In the eighteenth episode, Chief Inspector Boris Noethen receives a phone call from his old contact Claudia Benner. A young woman has turned up who desperately needs help; that’s all she is prepared to say over the phone. Detective Lucas is surprised when Boris stops the car by a camper van on the edge of town, where Claudia Benner quite obviously offers her services as a prostitute. They arrive too late: they find Claudia stabbed to death in her mobile home, and no trace of the woman seeking help. Suddenly the guys from the German Federal Criminal Police Office turn up at the scene and Boris has to set some boundaries. Kai Benner, Claudia‘s son, is surprisingly unemotional and seems more affected by the loss of income than the loss of his mother. A first hot trail leads Detective Lucas and her team to Viktor Gheorghi, the last person called on Claudia’s cell phone, who at around the time of the crime happened to be involved in a car accident not far from the camper van. Although he works as a security guy for a nearby brothel, Gheorghi denies knowing Claudia and the unknown woman. However, Detective Lucas remains on Gheorghi’s heels and comes up trumps: at the time of the accident he was spotted in the company of Alina, in all probability the woman who had last visited Claudia in her camper van. Detective Lucas and her team search flat out to find Alina. After a raid on the brothel and the intervention of her assistant, Tom Brauer, Lucas is sure of her facts: they were dealing here with a clear case of Eastern European women being coerced into illegal prostitution by a group of sex traffickers. But what did this have to do with Claudia, and where is Alina? Were they in contact with the illegal prostitutes? In the middle of the investigation the policemen from the German Federal Criminal Police Office reappear on the scene and hamper the ongoing inquiries. Ellen Lucas is certain that Viktor Gheorghi is the key to solving the case, but when he reveals himself to be an undercover agent from the German Federal Criminal Police Office she literally seems to be swept up in the maelstrom of an impenetrable network of prostitution and human trafficking.
