'True Detective' Drops A Major Caspere Clue

True Detective cut right to the chase during the penultimate episode of Season 2. All the pieces are finally falling into place, and Ani, Ray, and Paul are so close to cracking the whole case behind the death of City Manager Ben Caspere. In what we can now call true True Detective fashion, everything ties back together: the blue diamonds, the blackmail pictures sent to Vera, and the murder are all connected. It turns out, the girl in the pictures on True Detective, Laura, might be the key to figuring out everything.

How? OK, follow me on this. Since he was working for the LAPD at the time, Caspere was involved in the 1992 Los Angeles riots, and pocketed some blue diamonds from one of the crime scenes. This particular crime was a double murder, and two terrified little kids lost both of their parents while they hid in a cabinet.

Now, let's fast forward 20 years. One of the little kids from this crime scene, Laura, has grown up and wants to figure out what happened to her parents. How does she go about doing that? By taking a job as Caspere's secretary, and calling herself Erica. The girl that Ani and Ray look at in the pictures, we've met before. She was the shy and timid secretary that Paul and Ani met on the movie set, who told the detectives that she was still trying to keep Caspere's affairs in order after his death.

It is a total fluke that she happened to show up in the pictures Ani and Ray have. Those pictures were sent to the missing woman, Vera, as sort of a blackmail backup. The girl who sent them, Tascha, was probably killed in that very scary cabin that Ani and Paul found. She was taking the pictures to show the Big Guys who set up at these sketchy sex parties, not necessarily taking pictures of Laura/Erica. While Ani and Ray are looking at the pictures, Ani realizes that the girl looks familiar. That's when Ray jumps in and mentions that she is Caspere's secretary. Did True Detective just come full circle?

Just what Laura/Erica had to do with the actual murder of Caspere is still up in the air. Clearly, she's involved in it somehow. Whether she went after the diamonds herself, or tipped off the wrong people about his involvement in them, Caspere ended up dead. As far as we know, Laura/Erica is still alive out there, but with so much corruption in Vinci, I hope the detectives are able to find her before she becomes even more tangled up in this mess.

Images: Lacey Terrel/HBO; HBO