Night has fallen over Las Vegas and the surrounding mountainous foothills. Tim Daly -- or someone who looks a lot like him -- is driving an official-looking Land Rover over a rough dirt road. The husband and I have a debate:
Him: That's not Tim Daly.
Me: It is too! And he's looking for a one-armed man.
Him: Most likely he's looking for a show.
Me: Well, maybe it's a package deal.
Anyway, the ersatz Tim is driving along when he notices a car parked in a place where cars usually aren't parked. Naturally, he parks the Land Rover and walks toward the edge of the road to investigate. He hears a noise, and proceeds to slide stealthily down a grass-covered embankment -- a plan that, while laudable in theory, falls flat in execution when he does it and lands on his stomach, to a dead person. A young man pops up from a half-finished grave, registers the lawman getting to his feet, and does what all would-be felons do when confronted with a cop: he runs toward the law enforcement personnel. He trips just as he passes Ersatz Tim -- lucky for Tim since he's still not on his feet yet -- and the prone officer promptly wrestles the would-be escapee into submission.
Seconds later, swarms of Las Vegas's finest have forsaken Sin City to check out the crime scene in the desert. Gil and Nicky stop by Buzz, who exposits ably, "They caught him red-handed. Ben Jennings." Ben, now standing erect and flanked by two police officers, looks like someone who would be a roadie for Alien Ant Farm if he were not otherwise engaged with clandestine body-planting. Then again, perhaps the bands of today do demand more from their roadies than humping equipment and procuring willing groupies. I wouldn't know. Anyway, Ben looks no more or no less harmless than any kid you're likely to see in an MTV video. Make of that what you will.
Now that Buzz has made the informal introductions, Nicky decides to make the formal ones. He and Gil walk over to Ben, and Nicky does the honors: "Nick Stokes, Gil Grissom, Las Vegas Crime Lab. You wanna tell us what's going on here?" Ben does not. Gil steps in, asking, "You have anything to say?" Again, more silence on Ben's part. Gil decides to kill two birds with one stone -- mess with Ben's head and give us our punchy pre-credits lead-in -- by continuing: "You don't have to talk to us." He pauses long enough to sweep his flashlight beam over a corpse, and continues, "He'll talk to us." Yup -- right after The Who plays us into commercials.
Speaking of commercials, how appalling is it that Mastercard is already flogging Christmas consumerism on November 1st? Isn't there some sort of obscure clause in the FCC broadcast regulations we can dredge up that puts a moratorium on this holiday nonsense until November 23rd?
Back on the show, Gil's noting that they're going to have to impound Ben's car and take it into evidence. Sensing that automotive destruction is nigh, Sara pops onto the scene, chirping that she lost the boys at a fork in the road. Nicky smirks, "My bad." You know he's not really sorry; he wanted some time with Sensei Gil before Sara showed up and began volunteering to take Gil's pulse. Gil barely registers the kids squabbling; he tells them it's processing time. Ben is uncuffed, and the CSIs descend upon him. "Make like a scarecrow for me, partner, arms out, away from your body. That's it, stay just like that," Nicky tells Ben. Ben complies, a little freaked out. Sara whips out an industrial-sized roll of duct tape and collects the contents of Ben's shoe soles. Gil and Nicky lift fibers off Ben's clothing, then survey his body for defensive wounds. As they're working on Ben, the kid stands there, looking scared, but when Gil calls out to a tech named Matthew to give the corpse VIP treatment, Ben looks absolutely terrified.
The camera pans out, then down to the Vegas Strip, giving us a shot of the Paris casino, with Caesar's Palace in the foreground and the Bellagio immediately behind. This must be a shot from the north end of the strip. Anyway, we're in the swanky new part of the strip. A black SUV pulls up at a pristine valet area -- yup, the producers are definitely working on giving the impression that we're at a swanky Steve Wynn-esque casino -- and Catherine hops out, voicing over that they've got a dead female body in the Mediterranean Casino's spa. She and Warrick head in to the spa, where Brass is already waiting, and he exposits, "The body is Shelly Danvers, D.O.B. 10/10/81. An employee walked in to get towels, and found her here." "Here" happens to be a bench in the spa locker room. Warrick stares at the body for a moment, and we close-up on a livid patch of flesh on her thigh, then a copy of what looks to be either Harper's Bazaar or Vogue (it's far too tastefully laid-out to be Jane, and the words are in tiny type, which means that the editors presume their subscribership can read, thereby eliminating Cosmo), then her head dangling limply off the padded locker-room bench. Catherine eyes the scene and says skeptically, "A young woman, healthy, just reading a magazine. And all of a sudden, she DFOs?" Well, I nearly did after I saw what Bonnie Fuller had done to Ruth Whitney's legacy at Glamour, but I digress. Brass mutters that he is but repeating the story the night manager gave him. Warrick heads over to question the night manager. She chirps that she stumbled across the body when she was restocking the locker room with towels. As Warrick fixes her with a skeptical look, Catherine asks Brass if he moved the body. "Yeah, I was born yesterday," he replies. "This sash may have been tied by somebody else," she explains. Warrick gives the sash an appraising glance; the night manager immediately begins looking everywhere but at Warrick. Catherine looks up and asks the night manager if she knows anything about re-dressing the body. "Well, she was naked. I-I-I thought she should be covered," stammers the manager, who has clearly never seen an episode of a crime show -- any crime show -- or else she'd know that law enforcement types tend to view her little act of initiative as tampering with a crime scene. Catherine continues to stare at the night manager, and asks, "Did you move the body in here too?" Sure enough, the night manager did: "Guests were looking in. I put a robe on her. It's not like it's a crime or anything." Oh, but it is. "It makes us doubt the circumstances surrounding the victim's death," Warrick explains. The night manager begins to look distinctly queasy. ["A look she's good at, by the way; this actress's last major gig was as Steve Sanders's love interest on . Poor thing." -- Sars]
Back in the A plot, Sara is swabbing a white powdery substance from the forehead of the body found in the desert. She looks at the fruits of her labor and frowns intently: "Flour, maybe?" "But what kind?" Gil presses, displaying a heretofore unseen flair for milled grains. "All-purpose, self-rising, pastry?" Sara, who seems to be a Bisquick kind of gal, punts, "Trace will probably have a better idea." Sara continues to fill Gil in on how they'll process the body; she's going to have someone check the fingernails. Gil asks if there are any fibers caught in the neck wound, and Sara says pointedly, "You told me to wait for you." "That hasn't stopped you yet," he rebuts. "I did...observe some fibers in the wound. I didn't collect them yet," Sara says, a little chagrined at how easily Gil can read her. Gil gives her the go-ahead. She admits that she noted yellow fibers, possibly satin. Gil muses that the corpse has a dress shirt, but no tie. "Strangled with his own tie?" Sara muses. Gil merely replies, "Find me on the flour," and stalks off.
Warrick and Catherine are going through the spa reservations log and asking the spa manager if Shelley Danvers used the jacuzzi at any time. She says no, and both CSIs glare at her. "What, you don't believe me?" she inquires pissily. Well, no: she's already lied her fool head off once. Warrick reiterates my sentiments. Catherine points out that it's entirely possible for Shelley to have drowned in a jacuzzi -- perhaps her hair got caught in one of the jets -- and the manager snaps, "She did not drown on these premises." Warrick points out that they'll know whether or not Shelley did drown if they find water in her lungs, and "it'd be worse hearing it from him than from you." The manager rolls her eyes, trying to summon some sort of Lucy Liu hauteur and failing.
Back at CSI Central, David The Unfun Coroner is telling us about the body -- Oliver Dunne, corporate lawyer and father of two. Gil arches a brow and asks, "You get all that from his dentals?" David admits that he got it from the widow Dunne, who's already been down to ID the body. Gil looks up and notes that he happens to be holding a .380 slug in his hand. David takes us on a tour of where that .380 was -- Dunne's liver, for the most part -- courtesy of the TMICam. Gil asks David to confirm that the .380s embedded in Dunne's body aren't what killed him. David does so, noting that Dunne died of asphyxiation and explaining, "Without oxygen to his lungs, the capillaries wither and dry up. Whole pulmonary system shuts down." I'd like to note that the closed-captioning reads, "Without oxygen, the alveoli capillaries wither and dry up. Whole pulmonary system shuts down." So there -- a little extra detail, which I painstakingly transcribed while watching the TMICam shots of the trachea and said alveoli drying out over and over again. Gil registers this overkill, and asks, "Why would a guy shoot a man three times, and then strangle him with his own tie?" Sara makes a snazzy entrance right then, saying that she can't tell why, but she can tell where: a pizza shop. "The flour has a low gluten content, seven percent protein, it's typical of the kind of flour used to make cakes, pizzas, that sort of thing...the subtype of flour is another subtype: double zero. It's a very fine flour, used only in pizza baking ovens. And trace picked up some oregano in the sample," she explains, walking us all through the process of narrowing down flour to a specific locale. Gil looks stunned.
Not nearly so stunned, however, as Ben does in the scene. The youthful offender is busy telling Buzz that he lost his .380; Buzz is busy telling Ben that he's not buying that excuse. Before this can turn into something resembling a Mamet play, Gil interjects, "Are you employed, Ben?" Turns out Ben is -- at Dante's Pizzeria, behind the Stratosphere. He's a delivery boy. "Do you ever come into contact with the baking flour at Dante's?" Gil asks. Oh, my God. I so totally want a pizza now, except one without a murderous delivery boy attached. Ben admits that maybe he does, by virtue of schlepping all those boxes; he asks Gil why he's so interested. "Well, 'cause we found flour on the victim, and it's the kind used to make pizza. Can you explain that?" "No," Ben replies, and presses his lips together like a little kid. Gil puts on what passes for a paternal face, and says softly, "Why don't you earn some points by telling me what the science is going to tell me anyway?" "Well, I don't have to talk," Ben repeats stubbornly. Gosh, do you think he might have gotten himself embroiled in this whole mess owing to a less-than-complete understanding of the American judicial system? Gil concedes, a little: "No...but we're going to figure it out." Ben blusters, "If you know so much about these murders, what do you need me for?" Gil, who noticed the shift from a murder to multiple murders, says slowly, "Murders? There are more bodies?" Ben looks remorseful. Clearly his "I don't have to talk strategy" has been less than successful.
Cut to a phalanx of LVPD types going over the original scene with flashlights in hand. Nicky is pushing something that looks like a lawn seeder -- he grumbles that he feels as though he's mowing a lawn -- and Sara's walking beside him, holding a laptop that's apparently the monitor readout for the radar thingie Nicky's using. Sara eventually reads something interesting which, after a few keystrokes, clarifies as a human silhouette. Gil races over to talk to Ben, who's been standing around witnessing all this science in action, and asks, "Any more bodies you want to tell me about?" Ben demurs. Gil informs him that he plans on applying radar to the whole hillside. Ben's pretty much okay with that. Gil leans in over Ben's shoulder and says, "Sometimes, when I've been involved in a crime scene when I've been particularly involved with a dead body, I sit in my car and it hits me, how close I was, how heavy the body is, the texture of the body, how it feels -- you know?" Gil's kind of cute when he's attempting to play head games with someone. Ben shifts, clearly moved by Grissom's speech and trying to figure out what to say, and as Gil walks away, he calls, "Mr. Grissom, I'm not a bad person." He stumbles over the phrase. "You're not a bad person," Gil repeats back incredulously. Ben shakes his head, nearly on the verge of tears. "Then what are you?" Gil asks. Ben stands there, mute, as Gil walks away.
Meanwhile, Catherine is off harassing underlings -- David The Handler Of Liquid Men in particular. Apparently, it's a busy night at the body shop. David grumbles, "I hate it when you CSIs get territorial." "The victims' families hate it when we don't," Catherine responds. Then, to make my life harder, David The Liquid-Handling Lab Tech hands off a body to David The Definitely Fun Coroner. The only way it would be harder for me to keep track of everybody would be to introduce a half-dozen lab techs all named Jennifer. Catherine then descends on David #2 -- technically, David #1 if we're going by seniority, but he's the second David in this scene and...okay. Anyway, David says Catherine's name in a voice heavy with dread, then tells her the drowning theory is all wet. She prods him for some other sign that could lead to a probable cause of death; David points out the lividity -- or "red splotch," for us laypeople -- down Shelley's body. He begins to muse about the possibility of heatstroke, and Catherine decides that actual confirmation of evidence -- a little something we like to call "empiricism" -- can wait while she runs off to smack the lying hotel spa manager with a warrant or two. Before she can head down the primrose path of false premises, she runs into Warrick, who provides us with the following tidbit: Shelley was staying with fellow Terre Hautean Tina Kolas. The two girls came to Vegas as part of a travel package. Catherine greets the news with relief: "We need someone to tell us the truth about last night."
Speaking of truths, a few are about to be revealed. Gil is surveying a team of spade-wielding flunkies as they dig out the body. He's hailed from behind, and as he turns around, a man in a clerical collar approaches. Gil greets him with, "Father..." The priest continues, "Benjamin's a member of my parish. The officer won't let me talk to him. He said you're in charge --" "Of this crime scene," Gil clarifies. "He needs spiritual guidance," the priest tries. Gil casts a look over at Ben -- who is standing over by a sheriff's truck, flanked by uniformed officers -- and turns back, saying, "I imagine he does." The priest turns to go with, "Then you'll have no problem with me talking to him." Gil calls to the retreating figure, "It's the eleventh hour! I wouldn't expect anything less!" I instinctively huddle in my chair as I wait for the lightning bolt to strike down Gil on spot. The priest does so instead, with a look that could kill. Gil continues, "When the reality of their actions set in, they usually turn to religion." The priest is unwavering: "Can you think of a better time?" Gil has no comeback for that. He turns his irritation away from Mother Church and onto the infidels Nicky and Sara, who, as part of the spade-wielding-flunkie set, have been extracting the body from its grave. Nicky begins sweeping the dust off the body as Sara photographs it; they note that the wounds are different from the ones on Dunne's body, and Kenny Ramirez (they ID him from his wallet, found at the scene) had a big blow to the head that may or may not have been caused by a shovel. Gil, Sara, and Nicky try to puzzle what a middle-aged white guy and a young Latino would have in common -- other than being killed by (presumably) the same person. Robbery as a motive is out of the question. As they're brainstorming a connection, Buzz comes by and pants that they just found Dunne's abandoned car at an AmCon station off Highway 215. And -- miracle of miracles -- Ramirez's car is there too. Everyone heads out to the AmCon.
Meanwhile, in a hotel room that looks as though it was recently abandoned by Whitesnake, Catherine and Warrick are questioning Tina about the spa reservations Shelley had made. "We'd been drinking apple martinis for, like, three days straight. Shelley said the spa would detox her, you know, clean her out," says a blonde who is clearly packing three days' worth of hangover into one. Wow, Shelley's something of an idiot: alcohol dehydrates you, so sweating is hardly going to be good for your system. Catherine is busy giving Tina the fish-eye, so it falls to Warrick to point out torn pink shirt. Turns out Tina and Shelley were fighting over the shirt. "I caught her trying it on and I said give it back and then we had a tug-of-war over it, and the whole thing ripped right in two. We fell back laughing." You know, this is the kind of set-up most porn directors would hail as narrative gold. Especially after seeing the flashback. Catherine, however, is not in the adult entertainment business (anymore), so she's all about seizing the shirt as evidence. Tina simpers, "Anything to help." Catherine then asks how it is Tina has proof that Shelley used only the dry sauna; Tina points her to the pad of paper by the phone and says that Shelley used it to make her reservation. Warrick says they're going to take the pad. "But there's nothing there," Tina replies. "That's okay. We do magic," Warrick says. Off-camera, Gil screams, "No, dammit, we do science."
Back on the lonesome highway, Sara and Nicky are interrogating a gas station attendant. Sara's asking incredulously, "Two men were shot and killed and you didn't see anything?" "Sorry," the guy mumbles. "Come on, man, you don't just miss something like that. What was going on?" Nicky asks. The gas station attendant admits that he went joyriding in a friend's new car, and he didn't want his boss to find out. Nicky nods reassuringly and says, "Just walk us through it. When did you know there had been a crime committed?" The attendant claims that his buddy dropped him off; he noticed two cars, he went to check them out, and saw a blood splotch to one of the cars. "I don't see any blood," Nicky points out. "Yeah, I hosed it down," the attendant says. "You what?" Sara demands. "It was freaking me out!" he replies. Nicky and Sara immediately reel, so appalled are they with the idiocy they've just witnessed.
Time has presumably elapsed, as a car is now in CSI Central and Gil has enshrouded it within a plastic tent, the better to inspect it free of the taint of the outside world. Along comes someone else who's devoted himself to living separately from the world -- the priest. He ducks into the plastic tent. Grissom snarks, "I don't see your visitor's badge." "Priest's collar. People trust it," the priest replies. Gil gives him the fish-eye and the priest quickly amends, "Most people. Even lapsed Catholics." "What makes you think I was ever a Catholic?" Gil asks. "First time we met, you called me 'Father.' Only Romans do that; everyone else, it's always 'Reverend,' or 'Minister.' I wanted to know how your investigation against Ben is going," the priest expounds. Gil points out that, coincidence of coincidences, he happens to be working on Ben's car, and wouldn't the priest like to move along? "I didn't come here to tamper with your evidence," says the priest; Gil gives him a look. This is where you can really tell he's a lapsed Catholic; it takes years of sitting through homilies to perfect that kind of antipathy for men of the cloth.
The priest, apparently accustomed to this look, continues undaunted: "He's a good kid, all through school. Still comes to Mass every Sunday. If he has a problem, it's trying to please people." Gil is glaring throughout this entire bit; I can't tell if he's irked that someone has violated the sanctity of the investigative chamber, or that someone is trying to put a human face on what can easily been seen as a component of a forensics puzzle, or if he really, really has issues with JP2 and the boys. Gil then decides that it's his turn to do a little evangelizing; he gives a demonstration of how luminol works for the good priest, showing that Ben's car is soaked in blood. The priest looks over at Gil, horrified, as the car seats begin to luminesce. "He wouldn't do this," the priest says. "I believe the car," Gil says, the tension gone from his face and a faint smile playing about the corners of his mouth. Yup, somebody had a run-in with a Jesuit in their formative years. The priest looks down, mouth working, before meeting Gil's gaze and saying, "To whom much is given, much will be expected." (For the curious, he's quoting Luke 12:48.) Gil looks up, nonplussed, and the priest -- whom I'm just going to call Father Baker, because really, typing "the priest" over and over again is tiresome -- bids him good day. Gil glares his goodbyes.
Back in a less blasphemous plotline, the spa manager is busy protesting her lack of records for the dry sauna to an uncaring Warrick and Catherine. "That's okay, 'cause we do [have a record]. ESDA can look at this blank paper and see what's written on it, up fourteen layers," Catherine says, demanding that the lying spa manager prostrate herself before the altar of forensic evidence. Warrick decides to play Encyclopedia Brown for a moment by noting that a simple flashlight can often reveal pen impressions -- as in this case, where they've confirmed that Shelley logged an 8 p.m. appointment in the dry sauna. The spa manager snaps, "So she took a dry sauna. What does that prove?" That Shelley's clearly a spa naïf -- she should have gone for a mud bath, followed by a Vichy shower, a soak in the hot springs, and a 45-minute massage. That'll make you feel like a new woman after three days of imbibing last year's drink. "She died of a heat stroke. The coroner just called in with the final results of the inquest. Your sauna's kept at an optimal condition for a heat stroke -- 182 degrees. That could kill a person if you left them in there for longer than two straight hours," Warrick points out. "Especially if nobody checks up on them," Brass says, having decided to drop in and share the love with all of us. "A hotel employee is supposed to check on the saunas every fifteen minutes. Regulations, right? We got a copy of the check-up sheet." The spa manager looks at Brass behind her, and Catherine and Warrick in front of her, and realizes she's screwed coming and going.
Cut to Brass and company entering a tiled sauna, the manager hanging in the doorway. Catherine wanders around, saying, "So, Shelley was in here from eight until...what time did you call 911?" The hotel manager sighs, then launches into flashback: she came in to the sauna at closing time, ten p.m., which is when she discovered Shelley's inert body. "You moved her into the locker room? Put the robe on her?" Catherine prods. "I was just trying to protect the hotel," the manager says. "From negligent homicide," Catherine pushes. "They drill into us that the reputation of this hotel is everything," the manager says. Catherine is speechless.
Gil, meanwhile, is dealing with his own compromised crime scene as Nicky and Sara lay out the evidence for us all: the scene is useless, but the bullets dug out of Ramirez and Dunne have matching striations, and they match the Lorcin .380 registered to Ben. In addition, the blood Gil found and the fibers Sara lifted off the bodies all point to Ben. Worse yet -- the fibers are 12-ounce merlot-poly, found in car upholstery matching the carpet in Ben's car. "Bottom line...he killed him," Nicky says. "Very good, you guys, very good. But you haven't proved murder -- you've proved burial," Gil says. Nicky and Sara resume reciting all the evidence, and Gil reiterates: show him the murder weapon, or evidence that Ben did more than merely bury bodies. He starts, "Show me --" and Sara interrupts, "The holes in Christ's hands, Doubting Thomas?" Nice. Gil replies, "Yes. Empirical evidence. St. Thomas was ahead of us all." Well, he's not talking Thomas Aquinas here, who, despite being the patron saint of academics, was pretty much at loggerheads with Gil, writing as he did, "We must say that for the knowledge of any truth whatsoever man needs divine help, that the intellect may be moved by God to its act." Which is a pity, because of all the assorted Saints Thomas, Aquinas and à Becket were always my favorites. But I'm digressing here. Sara snaps us all back to the point of the scene when she asks Gil if his line of inquiry has "anything to do with the priest who's been coming around here?" Gil denies this vigorously. Nicky says, "But it's our job to present the DA with the best evidence possible. Let a jury decide. Anything else and we're playing judge. The evidence doesn't get any better than this." Gil looks at his subordinates for a long moment, then decides, "Okay, ship it. Show it to the DA." You know, this may be my years upon years of having attended the Stations of the Cross every Good Friday, but I'm thinking that this entire scene was meant to parallel the whole condemning-an-innocent man thing that, you know, more or less provides the narrative underpinnings for the central message of the Christian faith. Not that I'm terribly comfortable comparing Gil to Pontius Pilate or anything. I'm just saying.
Moving on to something that has no relationship to theology whatsoever...Brass is asking Catherine and Warrick if they'd be up for some grub. Catherine turns him down because she wants to go home and tuck her daughter into bed -- I do believe this is the first formal Lindsey reference of the year -- and Warrick's going home to watch football on his wide-screen television. Brass gives 'em a few yards' head start -- enough to ensure a truly distinctive double-take -- then says, "I'll go see Tina alone." Cue the double-take -- the looks on Warrick and Catherine's faces are priceless. Brass continues, "Hotel tells me she's down playing quarter slots." Well, we all deal with grief in our own way. Catherine asks Brass why he thinks this case is no longer closed, and he says, "My guy in the lounge tells me Tina and Shelley were having a catfight over some dude named Jeremy the day that she died. That's probably how the shirt really got ripped." Catherine asks Brass not to "ring [Tina's] bell" until she re-examines the case. Then she and Warrick abandon their lives and return to work.
Gil and Nicky are hard at work on unearthing evidence to corroborate the Ben-is-a-killer theory. What they find instead is that Ben has a brother Roger with quite a record. Nicky reads it off: "Armed robbery. Past convictions: breaking and entering, assault with great bodily harm. Paroled 9/27/2000 -- this guy is hard-core. He's looking at his third strike here," Nicky says. Gil, meanwhile, is sprinting out the door. Nicky stands, staring at the screen for a while. Sara comes in and asks what's going on. Nicky turns to her, concern writ large across his features: "You know how we pushed him to file on Ben?" Sara nods. Nicky gulps, "We might have been wrong." I pause the show for a moment to note that not only is Nicky having a good hair-and-wardrobe episode, but George Eads is doing a hell of a job tonight with the role. Seriously -- go, George!
Gil is down in the holding area with Buzz, sitting on a chair and facing Ben, the bars of Ben's cell dividing them. It's remarkably evocative of watching William Peterson with Brian Cox in Manhunter. "Tell me about your brother. We know that you only buried the bodies, so what happened -- did he threaten you?" he rasps. Ben doesn't talk; we only hear his breath hitching as he fights unsuccessfully to keep from crying.
Cut to Dante's Pizzeria, where we meet frere Roger, a scrawny, tough customer who's beating the hell out of a ball of pizza dough. "Did you learn to toss pizza in prison, Roger?" Gil asks. Roger responds to the question with, "Who the hell are you guys?" Buzz recites Roger's rap sheet and says, "You sound like the kind of guy where it wouldn't be a big jump to murder." Roger's impassive. He mumbles something about how his brother got him the pizza job and he's staying clean; Buzz says, "Suppose I tell you your brother said you did [these murders]?" Roger stops pummeling dough for a moment, then says with utter conviction, "He wouldn't do that." Gil then lays out how he thinks Roger committed the crime -- right after work (thus explaining the flour), first shooting, then strangling the victims. Roger and Gil have a stare-down, and Roger finally says, "Ben did it." He takes us through a flashback where Ben's apparently snapped, come to him for help, and been turned down because "I'm on a short line. It's [Ben's] mess; [he's] gotta deal with it." I suppose, in some circles, this passes for upright citizenry. Buzz pushes with, "What started the beef with the victims?" Roger replies, "Tempers, I guess." Flashback to Ben going mad over Rodriguez pulling into his gas pump. Roger continues, "Bystander gets a little too nosy and he gets it too." We flash to Ben, still in the grip of this inexplicable homicidal rage, deciding to off Dunne. Gil notes that whomever killed Dunne left flour on his face -- implying an up-close-and-personal killing -- and we flash to Roger strangling Dunne. Gil continues, "When a person changes his mode of murder -- from gunshot to ligature -- it's for one of two reasons: entertainment, or necessity. Which was it for you?" "Neither. I told you, Ben strangled that guy," Roger repeats. "The flour says you did it," Gil points out. Roger's not moved by the power of forensics.
So forensics decides to open a can of whoop-ass on Roger and Ben's trailer. Sara and Nicky are going through the single-width trailer with flashlights when Sara spots a dry-cleaning bag with the clothes intact. It stands out because, in Sara's words, "The trailer's low-rent and the dry-cleaning's expensive." Sara pulls out the contents of the bag; there's a livid stain on a denim shirt. She scoffs, "Pizza man's not as smart as he thinks; dry cleaning bakes in blood." "Could be red sauce," Nicky points out. "Oh, now you're cautious," she shoots back. "I'm just trying to put our mistake to good use," Nicky replies. Oh, thank God: the boy is finally demonstrating a capacity for experience- and observation-based learning. The two of them proceed to split up: Nicky continues to search the trailer's perimeter while Sara IDs the stains. He immediately notices a steel drum full of coals and begins digging. Sara, meanwhile, is taking a fabric sample. Both of them are successful: Sara's got hemoglobin, and Nicky's got a gun.
Cut to Roger returning to the big house. He's in a wife-beater, being led past his brother's cell to strains of opera-esque music. He's got a hardened, menacing look on his face. By contrast, Ben has a wide-eyed, open, frightened look; he's searching for something in his brother's face and not finding it. And again with a side comment -- whoever is playing Ben is fantastic; the casting agent's on a roll with these on-the-cusp-of-adulthood actors that are popping up lately.
While the brothers are having their little reunion, Gil is doing ballistics testing; Liam the Lab Tech is mere feet away, running through blood sample tests for Sara. The results: the dry cleaning baked in the stain, but it also degraded the blood to the point where there are no distinct or identifiable markers. Sara pounds on Liam to try again; he rebuts that he has, several times. Gil's testing is also fruitless; although the gun is the same, the barrel appears to have been altered, so the bullet striations are now different. Therefore, there's no way the evidence can link the bullets found in the victims to the gun Nicky found. Gil says they're going to present the evidence to the DA anyway; Nicky replies disgustedly that Roger's going to walk.
Cut to a scene of Roger -- evil, evil, eeeeeeeeeeevil Roger -- doing precisely that (to the operatic music that presaged his brief stay in the Las Vegas penal system) while Ben watches him with a look of abject betrayal. As Roger swaggers out, he tells Gil, "He's never been in any real trouble before. They'll go easy on him." Gil watches him leave, then follows Roger into the hall, saying, "The bullet jammed in the feed, didn't it?" We see Dunne's murder in flashback again. Roger smirks and walks off.
In a plotline that's destined to end on less of a down note than the Ben/Roger one, Catherine is outlining for Tina how Shelley's autopsy results point to a severe allergic food reaction -- and guess who just happened to be allergic to shellfish? Shelley, who unknowingly digested a seafood bisque with pulverized lobster, ordered for her by her best friend Tina in a fit of pique after Jeremy called the girls' room and asked for Shelley. "You killed her over a guy you met in a bar?" Warrick states in mild disbelief. "I didn't mean to kill her! I just thought that she would have an allergic reaction and not be able to make her date that night!" Tina sputters. Warrick's disbelieving look increases in intensity as this all sinks in. Catherine explains how, when a food allergy kicks in, its doing so in a room that's 182 degrees is likely to be lethal. Warrick adds that as the allergic reaction worsened, her circulation failed. Tina sobs and flails elaborately, saying, "I didn't even like the guy. I just didn't want to be left out." Warrick sighs and looks beleaguered; Brass rolls his eyes in a seen-it-all gesture and steps forward to arrest Tina.
Sara comes in to tell Gil that the DA's hunting him down -- she has no idea why. Fortunately, the all-knowing, all-seeing television set in his office fills us in: the DA's filing homicide charges against Benjamin. Gil bolts off to try to rectify the situation. The DA is not receptive to his arguments -- "Don't you have enough cases over at CSI, now you're trying to tell me which ones I should take to court?" Gil counters, "There isn't even one piece of evidence that says the kid was even present at the murders!" And this is where we find out how truly evil, evil, eeeeeeeeeeeevil Roger is: he just happens to have turned in the tie used to strangle Ben, claiming that his brother forced him to hide it. Gil claims that the evidence will -- the DA cuts him off, pointing out that most juries are too simple-minded to make critical distinctions in evidence. Gil counters that Ben was set up. The DA says, "They're both part of it, and if I can get one of them, I will." One can only hope that every night, as she's trying to sleep, the faces of those she's wronged float up before her eyes.
Gil makes a last-ditch effort to try and get Ben to confess to the circumstances leading to his involvement in the burial, asking the boy to explain how his skin cells ended up on the tie. Ben sticks with the I-don't-know. Gil then drops the bomb: "Your brother brought in that tie." Ben flails, clearly stunned that Roger would do this. Ben says, "I just picked up the bodies at his place," and we flash back to Roger -- say it with me, now: evil, evil, eeeeeeeeeevil Roger -- bidding Ben to pick up the tie because "I like it." That would be how he set Ben up. He then tells Ben, "You get into trouble, you don't have to say anything; I'm counting on you." Ben, clearly distraught, nods. God, I must be going soft in my dotage; I'm blown away by how well-acted this scene is, with the wheels visibly turning in Roger's head while Ben scrambles to help his brother. Buzz blurts out, "I got to ask: how does somebody bury two bodies as a favor?" Ben gasps, "He's my brother. He told -- he told me if I didn't talk to you guys and he didn't talk to you guys, it would all blow over, it would just go away." Buzz points out that it most certainly is not going to go away, and the best Ben can hope for is life without parole. "I don't think I can do that kind of time," Ben stammers through tears. Gil leans forward, pleading for Ben to think of any physical evidence that might link Roger to the murders; there is none.
Cut to a montage of paperwork: Ben got the death penalty. I promptly go into fits over this fictitious development, shouting to the television screen that this -- along with the statistical tidbit that race plays a factor in sentencing, in that African-Americans are at least three times as likely to get a death sentence as Caucasians, along with the ever-present specter of wrongful conviction such as the cases of Kenneth Adams, William Range, James Newsome, Lionel Kane, and John Aldomar in Cook County, Illinois alone, along with the lack of evidence linking the death penalty and the alleged deterrent effect it has, along with the all-too-disturbing idea that we live in a country with a Supreme Court that has yet to overturn Penry v. Lynaugh, thereby upholding the state's right to execute the mentally retarded -- this is precisely why we need to abolish the death penalty. I apologize for failing to make this a funny digression but frankly, there's not a whole lot of humor to be found in the death penalty.
Gil, however, doesn't go into screaming fits; he heads into the church. The two priests in the front note his presence. He eases into a pew, and Father Baker comes over. "I know that we arrested the wrong brother," Gil starts. Father Baker nods. Gil continues, "He [I'm presuming he means evil, evil, eeeeeeeevil Roger] came to see you as soon as Ben was in custody." Father Baker replies, "I tried to help without breaking my vows." Gil laughs ruefully and says, "We both have jobs that begin after the crime." "After the sin," Father Baker corrects. "Some people might call it a career in futility," Gil continues. "Some might call it a vocation," Father Baker counters. The two men smile wearily. Gil muses that hopefully, one day, forensic techniques will be foolproof, "and put the right man in jail." Even more optimistically, Father Baker says, "Someday, we won't need jails." He then invites Gil to celebrate Mass with him on Thursday nights; Gil is touched, but declines the invitation. "You don't believe?" Father Baker asks. "In religion? I believe in God. In science. In Sunday supper. I don't believe in rules that tell me how I should live," Gil replies. "Even if they're handed down by God?" Father Baker asks. He's a sharp cookie, that padre. Gil counters with the Crusades, asking, "How many people died because of someone's religion?" "Fanaticism," Father Baker corrects. "Semantics. They're still dead. I'm sorry about Ben, Father," says Gil. Father Baker stands up with Gil and says, not ungently, "You still suffer like a Catholic. A light bulb goes out, other people fix it, get a new one. A light bulb goes out for the Catholic, he stands in the dark, goes, 'What did I do wrong?'" Gil pauses for a moment before saying, "That guilt's not in me anymore." Then he leaves the church.
Gil heads back to CSI Central (a nitpick: unless Las Vegas has suddenly decided to convict with the same alacrity they use to nurture the matrimonial industry, there's no way Ben would be convicted over the course of a CSI shift), and Catherine warns him that a reporter will probably be calling to quiz him on the perils of going to a spa. Gil's violently indifferent to the prospect. He's futzing around with some paperwork when he notices several deputies bolting back toward the holding pen where Ben is; the deputies are shouting frantically. An expression of dread creeping across his face, Gil sprints back toward the action, entering Ben's cell as a deputy says desperately, "Hold his head, hold his head." "Oh, no, no, no, no," Gil moans, ducking into the cell and crouching over Ben. He then looks up from the boy, shouting, "How did this happen?" The deputy answers, "Incisor, he clamped down with teeth." Ben's convulsing; there are long, bloody streaks running from his mouth and his arm is covered in blood. He literally chewed his own wrist open in an effort to kill himself. Gil's beseeching them to try and hold pressure steady, and more rescue personnel come in, pushing Gil out of the way and into a corner of the cell. Ben dies before his eyes. Gil looks down at his hands -- covered in the blood of an innocent man -- then looks back at the dead boy. I'm so stunned by the ending, I can't even summon the wherewithal to make a snarky comment about the all the parable-driven parallels this scene conjures. And thus endeth one of the strongest episodes of CSI this season.