Tracker Season 3 Episode 16 Recap: Colter Shaw Battles a Deadly Obsession

By
Rebecca Murray
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Tracker Season 3 Episode 16 Recap
Justin Hartley as Colter Shaw in ‘Tracker’ season 3 episode 16 (Photo: Darko Sikman © 2026 CBS Broadcasting, Inc)

CBS’s Tracker continues its very violent third season with episode 16, airing on April 12, 2026. (What is Colter’s body count thus far?) Episode 16 begins with an injured man begging for his life, leading into Randy (Chris Lee) calling Colter (Justin Hartley) about the case of the week. The injured man is electrician Finn Helms, and he went missing after work last night.

(The following is a recap of season three, episode 16—”Struck”—and there are spoilers.)

Finn’s eight-month pregnant wife, Grace, offered $10,000 and Colter agrees to head to Buffalo, New York. Grace (Natalie Jane) explains Finn’s not answering his phone, no one has heard from him, and he missed their eight-month ultrasound. She shows off the baby’s room to prove Finn was really looking forward to their child’s arrival. He put everything in it together himself.

Colter goes through a bag of Finn’s and finds a bloody cloth. Grace doesn’t know why it’s bloody but admits he gets hurt a lot at work. Colter decides he’ll start the search at Finn’s work. Before he leaves, Grace confesses they don’t have much money, but she’s putting together a payment for his help.

Meanwhile, Reenie (Fiona Rene) is surprised to see Mark the bartender in her office. (They slept together but don’t have a relationship.) Turns out he’s a brand rep for a mezcal company, not a bartender, and he’s in town for a product launch. Mark asks her out but Reenie declines, claiming she’s too busy. Mark accepts her no but tells her where he’s staying, just in case.

Colter shows up at the job site and Finn’s boss says he fired him two months ago. Finn had been stealing items, so he let him go. Doyle, one of Finn’s former co-workers, waits until the boss is gone to explain that Finn was taking jobs off PowerUp, an app they use to get extra work. Not every job there is above board. Finn reached out last night to see if Doyle wanted to help him with a job, but Doyle had a date.

Fortunately, Finn mentioned the address and that’s Colter’s next stop. There’s a ladder leaning on an electrical pole, Finn’s van is parked nearby, and there are two sets of tools at the base of the pole. Colter climbs up and the electric box is still open. He looks around from that vantage point and can see into one house.

Colter fills in Randy and reveals he thinks the job was stealing information by tapping into fiber. There’s melted rubber on the ladder, indicating someone was electrocuted. Randy taps into a nearby security camera and they see people taking a body in a tarp to a truck. Randy tracks the truck but loses it. There are woods and undeveloped lots the way it was heading so they may have dumped the body.

Colter heads that way and spots a truck down a side road. It matches the one that Randy was tracking, and there’s a bloody glove in it. Although it’s been hours since the truck drove away from the job Finn was working, the two men have only now finished digging a grave to drop the body into. Colter calls out to them and neither of them are Finn. And unfortunately for them, they brought shovels to a gun fight. Colter has one of them crawl into the hole and show him the body. The man’s been electrocuted, but it’s definitely not Finn.

They claim the guy was a random tweaker they picked up to help them on the job. He touched a transformer and died. The men blame the victim for not paying attention to their instructions. Finn was there and freaked out, but the guy who hired them, Paolo, convinced him not to call the cops. Paolo was supposed to take Finn out for beers but may have taken him to a building he owns downtown instead.

Tracker Season 3 Episode 16 Recap
Justin Hartley as Colter Shaw in ‘Tracker’ season 3 episode 16 (Photo: Darko Sikman © 2026 CBS Broadcasting, Inc)

After calling in the dead body, Colter makes it to Paolo’s building and finds blooddrops outside and near the door handle. The door’s unlocked and he discovers Paolo (Robert Daprocida), injured but alert. He confesses he was just trying to scare Finn, but Finn fought back hard. He shot him, but Finn made it outside. Just as Paolo was going to shoot him again, a speeding truck hit him. That’s how he received his injuries. Paolo describes the driver as a “crazy chick” that Finn definitely knew. The woman wasn’t pregnant, so it wasn’t Grace.

Colter tells Randy he thinks Finn was having an affair. Randy hacks Finn’s PowerUp account and sees messages between Finn and Adelle Mucino. Adelle hired him for a job, but the messages are personal. Randy digs further and learns they met three years ago on a dating app when Finn and Grace were on a break. There hasn’t been contact between them since, until she hired him a few weeks ago for a job.

The action switches to Adelle and Finn, and they’re definitely in the same house, but it doesn’t seem Finn (Chad Michael Collins) is there by choice. Adelle (Lyndon Smith) is taking care of his injuries and didn’t call the cops to tell them he was shot. Not even Grace knows where he is, and Adelle wants to keep it that way. Finn isn’t just her patient; he’s her prisoner.

Night falls by the time Colter arrives at Adelle’s house. He breaks in and discovers Adelle is obsessed with Finn, writing her name as if they were going to marry and creating fake wedding invitations. A journal shows she thought about him constantly, and the calendar reveals she was tracking his movements. Adelle even replaced Grace’s face in a wedding photo and has it framed in her living room.

Reenie discovers Adelle has a history of stalking and attacking her ex’s. She was even locked up for it in a psychiatric facility. Colter thinks she intervened in Finn’s fight with Paolo, and Finn isn’t voluntarily with her now. He spots a home rental brochure for a place she manages and wonders if she took Finn there.

Finn attempts to break out of his restraints, but Adelle catches him. She reminds him of their first date and thinks they had something special from the get-go. Finn broke her heart when he went back to Grace. She thought about killing herself but decided to wait and see if he’d come back to her.  

She mistakenly reveals she’s seen the inside of his house. And she deliberately hired him for a job, so they’d reconnect. Adelle insists he’s safe now and they can start over. Finn thanks her but can’t leave Grace and his unborn baby. Adelle asks, “What if Grace had an accident? It happens all the time.”

Finn finally realizes exactly how crazy she is. Adelle is furious and grabs a gun.

Reenie’s working late and sends Mel (Cassady McClincy Zhang) home for the night. Mel wonders if she’s going to dinner with Mark, but Reenie’s too busy. We finally get more details on Mel when she confesses she used to run track to outrun the grief after her mom died. However, she tore her ACL and had to stop running. Reenie understands her point about not pushing yourself too hard but insists this is how she prefers handling things. But she promises to relax soon.

Tracker Season 3 Episode 16 Recap
Justin Hartley as Colter Shaw in ‘Tracker’ season 3 episode 16 (Photo: Darko Sikman © 2026 CBS Broadcasting, Inc.)

Colter breaks into the house in the brochure, gun drawn. He rushes upstairs when he hears banging and breaks through a door. Finn’s tied to the bed and gagged, and Colter quickly frees him. Finn believes Adelle is on her way to kill Grace.

Grace answers the door and Adelle claims she found Finn on the side of the road. She offers to take Grace to Finn, and Grace immediately agrees. Unfortunately, Grace leaves her phone behind. Fortunately, they have a door camera and Finn watches as Grace leaves with Adelle. Colter asks Finn to think about a place that’s special to Adelle. It might be where she’s taking Grace. They got stranded on a bridge on their first date so that’s probably where Adelle is heading.

Grace begs for her unborn baby as Adelle holds her at gunpoint. Adelle orders her to step on the railing just as Colter arrives. She holds Grace at gunpoint, so Colter won’t shoot. Finn walks up and claims he loves Grace more than anything in this world. She can kill him, too, if she kills Grace.

Grace makes a move and gets away from Adelle. Colter orders her to put the gun down but instead Adelle climbs on the railing, ready to kill herself since she can’t have Finn. She’s still got her gun, but Colter puts his down and asks that they talk. Adelle apologizes and lets herself fall. Colter’s lightning fast and snatches her hand before she plummets to her death.

Reenie shows up at Mark’s hotel room and wants to have sex before going to dinner and really getting to know him.

Colter pops in on Grace and Finn as Finn’s busy working on the baby’s room. Colter hands them an owl he carved for the baby, and Grace gives Colter his reward payment. Of course, Colter doesn’t accept it. He’s just happy that they’re both fine and suggests they add it to the baby’s college fund.

Episode 16 ends with Randy informing Colter he found info on the Chronostatis Institute that’s connected to Colter’s dad, Ashton. Colter asked him to research it earlier in the episode, and Randy reveals David Pearson’s name kept popping up. He even found a purchase of plane tickets to Alaska for Ashton and David, just four months before Ashton died. That means Ashton and David were still working together when they went to Copper Valley, Alaska. Government subcontractors were also in the area at the same time.

Colter thanks Randy and says, “I know what I have to do.”

 

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