Patricia Cornwell’s Scarpetta books, which debuted in 1990 with Postmortem, have had a long journey to the screen, with various actors pegged to play protagonist Kay Scarpetta throughout the years. Now, for fans of the bestselling mystery novels and newcomers alike, the wait is over. The first season of Prime Video’s Scarpetta follows two timelines: “Postmortem,” from the first book, and “Autopsy,” the 25th. Both follow separate yet connected murder investigations, as Kay Scarpetta (Rosy McEwen in the past, Nicole Kidman in the present), Chief Medical Examiner for the Commonwealth of Virginia, attempts to solve them. 

Though the mystery of the killer in the early timeline is discovered before the finale, the big question of the killer’s identity in the modern timeline is still unsolved—that is, until the Season 1 finale. 

Here, we break down the twists and turns of the Season 1 finale of Scarpetta, with the help of series showrunner Liz Sarnoff.

Who is the killer?

In the finale of Scarpetta, Kay Scarpetta is unraveling. Her once-full house is now entirely empty. Her sister Dorothy (Jamie Lee Curtis) and husband Pete (Bobby Cannavale), who moved in while their own house was being remodeled, have moved out to stay in a hotel. Her niece Lucy (Ariana DeBose) is off with Petersen (Anson Mount), and Scarpetta’s husband, Benton (Simon Baker), has left to stay with his colleague, cyber investigator Tron (Anna Diop), with whom he’s having an affair. 

Scarpetta is desperate to find the killer, but all of her supporters have effectively abandoned her. Her only remaining ally is the one she doesn’t want: Maggie (Stephanie Faracy), her longtime assistant who’s repeatedly stood in her way. In the finale, Maggie has come to Scarpetta wanting to help her take down Scarpetta’s boss, Chief of the Health Department Elvin Reddy (Lenny Clarke), who helped cover up one of the murders Scarpetta is trying to solve. 

Scarpetta’s most precious relationship is with Lucy, though even that has turned sour. That’s because Lucy is deep in grief over the loss of her wife Janet (Janet Montgomery), who she’s resurrected into an AI bot that still talks to her. But someone has deleted the AI, utterly crushing Lucy. She becomes suspicious of everyone, including Scarpetta, who she believes may have killed the AI Lucy. Though Sarnoff didn’t give away much about what to expect in the future, she did reveal that Lucy will be surprised by the identity of the person who deleted the AI, suggesting it isn’t actually Scarpetta. 

At the end of Season 1, Lucy finds herself at a surprising place: the door of Matt Petersen, a spiritual healer who was being investigated for murdering his wife. For Sarnoff, Lucy’s actions stem from desperation. “Sometimes when you’re lost, and you think somebody might have an answer, you go in that direction. She’s exhausted the opportunities for answers in her own circle. She’s going to ask, ‘Is there something you can tell me that will make this go down better?’ Lucy also just has to get away from her mother and aunt—she’s seeing now that there’s no road forward with them right now. She’s just trying to find a road forward for herself,” explains Sarnoff.

At her dining room table, Scarpetta receives a call from police officer Blaise (Tiya Sircar), who reveals the identity of the killer. Except the reception is bad, and Scarpetta doesn’t get any of the info Blaise lays out on the phone. The call drops, and when she puts down the phone, she discovers something terrifying: a flattened penny, the calling card of the killer, is on her table.

It’s here we discover the killer is police officer August Ryan (Austin McMains in the past, David Hornsby in the present), who’s standing behind Scarpetta, ready to attack. Ryan reveals to Scarpetta that when he attended the scene of Laurie Petersen’s murder 20 years ago, it fundamentally changed him. “The way we looked at all the flashbacks was what the fracture is in these characters and what caused it. That way, we could map their psychological journey. With Ryan, the fracture comes in seeing the Laurie Petersen crime scene,” says Sarnoff.

“In a weird way, Episode 1 is his flashback to the moment he starts to turn, and then we have a journey through the past that shows how he evolves.” The finale reveals that when Ryan was a child, his uncle would take him to the train tracks and make Ryan flatten a penny by placing them under oncoming trains while he slept with prostitutes in plain sight of Ryan. Picking up the pennies afterward left Ryan with burns and scarring. “It all combined in his brain and screwed him up,” explains Sarnoff.

What will happen to Kay Scarpetta in Season 2?

This is a considerable departure from the book, where the killer is another character altogether. “We wanted to have the killer be somebody we actually go on a journey with in the show. In the book, it’s more of a side character. This way, we could focus on Ryan’s growing fixation with Scarpetta. When we meet him in the present, he’s working for the parks police—the idea is that he didn’t want to go to any more crime scenes, because he’s worried about what it’s doing to him,” Sarnoff says. Ultimately, that wasn’t enough to stop his brutal killings, which he attributes to trying to impress Scarpetta.

The two fight, and Scarpetta outsmarts him, taking a metal baseball bat to his back, causing him to fall down the stairs and collapse on the floor. All of Scarpetta’s carefully coiled rage unspools, and she kills Ryan, caving his face in with the baseball bat, striking him over and over, blood spattering everywhere. “We put Kay through the wringer in the present day and especially the finale,” says Sarnoff. “She’s stripped of everybody she cares about. They all leave, and she’s left home alone with the murderer. It felt like the perfect opportunity for Kay’s emotional release. We needed to give her something physical to give this cathartic release. It’s something she’s going to struggle with in Season 2.”

In the final moment of Scarpetta, someone has arrived at the house and opens the door to find a blood-covered Scarpetta standing over a very dead Ryan. We don’t find out who is there, leaving the show on a major cliffhanger. Sarnoff wouldn’t comment on who’s at the door, though our bet is on either Blaise, who is coming to relay the information in person as the call dropped, or Maggie, who’s arriving to give Scarpetta the evidence to take down Reddy. But Sarnoff did explain what Kay is thinking as the camera closes in on her horrified face: “It’s the realization of what she’s done. She’s bashed this man's head to smithereens. It’s an extremely violent moment that’s now been witnessed by someone else. She’s f-cked up in every way imaginable. We really brought her down to the bottom. And she’s going to have to contend with that,” says Sarnoff.

Though the Season 1 finale leaves plenty of questions about what will happen to Scarpetta and her family, Sarnoff does hint at what we can expect in Season 2. The dual timelines will continue, and the present-day Scarpetta will have a heavy new case, focusing on abducted teenage girls. 

“There’s an opportunity for Kay in Season 2 to save someone,” says Sarnoff. “It inspires her to want to get back into the game. It’s a bigger case, a task force involving Quantico, than a hometown case. She also sustained an injury while fighting off Ryan. It takes her a while to get her feet back under her in Season 2," says Sarnoff. "She’s also questioning every relationship in her life after the events of Season 1."