It's raining in Las Vegas. Chris Isaak, or someone with his coiffure, is out for a drive. As plaintive country music wails -- something about a lonesome highway drive -- our intrepid motorist keeps winding along those twisty rural roads. Yes, you read that right: the twisty, rural roads outside Las Vegas. I don't question it anymore. So far as I am concerned, Las Vegas is a magical place with enchanted forests and bubbling brooks. Anyway, the driver notices a man garbed in a hooded black raincoat and holding a sign that reads, "Vegas." Naturally, he pulls over, because who wouldn't pick up a hitchhiker who takes his sartorial cues from the villain in I Know What You Did Last Summer? He asks the hitchhiker if he needs a lift; the vagrant silently gets in. Clueless McVictim asks, "So where are you headed?" The hooded visage turns and Paul Millander peers out, saying ominously, "It's not where I'm headed..."
Cut to the aforementioned babbling brook. We're literally two camera shots away from woodland creatures singing catchy tunes about forensics. Hi-ho, hi-ho, it's off to dust we go! The evidence rests in the prints, hi-ho, hi-ho. And now, back to the recap before Disney dispatches a squadron of attack lawyers -- Catherine and Gil get out of a car and walk toward what I presume is a crime scene. A trench-coated official greets them with, "Welcome to Good Springs." "Long drive," Catherine says wearily. I bet Gil made her listen to Maggots, Murder, and Men: Memories and Reflections of a Forensic Entomologist on tape, as narrated by Crispin Glover, on the drive down. Trenchcoat says apologetically, "I know it's out of your jurisdiction, but it is your name on the tape." Uh-oh. We establish that the victim is inside, the recorder on the edge of the tub; Trenchcoat hands over the victim's wallet to Gil. He palms it and follows Catherine inside. Catherine takes the wallet and identifies Clueless McVictim as Pete Walker, lately of California, born August 17, 1957. Catherine then provides backstory for all of you who began watching this show in Season 2: "That's got to be the work of Paul Millander." We see Walker in a tub, shot in the sternum, with a small hand-held tape recorder propped on the tub's rim. Catherine continues expositing for those of us who haven't been playing along at home: "The M.O.'s the same. Kills men with the same birthday as the anniversary of his father's murder." Gil swings in for the harmony: "In descending order. First victim was August 17, 1959. Second victim, August 17, 1958. 1957..." He trails off, and the dynamic duo exchanges a meaningful look. Catherine picks up the tape recorder and asks, "Ready for this?" Gil says, "I have a pretty good idea what it's going to say." Catherine presses play, and we hear, "My name is Pete Walker. I reside at 715 Lady del Sol and I'm 44 years of age. I'm going to kill myself. I'd like to say 'I love you' to my mother. I'm so sorry. I never wanted to put you through this. I just can't do it anymore..." Walker's voice trails off, and we hear a gunshot. Catherine starts. After a moment of silence, Millander says menacingly, "Happy birthday, Mr. Grissom." Gil looks less than festive. Catherine looks up -- and here, with the bangs pulled off her face and the mega-eyeliner, she's like the crime-fighting version of Margot Tenenbaum -- and breathes, "Isn't your birthday in August?" Gil replies, "August 17, 1956." Catherine gapes as Roger Daltrey comes in with Pete and John to sing a special version of "Happy Birthday." Or, as classic rock fans know it, "Who Are You?"
Gil is taking prints -- sadly, unaccompanied by singing bunnies -- as the young Turks burst on the scene. Jesus, Nicky's lost a lot of weight; his little legs look like pipe cleaners. Did the wardrobe department cop some kind of deal with George Eads where they stopped dressing him funny so long as he forswore solid foods? Nicky and Warrick ask Gil if it's really the work of Paul Millander. Sara jumps in and tells 'em all yes, citing the gunshot wound, the suicide script, and the body in a bathtub. Funny -- I didn't see her in the earlier scene. We get a nice aerial shot of the tub -- which Millander hauled into a room that is not a bathroom, as proof of that superhuman work ethic with which psychopathic killers are evidently bestowed -- and then Gil takes us on a tour down Memory Lane, asking us if we remember Royce Harmon and Stuart Rampler. Sara says, "Grissom, Catherine briefed us about your birthday." Warrick chimes in with, "Yeah, what's up with that?" He's probably all miffed because Gil gave every evidence of being a Virgo, and now we all find out he's a Leo. Gil dismisses him with, "Coincidence. Make anything more of it, it gives Millander power he doesn't deserve." Catherine, who is printing over on the opposite side of the tub (no bunnies there either), gives Gil a skeptical eye-roll. Nicky, in the first knee-slapper of the night, says, "We work together. [Millander] can't outsmart all five of us." He can when four of you are handicapped by the fifth. Anyway, Gil quickly refutes Nicky's fallacy of majority resources. The young Turks look uneasy at being corrected by Dad. Catherine steps in and outlines the assorted duties everyone else will be performing this episode: Nicky is locked in subplot subbasement A with the A/V tech, off analyzing the tape; Warrick and Sara are relegated to the satellite campus version of the subbasement, sent off to inspect the perimeter of the warehouse to determine how Millander got in and out. Catherine and Gil will keep the body company. After the Turks clear out, Gil thanks Catherine. It's a sweet little moment, and very telling as to their long-time friendship and collaboration. Catherine shrugs dismissively and says, "Big night..."
Cut to Sara, bemoaning the rain. This is turning into something of a theme with her. Warrick fared slightly better by finding some mud prints. The two stoop down to investigate, and Sara notes, "This is the point of origin. They stop at the threshold." Warrick clarifies, "He must have taken off his boots before he stepped inside." Sara swings the flashlight down to take a look and muses, "Only one set of prints..." Warrick swings his torch over to another area and tells Sara to check out the depth of the print impression as compared to his own prints in the mud; Millander's footprints are much deeper. Sara says, "He carried the body in. The extra weight explains the deeper impressions." Hey! It's like that parable about the beach, and the two pairs of footprints, except that here we have mud, and also the one set of footprints means that some psycho's killed you and begun hauling your body inside to set up a labor-intensive tableau. I'm betting this version isn't likely to make it onto inspirational plaques. Warrick and Sara record the prints for posterity. One camera snaps, and then we transition into another snapping flash as Catherine shoots the tub-leau. Gil looks up and asks her to check something out. "He's got stippling on the side of his face," Catherine notes. For those of us unfamiliar with brushstroke techniques, here's what stippling is: to engrave or paint using a series of dots and flicks, thus creating an even or softly graded shadow. In this case, the medium of choice is Walker's cheek, and the dots and flicks are created by gunpowder sticking to tiny abrasions. Gil wonders how that came to be: "From what I can tell, he was shot once in the chest. Unburned gunpowder wouldn't plume this way." Catherine notes that there are no entry wounds near Walker's face. Gil says he'll have Robbins -- I presume he means David The Transitively Named Coroner, who is, as it turns out, also going by the name "Al" -- check for leaks under the theory that perhaps there's a hidden bullet. Catherine goes back to peering in the tub and finds a long strand of brunette hair. "Hello, Dolly!" she crows. She and Gil bandy about the possibility that the hair belongs to either a victim or an accomplice.
We hear the suicide message again, and the camera focuses on an audio monitor catching the sound waves of the tape. The cute audio tech from a few episodes ago (his name is "Archie," by the way, which makes me wonder if he has a cat named Mehitabel at home) says assertively, "This wasn't recorded in a warehouse. There's no auditory echo." Nicky deduces that the recording was made in contained quarters. "Yeah, a car. A small SUV. The tape recorder was an inch from his mouth. Sibilant pops bear that out. Helps that the killer uses hi-fi mini-cassettes. Picks up everything ambient." Archie then proceeds to rid himself of some pesky ambience, like windshield wipers, but a whirring noise grinds on. Nicky asks what the noise is; Archie doesn't have any answers for him yet. But Archie does think Nicky can help him with something on the recording: he lifts out a track, and the country-western song plays. In three bars, Nicky's pegged it as Willie Hank's "Don't Pay the Ransom." He plans to call the local C&W stations to see when their Infinity- or Clear Channel-mandated playlists commanded they play that song; it will help establish a timeline. It will also keep him from getting sucked into my rant about how megalithic media corporations have scrubbed the FM dial clean of anything resembling personality, innovation, or regional flavor. Whoops! Turns out we all got sucked into my editorial tangent there. Sorry. Before Nicky can run off and deal with some poor DJ, Archie draws his attention to an imbalance in one of the color displays -- it indicates an imbalance in background sound during the recording. Archie, crack audio tech that he is, ascertains that it's the left speaker that's blown out. Nicky uses this information to determine that somehow, Paul Millander happened to be driving while the recording was made.
Back on satellite subplot location, Sara is telling Brass that it's apparently illegal to hitchhike in Clark County; Brass puts down the "Vegas" sign -- the sign he has been holding without bothering to put on gloves first, thereby contaminating it as evidence -- and says amiably, "Yeah, you got me." It turns out that Sara and Warrick are now at another scene: Walker's retrieved car. The Nevada State Patrol found it. Sara muses on the unfairness of life, what with the driver trying to do a good, if illegal, deed and ending up dead. Warrick asks the question that's been bugging me for the last thirteen minutes: "How would Millander know that the guy who'd pick him up had a birthday August 17, 1957?" Sara and Brass glare.
Cut to David The "I'd Be More Fun If My Name Weren't Suddenly 'Al'" Coroner x-raying Walker and confirming that the victim only suffered the one gunshot wound. Gil is not happy about this, noting, "The others didn't have stippling on the side of their faces. Unburned gunpowder doesn't change direction and stick." We see proof of this, courtesy of a TMI shot illustrating a gun firing a bullet into an abdomen. Gil keeps thinking aloud: such stippling might be possible if Walker turned his face away from the gun; David dismisses this as unlikely, due to the origin of the facial burn. We see Walker wincing away from a gun's barrel as it fires. Gil continues, noting that few people miss at close range, and it's possible the stippling burn was intentional on Millander's part. We flash back to Gil and Millander's International Coffee moment in the special-effects warehouse, where Millander had brought out the obvious prop du jour -- a latex mask that was half-man, half-monster -- and stammered, "I call this one 'Good Vs. Evil.'" Back in the present, Gil peers down at Walker's dead, stippled face and intones, "He's telling me he's going to show me both sides." Yes, Gil. Because it's all about you.
Across town, unencumbered by symbolism, Sara and Warrick are ripping apart Walker's car for clues. Warrick has found some gunshot residue on the ceiling above the passenger seat -- thus lending credence to Nicky's "Millander was driving" thing and Gil's "Millander winged Walker with a bullet because it was more expedient than whipping up another latex mask" thing. Warrick lifts some GSR from the ceiling fabric and tells us all the reason nobody's found a second bullet is that it went out the window. We flash to poor, doomed Walker haltingly reading his script while Millander trains a gun on him, then Millander deliberately grazing Walker's face as he shoots, the automatic window lowering in time for the bullet to exit. Warrick says, "I'm going to call Nick, tell him we found out what that unidentified whir sound was -- the bullet going out." It says something for Warrick and Sara that neither of them have exited the vehicle overcome by the screaming heebie-jeebies. The idea of knowing one was going to die, and being forced to play along with whatever one's would-be murderer wanted, absolutely horrifies me; clearly, people who deal with this stuff on a regular basis have learned how to take their imaginations in hand much more adeptly than I.
After an unsettling close-up on a narrowed brown eye -- belonging to Liam, not to Millander -- cut to Liam gushing to Catherine over the quality of the hair she found in the tub. Lucky them, it's got a full follicular tag, which means it can be tested for DNA. Catherine dismisses the idea of the hair coming from Walker (wrong hair color); Gil muses that it could have come from Millander. "That's impossible. The amelogenin on the follicle came back XX -- that's female," Liam replies. Brief digression: for those of you who are curious, amelogenin is the major enamel protein in teeth; it stabilizes newly formed enamel crystals and helps direct their subsequent growth. Owing to its role in tooth development and maintenance, amelogenin is a hot protein, and much research is targeted toward developing an amelogenin-like substance that will stimulate tooth regrowth in adults. So what does a tooth protein have to do with forensic testing? Much forensic DNA testing is done using Short Tandem Repeat (STR) testing; an STR is a sequence that contains repeat units comprised of two to six base pairs (bp) of nucleotides (the four building blocks that make up DNA, i.e. adenine, thymine, cytosine and guanine) that can be easily detected via PCR. Amelogenin has an STR that differs sharply, depending on whether it's expressed by an X chromosome or a Y chromosome; if it's expressed by a Y chromosome, it has a six-bp sequence that's missing from the X chromosome STR. There -- now we all know why the amelogenin test matters in the context of determining gender, just because I was curious. Catherine and Gil take the news in stride; Gil notes that the tag for the hair is aged. Catherine counters that it's nearly impossible for an aged tag end to be in such good condition. "Not if he nurtured it, kept it in a freezer," Gil suggests. "That'd work," Liam agrees, as if we've all thought about chilling our hair for posterity. Catherine wonders if this planted hair means that Millander's trying to tell them that he kills women. "Maybe just one," Gil says, in a manner that suggests foreshadowing. However, neither he nor Catherine can say anything that will portend means or motive.
Meanwhile, Walker's car has made it to CSICentral, and Nicky's going through it. After a cursory inspection of the glovebox, he snaps open the top of the between-seats drink caddy. It's a smart move -- he pulls out a sheaf of receipts and other tiny slips of paper that have a habit of collecting in cars. As Nicky's sorting through the papers, Liam's disembodied voice floats out, asking, "Is this the car the guy was killed in?" Nicky starts, then replies, "He was killed in a warehouse, and don't go sneaking up like that!" Hee. It's nice to see the investigators getting a little spooked out by their jobs. Liam has no pity, since he's the scapegoat of the squad: "Now you know how I feel, like, ten times a day. So what's this Millander guy's thing?" Nicky fills Liam in on Millander's thing -- saw his dad killed over a money dispute as a kid, ends up killing guys as a result -- and Liam hunches over in the passenger seat, trying to figure out if there's any relationship between correlation and causation in Millander's case. As both men are sitting there ruminating on the mysteries of life, Nicky sees a number imprinted on the plastic lining of the drink caddy. Liam offers possible explanations -- it came from a PEP Boys receipt or dry-cleaning bill -- and Nicky reasons that whatever the number came from, it originated in the summer, as that's the season for burning ink into plastic. Liam asks what kind of paper item you'd shove into your drink caddy in the middle of summer. "Something you didn't want. Or something you'd have to keep," Nicky replies. Before they can brainstorm what that might be, Nicky gets called to a meeting of the brain trust.
Cut to Gil, lost in thought as everyone else outlines the evidence found on the case so far and what it probably means. What this means is that it sounds as though everyone's speaking underwater. Sara recaps her mud country adventure with Warrick, and Nicky describes his trip into the heart of broadcasting darkness, i.e. finding out KWV had "Don't Pay the Ransom" playing from 1:47 to 1:51 AM. Ah, so it's an AM radio station. There's some hope there for idiosyncratic play. Anyway, Gil's not paying attention to Catherine, Warrick, and Nicky's construction of the timeline. He comes into the case just in time to tell everyone that all their hard work isn't worth diddlysquat: "None of it matters. This is one of the few cases where physical evidence isn't helping us much. I mean, look at context: the victim's birthday is always on the anniversary of the murder of Millander's father. Staged, like his father's death. A planted hair, a planted fingerprint, it's all biographical. [Millander]'s using the evidence to tell us a story." Then, frankly, he needs a better editor; the pacing stinks. Before everyone can let the impact of Gil's words sink in, Brass comes in to drop a major turning point in the case: Walker had a job driving newly-released film reels between Valencia, CA and Las Vegas. He took a regular route and, aside from a speeding ticket issued in July, had a clean record. At the words "speeding ticket" and "summer," Nicky lights up noticeably and begins to grin. This is not lost on Gil.
Cut to Nicky rattling off the number burned into the plastic -- -23 -- as Brass types it into a computer. Bingo! Gil commands Brass to run the names of the other two vics for traffic records. Royce Harmon had a terrible driving record; Stuart Rampler had tickets. All three were issued their tickets by the same cop, Kevin Yarnell. I realize the powers that be had to set up this scene for expository purposes now, to show how all three men happened to have some common factor that possibly alerted Millander as to their birthdays, but wouldn't it stand to reason that after Stuart Rampler, someone was motivated enough to begin combing official records for some sort of connection? Anyway, we meet Kevin Yarnell -- played by Neil Flynn, the wonderful Evil Janitor over on Scrubs and apparently the go-to man whenever someone wants a cop on their show, as his IMDB entry lists no fewer than eight cop roles in the last ten years. After Gil asks how many speeding tickets Yarnell issues a day, the cop looks down his nose at Gil and sneers, "Why is it any business of yours?" Gil says, "You issued tickets to three people who ended up dead." This doesn't frighten Yarnell: "You think I had something to do with it?" Gil quirks an eyebrow in the universal physical shorthand for I don't know, jerkweed. You tell me. Yarnell does: "Look. I'm a good cop. I protect and serve. I even go to court on my day off." Catherine clarifies, "You mean court dates for speeding tickets." Yarnell replies, "Yeah. Sometimes, believe it or not, people actually contest it. And I'm there fighting them tooth and nail." After a few more rounds of questioning, we learn that there are three regular traffic judges, and it would make Yarnell really happy if Gil and Catherine were to go bother the judges instead. They do. We see the bailiff commanding everyone to rise for the honorable Judge Mason who -- could it be? -- happens to be Paul Millander. The bailiff continues, establishing that we're in the city of Mulberry in Nevada. Mulberry...just like Mayberry, only with a homicidal law enforcement apparatus in place. I bet Mulberry's version of Aunt Bea is a priestess of Ashtoreth and Opie spends his time sacrificing cats to Cthulu. Anyway, as Judge Mason/Millander sits down, Gil's eyes bug out, his jaw drops open, and he has a little freak-out. Mason smirks, "You may be seated." Catherine remains standing, uncertain, watching Gil have the big meltdown.
And what a meltdown it is. Mason/Millander watches, seemingly not amused, as Gil sways a little, his mouth opening and closing, oblivious to the concerned stares of fellow court attendees. Catherine, who's seated, calls Gil's name. He responds by rushing the bailiff and imploring him to arrest Judge Mason on suspicion of murder. This goes over about as well as you might expect: the judge has Gil thrown in the pokey for contempt of court. Catherine makes like she's going to follow Gil, but Mason/Millander threatens her with contempt too. Since one of them has to go to the bail bondsman and come up with the scratch for springing Gil, she stays. Although I am curious to see if she charges the bail on an expense report later.
Cut to Gil sitting on the cell bunk, staring at the floor. Through the bars, Mason/Millander appears and asks quietly, "Where are you from?" I guess he must have not listened during the part where Gil hollered how he was from the Las Vegas Crime Lab. This innocuous remark cues the following conversation:
Gil: You know where I'm from. And I know who you are.
Mason/Millander: I'm not who you think I am. Local police have been out here twice this past year about a man -- Paul Millander, is it? Every time his story's in the paper. I've heard I look like him.
Gil: Identical.
Mason/Millander: You've heard of the doppelganger syndrome?
Gil: That every person is supposed to have an exact double somewhere in the world?
Mason/Millander: You believe in it?
Gil: Never been proved.
Mason/Millander: A Swiss neurobiologist recently published papers supporting its viability. Bruegger, I think his name is. Stands to reason this Millander is my doppelganger. The monkey wrench for you is that we're both in the state of Nevada.
Gil: Well, you know, we could always do a DNA test.
Mason/Millander: You know, if you keep that up, people are going to start calling you crazy.
Mason/Millander then springs Gil from the hoosegow, handing him his jacket -- CSI ID neatly pinned to the top -- and, after a veiled threat about the wisdom of checking out Mulberry's traffic courts again, invites Gil to dinner. His reason: "I tell my wife stories about my day and this one, she may need to hear in person." He gives Gil a time and an address. Gil stands there, clearly wondering if going to dinner is the smartest thing he could do. Catherine comes down to interrupt his reverie, asking, "Any chance he's got a twin?" Gil snaps back, "A doppelganger, evidently." He then asks Catherine if she's got a jar of mentholatum on her; they use her mentholatum to fume the prints Mason/Millander left on the jail cell bar. Catherine is to head back to the lab with the prints; Gil is apparently going to dinner.
Back at the lab, Sara's asking Liam if he's done further testing on that hair. He responds with, "You say, 'Jump,' I say, 'How high?'" Liam then does The Leap Of Exposition: he found testosterone in the post-pubescent female hair. Sara says that's not a big deal, as both men and women have testosterone; Liam corrects her with "this testosterone is endogenous." Interesting -- endogenous testosterone is an anabolic steroid, not a naturally occurring chemical for women. So unless Millander was hanging around the 1976 East German women's Olympic swim team, it's a little baffling. Liam and Sara wonder why women in the U.S. might possibly want to take a steroid -- improving athletic performance or attempting to boost libido both get suggested -- but in the end, both are mystified.
And now it's time for the My Dinner With Millander portion of the evening. Gil parks in front of a sprawling Tudor house and walks to the door hesitantly. After he rings the doorbell, he fidgets by studying the rubber Wellingtons on the doormat. When Mrs. Mason opens the door, he improvises with, "I was, ah, admiring these rain boots." He then gives this really cute, nervous little smile. After coming in, Gil compliments Mrs. Mason on her home, and gently prods as to how long they've lived there. She replies, "We bought the year we adopted Craig, so that would be '92." Mrs. Mason then goes off to prod Craig into saying hello. Gil introduces himself to the lad -- no signs of warped upbringing readily apparent to the eye -- and Craig asks Gil if he'd like an ID tag "for safety." As Gil processes this, we see Mason/Millander in the background, hovering behind Gil. He finally speaks: "Can't be too safe out there, can we, Mr. Grissom?" Gil gives him a level look and replies flatly, "No. We can't." Ah, Gil -- you gotta love him for his complete inability to dissemble. Mason responds by asking brightly, "Hungry?"
Over dinner, Mrs. Mason reminds her husband to tell Gil where he picked up the boots Gil was admiring; she turns to Gil and says, "My husband's only hobby is driving around the state looking for bargains, rain or shine. And I tell him, 'You're a judge now. We don't need bargains.'" Mason/Millander grins at his wife and finishes the story with, "To which I reply: 'Old habits die hard." Mrs. Mason smiles, "Truth is, I just think he enjoys his private time." Gil is taking this all in, trying not to let the weighted symbolism of "old habits dying" make his head explode, or to put a damper on the conversation by pointing out that perhaps, in addition to that bargain-hunting hobby, there's that serial-killing hobby Mason's neglected to mention. As Mason is explaining how, as a traffic court judge, he guards his private life against the petty political intrigues of his enemies, little Craig snaps a Polaroid of Gil, startling the poor man thoroughly. "You'll be safe now," he intones. I clutch my head as the double-coded meaning of the whole conversation comes crashing down on me.
Cut to Catherine checking AFIS, then calling Gil. Judge Mason's prints match...Judge Mason, not the prints they have on record for Paul Millander. After Gil gets off the call, Mason smiles that the fingerprints must have matched, and Gil looks a little miffed. Then, as Mason explains how Gil has confused Mason with "a very bad man" so he "left him fingerprints" as proof of his identity, Gil's face morphs into outright hostility. Hell hath no fury like Grissom when he realizes he's been played. I suppose now is a bad time to point out that at least he's collected supporting evidence of Millander-like storytelling via evidence. Dinner ends abruptly.
Back in the safe confines of CSI Central, Catherine and Gil are roaming the halls, puzzling over the problem of how to prove that Judge Doug Mason is the same person as Paul Millander. Compounding their problem: the records building for Mulberry burned down in 1982, thus making the retracing of Doug's identity that much harder. "So Judge Mason has no birth certificate. How convenient. Man, this guy plays way out in front," Gil says. Catherine does have news on Clan Millander; Brass has gone to the new records building and dug up records of current property tax payments for the account of Paul and Isabelle Millander. Gil and Catherine head to the Millander neighborhood; the house is a charming, low-slung Craftsman cottage (good Lord, Deborah's ardent interest in real estate is rubbing off on me). As a middle-aged woman warily opens the door, Gil and Catherine look slightly taken aback. Gil recovers, explaining, "We're with the Las Vegas Crime Lab --" Isabelle interrupts with, "Are you here about my husband? That happened over thirty years ago." Catherine and Gil exchange What, now? looks and then Catherine -- whose black crusher looks quite fetching atop her hair -- says, "It's our understanding that your child witnessed your husband's murder." That's apparently the magic phrase. Isabelle lets them in and closes the door. I salivate over the wood paneling on the wall and the tulip-shaped sconces, barely noticing that, when Isabel says, "My child was only ten..." she's adding a few more years to Paul's age at the time of the story. Catherine, who's been scanning the room for clues -- or else looking as I am with open admiration at the Stickley furniture and Prairie school-style wall treatments -- tells Isabelle she hopes they're not interrupting dinner. Isabelle proves she's very lonely and possibly a little unhinged when she says, "I always set a place for Paul." "Your son?" Gil asks. "My husband. My way of being together," she replies. Gil and Catherine are unnerved by this. Gil wanders over to a console and Isabelle gushes, "Those are from his best years --" "Halloweird," Gil says hollowly. Isabelle fills in that her husband Paul made hand molds and masks. Gil flashes to the scene last year where he held the latex hand with the fingerprints from the Roy Harmon murder, and quickly deduces that Millander had been using his father's molds -- and therefore, his father's fingerprints -- to plant at the crime scene. This is the point where Catherine excuses herself, ostensibly to go to the bathroom.
As she leaves, Gil asks Isabelle if he can survey what's left of Paul's work. Meanwhile, Catherine lied about using the bathroom; she's opening doors until she stumbles across a little girl's room -- pink, frilly, canopy bed, the whole bit. A plaque identifies it as Pauline's room. Things just got a little freaky.
Speaking of freaky, back in the main room, Gil is looking over an old ashtray made from Paul Millander Sr.'s handprint. Gil inspects the clay mold, then notices some green goop in the finger wells; he gently asks Isabelle if he can take the ashtray to the lab for testing, and promises to bring it back.
Back in the ultra-girly room, Catherine is looking at snapshots of a rather tomboyish little girl. She's going through drawers and notices a stack of baseball cards shoved below a stack of frocks. After noting that, Catherine walks over to the closet and casually opens the door. Wow, she's got nerve. She's also got some 'splainin' to do as Isabelle comes in and asks, "What are you doing in my daughter's room?" Catherine looks mortified. "I have a daughter myself. I was admiring the old clothes. She's beautiful." Isabelle looks stricken: "She died." Gil asks, "When did she die?" Isabelle quavers, "A long time ago. A lifetime ago." Gil prods, "What about your son?" That earns him and Catherine a non-answer and an invitation to leave.
And now, as we go to commercial, let us ponder what we know: Judge Doug Mason looks like the so-called Paul Millander, purveyor of a special-effects shop that apparently never existed. There was a Paul Millander who worked in special effects many years ago; this Paul Millander was apparently killed back in the day, in a manner witnessed by his child. Now, it turns out that Paul Millander the elder left an array of special-effects molds and artifacts, as well as an ashtray. Mrs. Millander is cagey about the gender of her child, mentioning only that her daughter died and refusing to even talk about a son. The daughter in question has left signs that she is perhaps not as feminine as her room would indicate. What does this tell us? Is anyone else thinking of Boys Don't Cry, or is that just me?
Meanwhile, Liam comes through for Gil in the lab, identifying the green substance as an alginate, a substance once used to make molds and special effects. Gil flashes back to Millander talking about the false hand, and says, "These are his father's prints. He was planting them as his own." Liam concedes that Millander's strategy was pretty shrewd, and Gil smacks him down for his trouble, saying, "If I refer to Millander as smart, it's one thing, but I mind if other people do it, okay?" Touchy! Liam takes his beating in stride -- considering the ego-crushing blows the young Turks usually dispense, this is nothing. Gil takes his leave of Liam to see what Catherine's up to. Why, she's analyzing fingerprints she lifted from that stack of baseball cards she took from Millander Manor, without a warrant or permission! I swear to God, I have this fantasy that one of these days, someone on CSI's writing staff will examine the Constitution, notice the Fourth Amendment, and think, verdicts like Schneckloth v. Bustamonte notwithstanding, that maybe having law enforcement personnel just poke around according to whimsy is a violation of privacy, and thus all evidence associated with it is inadmissible. A girl can dream. Anyway. Catherine notes that she found no records of Pauline Millander's birth certificate, or even of her existence, but she did test the baseball card fingerprint against the prints of, in her words, "the other child to live there," Paul Millander, and they've got a match. The prints don't lie: Judge Mason is Paul Millander. Just then, Gil's beeper goes off; it's Liam.
When Gil and Catherine come in to give Liam another round of eye-rolling abuse, Liam cuts them off with, "The hair you found in Pauline Millander's bedroom is female...Sara had me compare it to the hair found in the tub at the crime scene. They're a perfect match. DNA identical." Catherine wonders, "So [Pauline]'s brother planted it?" Sara explains, for those in the audience who are unfamiliar with transgender identity: "He planted it. He planted his own hair...Pauline was taking male hormone injections." This floors the older folk. Gil gapes for a moment before asking, "Why?" Sara states the obvious again: "My theory? Sex change." Ding! Remember that Mason/Millander's son was adopted. Remember that the pronoun game with Ma Isabelle talked about her child, but gendering the child brought on a whole different reaction. Catherine's coming around, pointing out that there was no evidence of Paul as a child in the Millander house. Gil sums up the whole situation with, "Paul killed Pauline. But he didn't murder her."
Back at Millander Manor, Gil is grilling Isabelle. "Is this what you've been hiding? That your daughter is now your son?" Isabelle shakes her head and replies with my favorite line of the episode: "Pauline went away and came back a very strange man." We see a flashback of a strong-featured young woman walking into an elevator, then being rolled out in a wheelchair, dressed as a boy with cropped hair. Isabelle says, "I wouldn't let him stay here, not like that." Gil figures that so long as Isabelle's all torn up inside over her child's gender reassignment surgery, she should also hear that her baby is a serial killer. And he finally asks for permission to collect hair from Pauline's bedroom. We don't get to see Isabelle's reaction.
Judging from the scene, however, which opens in an interrogation room with Gil waving around a glassine envelope with hair in it, I'm thinking that Isabelle recovered enough to permit a search. Millander leans forward and says, "They told my parents I had an 'endocrinic ambiguity.' My chromosomes said female but my body wasn't that sure. The doctors told my parents to raise me as they saw fit." I really wish they had gotten more specific with exactly what the biological ambiguity in question was -- so many gender syndromes are chromosomally based on an extra chromosome or a non-standard sequence on a particular chromosome, and it would have been interesting to learn whether or not forensic science tests for things like congenital adrenal hyperplasia (an endocrine condition that results in a hormone imbalance among people with an XX kerotype). As I'm pondering exactly why this sort of chromosomal testing doesn't get highlighted more on the show -- especially with all the fuss over the high incidence of XYY kerotypes in a prison population -- Gil and Millander are spinning some half-baked theory about how Millander was raised as both a girl and a boy, and "a boy could have saved his father." I have a hard time buying it, even more so now that Gil seems to have figured everything out in three minutes. Gil and Millander have a little bonding moment as Millander swabs his own mouth for Gil (the swab will be used for DNA evidence), and we find out that the two will meet in court. Millander asked, "Aren't you curious about your birthday?" Gil denies it. Millander says he's already picked his victim. Gil replies, "It doesn't matter. You'll be in jail."
Cut to the courtroom: we learn that Millander's arraignment has been bumped from 8 AM to last on the docket because he's defending himself. Gil has a funny feeling about it, and runs down to Millander's holding room. He sees a neatly folded jumpsuit and a severed ID bracelet. When Gil runs off to figure out how this happened, we see Millander in a suit, with a Las Vegas Police Department ID, walking through the detectors and out the door. He salutes the security camera. Gil watches the tape, looking as close to stroking out as I've ever seen him. Gil says, "He had my ID," as he remembers the ID on top of his jacket when he was in contempt of court (Millander photocopied it) and the Polaroid the Millander kid made. Put 'em together, it'll pass cursory inspection. Gil watches Millander wave, again and again.
Much later, CSI Central is deserted and he's finally going home. Catherine comes drifting up, and she notes that she thinks Millander slipped up with his victims; although they all have the "I love you, Mom" part of the suicide note, Pete Walker had no mother. Gil digests this, says, "He never slips up," and sprints off. Naturally, he's heading over to Millander Manor at this time of the night, alone and without backup. When he opens the unlocked door, he sees Isabelle at the table set for two, unmoving. He calls her name, then walks over: she's been stabbed. A noise that sounds like a tape spool flopping over sounds as Gil heads toward the bathroom -- in the dark, of course -- and toward the sound. As he opens the door, he sees Paul in the tub, dead by his own hand. Gil plays the tape: "My name is Paul Millander. I reside at Sand Creek Road. I'm 46 years of age, and I'm going to kill myself. I'd like to say 'I love you' to my mother, Isabelle. I'm so sorry. I never meant to put you through this. I just can't do it anymore. I've lost hope." Gil listens to the gunshot on the tape, then closes his eyes, overwhelmed.
And thus endeth the serial killer plotline, by giving us a transsexual who copes with the pain by killing. First the lethal lesbians, then the killer gay man, now this? The real mystery behind this episode is how GLAAD hasn't noticed a pattern yet.