Oh, sure, there's the Las Vegas strip. But two industrious Western Las Vegas University students are more interested in a personal kind of strip, if you know what I mean. The scene is a lot more artistically lit and framed than what your typical dormie gets when they're about to a) get lucky, and b) spark off the latest round of gossip up and down the hall.
Many network-friendly depictions of copulation ensue. And then God punishes the fornicators by killing them and leaving their cooling remains to be heckled by a clutch of cynical CSIs. But in His infinite mercy, He effects a miracle and puts the female fornicator -- "fornicatress"? "Fornicatrix"? Anyway, through some divine agency, the chick died with her bra on. Perhaps she suffered brain death after her underwire cut off her circulation. Brass quickly tells us that Trip Wilmont and Paula Levine have two things in common: they're both 18, and they're both dead.
As everyone rolls on down the hall, Liam the larval CSI calls out, "Hey, Grissom, when you went to college, did you live in the dorms?" "Surely you jest," Gil deadpans in response. Well, it's your loss, Gil. Sara heads off further discussion of Gil Grissom, Undergrad, by musing, "They say a B.A.'s worth a million dollars in extra income over a lifetime." Gil shoots back, "Yeah, but the present value of college tuition is about the same amount." Har dee har. Also, Sara overstated by a little; according to the U.S. government's "The Big Payoff: Educational Attainment and Synthetic Estimates of Work-Life Earnings" (warning: PDF), a high school graduate is likely to earn $1.2 mil over the course of their lifetime compared to the $2.1 mil someone with a bachelor's degree is likely to pull in. That's only $900,000 more. Better to go on for the master's degree, where you're likely to pull in $2.5 mil over your lifetime. And if you're lucky, your student loan payments won't wipe out that $400,000 earnings differential between you and someone who escaped college after only four years!
Ahem. I appear to have gotten a little pedantic here. Sorry about that. To get back to Gil, Sara, and Liam's comparative economics seminar, Liam asks, "So you're saying college isn't worth the expense?" "I'm saying it depends on what you learn," Gil shoots back. I'm thinking Gil could have stood learning a little about human nature in the dorms.
Anyway, Brass corrals the stray CSIs and leads them into Trip's room; Trip and Paula were discovered only after Trip missed a pivotal basketball game this afternoon; the R.A. got Trip's -door neighbor to jimmy the lock, and the paramedics took off after looking around and saying, "Yeah, the bodies are dead."
The CSIs troop inside. Gil looks around at the incredibly plushy mattress and box spring, the two pink, dead bodies on the floor, and the generally clichéd dorm décor. Sara comments, "Music, alcohol, candles. Kid was a regular Romeo." Gil replies, "For never was a story of more woe, than this of Juliet and her Romeo." Liam reminds us that sixteenth-century England was not without its bawdy humor: "Condom wrapper." Ah, mood-killer. How we do love thee. Gil rescues the scene by taking in the condom and quipping, "So much for safe sex."
The Who would like to know if it would have killed Gil to whip up another heroic couplet.
Commercials are over! I'm so glad that Elvis thing is off the air now. The first three roles I saw Jonathan Rhys-Myers in were as a sociopathic gender-bending rocker (Velvet Goldmine), a sociopathic Confederate solider (Ride With the Devil), and a sociopathic tyrant-in-the-making (Gormenghast). So now I kind of expect that quality in everything he does. While the nerve-wracking tension (Is this the moment he snaps?) added a pleasant element of suspense to Bend It Like Beckham, I think The King has enough cultural baggage without the pansexual sociopath thing on top of it. I'm just saying.
Wow, there I go again. You know this episode is not, shall we say, holding my attention when I'm all, "Hey! Let's chat about government statistics and Irish actors instead!" Yanking my attention back to what I'm actually paid to watch…
We're in Trip's dorm room, and Emergency Backup David's asking Sara to open a window. He notes the pinkish bodies and Gil says, "You're thinking pink skin tones are a common effect of carbon monoxide poisoning." Liam helpfully adds, "That vomit [on the floor]'s also consistent with exposure to C.O." Or it could have been premonition-fueled horfing: "Someone with too much product and a straightening iron is going to see me in my skivvies? Oh, I'm gonna be sick…" Gil tells Liam to take some vomit samples, and then tells Sara he's got to take off, as "[his] testimony's come up in the Hoyt case." The same Hoyt case we just saw in February? The wheels of justice are rolling at, what, 90 miles an hour? Gil rolls by only slightly less rapidly; he leaves Sara in charge.
Meanwhile, Susan the R.A. is busy telling Brass that she knew something was wrong when basketball-on-the-brain Trip missed a semifinal game. The -door neighbor kid adds, "I saw Susan banging on the door, so I used my pocketknife to jam it open." Brass asks if this is an acquired skill, and we find out that Zach developed this skill in self-defense, since every time Tripp got drunk and locked himself out of his room, he'd bang on Zach's door. Brass asks innocently, "You and Trip were friends?" Zach replies, "I'm not really the type of guy that Trip Wilmont would hang out with." "So I guess that's a no," Brass says sweetly. He's so sneaky like that. Zach adds, "We had Spanish 102 together. Sometimes, he'd roll over to my room, and I'd help him with his homework." "Did you help him, or did you do it for him?" Brass shrewdly asks. Zach just gives him a look. Brass says lightly, "Look, it's not the Spanish Inquisition." ¡O, SEÑOR BRASS! ¡TE AMO! Zach quickly tells Brass that Trip was hardly King Jerk of the jocks, but the two would never be considered friends.
Sara and Liam work the room. She's waving around a CO detector and finding nothing. Liam notes a trace of semen on the door handle, and heads outside to find a matching trace outside the door. Sara comes out just in time to catch Liam curling his lip in contempt. He explains, "Trophy condoms...when a stud scores, he announces his victory by putting his spoils on his neighbor's doorknob." Because that's so much more tasteful that cupping your groin and bellowing, "I GOT SOME!" Sara struggles to retain some sangfroid here, saying a little too casually, "Oh. My bet? Trip scored a lot." Liam's saved from having to reply to that by a toilet conveniently blowing up in the bathroom.
She and Liam wade into the bathroom, and survey the carnage. "Spontaneous? Toilet combustion?" Liam asks. Sara's cracking up as she replies, "Or a college prank." Liam wonders if the exploding toilet has anything to do with the case, and Sara replies, "Twenty feet away from two dead kids, we gotta check it out. Guess you should start processing this." Well, they do say it all flows downhill, newbie.
And now we're back in the Labitrail, where Vartann is wandering around, a searching look plastered across his attractive mug. Maybe he misplaced his copy of Thin Tastes Better. Why, no, I haven't forgiven him his behavior from earlier. Vartann is looking for a CSI; unfortunately, he finds Ecklie. The detective's feeling testy: "Homicide called you over an hour ago! A 419 at the Tangiers. No one's responded, not even the coroner." Ecklie wants to know if Vartann's hit up Gil or Catherine yet. Well, yeah: Catherine's on a case, and Gil's in court. Vartann also mentions, "Sofia's still on her task force leave. Both shifts are tapped." First of all, what is this task force of which Vartann speaks? Second of all, both shifts? BOTH? Did we not all sit through the episode where Ecklie decides not to put Catherine on the day shift, and then the episode in which Sofia went on about missing the day shift? Wouldn't that imply the existence of a day shift -- making it the third shift for the CSIs? So why this two-shifts business now? Surely there are other ways to get to the point of the scene, which is this: Vartann embarrasses Ecklie into working the case, and Ecklie's got a severe case of performance anxiety.
Down on the morgue, Sara strolls in and David the Flesh-Colored Coroner shrugs that he's looking at two healthy pink people who were in perfect health. Sara groans, "I am so hoping that you have more in your report than that." David says, "Well, there are two toxins which can turn a body pink post-mortem." Sara says they've already ruled out carbon monoxide. David plows on over her: "Which leaves one -- cyanide ingestion. Interesting fact about cyanide: not everybody can smell it...unfortunately, I don't have that ability." On cue, Hodges flings open the morgue doors and announces, "The Nose has arrived." ¡O, SEÑOR HODGES! ¡TE AMO! In a tone pregnant with dread, Sara asks, "Hodges has the genetic quirk?" "It's a blessing and a curse," Hodges answers modestly. He strolls on over and sniffs the stomach contents of both decedents. After some considered inhalation, Hodges decrees, "Hints of stale beer and Cheez Whiz. But I don't smell any cyanide." After Hodges floats off, Sara says, "All due respect to 'The Nose,' I'd still like to send a sample of blood to Tox." David sweetly tells her it's already done.
Cut to Ecklie getting out of his car and walking over to the body. Mark Vann does a great job with this scene, because the way he comports himself, you can easily imagine that Ecklie a) has a dread-induced stomachache, and b) hates that he does because c) it betrays the tiny voice in the depths of his soul pointing out that he's never been very good at being a CSI. So, good job by Vann. As he walks over, Vartann snots, "Crime scene's getting cold." Ecklie retreats behind what he knows best -- regulations -- and says stiffly, "I had to refill my powders." I half expect Warrick to pop up and begin babbling the whole "I keep my case tight, like my game. But not my pants" monologue again. As Ecklie looks over and thinks, "Yup, that's a dead body all right," Vartann tells him he found a rental car agreement in the glove box, and the dead guy's also known as James Billmeyer of New Jersey. He's not registered at the hotel, making it the rare dead body on the Tangiers premises that isn't also a hotel guest. One imagines this is important for whatever "Now [XX] Days Without Stumbling Over A Corpse" signs the Tangiers security keeps around the office. Ecklie snaps pictures of a nearby bloodstain and asks irritably if the coroner stepped in blood. Vartann replies, "No. We're still waiting on him. That shoeprint belongs to Mrs. Vivoldi. She called it in. We're waiting on you to take the statement." Ecklie says, "Let's do it," and Vartann snots, "Yes. Let's do it." You know, I can see where Vartann's pissed and all, but it seems like Ecklie is the type of person you don't want to cross because he holds a grudge and has a near-savant like ability to manipulate the machinery of bureaucracy; for a cop, that could easily translate into "night shift for ten years" or "lost all the pension paperwork a week before retirement."
Ecklie and Vartann then head over to Mrs. Vivoldi, who is what used to be called "a real pip." She explains, "I'd just finished lunch with the girls. We say 'girls,' but we're, you know, women." Ecklie gives Vartann a half-amused look. "I don't find being called a girl derogatory," Mrs. Vivoldi coos at Vartann. He's all, "Ah. Heh. And?" She continues, "I walking to the car. The SUV. A gift from Oscar. Thirty years with the same man." "Congratulations," Ecklie says unctuously. She beams: "Thank you. Are you married?" All pretenses of charm flee as Ecklie spits, "Divorced." Mrs. Vivoldi then seizes the opportunity to ask Vartann. He totally dodges the question, and steers Mrs. Vivoldi back on track.
To make a long flashback short, she totally ended up stepping in the blood that presumably pooled under Billmeyer's head. She's now got blood all over one of her equestrian-themed loafers (it's supposed to evoke Hermes, I think). Ecklie coaxes her out of them with, "We'll get 'em back to you. Even wash off the blood."
Back at the Labitrail, Paula's mom is going through the usual rambly, shock-filled monologue, finishing with, "She shouldn't have been in a boy's room!" The camera pans away from her, over Sara's back, and then...to Trip's mom, who's insisting, "Trip was a serious athlete. He would never sleep around the night before --" "Sleep around! Lady, have you READ I Am Charlotte Simmons? That's all collegiate basketball players do! It's not like they can fill their free time with reading!" Paula's mom shoots back. More or less. Considerably less. By the way, whose bright idea was it to have both sets of grieving parents in the same room? Because Trip's dad just called Paula a tramp, and I'm sure that's what every bereaved parent wants to hear -- that their daughter was a whore. And I'm sure many people would actually be mortified that all their decency flew out the window while they were reeling from grief. At least, I hope that's the case. Anyway, this scene is just so stupid, I can't bear it.
Commercials. The psycho-Elvis, he will haunt me in my dreams.
Hey! It's Catherine's case that we've all heard so much about! And the reason it's taken us so long to get to it is because it took Catherine, Warrick, and Nicky a long time to get to the rolling alfalfa fields of Iowa. What mysteries lurk among this perennial herbaceous legume? Will one of them be "What the hell is an alfalfa field doing in the DESERT CLIMATE of Nevada?" As the waders-clad Catherine and Warrick slog out to the scene, Warrick tells her, "This land used to be part of the Bennett estate." Catherine replies, "Bill Bennett? The guy who owned the Sahara?" No, Bill Bennett, the author of The Book of Virtues. He's got some ties to the gambling industry too. Anyway, Warrick continues, "Yeah, we used to come out here when we were in high school. It was like a seven-acre lover's lane." Catherine says, "I thought you said you were a dork in high school." Warrick responds, "I was a dork in high school. I'm still a dork. But I had dimples. I got a little action." Warrick has dimples? I suppose if he ever actually smiled on this show, we'd see them. Catherine doesn't doubt Warrick got play in the fields as a nerd.
She and Warrick make their way over to Emergency Backup David, who's looking a little spooked. The corpse is in the middle of a flattened circle; all the vegetation's been blown down. Emergency Backup David explains that we're looking at the 30-year-old Kevin Staniland, recently of Reno. He adds, "I figured before I processed the body, you'd want to photograph the crop circle." Warrick's all, "Crop? Circle?" Emergency Backup David quavers, "Well, it's a circle in the middle of a field? What would you call it?" Warrick concedes the point. He and Catherine wander over; Catherine wonders if the blindfold means Kevin was in a game of pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey gone terribly wrong. I wonder if Catherine's pumpkin-colored part means she was in a hair-coloring accident gone terribly wrong. Emergency Backup David turns over the body and announces that lividity's fixed, meaning that Kevin died there, instead of being dumped by puckish aliens as they sped off to wreck more crops and hang out with Whitley Streiber readers. Catherine wonders how Kevin ended up in the middle of the circle. As the music goes all funny, Emergency Backup David raises his eyes skyward and says, "I have an idea…" Warrick shoots him a look, and he adds, "I'll keep it to myself."
Back in the dorm, Liam and Sara confirm that the exploding toilet is still a mystery for the ages.
Emergency Backup David's back in the morgue and processing Kevin's body when Nicky bursts in hooting, "Crop circles? Come on, Super Dave, wasn't the alien autopsy embarrassing enough?" Wow, it's a rare day when Nicky can bust someone's chops at work. Usually he's the forensic piñata. Emergency Backup David replies, "Given the circumstances, alien was not an unreasonable conclusion at the time." Nicky snickers, "You need to get a girlfriend." "I'm engaged," Emergency Backup David snaps. Warrick's got a look like, And what does that have to do with getting a girlfriend? Then we get down to transmitting information: there's grass stains on Kevin's knees, and his tighty-whiteys were soaked in urine; it's unclear if that's pre- or post-mortem.
Just then, a big, flat white worm comes poking out of Kevin's mouth. Warrick yelps, "Ohhh! That's ALIEN! What is this?" Emergency Backup David grabs a camera and says, "I've got to document this." Nicky gets to bring the science -- or so he thinks -- with, "Hang on. We've got ourselves a tapeworm, gentlemen. This guy's been eating meat or fish infected with tapeworm cyst." As the TMIcam shows the cyst settling in a stomach, Warrick adds, "And that cyst grows up to be a nice, fat tapeworm that attaches itself to the intestinal wall to suck out all your nutrients." Nicky concludes, "Since this guy's dead, the tapeworm needed to find a new host." And that's when I said, "Really?"
My first question upon viewing this was, "How does the tapeworm know when a host is dead?" They're not extraordinarily complicated creatures. The guy was probably infected with one of two tapeworms: the beef tapeworm (Taenia saginata) or the pork tapeworm (Taenia solia). Both are pretty basic animals, with two outstanding body parts: the scolex, which attaches to the gut and becomes the primary means by which the worm ingests (our) food; and the proglottid, which is a flat segment containing both male and female organs. The tapeworm will continue to add proglottids throughout its life -- beef tapeworms can have 1000 of 'em -- and the terminal proglottid's the one that performs a reproductive function: it breaks off the worm, passes out of the human host, and releases eggs, thus beginning a new lifecycle.
So we're not dealing with animals known for moving around, except in bits and pieces. And in the research I did, I couldn't find any documented instances in which a mature adult tapeworm fled its dead host. I'm inclined to disbelieve CSI's scientific veracity here, if only because I can't believe that in a world where there are an estimated 100 million tapeworm infection cases annually -- some of which inevitably contribute to the death of their host -- we haven't seen the Animal Planet show Peripatetic Parasites where all the dispossessed cestodes are wandering around, looking for a new host. I'm also inclined to wonder: Were the people who wrote this maybe thinking of roundworm (Ascaris lumbricoides) migration, described here in delightfully squirmy detail? I mean, I'm open to documented incidents in which a tapeworm was seen fleeing a dead body, and if you know of any, put 'em in the episode thread. I just haven't been able to find any myself, and it's not for lack of looking. ANYWAY. Did that scene suddenly make you paranoid about your own intestinal flora? Anyone?
Sara swings by Mia's lab for a little girl talk about semen. The semen on the doorknobs is consistent with Trip's DNA. Mia concludes, "What I'm thinking is that Trip put a trophy condom on his neighbor's door, and then transferred a trace of his reproductive material back on to his own doorknob." Sara looks a little weirded out that Mia's so comfortable with the idea of trophy condoms; Mia says wryly, "Sara, I went to college." Well, so did I, and we didn't decorate with prophylactics either, so step off, Mia. Liam comes in right then to share the news that he "just spoke with WLVU's student affairs officer. Apparently Trip's -door neighbor, Zach Capola, filed several grievances against him. I'm headed over there now." Sara begins to take off and says, "I'll drive." "You always do," Liam says forlornly.
Down in the morgue, Catherine and David are hanging out over Kevin's corpse. "He's got a time of death -- about midday, the day before. The cause of death is less definitive. Cuts and abrasions are superficial, there's no obvious anatomical defect, and at this point, I'm going to have to check the default, cardiac arrhythmia." Catherine prods, "A young man's heart stops and you don't know why?" David's not backing down.
Cut to Zach yawning at the CSIs, "This is bunk. They said my grievances were confidential. They said my name wasn't even on the form." Sara wants to know why confidentiality is so important, and Zach points to Liam, replying, "Ask him. You look like you were a jock in college." Liam asks, "Me?" seconds before a genuinely skeptical Sara asks, "Him?" Ha! Zach points out, "If it had gotten around that I had ratted out Trip, the whole basketball team would have come down on me." Sara and Liam work around to implying that Zach was lying earlier. Zach says, "I didn't see a need to badmouth the dead. But if you want the truth, he was an ass, okay?" If his parents are any indication, Trip came by it naturally. Sara and Liam look at each other as if wondering, Someone who has a sense of appropriateness when it comes to how one speaks of the dead?
And now, back to the morgue for more hijinks. David strolls on inside and nearly scares himself silly when he sees Ecklie lurking among the body drawers. With his customary, faintly accusatory tone, Ecklie asks, "Where have you been?" David's not having any of it; he replies, "I posted three bodies, and then I took a time-out." Ecklie tries on the unfamiliar word combination: "A time...out?" David continues imperturbably, "A personal hour. A few weeks ago, my Siamese had kittens. I went by the house to check on 'em. They're just about weaned. You want one?" Ecklie gives him a look and spits, "I'm allergic." I bet the first thing the former Mrs. Ecklie did when she left was to adopt a couple of cats. Anyway, the two turn to discussing the not-yet-autopsied James Billmeyer, which is how they discover that the drawer holding his body…now contains only air. Long story short: the body, it is lost. The whimsical strings, they play.
And the shit, it continues to flow downhill. In the scene, we see Emergency Backup David pacing and fidgeting outside Ecklie's office. He's making me tense just looking at him. David the Disgruntled Coroner swings on out. He stops to exchange a look with his underling; his disgusted expression speaks volumes. Curiously, this does not soothe his underling. Emergency Backup David heads in and stands nervously in front of Ecklie's desk. The harried-looking Ecklie is scribbling something on some paper, and giving off a general air of misery. Emergency Backup David casts his eyes skyward for guidance, then tentatively essays, "Sir?" "We? Have a situation," Ecklie quickly replies without looking up. "I know. The body disappeared," Emergency Backup David says. "No, no. Mr. Billmeyer didn't disappear. He's missing. There's a difference." Ecklie says through gritted teeth. He really does look exactly what you'd expect from a reptile who had embraced the Six Sigma program. Emergency Backup David protests, "Sir, this isn't my fault." Ecklie would like to believe otherwise. "You prepared the body for autopsy, right? Walk me through that." Emergency Backup David's all, "Come again?" I can see why: no doubt, Gil and Catherine wouldn't need to be told, nor would the make-believe leader of the Brigadoon shift formerly known as "days." He eventually says, "Okay. Um. I brought him into the washroom. I photographed the body. I took hair and fingernail cuttings. I emptied his pockets. I removed his clothing, washed his body, tagged him, I put him into the cooler, and I haven't seen him since." Ecklie decides he can't handle the truth, so he rolls his eyes and glares for a while. Emergency Backup David looks as if he wishes he could come up with a better lie. Ecklie continues to glare before saying, "I've lost my keys, I've lost my sunglasses, even a wallet --" "Sir, this really isn't my fault --" Emergency Backup David protests. "I never lost a body," Ecklie spits. "I didn't do anything," Emergency Backup David says, looking openly contemptuous. It's a weird look on him. "This goes on your record!" Ecklie threatens, always the last refuge of managers who know their underlings are better than they are. The scene ends with Emergency Backup David asking, "What would you have me do?" and Ecklie hollering, "Get out!" I don't think Ecklie was expecting Emergency Backup David to hold his ground. And underestimating his personnel is a sign of poor leadership.
Cut to a bored and irritated David the Contemptuous Coroner telling someone on the phone, "Six-one, brown hair, 200 pounds...are you sure? All right. Thanks." Emergency Backup David comes in, and David says, "I've checked every mortuary and funeral home in the city. No luck." Emergency Backup David says, "Right. Because you never authorized a transfer." David then asks his subordinate, "Are you familiar with the word necrostuprum?" Why, yes -- it means "body snatcher." David says acidly, "We didn't mislabel or misplace the body. Someone took it." Emergency Backup David asks, "If you wanted to steal a body, wouldn't it be easier to go to a hospital or university facility?" David concurs, then concludes, "Somebody wanted this particular body."
Meanwhile, Nicky's carrying on about crop circles in Catherine's general vicinity, then clues us in to the relevant portion of the monologue with: "In 1985, farmers near one U.S. military base suspected the source of a recent incident to be the downwash from a helicopter's rotor blades. The spinning of the blades caused the chopper to rise, forcing the air downward, in effect bending the grass below." Catherine quips, "For every action, there's an equal and opposite reaction." Words to live by, missy. Nicky explains, "Since I'm a skeptic when it comes to aliens and earth energies, I went with the chopper." And provided us with the sweet, sweet reason to see Archie.
Catherine seems as happy to see him as I am. He quickly proves himself useful above and beyond a purely aesthetic capacity -- not that his tremendous contribution in that regard should be underrated -- by analyzing radar feeds and proving that yes, a chopper was hovering above the ground the afternoon.
Cut to tired-seeming lab tech Henry bumping around his lab. Sara comes over, saying she got his page, then interrupting herself to ask, "Don't you work days?" "Ecklie keeps moving me around," Henry tells her dryly. That, or his shift receded into the mists, not to be seen again for another 100 years. We quickly establish that Trip and Paula were intoxicated. Drunk college kids having sex? What are the odds? Henry soon tells Sara, "You want a surprise? Check this out. I know you and Liam tested the scene for carbon monoxide, but did you check for carbon dioxide?" Sara says she didn't, explaining, "I've been a CSI for eight years. I've never processed a CO2 scene. I mean, you'd need a ton of that gas to cause serious damage --" "It's a first for me too," Henry says. He's all geeked up about it, though. Henry continues, "I found traces of blood in Trip's vomit. CO2 levels are usually .03% of blood. His levels were 8%." Sara explains why this is bad: "CO2 replaces oxygen on hemoglobin molecules. At 8%, those kids would have literally suffocated on the cellular level." Henry points out, "Still doesn't explain why they were pretty in pink. Carbon dioxide, unlike carbon monoxide, doesn't affect skin coloration."
In another part of the lab, a pissed-off Vartann is pawing through Billmeyer's suitcase. He peevishly asks why David wants him to do this, and the coroner calmly explains that someone obviously wanted Billmeyer's body, and his earthly belongings may explain why. Vartann snaps, "So you're a CSI now?" David gives him a long, level look and replies, "If I were, I'd have fingerprinted the cooler, dickhead." That last part is silent. Vartann looks at David with new respect, realizing that they're united in their total contempt of Ecklie. He then suggests, "Maybe you should just put together a list of everyone who had access to the morgue." The truce is over faster than the series run of a Rob Lowe-centered drama as David replies, "Law enforcement personnel, CSIs, paramedics, funeral home personnel, maintenance workers, hospital workers, janitors, people that get lost in the building…" Vartann concedes defeat. And then goes back to read the suitcase's entrails to see what they reveal of Billmeyer: "Two pairs of socks, two pairs of underwear, two t-shirts. That tells me the guy was going to be staying in Vegas for two days." David says snidely, "Your powers of deduction are remarkable, Detective." "Thank you," Vartann replies. David then finds the real clue -- or so he thinks, the poor, deluded, at-the-34-minute-mark man. It's an airline beverage napkin with one Jacinda Hendler's phone number and the legend "Call me!" on it. Vartann continues to state the obvious with, "Decedent probably met her on the flight, possibly hours before he died." "You think?" David snots. Vartann realizes that David's busting his chops and grips the napkin so he can run out, promising, "I'll run it down." Boys, boys, boys. Transcend whatever petty occupational quibbles you have and focus on the common enemy here: Ecklie.
Cut to Jacinda explaining that yes, she dug Jamie. She asks what happened to him, and Ecklie says cheerfully, "He died." It's left to Vartann to explain that they contacted her because her name was on a napkin, and she quickly spills the story: the two of them actually got frisky under an airline blanket, but prudence won out before the two of them decided to join the mile-high club. Ew. Not the airplane sex thing. The airline blanket thing -- those little rags are nasty; I'm surprised they're not used to suppress libidos. Jacinda tells them that Billmeyer had told her he was flying in to party with friends in Seven Hills.
Meanwhile, back at Trip's dorm room -- which Sara and Liam are surely getting tired of, despite how freakin' large it is -- Sara tells Liam they're looking for sources of CO2. "It comes from factories, cars and volcanos. It's not something we're going to find in a dorm room," Liam mopes. Liam has clearly never heard of the MIT pranks. Sara is busy wondering if someone pumped in gas via a vent, but Liam's too distracted by his newest discovery: "A sex journal! Names of girls, dates, and sexual activities." "Boys and their conquests," Sara sniffs. Frankly, I'm stunned that Trip was even literate enough to manage the details he had. Liam's reading through the entries. "I've never even heard of some of these," he marvels. Sara turns around and asks, "Really?" I have a feeling she's not averse to schooling the boy. And that...I have no idea how to feel about that. On the one hand: good for her for moving on from Gil. On the other: can't she find someone to date outside of work? When she invites Liam to help her move the bed, it kind of works on a number of levels. But the one we're most concerned about: there's a hole in the wall between Trip's room and Zach's, and it's just the right size for a gas-bearing pipe to be inserted. When they head over to Zach's room, there's a brief conversation about how he's a car buff, which somehow leads into the implication that surely, someone who's into mufflers would be able to drill a muffler-sized hole in the dorm room wall. Zach is all, "I didn't even know the hole was there!" He does not point out, "And it's kind of stupid for you guys to even imply that my interest in cars gave me the know-how to pump CO2 into Trip's room."
Meanwhile, in another plot, Catherine and Warrick have tracked down the owner of the helicopter as he lands the thing. What, the guy who figured out it was a helicopter wasn't allowed to put on his big-boy pants and go outside? Warrick says something that usually strikes fear into the hearts of the unwary -- "We've got information that puts you at a crime scene," but Morgan Wendel merely smiles and says, "You're here about Kevin." He says, "I'll tell you everything, but I want immunity." "We'll see," Catherine replies, whipping out her cell phone so she can call a D.A. and see about a deal. In another episode in a parallel universe.
One spiffy waiver of immunity later, we get the story in flashback: a blindfolded Kevin is told to jump out of the plane. He protests, "Without a parachute? That's my stunt? No way!" We pull back to see Catherine, the host Tucker, and some guy in a suit who I assume is a lawyer watching this flashback on tape. Tucker saying, "Dude! The name of this show is Going All The Way! You signed a contract! Now do it!" Kevin reasonably protests, "This isn't going all the way! It's suicide!" Now it's Nicky's turn to look disapproving. And then on the tape, Tucker says, "You've already eaten raw meat" -- when? A few months ago? Because that tapeworm was pretty mature. I'm just saying -- "you stuck your face in a beehive. You don't go all the way, you don't get nothing!" Tucker manages to look ashamed of himself. I hope. Especially since we've gotten to the point in the tape where Tucker's pushed him toward the hatch of the copter, Kevin's peed himself in fear, and Tucker's humane response is to snicker, "Get this! Get his crotch! Our first contestant peed his pants! RE! AL! I! TY! You can't fake this!" And then he pushes a screaming Kevin out of the plane. We then get to the gotcha twist: the plane was only four feet up, so it was all an elaborate joke. And once Tucker realizes that Kevin's not moving, it's time to turn off the camera so the cover-up's not recorded too.
In the interrogation room, Catherine says, "Kevin thought he was being pushed out of a helicopter a thousand feet in the air." The lawyer attempts to get Tucker off the hook by asking if they have a warrant for the tape. Catherine says, "The pilot gave us the name of the cameraman, who supplied us with the tape voluntarily." Tucker protests that he had assured Kevin that all the stunts were safe, so it's not his fault if Kevin didn't believe him, adding, "He signed a waiver. I'm not guilty of anything." Catherine points out, "When you saw that he wasn't moving, you just took off. That sounds like guilt to me." Nicky adds, "You scared him to death. He had a heart attack. So the signing of a waiver doesn't make it any less criminal." Catherine tags back in: "When the jury sees that tape, you'll be going all the way -- TO JAIL. Second-degree murder, 25 to life." Tucker looks at his lawyer as if to say, "Feel free to jump in here and offer a plea bargain, paid professional law guy."
And that plotline's wrapped up. It's awfully gutsy of the show that gets it ratings lead-in from Survivor to go making statements about the kind of people who get involved in reality TV.
So let's get back to Ecklie's case. He pulls up to the lab in his CSImobile and notices a lot of people milling around a bench marked off with yellow tape. Ecklie ducks under, muttering, "I hope this is a fire drill," and David cheerily says, "Conrad! We found our body." "More like he found us," Ecklie replies. And from the looks of it -- party hat, cigar in mouth, ugly shirt -- the body's been having a better day than Ecklie is.
As Ecklie snaps photos of the body as-is, he says, "Doc, I want you to process the body." David doesn't even bother to disguise his withering contempt as he says, "Yeah, Conrad, I'll get right on it." Heh. He is the wrong person to piss off in that lab. Emergency Backup David comes over and acidly comments, "Ah, yes. The guy we left on the bench." You know, when you've pissed off Emergency Backup David, you have no friends left on the planet.
Hey! Gil's swung by to pour some lemon juice in the paper cuts of Ecklie's ego. He gives his superior a cheery hello. Without even looking up, Ecklie snarls, "I thought you were supposed to be in court." Gil says that he's on his way back; he only stopped by so his most ardent groupies could get a new chance to drool at him in a suit. Because he's also wearing his company manners, Gil adds, "And this must be Mr. Billmeyer. I'm so glad he's back." Ecklie is trying to keep his cool as he mutters, "Very funny." Oh, someone doesn't deal well with comeuppance. Gil adds guilelessly, "You might want to have Hodges analyze that cigar. Oh, and the print tech is free. He could, uh, spray the party hat with ninhydrin." Ecklie sourly says, "I remember how to do my job, Gil. Thank you." Look who doesn't like the taste of humble pie; maybe he's on the Pratkins diet. Gil's amused. He gives Ecklie one last tweak: "I love it when you wear your gloves." As Gil wanders off, Billmeyer's body falls over too. Because nothing can go right for Ecklie as a CSI.
Meanwhile, in Sara's plot, she basically glares at Zach until he admits he wasn't in the dorm during the time of Trip's death because he's been hanging out with his Los Angeles-based boyfriend for the past four days. Liam asks if anyone other than Zach has access to his room, and Zach is all, "Hi, didn't we establish that anyone can break in any time they want?" Sara then asks why Zach's finger's all blistered. He says, "I'm not sure. I had just gotten back from my trip, and I saw something on the floor, so I picked it up. It kind of burned me or something." Sara asks, "And that didn't see weird to you?" Zach shoots back, "I'm in college. A lot of things seem weird to me." Sara smiles as she concedes his point. She asks where the finger-burning thing is, Zach says he tossed it, but it's not in the trash can. Zach shrugs, "It was there. I don't know what to tell you." Zach takes off, a police officer in tow to make sure he doesn't attempt to flee the state. Sara prepares to process Zach's room.
Liam asks, "Well, what are you thinking?" Sara says, "Name a chemical compound that can burn skin and can also disappear into thin air." "Holy water!" Liam blurts. Kidding! He concludes it's dry ice, then asks, "Can you put enough dry ice in Zach's room to approximate the level of carbon in Trip's room?" Sara asks, "Is that a dare?" Liam gives her a look like, I can't wait to hear that line in another context.
And now we have the experiment in which we establish that it takes 30 pounds of dry ice to reach a lethal level of CO2 saturation door. Sara muses, "Carbon dioxide is one-and-a-half times heavier than air. You know, it's conceivable that if Trip and Paula had been sleeping in his bed, they might still be alive." Liam adds, "I think I know why the bodies turned pink...dry ice is cold. Dry ice significantly lowered the temperature in both rooms, and a drastic decrease in temperature can turn a dead body pink. We see it all the time when we pull dead bodies from one of the rivers." Sara compliments him on his beautiful mind. So now the question is, who put the dry ice in the room?
And now David has gotten right on processing Billmeyer's body. Billmeyer is as fresh as a forest glen. "Whoever took him probably sprayed his body with disinfectant to cover up the stench. You got cause of death?" Ecklie asks. Why, yes. David says, "He died of a heavy heart -- heart weighed 500 grams instead of 300. Hypertensive cardiovascular disease." Ecklie seems disappointed to conclude, "So his heart stopped, he keeled over, hit his head on the pavement." We soon establish that Billmeyer knew he had heart problems, and "a heart that size, he was a walking time bomb." We also find out that Billmeyer participated in a postmortem beer bong. David deadpans, "Wouldn't be my postmortem beverage of choice, but to each his own."
Cut to Neil processing the party hat for prints while Hodges processes the cigar. Because Hodges is a multi-tasker, he also takes the opportunity to brownnose Ecklie about it, and Ecklie calls him on it with, "Why, thank you! Why don't you quit blowing smoke about it and tell me about the cigar?" Hodges does: "Low in nicotine, high in furfural. I compared it to other tobacco samples from the exemplar collection. It's consistent with the Perdomo Reserve brand. I took the liberty of calling the cigar society, they referred me to the Vegas distributor, I spoke to him directly. Perdomos are very high-end. He only made one sale this past month -- it was to a guy in Seven Hills." Neil comes in and says cheerily, "It smells like my grandfather." Hodges swivels, outraged that his narrative web of unctuous effort, replete with quivering subtext (I do it all for YOU, Ecklie!), has been blown apart by one doof with fingerprint data. Neil asks, "Am I interrupting?" "Actually, yeah. Conrad was just about to pat me on the back," Hodges says. Ecklie gives him a humorless smirk and a definite smackdown by focusing on Neil instead. Ah, Hodges. Remember that there are only a few inches between a pat on the back and a kick in the ass. Anyway, the prints all match paramedic Preston Hayburn, who would have had access to the morgue. Ecklie compliments Neil on his work while Hodges sputters in outrage. Both men hand over numbers of people they tracked down, and Ecklie politicks it by saying he'll check out Hodges's guy first, then the paramedic. Heh.
And now, it's time for gratuitous violence against plumbing fixtures. Somewhere, the Wild Dada Ducks are crying. What Liam's doing is testing the theory that the killer flushed his or her excess dry ice down the toilet. He explains, "When the ice was flushed, it would have lodged in the drain trap. As the ice sublimated, gas was released. It would have built up, causing the toilet to explode." As the toilet bubbles and squeaks, Sara shares the news that Zach's alibi checks out, so he's officially off the roster. Liam sighs that he had the dorm's credit card records checked; nobody in the dorm bought dry ice on credit, and when he checked retail outlets, nobody had purchased a large quantity of dry ice in the last few weeks.
Cue the toilet exploding. Both Sara and Liam crack up from the sheer joy associated with having blowed stuff up real good. The explosion jars Sara's brain, because she suddenly realizes, "We are talking about a university here. Science Department would probably keep the stuff on hand. Science major would have access." SCIENCE DEPARTMENT? SCIENCE MAJOR? Which science discipline? Which science major? I used to date a chemist -- he had access to far different lab materials than I did as a microbiology student. You'd think that geeky Sara and geeky Liam could have name-checked a few disciplines which use dry ice.
Cut to the sadly stereotypical brainy college chick -- self-effacing, glasses-wearing, secretly wishing someone would whip off the frames and scream, "Miss Sakimoto, you're beautiful!" In a tone that transmits how very hot she was for Trip's body, Susan the R.A. comments on how jock and chick magnet Trip certainly wouldn't have been interested in "dorm activities" (read: her). Liam whips out Trip's sex journal and asks if Susan's seen it. She has not. Liam says, "Trip kept a record of his, uh, relationships. Your name is in here. Three times." Susan gets a guilty look on her face. Liam keeps reading, "On February 2, you hooked up for the first time. Looks like second base. On February 9th, you rounded third, and on February 18, you had a grand slam." Susan's more than a little mortified that Trip wrote that all down. It could have been worse, Susan. There could have been a weblog with a live video feed. She looks from Liam to Sara, who only arches an eyebrow.
Me: Now she's grateful she went after Gil the monk.
Mr. Sobell: Oh, like Gil wouldn't have an elaborate system of hieroglyphs and insect ratings for everyone.
Me: No…no, I think Gil would require therapy if he actually came into physical contact with someone. Why would he record the trauma?
Mr. Sobell: (as Gil) "She was a magnificent dung beetle, while this one was merely a cockroach."
Susan stammered, "We had sex, I admit it. No big deal. I didn't tell you guys because I'm not exactly proud of it." Well, that's understandable. The not-proud part, I mean. Who would want to admit they humped someone who kept a slam book? Sara says, "Trip and Paula died from carbon dioxide gas. We already know that you have access to dry ice, and as a materials science grad student, you're familiar with the chemical properties...last week, you checked out forty pounds of dry ice from the campus lab...I spoke to your advisor, who told me your experiments required two pounds of dry ice. He broke your heart. He led you on. He let you believe it was serious, and after you went all the way, you were history."
Sara's expression betrays some empathy with Susan, which is probably what's making Susan lose it. She breaks down, admitting, "I'm an idiot. I've been consulting my female advisees not to take that kind of crap." Liam tells us it was Susan who broke into Zach's room and drilled a hole in the wall, then went in that night and set up a cooler so the ice would evaporate right to the brand-new vent. Liam explains, "Trip and Paula were asleep, passed out from the alcohol. When the ice evaporated, gas engulfed the room, killing them." Susan stammers, "I didn't know Paula was there, I never meant to kill Trip...no, no, look. Trip's room is 16 feet by nine feet, and I used exactly the right amount of ice just to make him sick. If he had been in the bed three feet above the ground and not on the floor -- I just wanted him to miss his basketball game. Trip slept on the floor only when he had girls over, and he never had sex before a big game, so he shouldn't have been on the floor."
Sara cuts off Susan's ramblings: "Your science was perfect. Your instincts? Not so good. And you miscalculated one huge factor: the sex drive of a college jock." And there goes that case. No doubt the Independent Women's Forum's checked it into their library so the time they get their knickers in a twist over the horrible things "hooking up" does to co-eds, they can cite this episode as a reference.
So let's end on a more jocular note: Ecklie and Vartann meeting Charlie Jackson, he of the swanky cigars and high school friend of Billmeyer. Jackson lets them in, and we see post-party debris, along with a big, shiny box of Perdomo Reserve cigars. Charlie soon admits, "James was dying. He had a bad heart, everybody knew it. So we flew him out here for one last bash, then Preston got a call to the Tangiers and it was Jamie. Poor guy died in the parking lot." Ecklie asks, "And then what? You decided to throw him a dead man's party?" Who could ask for more? Everybody was coming, and they brought James's body in the door. The flashback that follows is like the remake of Weekend at Bernie's nobody was clamoring to see. In the present, Charlie says, "He was my best friend, you know?" Vartann says, "It's a Class D felony to steal a corpse with the intent to steal or mutilate. I'm not really sure how to classify partying with the dead." Charlie presses, "I know how it looks, but if you knew Jamie, it's what he would have wanted. And we did return him." Vartann points out he's still going to arrest Charlie for obstruction of justice and conspiracy to commit theft. Charlie takes it like a man, saying, "He would have done it for me." Ecklie and Vartann both look like they're not exactly relishing the way this case turned out.