Evidence of Things Unseen

Ah, Miami -- known for its bustling nightlife, its cutting-edge fashions, its Dolphins, and now, thanks to the efforts of this lousy little spin-off, its grimy adult book stores. The Dade County Chamber of Commerce must be delighted that the CSI brain trust decided to farm out their franchise here, as opposed to, say, Bangkok.

Our episode opens in one of those grimy adult bookstores, which happens to be equipped with a bank of peepshow booths. We're all adults here. We know what goes on in such places -- the women sip tea and eat scones while talking earnestly about the human condition as the men listen attentively and quote appropriate passages from The Oxford Book of English Verse. Or, more accurately, the women dance around in as little clothing as allowed by CBS Standards & Practices while their raincoat-clad clientele fish around for quarters and give silent thanks that tomorrow is laundry day. Remember, fellas, protein gets out protein.

The barrier in one such booth rolls up to reveal a not-at-all unattractive blonde lounging in a not-at-all sexy pose on a divan. "You're not going to disappoint me, are you, Ace?" she heavy-breathes at her patron. Well, if her goal that night was to be gaped at by a sweaty, open-mouthed-breathing toad of a man, then no -- no, he isn't. She removes her dressing gown. The barrier slams down. Toad Man feeds another coin into the slot. The barrier rolls up -- she's now dancing au naturel. The barrier slams down. Another coin into the slot. The barrier rolls up -- and Toad Man is slumped against the blood-streaked glass window. Ew. I don't care if laundry day is tomorrow -- ain't nothin' going to clean up that mess.

As we fade out on the woman's terrified scream, we fade up on Horatio Caine examining the body of the recently deceased. Now it's my turn to scream in terror. Because the camera is placed on the other side of the glass window and because the window is streaked with the one-time contents of Toad Man's circulatory system and because the entire scene is bathed in red light, Horatio doesn't so much resemble a remorseless crime-fighting machine here as he does a particularly malevolent Oompa Loompa. Cause of death: overindulging in chocolate. Another grisly murder solved, Detective Wonka.

The cop who helped Delko and Speedle uncover the hidden dangers of siphoning gas strides past the racks of videotapes, DVDs, and adult novelties. "No ID on him?" Nameless Cop asks Horatio. "Jeans, t-shirt, Kmart socks," Horatio says. Kmart socks are that easily identifiable? "Big spender," Nameless Cop snorts. Yeah, well, we can't all afford socks woven from gold filament, now, can we? "He saved his pennies for the peeps," Horatio grimly agrees, and that's one of those lines that probably sounded much grittier and edgier on paper. Horatio stands up and calls over Speedle, who's busy photographing one of the establishment's adult-entertainment artisans. "How old do you think the girl is?" Horatio asks Nameless Cop, who, until the carbon-dating kit arrives from the lab, guesses that she's eighteen or nineteen. This does not please Horatio. "Just a kid," he mutters, which is technically incorrect by the legal standard of adulthood, though Horatio's never been one to let legal technicalities get in the way of a good brood. Horatio posits that the weapon needed to be long enough to penetrate the back door of the peepshow booth and do damage -- something the TMICam thoughtfully shows us, since the incidence of violent stabbings is practically unheard of here in America. "The guy inside the booth must have been pressing against the wall," Nameless Cop helpfully posits. "Poised to see paradise," Horatio says. Bwah? That line made to no sense. Wouldn't you agree, Roger Daltrey? "Yeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaaah!" See? You just can't fool Roger Daltrey. Not again, anyhow.

After taking a moment to learn a little bit more about our advertisers' find products and/or services, we return to the adult bookstore, where Horatio and Alexx are poking around the body. "Sharp force injuries," Alexx says. "Three knife strikes through the door," Horatio responds -- in addition to helping various widows through their grief, he must be our autopsy-jargon-to-English translator for the night. Alexx points out that there are only two knife wounds in the body; Horatio counters that those two were apparently enough to get the job done. As Horatio and Alexx chat amicably about the victim's ID -- "nothing out of the ordinary...so far," Alexx offers -- the coroner notes that our murder victim had bad teeth. Thankfully, she does not tap into those creepy conversing-with-the-recently-deceased powers to taunt the poor fellow about his substandard dental work. "He looks Eastern European to me," Horatio offers. Yeah, well, you look like a pasty-faced jackass to me, but you don't hear me jumping to conclusions. You pasty-faced jackass. Alexx dashes off to the autopsy bay to find out more about how our victim wound up in the Great Peepshow Booth in the Sky, so we cut over to Calleigh, wielding an impressive band saw, while a man we can only presume to be the proprietor of the dirty bookstore looks on and leers. "You ever seen that video Sexy Guns, Sexy Girls?" he asks in quite possibly the most awkward conversation-starter this side of "You have an interesting bone structure." "If you go into a booth with that saw, you don't even have to take your clothes off. You'd make a fortune in tips." I'm just out of touch with what appeals to people's prurient interests these days, I suppose. Calleigh is equally nonplussed. "You're standing in my crime scene," she says, and that probably would have sounded cool and hard-bitten if it hadn't been delivered in Emily Procter's emotionally vacant chirp. I should probably pause for a moment here and confess that I don't care much for Emily Procter's acting ability -- not here, not in The West Wing, not even in The Dukes of Hazzard: Reunion! For the remainder of this recap, I will try to keep my searing hatred in check, since I'm sure plenty of people find her wooden performances to be absolutely delightful. I guess that's why clothes come in so many shapes and styles -- because other people have lousy taste.

The bookstore owner is perturbed that Calleigh is sawing away at the booth door. "If you take the door, I've got to close the booth," he protests. "Then close the booth," snaps Horatio, suddenly appearing in the scene so that he can watch someone else gather evidence per his contractual obligation. The proprietor skulks off muttering something about trampling on the rights of honest pornographers to earn a living, leaving Horatio and Calleigh to talk weaponry. The murder weapon was an eight-inch serrated blade -- the strike is wider at the top than the bottom, suggesting that the killer used some sort of hunting knife. "Well, he was hunting," says Horatio in an effort to spike up the pomposity quotient in this scene. "The question becomes, how did he know where to aim?" As is the case with any questions posed by Horatio, he also supplies the answer -- a small peephole bored into the door of the booth. "That looks recent, doesn't it?" Horatio asks. I don't know, Horatio...does it? You're the crime-fighting genius, aren't you? Maybe you should tell me for a change, shouldn't you? Man, this is annoying, isn't it?

We'll assume that the peephole is recent, since Horatio is now hovering over Delko as he exams the booth's various bodily fluids, blood and otherwise. "A lot of people have been in this booth," Delko observes. "Everybody but a janitor," says Horatio, and he doesn't know how right he is. A while back, a friend of mine -- and yes, I realize that beginning an unsavory story with this kind of narrative conceit usually implies that this "friend" is actually me, but take my word for it, in this case, I'm actually talking about a friend of mine -- went into a peepshow booth, sampled the entertainment therein, and left without leaving a little bit of himself behind, if you get my drift. And as he's leaving, the small, aged Yoda-like guy whose job it was to clean up the place scurried into the booth with a squeegee and a dishrag, only to find the booth in pristine condition. "No mess?" the beaming janitor asked my friend hopefully. "No mess!" My point? No matter how awful your job is, it can't be worse than that guy's. Unless, of course, you happen to muck out peepshow booths for a living. In which case watching CSI Miami is probably the least of your worries. Anyhow, Delko's discovered a hair among all the blood and other humors. "It could be from a million guys," he says. He forgets, however, that Horatio is blessed with super-vision and is able to note the hair's unusual thickness. "I don't think that's human," Horatio says. We could say the same about you, pally.

Back in the lab, Alexx is finding particularly thick hairs on the victim -- at least twenty of them, and probably more once they process his clothes. Horatio is doing what he does best -- hovering over someone else's shoulder while they do all the work -- until Alexx asks him to lend her a hand and flip the body over. Horatio obliges. Now I know what it must have felt like for an earlier generations to watch Neil Armstrong walk on the moon -- we've just witnessed something never before seen on television. The entry wounds, each marked numerically with black ink, are T-shaped. "Which means the killer used a single-inch blade," Horatio says, and boy, we need a TMICam shot of said knife penetrating the skin like we need an eight-inch serrated blade stuck in our backs. Alexx reveals that the first stab slipped right between the victim's ribs and punctured the left lung, filling it with blood -- thus, that blood spit-take we were treated to earlier. And treated to again, courtesy of the FlashbackCam. Thanks, CBS! I wasn't hungry anyhow. The second stab chipped the fifth vertebrae and severed the victim's spinal cord, which, if the TMICam is to be believed, is normally coursing with bolts of electrical energy. "There's your cause of death," Horatio says. "Lights out, my friend." The body, stunned into silence by Horatio's witty banter, offers no rebuttal.

While Horatio's busy trying out one-liners for the Schwarzenegger picture, Calleigh's hard at work trying to discern the murder weapon. She's narrowed it down to three -- the Gryphon M35, a recon with a tanto point, and whatever knife was used to apply the eight layers of clown make-up currently covering her face. Or an Echelon MPT. Yeah, probably that's what she said instead. Horatio ponders whether the killer was in the military, or perhaps a rogue SWAT team member bent on ridding the world of all Eastern European masturbators with bad teeth. Calleigh points out that the knife is weapons-grade "and that whoever owns it didn't get it to play mumblety-peg." For younger viewers who don't understand the reference, mumblety-peg is an old-time children's game, in which players toss a jackknife in various and sundry ways with the goal being to get the blade to stick into the ground. This game was apparently much more popular back in the days when children were better armed and lawyers didn't roam the countryside searching for class-action suits. Looking at the peephole in the door, Horatio points out that he's about six feet tall, which would make the killer the same height. Oh Lord, please let Horatio be implicated in this grizzly murder -- and let him be arrested by a blowhard CSI who pooh-poohs evidence-gathering in favor of trusting his gut. That'd be ironic enough for an O. Henry story, except that in O. Henry stories, the writing is actually good. Anyhow, while visions of Horatio being led off in leg irons dance in my head, Horatio and Calleigh figure out that the killer was right-handed and deduce how he leaned in to hide his knife-wielding from the other porn store patrons. Their flashback is about as interesting as I made it sound. "Now, people don't make a lot of eye contact in a place like this," Horatio says, "so even if he was detected, someone might just think he was wasted." Calleigh suggests that the killer definitely knew his way around the place. "There's a reason the Italians call it 'little death,'" Horatio responds. First off, it's the French who call it that. Second off, what the hell does that have to do with anything Calleigh just said? Third off, what's with all the witty bon mots this week, H? Toning up the snappy patter for Jade II: Sex Crime Boogaloo?

We're back at the club, where the not-at-all-unattractive blonde dancer from the crime scene is just leaving her shift. Horatio is waiting for her. Since I'm new here, let me see if I'm following the timeline -- in the aftermath of the murder, Horatio's had time to arrive at the peepshow booth, go over the crime scene, observe the autopsy, narrow down the list of possible murder weapons to three knives, piece together how the murder took place, try out corny action-hero lines that Steven Seagal would be too embarrassed to utter, and still arrive back at the adult bookstore to pester the dancer. Is the adult bookstore just down the street from police headquarters? Does the dancer work sixteen-hour shifts? No wonder she looks so tired. We're about to know how she feels after this crackling exchange of dialogue:

Dancer: I'm not working.
Horatio: I am.
Dancer: One of the cops.
Horatio: CSI.
Dancer: Well, you came to the right place. My whole life's a crime scene. When are you going to arrest whoever's responsible for me having this crappy job in this crappy town?