Camp Fear

There's no such thing as a rainy day in Miami. At least, there isn't in the establishing shots, which feature glistening white buildings set against a sparkling blue waterfront, bordered on one side by long, empty highways upon which a brooding lawman can speed in the stud vehicle of his choice and on the other by verdant wetlands that the Bush administration will no doubt decide to drain and sell off for commercial development, if their current track record in re: America's natural resources and wonders is anything to go by. But I digress, and thus almost miss the schoolbus wending its way down a dusty road. It stops and disgorges a bunch of preternaturally blonde and clean-cut teenagers wearing blue-sleeved baseball jerseys and toting bright orange trash bags. I think it's sweet of the Villagers of the Damned to adopt a highway in between killing sprees. One blonde girl bids her less blonde friend to ditch this boring highway job with her, and they head off into the dry and abundant brush to smoke, since Floridians are in no danger whatsoever of epidemic wildfire sweeping across their state. The tall blonde girl pulls out a pack of cigarettes, and her shorter friend gasps, "Where did you get those?" "My mom's purse," Blondie replies. "You are so busted," the other girl continues. Yes, especially when Mom finds out her daughter has absconded with her smokes to the foot of the Appalachian Trail in Amicalola Falls State Park in Georgia, if the mountains in the background give any indication as to where this schoolbus took the children. Or maybe Mom thinks that Florida's naturally mountainous; Blondie seems to be dismissing her materfamilias's mental capacities in a series of remarks about how not-busted she and her friend will be. Blondie uses a book of matches to attempt to light the cigarettes, fails, and has to lean into the underbrush to retrieve them. I get my first good look at her shirt, which reads "Briar Bay Baptist Church: Adopt a Highway." Give the producers points for getting that detail right: the biggest adolescent hell-raisers I knew were all active members of my church youth group. Anyway, the two girls lean down into the underbrush to get their matches and apparently find something else that sends them screaming back toward the highway.

The camera gets all arty here, panning quickly from the trashbags to the bare, splayed legs of a girl clad in bikini underpants, up her torso, to her rolled-back eyes. This reminds me a little too much of a high-fashion ad -- the kind of thing that some talentless hack looking for some free publicity for his label would do, then insist is meant to be an artistic representation of un petit mort -- and the series of shots, which are accompanied by the clicking of camera, focusing on her well-manicured hands and feet, her arm flung behind her head in a classic cheesecake pose, and her vacant face, do nothing to dispel the impression that we've just witnessed a prime-time eroticization of murder. Seriously: this is the kind of segment that would fit right in with Jean Kilbourne's Killing Us Softly series. It is amazing to me that this show -- and, to be fair, the original CSI -- has no problem portraying dead women with such strongly erotic imagery; while it's true that we did have dead male stripper plotlines on both this show and the original, the dead men weren't depicted with the same strongly sexualized camera treatment. In fact, their deaths demonstrated the fatal results of deviant female sexuality. There's a whole thesis to be written on sexual imagery and CSI shows here, but y'all aren't here for a discussion of the forensic male gazes. You're here for the derisive comments about Horatio. So let's get to those.

Cut to Horatio looking down and saying, "Well, we've got a Jane Doe. She could be a runaway." The camera keeps clicking as Alexx says, "She's not a street kid. Not with these nails." Sevilla suggest that the girl could be a victim of a hit-and-run, but Horatio disagrees, noting that the girl's too far from the road. Alexx adds, "Looks like she's been hit by every bug in south Florida, though. Poor baby's been eaten alive. Smells like beer. You are much too young to be out drinking, sweetheart." Sevilla suggests that the beery young miss was coming home from a party, but Horatio pooh-poohs that idea too. He then commands Alexx, "Check her lividity." Alexx does not ask him for the magic word, but merely rolls the girl a little and pulls up her tee, noting, "I've got double lividity. Her blood's settled twice, meaning she's been moved." Sevilla concludes, "So it's a body dump." Horatio leans back, squares his shoulders so he's filling ninety percent of the frame, casts his gaze into the middle distance, and decrees, "So we are in search of a crime scene." Roger Daltrey immediately screams his agreement and we go to the Kim Delaney-less credits. Yeahhhh!!!!

This holiday season, it's tough to decide which commercials unnerve me more: the ones where Kirstie Alley, swaddled in a hectare of velvet and made up Calleigh Duquesne-style, bullies people into having a Christmas Thai-cathouse-style at the Pier One Imports, or the diamond industry commercials that all but state, "Only cheap jackasses don't get their women diamonds for Christmas!" And they're both on right now. It figures.

Once we're back at the body dump location, Horatio's hunkered down and staring at a track in the dirt. He calls, "Calleigh, please," and she sprints on over. I'm relieved to report that she hasn't been too badly mauled by the hair and wardrobe people today. Calleigh immediately plops down to Horatio and puts her ear near the ground. Horatio asks Calleigh to tell him about the track he found, and she replies, "Faint tread impression, knobby tire, narrow track width. Put it all together, it spells ATV." Guns, gears -- if it's inorganic, it's right up Calleigh's alley. Horatio notes that the tread seems pretty fragile, but wants Calleigh to try and make a cast of it anyway. She whips out the hair spray. Haven't we seen that move before??

While Calleigh's spritzing the sand, Speedle and Delko are entering the land of the B-plot. We hear Speedle before we see him, and he's saying something about how "Delacroix says this guy's a wharf rat." As the two of them head to a shiny silver trailer, Delko asks, "Do we have a name on him?" We do -- it's Willie Stango. Speedle adds, "His ex-wife came by to check up on him. Said he'd been ducking her calls for a week." His ex-wife must have called immediately after getting a snootful of the smell, which hits Speedle the minute he enters the trailer and causes him to fling an arm over his mouth and nose in self-defense. Delko retches a few times and comments, "It smells well-done." Speedle's pressed a surgical mask against his face by this point, and after he and Delko have rolled over the body and noted the waxy, reddish skin around Stango's mouth, Delko comments, "Oh, yeah. It looks like someone torched him." Delko waves a flashlight around the trailer -- which is none too tidy, but it's not like Stango's lack of housekeeping skills will be traced to a psychotic depression or anything -- and notes, "No signs of forced entry. Probably someone he knew." "Like a pissed-off ex-wife," Speedle comments. You just know he's at the fun table at weddings.

As Delko's looking around the trailer, he's noting lots of discarded milk cartons. He quips, "Got milk?" Speedle notices a small spill to an open carton and comments, "It's all over the place." He takes a swab, then makes a face, so we're left to conclude that the milk is probably sour. We then hear the sound of a camera snapping as we flash-focus on another puddle of milk, a carton near Stango's hand, Stango lying on his back, and a cell phone within reach of his hand. I guess we're supposed to infer, between this photographic sequence and the earlier one, that we're viewing the scene through the eyes of the CSI who's photographing it. Delko picks up the cell phone and notes that it's working, and that Stango's missed a lot of calls. Speedle thinks that checking all of Stango's missed calls is an excellent place to start. Ten bucks says that he's managing Horatio-style, and the missed calls are an excellent place for Delko to start while Speedle does something else, like email Warrick again and forward "Top Ten Ways To Know You're The Brains Of The Crime Solving Duo..." spam he got off the CSI-L listserv.

In a paradigm-shattering move, Horatio has left the skybox and is actually attending an autopsy in the same room where Alexx is conducting it. He's still standing ten feet from the gurney, but he's in the room, so that's progress. Alexx fills him in: the liver temp indicated that the girl died somewhere around 5 AM that morning, and her body is covered in insect bites. If we had Gil on the case, this would be the point where Gil began matching bug bite to specific insect, and lecturing anyone present on biological and metaphorical significance of each insect introduced. Here, I'm not so sure. Alexx continues as Horatio creeps ever closer -- the girl also sustained blunt force trauma to the right side of her head. Alexx concludes, "Blood loss could have led to endotoxic shock, but I'll have to do more testing." Horatio concludes that somebody hit the girl and dumped her. The bug bites -- and their significance therein -- go completely unremarked upon. Alexx points out that the cause of death is still uncertain and could therefore be accidental. Horatio decrees, "Teenage girl doesn't wind up by the side of the road dead and it'd be an accident. What about sexual assault?" Well, it's nice to see them address the fact that this girl was found in her skivvies, however indirectly. Alexx mentions that there was slight vaginal tearing around the opening. Then, with the saddest expression I've ever seen, she holds a diaphragm aloft. Alexx comments, "Fifteen years old and she was planning on having sex." How did they figure out she was fifteen? Horatio comments, "Well, someone was. Maybe someone who didn't get their way." I can appreciate how he's always looking for the sinister motive, blah dee blah, but inserting a diaphragm isn't exactly a random drive-by event. Unless there were roving gangs of contraceptive commandos running wild and forcibly inserting diaphragms or Norplant into unwilling girls, it's pretty safe to assume the girl inserted the diaphragm herself.

Just then, a bald labmonkey comes in to tell Alexx he's got the tox screen she wanted, but stops to gape and comment, "Cool room." Horatio curtly says, "Mmm-hmmm," then asks, "Ruben, have you seen Megan?" Ruben says, "She had court today." The Chords Of Convenience play as Horatio looks up and says, "I thought she had court yesterday." Ruben replies, "She stopped by, told me to give you this." He hands over an envelope. This is shaping up to be one of the most entertaining ex post facto departures I've ever seen, albeit in a totally accidental way. If you're going to have a highly-publicized departure, you should wring it for as much implausibility as possible. Have Horatio ask Ruben where Megan is, only to have the other man reply, "I thought you knew. She had your credit card when she was booking her flight to the Grand Caymans." Anyway, Horatio notes that the envelope reads "PERSONAL AND CONFIDENTIAL," which would seem to inspire all sorts of snooping among people who pry secrets out of others for a living, and listens to Ruben telling Alexx that the body's BAC was 0.0. Alexx is startled: "So she smelled of beer but didn't drink any? Okay, that's odd." This from the woman holding salons with the recently deceased. Ruben counters, "Not as odd as this -- her pro time's up to about 25 seconds." For those of you who wonder, as I do, what a "pro time" is, it's the nickname for "prothrombin time," or the time it takes for a plasma sample (it's blood plasma that contains all the clogging agents, not the RBCs) to form a firm clot after being treated with the coagulation inhibitor thromboplastin. Pro Time is also the trademarked name for a kit used to determine blood coagulation time, but given that we're simply talking about how long it took Jane Doe's blood to clot, I think the reference is just to the general blood-clot test, not to the brand-name kit.

Anyway, Alexx notes that Jane Doe was a slow clotter, Ruben suggests that Jane Doe was taking a blood thinner, and Alexx counters that the body's lack of bruises belies the thin-blood idea. Horatio asks, "We've got no ID, no crime scene and no cause of death, right?" He says that like it's an impediment to solving the crime or something. Anyway, the upshot to this is that Horatio concludes, "We know she was doing one thing before she passed away." "She was breathing," Alexx concludes. "She was breathing air filled with contaminants," Horatio clarifies. Alexx replies, "I'll swab her nasal passages and sinus cavities." It just goes to show, whoever coined the saying "you can pick your victim, you can pick your nose, but you can't pick your victim's nose" was wrong. Horatio takes off before Alexx can begin excavation. We do not follow him. Alexx swabs out something that looks a lot like sparkly tapioca, and the camera rushes in for a close-up. We then check Alexx's face -- not a whole lot going on -- before zooming back on the face of Jane Doe, whose eyes appear to have moved down so she's staring at the camera, and her hair is perfectly done in a little dutchboy cut. Rare is the person who looks better after their autopsy, but Jane Doe's managed it.

Horatio's off waving a black light around the lab and giggling to The Dark Side of the Moon album when Calleigh comes in and tells him the tread marks are from the DTP Mudgator's quad-claw design, which is standard issue on 650-series ATVs. Calleigh notes the scuffing on the outside ribs, and Horatio tells her, "Nice work. Have you ever played this album to Wizard of Oz? It really does match up. Freaky, man." Oh, he does not either. But wouldn't it make his character more fun if he was really was skipping departmental meetings to go check out Rush night at the local Lasarium? What Horatio's actually doing is discovering a laundry mark on the t-shirt the girl was wearing. As Calleigh explains it, "Used to separate identical quantities of clothing." Horatio replies, "An invisible laundry mark, just like our Jane Doe, who's not been reported missing yet, has she?" Horatio worked a little too hard on that metaphor, methinks. Also, I'm distracted by the question of what practical use an invisible laundry mark would have. I can see what use a visible laundry mark would have, but it seems as thought you'd have to have some pretty sophisticated laundry machines to detect invisible marks and sort accordingly. Not that it's impossible -- given that high-end domestic types have declared the laundry room the target for overpriced consumerism, laundry machines that read and sort invisible markers seem entirely plausible. I'm just stuck on the functional aspect of an invisible marker. Anyway, Calleigh has no ear for strained metaphors, so she merely tells Horatio that Sevilla's blanketed the local agencies with pictures, but no bites so far. Anyway, since institutions are required by law to register their laundry marks -- a factoid I stumbled across while doing research on laundry marks, not something that's mentioned in the show -- it should be easy enough to trace the origins of the t-shirt. But we've forgotten about the t-shirt, because there's nasal mucus to be passed from Horatio to Calleigh. The whole exchange is shot in silhouette against a light screen, so it's got this weird Alfred-Hitchcock-goes-to-the-lab feel to it. Calleigh deadpans, "Nasal mucus. And it isn't even my birthday." "Sorry about that," Horatio says unrepentantly, then flees while Calleigh realizes that yes, once again, she's doing the dirty work so Horatio can divert his attention elsewhere. I guess you don't get to be a stalker in the name of justice without delegating.

And now, the B-plot. Speedle more or less falls through the doors of the morgue, greets Alexx, and asks, "Mind if I observe?" "When do I ever?" she replies pleasantly. Oh, who doesn't love Speedle? He sidles up, and she asks, "So, Mr. Observer, what do you see?" Speedle replies, "Partial thickness burns on the lips, tongue and oral mucosa." Thanks to the generosity of the TMICam, we see these burns too, in excruciating detail. Speedle then pulls back a flap of skin and notes, "Stomach lining appears to be red and inflamed." Alexx asks, "What about the lungs?" Speedle replies, "Swelling of the main stem bronchii, release of edema fluid." "Meaning?" Alexx asks with a faint smile. "Meaning he was fried from the inside, and the heat from the burns blocked off his airway," Speedle replies.

Alexx gives Speedle a grin and says, "Not bad. Not bad at all. You know, Speed, any time you want to cross over to our side of the street..." Speedle shrugs off the obvious compliment and asks, "Do you have any idea what might have caused it?" Alexx replies, "Nah. We're running tox. But if you want first dibs on the stomach lining..." She holds the jar aloft, and Speedle says, "Well, yeah." He takes the jar and wanders off again, leaving Alexx grinning over Stango. Nice scene -- not only is it refreshing to see Alexx interacting with someone who's not going to be drawing all her conclusions for her (cough, cough, Horatio, cough), but it's fun to see Speedle working on mastering something he may not know yet.

The fun is over once we get the nostril's-eye view of what's really in mucus. As we see assorted objects that look like grains of pollen, a tech tells Calleigh, "The great thing about the nose is that it acts like a filter. Everything you breathe gets trapped inside -- spores, dirt, live dust mites." Calleigh breaks in with, "Remind me never to breathe again." Have a little more faith in the immune system, Calleigh. Anyway, the tech finds a kind of pollen that looks a little bit like an apricot. Calleigh looks up from her microscope, and her eyeliner looks as though someone rimmed the eyepieces of the microscope with charcoal as a practical joke shortly before she entered the lab. She eyes Horatio and streaks out of the lab to apprehend him as he walks by. Horatio's turned up the ID for the laundry mark -- Pharos Academy, a juvenile boot camp for girls in southwest Dade County. Calleigh exposits, "Tough love. Parents ship their kids off when they lose control. Last chance before the courts get involved." And highly controversial, although I doubt we'll get into issues like the long-term effectiveness of the boot camp approach, the accrediting issues that sometimes surround the staff and programs, the allegations of abuse, the often problematic relationship between for-profit camps and the contracts they have with local law enforcement agencies, and so on.