It's night in glamorous Miami, and the beautiful people are having a party. A shirtless man undulates between two well-groomed women, and all over the room, that sort of set-up is replicated in assorted numbers and combinations of genders. It is precisely the kind of party that the people who feel like losers for staying home on Saturday night are convinced the rest of us are having while they're making friends with their remote control. The camera then swoops over to a woman who's attractive in a generic way. She's seated, and she puts a shot glass between her thighs before bidding the man currently dancing between them -- and, while he's shaking his groove thang, let me just ask, who on Earth thinks that pelvic figure-eight thing is sexy? -- to shimmy on down and do a no-hands shot. The camera pans to her pleased look, then to her friends who are egging the spectacle on. I take it back about this being the kind of party people suspect everyone else of having; this is the kind of party that would only take place in a world based on liquor ads. The guy finishes his shot, and the generically good-looking person, who I now realize is Jamie Luner, asks, "How'd you like that?" He smolders in her general direction.
Cut to daytime, where a Hockney-blue swimming pool is surrounded by lurid pink cabanas. I seriously have to question the wisdom of the pink motif; are there plush unicorns and teddy bears on the beds too? Would it be possible for any man over age eighteen to enter one of those pink nightmares and not suffer immediate impotence? Anyway, a grounds worker's nearby, beginning the onerous chore of cleaning up after a night of someone else's debauchery. As he attempts to wind up a strand of outdoor lights, the end of the string refuses to come. After a few impatient yanks, the end of the lights flies free -- and a human foot falls out of a swath of bright pink fabric. It's death by ill-conceived theme decoration!
Cut to Horatio and Sevilla walking onto the grounds. She's filling him in: "We've got a looker -- twenty-two-year-old named Noel Peach." Horatio asks if they know why Peach was there. Sevilla says, "Some sort of private party." Horatio replies, "Not private anymore, is it? Did we find out what killed him?" Sevilla's been briefed on Horatio's supernatural crime-solving powers, and she replies, "I was hoping you could tell me." The camera pans over to Peach, who's now lying on his back in a classic cheesecake pose. Damn -- any postmodernist who wants to write a paper on necrophilia as the latest erotic trend has just been given the first fifty pages of Baudrillardian deconstruction. Horatio comments on the tableau by hunkering down and quipping, "I guess we can't rule out exposure."
The Who caution us against not getting fooled again, and we go to commercial.
Once we're back, Alexx is crouched to Peach and telling Horatio that if liver temperatures are anything to go by, Peach died between five and seven that morning. Horatio muses, "No sign of trauma or injury. Look at this white substance around his mouth." Horatio lifts it off. Alexx asks, "Drugs?" Horatio opines, "Wouldn't be a first at a Coconut Grove party, would it?" Alexx notes that Peach is also sporting a substance on his genitals which could be semen; the presence of a condom wrapper supports that idea. "At least he was careful," Alexx says. "And busy," Horatio adds. No -- busy is six condom wrappers, not one. He then finds a number of different hair samples. Calleigh breaks in then with her find -- a number of dead Culex quinquefasciatus. "Mosquitoes!" Horatio says, adding, "And you knew their Latin name! You've been cheating on me with an entomologist in Las Vegas, haven't you?" Actually, he adds, "Mosquitoes who are attracted to circulating blood and carbon monoxide from breathing, which means our friend here was alive when he got bit, doesn't it?" Calleigh thinks it means that they might find traces of whatever was in Peach's system. Just then, Horatio calls for Speedle, who emerges looking cranky (of course) and holding a bra aloft in one hand, quipping, "I don't know what the Latin name for this is." Calleigh tells him there isn't one, on account of Roman women favoring leather straps instead. Speedle just blinks, then waves the bra around, saying, "Must have been one hell of a party." It's not really a party until someone goes home without their underwear. And in the hell-of-a-party vein, it looks as though Peach was restrained at some point. Speedle wonders about the possibility of bondage, and Calleigh dismisses it with, "Seems kind of contradictory. What kind of stud likes to be tied up?" Calleigh needs to expand her social horizons. Horatio comments, "Unless we've got it backward, ladies and gentlemen, and our friend here wasn't the predator. He was the prey."
And now, the party post-mortem. These are typically more fun over a really greasy breakfast and a lot of Bloody Marys, but I suppose talking to the police is kind of par for the course in some circles. Horatio comments to the person he's questioning, "Rough way for a night to end?" She replies, "I almost didn't come. This was my first time." Horatio gives her a look and says, "Your first time. For what?" "A cupcake party," she replies, in a tone designed to convey to Horatio precisely how unhip he is for not immediately grokking what she was talking about. Horatio says, "A cupcake party. Care to explain that?" Cut to Jamie Luner expositing, "Cupcake -- it's, um, kind of hard to describe. Basically, it's an environment where women are in charge. Get together and celebrate our sexuality." Or, it's a thinly-veiled rip-off of the CakeNYC parties, which have garnered press in Vanity Fair and Bitch recently. The Cake parties are apparently power bacchanals in which the young and beautiful can pretend to be edgy by indulging in the kind of sexualized hijinks that a Brat Pack movie would have featured in the sequence where Rob Lowe and Andrew McCarthy are whooping it up on the town. There is indeed the rap about it being a woman-dominated sexual experience, but the whole Cake idea more or less presupposes that women buy into the idea that they're not in control of their sexuality, their sexual choices, or their sexual lives, and that "sexy" is defined by and for men as a rule. It seems to me that "rebelling" against that set of ideas does more to validate them than it does to empower the would-be rebels, but that's just me.
Anyway. Horatio asks, "That celebration includes male entertainment like Noel Peach?" Jamie replies, "There were quite a few male dancers there. We're all about appropriating allegedly macho forms of erotic entertainment and calling it empowerment." Or maybe she stopped after that first sentence. Horatio's not really pondering the philosophical underpinnings of The Cupcake Theory Of Empowerment, because he's focusing on Jamie's hair and recalling how similar it is to the hair samples he found. Horatio asks Jamie to describe the entertainment, and she says, "It was harmless, really." Yeah, if the definition of "harmless" excludes aesthetic offenses. Horatio editorializes, "A little harmless lap dance followed by a little harmless sex." Jamie clocks in with the first asinine line of the night with, "Cupcake isn't about having sex; it's about taking it back."
The hostess of the party is busy picking up discarded hot-pink rose petals. Horatio comes over and smiles, saying, "I do that too -- I'm always picking up the things people leave behind." Hostess gives him a look, and he continues, "This is your home. This is your party." She concedes that this is the case. Horatio continues, "I must admit that I find Cupcake to be an interesting concept, but I don't understand it. You don't have sex at the end of the evening. So what do you do?" Hostess clocks in with Asinine Line #2 by asking, "Don't you think there's something freeing about just stimulating your senses and leaving it at that?" Horatio replies, "Sure, that's possible. But when people get stimulated, they get territorial. That's human nature, and that can be dangerous. Your party have rules?" Hostess gives a little chuckle and delivers another howler: "That's the great thing about Cupcake. There are no rules." So basically, what we have is a collection of women acting like louts, and it's called empowering your senses by taking back sex? Wouldn't it be less trouble to get a catalog from Babes in Toyland? Horatio watches the hostess leave as Speedle comes up and asks, "So let me get this straight: everybody gets together for sex, and then nobody has it? Everybody knows what goes on at an orgy. I mean, you can add all kinds of weird little party favors, cupcakes, weird ingredients -- an orgy's an orgy." Nice to see that Speed wouldn't bat an eye at a catered orgy with gift bags. As he's talking, Horatio watches the hostess walk outside and carefully drop the rose petals in a specific planter. Speedle finishes with, "Noel Peach is the one who got screwed." Sevilla ushers the hostess back inside, and Horatio notes, "In more ways than one."
And now, I realized why I've liked this episode so much until now -- no Megan. She and Delko make their appearance, walking down a dock at a marina, with Delko saying, "This is our first time. You know, the two of us on a case. You usually work with Speed." Megan realizes, "Yeah -- I guess I do." Delko continues, "He says you taught him a lot." I'm thinking Delko's the Nicky of this show for sure -- admiring of his coworkers' abilities, slightly eager to have them validate his job performance in return, not getting any respect. Before Megan can make any substantive reply, a detective joins them and gives them a little exposition: two Bostonian transplants, Lisa and Mark Tupper (why don't TV shows ever depict a married couple with different last names?), were napping when an unidentified male climbed up their yacht's aft ladder, and promptly dropped dead. So what are the odds that around the country, yacht owners were nodding their heads and saying, "I hate when that happens..."? Megan's a little incredulous: "A guy comes out of the Atlantic and chooses their boat to die on?" What, he should have picked someone else's? Anyway, the trio troops over to the body in question, and the detective -- whose name we don't know, because we're apparently only getting introduced by name to those characters who don't speak -- says, "Single stab wound. Pallor indicates he bled out." Megan wants to know where the rest of the blood is. She swipes the deck quickly, then adds a reagent, and it shows up bright red. I think it's bright red; when they shoot this show outside, they do it through the Sergio Leone filter and everything ends up with a yellowish tint. Megan looks disturbed, and we flash back to someone losing all eight pints of blood all over the deck of the boat. Megan concludes, "There was a lot more blood [beat] than what we're seeing." Meanwhile, Delko's off poking around the galley. He sees a Mag light lying on the countertop and picks it up; it appears to have blood on the rim. Delko's inspecting it more closely when he sneezes, and we get the TMICam shot of the aerosol. I immediately shriek, "Contaminated evidence!" because I'm a big geek like that. Delko rubs his nose and looks irritated for a moment, and then Megan comes up. As she prattles on about knives, then asks, "Did you find something?" Delko does not say, "Well, I did find a flashlight, but then I sneezed all over it, so let's keep that in mind while we're processing evidence." After Megan congratulates him on his find and says, "Let's get it to DNA," he replies with nothing that resembles the sentiment, "Gosh, DNA is going to be working with a tainted sample." After she walks off, Delko realizes he blew it big-time.
Back at the autopsy bay, Alexx and Horatio are going through the usual drill, i.e. she's busy examining the body while he supervises from somewhere outside Tampa. Alexx notes that Peach's heart simply stopped beating; as Horatio notes, this isn't a terribly common phenomenon among the healthy twenty-five-and-under set. Alexx replies that Peach came up negative on the tox screen for run-of-the-mill controlled substances, and asks about the white stuff around Peach's mouth. Horatio replies: "Six percent conchiline and ninety-two percent aragonite -- good old-fashioned ground-up pearl dust. Harmless." And also part of the annoying trend toward elaborate drink garnishes. I had thought I was alone in noticing an increase in the amount of foliage menacing a perfectly respectable cocktail, but according to the New York Times, "cocktails are dressed to kill." Anyway, Horatio asks if Peach could have been allergic to it. Alexx notes, "No rashes, no edema, no airway congestion -- just the ligature mark you found and a tiny oval impression on his chest. Those certainly didn't kill him." Horatio wonders where they go from here. Alexx replies, "With an apparent death of natural causes. I hate to say it, but we could be done here."
Just then, Horatio has a brainstorm, and asks if there's a chance there's semen present. Alexx confirms, "Yeah. Tails on sperm indicate sex just before death, and a vaginal contribution that eluded the condom. But that's not why you're here." Horatio caves under Alexx's penetrating stare. I'm betting that once Megan's gone from the show, Alexx is going to be moving into the role Megan should have played: smart, strong, counterbalancing voice of experience within the team. Alexx tells Horatio, "You think one of the women did it." He admits that she's got him there. Alexx replies, "No such thing as free love." Horatio, who appears to have quite the strong puritan streak offsetting whatever kink factor the show's been alluding to, comments, "Consenting adults have at it, but I can guarantee you our friend Noel didn't consent to this, did he?"
In the DNA lab, Megan's setting up some swabs when Delko comes in. She explains to him that she's just prepped some swabs off the knives, and there's no trace of blood. Delko adds, "Detective Puig says the rest of the Tuppers' story was confirmed. The marina owner saw just the two of them going out." And now we have a name for that detective. Yay! Megan grudgingly admits that perhaps the Tuppers were telling the truth. Delko wonders why they would have cleaned up the blood. Um, because they're dumb? Megan says, "People hide things, half the time without even thinking." She then asks how that flashlight is coming along. Delko pauses for a small eternity, then says, "Um. Hair. Belonged to our dead swimmer. The blood...we're still testing." Delko mumbled that last part, and you can tell the sneeze thing is eating him up. Good -- it should. Megan says, "The hair is [beat] enough. Let's bring the Tuppers in." And then we're whooshed to an interrogation room, where Megan's talking to the bland, bland Tuppers. To make a long and tedious scene shorter, Lisa admits that she clocked the dead guy with a flashlight after she came out of the galley and saw this total stranger standing over her husband. Another nameless detective goes outside with Megan and says eagerly, "We could charge her with assault." I'm sure there's a decent chance of that being thrown out after a halfway competent lawyer points out that she was only acting out of fear for her own safety. Megan's not too sure it's time for an assault charge yet.
Back at the A-plot, Calleigh and Horatio are looking at her mosquitoes. Calleigh's saying, "So I asked myself: a bunch of dead, dried-out mosquitoes. What's strange about that?" Horatio counters that mosquitoes get swatted all the time. Not the ones Calleigh collected. Horatio notes that, like Peach, the mosquitoes were alive one moment, and dead the . Horatio muses, "If Noel did die of natural causes, then what killed these mosquitoes?" The two of them conclude: "Since mosquitoes drink blood...something in his blood must have killed them." Horatio decides, "Let's have Alexx go over the body again...looking for something lethal."
Then Horatio goes to deal with a batch of cupcakes. He and Speedle walk into an interrogation room, and Horatio says, "Ladies, someone had sex with Noel Peach just before he died, so we want to get a DNA reference swab from each of you, okay?" The women all look like they're thinking, "Nothing on the Cupcake website said anything about empowering sexuality requiring DNA swabs." Speedle sighs heavily and says with no small amount of beleaguerment, "If you could just form a line right here --" A small, dark woman in a strapless dress blurts out, "That's not necessary. It was me." I was really hoping that a few other women would go, "No, it was me!" in the Cupcake version of Spartacus, but no such luck. Cut to Horatio giving her a disapproving glare. What is his problem? Aside from the dead guy, I mean.
Cut to the girl -- whose name we never find out, as is par for the course for this episode -- protesting that Peach was fine when she left him around two in the morning. She protests, "Please, you have to believe me!" If this were a conversation with Gil, the bug-man would be saying, "We believe the evidence," but since this is the all-knowing Horatio, he's going to make his judgment based on a set of criteria known only to himself. Or he's going to ask, "What did you do with the condom you used?" The girl says they didn't use one. Wow, that's stupid -- you boff a male dancer and you don't practice safe sex? Is Cupcake about frequent courses of antibiotics as well? Horatio looks shocked. I bet it has less to do with the unsafe sex and more to do with the realization that more than one woman slept with Peach on the night he died.
And now, Horatio's passing on the news to the of kin. He's really good at it, finishing with, "You have my number. If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to call me." Alexx comes over and asks Horatio, "of kin." Horatio says tightly, "That was his mother, and she told me she had spoken to him three days ago and he had declared a college major." Alexx asks sharply, "Did she know what else he was into?" Horatio answers, "No -- only that he no longer needed help with his tuition." They take a moment of silence, and then Alexx justifies her presence in this scene: she had gone over Peach's body again and found an injection site, but there was nothing in his medical records to justify a daily injection. Horatio muses, "So we've got dead mosquitoes that are telling us nothing..." "And a body telling us everything. One of the hardest crimes to solve," Alexx finishes. Horatio connects the dots: "Poison."
Fade in on Horatio giving Calleigh and Speedle a poison primer as they look at a video still of Peach's body: "The three more common poisons are strychnine --" "That's obvious. It leaves the body horribly contorted with that gruesome grin. Arsenic causes hair loss, makes the skin jaundiced --" says Speedle, voice dripping with contempt. Not to be outdone in the presence of the great Horatio, Calleigh rushes in with, "And cyanide has that bitter almond smell." I'm thinking that smell wouldn't have been a factor during Cupcake night; those ladies look like they're the kind of women who take the concept of a "fragrance wardrobe" pretty seriously. Calleigh continues, "The tox screens were negative for all three, so that leaves us..." "The world. It leaves us the world because any element can be poisonous. It's all about the dose," Horatio says. Speedle brings up hyponutremia as a reminder that even water can be lethal. Calleigh says, "You'd think it'd be easy because you just put his blood in the mass spec and get a result." Horatio points out that poison diffuses throughout the body and gets metabolized into different tissues, so finding it isn't exactly a matter of logical deduction. He then lays out the game plan for everyone: "Here's what we're going to do. Alexx is going to take a sample from the body. We're looking for what was given to Noel, and who had a reason to give it to him. This kid had a family." This is apparently news to Speedle, who must have been nurturing the impression that men turned to exotic dancing after being evicted from an orphanage.
On the B-plot, Alexx is telling Megan that the flashlight blow was so minor, it really doesn't contribute to the cause of death, as "blow to the head" really doesn't exacerbate the already considerable damage caused by "stab wound in the liver." However, Alexx's whole attitude is best described by stab wound, schmab wound, as the dead guy's organs are infinitely more interesting: his spleen is twenty percent smaller than normal, and his heart and lungs are twenty percent bigger. Megan muses that maybe they're dealing with some kind of athlete, then finishes up kind of lost: "But the spleen...is that it?" Alexx smiles and gently reproves her with, "Would I do that to you?" It turns out the stab wound has some kind of microorganism in it. Megan's mood seems much brighter.
Meanwhile, Horatio, Calleigh, and Speedle are tearing apart the hostess's house in pursuit of whatever the poison is. Like so many other would-be perps, this one uses only lawsuit-proof generic products, so no fine brand names are implicated in the committing of a crime. Over the course of the search, Speedle finds a set of autumnally appropriate lingerie, and Horatio finds an injection pen which yields fingerprints as soon as he's back in the lab.
Since we were all sitting on the edge of our seats wondering what microorganisms the mystery swimmer brought back from the briny deep, I'll tell you: barrel sponge spores. Delko tells us the barrel sponge lives over fifty feet underwater, beneath the sun canopy. Or, if you want to get technical about it, below the photic zone, i.e. the sunlit area where marine plants live. The lower boundary of the photic zone is compensation level, i.e. the area in which photosynthesis does not exceed basic respiration, and below that, everything relies on organic materials falling from the photic zone. The photic zone varies wildly in temperature, salinity, and amount of sunlight depending on depth -- and that varies wildly too -- but it's generally the workhorse of your open-water ecological zones. I could happily continue about how the photic zone fits into the pelagic part of the ocean and how pelagic can be more accurately classified into the separate epipelagic, mesopelagic, bathypelagic, abyssopelagic, and hadopelagic zones, but then we'd be entering the wide world of oceanography and marine biology, I'd go off on tangents about the Monterey Bay aquarium ["please do -- that place rules!" -- Sars], and this recap would balloon to, like, fifty pages. So, what this brief lesson in oceanography means for the case: if this guy was below the photic zone, he was way the hell underwater. Megan wants to know, "How is this possible? There was no excess nitrogen in this guy's system so he wasn't using compressed air." Delko replies, "I'm thinking he was a free diver. They're purists -- they dive without air tanks. The record's a hair over seven minutes. They train like crazy, condition their lungs, then hyperventilate to shut off the breathing center." Megan points out that most people last thirty seconds underwater. Delko counters that he's heard about one contest that produced a heart attack and forty shallow-water blackouts due to hypoxia. He then tells Megan what hypoxia is, which seems kind of odd given that she should have run across it before in her line of work. The two of them figure out that the contracted parts and big oxygen-carrying organs are in line with the extreme diving hypothesis. As it turns out, there was an open-water diving contest that very morning over at Cranson Marina, so maybe there's a lead there.
Delko and Megan have evidently teleported to the marina with Detective Puig Apparently, time passes differently in Miami if we are infer that over the course of one day, the following has happened: a guy fell into the boat, the Tuppers called the police, the police came out, the CSIs came out, the CSIs ran tests, the tests came back, the Tuppers were questioned, the body was autopsied, and now we're back here? Or, for that matter, in the same day: Peach was discovered, Horatio and gang worked the scene, Horatio found out what cupcakes were, Alexx did that autopsy, the Cupcakes were collected for round two of questioning, there was a second autopsy, we had a poison tutorial, then went to tear the hostess's house apart? Talk about your killer time management skills. Anyway, Detective Puig accosts a curly-haired young man with a diving knife strapped to his arm and asks whom they can query about the morning's diving contest. As luck would have it, they can ask him. Within moments, the body is identified as Adam Cassidy by his brother Carson. Incidentally, Carson is a dead ringer for the homicidal Scandinavian on CSI a few weeks back. Megan has to break the news of Adam's death to Carson, and then Carson wanders down the deck to be alone and think about those two people he killed in Las Vegas. Meanwhile, in a sport that you would think demands extra attention to safety, Curly is telling everyone, "There were, uh, fifteen guys? We must have lost track." It's a wonder another dozen bodies haven't begun popping up, what with the attention paid to the contest proceedings. Puig asks why they don't go down with a buddy, and Curly gives him a rap about how free diving's an aquatic form of rugged individualism. Well, kind of. In so many words. Megan gets distracted by a tuna, then comes back to ask Curly whether hypoxia can cause delusions. Curly's all, "Not if you know your limits." Delko asks, "That's the point, isn't it? Pushing past limits?" Curly has clearly never thought of this. Nor of many other things, I bet.
Back at command central, the CSIs are gathering in the lab. Speedle sing-songs, "Whaddya got there, Delko?" "Spear guns," he replies. Calleigh coos, "I'll trade you some stale caviar for one of those nifty spear guns." "I hate fish eggs," Delko grins. Megan comes in, and Speedle looks up, calling, "Hey, Megan, did you miss me?" Megan grins, and Delko says, "She actually forgot your name. The two of us working together swabbed every spear and knife from that competition, and on this one here, we found traces of human tissue." Megan adds that the spear gun belongs to Ignatio Paez, so they've got a weapon and a suspect. Delko says, "What have you got?" Speedle clears his throat for effect and holds up a pair of sheer purple panties, commenting, "A murder weapon of a different sort." The DNA results indicate that the panties are Nikki Olsen's -- whoever the hell that is, what with none of the Cupcakes ever being introduced -- and there was apparently one of Noel's pubic hairs in the "intimate part of her intimates." Speedle then whips out Exhibit B -- the matching bra -- and notes that the clasp matches the indentation on Peach's chest.
Horatio has news of his own too -- the print on the injector pen matches this Nikki Olsen. Callie says, "The blonde girl?" which only narrows it down to, like, four different people. Calleigh notes that the injector pens usually contain only one dose of ephinedrine, but it is possible to double- or triple-load the pen. Horatio intones ominously, "They could, and give old Noel his last dance, hmmmm?"
And now, we find out who Nikki Olsen is -- it's Jamie Luner. Ah, well. Can we all remember that Jamie = Nikki? Good. Calleigh slides a picture of the injector pen across to Nikki and she says, "It's for bee stings. I'm allergic. Arrest me." Horatio notes that Noel had no bee stings, but he did have a puncture mark from the pen, so if she'd like to explain that, they're all ears. Nikki immediately begins with, "I never would have hurt Noel, and frankly, I don't know anyone who would." Horatio has a Gil-like moment where he counters, "The evidence says it's you." Nikki replies, "I thought he was gonna die." We flash back to the shooter-between-the-knees scene, and Nikki fills in the rest: Noel is allergic to shellfish, so the vodka, oyster juice, and pearl dust set him off. Which would make sense if pearls and oyster juice were the products of shellfish and not, say, mollusks. To be fair, there is some cross-reactivity between crustacean and mollusk allergens, and the cross-reactivity is based on a protein (tropomyosin) found in the animal's meat. ("Molecular And Immunological Characterization Of Shellfish Allergens," Frontiers in Bioscience 3, d306-312, March 15, 1998). But still, can't the people who dream up the explanations on this show bother to get any of the basic facts -- mollusks versus crustaceans, for example -- right, much less the crucial details? We then get an explanation for the underwear and the pubic hair that's only slightly more plausible than the allergy reveal: apparently, Nikki has always fantasized about having a man dress up in underwear and heels for her, and rather than go to the local showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, she had Noel play Frank N. Furter for her delectation. She claims, "I wanted to humiliate him," apparently unaware that in some circles, there's nothing wrong with a man donning lingerie and four-inch heels. Whatever happened to challenging the conventional bounds of sexuality, Cupcake? In any event, Nikki says that Peach was dating someone else, and when she wasn't making him caper in accordance with her tiny little fantasy life, she was very happy for him.
After that scene's over, Calleigh and Horatio meet in the hall. Calleigh reports that Alexx found only a single dose of ephinedrine in Peach's body. She asks Horatio, "Do you believe [Nikki's] story?" Horatio replies, "That depends on whether or not you like seeing men in your underwear." Cough Delko cough. Calleigh muses, "Leather chaps, nothing else. That was a joke." "I know," Horatio says solemnly. I bet he knows from experience, too. These two act as though they've got a history. Calleigh and Horatio get over their moment, and agree to begin back at the beginning. I can only imagine what Speedle's reaction will be to this news, in part because we will never see it.
Cut to Megan delivering a line in her own inimitable fashion: "Mr. Paez, we found..." The Yeti? The missing reel of the Zapruder film? The Loch Ness monster? Amelia Earhart? Ambrose Bierce? A map to Atlantis? The possibilities are endless, and so is the pause between words. "...human tissue on your spear gun. Are you telling me you don't know how it got there?" The camera then pulls back to reveal the guy who had no idea how many people entered a diving contest; something tells me he won't be too useful in explaining how human flesh ended up on a spear gun. After an extremely unsuccessful line of questioning, Megan asks if she can run a test on him; Paez, who has been spacing out during the interrogation, agrees. Megan trains the typmanometer -- a doodad that measures the inner ear's response to waves of sound and pressure -- on Paez's ear and discovers that "his [beat] eardrums are ruptured." She then turns to Paez and shouts, "You're losing your hearing, aren't you?" Oh, who isn't in this franchise? Delko tells us, "It's caused by intense pressure from repeated dives to depth." To depth? Quantify this "depth" of which you speak. Is there a specific pressure associated with it? Delko will do no such thing, and long story short, if you don't perform Valsalva or Frenzel maneuvers (the former is forcibly exhaling while keeping the nose and mouth closed; anyone who's ever had their ears pop on a plane has tried that. The latter is where you pinch your nose and try to make a "k" sound, thus lifting your Adam's apple and the back third of your tongue), your eardrums will explode as the water pressure pushes in on your ears. We learn all this so that we can eliminate Paez from the list of suspects, as it would be impossible for him to sink to barrel-sponge level without completely blowing out his inner ears.
Back in the A-plot, it's time for The Speedle Does Science Segment Of The Week. He swabs a dazzling assortment of things found in the Cupcake home. We then see him telling Horatio that there were traces of chalk on the condom wrapper. "Chalk?" Horatio asks, fearful of learning what terrible depredations these Cupcakes subjected Noel to. Speedle looks on the bright side: "It might lead us to someone else who had sex with Noel." As a matter of fact, it leads them to Sophia Ananova, a twenty-four-year-old third-grade teacher.
Megan's off taking all sorts of samples from the blowgun and generally pretending she's a scientist, and when she's done, she exhales heavily. Delko and an incredibly ugly sweater come in; it's not clear who's wearing whom. Megan tells Delko that the DNA on the spear does not match Adam Cassidy. Conclusion: they don't have the murder weapon. The two then clumsily segue into Delko's crisis of conscience. He tells her, "When I was processing the flashlight, I sneezed." Megan says, "You contaminated evidence. Why didn't you tell me?" Delko replies, "I wanted to, I just didn't know how." Oh, Delko. Megan is taking this really calmly. She says, "We all make mistakes. What's important is that we don't make them very often. And we make them only with victims whose families won't sue." Actually, she adds something about "we never withhold information." Delko is penitent. Megan tells him, "Don't let it happen again." He assures her it won't. She adds, "I'd hate to lose the only CSI in Miami who can process a crime scene in fifty feet of water." He's the only one? That's seems shortsighted in Miami. In Nevada, sure, but Miami is kind of surrounded by water, isn't it? Anyway, the whole scene was about owning up to your errors, Delko did, and we can all move on.
And we do -- we move underwater, where Delko and a metal detector are busy examining the briny depths. He comes up with a knife and brandishes the shiny weapon aloft. Megan smiles. Cleavage alert: she started off the scene in a turtleneck, got the ID of the victim in a scoop-neck tee, and is now wearing a wifebeater tank top. The closer they get to solving this, the more likely it will be that she's wearing a camisole.
Cut to Horatio talking to Sophia Ananova in her classroom, where she slings a ladleful of attitude on the stroganoff of interrogation. You know, those extended X of Y things sound so much better on SportsCenter. Anyway, she's all, "I don't believe this! I could lose my job." At the risk of sounding unsympathetic, maybe she should have thought of that before joining a batch of Cupcakes. Horatio absently replies, "What you do on your own time is your own business...but when you commit a crime, it becomes our business." Just then, a third-grader comes running in, and Sophia has to put on teacher face for the girl before reverting to hostile witness, asking, "Can we hurry this up a little? I've got Later Gators in five minutes." Things are hurried along nicely the minute we find out she's carrying around condoms of the same brand as the one found on the crime scene. Sophia snits, "I want to be safe! Is that a crime?" Horatio concedes that it is not, but murder is.
In the interrogation room, Sophia issues the Clintonian denial, "I did not have sex with that man." Sevilla isn't buying it. As she continues her interrogation in detail, Horatio observes Sophia doing the St. Vitus's dance many of us recognize as a nic fit. Horatio determines that Sophia's got the patch; then he's off to kill some more mosquitoes and find the smoking gun, as it were. We see him and Speedle staring down at several tiny insect carcasses, Horatio saying, "Nicotine is one of the most toxic of all poisons. More lethal than cyanide or cobra venom, believe it or not." Speedle correctly points out that the seven to twenty-two milligrams of nicotine per patch is not enough to kill someone. Horatio counters that fifty milligrams is, so all you'd have to do is slap on three to four patches: "First, the seizures as the nicotine moves through the central nervous system, followed by paralysis. The lungs collapse, the heart stops beating. It can happen within five minutes." Just then, Calleigh comes back to deliver the news that verily, Peach did die of nicotine poisoning. Horatio says, "Okay, but how was the poison introduced? It wasn't inhaled; the dosage would have been too small. And it wasn't ingested; he would have tasted it." Speedle shrugs, "Transdermal absorption -- she stuck a couple of patches on him." Horatio points out that they didn't find any adhesive on Peach's body. Calleigh begins brainstorming other methods of dermal contact, but Horatio cuts her off with, "We're not making this case. Let's got back to the body."
And go back they do, placing a grid on it and swabbing each section of the grid for nicotine residue. The exposure site, as it turns out, is beneath the sheet. Alexx lifts it up, and both women peer down interestedly. Calleigh raises her eyebrows and comments, "Oh, my." Alexx says, "Confirmation -- nicotine was introduced through the penile tissue. It gives a whole new meaning to the term 'members only.'"
And now, we've reached the point in the B-plot where I just don't care anymore, as Megan's managed to find traces of Adam Cassidy's blood on a blade that's been marinating at the bottom of the ocean for a day or two. We find out that the brothers Cassidy had quite the diving rivalry. Given that this is Carson Cassidy's knife, it's not looking so good on the fratricide front.
Meanwhile, Horatio's pondering penile tissue and nicotine. ["Another award-winning entry in the 'sentences I never thought I'd edit' contest..." -- Sars] Calleigh and Speedle come in howling for Sophia's arrest warrant, and Horatio points out that since the box of nicotine patches is full, it's unlikely that she's the culprit. Calleigh counters, "She bought a new box." "Distillation takes time," Horatio objects. And...she still could have bought a new box. There's nothing to say she didn't distill nicotine from the patches; I don't see what the problem is here. But it does give us an excuse to look at a dead rose and see where the nicotine came from; it was in insecticide form.
Cut to Calleigh testing the gardener's arsenal back at Cote d'Cupcake. He's busy telling Horatio, "I keep the insecticides locked in my truck. Some of that stuff is dangerous." Just then, Speedle brandishes a bottle and says brightly, "Red Kill! Forty percent nicotine sulfide solution." The gardener stammers, "I could have sworn I locked that." Ah, but there are a couple of prints anyway.
In the B-plot, Cassidy's lawyer is busy explaining why there's no case: "Adam must have borrowed that knife. We already know he borrowed a spear gun. Look, you've got no witnesses. You've got no case." Megan's not rattled. She asks Cassidy to take off his shirt. Lo and behold, he's got an infected cut. Megan gestures to it and says, "There [beat] are your witnesses. Hundreds of them. Deepwater [beat] barrel sponge." Carson sits down again and Megan tells us what happened: the brothers Cassidy were down around the fifty-foot mark, already in the throes of hypoxia, when a tuna went swimming by. One of the boys swam by the other, there was an underwater tussle, Adam shot Carson with a spear gun, and Carson stabbed back. As Megan says, "You were both oxygen-[beat]-starved, running on [beat] adrenaline." Carson says, "It was like a dream. My hand wasn't my hand." Megan replies, "That [beat] would be the hypoxia talking." Carson replies, "That's not supposed to happen. Free diving makes everything clear. It's a trip down to primal instinct." Megan replies, "Killing your own brother -- it doesn't get more primal than that." Carson is left to blubber and ponder his cross-country aquatic terror spree.
Meanwhile, Horatio's finally getting around to interrogating Hostess, whose name we never really grab during the episode. Does not naming the murderer break one of the rules of TV detective narratives, or am I being excessively nitpicky? We find out Noel had called our hostess over 107 times in one month. On the bright side, those calls were extremely brief. The hostess, who is under the mistaken impression that she is the smartest one in the room, asks Horatio, "Why would he do that?" Horatio sends us all into a pink-tinted flashback with, "Well, Nikki told me he was seeing someone new, and based on those records, I think it's you. But you weren't the one who wanted him. It was the other way around. Noel was obsessed with you. He pursued you, even tried to make you jealous by going off with Nikki. He wouldn't end it. So you decided to end it for him. You took the condom out of Sophia's bag, added nicotine insecticide. We found your fingerprints on a bottle in your gardener's truck. And after the party, you let Noel come to you one last time. You knew he couldn't resist." In the flashback, I love how she was toting around this giant bottle of pesticide at a party and nobody noticed. However, I am confounded by the logic that goes into deciding that the only way to do in someone you deeply dislike is by sleeping with them. Surely there were other ways to get the nicotine on his skin that wouldn't require sexual contact?
Back in the present, Horatio notes that poisoners do their homework, so they tend to want to show off the results. Hostess's eyes slip to the rosebushes, and Horatio recalls how she was hovering around them the day after murder. As Horatio points this out, Speedle hoists a spent condom aloft. His look of disgust speaks for us all. If this woman is allegedly bright enough to poison someone, isn't she smart enough to flush the damn condom down the drain? The hostess is looking at the condom in horror. Horatio leans in and says, "I'm guessing that inside that thing will be nicotine, and on the outside will be your epithelial cells. You could have poisoned yourself." The hostess shoots back, "Well, that's why they call it 'safe sex.'" Horatio counters that Peach might have begged to differ. The hostess blusters, "He didn't understand." Horatio replies, "He was in love with you." "So what?" she asks irritably. Horatio keeps looking at her, and she keeps on babbling: "Why is it always about what the man wants? His decision, his orgasm, his rules." Because you're seeing the wrong guys? Because you're dumb enough to buy into a concept of male-centered sexuality instead of deciding you deserve better? Horatio simply says, "So you killed Noel because he wouldn't play by your rules. Is that what you're telling me?" Hostess replies weakly, "At least it gave me a new kind of thrill." A new kind of thrill? Lady, get into the Scharffen Berger. You'll be getting all sorts of thrills for days. Seriously. That stuff is going to be regulated by the government once someone realizes how good it is. Horatio's not too impressed with the thrill-seeking, and says, "I hoped you enjoyed [your new kind of thrill], because it's going to be your last."
Then he goes to spend a little time with Noel Peach, what with having avenged him and all. That having been done, Horatio then charges off to go put on an all-black outfit and lurk in the nearest Chippendales, making sure the male dancers don't come to any harm. Kidding! But you thought he would for a moment, didn't you? At least this episode didn't end with Calleigh or Megan renouncing their Cupcake membership, having learned a lesson to live by. Instead, it only ended with the lesson that women who want to take charge of their own sexuality are silly and/or homicidal. It's your call as to whether that's an improvement.