The Bridge (2013)

Pilot

The lights go out on the Bridge of the Americas, plunging the US-Mexican border into darkness. When power is restored, Judge Lorraine Gates's body is found directly on the border line. Both El Paso Detective Sonya Cross (Diane Kruger) and Chihuahua Detective Marco Ruiz (Demián Bichir) arrive on the scene. Ruiz allows an ambulance with Charlotte Millwright (Annabeth Gish) and her husband (Robert R. Shafer), who is having a heart attack, to cross back into the States. When Gates's body is moved, it comes apart at the waist. The coroner (Mary Pat Gleason) informs Cross and supervisor Lt. Hank Wade (Ted Levine) that the top part of the body is Gates's, but the bottom part is a young Hispanic female's, later identified as Cristina Fuentes. Ruiz matches Fuentes with a previous case where 25 dismembered bodies were found in a "death house," one of many body drop sites. The judge's car and her lower half are found, but her ID card is missing. Ruiz considers it the killer's trophy. Meanwhile, the person (Thomas M. Wright) who dropped the body off at the bridge has abducted Eva Guerra (Sandra Echeverría), his next intended victim. The car the abductor had used is traced to reporter Daniel Frye (Matthew Lillard), but he becomes trapped inside by an apparent bomb with a timer. The timer elapses, leaving a message saying this crime wave is "only the beginning." Elsewhere, Charlotte's husband has died and she goes through his personal effects at their ranch. She finds a second cell phone, which is password protected, and is hung up on when she answers a call. She also finds a key in his wallet. She asks a ranch hand (Alejandro Patino) about both. He doesn't know about the phone, but takes her to a remote cabin on the ranch. In its cellar, she finds a padlocked door which the key unlocks.

Calaca

Marco and Sonya. Marco reluctantly brings Sonya to Mexico to police headquarters to look at additional evidence concerning the dead Mexican girl who was found with 22 other bodies, including the son of a drug lord. The captain arrives to greet Sonya. She abruptly starts asking him why his office didn't investigate the case of the murdered Mexican girl. She also reveals to him that she knows about the drug lord's dead son's missing file from the evidence box, which Marco told her about. The captain pulls Marco into the hallway and warns at him that his current case should not start to dig up details about the death of the drug lord's son. Sonya. Sonya obsessively looks at the case files while at home, and then gets an urge to go out. She has casual sex with a stranger later that night, and then gets back to her case files. Charlotte. Charlotte discovers a tunnel below a cabin on her deceased husband's ranch. A lawyer visits her to tell her that her husband died with prior obligations due to financial problems. He leaves her a pot filled with money. After Charlotte discovers the money she brings it back to the lawyer. Linder. There is no sign of the girl he transported from Mexico to the US at the mobile home. Instead, he emerges from the trailer with two large trash bags including the girl's id and cell phone. He starts to burn the bags, but pulls out the cell phone when it starts to ring. Adriana. First seen in the back of a truck with other immigrants, Adriana stops one of her fellow travelers from killing the truck's driver once he demands they go the rest of the way to the US on foot. She leads the stranded group of immigrants into the desert, where they eventually stumble upon containers of water surrounding a skeleton statue. She is the only one in her band that does not drink the water. She manages to get to a road, and crawling with exhaustion beckons an approaching car for help. An unidentified man gets out the car and approaches her. Daniel Frye. After thinking he was going to die from a bomb in his car he publishes a story about the message on the phone in his car. He gets another call from the perpetrator of the bridge double homicide. The caller gives him a series of numbers, which a Frye associate identifies as a GPS coordinates. They follow the GPS coordinates and discover nine dead Mexican bodies.

Rio

The self-proclaimed killer of the two people found on the bridge, the nine Mexicans in the desert and the abductor of Maria tells Daniel Frye that he will kill Maria unless he gets $1,000,000 from four Americans, including Charlotte's deceased husband Karl Millwright. The four people he names are the richest men in El Paso, according to the killer, citing dialectics. Marco expresses frustration to Sonya that she filed a complaint against him for disturbing the crime scene at the bridge. Sonya refuses to withdrawal the complaint and Marco says he will handle it himself. After the killer makes his demands for the ransom from Karl Millwright, Charlotte goes to the El Paso police station to answer questions. Marco asks her casually about her husband's dealings in Mexico. Afterwards, Marco's wife, Alma, and son, Gus, visit him in the El Paso police station where Alma tells him that Gus has dropped another class. Marco introduces his family to Sonya, and Gus is taken with Sonya. Alma says Sonya is very pretty. Later, Marco goes to Charlotte's house at night and tells her he could use her help to get rid of Sonya's complaint. Charlotte agrees to sign a letter that attests Marco did not take money from Charlotte to let her go through the crime scene with her dying husband. Charlotte asks Marco if he is happy in his marriage and they end up kissing after she says she isn't tired. Later, Charlotte is in her pajamas waiving to Marco as he drives away. Charlotte buries her dead husband and her step daughter calls her a whore. After the funeral ends, Charlotte approaches a woman who is still on the ranch. This woman tells Charlotte to work with her to keep running the immigrants through the tunnel on the ranch. Charlotte refuses, and the stranger says goodbye to the horse Charlotte's husband bought with payments from running immigrants in the tunnel. Later, after saying goodbye to Marco, Charlotte hears some noises from the horse barn and discovers one of her horses dead and hanging from the barn's ceiling. At the location where the nine dead bodies were found Sonya deduces that the killer was watching the Mexicans drink the poisoned water and saw Maria escape his trap. Sonya also notices in the distance a trailer home, which proves to be Linder's trailer. Sonya finds burned women's clothes at Linder's trailer. Marco and Sonya bring in Linder for questioning about the murder of the lady down the hall from his apartment. The police have no proof to hold him after brief questioning. Frye goes to Mexico with fellow reporter Adriana Mendez to talk to to the people that were with the nine Mexicans before they tried to hike across the border and died from water poisoning. The unidentified killer ties Maria to stakes in the ground and sets up a web feed to Frye's newspaper to show Maria slowly die from sun exposure.

Maria of the Desert

Charlotte tells her foreman to open the tunnel from Mexico after she gets scared by the dead horse. Separately, Linder has Eva in the back seat of his car. Eva is the girl he put in the trunk of his car in the first episode of the series and brought across the border to the US. Linder drops Eva off at a secluded house and tells her she will be safe there from Hector. A Mexican man on a roof with binoculars complains about police scrutiny in the wake of the kidnapping of the Mexican girl Maria. An accomplice tells him that Hector killed someone in the US. The Mexican man says he will take care of everything. He approaches Mexican woman who runs the tunnel that goes to Charlotte Millwright's ranch and tells her he needs to use it. He goes through the tunnel with an accomplice and a suitcase. In the El Paso police station Marco gets a call and says he has to go outside. Marco meets the Mexican man who just crossed the border, and this man tells Marco he has the ransom money for Maria in the desert. Marco brings the money back to the police station and tells the FBI and police that the money is from a legitimate storage business that doesn't want to see a Mexican girl die. The FBI takes the lead in the money drop to the kidnapper, and one FBI agent, Ralph Gedman, goes into a bar which is the prearranged meeting place. The bartender gives Agent Ralph a phone with a message on it. After listening to it, Ralph takes out his FBI earpiece and leaves the bar. Meanwhile, Sonya has identified that Maria in the desert is close to an oil derrick based on the moving shadows in the web feed. Sonya and her boss, Lieutenant Hank Wade, scour derrick sites, and eventually find Maria. They tell the FBI to stop the money drop and find the kidnapper, but Ralph and the money have disappeared. Marco investigates a building nearby and is ambushed by the killer. The killer holds a gun to Marco's head and Marco pleads mercy as he has a family. The killer drops two bags by Marco: the bag of ransom money and the head of FBI agent Ralph. Inside the bag with Agent Ralph's head there is a phone that shows a video of him with his shirt off chugging a liquor bottle in front of a scantily clad young Mexican woman.

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