Chicago PD's latest episode, "Name Image Likeness," opened with the two youngest officers in the IU: Kiana Cook (Toya Turner) and Dante Torres (Benjamin Levy Aguilar). They responded to a call and find that two people had been shot and killed at a jewelry store. Cook spotted someone trying to flee the scene, and Torres stopped him, but he wasn't even supposed to leave the car due to the fact that he's still recovering from an arm injury.
The person who tried to flee was a tweaker who had nothing to do with the crime, but was able to provide the IU with some crucial eye witness information. He claimed three men shot up the jewelry store while wearing ski masks, but only two of them left. IU eventually identified one of the men as a superstar college athlete named Amir Jackson.
Jackson has a full ride scholarship to play basketball, but the more Hank Voight (Jason Beghe) and the rest of the team dug into his past (and the evidence from the jewelry store), the more they came to see the athlete as a suspect. Jackson was on probation following a DUI charge, and the bullets that were used in the jewelry store shooting matched those used in several other robberies.
Cook takes on her first Confidential Informant
Voight and the team did note that none of the other robberies resulted in murders, and were often focused on tagging the stores with graffiti. The getaway car the thieves used was linked back to a stripped named Ruby (Natalia del Riego), who eventually admits that she let Damone Russell (Myles Evans), another college athlete, use it. The only problem was, Russell was virtually untouchable.
The athlete's lawyer was at the police station as soon as he was brought in for questioning. The lawyer told Voight and the IU that one phone call to the mayor would make all this disappear, and noted that Russell was worth millions of dollars. The team had to let him go, but Cook had another plan in mind.
The officer floated the idea of turning Ruby into a Confidential Informant. Voight agreed, and they gave the stripper a wire and camera set up the next time Russell appeared in the club. It seemed as though they were on the right track when a drunken Russell showed up and began talking, but then it went bad. The camera was cut off, and when the IU rushed it to the club, Ruby was nowhere to be found. To make matters even worse, her phone was left behind.
Ruby eventually resurfaced and claimed that Russell was getting paranoid around her. She turned off her camera and spent an hour with the athlete at a motel in an "effort" to make him talk. She went on to say that Russell was innocent, and fed the IU the name of another athlete. Only Cook suspected something was up. She followed her gut, and discovered that Ruby had been lying the whole time. It turned out that Ruby helped Russell hide the stuff they heisted from the jewelry store in the river.
Cook also reconnects with her estranged mother
Russell was the one who pulled the trigger in the store, and the IU had him dead to rights. The mayor may have been a fan of the athlete, but there was nothing he could do to get Russell out of this one. The same goes for the athlete's lawyer. A shaken Cook has a heart-to-heart chat with Voight at the end of the episode, and expresses frustration over being tricked by Ruby.
Voight assures Cook that it happens to the best officers. He tells her that most CI's belong to "someone," but the someone in question is rarely a cop. The episode also progresses the arc between Cook and her wealthy mother. The two have always had a tense relationship, and Cook spent most of "Name Image Likeness" refusing to pick up her mother's phone calls.
Cook didn't want to associate with her mother, given that she feels the latter walked out on her and her father. She confided as much in Adam Ruzek (Patrick John Flueger). By the end of the episode, though, the officer decided to return her mother's calls. Probably the best Cook outing to date.