their party.

Things take a turn, however, when Veronica tells her father that his good news to the Dean was only because he wasn’t looking in the right place. She explains Mrs. O’Dell’s affair with Professor Landry and he follows up on it with corroborating evidence like phone records. At the Pi Sig party that night, Veronica organizes her troops (Mac, Piz and Wallace) to detecting potential rape victims using the GHB finding coasters. However, when they get there, they find a cheap knock-off at the party instead of the legitimate versions from the Take Back the Night booth. Although the party has been uneventful as far as GHB goes, Tim Foyle does appear at one point to lose his mind at his girlfriend making out with Dick. After witnessing his meltdown, Veronica sees Logan and shares an awkward moment before Wallace and Piz show up with a dosed drink. Logan volunteers to help by driving to the potential victim’s house to make sure she’s safe.

While Veronica attempts to save someone from getting hurt, a very drunk Dean O’Dell arrives at the Neptune Grand to do the opposite with the aid of his handgun. At the party, a girl tells Veronica that Kim Kaiser wasn’t at the party, but her sister Carrie was and walked back to her dorm. Once Veronica starts to take off towards the dorm, she hears a warping sound on Club Flush, Mercer’s radio show, which indicates that the show is on a delay. Veronica bursts in on Mercer and the comatose girl before he can rape her. She tazes him but the two wind up in a struggle and her tazer is lost under the bed of the drugged girl, but she manages to stab Mercer in the leg with a unicorn shaped object she found under her bed. Veronica runs to Wallace’s room in hopes of outrunning Mercer, but winds up being saved by Moe, the RA, instead, or so Veronica thinks; ot turns out that Mercer wasn’t working alone and the RA was in on the rapes all along. The tea he gave her was drugged with GHB and she was locked in his room. In a bout of self-preservation Veronica calls her father and attempts to hide while misdirecting the rapists by opening a window to make them think she escaped.

Mercer and Veronica square off

Veronica’s phone goes off while the two argue, betraying her position in the closet, but she does manage to hit Moe in the foot with the hammer she found. While he freaks out and tries to get out of their partnership, Veronica blows the rape whistle that Parker gave her with the coasters. While Mercer gets all of his GHB supply from his room, he runs into Parker, who screams rape. Mercer tries to deny everything and takes off with Moe shortly behind him. Parker finds Veronica in his room and her father takes her to the police station where she tells Keith that he has Moe’s number and Moe isn’t smart enough to turn off his phone after fleeing.

Veronica explains the scam to her friends, that Mo was the set-up man and Mercer was the rapist but it dawns on them that they haven’t seen Logan in a while. Outside of a diner, Logan wails on a police car with a baseball bat so that the Neptune cops will put him into the same cell as Mercer and Moe. Also that morning, Weevil finds Dean O’Dell dead from a gunshot wound to the head in his office.

Watch Veronica Mars

• Watch Veronica Mars Episode 20: The Bitch is Back
• Watch Veronica Mars Episode 19: Weevils Wobble But They Dont Go Down
• Watch Veronica Mars Episode 18: I Know What Youll Do Next Summer
• Watch Veronica Mars Episode 16: Un-American Graffiti
• Watch Veronica Mars Episode 15: Papas Cabin