Spring Break

Hey, everyone! You can party in South Beach! Who knew?

The usual melange of preternaturally pretty people, overflowing pitchers of beer, and pounding house music assaults the senses, so this must be a party. The DJ announces that spring break is here, and the crowd shrills in response. If these gyrating nitwits are in any way representative of the spring break experience, then I'm grateful I opted to go canoeing in the Okeefenokee during my semester breaks. We see a series of quick-cut scenes meant to show exactly how much goes on at a party -- kids drinking out of a beer bong, a co-ed couple bumping and grinding by the pool, two girls licking each other for their audience's delight, girls losing their bikinis in the pool, a lot of hooking up -- and then we see someone with a Dumb and Dumber leer holding a video camera and recording a woman's breasts, then a tray of shaking Jell-O shots, then a woman's shimmying bikini-clad ass. Wow, do you think there's some sort of symbolism there? We switch out of the camera-eye's view and back to the party at large.

Then we switch to the packed streets, as more kids in convertibles roll down the street. The cars are filled with bikini-clad women, and the curb is filled with guys sporting video cameras. My innate misanthropy collides with my surveillance-society loathing, and I decide that this whole spring break thing is just beyond my ken. Why do people do this? Is someone holding their loved ones hostage? Is it post-lobotomy therapy? Anyway, we switch back to camera's-eye view for a second. Then we move over to a guy who looks an awful lot like a post-makeover David Silver, i.e. thinks-he's-hip A/V geek, and he's all, "All right, ladies. This -- this is for Babes on Break. Show America what you got." What I'd show is my fine left hook, but these girls take the nonviolent Mahatma Gandhi approach and share their breasts. The crowd goes wild; several other guys get the scene on tape too. AV-geek guy -- the actor Sean Maher, who last appeared on the misbegotten space opera Firefly -- gives the girls show t-shirts. That seems counterintuitive. You'd think he'd give them Babes on Break pasties instead. The scene ends with one girl shimmying for the camera in her tank top.

The sun comes up on the beach and we see the tide rolling in, splashing the feet of two guys passed out on lawn chairs at the surf's edge. The brown-haired guy sits up and asks his blond companion, "Dude, where's the car?" Heh. Throw in a lot of pudding, two gay Swedish aliens, and Jennifer Garner, and you've got yourself an amusing scenario. But since this is the laugh-free CSI: Miami, you just have the two guys exchanging a dialogue that can be summed up in the sentence, "Alcohol-fueled blackouts are funny!" The two clowns leave the chairs and retreat from the surf's edge, telling the slumped figure of a -- you got it -- bikini-clad girl, "You better get up! Tide's coming in!" They go to wake her up, but her open eyes, set in a head that's rotated about 110 degrees from the front of her body, clue these two in that she's not going to wake up any time soon. The morons scram.

And yet, the presence of Alexx and Horatio in the scenes seem to indicate that these two may have actually called 911 at some point. That, or Horatio and Alexx are on their morning Body Walk at the beach. Horatio is standing and looking down at the body while Alexx crawls around and does the dirty work. Alexx says, "I hate to state the obvious, but her neck's been broken." She wobbles the girl's head around on her neck -- why worry about spinal injuries at this point? -- and tells Horatio, "Sunburn says she's a tourist. You know what that means." That she forgot to apply her sunscreen before getting her neck snapped? Horatio says disapprovingly, "Come down here to blow off steam, think the usual rules don't apply." Yes -- like the rules of sentence construction -- would it kill these people to speak in complete sentences? She came down here for spring break, she thought the rules didn't apply! It's not hard. Alexx says sadly, "Spring break. How'd this happen, sugar? All you wanted was a week of fun and sun. Good time, hanging out with your friends." Horatio adds, "It should have been the time of her life, Alexx, instead of the end of it."

The Who screams their agreement. Credits, then commercials. Yay, X-Men 2! Boo, Hitler!

Once we're back from commercials, we see a few shots of packed beaches, and then we're back with the dead girl. We find out thanks to Tripp that the morning morons did indeed manage to combine their brainpower and remember the 9-1-1 sequence, and then we see Horatio request a new body bag for the girl, for reasons beyond my understanding. He also wants her in the special morgue for VIPs. Tripp suggests that the girl could have been dumped, but Horatio tells him the lack of drag marks suggests that the crime happened on the spot. What, and people can't kick the sand around after dragging someone somewhere? Tripp says, "This time of year, all the nuts roll down to south Florida." Speedle, who's been skulking over at the edge of the crime scene, tells Horatio there was a big party at this spot. Horatio wants to know how Speedle knows. "'Cause I was there, okay? The Speed Man needs to blow off a little steam after a long shift, okay?" Oh, he does not. Instead, Speedle points out the presence of motor oil stains on the sand, which lead him to conclude, "Only snowbirds be dumb enough to park way out here. They're lucky the tide didn't take their vehicle." Horatio instructs, "Let's set a grid of ten yards in both directions, see what we got?" Which both directions -- up and out? Up and down? And what is this "we"? Doesn't Horatio have sisters-in-law to ogle, the unjust to stalk, the afflicted to comfort?

Cut to yet another party scene, because CSI: Miami hasn't fulfilled its breast-flashing quota for the week. We then see Calleigh -- or rather, her back -- as she walks somewhere, and off-camera, a guy says, "Hey, blondie. You're hot. Flash me." I can't believe that would actually work under any circumstances. We get the front view, where the camera monkey is capering behind Calleigh, imploring, "Why don't you show me something? Flash me, flash me, flash me. You know you want to." It's a wonder this young man still has most of his facial features intact. Calleigh eventually turns around and opens her jacket to reveal her police gun holstered at her hip, and her badge. She asks, "Is this hot enough for you, or do you want to see my weapons permit?" The camera-clown is all, "I didn't mean anything," because the words "flash me, flash me, you know you want to" can be taken in so many ways. Calleigh heads upstairs, while the camera-clown swoons on the landing, either in the throes of a road-to-Damascus conversion moment where he'll subsequently quit his gig and devote his time to helping nonprofits like About Face combat unrealistic media images of women, or thinking, "After this, we should branch out into Babes in Blue."

Anyway, now that's Calleigh's shrugged off that latest aggravation -- because God knows it's a burden being so beautiful -- she heads up to see what all the fuss is about. Why, it's about the young man lying at the bottom of the pool. The pool, by the way, is filled with floating leaves and kelp, which can't be good for the filter. Vin Ethanol tells us, "The motel manager called it in. He says there were a hundred kids out here last night, and no one saw anything." Those same hundred kids are now all hanging around on the balconies, watching the goings-on through their hangover hazes. We don't yet know if the victim was staying there, and the habit of booking a room for ten certainly isn't going to make checking the hotel registry a quick and painless task. After Vin Ethanol stalks off, Delko points out, "[The dead body] hasn't been down there long. It usually takes a while for the body to float. Body gasses have to have time to build up." Calleigh looks at Delko and says, "Well, it looks like somebody's getting wet." "Music to my ears," he replies. You know, these two have a lot more chemistry when they're not trying so hard. Delko peels off his shirt to reveal the wetsuit he's wearing underneath -- what, he wears that thing everywhere? Wouldn't that get uncomfortable after a while? -- and the girls ringing the balconies and the pool patio whoop appreciatively. Then he dives in to pick up the body.

Back on the patio, two girls -- I'm getting tired of typing bikini-clad, so let's just assume, for purposes of brevity, that unless stated otherwise, any of the spring-break crowd to whom the CSIs are speaking are wearing bathing suits -- hunker down and get Calleigh's attention, with, "Excuse me, ma'am? Can we talk to you?" "Only if you promise not to call me 'ma'am,'" Calleigh replies. One girl replies, "Your friend is so totally hot. Do you know if he has a girlfriend?" Calleigh replies, "Um. Not currently." I wonder what happened to the girl he was boffing when he got his testicles irradiated. Maybe she had a Silkwood-style meltdown. The girl asks, "Well, how old is he?" For some reason, that throws Calleigh.

You know, with two mentions of how hot the CSIs are in less than two minutes, I'm beginning to get the impression that we're supposed to think of this crew as the sexy CSI team, as opposed to those stodgy folks in Las Vegas. Anyway, once Delko's hauled the body on to the patio, he tells Calleigh, "Cute girls." She replies, "Yeah, they thought you were cute too." Delko replies, "You know I don't like girls that way -- I thought they'd be cute in my new neoprene line of eveningwear." Oh, he does not. Instead he pumps Calleigh for details on what they said, and she passes him the note they wrote: "Do you like me? Check this box: [] Yes. [] No." Oh, she does not. I'm sorry -- this whole scene is just so ludicrous, I can't recap it straight. Calleigh merely busts his chops by reminding him obliquely that they're a little on the young side.

Anyway, after the camera lingers on Pool Guy's scraped feet -- with the blood still present -- Delko compresses the guy's chest a few times and concludes, "I don't think he drowned. There's no foam around his nostrils or his mouth. Means there's no water in his lungs." Calleigh notes the foot scratches and bruises on the guy's arms, and concludes that he might have been beaten. Delko adds, "Wasted too. Check out the tag on his trunks. On backwards." Calleigh concludes, "Something's not right. We should get an autopsy." Oh, should they? And here I thought all unexplained deaths got autopsies anyway.

And now -- the VIP room. The girl's on the slab, Alexx is preparing to rinse her off, and Horatio's doing her hair. He finds a sparkly star barrette and asks, "Still a little girl, isn't she?" Or one of those annoying ravers with the kiddie culture couture. Alexx then summons Horatio to check out the tooth marks on the girl's body -- "At least six sets, avulsed. Most dramatic type. Bites like this don't just happen." By the way, an avulsed wound is one in which the tissue is forcibly separated or torn from the victim's body, so we're supposed to infer that the bite marks here are particularly deep and vicious. Horatio concludes that they've got a predator, and says, "Let's see if he had a history." Alexx will swab for saliva and semen to see if there's anything for CODIS. Horatio will call the forensic odontologist.

Outside the VIP room, there's a party on the beach and everyone's invited! As Speedle digs alone -- so much for that vaunted "we" Horatio was flinging about -- we see a tequila booth about to go up, with giant bottles being inflated under a gaudy yellow tent. Speedle digs, and then some tequila shill clad in a company shirt and khakis is sprinting toward him. He stops at the tape and shouts, "Buddy! You want to get this moving?" Speedle unbends from his hunched position with a look that clearly says, I didn't get enough coffee this morning and you, buddy, are going to pay. The khaki-wearing tool says, "Hey! Ted Zink, Matraca Tequila. You're in my party area." Speedle asks, faintly and incredulously, "Your what?" Ted explains, "We're hosting a big event for the Greeks. Part of our spring break marketing package: Lauderdale, Daytona, Miami Beach. We take the party wherever the kids are. You know, you hook 'em young, they're yours for life." Speedle is unimpressed by this guy's clever marketing strategy, and says testily, "Sir, can you read the yellow tape there? It says 'crime scene.'" Ted is unfazed: "Hey, I got a permit to be here." Ted is very stupid, because if he were half the marketing weasel he thinks he is, he'd realize that one surefire way to get a facile and fickle market turned off is by obstructing a spring-break murder scene. Speedle says sarcastically, "Ohhhhh. A permit!" Ted's basking in the glow of righteous stupidity: "Yeah, that's right. From Parks and Rec." Speedle wanders on over to the corner where Ted's nodding his head, pulls out his cell phone, and begins punching numbers as he says, "Well, I'm going to let you tell that to the parents of the girl who got murdered here last night." Somewhere in the primordial recesses of Ted the Marketing Weasel's brain, a survival instinct flares up, and he realizes he's walking into a Bad Idea trap.

Speedle continues, "I'm going to let you tell them that we can't process this crime scene because you have a permit for a party." Oh, Speedle, you just made my heart go pitter-pat. Ted backpedals furiously, "You misunderstood me," because "I got a permit to be here" is really Matraca Tequila-speak for "Please, continue to dig here." Speedle's not done yet -- he adds, "Then I'm going to arrest your cheap tequila-pushing ass, and have you spend the night in lockup, with all the drunk-and-disorderlies, and you can smell the vomit of the fraternity boys." Ted magnanimously decides the party can wait until Speedle's finished. Speedle returns the courtesy with, "That's a capital idea, Ted."

Horatio's now searching the computer databases for other cases in which female rape-and-murder victims were found on the beach, but the real point of this screen is to show him and (Y)Elena making goo-goo eyes at each other as she stands in the corridor and talks to some nameless flunky. First Horatio watches (Y)Elena and smiles while she chatters, and then he actually gets a hit on a similar murder and looks down at God-knows-what while (Y)Elena wanders over to the glass wall and undresses Horatio with her eyes. Believe me, it's as painful for me to watch as it is for you to read. When Horatio looks up again, (Y)Elena has scampered off. He answers his cell phone, and it's Alexx. She tells him of the semen she found: "Oh, I recovered it. Sent it on to CODIS. Findings are postmortem. The vaginal tears at five, six, and seven. No resistance or compliance by our victim." Apparently not comprehending the meaning of the word "postmortem," Horatio asks, "Was she unconscious?" Alexx replies, "I was hoping for that too. So I swabbed her wounds. No blood was circulating at the time of penetration. She was already dead." So now they're looking for a necrophiliac biter. That should eliminate a substantial portion of the greater Miami-Dade metro area. I hope.

We see a few more camera's-eye views of the Babes on the Beach girls -- and it amazes me that these girls simply accept a t-shirt and not, say, a royalty check for what they're doing on-camera. Then again, given the probable mental capacity of a would-be Babe on the Beach, the idea of someone else getting large sums of money for the dissemination of their images is probably too complex for them to comprehend sober, much less as drunk as they undoubtedly are when these guys go trolling with their cameras. We then see the beach, where Speedle is doggedly digging. He hits pay dirt, metaphorically speaking, when he finds a Michigan ID for a Rachel Moon.

Speedle has evidently hied to the lab, where he's handing the ID to a lab tech and explaining, "That's her picture. The birthdate says 1979, but there's no way she's 24 years old." The tech explains, "If it's a fake, it's a good one. There are no glue lines, no bumps. Lamination thickness is dead on." And this is where I show my age and reveal that when I first got my driver's license in Virginia, it was a two-parter in a little plastic envelope; the first part had your photo and signature, and the second part had your license information. This way, when you switched from your learner's permit to your license, all they had to do was swap out a piece of paper. And when you turned 21, you went from getting a profile photo to a full-on frontal photo. Therefore, by the time I got to college, it was not uncommon to walk into my newspaper office around spring break and see people scanning in assorted pictures and license parts to create fakes. Ah, the good old days, when faking license information was easy! Anyway, Speedle asks, "Whatever happened to just stealing your older sister's ID?" The tech replies, "These days, you don't have to. A college kid with a scanner and a high-res printer can rip these things out." He then puts the ID under the sooper-dooper forensic ID debunker thingy and comments on the quality work: inclusion of the state seal, UV ink, a security layer of "invisible" text. However, the forger missed the third layer of the laminate, so they're able to peel off the other layers and discover that the ID belongs to someone else named Rachel Moon.

Cut to Speedle explaining to Horatio, "We traced the license back to Rachel Moon of Michigan State. We faxed her a picture of our victim. She ID'd her -- some girl in her dorm. Tiffany Heitzenrader." Tiffany's a 19-year-old, varsity soccer-playing homecoming queen on the dean's list. We find out that Tiffany's sister is flying down because the Heitzenrader parents are too broken up to do so. Horatio commands, "Let Me know when she gets here." Oh, that's just creepy.

Horatio gets back to his database searching and finds a whole lot of nothing. Fortunately, Tripp comes in just then to tell him CODIS got a hit on the semen, and it belongs to Carson Mackie, aged 28, owner of a video company with a New Jersey address. Carson was convicted of statutory rape in 1993; he was 19, she was 17. We discover that Carson is currently in the Miami area.

After another gratuitous shot of a woman's breasts -- I love how this show is all outraged for the nubile young victim, and yet practices the mindless objectification of women that leads people to regard females as fair game for anything -- and a few more video-eye-perspective shots of women with bodies that would make your average college-aged women roll her eyes, we see Carson. It's the tool with the camera from the pre-credits sequence, Mr. Firefly himself. He's all, "All right, ladies. Spring break only comes once a year. What are you going to show me?" Again, my suggestion -- a palm breaking the camera lens -- is not the one the ladies consider. One girl asks, "Will you see our faces?" Carson evades a direct answer with, "Believe me, if you take off your top, nobody will be looking at your face. Come on, show me something." What, it would kill this guy to say "please"? His temerity is breathtaking. We get a camera's-eye view of the pitch, and then Horatio pops into the scene and waves. Heh -- that is probably the first evidence ever of Horatio having a sense of humor. Horatio heads over as Tripp tells Carson the cops want a few words with him. Like countless tools before him, Carson is under the impression that the police are somehow subservient to his schedule, and not vice-versa.

There's a brief scene where the odontologist is snapping pictures of Tiffany's assorted bite marks while Horatio waits in the skybox. The odontologist then takes molds of the bites, the better to match them against Carson's dental molds.

Cut to Horatio getting the bad news from Otho the Odontologist (what? It's not like the writer gave us a better name): the tooth molds don't match. Oh, wait -- we do have a name once Horatio argues, "John, this guy stinks." So? Are you asking John to frame the guy? Are you suggesting that everyone cram the evidence into a neat conclusion? Anyway, Horatio takes out his bad mood on Carson, since they will be charging him with necrophilia, and Tripp adds that they're going to share that information with law enforcement agencies up and down the Florida peninsula. Unless there's some necrophilia notification law in place -- kind of Megan's Law, except for necrophiliacs -- I can't see how Horatio and Tripp haven't just opened themselves up to a huge harassment lawsuit. Tripp adds, "Every time you roll into town, every time you set up shop, the law's going to be looking over your shoulder and making jokes like 'Why are you interested in her? She's still breathing!'" Oh, he does not -- he starts off with the set-up-shop thing, then finishes by pointing out that scantily-clad, underage-drinking young women tend not to hang out with cops. Horatio adds, "So why don't you put that in your video?" Somehow, "Why don't you cram that up your ass?" seems like it would have been more effective.

Cue Speedle coming in to show Horatio something; the Grief Whisperer departs, leaving Carson to contemplate how unfair it is that he got buzzed when those guys in Weekend at Bernie's never had to pay. Anyway, Speedle's showing him a new database they've rigged up where they've munged all the data from assorted sexual assault and murder cases on the beach, and come up with three other cases -- Daytona Beach, Panama City, Key West -- in addition to Miami. As we see assorted shots of broken-necked women, Horatio notes, "All spring break destinations where the girls are most vulnerable." Speedle replies, "This guy's calculating." Horatio notes, "And he has plenty of opportunities because we've got two weeks left to go." This makes very little sense, as it's not established whether the deaths took place over this spring break, or over the past three. And if it were this spring break, then wouldn't the nature of the deaths have made it into the newspaper, or wouldn't other police departments have put out a warning for this guy? Anyway, Horatio gets off the cell phone and tells Speedle that they've got another victim -- only this one's alive.

Hey, what do you know? The victim was attending the Matraca Tequila party! I bet Ted the Marketing Weasel is on his knees in the distance, bellowing to the heavens, "How have I wronged you? I just wanted to sell bad tequila!" Horatio heads on over to the victim and says, "Amy? I'm Horatio Caine. I'm with the crime lab. You all right?" Amy's petulant, sobby, "NO!" is unintentionally hilarious. Horatio asks, "What happened?" Amy tells him, "I was with all my friends at this tequila party up by the hotel, and I guess I did too many shots, 'cause I felt like I was going to heave. I walked on the beach and I must have passed out." Horatio asks what happened after that, and Amy replies, "I thought I was dreaming of sharks. I opened my eyes, and this guy is biting me. So I yelled my damn head off and kicked him as hard as I could, and I must've connected, because he left." Amy couldn't get a good look at him, because it was dark and she was still pretty drunk.