MEANWHILE, back in his cell, Ned is worrying about the damn Dead Dad thing about which I cannot be bothered. Jim Dale would back me up, I'm sure, if he wasn't distracted just now by Ned's newly arrived cellmate, Burly Bruce. Seconds from his own violent death at the hands of the angry BB, Ned can think only of Chuck, thus giving him the genius idea of asking Burly Bruce about his own untouchable girlfriend, Sheila, melting the crazy dude's heart. What follows is a filler-story about how Burly Bruce ordered his doll ("girlfriend") through a catalogue ("personal ad") in order to have someone to ride with him in the carpool lane.

Back at the Pie Hole, Emerson and Chuck are talking over the whole fingerless killer. Emerson complains that no missing-digit tragedies have been reported at any nearby hospitals. Maybe, Chuck posits, due to phantom-limb syndrome, the killer hasn't even noticed his missing finger. "Hey, yeah," Emerson snarks, "that would narrow our list of suspects down to only insanely stupid people." Emerson says their only choice is to go back to Bittersweets and investigate the scene of the crime. Chuck cringes. How will they get past Dilly?

Cut to Operation Olive. Our tiny heroine is once again forced to cover for the Scoobs and goes to distract Dilly (who is wearing mittens while she sweeps up the broken glass of her door) with a walk down the block ("death is the worst!") as Chuck and Emerson sneak into the candy store. Using ingenuity, they are able to lift nine fingers' worth of prints, but as they go to sneak out of the store, Dilly makes them in the reflection of her car tire rims. "Do you want proof of what happened to Billy?" she asks Olive, not giving away that she has seen the crime fighters. With that, she opens the car trunk, forces Olive in at gunpoint ("oh, craaap") and goes after Emerson and Chuck with a dose of extra-crazy.

Lucky for Chuck and Emerson, she has to take her mittens off to shoot them and, as they see she has all her fingers and thus cannot be the killer, they convince her to let them go so that they can bring the real baddie to justice. She releases them, insisting that all she really wants is j-j-j-justice. Hitting the auto-unlock on her keychain, Dilly admonishes, "Take your trunk-monkey with you." Poor Olive is released from her prison ("stinks in there"), and Emerson, employing the skillz of the coroner, learns that the real killer is none other than the health inspector! He had been blackmailing Billy Balsam for paying him off to do the surprise inspection on the Pie Hole. When he demanded more cash from Billy, a brawl ensued that led to the taffy-induced death. Thus, Ned was released, to the screams of his ladies -- one who can hug him and one who can't -- and even to the joy of Emerson, who grudgingly welcomes him back saying that he realized how valuable Ned's poker is to the whole detection enterprise. Ned has come to his own realizations: everyone says that the truth will set you free, but through the insanity of Burly Bruce, he figures that's a fallacy. "Burly Bruce was free to love someone," he says, "because he was so good at lying to himself about that doll being real. Which is to say...'Go, lying!' or, at least, 'Yay...to not telling the truth!' I'm not going to tell Chuck about her dad." Emerson: "Hmm. I just heard that as though it came out of my own mouth. Oh, wait. It did." Ned says that Emerson was right all along, and wishes him a good night as Chuck and Olive moonily offer him a celebratory piece of pie. Left alone to clean up in the restaurant, Olive turns to find Alfredo there, waiting for her, but as they cling together in a passionate kiss, it's revealed to be only a fantasy. "Sometimes," Jim Dale says, "a crime of passion is not realizing the passion in time." While other times, he adds, showing us a poignant Burly Bruce looking out the window of his lonely cell, the crime is not seeing the world as it truly is. "But most times," JD says, wrapping it up as we see a four-fingered hand slip beneath the surface of a swamp, "crimes of passion are, actually, a crime." Dilly don't play, y'all. She has achieved her revenge on the health inspector, but good.