Grave Young Men

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.