Breathless

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."