Chicago PD season 7, episode 16 recap: Intimate Violence

Michelle’s dark past

Intelligence went back to the drawing board after Michelle’s reveal—literally, as they discovered Shane’s record of felony convictions. He had just gotten out of jail six months earlier for another armed robbery charge. Jay told the group that since Michelle didn’t give him up as a cop, he sensed that she was in trouble with her husband. Hailey agreed, and said that the best play they could make was to earn Michelle’s trust.

Intelligence zeroed in on Shane as he met with his collaborators Mike Brady and Eric Walsh. That wasn’t the only loose end they tied up, as the gunshot victim from the robbery scene had died at Chicago Med. This case had now turned into a homicide investigation.

That was the first thing Jay and Hailey told Michelle when they tried to push her for information. She asked why they were talking to her if they knew her husband was guilty, to which they pointed out that while they didn’t have any evidence on Shane, they had evidence on her, and she could go away for felony murder.

Michelle still didn’t budge, so Hailey tried a different approach, this time looking into her past. She and Jay spoke to a doctor at Chicago Med who had treated Michelle’s domestic violence injuries four years ago. They used photos of those injuries to get Michelle to talk, and she told them that she’d overheard Shane on the phone. He said something about a job.

But Chicago PD threw out an obvious caveat: she didn’t want him to get caught and go back to prison. She wanted them to be a normal family for their daughter Tina’s sake. Hailey promised Michelle that she could get free from Shane, and Upton knew just the way to do it. She and Halstead took Michelle to a new apartment, and told her she would be able to start over if she wore a wire.

Michelle agreed, and Upton and Halstead set up across the street from the house she currently shared with Shane. They listened in while Michelle confronted Shane about the robbery. He hit her, which was unnerving to Jay, surprisingly—you would have that thought given Hailey’s past abuse, she would’ve been more sensitive to it. Instead, she talked Jay down from going in to save Michelle. She reminded him that since they were cops, they had to think of the shooting victim’s family too.

The wire gave Intelligence a possible fourth person involved in the robberies: John Franklin, the delivery driver who dropped money at the check-cashing places that had been hit. Chicago PD revealed quickly that Franklin went to the same church as Brady, which was how he got recruited. Brady had taken advantage of Franklin’s need for money to afford his mother’s medications to use him as an inside man.

Intelligence’s next idea was to set up a sting. They pulled Franklin out of lockup and got him to do a drop like normal. When Brady and Walsh arrived to get on with the heist, there was one problem: Shane hadn’t shown up yet. Michelle wouldn’t let him; she’d panicked and insisted that he not go this time. He got angry, and things got heated once again.

This time, instead of holding back, we saw Halstead and Upton come to the door of the home and question Michelle. She admitted that he put his hands on her, so Shane was arrested. While that defused the domestic situation, the sting operation was completely blown, so where did that leave Intelligence?