Some people online have asked this question: How long did it take them to solve the Merritt Lingard case? I don’t have a conclusive answer for this, but I’ve sat down and gone through all the episodes to try and figure out how many actual days were shown between Carl coming back to work after the shooting and finding Merritt.

And the answer is: 20

Now, we don’t know if these days were all consecutive, and likely they were not, although some of them definitely were as per dialogue or events specifically alluding to this. To me, this suggests that it didn’t take them longer than a month to solve the case, but as for how long it actually was is anyone’s guess.

I’ve documented this all in a Google Sheet, so take a look if you’d like to dig deeper.

That said, some episodes were pretty messy regarding the timeline, e.g. them switching between daylight and nighttime and back to daylight but the characters were wearing the same clothes the whole time. This suggest that they may have switched scenes around in editing to make it flow better, or perhaps even continuity errors regarding clothing, which can also happen.