You can gamble in Las Vegas? Who knew?
We open on a casino. People are hitting the roulette tables, throwing dice and engaging in other games of statistical probability that megalithic corporations have rigged in their favor. Despite this, they look like they're having a good time.
A player -- not a smooth, would-be ladies' man, but an actual gambler -- slides a Benjamin across the table to his blackjack dealer. She looks up at the floor boss and calls, "Changing one hundred." "Changing one hundred," he confirms. She puts the bill in a Lucite box and slides it into the table; it appears to lock there. I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that the box drops the money into a secured safe set into the table. Except I'm not really, because in the scene, a uniformed security officer comes over pushing what looks like a big steel lockbox, then bends over the table, slides out the steel box, and replaces it with a fresh one, all under the watchful eye of the floor boss. The security guy then looks up at one of the surveillance cameras set in the ceiling and gives it a thumbs-up. We switch perspectives to the surveillance office, where the scene is replayed on a tiny monitor set in a larger bank. "Section G-3 all clear. En route to H-4 and then soft-count." Both men watching the monitors look as though they're in danger of slipping into comas any second now. The camera pulls back to look at a monitor where three long-haired, sunglasses-wearing figures are striding into the casino.
And then we're back on the casino floor, tracking these same three people. One of them is very female, in a fake-looking blonde pageboy and Jackie-O-style glasses; her companions look like Howard Stern and Denise Bryson. The three of them fan out on the crowded casino floor, and then the blonde woman takes out her gun and shoots down the chandelier. Instantly, and nearly reflexively, everyone hits the floor about the same time as the chandelier does. The man in the Howard Stern wig and red coat shoots the security guard in the back, then the Denise-Bryson-looking-guy does likewise. Denise gets a little trigger-happy -- handy for providing cover while Howard relieves the rolling lockbox of its contents. Blondie continues to cover the other half of the casino floor, with considerably more poise than Denise.
Up in the surveillance booth, both men have snapped to and one is saying, "Section G-4, security intercept at section G-5! Contain! Contain!" The two of the continue to watch Denise shoot at people while Howard robs the cart. We transition back down to the live action, and the three of them are now shooting their way out of the casino. Blondie takes the time to shoot out the barware -- smart, given that it puts on an impressive show and is a pain in the ass to clean up -- while Howard and Denise shoot security people instead. Just then, Denise goes down in a wrenching spasm; we watch the body fall and note that inside the shot, Howard's gun-holding hand is tucked discreetly by his hemline.
Then the chaos is over and we're in a considerably more calm casino. Gil and Brass are walking down the stairs; Gil is asking about body count. "Five guards, three civilians wounded, one dead bad guy," Brass says, continuing, "Armed robbers snatched the lockboxes from two high-stakes tables right off the rolling cage." "Cash on wheels," Gil notes. Brass continues expositing, as per his sworn duties as Captain Exposition. "Three women -- well armed and well muscled," he adds. Ohhhh, I feel a punchline building here. Gil counters that the mesomorphic maidens were small-time. Brass replies that they got away with $250,000. Gil reminds him that in Vegas economic terms, that's a petty-cash fund for one table. They walk over to Denise's prone body and Brass rebuts, "Small-time or not, these ladies are dangerous." Gil looks down at Denise and smirks back at Brass. He then hunkers down to examine the body and cracks, "Dangerous, yes. Ladies, no." He pulls off a wig. Brass looks like he's suddenly reevaluating the last few dates he went on.
Cue the Who. Incidentally, back in the day, Roger Daltrey would have made a fetching drag performer. Now, not so much.
Back at the casino of crime, Warrick and Nicky are hunkered down, tending to the unenviable task of cataloging the eight thousand or so bullets Denise and Howard sprayed around the joint. Warrick notes this with, "These guys packed enough ammo for a small army." Nicky replies that security managed to get off a few rounds before being riddled with bullets from a .45 -- and the security guards were packing nine-millimeters. Warrick pines for the good old days of yore, as in last year, when he was gambling like a drunken sailor and security was unarmed. "Times have changed," Old Man Nicky says laconically. Warrick ruefully agrees, then bends back to cataloging bullets. Meanwhile, Brass continues to lay down the backstory: "Same M.O. [modus operandi] as Laughlin, men dressed as women, came in and shot the place to hell, in and out in under five." Gil figures that Laughlin was a dress rehearsal. He and Brass walk toward the floor boss -- Gil expanding on this theory as he goes and basically working around to "practice makes perfect" -- when the floor boss steps in with his own nostalgia-soaked monologue about how in the old days, back when the Mob ran things, this would have never happened. Brass interrupts the man -- Mr. Duncan -- shortly before he launches into a soliloquy on the glory days of Lucky Luciano's involvement in Las Vegas's civic growth, and asks him to recount what happened. Mr. Duncan does: "We'd just made a money transfer to the rolling cages. Then -- bang -- chandelier comes crashing down. It sounded like an explosion, so I dropped to my knees, took cover." "Anything else?" Brass deadpans. "Yeah. I started praying for the gunfire to stop," Duncan replies. He wanders off, and Brass snorts, "Well, that was helpful." Gil says, "Actually it was. The chandelier gives us a starting point. The falling chandelier distracts the guards, makes them easy targets. The armed robbers load up, head for the exits --" "Quick escape," Brass cuts in. Gil continues as if he had never been interrupted: "Chaos moving in one direction, the money moving in the other." While he and Brass are mapping this out, we see another recreation of the crime scene via flashback -- and I'm thinking that either Brass needs to get glasses or else he needs to stop picking up chicks at professional wrestling matches or something, because there is no way any of those guys looked especially feminine.
Meanwhile, Sara and Catherine have been dispatched to the wilderness. They're driving down a lonesome stretch of highway under cover of night, and Catherine's saying irritably, "Can you imagine living out here?" "It's peaceful," Sara counters in a glass-half-full kind of way. "Peaceful? The town just lost five percent of its population," Catherine replies. Well, in a town of twenty, that's not hard, but so long as we're only looking at statistics without anything resembling context -- okay, Catherine, good point. Sara, who does not possess my freakish ability to divide and multiply by fives, says, "I thought you said this was a single homicide." Catherine snorts, "Yeah, in a population of twenty." Fortunately, Sara's saved from multiplication drills by the timely appearance of the Kwik-E-Mart, complete with lonesome state trooper (his job is to patrol the lonesome highway). They pull in, and the trooper -- whom avid television watchers will recognize as Bull Randle -- smirks, "Two hours to go seventy-five miles. You got lost." Since they're women, you know. And -- oh, frail vessels we -- all women are dizzy broads behind the wheel. Sara and Catherine give his crack exactly the attention it deserves, then remind him that one of the nice things about a dead body is that it rarely gets up and goes anywhere under its own power. Bull, however, has places to go, highway to roam, so he fills Sara and Catherine in: Dustin Bale is the name of the stiff, and he's got a bullet in the chest. Before he can take off, Sara bends down to read his nametag -- since they never got around to introductions -- and says, "Officer Spencer, did you touch anything?" Officer Spencer gives her another oh, you silly lady look and says, "Fourteen years as a state trooper? I know how to secure a crime scene without contaminating the evidence." Sara apologizes; he accepts and hits the road.
Sara and Catherine enter the convenience store -- and for the first time, we see that Sara's wearing a truly wretched tie-dyed shirt. I can appreciate that the wardrobe department is trying to delineate between Catherine (confident in her sexuality, likes dressing to flatter) and Sara (indifferent tomboy), but really, can't they find better tomboy togs? Anyway, the two women enter the Kwik-E-Mart, and as they're walking in the store and doing a visual scan, Catherine notices a white, lumpy substance clumped on the floor. Sara and Catherine debate whether it's vomit -- only if someone's on the all-starch diet, ladies -- and we find out instead that it's potato. "Poor man's silencer," Catherine says. We see a shot of a gun, blowing a potato away. Catherine muses, "Why would an assailant need a silencer all the way out here?" Sara, who has wandered off and begun to fondle a particularly provocative-looking potato, has no reply. She then wanders over to the cash register, and notes that the last bill of sale was eight hours ago. Catherine wonders why it took so long for the death to be reported. Sara posits that the assailant flipped the sign from "open" to "closed" on the way out, thus rendering the occasional passersby uninterested in coming inside. Catherine looks up at the security camera and gloats, "But not without getting his picture taken too." Sara goes to get the camera down, and goes, "It's plastic." "You're joking," Catherine says, as if this is the worst news she's gotten all day. It may well be. "Nine-volt attached to a blinking light," Sara clarifies. Catherine replies, disheartened, "Real or fake, it didn't work."
Back at the A-plot, Gil and Brass are taking down a whole lot of contradictory recollections from assorted witnesses. They decamp, and Brass says, "I've interviewed seventeen people. No two accounts are alike." Gil counters, "A professor conducted an experiment, asked a bunch of students to count the number of times the ball was passed...during the game, a person dressed in a gorilla suit ran across the court. When the professor asked his students if they noticed the gorilla, fifty percent responded, 'What gorilla?'" Brass fixes Gil with a pissy look and deadpans, "That's wonderful, Gil. If I see a gorilla, I'll arrest it." Or bury it. Either way, I don't know if it's that weird sage-green jacket or Brass's natural dyspepsia talking, but whatever it is, he amuses me.
Nicky's outside talking to the valet about the getaway vehicle -- it's beige, beat up, and possessed of flashing hazard lights. We establish that the car did not peel out, despite the driver's best gun-the-engine efforts. Nicky hunkers down and examines the dark fluid pooled on the pristine cobblestone pavement. "Smells like wood," he observes. "Motor oil?" the valet asks. "No," Nicky replies. "No?" asks the valet. "Transmission fluid. But it's brown, not red," continues Nicky. There's something weirdly off about using the Socratic method to bone up on automotive lubricants. "Which means?" the valet prompts. "It's not the right color," Nicky says.
Naturally, this is when we transition to a big, red, bloody wound, with David The Conditionally Fun Coroner twiddling a pair of pliers in the meaty bits to extract a bullet from Denise's dead body. Gil comes in and says, "Extraction is an art, Albert." I'd like to think he's quoting someone, but I don't know who. It certainly makes more sense than thinking that the writers have changed David's name halfway through the show. Since neither Gil nor David appear to have been thrown by the Albert reference, I won't harp further. We find out that Denise is actually one Adam Burrow, shot in the back with a hollow-point bullet at close range. "Mushroomed upon impact, maximizing trauma," David says. We see this effect up-close and personal, courtesy of the TMICam. Gil quickly deduces that Adam was shot in the back by one of his own partners, since the bullet in question is a .45 and not a nine-millimeter. The case just got interesting.
Back in the middle of Nowheresville, Catherine and Sara are working the scene. Catherine is blowing through a long plastic tube, which appears to dispense a fine white powder over the sign. Sara comments, "Wow, a fumette. Did you get that out of some museum?" Catherine replies, "Hey, don't knock it. It's still the best tool for lifting prints off cardboard. Blow and print." Meanwhile, Sara is trying to get into the mind of the criminal, asking, "If you were in a hurry, how would you get back there?" "Easy. Jump the counter," Catherine says. "Exactly what I'm thinking," Sara confirms. She heads back and begins whipping out a voltmeter, charges a sheet of foil, and uses the charged sheet to lift the dust from the footprints. She then begins musing, "Suspect entered, shoots the clerk through the potato, then hops up and over, leaving behind shoeprints, grabs the cash, flips the sign from open to closed, then exits." It is to Jorja's Fox's eternal credit that she manages the phrase "shoots through the potato" without breaking into uncontrollable giggles, as I would have done. Let's face it: "potato" is a funny word. Catherine asks how old the killer is; Sara asks what she's thinking. Catherine notes that the shoe size is relatively petite, so they may be looking for a minor.
Meanwhile, Warrick's just uncovered something interesting in the surveillance camera records. He walks Gil through the set-up and Gil snorts, "All the costumers in the world and they dress like women." Well, they would have turned heads if they were dressed like the Rat Pack, or George Clooney and Brad Pitt, I suppose. "Ski masks are all played out," fashion maven Warrick informs Gil. Warrick then walks Gil through the way the robbery went down -- the boys took out the casino security while the woman in black shot out the chandelier. Gil wants to see the other man (the Howard Stern doppelganger); Warrick punches a few buttons, and we get a close-up look at the guy. Warrick snorts, "No amount of make-up in the world's could cover up that chunk of Adam's apple." Gil then extrapolates that shortly after determining they could escape, Howard shot Adam. They then turn to the woman -- "dressed as a woman, among men dressed as women. Now see? That's a disguise," Gil says.
Speaking of womenfolk, Catherine's stalking around the Kwik-E-Mart, looking frustrated and edgy. I don't blame her; going by the light outside, they've been in there all night. The consumerist postmodern charm of a Frito-Lay display is bound to expire after a few hours. She turns on Sara, who's patiently dusting a counter with bright-pink powder, and comments on Sara's choice rather incredulously. This seems odd, given that she's worked with Gil for some time, and he's got that fabled Red Creeper powder. Anyway, Sara shrugs that the powders are in the kit, and Catherine snips, "Protocol's black!" Sara asks when Catherine developed an avid interest in her choice of powders. Catherine punts on that and launches into a rant: "The assistant coroner's four hours late and we are stuck out here until he transports the body. And I haven't even heard from Grissom." "Should I try green?" Sara wonders, ignoring Catherine. This does not deter Catherine: "I should have never been sent to this remote scene in the first place. I've got seniority. I deserve -- no, I've earned the right to pick my cases!" By this point, Catherine's nearly shouting. Sara gets up, drops some change on the counter, and silently hands Catherine a PowerBar. Catherine takes it, rocking from foot to foot in the still-angry dance, and says, "If I start eating, I will shut up." Sara lets that pass without comment. She heads back toward the body and asks Catherine, "Do you have a mirror?" Catherine, who is still apparently suffering from low blood sugar, snarks, "Since when do you care about your appearance?" Since she had to start worrying about you shedding on her clothes back there, you cat. Sara glares. "I mean, at a crime scene," Catherine backpedals. "It's not for me," Sara says. She wants to examine the body -- but since she's not allowed to touch it, she wants to use the mirror to amplify obstructed views. Just as Sara's hunkering down, the Emergency Back-up David and his chauffeur, Cato, come in to fetch the body. Catherine straightens up and mumbles a heartfelt "oh, thank God" around a mouthful of PowerBar. She'll be chewing that for days. Sara immediately straightens up with a "Busted!" expression and stammers that she wasn't looking at the body. David gives her a swoony smile and says, "I know you better than that." Hmmm. Looks like that little crush might be back, or else he just flirts with all his CSIs to pass the time between bodies.
Speaking of flirty lab techs, Liam The Lab Tech is kicking back and hanging ten (figuratively) over a surf magazine when Nicky comes sauntering on in. It's another good clothing episode for Nicky, which leads me to wonder if wardrobe has finally gotten over their grudge against him. Nicky sidles up behind Liam -- okay, how many times have I written that sentence lately? -- and asks, "You're a surfer now?" "Dude, I rip," Liam affirms. "We're 300 miles from the nearest beach," Nicky points out. This is irrelevant to Liam; surfing is a state of mind. It turns out that Nicky didn't come in here to talk neoprene; he came in to get the mass spec report on his transmission fluid. Quelle coincidence, it happens to come out, and Nicky reads the results with a skeptical eye: "Type F with Dextron?" Liam fails to see why this should cause alarm. Nicky explains, "You should be reading Car & Driver instead of Sand & Surf. Someone put the wrong type of fluid in the car's transmission. See, Ford automobiles use a thick, type-F transmission fluid. General Motors uses a yellow fluid, with Dextron. Now, when Dextron's put into a Ford, it thins that type-F fluid. Friction builds, gears grind. Second gear is usually the first to go. Friction causes the engine to overheat, in turn cooking the transmission fluid, turning it brown. Leak on the pavement is the first clue you've got a problem." Liam warmly congratulates Nicky on narrowing the getaway car search to leaky Fords. Nicky corrects Liam, pointing out that he's looking for leaky Fords with thrashed second gears -- meaning dead leaky Fords. That ought to narrow the selection considerably.
Leaving behind the wild world of automotive automata, Warrick and Brass are about to go through Adam's apartment for clues. I'm predicting that they'll find a wide variety of unflattering women's clothing. Brass is explaining to Warrick that Adam had recently exited the pen after a four-year stint for grand larceny. The two men stop at Adam's door. Brass extols the virtues of the warrant, Warrick extols the virtues of a special tool-thingy that lets him mangle the cheap doorknob-based lock, and they're in. Adam wasn't much of a housekeeper. Brass, possessor of a legal document, asks why they're violating the dead man's sanctity; Warrick replies that they're looking for anything that links Adam to his little dress-up pals. He instantly hones in on the dirty laundry, reasoning that trace elements could help reconstruct Adam's whereabouts before the heist. Brass burrows in Adam's closet, then quips, "While you're at it, don't forget his wigs and bras."
Back at CSI Central, Sara's sitting in front of a computer, scanning in her shoe print and looking for a match in, I presume, the Imelda Marcos Forensic Database. She then wanders over to a female tech and Catherine, and says she's found a match -- Skechers, size 5. "We're looking for a female," she says. One with very tiny feet. Sara inquires after the prints and the tech -- who could be Lilith Sternin-Crane's long-lost sister, deadpans, "You two lifted 82 suspect prints. Forty-three are partial." So far, the only print they've ID'd comes from Officer Fourteen Years On The Job. "I'll just beef him to his captain," Catherine says. "Tough. I like," replies the tech approvingly. She then finds another match on another print -- it's Tammy Felton, the little sociopath from last season. We flash back to the episode -- and boy, was Catherine's hair longer then -- and then Catherine gives Sara a brief recap. She then walks off to bounce the Tammy development, with its corresponding observation that Tammy's people-using habits mean she probably wasn't alone, off of Gil. Fortunately, she runs into him in the hall. At first, Gil's practicing evasive maneuvers, saying, "If you're going to badger me about your crime-scene location, put it in a memo." Catherine reminds him that he doesn't read memos, then segues into, "Do you remember Tammy Felton?" "I always remember the ones that get away," Gil replies, still in an evident hurry to get away from Catherine. "She's back," Catherine says, and Gil turns around, suddenly interested. Catherine continues to explain that Tammy is a prime suspect in the Kwik-E-Mart homicide. Just then, Liam interrupts by calling for Grissom; he hauls Catherine into Liam's lab as he walks in.
Now it's Liam's moment: he reveals that ballistics sent up one of the .45 bullets found on the scene, and it had a strange substance on it -- potato. Catherine quickly deduces, "There was potato on the bullet because there was potato on the gun." "This bullet is from my investigation," Gil points out. "Right. One of your armed robbers may have used a potato as a silencer prior to the heist," Catherine replies. "Tammy Felton?" Gil asks. Catherine can't answer him definitively, but really, how common are potato-contaminated guns in the state of Nevada? Gil notes that his case had three robbers, and even with one dead and one pegged as Tammy, they're still one suspect short. Just then, Sara comes in and drops #3 in their laps: Darin Hanson, also known as the Moustache Man whom Tammy drove off with into the sunset last year. What're the odds? Catherine and Gil, who did not have the benefit of seeing the last five minutes of the episode, quickly figure out the Tammy-Darin connection.
Then Gil and Catherine go down to see Bobby the Southern Ballistic tech. He shows them the bullets from the casino and the Kwik-E-Mart -- they're the same -- and Gil says, "They confirm the story told by the potato." "Same gun. Two crimes. One case," Catherine summarizes. "Three suspects: Adam Brower, deceased. Tammy Felton and Darin Hanson, still at large." Just then Nicky comes by, wearing the same Nike Air Deus Ex Machina shoes Sara had on when she dropped off the Darin Hanson prints. Nicky exposits that they may have found the getaway car. Catherine asks why Nicky thinks this is the right car. "It's beige, abandoned, 1977 Mercury Cougar. Mercury's a division of Ford. I'll drive," Nicky says. That can't have made any sense to anyone beyond Nicky and Liam. Gil and Catherine follow Nicky anyway.
They're all outside. Naturally, Brass is there already. There's evidence of a second getaway vehicle -- a dirt bike, actually. Nicky's the one who notices it; he's like a grease monkey savant. Back at the car, Gil and Catherine examine the car, then pop the trunk. Surprise! A dead Tammy Felton's inside. And boy, she looks pretty freaky, even for a dead person. One nice detail, however, is that her blonde wig is stuffed in the trunk with her.
Cut to David The Coroner examining her -- at least in this scene, her make-up's off and her eyes are closed. I wonder why that is. He weighs in: "Contusions on the anterior neck, streaking erythemia on the lateral aspect of zone one. Cartilaginous tracheal rings are crushed..." Catherine interrupts and confirms that Tammy didn't put up a fight: "She was killed by the one person in life she trusted." We flash to how the murder must have happened -- Darin kissing Tammy shortly before strangling her. Catherine continues, "Darin Hanson stared her in the face and she never saw it coming." David swabbed Tammy's neck and confirmed epithelials; he's going to test them against Darin Hanson's DNA. He also mentioned that he called her parents, who will be coming in, off-camera, to ID the body. According to David, they sounded "oddly relieved." Catherine replies, "They finally know where she is."
Wearing a fetching blue coverall, Nicky walks over to Warrick (also similarly attired) in the CSI Chop Shop. Warrick climbs out of the Cougar and sticks out his gloved pointer finger. "I'm not pulling it," Nicky promptly says. Warrick gives him an oh, please look, then says, "I found similar dust on Adam Brower's clothes. Check it out." We get the TMICam zooming up three different levels until we're seeing the raw, jagged edges of individual crystals. We then zoom out onto a microscope's lens, then to Liam looking at a sample and commenting, "Real live fairy dust." I valiantly sit on a half-dozen comments, which is hard with Nicky hovering behind Liam. Nicky says, "Yeah. Turns grown men into criminals." "What's the composition?" asks Warrick. Liam explains that it's silica dust, and each particle's a hundred times smaller than a grain of sand. Gil comes in then and busts the three stooges with, "I thought you guys were processing the car?" Warrick displays a cool head under pressure and distracts Gil with, "Yeah. What do you know about silica?" "It's used to make glass. It's mined in open pits. Why?" Gil replies. "Silica was found both on Adam Brower's clothing and the getaway vehicle," Nicky says. Gil notes that there's an abandoned silica mine not too far from the Kwik-E-Mart. Liam speaks for all of us when he says, "What don't you know?" Gil only looks at him, clearly communicating his reply via telepathy, since he's just that smart.
Cut to approximately eighty squad cars rolling into the abandoned mine area. Gil, Warrick, and Nicky decamp from the CSIMobile and begin waving their flashlights around. Random officers scatter hither and yon and begin exploring abandoned mine shafts. Gil couldn't care less; he's more interested in the motorcycle tracks on the site...tracks that lead to the bike parked to an outhouse. As the three men walk toward the outhouse, the ground sparkles beneath their flashlights. Nicky wrinkles his nose and comments, "That smells nice." "It shouldn't smell at all if this place is abandoned," Warrick points out. The CSIs head over to the outhouse; Gil warns, "Get your guns out." He plants a foot, yanks open the door -- and confronts a dead Darin Hanson. He sighs in relief before making formal introductions between the corpse and his subordinates. Warrick notes that Darin's been shot execution-style with a .45. "Adam, Tammy, Darin, all dead," Nicky says. "And we're out of suspects," Gil broods.
Later, the entire team's regrouped, trying to reconstruct the sequence of events in both cases, trying to tie them together. So far, they have this: shortly before pulling off the heist, Tammy and Darin killed the clerk at the Kwik-E-Mart. Then they went to the casino heist, where Darin killed a whole mess of people, including but not limited to Adam Brower. Shortly after the heist was finished, Darin killed Tammy. The CSIs confirm that Darin's killings were motivated by greed, but, as Sara put it, "Who killed him, and where's the money?" Never one to make a case simpler when it could be more complicated, Gil also points out that they don't know why Darin and Tammy decided to knock over the Kwik-E-Mart that day either -- and the connection will help solve the case. "Right now, we have more questions than answers," Sara says. Fortunately, Warrick comes in, shod in the same Nike Air Deus Ex Machina kicks Nicky and Sara were wearing earlier. He's been on the phone with their Laughlin counterparts, and in that crime, there were four crooks, not three. "Maybe the tower surveillance missed something," Nicky counters. "They didn't. We did." Everyone regroups in an editing bay, where Warrick points out something we all missed earlier: security boy Duncan, Mister This Never Would Have Happened If Sam Giancana Ran This Joint, ducked before Tammy shot down the chandelier. In other words, he knew it was coming. The best part of the scene -- Sara doesn't see it the first time and asks, "What are we looking for?" Warrick teases her with, "You missed him? We'll play him slow, just for you." Sara purses her lips, and Nicky grins down at her. Oh, those wacky young Turks, always ribbing each other. Warrick plays it a few more times for those of us at home. "Well done, Warrick. You found our mole," Gil says. Warrick isn't done yet; he found out that Duncan was a relatively recent employee -- and his last gig had been in Laughlin, at the practice casino.
Gil and Catherine catch Duncan on his way out of town -- God, he waited until now to leave? He deserves to get caught -- and Brass arrests his procrastinating ass. They take Duncan, whose name is actually Max, to the station and interrogate him. Brass begins by mildly inquiring, "Max, are you clairvoyant?" Catherine clarifies that he ducked before anyone had a cause to; Max counters that he saw a gun, so he hit the ground. Brass changes lines of questioning: "Why did you leave town? Trying to beat a murder rap?" Duncan denies the accusation. Catherine jumps in: "Did you forget about Darin Hanson? Your car was covered in gray dust. Silica. That places you at the murder scene." Duncan ignores his lawyer's advice -- blowing several thousand dollars in the process, I imagine -- and protests that Darin was already dead by the time he got to the site. "I'll admit I helped him out. I told him when and where to hit. That's why I ducked. That's it." Catherine points out that it still doesn't explain why Duncan went to see Darin. Duncan continues to ignore his lawyer and says he went with the express intention of collecting his share: "The money was gone, Darin was dead, and I panicked. But I didn't shoot him!" Brass explains that when someone is killed during the commission of a felony, all the co-conspirators are liable; therefore, Duncan is guilty of Adam Brower's murder simply by association. Duncan's lawyer says, "Let's make a deal." "Darin was the only one I spoke to -- I never even met the other three!" Duncan says. Well, that's not right. This confirms that Duncan's really not in the loop on this. Brass and Catherine come to the same conclusion. They also deduce that the mysterious fourth man must have been responsible for the daisy-chain of murders.
Or perhaps not. The cute tech from a few episodes ago is busy using the wonders of Photoshop to turn the Laughlin casino criminals into suspects we know and, um, know. Three of them are accounted for: Adam, Tammy, and Darin. After some futzing around, we learn that the fourth is...Dustin Bale, the clerk from the convenience store. Well, so much for Sara's theory that once the fourth man is identified, they can solve both crimes and figure out where the money is. She recovers quickly, musing, "[Dustin was] in on Laughlin, out on Vegas. Darin killed him first. They cleared out the register to make it look like a robbery." Gil's not quite sold yet: "The pit boss said there was Darin plus three." "Because he knew there were four at the Laughlin heist," Sara replies. Gil points out that it would have been awfully hard for Duncan to see how many people were there when he was cowering on the floor, which indicates that the fourth-man-as-murderer theory is officially over. "And we're back to who killed Darin Hanson," Sara says. Meanwhile, Catherine and Nicky are visiting with the affable Bobby The Ballistics Guy. They're looking at the bullet from Darin's noggin; it's a .45 automatic. He then explains that owing to the smooth bullet grooves, the projectile was fired from a polygonal barrel. There are only two types of .45s with polygonal barrels: Heckler and Koch USPs, or Glocks. Bobby then narrows it down further: there are six grooves with a right-hand twist, making it a Heckler and Koch. The team then accesses ATF records and finds out that, of the eighteen registered in-state (ten in Clark County, seven of those still in circulation), one name is jumping off the page: Officer Spencer, he of the fourteen years on the job.
Cut to the CSI team out at a dingy little highway patrol shack in the middle of nowhere. Officer Spencer is being frisked, and he's none too pleased about it. He asks patronizingly if they're really accusing him of murder; Brass answers with some asperity that yes, that's the case. "Where did you stash the cash?" Catherine asks. "I'm a state trooper," Spencer replies. Way to avoid the question there, Bull. Brass asks how Spencer happened to hook up with Darin; Catherine fills us all in: Spencer caught Tammy and Darin in mid-Kwik-E-Mart heist, and Tammy talked him into letting them go. We flash to Tammy saying, "Let's be smart about this. You can take us in, or we can cut you in." Spencer took a wad of cash and demanded more -- in flashback -- and we see how the rest of it unfolded, with Spencer killing Darin while he was taking a time-out in an outhouse. Gil and Catherine confirm this by noticing the silica blanketing the carpet and leading directly to Spencer's locker. As Gil explains, "Silica is a crystal. It reflects the light. Even trace amounts will show up." I'm thinking Spencer is regretting his lack of inorganic chemistry acumen about now. Speaking of lack of academic acumen, after the intrepid CSIs find the money stashed beneath a false bottom in Spencer's locker, what's his big explanation for throwing away a long-lived career in law enforcement? "More than I'd make in my lifetime." It was $250,000! What was he making, a hundred dollars a month? Even at $25,000 per year, he'd have made $250,000 in ten years. Spencer then gives a sad-sack story about how he was never really lucky: "I was never that guy." "Yeah, we'll you're still not that that guy. Get him out of here," Brass spits. Catherine muses that $250,000 made a career cop a rogue. Gil counters, "Well, he had his price." "We all do," Catherine says, a rueful smile playing about the edges of her mouth. Gil looks up, startled, and Catherine meets his gaze before smiling. He looks away again, thoughtfully, and the screen goes dark.