Previously on CSI: Sara Sidel fled the ridiculous real estate market in San Francisco for much cheaper Las Vegas. Warrick and Nick were tied at ninety-nine solved cases apiece until Warrick made several errors in judgment on the same night Nick happened to solve a case; Nick got a promotion.
And now...time for CSI, brought to you courtesy of yours truly, and the IV drip filled with DayQuil. Stupid fall colds.
We open on what looks like Lake Mead, at night. Two men are in a small dinghy, fishing. Something bumps against the hull of the boat. "What the hell was that?" Man #1 asks. "Probably one of those eight-foot carp," replies the other. They're pretty sanguine about this, which is surprising given what cool things one could do with an eight-foot carp, like build a giant koi pond, or prepare gefilte fish for all of Reno. These guys, however, view eight-foot carp as freaks of nature -- and rightly so -- and decide to vacate the premises before the episode turns into a bad Jaws sequel. One of the guys tries to start the motor, but it won't turn.
"Something's probably caught in the blades. Check the prop," says the guy not starting the motor. "I'm not sticking my hand down there," says Guy 2, apparently in response to me screaming, "Oh, no! This is how the mutant carp will get you!" Guy #1 decides he'll brave the jaws of the homicidal carp and plunges his hand into the Stygian depths. "I got something," he says. He sure does -- he has a human leg, clad in a red high-heeled shoe. "Dude, throw it back!" says Guy #2. I can tell that he thinks the carp took care of the rest of that woman, and they're .
In the shot, we see the leg drying out on a tarp as police lights wash over it. In the cool glare of the floodlight, the skin looks creepy and green; I have the feeling that it would squish if you touched it. Catherine snaps on her latex gloves and crouches to get a better look; Gil's already attempting to commune with the corpselet. Catherine notes that the femur is the strongest bone in the human body, and yet this femur was shorn clean through. "Like a Ginsu through a banana," Gil helpfully finishes. Does Gil actually own a Ginsu? My parents have one, and given the wide variety of animal carcasses they've dispatched with that thing, I wouldn't be surprised if the Ginsu could take on a human leg. I'm digressing -- blame the DayQuil.
Brass saunters up, asking, "So what do you think, drowning?" No, Brass! The carp got her. It's an eight-foot beast -- I bet it bumped her boat a few times, then overturned it and got her in one or two gulps. Fear the carp! Gil, of all people, takes the practical route: "Probably. But under what circumstances? You don't wear flippers at a five-star restaurant. Why would you wear three-inch heels to the lake?" Brass has no answer for that. Gil cracks, "Mr. Watson, the game is afoot."
Fortunately, we're saved from further punishment by the timely appearance of the credits. And then come the ads -- God help us all, someone made another miniseries about the Kennedy clan.
We're back in the squad room: Warrick is clad in suit coat and dress shirt, collar upturned as he begins to tie his tie. Nick is considerably more casual, to the point of being shirtless. He asks Warrick, "What do you think, bro, breakfast on me?" "Not if you keep saying 'bro,'" Warrick shoots back. Oh, wait. That was me again. Warrick replies a lot more civilly: he has a court date to get to, since the best witnesses for the prosecution are the ones suffering from exhaustion. Nick offers his condolences, and a female voice rings out, "Fine suit! And...just fine." It's Sara Sidel, courting a sexual harassment lawsuit first thing in the morning. And some of us just start with coffee. Nick comments to this effect -- much more pithily than I -- and Sara replies that she's merely being observant. Warrick cuts off this banter by noting the evidence room opens in five minutes and taking his leave. Nick pulls on a shirt to shield his shapely pecs from Sara's prying eyes. She informs him they have to head over to fraternity row; there's a body swinging from the rafters at one of the houses. Nick comments that the two of them will be working a double shift; Sara comments on his shirt: "Are you going to be wearing that?" "Yeah," Nick replies, puzzled. "It's that...hideous." "Hideous?" he says. Well, hideous is a strong word. Let's just say that the coloring does nothing for Nick. Winters should never wear warm olive tones. Sara leaves and Nick starts unbuttoning his shirt again. How many shirts does that man have around the office? And is at least one of them an undershirt?
Far away from the sartorial hijinks in the squad room, Catherine and the Cool Chick Coroner are looking at the leg. The coroner notes it was severed post-mortem. "That's good news," Catherine says. "How do you figure?" asks the coroner. "Do you want to be alive when your leg is being cut off?" Well, when you put it that way -- no. Just then, Gil wheels into the room, bearing a sodden greenish body on a gurney. Good news! It's the body that goes with the leg, apparently found floating half a mile from Calville Marina. Since this body -- female, Caucasian, mid-thirties and sporting a wedding ring -- does not bear a tattoo giving instructions on contacting the of kin, Gil and Catherine must turn to prints. Unfortunately, in the words of the coroner, "her skin's shriveled like a Shar-pei. No pressure, no prints." Gil thinks for a moment, then looks expectantly at Catherine. "No," she says, "No way. Use your own hand."
"Come on, Catherine, my hand's too big."
"No!"
"It's the only way we can print her!"
"Lay some dead flesh on the living? Wrong Hannibal Lecter movie, manhunter!"
Well, she leaves out that last part. Gil soothes, "Her skin on your hand should feel like a leather glove." Catherine is not consoled. In fact, she's probably flashing to the same Silence of the Lambs scene I am. Gil ignores her, and begins peeling off the skin. He turns to Catherine, a limp gray bundle of flesh in his right hand, and extends his left gallantly, saying, "May I take your hand?" Catherine slams her hand into his palm, glaring balefully. Gil slides her hand into the decedent's skin, thanks Catherine on behalf of poor dead Jane Doe, and begins the printing. Catherine grits her jaw and thinks, "The finest minds in science can create a transgenic bunny that glows in the dark, and yet nobody's come up with a way to replicate the pressure of a live hand producing fingerprints."
Back in a part of the world where the sun shines and people aren't donning the waterlogged skins of the newly dead, Sara and Nick are wandering through the world's cleanest fraternity house. I mean it -- I've been in a few frat houses in my time, and the indeterminate organic matter/square footage ratio was always stacked in favor of the ick. Not only can you see the floors in this fraternity house, the walls aren't covered with Larry Flynt's finest offerings. Still, since this is television, Nick curls his lip and says, "I can't believe I used to live in a place like this. It seems like it was a hundred years ago." "And here I had all this respect for you," Sidel shoots back. The two wander over to a knot of generic blond youths; one introduces himself as Matt Daniels and tells the two investigators that James is upstairs. He sure is. Not only is he upstairs, he's also about two feet above everyone else, feet gently swinging in the breeze. "Good God!" Nick says, deeply disgusted. Sara determines there was no suicide note, then instructs the cops to hold everyone downstairs for questioning. "Just get him down," spits Nick, who looks like he's going to go home and burn his pledge paddle as soon as his shift ends.
Gil and Catherine are walking through the squadroom. The prints bore fruit; the woman is Wendy Barger, a local from Green Valley. Gil clucks that they should contact the of kin. Catherine tells him she already has; she talked to Wendy's husband, who hadn't reported Wendy missing. "She was in the water for two days," Gil says incredulously. "Where's the husband now?" "At the coroner, IDing the body." However, the coroner has elected to leave the grieving spouse alone with his sodden bride so she can come up above ground and tell Gil that Wendy's body showed evidence of semen and vaginal penetration, sported a dislocated shoulder and a cracked skull. Gil thanks the coroner -- we finally learn her name is Jenna -- and the two walk over to meet the husband. Mr. Barger is the television embodiment of Walter Mitty, and seems remarkably composed for someone who recently spent time with his wife's battered, waterlogged, chopped-up body. Or perhaps he's still in shock. In any event, he remembers his manners, rising to shake hands when Gil and Catherine walk in. Over the course of the conversation, we learn that the Barger marriage may have been unraveling, something that becomes apparent when Catherine asks, "When was the last time you two had intercourse?" "That's rather personal, isn't it?" "It's part of our investigation," Catherine says, softly and matter-of-factly. Mr. Barger looks wary; his entire body screams that he suspects Gil and Catherine are going to judge him by the quality of his sex life. "The average is only once a week. Saturdays." He's hedging and they all know it. Catherine prods: "Mr. Barger..." "P-probably four months ago!" he blurts out. The poor guy. His wife shows up dead and he's stuck telling strangers about his less-than-stunning sex life. Gil turns the conversation away from marital relations and back toward evidence collection, asking Mr. Barger for a DNA sample. "What's going on?" Barger says. "I thought Wendy drowned." Catherine explains that she's still piecing together the case; Gil follows up by imploring Barger to give them the DNA sample. Mr. Barger looks at him, stunned.
Back at the world's cleanest frat house, Nick's asking some random blond guy -- apparently everyone in this fraternity underwent their own round of DNA testing to guarantee genetic conformity -- if James was depressed. The blond guy, Matt, says he thinks so. Sara presses him: "Could you say that? He was eighteen, he had his whole life in front of him. Why would he want to hang himself?" "I dunno," replies our fair-haired boy. "He didn't get in? Pledging a fraternity isn't easy." Right. Let's not confuse pledging a fraternity with splitting an atom or climbing K-2. There's a world of difference between doing something challenging, and flinging yourself into organized mind games for the sake of wearing a few Greek letters. Sara seems to feel the same way. The blonds in the room stare uncomprehendingly at a woman who fails to be awed by their letters; Nick just looks uncomfortable.
Speaking of uncomfortable, what's Warrick up to? He's exiting his car, wearing the ugliest suit in Christendom. No, really. Warrick is not the kind of man who should be wearing light gray glen plaid -- he looks better in earth tones. What's with the wardrobe this week -- first we get Nick in the olive shirt, and now we get Warrick in that suit? Someone get wardrobe a copy of Color Me Beautiful, stat. Few men could pull off the giant Rubbermaid file box as accessory look either, so Warrick's doubly behind the ball insofar as court-appropriate ensembles go. As he heads toward the courthouse, looking as irritated to be out and about in glen plaid and plastic as I am to be watching, Judge Cohen comes out to tell him the case has been continued. "Nobody told me," Warrick shoots back, now even more annoyed because he's tired, he's in a bad suit, and he doesn't even need to be there. "Nobody was supposed to tell you," smarms the judge. "You're going to do something for me." Warrick replies that the two of them are already even; Cohen replies that they will be after Warrick does one more thing -- namely, compromise the evidence in the Henderson rape trial, a case that could nail a serial rapist, because Cohen owes the rapist's family. Warrick protests and Cohen flashes a predatory grin. "Don't worry," he drawls. "I've got your back." If I were Warrick, I'd be carrying a hand mirror to make sure Cohen wasn't burying shivs back there. That man is a travel-sized package of evil.
Back at the lab, Liam Gallagher is multitasking. Gil comes in and screams over the music, "Hey, maestro, what's the latest on our floater?" "Come hither," Liam replies. He shows them a PCR gel, and fluoresces it to show how the DNA found in the semen bears no resemblance whatsoever to Mr. Barger's DNA. Gil blinks, nonplussed. "I liked the husband for this," he says.
Switch to the scene, where an off-screen lawyer says, "You were wrong. My client's been through enough stress as it is. Winston, come on." Mr. Barger's first name is Winston. That seems so appropriate somehow -- the only other Winston I've known was a worried little pug, and something in this guy's expression puts me in mind of that preternaturally fretful dog. He gets up, draws on whatever dignity he has left, and says, "When you find out what happened to my wife, I want to know everything." "I promise," says Gil. After he leaves, Gil and Catherine are left to talk amongst themselves, so I take the opportunity to check the appropriateness of their outfits. Both pass muster -- Catherine's burnt-orange turtleneck sets off her hair, and Gil's shirt brings out the blue in his eyes. I wonder briefly what Nick and Warrick did to piss off wardrobe, then pay attention to the conversation again.
Catherine asks Gil, "Would you want to know everything?" "You're asking the wrong guy," Gil replies, hinting that they've had a similar conversation before. Catherine lays out her argument: Winston admitted he and Wendy were having problems, Wendy was already staying at the lake for extended periods, and the situation is ripe for Wendy to be seeing someone else. "You were married. You tell me," Gil says. "Very good to excellent," Catherine says. The intrigue! Did those two have an affair while Catherine was still married? Did Catherine's hitherto unseen ex have an affair? The mind swirls with possibilities...
Warrick's mind is swirling with moral conflict. He's down in the evidence room, requesting that technician fetch him the Henderson evidence. Warrick puts pen to paper, trying to sign out the evidence, but draws back several times. Fortunately, Gil comes by. The two make small talk: Warrick tells Gil the case was continued; Gil tells Warrick to take a day off and rest, as he's been working hard lately. Warrick replies that it's "nature of the beast." Gil then tells Warrick, "Go. Besides, I owe you a party." "A party?" Warrick asks, uncomprehending. "I made you a CSI-III." Warrick clearly doesn't know whether to laugh or to cry. He gives Gil a shaky, hollow grin, sighs deeply, and slouches in defeat. "More money, more problems," he says. Gil grunts noncommittally, then turns to go. Warrick turns back toward the clipboard, looking miserable.
Speaking of miserable, that's how I feel after taking in the chow-cam shot of Brass talking with his mouth full. He tells Catherine through a craw full of burger that whatever Wendy was doing, none of her friends knew about it. He also shares the obvious: Winston was clearly happier in their marriage than Wendy. "She had something on the side," Catherine says, waving a biscuit for emphasis. "I know firsthand: when you don't cheat, you don't suspect." Well, scratch that Catherine-and-Gil theory. "I wish I'd been married to you," Brass grunts. While I'm digesting the concept of a world -- however fictional -- where Brass convinces one, much less two, women to sleep with him, Catherine disabuses him of the marriage notion and rises to leave. She and Gil are about to head down to the coroner's -- Brass turned down her invite by noting that he prefers live bodies, leaving me to wonder uneasily exactly how he conducted the experiment leading to this conclusion, and what the control group might have been -- when Warrick comes by, looking even more uncomfortable than he did minutes ago. Perhaps he finally passed a mirror and realized what he was wearing. Warrick calls out, "I'm in purgatory. I need some guidance." Gil tells Catherine he'll meet her at the car, and turns back toward Warrick.
We finally get to see young James Johnson, all laid out on the gurney for Nick and Sara. This coroner, who looks like he's Wallace Langham's long-lost cousin, notes the petechial hemorrhaging that usually connotes asphyxia, giving the camera a fabulous opportunity to zoom in on the eyeball. We're treated to a screenful of burst veins and glassy iris for a moment, thus driving home the point that when one hangs oneself, the blood vessels in the eyes burst. The coroner notes that the evidence is a little odd; another side effect of hanging is the presence of teeth marks in the tongue, and Johnson's missing those. After pulling out the tongue for viewer edification, Sara notes, "No teeth marks." "But we found him swinging from the ceiling," Nick says. Poor Nick: week after week, he's the straight man, stating the obvious in the interest of advancing the plot. Sara says, "The question is, how did [Johnson] get there?" "Speaking of how did it get there, how did this get on his penis?" the technician asks, whipping back the sheet so Sara and Nick can spend time staring at the corpse's crotch. I sincerely hope the actor playing dead James Johnson at least had a Speedo on; it's got to be strange enough letting someone yank your tongue out, but having a crew of actors hone their Method by staring at your genitals is bound to give anyone a complex. The actors, who are all behaving much more maturely than I, all stare clinically. Sara calls out, "Nick, you wanna take a look at this?" Nick demurs, saying he has a good idea what's on Johnson's penis and how it got there.
Cut to the Phi Alpha house. Nick is staring at a roomful of interchangeable guys, asking, "Does your fraternity practice hazing?" Matt answers, "No. It took a long time for us to get our charter. We have a strict no-tolerance policy. As president, I enforce that to the letter." Nick and Sara run this through the bullshit filter and it comes out as, "Hazing? Of course. Why, I'm the ringleader!" Nick turns back to Matt, grins winningly, and whips out some hayseed accent. "Come on, guys, I was a Greek, and we had all kinds of policies but we still hazed." Sara grows impatient with Nick's approach and just comes right out with what's on her mind. "We found ink on James's penis. Are you trying to tell me he was just practicing his penmanship?" Nick fixes Matt with a grin; Matt replies, "The state passed a law. No hazing. It's six months in jail, plus expulsion." Again, courtesy of the filter: "Yeah, we did it. And at least one of us is related to a lawyer who will argue that hazing is something that happens only in the Los Angeles atmosphere, so we're untouchable." Matt's little sidekick, Pledgemaster, pipes up, "But there is an initiation."
Everyone flashes back to the initiation as told by the Phi Alphas. It's pretty typical stuff: a bunch of boys being harassed by beer-swilling buffoons while the two lead guys pick on James. Flashing back to the present, Matt says, "He wanted to belong, but I questioned his chops." The two boys gradually reveal that the pledges had an "assignment": go to sorority row and get different parts of their bodies signed. Each part of the body was worth a different number of points; James was singled out for being deficient in points, and thus was directed to get several people to sign his penis, to make up the deficit. As the Phi Alphas are recounting this, Sara looks incredulous. I can tell she's thinking, "What person in their right mind would volunteer for this?" Nick just looks regretful. I bet the faces of those he hazed are floating up before him. The Phi Alphas continue: they catch James in the bathroom signing his own penis rather than whip it out for sorority women, and they parade him into the main room of the fraternity house for a dose of extra-special humiliation. By this point I'm wondering why anyone would bother to piss on these goons if they were on fire, much less go to all the bother of convincing them you're a worthwhile pledge. Sara, again, reads my mind: "You humiliated him in front of all the other actives. The kid was so scared he had to sign his own penis and then you give him a beer shower. And you don't call that hazing?" Pledgemaster, a.k.a. Kyle, looks away from her condemning glare and toward Nick, who's showing no sympathy. "Answer the question, guys," he barks. Kyle says, "I had no choice. I had to ding him." "You're only as strong as your weakest link," says Matt. Nick and Sara aren't buying it. "We didn't pledge him, he pledged us," Kyle says. Kind of wordy when all you need to say is "he asked for it," isn't it, Kyle? Matt says, "He knew what to expect if he didn't measure up." Or measure down, if the two scabrous specimens on the couch are indicative of the fraternity's quality. Nick, looking ever more disgusted with each passing minute, turns toward Sara and mutters, "Humiliation, initiation, appreciation." "That's what it's all about," says Matt. "We're sorry, but we didn't kill him." Sara lets us all know how much she believes that.
Back at the station, Warrick's on the phone with Judge Cohen. He sets up a meeting with Cohen in person, then hangs up the phone and slouches in defeat. If Warrick keeps up with the miserable hunching, he's going to be shaped like the letter C by the end of the episode.
Gil and Catherine are back in the morgue with Jenna, looking over Wendy's body. We get the up-close view of lime-green splinters embedded in the mother of all bumps on the head, then move down for a close-up of Wendy's alveoli, the better to show us that they're not waterlogged. In other words, Wendy didn't drown; she died before she hit the water. Gil's getting kind of agitated: "So we think she was raped, killed, then dumped in the lake." "After a very nice dinner," Jenna replies, then hauls out a Tupperware container full of the contents of Wendy's stomach. I wonder, briefly, if I'll be seeing the contents of my own stomach soon. Wendy had fried calamari; Gil digests this information.
The shot is of Lake Mead, the giant man-made reservoir powering Hoover Dam. Now I'm all confused. Lake Mead and Hoover Dam are under the auspices of the Department of the Interior, so wouldn't any bodies found there be handled by federal investigators? I amuse myself by imagining the festival of weirdness that would accompany Gil tangling with federal investigators like Dale Cooper or Fox Mulder, but realize the episode's already at the halfway mark, so guest appearances by maverick Feds are highly unlikely. Returning back to the real episode instead of the pretend one in my head: Gil and Catherine are climbing a set of wooden steps toward a restaurant. Catherine petulantly asks why they're there; Gil tells her it's because the restaurant is the only one within ten miles of Calville Bay that serves calamari. Catherine prods, "And you know this because..." "I come here for calamari," Gil says. "Alone?" "No. Sometimes I have a beer with it." Heh.
Gil and Catherine grill the waitress. She remembers Wendy and the man she was with, someone who's apparently a good tipper. "Would you happen to know the name of this good tipper?" Gil asks, far more pleasantly than Catherine's been asking any of her questions. The waitress sure does. And in the scene, so do we: Mr. Goodtipper is also known as Mr. Swelco, and we see him sniffling as he wraps his mind around the news that Wendy's dead. "Could you tell us about your affair with Wendy?" Gil prods, and Mr. Swelco spills the beans: he's separated from his wife and recently filed for divorce. Catherine swoops in with, "And when Wendy didn't follow, you got angry..." Mr. Swelco tearfully but vigorously denies that and tells the investigators that Wendy refrained from telling Winston she wanted to leave because she feared the news would break him. As opposed to, say, hiding your affairs from your husband, dying in a hideous misadventure, and letting total strangers piece everything together for your so-called fragile husband -- that's bound to be a lot less hurtful than coming clean. But I digress. Gil walks Mr. Swelco through his last night with Wendy. After they ate at the restaurant, they took his outboard boat back to his luxe lake pad for a little post-prandial coitus. Gil asks why they took the boat; Mr. Swelco replies that "Wendy didn't want anyone to see her car in my driveway, so she always parked at the marina and we took the outboard over here." Mr. Swelco confirms that Wendy left after the two of them had sex -- thus solving at least one mystery concerning the evidence, namely that of where the semen came from -- and claims that she took the boat back to the marina.
Gil and Catherine leave Mr. Swelco's house -- which really is charming in a rustic way, all exposed redwood and French doors -- and debate whether or not they believe Mr. Swelco. "I believe he had an affair," Gil says. As the two reach the edge of Swelco's porch, they see a car parked on the gravel bank below. It's Winston. Gil and Catherine skid down the embankment to talk to him. "You didn't call, so I was following you," he says. "Uh. This is Phil Swelco's house, isn't it?" "Do you know Mr. Swelco?" Gil asks. "Informally. Does he have something to do with Wendy's death?" Catherine leaps in, trying to distract Winston from following that line of thought to a painfully obvious conclusion. Gil gently tells Winston to back off and stay away from them until they're ready to tell him what happened. As Winston drives off, Catherine and Gil walk along the shore toward their car. "You know," she says, "eventually we're going to have to tell this guy that his wife was having an affair with someone he knows." "No we don't, Catherine," Gil says. "We have to tell him how his wife died. Just the facts, without all the other stuff." "When Eddie was cheating on me, I sure wish somebody would have said something." "You mean me," Gil replies flatly. "Who else?"
Some time later, Gil is sitting in his lab, watching a large spider march around a too-small aquarium. Catherine comes in and inquires if he's picked up a new pet. "The African baboon tarantula, most feared of all arachnids. But basically harmless." Catherine squirms a little, and Gil clucks over his spider. "I think you scared him. All his little hairs are standing up." Catherine cuts him off by telling him she's got news on Swelco's boat. "Was it at the marina?" Gil asks. "What do you think?" Gil holds his pet aloft: "My spider sense says it wasn't." Oh, God -- someone stop him before he puns again.
Nick is microwaving a burrito; I'm pleased to report he's wearing a dark shirt that does a lot to complement his coloring. Sara comes in to share the coroner's preliminary report. "A strip of raw calf's liver was lodged in a cleft in the victim's throat. Cause of death: choking." Nick looks contemplative, and his brow furrows in even deeper thought as Sara notes that microscopic threads of fabric were found in the liver.
Cut to Kyle: "Microscopic fiber?" No, you mis-listening Neanderthal, microscopic threads of a larger fabric. "Kyle, I'm getting that hazing feeling," warns Nick. Sara jumps all over Kyle, suggesting assorted hazing methods that will no doubt turn up on campuses all over the country this spring. Kyle plays dumb -- not really a stretch -- and Nick growls, "Tell us about the liver." "What about the liver?" parries Kyle, honestly not comprehending that two police investigators might find his omission of liver in his version of events suspicious. Nick turns toward Kyle and airs his own conflict on the matter: "Eleven years ago, I was you. Smoking cigars in closets, playing tanks. I wore a trout in my jeans pocket for seven days until my leg went half numb." I'm impressed that Nick's finally realized how hollow his actions were, but a reality check is in order. You wore a dead fish on your person and numbness is what you remember? What about the slime, the rot, and the odor as all the bacteria that live in fish slime realized they were living on the equivalent of an all-you-can-eat salad bar? Numbness would be the least of my worries -- try social ostracism for hauling around dead wildlife, or a killer case of the runs from an opportunistic bacterial infection, or a profound crisis of self-identity when you realized you were an idiot for hauling a fish around all week. But I digress again. Nicky's little speech finally convinces Kyle that Nicky, like the Phi Alphas, was once dumb enough to buy into the hazing culture so he can be trusted. Kyle takes us all into flashback again -- apparently, James begged him for one more chance, so Matt made him swallow a strip of raw liver. That sounds probable; a friend of mine who pledged a fraternity had to eat a stick of butter coated in Dijon as one of his "assignments." In flashback, James begins choking on the liver, Matt and Kyle perform the kind of Heimlich that wouldn't help a kitten, and James expires shortly thereafter. Back in the present day, Sara acidly begs Kyle to help her understand how someone who died from choking ends up swinging from the rafters. Kyle looks shocked that anyone would think to inquire about this. Sara squints menacingly. Kyle finally admits that he and Matt panicked. "We could lose our charter, or get kicked out of school, or even go to jail," so they set it up to look like a suicide. Because, you know, explaining that innocent non-hazing and its tragic unforeseen consequences to the authorities would be a lot more trouble than trying to fake someone's suicide. "You do realize that you just admitted to killing him," Sara says. "It was an accident!" Kyle responds. "It was an accident. But it's beginning to look a lot like Christmas." Huh? Kyle's unruffled. "Look. My dad's a top defense attorney. So if charges are filed --" "Don't worry, they will be," interjects Nick. "It'll be manslaughter, not murder, and me and Matt will wind up with community service." Kyle's face rests into an attitude of self-assured entitlement; the camera stays away from Sara, which is a pity, because I would have loved to see her bitch-slap the smug look clean off Kyle's face.
Cut to Nick and Sara striding away from the tank. "We can hold him on manslaughter," Nick says. "Are you willing to settle for that?" Sara demands. "You know as well as I do there's more to this." Nick asks her to slow down; he realizes that if Kyle had performed the Heimlich as he claimed, there would be evidence of that trauma. He and Sara sprint toward the coroner's office.
In the scene, they're checking out x-rays with the coroner. A typical Heimlich leaves the person very badly bruised at the least, and sporting a broken rib or two at the most. Johnson's thoracic cavity is unblemished. Even more intriguing -- a closer examination of James Johnson's penis reveals the signature "Jill W., delta delta."
Cut to Nick talking to Jill W. After feigning girlish dismay over being caught out signing boys' penises, she asks, "You don't think that had anything to do with what happened?" Nick asks her to go into further detail, and Jill does. "We sign them and they sign us." "Of course you do," says Sara, sporting a smile that smart people recognize as contemptuous. Jill, fortunately, is oblivious and mentions that she knew James only because he was pledging her boyfriend's house. Her boyfriend? Kyle.
Nick and Sara let themselves into Kyle's room -- the largest collegiate dorm-type room I've ever seen -- and toss the place. Nick finally overturns the trash basket where a hangman's noose of twine, still wet with blood, is coiled. Jesus wept, those Phi Alphas don't know the first thing about staging a cover-up: if you can get rid of the murder weapon, do so. Don't store it in your trash can.
Warrick saunters down the hall, back in an outfit that flatters him, and runs into Liam the lab tech. Liam is oblivious: he's wearing headphones and grooving on whatever he's hearing. "Let me guess...Rage Against the Machine or Radiohead," Warrick says. "Actually, it's an audio book on restriction enzyme analysis and DNA typing." I honestly don't know what's cooler about this scene, the possibility that there exist books-on-tape that aren't by John Grisham, or Warrick's apparent knowledge of Radiohead. The two walk past Gil, who is setting up an elaborate model of Lake Mead, and preparing an impressive array of tiny model boats to navigate the model shores. Warrick says, "You know Grissom. For him, the shortest way between two points is science. For Catherine, it's pounding the pavement." The scene cuts to a montage of Gil running his model scenarios while Catherine slogs though brackish water. Finally, the edge of her flashlight beam catches a dull gleam, and she finds Swelco's boat, a small white dinghy with lime-green trim, cocked at an angle among the reeds. She calls Gil to tell him she found the boat. "It was outside Barring Point Bridge." The camera pulls away from Catherine's profile on the phone to Gil's -- and he's looking down at his model boat bobbing askew at the sign designating Barring Point Bridge.
Warrick's waiting on a bench in an unusually lush park. I know Las Vegas has more than a passing acquaintance with irrigation, but this goes beyond normal landscaping measures for a desert. As Judge Cohen approaches, Warrick rises. He's positioned directly below the streetlight while the judge stands on the periphery, his face hidden in shadow. What is it with Warrick and the overtly symbolic lighting? Anyway, the two have a cautious conversation: Warrick tells Cohen he needs assurances of Cohen's intentions, Cohen replies that he's on a two-way street, and Warrick goads Cohen into outlining exactly what he wants. In come Brass and a whole lot of uniforms to arrest Cohen, Warrick whips up his shirt -- something I'm not about to object to and, in fact, hope gets worked into the scripts on a regular basis, perhaps where Warrick and Nicky are forced to go undercover as cocktail waiters in some Caesar's Palace rip-off...oh, wait, the DayQuil's kicking in again. Anyway -- Warrick was wearing a wire, and as Cohen realizes he's been played, Warrick says defiantly, "I told you. Nobody owns me." Even after the judge has been hauled off, Warrick sighs deeply. That poor man.
Back at headquarters, Liam the lab tech continues to charm me by busting Gil's chops between spoonfuls of Ben and Jerry's. Gil mildly counters that he and Catherine are not competing, but working together; when Liam pushes him to admit Catherine's methods have merit, Gil responds by quoting Robert Frost, "'Two roads diverged in a yellow wood...'" At least he's not reciting Amy Lowell. Liam the lab tech, who actually gets referred to as "Greg," presses Gil for a hypothesis on who killed Wendy, and offers a theory of Winston as jealous, homicidal husband. Gil blinks several times, then takes his leave. "You keep thinking, Butch. That's what you're good at." Hee! I love that line, and I never get tired of hearing it. Liam the lab tech -- folks, it just sounds better -- asks Gil to remember him and the rest of the little people should his theory be right.
Gil and Catherine are bent to the unenviable task of going over the boat with flashlights, centimeter by centimeter. Once Catherine finds some skin and Gil finds some blood, the two of them realize they may be looking at a motile murder scene.
Switch to the tank; Brass is instructing a haggard-looking Phil Swelco to wait outside while he talks to Gil and Catherine. The blood on the boat is Phil's; he claims he cut his hand cleaning fish. Brass clearly doesn't believe him, but promises to call the lake clinic to confirm. Just then Winston shows up and professes amazement to see Phil there. Catherine immediately steers Winston in one direction, and Gil guides Phil in the other. The camera pulls back to show Catherine sitting to Winston, leaning in sympathetically. "I always knew she was seeing someone, I just didn't know who," Winston says tremulously. "I'm sorry," Catherine says. Winston doesn't hear her: "She was having an affair with Phil Swelco. And you think he killed her."
Cut to a dark parking lot where Gil is conducting the Grissomian equivalent of losing his temper. "You just compromised our entire investigation!" "He deserved to know the truth!" Catherine says. "Knowing that she died, yes. Knowing that she had an affair, how does that bring closure?" Catherine sighs deeply: "I guess you just have to be on the wrong end of an affair to understand." Well. That clears up a lot: her husband cheated on her, Gil knew and didn't tell her, and somehow she found out. "Don't make this about Eddie. You hurt our case because your ex hurt you." "We bring ourselves to our cases!" Catherine says heatedly. "I knew how Barger felt. Would you just relax? I didn't give him chapter and verse!" "You didn't have to give him anything!" Gil calls after Catherine as she storms away from him. "We're scientists! We're not psychiatrists or victim's rights advocates!" "You're right. I should be more like you. Alone in my hermetically sealed condo watching Discovery on the big screen and working genius-level crosswords, but no relationships!" You know, she's trying to make that sound like a bad thing, and yet I can't help but think there's a lot to be said for that lifestyle.
But Catherine's not done yet, "No chance anything will ever slop into a case. Right, I want to be just like you." Gil looks unmoored, and struggles to remain calm: "Technically, it's a townhouse. And the crosswords are advanced level, not genius. And you're right. I'm deficient in a lot of ways. But I never screw up one of my cases with personal stuff." Catherine narrows her eyes like she's aiming a pistol. She leans in and spits, "What personal stuff?" then stalks off. Gil watches her leave, and the expression on his face says that Catherine's hit him where he lives.
Nick and Sara are talking to Matt; Nick asks Matt if he wouldn't mind filling them all in on how ticked off Kyle was to see his girlfriend's signature adorning a hated pledge's privates. Matt promptly rolls over, and takes us into one last flashback concerning James Johnson's death. After Johnson showed everyone Jill's signature, they all had a good laugh, then Kyle spirited James up to his room for some bonding, if by bonding you mean "deliberately tricking someone into swallowing some liver by assuring them you'll pull it out, then yanking the noose instead to ensure they die." After the confession is signed, sealed and delivered, Nick and Sara visit Kyle back in his cell to inform him that he had best work the filial-pity angle with his dad; thanks to Matt's confession, his charges have been upgraded to Murder I. Sara crows, "One thing about the fraternity upstate, the brotherhood's fantastic." Nick adds, "Oh yeah, they're going to looooooove you." The two detectives leave and Kyle falls back limp on his bunk, visions of Oz dancing through his head.
Gil and Catherine are back at the boat. "She ran out of gas," Gil says, "Catherine, get in the boat." "What?" "Just indulge me, please." Catherine climbs in and yanks the engine cord a couple dozen times. After she stops, she realizes her shoulder is sore. Gil reconstructs the scene for us: Wendy left Phil and puttered off in the boat. Halfway across the lake, she ran out gas. She panicked, and tried restarting the engine. For her troubles, she got a dislocated shoulder, a fatal blow to the head when she lost her balance, and a trip to the bottom of the lake. Her leg was severed later by a boat propeller. Wendy's entire death -- which seemed, on first impression, to be a particularly brutal murder -- was just one senseless misstep after another. "It was an accident," says Catherine. "I guess we better go talk to the husband. Unless you think I'll compromise the integrity of the case again." Gil looks wounded -- I swear, William Peterson has used more facial expressions in the last twenty minutes than he did in the first three episodes -- and asks, "Can we have a truce?" "I would love to," Catherine replies, and they shake on it. He raises his arms and lifts her out of the boat, and they prepare to go talk to Phil and Winston. "But," Gil adds, now that he's back in Catherine's good graces, "let me talk to the husband and the boyfriend." Catherine shakes her head; this is an argument that's not going to get settled for a long while.
As Gil's heading out the door, Warrick hails him and thanks him for all his help. Gil says, "I'm proud of you." Warrick acknowledges that Cohen's vast network of corrupt civic employees is going to be a problem. Gil tells him, "I can only help you so much. The rest is up to you," then walks off. Was that meant to reassure Warrick, or warn him? Warrick took it as the latter. That poor man never has a good day.
We see another lovely aerial vista of the lake and hear a knock. Gil and Catherine let themselves into Phil Swelco's house and race up the stairs as they hear a man sobbing. They enter the living room and see Swelco sprawled on his back, very dead. The back of Winston's head, shaking with grief, is visible. "He killed my wife," Winston hiccups. Catherine says, "We just came from your place. We wanted to tell you your wife's death was an accident." Winston's face folds in on itself in fresh lines of anguish. Catherine crouches by Swelco's body to check the scene while Gil kneels in front of Winston and says, softly, "He didn't kill her." The last sound in the episode is Winston's low keen of guilt. The camera pulls back to show the four people -- the investigators kneeling before perpetrator and victim, looking at each other. It's a downer.
week: Gil goes after a drug dealer that bears a striking resemblance to a young Ted Kaczynski; apparently the guy deals a brand of weed that hosts killer maggots. The administrative smackdown Catherine should receive for giving Winston the kind of information that drove him to kill is nowhere to be seen.