If you're ever in a position where you're writing or directing a television show, and you need to grab the attention of the viewing audience within seconds, opening the first scene with a shot of the back of someone's head in the dark is not the worst way to go. For one, this bold move immediately inspires questions: Who is this guy? Is he using a clarifying shampoo? Will he knock Horatio off the screen for more than thirty seconds?
Answers: I don't know, probably not, and no. Horatio and (Y)Elena are walking along a sidewalk-cum-parking lot, and the Widow Caine tells Horatio, "Well, this is me." "That's right," he replies. Awkward small talk much? (Y)Elena asks if Horatio's okay to drive, and he replies, "Yeah. I was just thinking about how awkward Thanksgiving is going to be when we have to explain to your side of the family that you'll have a new husband and old in-laws. And then I was mentally rearranging our living room so there are multiple brooding nooks. Um, what? Did I say all that in my out-loud voice?"
Actually, Horatio just kind of gazes at (Y)Elena and asks if she's okay to drive. She gives him a giddy, pop-eyed look and asks, grinning, "What? Do I seem...?" "Happy," Horatio says. Then he adds, "I haven't seen that smile on your face in a while." Naturally, I'm off and running on the speculation track as to when and where he used to see that smile before. While someone could argue that these two are simply in-laws who are extraordinarily, platonically simpatico, I'm thinking that someone's been carrying a torch, or there's an affair in the background, or there's one about to start. And frankly, if we're staring down the barrel of the third option, that's kind of creepy.
Anyway, (Y)Elena smiles and lilts, "For the past two years, every morning when I wake up, I'd have this thought that comes to my head: Raymond is dead. And now in these...in these past few weeks, it's just not the first thing I think of." Oh, please God, let it not be because the first thing she's thinking in the morning now is, "I wonder if Horatio's on the market?" Horatio grins -- one hopes it's because he's happy (Y)Elena's moving on to the stage of her life, and not because he can now move in on the Widow Caine without appearing to have pulled a Claudius to her Gertrude. Then he asks if she's bringing Ray, Jr. to see him tomorrow. I thought the kid was a girl? At least, that's what it looked like in the picture on the desk last week. Anyway, Horatio's looking forward to seeing his nephew, he and (Y)Elena wobble in each other's personal space for a moment, and she takes off.
As Horatio walks to his car and passes a conveniently shadowy area, his Crimey Senses tingle, and we see the front of the head which opened the episode. It belongs to a Pete Wilton, whom Horatio put away six years ago for knocking off a chain of grocery stores and committing a manslaughter in the process. Naturally, Horatio has Javert-like recall and can immediately recite the pertinent details of the case. Anyway, Pete mentions that he's two years into his parole and he's got a problem. He reaches into his jacket for something, and Horatio says, "Pete, if you make that move, it's going to be your last." Pete replies sincerely, "Relax, Lieutenant, it's a photograph." Horatio instructs him to take it out slowly, and Pete does. He explains, "It's of my son, Jeff. He went to school three days ago and he never came back." Horatio asks if Pete went through the usual routes; Pete replies that he went to the cops, but they weren't exactly interested in a parolee's missing kid. Pete assures Horatio, "He's not the way I used to be. I know that something happened to him." Horatio tries to blow Pete off with, "Okay, I'm sure the detectives are on it. Let Me call..." Pete insists, "It has to be you. Look, I was guilty and you knew it. You came after me with everything you had. I saw that. I know you can find my boy." Horatio asks what kind of trouble this as-yet-nameless boy was in, and Pete assures him that the kid's a good egg. He appeals to Horatio's ego some more, and Horatio finally grants him help with, "Okay, Pete, listen to Me. If you're lying, I'm out. You understand?" Pete does, and thanks Horatio for his time.
The very morning, Horatio walks into the detectives' main office as Detective Tripp (bald; we've seen him before, on the IAB case, I believe) is reiterating a suspect's testimony skeptically with, "Right. He backed into your knife nine times. Sit tight while I rustle up some booking slips." Horatio draws Tripp aside and asks for a minute. Tripp gives him thirty seconds. Horatio uses that time to refresh Tripp's memory about young Jeff Wilton; Tripp's of the opinion that Jeff took a road trip to the Keys. Or would that be a waterway trip? In any event, Tripp's not terribly concerned about the kid, and he justifies that with, "I've got twelve confirmed dead yanking my chain right now." Horatio gets a little huffy with, "So you're not interested in the kid unless he's dead?" Tripp protests that Horatio's putting words in his mouth, and Horatio makes nice with, "Why don't you let Me take this one off your hands?" Tripp points out, "There's no crime scene to investigate." Horatio counters, "Maybe not, but that doesn't mean there wasn't a crime."
The Who agrees with Horatio. It must be nice to do your job knowing that The Who is in your corner. How many other detectives can say British bands are backing their every move?
Once we're back from commercials, we see the naked body of a man lying supine, his flesh mottled with all sorts of contusions. Alexx is taking pictures, but lest we get all excited about a scene in which she might actually talk, we quickly switch to the adjoining room, where Vin Ethanol (or Bernstein, for you folks who are insistent that he has a name) is saying, "I want to be sure I have it right: you and the deceased had drinks last night, came back here around midnight..." Rena Sofer, who's evidently playing this week's femme fatale, fiddles with the sash of her silky white robe as she simpers, "Made love for I don't know how long. And when I woke up this morning, he was beside me, dead." As she recites this, she goes from playing with her sash to playing with her hair, then sliding her fingers up Vin's notepad. Speedle takes all this in, then calls Vin back down to Earth. Rena asks, "Who are you?" "I'm a crime scene investigator," Speedle replies, then takes off. Rena looks at Vin and says almost accusingly, "I thought you were the detective." "I am, but Speedle analyzes the scene -- the forensic evidence that might explain the death in question." He leaves Rena to fiddle with her hair and look petulant. I look petulant too: Rena Sofer is a strikingly lovely woman, and she is probably a competent actress, but she is the third member of the Television Troika of Death. Sure, you're saying to yourself, there's the infamous Ted McGinley curse where every show he went on floundered creatively almost immediately afterward (and yes, I do count his Sports Night and West Wing outings in that thesis, not just the Love Boat, Happy Days, and Married with Children gigs). Fine, you're saying, there's Paula Marshall, who went from Cupid (cancelled mid-season) to Snoops (trashed by David E. Kelley in an Entertainment Weekly piece that was supposed to promote the new show) to Sports Night (where she effectively acted as a leaden weight drawing the sodden Season-Two corpse ever downward to Davy Jones' locker) to Hidden Hills (which I wish to God she would kill already). But what has Rena Sofer done? Aside from show up on Ed and usher in a tiresome phase of the Ed 'n' Carol "will they or won't they?" ordeal? She's been in the promising-but-cancelled The Chronicle on the Sci-Fi Channel, and she's about to be in the U.S. version of Coupling, which may well end up being another embarrassment like the U.S. version of Cold Feet was. Rena Sofer is an early warning indicator that a show's about to take a dive downward. Beware her! If she's showing up here, God only knows where CSI: Miami will be going .
Well, we can't really tell now, so we might as well focus on where Rena's going , given that she apparently has license to roam freely around a crime scene where the techs are working away. She comes over to Speedle -- somewhere in transit, she also picked up a giant cup of tea -- and purrs, "Do you have any questions for me?" "Yeah. What are you using on your hair? I love the curls, and there's no frizz. Is it shampoo? Do you use a silicon finishing serum?" Speedle asks. Actually, he comes close, commenting on her ticky-tacky manicure with, "Why do women do that to their nails?" The ticky-tacky in question is a set of long white talons with little gold stars on the tip of the index fingernail. Rena tells him it's to attract men, which she emphasizes by petting Speedle like a cat. Speedle gives her hand a look and tells her to take herself and her tea to someplace other than the crime scene. I ask the room at large (the husband and two indifferent cats) what she was doing running around the crime scene in the first place.
Speedle heads over to the body, where Alexx gives him the 411 -- the guy ran marathons, and she thinks he may have had an enlarged heart or some other cardiac weakness. Speedle begins rattling off respiratory hypotheses: asphyxiation, sleep apnea, being smothered in your sleep by Rena Sofer. Well, he doesn't do the last one, but it's not like she's behaved in a way that makes her appear at all innocent. Alexx immediately tells us why someone might favor smothering someone in his sleep: "It's almost impossible to distinguish accidental from homicide. Result of closing off the air to the windpipe's the same." As Alexx speaks, Rena drifts into the frame and watches her, very obviously monitoring what the CSIs are doing. We get a TMIcam shot of what suffocation entails, and Alexx narrates: "Blood stops carrying oxygen to the alveoli. I'd say he fell asleep in his pillow if I hadn't watched Miss Thing put her suave on Vin Ethanol earlier." Speedle smirks slightly, then turns to look at Rena, who smolders back in his general direction.
Back at the A-plot, Pete's ushering Horatio into Jeff's room, assuring him that he hasn't touched a thing. Horatio and Delko get Pete out of the room by asking him to put on that pot of coffee he offered earlier, and then the shut the door and proceed to rifle through the kid's stuff. Among the finds: a drawer with Newsview magazine, the cover story featuring a collage of clip-art guys (stockbrokers, football players) and the headline "New Technology: Horizontal Drilling." I love the prop publications. Horatio uncovers a bottle of Three-in-One oil; Delko informs him that it's used to clean guns. Delko then flips through Newsview -- I immediately note that the paper stock seems to be too expensive for a weekly -- and he discovers the publication Weapons of Death hidden within. I have a feeling that NRA members are probably bashing the remote into their forehead right now as they keen, "Gun owners aren't all delusional militia nuts! They're not! Those magazines make us look bad!" Horatio, meanwhile, is rifling through Jeff's laundry and asking it, "What do we have here?" What he has is a tee reading "Four Twenty Boyz" in a stencil font. Horatio guesses that the name links up to getting high. Over at the desk, Delko (who's now flipping through Soldiers and Commandos), asks how someone so obviously un-street as Horatio would know that. Horatio replies, "My brother worked narcotics undercover." I give a moment of thanks that, insofar as we know, Gil is an only child and Catherine's sister is alive, and I don't have to deal with constant references to My Dead Brother on that other show.
Horatio then finds a stash and concludes, "Our friend Jeff is a stoner." Our friend Jeff is also jeopardizing his dad's parole, but we'll get into that later. The pot, by the way, looks like oregano. Delko concludes haughtily, "The father lied," conveniently forgetting whatever teenaged misdeeds he managed to get by his parents. The father may not have known his son was smoking, Delko -- did you ever think of that? Why else would an ex-con out on parole agree to let two cops search his son's room and find something that violates his parole if he didn't know it was there in the first place? I'm not even a cop, and I can figure that out. Horatio tells Delko, "Kids make excellent criminals -- they're sneaky." Don't forget remorseless and self-centered. Horatio muses, "Here's how it might have gone. Jeff sits up here at night in the dark without his dad being any the wiser." Then Horatio opens the latch on the bedroom window (what, no screens in Florida? I have a cousin and a sibling who both swear that 98 percent of the air they're breathing down there is made up of insects) and notices that Pete is apparently oblivious to both Jeff's smoking habit and his shooting-a-gun-into-the-backyard-tree habit. How can the neighbors not have noticed or complained? This plot has officially veered off the tracks, killed all innocent passengers and bystanders, and gone hurtling over a cliff to smash on the jagged rocks of improbability. I declare my interest in this outcome gone.
Horatio walks over to the tree, sticks a laser near it, determines the trajectory to indeed be consistent with the "Jeff shoots guns out the window of his well-kept suburban house and nobody notices" hypothesis, and then -- BAM! -- Calleigh appears. What, did Horatio say her name three times? Is there some magical incantation involving GSR and the sacrifice of a chicken? Whatever it is, it's unnerving having her just appear like that. And that's even before we get a gander at what she looks like today; fortunately, someone beat the wardrobe mistress into submission ("No wire hangers! No wire hangers!") so Calleigh actually looks like a career-oriented adult and not a pioneer-era forensics groupie. Calleigh comes over, dragging a man with a chainsaw, and the Lorax cries as a tree goes down for science. Horatio's work here is done; he tells us all where we're going with, "Weed, bullets -- let's go over to Jeff's high school locker to see what other surprises he has for us." Delko points out, "School property. Could take a day to get permission. Red tape." Horatio orders, "Cut through it as fast as you can. And the same goes for this tree."
Back at Rancho de la Rena, Alexx is staring down at the supine dead guy (still no name) when Speedle comes over to ask, "You're not going to move him?" "I think he's been moved enough," she snorts. I love me some snarky coroner. Alexx continues, "Dual lividity. Body laid on its stomach and then flipped over." Speedle suggests that the paramedics are culpable, but we all know that's not possible, since Hank the duplicitous body-moving bastard is still working in Las Vegas. Alexx refutes Speedle a moment later by pointing out, "He was on his stomach long enough for blood to settle. A couple of hours. Before that, he was dead on his back another couple hours. Something or someone moved him into secondary position." I should point out that Alexx's speech has been illustrated by a TMIcam showing blood settling in assorted places. Speedle muses, "Flip-flop usually means someone can't decide [whether] to call 911 or skip town."
And off Speedle goes to visit the someone in question. She's seated in a pose best described as "Whistler's Hooker." Speedle gazes upon Rena for a moment, then comes in to tell her that he'll need to swab under her fingernails. Rena rises and, after agreeing, asks why. Before Speedle answers, he checks out her cleavage and notices what look like tiny scrapes. As he begins working, there's some leaden banter not worth repeating here, and Rena says, "I might as well tell you, things got a little rough between Chuck and I sexually." Speedle's not exactly salivating at the news; he asks, "You saw me notice those scratches on your chest?" Rena replies, "He can get himself worked up." She's giving Speedle her bedroom eyes; Speedle looks up and gives her the same look he gives everyone else -- irritation mixed with impatience. He then tells Rena he's going to need to photograph those markings, which is her cue to get naked, the better to dazzle him with her presumably numerous charms.
Calleigh's studying a segment of the tree trunk she had the nameless tree surgeon (or would he be a tree euthanasiast?), and Delko comes over to ask her how it looks. "Like a starry, starry night," she replies. I didn't know she was a Van Gogh fan. Calleigh enumerates all the different types of ammo this poor tree had shot into it, then invites Delko inside. He replies, "I can't. I can't find another lead apron, and Calleigh isn't around." Aww. Delko's still worried that he's going to get his gonads fried on the job. thing you know, he'll be ducking out of assorted labs after he finds out that some DNA-processing reagents are tetragenic. Anyway, this whole scene is really a set-up for some Horatio gossip; if you can't have Horatio onscreen, talk about him, I guess. Delko asks Calleigh if she was working in CSI when Horatio's brother was killed. Calleigh name-checks Ray and tells us she had just started. So she's only been in CSI for two or three years? What about the others? And where are all the presumably experienced CSIs? Did they get packed off with Kim Delaney? Delko pokes around some more, saying, "I didn't realize his brother worked narco." They have got to come up with hipper police lingo -- Narco sounds like Falco's younger brother, who would have come up with "Break It Down, Rossini." Anyway, Calleigh says languidly, "Yeah, undercover narco cop gets killed in the line of duty, he might have been dirty, something like that." Delko emphasizes how he didn't say anything about the "dirty" part, and Calleigh replies, "Nobody ever does." Except Delko right then, who asks, "Was he dirty?" Calleigh gets all serious: "I don't know. I don't know what Raymond Caine was. I'm not entirely sure Horatio does either." Then she goes on to make wood pulp out of a formerly-thriving tree.
By the time Horatio comes in, Calleigh has dug out an impressive array of shells. He comments, "Wow. This tree has more lead than wood. You've got nines there, .44s, .22s..." Calleigh adds that there were "over 200 expended projectiles that we couldn't see." I'm going to plead for Sars to run an intervention on this, but I suspect that the grammatically correct way to explain how there were a large quantity of items is to say there are "more than [X number]," as opposed to saying "over [X number]," since the latter implies that a limit is being exceeded, while the former communicates a large, albeit imprecise, number. But I can't find a documented answer in my copy of Fowler's Modern English Usage, my Chicago Manual of Style is at work, and this paragraph is moving far away from the actual events of the show and into another one of my snits about how nice it would be if the writers actually forswore colloquial speech for something a little more literate. So: gun-crazy kid shooting tree, lots of guns, Horatio concluding, "This. Is not target practice. This is training. This is training." He then compliments Calleigh -- I'll say this for Horatio, he is good at giving his subordinates feedback -- and we go to commercial thinking about the perils of a missing kid with access to firearms and extremely good aim.
When we come back from commercials, Horatio has Pete in the box. Pete has evidently been briefed on what Horatio found, and he's wide-eyed as he tells Horatio, "I didn't know he was into that." Rather than take someone who jeopardized his own parole out of concern for his son at his own word, Horatio has to prove that sometimes the system sucks with, "Let's ask your parole officer about that." The parole officer sneers, "All that ammo, the son's probably in training to knock off a chain of markets just like his old man." Ass. The parole officer continues to stay on my bad side by suggesting that Pete prevailed upon Horatio because Jeff stole one of Pete's guns, and Pete wants him found before the gun can be connected to another crime. Pete replies that he doesn't have a gun, and the parole officer snorts, "Right. You just got a hundred bullets in your backyard tree." Maybe he does -- if the guy works, he may not know what's going on with the kid. The parole officer effectively forces Pete into a Scylla-and-Charybdis position: "Unless you're gonna make a case to the board that this contraband is your son's, you're going back inside to serve out the rest of your sentence." So...sell your kid down the river for something he may or may not have been doing, or lie about the contraband to protect him and serve the rest of your sentence. God, this storyline irritates me, and Horatio's smugness about forcing Pete to claim that the pot and the ammo were his is both annoying and repellent. Horatio delivers Pete unto the asshole parole officer for a return visit (duration: 729 days) to the pen, and broods about how Jeff is still out there.
He can't brood long. He's got a hot date with his sister-in-law and his nephew. After a few seconds of family-style banter, (Y)Elena excuses herself, and the kid's all, "She set this up so you'd give me five minutes of the male authority-figure attention I so desperately crave, and now I'll stop beating up my incredibly news-literate fourth-grade classmates when they insult my dad." Or something to that effect. Horatio talks too, but I think we can all correctly track what he's going to say: Your father was a good cop, ignore the playground weasels, to thine own self be true and get used to calling me your new daddy. Maybe not that last one -- no doubt that conversation will be coming later on.
Delko has managed to cut through the red tape, because now he's cutting through the padlock on Jeff's school locker. After whipping out a flashlight to explore the inscrutable interior of deepest, darkest lockerdom, Delko unearths Gun Ho magazine. Frankly, with a title like that, I'd expect something other than a pistol on the cover. The headlines are enjoyable as always: "Heart Stopping Man Stopping .45," "New Laser Sights Will Make You King of the Jungle," "Big Time Survival Techniques," and "Take 'Em Down: Our Pull-Out Combat Guide Shows You How." I especially like that last one; it's fun to imagine some The Most Dangerous Game scenario in which a group of batty, amoral rich people is taken down by a wild-eyed Gun Ho subscriber and his pull-out sheet of combat strategies. Delko also finds sneakers with all sorts of dirt.
Back at the lab, Calleigh sits in front of a monitor, running bullet data until she gets a hit. She reports to Horatio, "I found the owner of one of the guns that fired a bullet into the Wilton family tree. Nick Gordon, age 45. Six months ago, the gun was used to shoot out a scoreboard at Antioch High School." Horatio notes that Jeff is currently an Antioch student. Calleigh continues, "So I called the principal and found out that Ben Gordon, age 17, was responsible for shooting out the scoreboard. However, they believe another kid was with him, but because of the privacy law, they can't say anything." Stupid privacy laws, not allowing police to haul us in whenever they want to know something! I bet we won't have to worry about that for much longer! However, Calleigh thinks the principal's pause when she said Jeff's name links him to Ben Gordon. Horatio wants Ben and Nick in, pronto.
Cut to Speedle having a pillow fight with himself. As he analyzes the down in the pillow, he gets a call telling him Rena's waiting for him in the lobby. When he wanders out, we see that she's got the same wardrobe she did in The Chronicle -- half punky, half pop-tart -- and it still looks incongruous with her classically pretty features. When Speedle meets Rena in the lobby, she's all, "Hi-i-i. Thanks for coming out." It's not working on him; the first thing he notices is the weekend bag she's carrying. After Rena makes a bid for privacy, he steers her into an empty call area, and she tells him, "I have a photo shoot tomorrow in St. Thomas." Speedle deadpans, "You're a photographer?" Rena's all, "I'm a model. Bathing suits. It's probably why I was so comfortable when you wanted to take pictures of me. I realized later I might have been a little too casual." She's attempting to flirt like mad at Speedle, which is not unlike watching Pepe Le Pew try to woo one of those hapless kitties that's suffered a paint accident. Speedle says flatly, "So...your boyfriend dies and you're able to go to work the day?" Rena's resilient that way. Speedle asks her point-blank if she moved the body, and she bats her eyes, "Is that what the autopsy said?" Speedle shrugs, and she continues, "When I woke up and he didn't respond, yes, I rolled him over on his back and called 911." Speedle looks off to the right for about the third time in this scene and points out, "Homicide has you calling 911 at 7 AM. Paramedics show up at 7:08. It takes hours for lividity to form." Rena asks, "Really?" but not in the "You don't say!" context. It's more of the "Oh, I didn't need to know this, did I?" context. Speedle nods, and Rena suddenly remembers how she rolled her boyfriend over in the middle of the night when he got too cuddly. Speedle asks, "So he was already dead in the middle of the night." Rena answers, "I suppose so. I read in Vanity Fair that time of death could never be exact. It's all estimates." Yeah, but I read in Vanity Fair that Gretchen Mol and Josh Hartnett were going to stun the world with their awesome thespian skills, so that just goes to show that you have to take everything in Graydon Carter's little magazine with a grain of salt. Speedle disabuses her of that notion. Rena asks if Speedle will fill her in on what he finds; he tells her he can't, but appears to bend a little and concedes, "When it's appropriate, okay?"
And now we go into the scene where it will all become clear that Ben Gordon is acting out because Daddy doesn't pay enough attention to him. We see Nick Gordon nattering on about travel arrangements on his cell before he pauses long enough to tell Horatio that Ben's out front having a smoke. He shrugs, "I can't stop him." Oh, bushwa. This is going to make me sound like a crotchety old woman whose only joy in life is standing on the porch and hollering, "You kids get off my lawn!" but here goes: if this jackass would get over the idea that he's somehow supposed to be his kid's buddy, and embrace the idea of disciplining the kid and making it clear who's the boss until said kid's 18, then there's no way young Ben would be lighting up in clear view of his dad. Sneaking a cigarette and going to elaborate measures to ensure that Dad never finds out he smokes, sure, but not openly flouting parental authority without fear of the consequences. I have no idea where this I'm-your-friend approach to raising children came from, but I can tell you from countless hours spent watching parents try to reason with their screaming or surly spawn in public places that the let's-be-friends thing isn't working. Besides, raise your kid with military-style authority and you guarantee them conversational fodder for the rest of their lives, and isn't raising someone who's a riveting conversationalist a more noble goal than raising a chain-smoking adolescent gun nut? Wow, it's not often I manage to bring my foam-at-the-mouth ravings back to bear on the actual subject on screen.
Horatio heads outside to see the junior tobacco fiend, and Alexx pulls him aside to raise another red flag about young Ben: "Kid's been staring at dead bodies for ten minutes -- naturals, traumas...my first-year MEs would have passed out by now. Says he's here to see you." Horatio thanks Alexx (again with the courtesy -- how pleasant!) and goes over to introduce himself. Rather than say, "Pleased to meet you," Ben asks, "Did you ever kill anyone?" Horatio admits that he has in the line of duty, and has Ben stub the cigarette. Ben looks down at the body strapped to the gurney below and says, "That's an entrance wound, right? It's small because the skin snaps back into place once the bullet passes through." I realize that this is supposed to indicate that Ben's something of a ghoul, but given that the two CSI shows impart pretty much the same information to a sizable percentage of the television-watching population, it's not really working. Horatio, however, has logged Ben as a little bit creepy. He asks if Ben likes guns, and Ben, who is not that bright, tells the cop, "They're cool." Horatio then draws an inference connecting love of guns to Jeff, and asks if Jeff was with Ben when he shot out the scoreboard. Ben looks up for the first time and practically drools, "No, I did that alone." Horatio asks if Ben ever goes shooting with Jeff, and the kid gives himself away with, "If I fired a gun, it wouldn't be at a stupid tree." Horatio asks what Ben would shoot at; Ben replies, "The kid who killed Jeff." Horatio jumps all over this: "So you know Jeff is dead." Ben lets his jaw swing in the breeze for a few moments before answering, "If he was alive, he would have called me by now." Horatio dismisses Mister Spree Killer 2005 to go have lunch with his dad for a couple of hours -- way to escalate the kid's issues -- and picks up the dropped cigarette so he can test it for DNA.
Vin Ethanol comes into Speedle's pillowy lab, makes a crack about the tech sleeping on the job, and waits for Speedle to speak. Speedle does: "Are you a down man or a feather man?" Vin asks if they aren't the same thing, and Speedle replies, "Feathers are for flying; down's for insulating. The more mature the down, the better the air-trapping ability. It's called loft." Vin thinks that an airy pillow would explain Rena's scratches, what with Chuck the dead guy being able to breathe a little longer than she thought he could. Vin then shares that Chuck was two days away from wedding a woman who was not Rena, but is sitting off-screen and weeping from the dual shocks of a) her fiancé's death, and b) her fiancé's girlfriend. Things don't look good for Rena.
Things do look good for Delko, however. He's analyzed the cruft from the sneaker treads and found a lot of organic matter, but low mineral content with the exception of the man-made mineral "Mastico," which is used to repair headstones. Delko puts forth, "I'm thinking Redeemer Cemetery. It's the oldest one in the county." It's also within walking distance of the high school.
Horatio's out at the cemetery with Tripp, who comments that the admittance window for these grounds was a little less than a hundred years, from 1868 to 1960. We get a few shots of the cemetery in full-blown Southern Gothic Disarray -- fecund foliage, artfully weathered headstones listing 30 degrees, an old woman wafting around a big hat and two acres of organza while she carries on about the night poor Willis Dean Dubois was shot defending her honor in a duel. Okay, so I made the last one up, but it wouldn't be out of place. Horatio smells decomp in the wind, and within seconds of sharing that observation with Tripp, they've found a body. There's an exit wound in the head, which Horatio finds by watching where the maggots go ("Sweet going in and ugly going out," says Tripp as the TMIcam backs him visually), and an entry wound in the back. Tripp concludes, "This was an ambush. So much for me saying he was in the Keys." Oh, just grovel before the awesome temple of Horatio's mind a little more. Go on. Horatio throws a bone by pointing out that this person could have been shot in the Keys, because the body's been moved, and then adds that this isn't Jeff. So now they're looking at another random dead teenager, connected only to the case by virtue of some cemetery dirt.
Within seconds, Alexx is on the scene and identifying Johnny Decomp at Mark Hubbard, born 1986, courtesy of his Antioch High library card. She then confirms that the body was moved, which suggests that Hank's recently taken his girlfriend to the Keys and done some recreational body-moving on the side. I'm sorry -- I'm never going to get tired of making that joke. Horatio asks Alexx to be pay extra attention to the fingernails during the postmortem. Calleigh's off hunting for bullets when Delko calls her to check out the mausoleum some punks have desecrated. Calleigh notes the high-velocity blood spatter, which suggests a gunshot, and then she notes the projectile. She, Horatio, and Delko reconstruct Mark's awful final moments and realize that there were three people in the mausoleum, not merely the shooter and the victim.
Meanwhile, Speedle's analyzing the pillow and coming up with a facial impression, which confirms that Chuck was smothered with a faceful of down. We quickly cut to Speedle sitting across from Rena in an interrogation room, sliding over a photo and explaining that what she's seeing is Chuck's DNA-confirmed saliva. Rena's all, "And?" and Speedle asks, with the air of a man about to lose his patience, "Did you press his face into the pillow, causing him to suffocate?" Rena pauses so she can think up a new lie, and finally hedges, "Yes, and no." Speedle warns her, and Rena continues, "You're so sure I'm guilty. I could see it when you walked through the door." Speedle's all ears if she's got an explanation to back that yes-or-no thing. She sure does: "Yes, I pressed his face into the pillow. No, I did not suffocate him. He did, however, orgasm." Speedle fidgets uncomfortably before saying, "Excuse me?" Rena sighs and says, "My marathon-running boyfriend was a pillow-biter. Satisfied?" She raises her eyebrows in such a way as to make me suspect that she and Speedle just had a conversation concerning her practice of sodomizing her boyfriend, network-standards-and-practices-style. Wait! We're still having the conversation. Rena continues, "He liked to give himself over to me. I could be more explicit." Speedle hastily assures her that there's no need. Rena estimates that there was some role-playing around 2 AM; then they drank some more and cuddled. Speedle gets up, and Rena's instantly solicitous. He tells her, "It's just that this job...uh, it's weird sometimes. You know, you learn certain things about people." Vin, meanwhile is watching in horror from outside the room, something that nobody misses. Nobody misses the little how-can-you-talk-to-her-without-me conversation that follows either. Speedle then wanders off, presumably to ask Alexx to check Chuck's body again to see if she can verify the suggestion Rena made about pillow-biting.
And now, a cigarette Horatio found at the cemetery gets stripped for a DNA sample while Calleigh looks over the baseball bat bag she found at the mausoleum. It's all very montage-a-riffic. When we get the results, the cigarette butt has three different donors, one of whom is Ben (they got his DNA from another cigarette sample). We also find out that the bat bag had been used to tote rifles.
Cut to Horatio talking to Nick the Neglectful Dad, bringing home the guilt by laying out photos of dead Mark and saying, "Your son is in a great deal of trouble." Nick immediately tries to pin it on the ex- and current-con's kid, pointing out that Ben's admitted he was shooting guns over at Jeff's. Ben is seated and looking, like, so embarrassed. Horatio asks if Ben mentioned anything about being at the cemetery the morning Mark Hubbard was killed. Nick's all, "He told me they go there in mornings before school for horseplay." Horatio talks to Ben: "I have a blood pattern, My friend, that says there were two people at the cemetery when Mark was shot to death. So, are you the shooter, or was Jeff?" Ben looks up all creepy-like and intones, "I'm not saying anything about Jeff." Horatio rolls with that and moves on to asking where the guns are. Nick's all, "What guns?" and Horatio explains, "They carried their rifles in a bag and foolishly left it behind." Heh. It's time some cop expressed contempt for how stupid criminals can be. Ben continues to not say anything, and Horatio leans down to put the fear of Caine in him: "I can wait."
Calleigh's found that the bat bag also had the Four Twenty Boyz written on it, which ties the bag to Jeff at the least, and probably Ben. Horatio takes his line of inquiry down the THC road, but Ben soon sets him straight: "It's not a time. It's a date. [April 20 is] Hitler's birthday. All around the world, the whole week." Horatio concludes, "So we have Waco, the Federal building, Columbine and now Antioch. So you guys were planning an action, weren't you?" Ben explains that he and Mark backed out; Jeff shot Mark, and threatened Ben to ensure his silence. Horatio asks where Jeff is, and Ben replies that he's at the mausoleum. Horatio calls him on that, and suggests, "Why don't you tell Me what time you're due out of school?" Ben says it's normally 3 PM, but there's an assembly today. Horatio quickly concludes that Jeff will begin shooting at 4:20 PM. I'm thinking that at that point in an assembly, some students might welcome the distraction.
Cut to a zillion police cars speeding towards the school. It's begun raining, and Horatio sprints through the rain and up the stairs to the school. He and Principal Roland make their introductions. We learn that Jeff's MIA, but there's a SWAT team on the way. Horatio says he wants everyone out of the building. The principal says, "I don't want to create a panic," which is, of course, the cue for all hell to break loose. Horatio runs down the hall bellowing, "I need everybody to leave the building right now!" The kids run out. Horatio -- alone, with no backup and no communication with anyone to indicate what he's about to do -- runs into the building and towards the faint popping sounds of gunfire. Within moments, we're seeing Jeff shooting up the joint as students scatter. Naturally, Jeff is wearing a black trench coat, because anything that can remind us of an actual high school massacre only makes the scene more interesting, right? Jeff spends all the ammo in his rifle, drops that and pulls out a handgun from his coat, and prepares to shoot some more when Horatio -- who, come to think of it, doesn't look a whole lot different in his dark ensemble -- comes at him with his gun drawn. Horatio tells him to drop the gun, and Jeff's all, "You have no idea what I've done." Horatio says, "That's not true, Jeff. I know about the cemetery, and I know about Mark. Jeff, we can put a stop to this right now if you want to." As Horatio's been talking, he's been walking closer too. Jeff doesn't agree. Horatio tells Jeff, "I want you to think about your dad." He does not add, "Who you've just sent back to jail." Jeff's another one with the Daddy-didn't-love-me complex, and Horatio quickly disabuses him of that notion, and this time he does add, "He's back in jail for you." "Lies!" Jeff insists. Horatio presses forward: "No. He took the gun rap. Two more years inside, for you." Jeff lowers the gun a little bit and asks if that's true. Horatio assures him it is, and quickly recaps how it is we've all gotten to this point, in far fewer words than I did. Whatever progress he's made in calming Jeff down is undone as Jeff notices the SWAT team marching up behind Horatio. Jeff decides to take the dramatic way out; he instructs, "Tell him I said thanks," then attempts to shoot himself in the head. However, Horatio's superhuman reflexes enable him to quickly tackle Jeff and prevent a tragic teen suicide. Horatio has Jeff on the floor, Jeff's gun goes sliding away, and within a blink of the eye, Horatio's on his feet with his gun drawn, commanding Jeff not to move. He then disarms the boy, and Jeff's all, "I could have killed you." An angry viewership demands to know what stopped him. Horatio's all, "I know. But you didn't. We're clear." He steps aside so Tripp can berate the kid for a while while the SWAT team looks down the barrels of their guns at him.
Back at CSI Central, Speedle and Alexx are having lunch together, and Alexx shares Chuck's tox screens; he's three times over the legal limit for ethanol. She's guessing vodka, since there's no smell. Speedle wants to know if excessive alcohol would impede sexual performance. In the audience, men and women are all nodding vehemently. Alexx says, "Oh, honey, that amount of alcohol would impede an elephant's sexual performance." I'd like to see the grant application of the zoologist who plans on conducting experiments to find out exactly how much alcohol it takes before the bull elephant's forced to slur, "I swear, this has never happened before." And then I want to see the look on the grad students that zoologist will have doing the dirty work. Anyway, Alexx suddenly puts two and two together and asks, "Catch her in a lie?" Speedle says he has to look at the evidence, then finishes his sandwich so he can do just that. He finds small indentations on either side of Chuck's face-spit in the pillow, then zooms in on the photos so he can see what those indentations are. Why, they would be the charms that were on Rena's fingernails lo those many minutes ago.
Speedle's now looking at Rena as she traces a fingertip around the rim of her tea cup in an interrogation room. He finally comes in, and Rena gives him a flirty hello. Without looking at her, Speedle says, "The guy was passed out on his back. You took a pillow, you put it over his mouth, pressed down as hard as you could with these little hands, and this little charm. Probably for about five or six minutes. It would have taken less time with an inferior fill, but only the best for you, right?" Speedle had taken Rena's hand during the "these little hands" part of that spiel, and now she goes into full flirt mode, sliding her fingers around his and cooing, "I was glad when you called. It's crazy, huh? I mean, I knew...but still, I was glad." Speedle pulls away his hand and says, "You've been playing me since day one." Rena replies, "If you believed that, your partner would be here right now." Speedle begins smirking slightly as he deadpans, "I didn't think you heard us." Oh, yes, Rena did. She suggests, "People get smothered by pillows...accidentally." Speedle points out, "Yeah, but Chuck wasn't one of them. You should have let the guy get married." Rena only looks at him, and Speedle nods to the wall where the one-way window is. She finally follows his gaze, and when Vin comes in with a booking officer, she says, "He was watching, from behind the mirror." Vin assures her that this wasn't the first time. Speedle snaps into full acerbic mode and asserts, "I don't conduct interviews without my detective ever." And then Rena's getting arrested. She makes one final Mary-Astor-style appeal to Speedle, which he rolls his eyes at.
And now, the tiresome final sequence where father con and son con meet for a remorseful conversation. On the bright side, both men can carry off orange. Pete upbraids his boy with, "It's a sorry state. I'm just grateful to Lieutenant Caine that only one person was killed." Jeff apologizes for letting Pete down; Pete apologizes for letting Jeff down, but he adds, "But you killed someone, and you're going to have to pay for that for the rest of your life. I want you to think about that, hard, every day they keep you inside. Because when you do get out, you're only going to get one more chance. And we're not going to see each other for a long, long, long time." Jeff asks what happens now, and Pete tells him it's up to him. Horatio simply watches all of this. Jeff is led off. Pete asks, "Think he heard me?" and Horatio replies, "I'll let you know." Then he saunters on out and walks down the hallway all backlit and silhouetted, but not so obscured as to cause us to miss the brooding pose we've all come to know and...well, to know.