‘Tracker’ Season 2, Episode 14 Review: Colter Shaw Delves Into Ritual Sacrifices and Vanishing Children

It wouldn’t be Tracker Season 2 if it wasn’t edging closer and closer to the supernatural. This week is the season’s second dalliance with magic. Episode 5 of the CBS series delved into witches with a woodland healer, and Episode 14, “Exodus,” gets into something a little more sinister with ritual sacrifices and a spree of missing children. Plus. we finally earn some insight into Reenie’s (Fiona Rene) new client.

At the top of the episode, a teenager named Anton (Humuza Bazira) is attacked while practicing jazz saxophone at a bus stop outside of New Orleans. A local detective, Veach (Marci T. House), who’s dating Anton’s dad (Dohn Norwood), has heard about Colter and suggests that they hire him. When Colter arrives, it’s the same old story: the police can’t do anything for another 24 hours, but the family is worried. Anton’s dad says that he’s been getting bullied at his fancy music school. He’s not the first teen to go missing from the area recently. He also says that there’s been a “darkness” in town for as long as he can remember.

So, Colter gets cracking. He employs Cousin Randy (Chris Lee) to hack into CCTV footage outside of the bus stop from a diner — no big deal. Detective Veach, who’s helping out off the books and confirms the “darkness” in town, recognizes one of the people in the video, a kid named Cal. They go to his house and Cal sheds some light on the situation: he let Anton crash with him after he got attacked at the bus stop, but then he left with an older lady, Sherry Chevall (Wonser De-Gbon), who he’d been hanging out with after school. Anton told Cal that their relationship was a “musician thing” he wouldn’t understand, but Sherry has a prior kidnapping charge. Did she use jazz to groom this child?

At Sherry’s house, they find proof that she was there with Anton and that they packed and left together in a hurry. After Colter and Veach go to a jazz club where actual jazz singer Liz Cole is singing, they learn from the bartender, Jessica (Tara Wilson) that fifteen-year-old Anton was illegally employed as a barback so that he could play music there regularly. Jessica gives this up after some rude, patronizing prodding from her boss, Hugo (Karl Makinen), which brings us to another classic case of Colter not noticing the shadiest person in the room. Hugo is obviously up to something. Just look at his ominous fedora!

But Colter remembers that New Orleans old bars like this one sometimes have hidden rooms left over from the Prohibition era and gets distracted looking for a secret exit. It could happen to any of us! Plus, Veach knows Hugo — he’s from an old New Orleans family and used to throw big parties. And they do find a secret back garden with some mystic art, rose petals, and a dead body. Detective Veach connects it to old magic, older than Voodoo, that’s basically a local religion whose practitioners call themselves “infini,” short for infinity. Is Sherry not only a groomer, but a witch? The blue paint on her face when we first see her in a basement with Anton definitely suggests that.

Not so fast. Reenie looks into the dropped kidnapping charge and learns that Sherry was helping Anton get out of an abusive home. Curiouser and curiouser! Reenie also says that Sherry has a brother, a preacher, who may also be involved in what happened to Anton. Hugo directs them to a church a half hour away where he says they can find the brother. Hmmmm!

Colter finds an infini manuscript hidden in a piano behind the jazz club before they head to the church. The spells are not nice in the least. They’re for summoning, sacrifice, and torture. More importantly, Veach recognizes the symbols from the other teenage bodies she’s found. They need to find Anton, fast. But then, while they’re on the road, Veach learns that Hugo gave them bad information about the location of Father Chevall’s church. Hugo is the one doing the sacrifices to gain immortality. He tricked Anton, Sherry, her brother, and the other teenagers into doing dark magic rituals for him. He’s already killed two kids, and needs Anton to complete the ritual.

Sherry leaves the basement where she and Anton are plotting their escape and finds that Hugo has killed her brother. When Colter and Veach arrive, Hugo is holding Sherry hostage. Veach gets injured in the shootout, and Colter runs through the pews to avenge her. I wish Colter had come up with something more threatening to say to Hugo about his ritual sacrifices than “Found your printouts,” but it was a high-pressure situation. He manages to get the drop on Hugo and take him down. That’s all that’s important.

However, Colter is a little shaken up by what happened to Veach. She survives, but he’s at her hospital bed in a short-sleeve henley looking worried. They really bonded throughout the episode. She’s a former foster kid. He also had an unconventional upbringing. (Did you catch him telling Cal he was homeschooled? Do you think that’s true, or some kind of euphemism?) Usually, the only people who get hurt are the villains on Tracker. This is a rare occurrence for Colter Shaw, as far as we know. Maybe that’s why he doesn’t let people get too close, and primarily communicates with his friends and coworkers over the phone.

While Reenie is looking into Sherry’s criminal record, the demanding client she’s been alluding to for the past few weeks makes a surprise visit to her office. Leo Sharf (Pej Vahdat) has a lot of opinions on how they should decorate and even offers to have his interior designer “swing by” for a consultation. He gives her a job to do without a paper trail and hands her a burner to get it done. He also alludes to wanting his professional relationship with Reenie to be exclusive and is clearly willing to offer her a lot of money to make that happen.

Will Reenie be tempted to leave Team Colter? Given the shady nature of this client and the honest good that she’s able to do for her favorite van dweller, she’ll probably turn the offer down eventually. But it will be interesting to see just how far he’s willing to go, and how bad this potentially gets, before she makes a clean break. Colter, once again, refuses the reward and insists that his client donate the money instead. That’s all well and good for Sherry, Veach, and Anton’s community in New Orleans, but if he wants to keep his employees around, he’s going to have to, like, pay them.