Ah, suburbia. We're in a housing development that goes beyond "prefabricated" and into "cloned." As a thin, balding plumber navigates a dry and roomy crawl space, a strident female voice screams, "What's taking so long? I just wanted you to fix the leak!" I briefly entertain the hope that perhaps the plumber will thrust his hand through the floor Carrie-style and kill this harridan, but I suspect this is just so much backstory leading up to the inevitable moment where some civilian discovers a body. Still, if that woman is so adamant about how she wants the plumber to use his time, then maybe she should have been more specific about what was leaking and where. Few plumbers are psychic; they're not going to crawl under a house, commune with an i-beam, and instantly know where the leak is. Granted, for $90/hour, they should be, but you just can't have it all.
Good Lord, I've digressed and we haven't even hit the credits yet. Back to the show!
The plumber continues his crawling, as he shines his flashlight on a concrete berm, he mutters, "I've found something." The camera glides along the path of the beam to rest on his discovery -- four spidery, mummified human fingers sticking out of the concrete.
Cut to night. The entire house has been taped off, a process I sincerely regret missing since I would have liked to have seen how the harridan in Scene I reacted to the news of a body in her basement. Nicky's wearing a dorky blue jumpsuit and pulling a toolbox out of the CSI van. He crouches by a crawl space and radios, "Okay, I'm ready up here." "Hang on a minute," replies Gil, and the scene switches to him belly-crawling in what looks to be a considerably darker and cobwebbier crawl space. Fortunately for Gil, he doesn't share my claustrophobia; in fact, he looks downright ecstatic. Oh, that Gil -- overjoyed by the idea of bodies moldering undetected in cramped and dingy places. Gil shines the flashlight from his hardhat onto the hand and identifies the hand as definitely human based on the metacarpals and phalanges. He then joins Nick outside; Nick has been passing the time by staring at the house's foundation and muttering, "There's got to be a better way." Not according to Gil: "When a body decomposes in concrete, it leaves an air pocket, vacuum sealed. We do this right, it will open like a jar of pickles." I can appreciate the use of metaphor as a teaching device as much as the person, but Gil's colorful lectures have a way of putting one off one's food. Nicky, made of less imaginative stuff than I, buckles down to work, joining Gil in chiseling a hole in the house's foundation. The bricks fall in, and a cavity is revealed, with a set of human bones resting inside. Nicky says, "Ten bucks says they sell the house." Gil replies, "By law, you've got to disclose everything: three bedrooms, two baths, and a skeleton in the basement."
Cut to the credits, which pass as I blink in shock at Gil's failure to make jokes about skeletons in the closet.
Cut to the office. Gil's handing out work assignments, telling the assembled morgueteers that he and Nicky will be handling the skeleton. "I hear it's just bones. What a rush," Sara says dully. For someone who spent her last extraneous subplot singing the praises of cremation, she's pretty up on this human remains stuff. Gil ignores her and addresses Warrick, telling the two junior CSI folk to investigate the scene at an officer-reported shooting. He warns them of the potential pitfalls in investigating a cop, which go unnoticed by both Sara and Warrick since they're too busy bickering over who will drive to the scene. The only people left in the squad room are Gil and Catherine. She asks Gil what she's to be working on since she "could use a rush," and Gil, like an idiot, tells her he's got something that fits the bill, but he can't give her the case due to conflict of interest. "The alleged rape victim is an exotic dancer," he says. "Because I used to be one, I'll be biased?" Catherine replies. Knowing you, Catherine, yes -- everything sways the direction of your investigation. But Gil doesn't think Catherine's affinity with the g-string divas will be the problem; it's fact that the rape suspect is her ex-husband. "He's asking for you, but you can't take it," Gil warns her, little realizing that telling Catherine to separate her personal biases from her work is an exercise in futility. This is a woman who got someone killed because she was in a snit about a dead woman's marital infidelity. God only knows what egregious professional violations Catherine will commit when dealing with her ex-husband expressly against Gil's wishes, but I am fully confident we'll spend the rest of the episode finding out.
Catherine and Gil dicker a little; then Gil hands her the file, telling her to talk to Eddie, then pass off the case after she's finished with the preliminary round of questioning. He stares at her, clearly wondering if he's done the right thing, and the camera pans on to Catherine's face. A nice transition shot takes us to a picture of a graying man in the tank, rubbing his face in worry as Catherine's reflection stares at him intently. She shakes her hair, rolls her eyes, then steels herself for a conversation with the ex. As Catherine walks into the tank, Eddie immediately starts protesting his innocence. Catherine is dishing out forensic jargon in reply, then Eddie says, "We had sex, okay? But she was with me one hundred percent!" Catherine looks up and says, "In a parking lot behind the club." Eddie gives her a look clearly meant to push a few buttons, and says, "Well. Some women like the outdoors." Catherine assumes a look I normally associate with my cat when she's trying to communicate high dudgeon with minimal effort, and asks if Eddie's presumed girlfriend knows about his habit of boffing strippers in the wild. Eddie responds that he's a single man, and Catherine acidly informs Eddie that perhaps he should call the ex and plead for money to pay a lawyer. Naturally, Eddie takes this moment to scream at his wronged ex-wife, "Cath! I'm in a jam here!" which leads me to suspect that even if the infidelity didn't kill this marriage, his incredible denseness would have. Catherine continues playing hard-ass until Eddie plays the child card, reminding Catherine that perhaps the child might not benefit from visiting her dad in the clink. Whatever objectivity Catherine has gathers its skirts, curtseys to the audience, and disappears for the remainder of the show.
Down in the morgue, Gil and Nicky are standing over the bones, trying to determine telling clues. Gil muses, "Based on the auricular surface, I'd say she died when she was about twenty." "'She'?" Our Boy for Exposition asks. Gil explains, for the sake of all of us at home, that one can usually assign a gender to a skeleton based on the width between pelvic bones, then deftly addresses my sniping about Nicky the Exposition Wonder Boy by noting, "For a ladies' man, you don't know much about bone structure." Nicky grins and replies, "I know all I need to know," then rips into a deconstruction of the presumed cause of death, noting that the gouges on the skeleton's ribs indicate this person knew her attacker. Gil notes that the nature of the gouges indicates a curved, serrated edge and finishes, "Whatever killed this girl, was not a traditional weapon." He then crouches down to see eye-to-skull-socket with the bones, cups the skull gently in one hand, and peers intently, whispering, "Who are you?"
Cut to a parking lot that looks like it's behind the new Aladdin casino. Sara and Warrick walk over to a crime scene in progress, only to be greeted by Brass. He introduces them to a cocky-looking cop named Joe Tyner, and the four make small talk about what led to this scene. Tyner takes us all on flashback -- he was pursuing a Jeep driving like many large vehicle drivers in the Bay Area typically do, i.e. all over the road with no consideration for other cars, double yellow lines, or any of the other regulations or conventions the rest of the vehicular community follows as a matter of course. It's dismaying to learn that poor driving is a regional constant. Anyway, the officer's chasing down the Jeep, the Jeep pulls into the empty parking lot behind the casino, and Tyner drives up and leaps out of his car, drawing his gun and yelling, "Get back in the car!" as he does so. Tyner, who looks all sorts of wigged out in the flashback, is yelling for the guy in the Jeep to toss his keys on the ground and put his hands on the wheel. The guy, who's clearly falling apart as the seconds elapse, begins babbling, "Whatever you think I did, I didn't do. I didn't do it. I'm on three strikes, man. Let me just show you my registration." As his hands move off the wheel, Tyner's eyes widen and he shouts for the driver to put his hands back on the wheel. We see the driver reach for a gun kept by his knee and shoot himself in the forehead.
Back in the present day, Sara listens to this harrowing tale of suicide-by-cop and asks abruptly, "Where's his gun?" Tyner replies that he left it in the Jeep, and Sara goes off to bag the firearm for further examination. Warrick asks for Tyner's gun, and the two men give him a small measure of grief; Warrick keeps his cool and informs them it's standard procedure, and Tyner hands the gun -- which he claims he didn't fire -- over to Warrick. Over at the Jeep, Sara peers in and verifies that the driver really does have a bullet hole in the middle of his forehead. As she's collecting the gun, we hear Warrick say, "We're going to need to seal this lot." Brass replies, "Tyner told you what happened. Whose side are you on here?" Brass, now is not the time to be pulling that thin-blue-line business, especially with your neighbors in California undergoing not one, but two, trials in which rings of police officers set up citizens, filed false charges, and committed other atrocities in the name of police work. Warrick smacks Brass around a little -- only verbally -- and asks him to step aside so the CSI folks can do their job. "At least test his hands for gun residue!" Brass says, and Sara replies, "At this close proximity, they'll both be covered, no matter who fired." Brass and Sara stare at each other a while, and eventually Brass averts his eyes as the scene fades out.
Gil is standing over a chunk of masonry and staring at it when Nicky walks in. "You brought the foundation of the house back here," he notes, and Gil defends the decision by pointing out that since the Jane Doe was dumped in the concrete when it was still wet, the chunk holds a partial impression of her features. It's like those casts archaeologists can make of Pompeiians who were trapped when Mt. Vesuvius erupted -- and it's proof that Gil takes all the cool work, because we find out that Nicky's been sent out to check the house's permits. Since the house was sold after it was completed, the homeowners aren't suspects. The scene closes with the two men musing that, but for a leaky pipe, the body would have remained undetected, thus depriving them of an opportunity to do a lot of cool forensics work and bother a murderer grown complacent with time.
Back in the part of the lab that doesn't give the impression of being 500 feet below the Earth's surface, Warrick is hunched over a microscope. Sara comes in, and Warrick muses, "Why would a guy speed all the way down the Strip, just to pull over and cap himself?" It's nice to see all that unpleasantness with the judge hasn't put him off thinking about deep philosophical issues. Sara, who has no time for tautological discourse, walks Warrick back around to the evidence they're supposed to be discussing, and it comes out that both the officer's gun and the dead guy's were nine-millimeter weapons, and both are missing a bullet. "Brass isn't going to like this," warns Sara, and Warrick snaps back, "I don't give a damn what Brass likes." "Like I do? If Tyner's dirty, he goes down. I just know what happens when you piss off a PD." In Warrick's case, that means you have two public agencies gunning for you. All he needs to do is run afoul of the Las Vegas firefighters to maintain his streak of stumbling into civic messes. He knows this too -- the camera pans out on Warrick looking grim.
Gil is sitting at his desk, letting his little spider run across his palms, when there's a knock on the door. A pallid blonde stands in the doorway asking, "Gil Grissom? Or...should I call you Spiderman?" "It's harmless," Gil assures her. "Of course it is," she purrs in a voice that evokes cold winds in November. "It's an orange-kneed tarantula. Nice specimen." Gil looks up through half-closed eyes and lifts the hand with the spider to her, cooing, "The tarantula's touch is very gentle." "It leaves no prints," she whispers, soft as frost forming on a winter window. "They move without a trace. May I?" She slides her hand under his, and Gil opens his mouth as he shifts the spider to her palm. I've seen less explicit allusions to sex in a Paul Verhoeven movie. The woman sighs gently and pulls her palm back, Gil rises with a love-struck look on her face. "Maybe I should introduce myself," she says. "Teri Miller does not need an introduction," Gil moons. "I need you to make me a face."
In another part of the building, one where the walls aren't in danger of melting from the volcanic sexual tension bubbling below the surface of spider talk, Sara and Warrick are having a discussion with Tyner. He's vehemently denying any involvement in the driver's death, and Sara's pressing him about this missing bullet. Tyner reveals that he doesn't top off the clip -- the fourteenth bullet puts pressure on the clip, and the gun can jam just when one needs it most -- and Warrick asks Tyner if there's anyone who can confirm his habit. Tyner leaps to his feet: "It's not a story! And no, I don't tell people how I carry. Do you? Check the other magazines!" I like this guy -- he's playing the accused-cop-on-the-edge thing just right. Of course, Brass has to come crashing in, thus ruining the effect with his usual bombastic style: "What's going on in here!?" Warrick, ever cool in the face of irritability, replies that they're all having a little talk. Brass informs them all he's the union rep on this case -- a move clearly intended to cow the investigators -- but Sara counteracts by telling Brass Tyner's clip was missing a round, and the bullet's missing. Tyner protests again, and Sara says, "With a record like yours, we're supposed to take your word?" Warrick picks up the beat with, "Five civilian complaints, three for excessive force, two IA investigations --" "I was cleared!" Tyner interjects. Warrick pauses for a moment, calculating the maximum effect, and says, "I'm sure you were." Tyner, as expected, explodes. Brass calms him down, then displaces the anger by charging Sara and Warrick to go out there and find the one missing bullet. Warrick makes a crack about how fortunate it was that he sealed off the crime scene, and departs while Brass and Tyner fume impotently.
Back in the looooooooooove lab, Teri's bent over the foundation, filling it with putty and demonstrating the same flair for gruesome food metaphors that Gil has: "It's like a human Jell-O mold!" She explains that it won't be easy to get a face together, and Gil replies, "They told me you were the top forensic artist in the country --" "And Canada," Teri continues. "I didn't say I couldn't do it. Give me your hand." Gil does, and Teri murmurs, "You'll enjoy this. It's a science as much as an art." Gil plunges his hand into a bowl full of goo -- no Freudian meaning there, no sirree -- and Teri guides it into the cavity, molding the gel to the contours of the face. Jesus, they keep this up and I'll need a cigarette at the commercial break. Gil looks pole-axed as Teri pours a bucket of latex into the molded cavity. A moment later, Teri pulls out a blob of latex; Gil peers over her shoulder and says, "It doesn't really look like anything." "Of course not. No shadows. No shadows, no perspective," Terri replies as she deftly smoothes and molds the latex with her fingers. "Now look," she finishes, and holds up a slice of feminine-looking face, mouth fixed in a tight line and eyes closed. The camera fades out on the face, and back on Teri, seated at a bench and working on adding more slices of face to the mannequin head in front of her. Gil sits to her and says, "So teach me." It's foreplay and expository dialogue! Teri walks us through both the production process and the ethnotyping she does based on bone structure and dominant phenotypes in the country. We learn that the skeleton likely belonged to someone of Nordic descent; as Gil queries why Teri's popping brown eyes in the empty sockets, Teri replies that the majority of people in the U.S. are brown-eyed and "it photographs better. You want to get her picture out there, don't you?" Gil replies that he does, brooding, "There's someone out there who needs closure. And someone out there who needs to go to jail." Teri regards Gil for a moment, then presents him with the finished face. Creepy dead glass eyes aside, it's pretty human-looking. Gil grabs a camera to take a picture of the model, and the camera pulls in tight on the face...
...and pulls back out to show a frontal snapshot floating behind an anchorwoman's head as she says, "As we first reported yesterday, the unidentified remains of a Caucasian female were unearthed in Summercliff. The five-foot-tall woman was approximately twenty years old." Gil is watching the broadcast and wondering, as I do, how the artist's reconstruction came to resemble Ellen Barkin in Drop Dead Gorgeous, when Nicky brings him coffee. A hotline flashes on the screen and Catherine walks in, saying, "Hotlines...hit or miss." "I don't know," Gil muses. "In my experience, people usually remember a beautiful woman." Catherine gives him a full-on stare, and Gil realizes she wants some alone time. Nick makes some awkward excuses and scoots from the room. Catherine says she saw Eddie, and he actually seemed scared. "Does that make you happy?" Gil asks, a question that would be socially inappropriate for anyone else but him, and Catherine hedges. "You're not still in love with Eddie?" Gil asks. Catherine drops her head and sighs, refusing to meet his eyes. Gil, who is only now realizing that perhaps even telling Catherine about this case was a bad idea, vehemently declares that Catherine has to drop the case and give it to Warrick. Catherine is still silent, refusing to meet his eyes. A nameless lab tech breaks the scene by summoning Grissom back to the Jane Doe skeleton; Grissom leaves the room after finally catching Catherine's eye. He's clearly not convinced she'll keep her word: "You have to pass off the case. You could compromise the case and there's no going back. You could hurt Eddie as much as you could help him." Catherine slouches in her chair and watches him go, shooting him much the same look I shot my seventh-grade science teacher when I planned on ignoring her.
Gil re-enters the bowels of the lab and stands over his skeleton with a jovial, mostly-bald coroner. The coroner points out something Gil missed -- a hairline fracture in the posterior skull, which we get to see in the patented C.S.I. TMI-cam close-up -- and some salt and sand in the inner ear, which is kind of odd, as few people go snorkeling in the desert outside town. Just as Gil is pondering the possibility that someone might have killed this woman on the beach and dragged her body back to Vegas for an anonymous interment, Nicky comes barreling in: "The hotline just lit up -- five people, and they all identified the same person. Faye Green. And her mother just confirmed." Gil looks shaken, steeling himself for another horrific encounter with the living outside the protective walls of the CSI labs.
Sure enough, in the scene Gil, as opposed to whatever officer might have handled Faye Green's case when she was still classified as a missing person, is sitting in the Green living room, listening to her mother explain, "I need to know what happened to my daughter." Gil gently leads Mrs. Green around to a discussion of Faye's hobbies, including scuba diving, and learns that Faye had just left home and moved in with her boyfriend Jason Hendler. Mrs. Green assures Gil that Jason is in no way a suspect: "He loved my daughter. He was good to her." Then she breaks down in tears. The camera pulls back on the scene: Mrs. Green, bent over a dining room table full of open photo albums, rocking back in forth while she sobs, and Gil, sitting still and uncomfortable across the table from her as they pass time in a sunny afternoon.
Before we can get too depressed over the whole thing, someone who might be considered the poor man's Angelina Jolie -- provided the man had had a few drinks first -- is telling the camera she's given Eddie Willows twenty or so lap dances. She continues spinning her tale of woe, telling a detective how she went out to the parking lot for an innocent round of drinks with Eddie, especially since working as a stripper in Vegas has taught her that the customers are usually men with sincere shining intentions, and thing you know, she was raped. Catherine hovers in the doorway as the stripper -- who is sporting a dainty nose stud, a costuming move clearly meant to convey to the CBS audience that this girl is trash -- heaps imprecations on Eddie's head. Catherine comes in and introduces herself awkwardly -- "I'm Catherine Will -- just Catherine. I'm a forensic scientist," the girl makes a crack about Catherine seeming so normal, and the two are off and running in a contest to see who can out-cynic whom.
Both women are promptly outclassed by the attitudes Warrick and Sara are sporting, which is entirely understandable given that the two of them have spent all afternoon in a parking lot looking for a bullet. Given that it's a sunny afternoon and Vegas is a desert, the job has to have been both tedious and uncomfortable. Just as Sara's about to throw in the towel and throw down the metal detector she's holding, a parking lot attendant comes forth to ask if they're with the police. "I saw what happened," he said. "Police make me nervous. You guys aren't cops, are you?" "We're crime scene investigators," Warrick says in a don't-play-me-boy tone of voice. "We need to know what you saw." The kid folds faster than a metal chair at a professional wrestling match, and tells the following story: he was taking a break in someone else's car, and watched the scene unfold. From his angle, he could swear he saw Tyner fire impulsively. "Just like that," Sara says skeptically. "Just like that," the kid confirms. Warrick looks unhappy as Sara spells it out for him: between the missing bullet and the eyewitness, it looks as though Tyner's going down. "We better tell Grissom we've got a war [between departments]." Warrick puts on that beleaguered look he wears so well, given than he has plenty of practice wearing it.
In the scene, Warrick's taking off his shirt as Gil gives him flack about the case: "I heard about your witness: a valet who joyrides. How reliable." Warrick ignores him, and Gil changes the subject: "How's the thing going with Eddie Willows?" Warrick ad libs as best he can until Gil asks if Warrick's called the DMV yet. "Uh, yeah. Just about," Warrick feints, hoping he hasn't stepped into it. He has; Gil stands up, slams his locker shut, and asks Warrick why he'd call the DMV on a rape charge.
Just then Catherine walks into the locker room -- which is, like the bathroom on Ally McBeal, unisex and therefore exempt from my snide queries about how plausible this sort of scenario would be in an actual office -- and admits, "I didn't hand it off." She apologizes to Warrick, who snits back, "If you want me to suave anyone, I gotta know the shot." Catherine apologizes again, and turns to face Gil, who's worked himself into a bad mood. He rebukes her yet again for doing things that could contaminate the case, since he didn't learn anything from the Barger case where Catherine did, in fact, manage to contaminate the case and inadvertently get an innocent man killed. Gil, come on! Catherine shouldn't be anywhere near this case! You're an idiot for letting her do visual inspections! Get her o-f-f any sort of investigation where the father of her child is involved. But Gil doesn't listen to me, and so he and Catherine talk some more about the evidence in the Eddie Willows case. When Catherine notes the bruises on the alleged victim's body are consistent with his "vigorous" sexual style -- again, information that a crime scene investigator should not have, Gil feigns confusion. "Vigorous?" he asks. "She's trying to tell you that Eddie likes it rough!" Warrick pipes up from the opposite end of the locker room. Catherine, looking more uncomfortable by the minute, uneasily thanks Warrick, who does not do anything like crow, "Payback's a bitch!" before leaving. Gil hectors Catherine about evidence, noting that "you may not like where it leads you," which is something Warrick reminded Catherine of in Episode 3, and stalks off.
Meanwhile, Liam the lab guy comes out for his five minutes on the show. Nick is hovering over his shoulder as Liam looks at the sand found in Faye's skull, and asks Liam if he can pin down a specific beach based on the sand. Liam replies that doing so would require research, and he volunteers himself for a fact-finding mission in Hawaii. Nick suggests that Liam pass that one on to Gil, who's glowering right behind Liam, and Liam quickly changes his mind. He begins discoursing on the nature of sand, and we learn that the grains found in Faye's skull are man-made, thus eliminating any prospect of her getting killed at the beach and raising the question of what crushed quartz crystals are doing in Faye's skull.
We can't ponder that too deeply, because the scene has changed and Brass is charging up to Warrick, displaying all his issues with transference of blame by accusing Warrick of executing payback over the earlier to-do with Holly Gribbs. Sara comes up and tells Brass that their case is about their case, nothing more. Brass conveniently ignores reason in the name of advancing the scene, loudly declaiming that the DA has filed charges based on the testimony of a valet and a missing bullet. Lucky for him, Tyner is walking down the hall in his civvies; he hears Brass discussing him and sprints down for a confrontation with Warrick. Tyner goes off, making fun of people who adhere to the scientific principles, and finishes by screaming, "You have no idea what it's like putting your life on the line every day!" "What, being punk-ass cops who hide behind union reps?" Warrick replies, and Tyner leaps on to him. Fortunately, Nick and Gil are nearby, and they rush to pull back Warrick. As Brass is pulling Tyner in one direction and Gil and Nick are herding Warrick in the other, Warrick says, "You don't deserve a badge." Tyner goes lunging again, only to be thwarted by Brass and screams, "Scientists!" in the same tone of voice the rest of us use to scream, "Murderer!" Tyner finishes by taunting the CSI boys with a classic Freudian insult -- "I bet you've never pulled your weapon!" -- to which Gil replies, "I hope I never have to." Oh man: if that's not the sign that Gil will be drawing his nine millimeter before the end of the episode, I don't know what is. Nick walks Tyner out the door, clearly reveling in doing so; Sara ushers Warrick in the opposite direction, urging him to cool down; Brass whirls on Gil, saying, "This is all your fault." There he goes with that transference thing again. After making the usual tired accusations about scientists being out of touch with reality, Brass harps on the missing bullet and whirls off.
Catherine promptly goes into the conveniently empty locker room, jimmies open April's locker, and begins rifling through her things. She notices a box of VCF contraceptive films, and pockets them for later use.
Meanwhile, the two members of CSI who haven't demonstrated any difficulty with conducting themselves ethically on the job are standing in front of the door of a nice house. After the doorbell ring fades, an attractive if nondescript brunette comes to the door, asking Gil and Nick if she can help them. A man wanders to the door behind the woman and asks what's going on; Gil tells them they're investigating the disappearance of Faye Green and asks if he can come in.
The three men are walking down a hallway lined with polished wooden walls; one wall has a carefully-hung display of black and white photos. The man -- who, for sake of brevity, I'm just going to confirm is Faye's old boyfriend Jason Hendler -- pulls Gil aside and asks, urgently, "Did you...find her?" "I'm afraid we did," Gil replies. He tells Jason that Faye had been dead for quite a while. Jason takes the news impassively, saying only, "Hmmm. We'd always hoped." Gil asks to look around and Jason answers, "I've got nothing to hide." The two proceed to walk around and Gil is immediately drawn to the fish tank. "A trigger and a lionfish. Interesting choices. Violent, carnivorous predators." As the brunette woman looks on at Gil psychoanalyzing her household's choice in fish, Nick paces around the room, noticing a loose floorboard. Suddenly, "may we look around?" has turned into "may we pry up your floor board?" Gil pulls up the floorboard, suspecting that the fish tank may have overflowed or been knocked over, and finds a quantity of ground quartz crystals. Gil tells the Hendlers he thinks the tank was over here, it was knocked over, and there was a large amount of water and sand all over the place. Jason Hendler says, "I'd like you fellows to leave now," and Gil replies, "Fine. But we'll be back with a warrant." Nick smiles and nods, then follows Gil out. Who can blame him? You can't really follow up a line like that.
Catherine, meanwhile, is quizzing Liam the lab tech on the rape kit results. He notes that the results included semen and spermicide. Catherine appropriates his chamomile tea to demonstrate how the contraceptive film April was using would leave that residue in whatever bodily fluid samples were taken. Liam looks green, and who can blame him? Nothing -- not Jell-O, not pickles, not tea -- is safe from the investigators. You may as well hide your food and eat it while shut in a utility closet before it's used to demonstrate another, equally inedible principle. Catherine deduces that the presence of the spermicide means that April had the forethought to put in her contraceptive before going out to the parking lot -- and the forethought more or less nullifies the theory that the sex was less than consensual. Liam just looks dismayed over his now undrinkable tea, and the revelation that Catherine used to strip at his favorite club. Catherine assures him he would have remembered seeing her, and saunters off, leaving him to ponder the vagaries of his job.
Nick and Gil are walking down the hall, sharing the news that Jason Hendler used to be a subcontractor to the housing development where Faye's bones were buried. Just as Gil's getting excited about nailing Jason for murder, he notices Teri walking across the hall, wheeling her suitcase behind her. "Hey!" he calls, peeling off Nick and leaping to Teri's side. "You weren't going to say goodbye to me?" "I'll, uh, I'll meet you outside," Nick mumbles, extremely aware that Gil didn't hear a word he said. Teri fixes Gil with a sultry look and says, "I figured I'd let you off easy. But I did tack up my number on your big fish corkboard. Under 'cold cases.'" "The ones that got away," Gil says with a rueful smile. "Let's hope not," she says, then takes her leave. Gil watches her go with a mooncalf expression. They're no Bogey and Bacall, but I'll take what I can get on this show.
Cut to Warrick and Sara explaining the way the shooting went down. Based on the trajectory of the bullet and its final position in the tire, the only way that driver was shot was via the self-inflicted route. Warrick finishes the explanation -- which he delivered in small words so Brass could understand -- by pointing out that Tyner's off the hook. "So I bet, you think I owe you one, huh?" Brass says, clearly not above looking a gift horse in the mouth and demanding a set of braces for it. "We work, we get paid. You don't owe me anything," Warrick replies. That Warrick. He is a class act, crippling gambling addiction aside. I officially declare him my favorite C.S.I. character. Brass walks off, and Sara rolls her eyes at her departure.
Catherine is confronting April, who says, "He promised me a lot of things. I was sick of waiting." It turns out April had aspirations to be in music videos, and when Eddie failed to deliver on his promises, a friend who had set up a high roller on a rape charge and profited from his willingness to pay it off suggested that April do likewise. "Wait a minute. You think Eddie has money?" Catherine asks, clearly seeing herself lo those many years ago when she was taken in by Eddie. She confounds April by laughing cynically, then refusing to explain why.
Back at the Hendler house, Gil's prying up floorboards and soaking the surface with luminol. "I know what you're doing! You're looking for blood!" Jason says, panicky. "My husband didn't do anything. Why are you harassing us?" demands the wife. Nick and Gil ignore them both, noting that the luminol didn't appear to have picked up the blood, but luminol plus an alternate light source will reveal any blood proteins that have soaked into the wood. Both men comment on the floorboards' maple composition, noting first that maple's quite absorbent, and second that the boards have been lacquered, something that's not exactly typical with maple. Nicky finishes by muttering suspiciously, "Only time you lacquer maple, you have something to hide, " then flashes the light, and the floor turns into an abattoir. The worst part are the small, bloody handprints where it looks like Faye struggled against her attacker. Gil then brings the lights on again and walks us, via flashback, through a scenario where Jason and Faye have a fight, he shoves her into the fish tank, and she falls to the floor with a concussion. When he moves in to kill her, she surprises him by fighting back, and a struggle ensues before he finishes her off. "What did you use to kill her?" Gil asks, almost conversationally. "I didn't...kill her," Jason replies emphatically. Gil goes on to hypothesize that Jason drove Faye's body over to Summercliff and dumped it in concrete; Jason counters that at the time of Faye's disappearance, he had worked as a subcontractor less than a week, and his now-wife Amy, who was already working for the company, could back him up. Amy confirms that Jason had only worked at Summercliff a week, and was in fact in Reno the night of Faye's disappearance. "Yeah, you painted your floors and covered your tracks for what? Aesthetic reasons?" inquires Nick; Amy's jaw drops and her mouth works, but she has no answer. Gil fixes Jason with his I-am-but-the-tool-of-blind-justice look and says pointedly that the past had to catch up with him someday. Jason explodes: "I didn't kill Faye! I loved her! I still love her!" Both Nick and Gil, sensing a real awkward moment, what with Amy standing behind Jason, scramble to look anywhere else but at the two of them. Jason, finally realizing his wife is behind him, spins around, hands up. She's shaking her head from side to side, looking utterly dismayed. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry," Jason says as Amy croaks, "You still love her?" Nick saves these two from further awkward conversation by instructing the uniforms standing by to arrest Jason. As he's rushed out, Gil tells Nicky he'll be riding along in the car to bring the homicide detectives up to speed, and that the Hendler house is now a fresh crime scene. Nick vows to get to work as Amy stares blankly.
Cut to Nicky moving back down the wood-paneled hall where he left the crime scene kit. As he pulls out his gloves, he notices the black-and-white photos on the wall and stares closely. He notices a shot of Amy and Jason at the top of a rocky cliff face they've scaled, climber's axes in hand, and Gil's voice flashes back, "The instrument had to be slightly curved." The light bulb goes off over Nicky's head and he calls out, as calmly and normally as he can, "Mrs. Hendler, do you and your husband do much rock climbing?"
Amy replies in the affirmative by pointing a gun at Nick. Less than fifty feet away, Jason is screaming about his innocence. Before the cops shove him in the car, he says, "I gotta ask you something. Why do you care so much about the floors? Amy paints them every spring. It's no big deal!" And the light bulb goes off over Gil's head.
Nick backs up as Amy keeps him at gunpoint, spilling her story. Once Jason went to Reno, Amy came back "to tell Faye we would be together again someday." "Mrs. Hendler, put the gun down," Nick says calmly, but his reddening eyes betray his fear. Amy's oblivious: "Do you know he was engaged to me when he met her?" We flash back to a violent physical argument, and Amy stabbing Faye with an ax, repeatedly. "There was blood everywhere," and oh, she could keep washing her little hand and it would not come out...sorry. I flashed back to Macbeth there. Nick listens, his eyes nearly brimming with tears. "Blood, everywhere. No one else could see it. But I knew it was there." Nick tries to collect his wits and says, "Mrs. Hendler, I'm a good listener. You've got to give me the gun." "I can't!" she cries. "I'm sorry," she whispers as she takes aim. "Wait!" Nicks pleads. "You arrested my husband!" Amy keens. "Wait!" Nick begs again, louder. And then Gil appears -- gun drawn, which is some sort of historic first for him -- and tells Amy, "I don't want to fire my gun any more than you do. For five years, you've been washing the blood off your hands. Let's put down the gun." Amy does, and Gil steps forward to get it. She shrinks visibly and gives him a miserable, broken look. Gil steps back and asks, "You okay, Nick?" Nick, who had turned his back to control himself, haltingly answers, "Yeah." I have to say, George Eads did a fine job here -- Nick is clearly someone who naively thinks he could be a hero, but has just run into proof that he's human, and Eads did a great job of showing Nicky trying to do his job through his fear. Mind you, Nicky still runs a clear second behind my man Warrick, but that scene did a lot to raise his approval rating.
And in the last scene of the episode, it's day and Catherine is watching Lindsey play on a playground. Eddie comes by to thank her and offers her breakfast. Catherine curtly turns him down. Eddie pushes for the two of them to "talk about what happened between us." Catherine replies that there's nothing to talk about. Eddie puts the moves on her, crooning, "Why do you fight the one thing we're good at?" and Catherine is just about to fling herself into him face-first when, mercifully, their daughter runs up to distract them. The episode ends with them exchanging Meaningful Looks, suggesting that we're in for a few more storylines with this guy or, God forbid, a scene where they kiss and make up.
week on C.S.I.: the entire squad works on the gruesome mass murder of an entire family. If I didn't know better, I'd say it's a homage to the gruesome mass murder William Petersen has to investigate in Manhunter.