Episode 4: Past Tense

Tru plays detective when she tries to solve a mystery involving a stripper and six college friends… five of whom turn up in the morgue.

At a graduation party in a university neighborhood, a guy named Ethan and some of his friends - Blake, John, Hat, Tall Guy, and Blonde - celebrate the end of four years of school. As the party rages the scene shifts to another part of the house, where a girl lays dead in a library room. The time flashes back to the previous day, when Harrison and Tru discuss Tru’s ability to relive a day. Harrison still finds it hard to swallow, and urges his sister to leave the past alone.

The next morning Tru awakens when there’s a knock on the door. Lindsay enters with some food, and the topic of conversation turns to boys. Lindsay says that she just read an article that claimed one in every seven guys is a keeper. Meanwhile Meredith is informed by one of her bosses, Clayton, that mandatory drug testing is about to begin for all employees. Later, as they have dinner, Harrison tells Tru that Meredith didn’t pass the test and ended up getting fired. When Lindsay returns home from work depressed, she realizes no one remembered her birthday. At work Davis tells Tru that five men were brought into the morgue. Their wallets were missing, making identification difficult. Four of the men had high alcohol levels in their blood. The fifth did not, but his blood contained traces of a chemical called avlocardyl. One of the personal items taken from the bodies is a business card for a strip bar called Foreplay.

As Tru realizes she forgot Lindsay’s birthday, she meets a handsome guy named Luc who’s got an interview for a crime scene photographer job elsewhere in the building. Tru gives him directions to the sheriff’s office upstairs and tries to hide her attraction to him. Tru then makes her way to the crypt, where all five corpses plead with her to help them. Tru then awakens in bed… and discovers the day is repeating. Lindsay enters with food, only this time Tru remembers to wish her a happy birthday. When Tru hooks up with Harrison, she tells him she’s reliving the day and says that she’s going to need help identifying the five men in the morgue. She leads him to a strip club, and suddenly Harrison’s interest is piqued. After doing a little detective work, Harrison matches the name on the business card, Turquoise Girl, to a stripper named Tara, who works in telemarketing when she isn’t taking off her clothes. Tru approaches Tara at the office where she works, where Tara says that she’s got a bachelor party gig at a hotel that evening. Tru convinces the concierge to give her the groom’s name. She then contacts the man, John Brockett, and after convincing him that she works for the hotel, urges him to cancel the party. At first John suspects the interference is the work of his bride-to-be, but instead of canceling, he instructs Tru to pick another room at the hotel.

Tru quizzes Davis about avlocardyl, a liquid that can kill in a few hours. Later Tru tells Harrison that she suspects someone will put the poison into the drinks being served at the party. Later she visits Meredith and warns her about the random drug test. Tru then makes her way to the hotel room where the bachelor party will get underway. There she meets the five men who ended up in the morgue. She claims the hotel sent her to act as bartender. Tru gets a surprise when a sixth man, Blake, turns up at the party. Tru tells Harrison any of them could be the killer. The guys watch a videotape of them playing touch football. When the camera pans to Catherine, the girl killed in the library, Blake shuts off the television. Moments later Tara arrives, and reacts with relief when she sees Tru. She’s always happy when there’s another girl around during a bachelor party. Tara tells Tru she’ll do whatever it takes if the guys get out of hand. Later Ethan asks Tru to make him an alcohol-free drink, as he’s on the wagon. Tru suddenly realizes it was Ethan’s corpse that was poisoned with avlocardyl. She rules him out as the killer. Tru then contacts Davis and asks him how alcohol would react to the chemical. Davis tells her the alcohol would act as a masking agent, leaving no traceable cause of death. Shortly thereafter Tru identifies another of the corpses based on his wedding ring. She rules him out as the killer as well. When Blake turns up missing, Tru makes her way into the hotel hallway, where she searches for him. She bumps into Blake, who says he checked with the hotel and found out they didn’t send up a bartender. Tru then makes up a story about being a journalist writing a story about guys. Blake doesn’t buy her story and threatens to call the police. Suddenly a scream erupts from the hotel room. Tru and Blake race inside, where Tara pushes away from Hat’s grasp. She tells everyone she’s taking a break to cool off. Tru follows Tara and discovers that she stole the men’s wallets out of retribution. Tru then realizes that Tara’s been drinking some alcohol that Tru hid when she first entered the hotel room, thinking it might have been laced with poison. Since Tara’s body didn’t turn up in the morgue, the alcohol couldn’t have been the source. She realizes the ice contains the poison.

Tru phones the morgue to find out if there’s an antidote. Davis tells her there is: it’s called glucagon, and it might be in the med kit at the morgue. Moments later Blake has security escort Tru out of the hotel. Tru goes to the morgue, finds the antidote, and makes her way back to the hotel, where Blake reminds her that she’s not welcome. Tru quizzes him about the girl who died. Moments later Harrison phones with news that John’s fiancée called off the wedding months earlier after she discovered that he was cheating on her. Tru realizes that John is the killer. She tells the guys what she’s discovered, then confronts John with the details of his plan to kill his friends. She tells him that crushed ice was placed at the bottom of every glass to keep the drinks cool; including his. If she’s wrong, and he didn’t poison the ice, he won’t need the antidote. John turns pale. Later police take John away. Blake then recounts how John played rough with Catherine during the graduation party, sending her crashing through a glass coffee table. The guys never said anything to the police. One day the guilt got to Blake and he wrote John an anonymous note, threatening to turn him in. Not knowing who authored the note, John set out to kill all five of his friends. Later Meredith tells Tru she passed the drug test. What Tru doesn’t know is that Meredith used the tip-off to have a colleague substitute his own sample.