Ashes to Ashes

Morning has broken over Miami, and the faithful are gathered for Sunday mass. At least, I assume it's Sunday mass; few churches are going to have a full complement of altar servers for the daily masses, and how else can you explain the dozen or so children there? Or am I expecting too much "logic" from this show? Anyway -- hot church, lots of altar servers, no priest present. As we all wait for the priest to arrive, the camera pans over the statues -- St. Anthony and St. Elizabeth, both of whom I recognize from my grandmother's church -- and then to a woman who's had enough with the waiting. She genuflects before the altar, then heads toward what are presumably the priests' quarters. The faint ululations of a boy soprano start up, so we are all cued in to the impending tragedy. Sadly, the woman in question is not. She passes through the vestry, knocks on the door, and tells Father Carlos he's on in five. Then she opens the door and discovers that Father Carlos is in no shape to give mass at all, what with him lying face-down in a puddle of blood. The poor woman screams, the tragedy is set in motion, and the boy soprano shuts up so he can move on to warble portents of doom for some other drama.

Speaking of portents of doom, it's Horatio, greeting Detective Sevilla and Megan. Megan tells him, "Body was found at 7:40 this morning by vic's housekeeper. She checked in on him when he didn't show up for mass." We find out that the housekeeper has stuck around for questioning, and she's already told Sevilla and Megan that she had cleaned last night; at 8:15 PM, the place was spotless and the priest was alive. The three enter the apartment quarters -- spare, save for the bloody footprints and other conveniently visible evidence -- and Horatio immediately notes the expended shell casing in a wall; he neglects to mention the fine stippling of blood immediately below it. And then the camera pulls back so we can see Horatio assessing the room, and also so we can get a look at Megan's super-duper-flared pants. Someone in wardrobe really hates her, or else they're under the impression that anyone who spends a lot of time gathering evidence would welcome the chance to don any article of clothing whose fabric could easily trip them up, absorb blood pools, or otherwise impede their work. Cut to Megan inquiring rhetorically, "Who would want to kill a priest?" Viewers in several American dioceses wonder why she has to ask. So does Horatio, who replies, "Nowadays, anyone."

Not The Who. They won't get fooled again.

Back on the show, Alexx is rolling over Father Carlos -- who apparently followed the Way of the Parrothead before converting to Catholicism, if the tattoo on his bicep is any indication -- while Megan sits there and ponders whatever it is she thinks about in her spare time. Horatio hunkers on Alexx's formerly free side and asks Speedle, who's about seven feet in front of him, what it looks like. "It" apparently refers to the partial prints on the coffee table. Speedle's marvelously surly. We zoom back to Alexx, who tells us that Father Carlos's liver temp (82 degrees Fahrenheit) indicates that he was probably killed between 9 PM and midnight. And then we zoom to Horatio, who announces the genesis of the B-plot. He's off this case and on to another one. He asks Megan if she's okay with the scene, and she replies, "Sure. I'm just [beat] waiting for Speedle to finish up with the prints." Then she turns back to Alexx, who explains, "Possible entrance wound, back of his neck, and the second here, to the shoulder." We see both of these in TMICam shots. We also see a probable exit wound immediately under Father Carlos's heart. The smoke curling up from around the edges of the wound is a nice detail. We then zoom over to Calleigh, wearing a face that she keeps in a jar wrapped in lead-impregnated cloth, so as to prevent its glowing radioactivity from harming anyone else, digging a bullet out of the wall.

Then we go back to Alexx, pointing to a bullet wound in Father Carlos's thigh. She then leans in and asks, "What can you tell us, Father, about who did this to you?" My respect for Alexx grows by leaps and bounds; I hope there's a sweeps event where the guests at a diplomatic ball are massacred so we can see Alexx working her knowledge of Burke's Peerage as she chats up the dead. Calleigh bats her eyes -- no small feat with the lashes she's got attached -- and tells us that whomever shot the padre meant business, rifle-shootin' business. Megan stands up and does a word problem: "Three possible shots [beat] and only two casings. Are we missing one?" Speedle congratulates Megan on her subtraction skills, then shows her the two separate shoeprints he's lifted, which indicate that whoever was wandering around the rectory had worn out the left sole of their shoe much more dramatically than the right. The team begins brainstorming: there's no sign of break-in, because priests open their doors to a Catholic cross-section of humanity; there are two glasses, but the one without alcohol has a lip-print that's probably the result of lip balm. Megan notes, "Priests can have [beat] a drink. They can also [beat] have company over." Speedle says, "You've got an uncle who's a priest, right?" Megan clarifies, "Jesuit. He drinks, smokes, plays poker. Just doesn't [beat] have sex." But he does provide that all-important personal connection to the case, and heaven knows, we can't have an episode of CSI: Miami pass by without there being some sort of personal connection for Horatio or Megan. Meanwhile, Alexx is pulling a condom out of Father Carlos's pocket and quipping, "Don't know if we can say the same thing about our priest."

Meanwhile, in this show's inaugural B-plot, Horatio is pulling up in the CSI Humvee and hustling over to where Delko is, a ravine in which a thoroughly gutted SUV has rolled to a rest. As Horatio walks over, someone shouts off-camera that she's with Highway Patrol and the car was stolen. Horatio stands on the lip of the gully and shouts for Delko, who responds by scaling the grade and saying, "We've got a female driver, H. She's dead." The woman is the only person in the SUV, which was reported stolen two weeks ago in Georgia, and which went right over the edge of the ravine sans skid marks. Horatio and Delko wend their way back toward the scene, and Delko prepares us for the crispy carnage within by warning, "I'm thinking the fuel line ruptured when the car hit bottom. The gas tank punctured, and sparks set it off on impact." The camera then focuses on the woman in the passenger seat, who's roughly the same color and consistency as pork barbecue. We get a flashback to the car going over the edge a few times -- hey, if it's going to cost money to send an SUV over a cliff, then get your money's worth -- and then we're back with Horatio and Delko. Delko's showing off his newest piece of evidence for Horatio, a charred label to a bottle of Beauchamp cognac. Horatio comments, "Our car thief has expensive tastes -- that's a $400 bottle of cognac." Well, it was an expensive car, too. You wouldn't expect an SUV thief to be hitting the Mad Dog 20/20. ["Not until CSI: Camden, NJ, anyway." -- Sars] Horatio and Delko walk over to the car and survey the fried body within. There's no ID -- the purse found near the car was bereft of anything that could help. Delko also reveals that there was a suitcase found near the car, and Horatio muses, "Now why would this poor thing travel with a suitcase and a purse and no ID?" Could it be...foul play?

The camera then swings to a shot of a statue of Jesus, who looks as if he's either exhorting people to come and be fishers of men, or he's participating in the wave. Speedle comes over to the statue and tells Megan, "Last time I was in church was when Kurt Cobain died." Because...Nirvana's cover of "Jesus Wants Me For A Sunbeam" was so moving? Because...he and his college pals were participating in an attempt to exorcise Courtney Love remotely? So many possibilities, none of them explored here. Megan's not really moved by Speedle's admission. The two of them progress to a doorway, and as Megan goes to reflexively bless herself with the holy water, she draws back, noticing that there's something in the water. A quick portable lab test later, and we've got confirmation of blood. Speedle comments, "The killer washed his hands, huh? A regular Pontius Pilate." Megan offers an alternative theory: "Or [beat] he blessed himself, which means we're looking for a devout Catholic." From the depths of the couch, I snort dubiously; I'm so impious as to actually physically dread a divine lightning strike whenever I take communion in my mom's church, yet I still reflexively bless myself upon entering or exiting a church. Very nearly every Catholic does; the ritual gets pounded into your head at an early age. Plus, if you're really good, and you hit the water at the right angle, you can drench a sibling without fear of retribution.

Ahem. I appear to have wandered off into one of those passages lifted straight from any number of "I was a Catholic-school refugee" books. Back on the screen, Alexx is digging something out of Father Carlos and telling Calleigh, "Don't say I never gave you anything." Can you give her a bottle of Cetaphil and an appointment at the Bobbi Brown counter, too? You'd be doing her -- and us -- a big favor there, Alexx. Anyway: it's a .223 slug, which makes Calleigh very happy on a number of levels: it's a homemade bullet cast from hot lead, it was reloaded, it was fired from a hunting rifle, and best of all, it matches the slug she dug out of the wall. Calleigh hands the bullet over to Megan, who comments that it's kind of mangled for a bullet, and Alexx points out, "It's mangled because it entered the body twice." Calleigh wants to show us all how. Alexx calls over Speedle, "I need some muscle." He comes over to heft the body; sadly, Speedle's back is to us, so we can't see how he feels about being reduced to mere muscle. After rolling the body on its side, Speedle ducks out, missing The Calleigh & Alexx Show: Let's Stick Rods In The Body To Demonstrate Bullet Trajectory. As Calleigh's busy driving skewers through the priest, we see the other end of the stick emerge from his back, dripping with grue. Okay, I'm all for gross if it serves the plot -- for example, when the guy liquefied on CSI last season, or a few weeks ago when they had to saw open the Candyman's head -- but if you're just tossing it on screen because you can, then ewwww. Long story short: the first bullet went in through the chest, emerged in the shoulder, and stuck in the wall; the second shot was closer range, at the base of the neck, and exited the chest before re-entering the thigh and flattening upon impact with the femur. This explains why there were only two casings at the rectory: the priest slumped to a sitting position after Bullet #1, and Bullet #2 ricocheted around.

After that female-bonding scene -- which, by the way, I very much enjoyed, because it showed a dynamic among colleagues that's unique to this series -- we get Speedle and Delko whipping out their case files to see whose is bigger. Delko goes first, boasting that he's got a burn victim who may or may not have been helped along by some $400 lighter fluid. "Can you beat that?" he asks. Speedle thinks he can: "I got a priest, shot with a rifle, dead in a church." Delko thinks that's not bad. Speedle contends that it's "at least a draw," no doubt fully aware that had the priest been shot in a more incongruous location (the lingerie department at Saks, the kitten kennel at the local SPCA, a nearby ashram), he'd be the hands-down winner. Delko laughs, and then Megan comes over, saying dismissively, "Boys and their measuring sticks -- you guys crack me up." She's come over to see what progress Speedle's made on the lip print; he replies that it's neither lipstick nor lip gloss, but rather, lip balm with SPF 45 and the unique ingredient macadamia oil. Megan then asks if there's any progress with regards to prints on the condom. Speedle replies that the only prints present belong to Father Carlos. Megan muses, "In my senior year, Sister Mary Frances found a condom in my desk. Her prints would have been on it." Speedle snorts dismissively, "Yeah, right." He must be a Boston Globe subscriber. Just then, before he and Megan can talk about current events vis a vis the Catholic Church, something beeps, and we find out that the mystery lip print belongs to someone wearing lip balm commonly worn by skateboarders or surfers. Speedle attempts to head back to that current-events discussion with, "A teenage boy, a priest...we might have motive."

Horatio's manning the command board in the skybox while Alexx labors on his flash-fried victim below. Horatio asks Alexx, "What do you see?" Alexx tartly replies, "It's what I don't see -- any broken bones." Horatio notes that the victim may have been drinking, and the pending tox screen will tell. Alexx continues, "I've seen drunks so looped they fall out of a car doing sixty and don't break a finger." She then begins checking passages; Horatio resituates his monitors so he can supervise further. Alexx notes that there's soot in the woman's lungs; Horatio concludes, "So she was alive during the fire." "I hope you didn't suffer too much, darling," Alexx tells the body. Horatio interrupts this moment of compassion for the victim by saying, "Alexx, if she's going to help us, we need to know who she is." And she's going to have an "if found and autopsied, return to [your name here]" label stamped on her liver? Alexx picks up a brittle, burned limb and notes caustically, "Can't get prints from bone." I note that she appears to have freshened her makeup in solidarity with Calleigh. What is it with this show? Both Khandi Alexander and Emily Procter are lovely women, and whoever is running the make-up department is just oblivious to this. I realize it's Miami and every self-appointed style expert in North America loves to point out how Floridians are into the bright feminine colors, but this goes beyond the boundaries of regional style and into an uncharted territory of excess. Ahem. Back on the show, Alexx dumps out the stomach contents to try to draw a timeline between last meal and time of death, and something goes clank in the metal pan. She tells Horatio, "You're not gonna believe this," and he zooms in, just in time to see Alexx extract a diamond ring from the mix. Alexx says, "Looks like she ate about four carats for her last supper."