Night has fallen, the cue for lovers the world over to slip out of their houses and get their freak on in public. Two lissome young things are playing a game of hide-and-seek around a swing set and giggling like mad before flinging aside all pretense of coyness and falling to the sandy ground in a tangle of limbs. Ah, youth. Ah, unfinicky youth: I hate the texture of sand on my skin, and can only imagine that, had any dates tackled me in a sand pit back in the day, I would have responded with considerably less ardor than the young woman does here. Actually -- she's more or less mimicking my probable reaction: her eyes growing wide with revulsion shortly before she screams in horror. But she's screaming because she sees a dead face submerged in the sand. We get the flashbulb-style transition, and then another shot of the face still buried in the sand, a considerably larger audience -- composed of law-enforcement personnel -- peering down in interest.
Cut to Gil and Brass. Brass notes, "You've been walking in circles for ten minutes." Gil replies, "There's no sign of struggle. Whatever happened, happened somewhere else. This is a secondary scene." "Body dump?" Brass asks. "Textbook case. David, when you dig her up, tag this one special processing," Gil replies. Evidently, the ability to deduce gender from nostrils alone is yet another of his myriad forensic talents. Brass does not think too highly of the perp thus far: "A thousand square miles of desert in Vegas, this perp dumps the body in a sandbox." Gil doesn't disagree, but notes, "He didn't put it here to hide it. He put it here to be found."
And on that note of pronoun confusion -- she? it? she? it? -- we go to the credits.
Once we return from commercial and credits, Catherine and Gil are both kneeling in the sand and staring down at the body. "This sand's a nightmare," Catherine notes, clearly a woman after my own heart. "To get to the evidence, we might destroy the evidence," Gil replies. Yes, master. Catherine -- who is endearing herself to me with every passing minute -- turns her gaze from the body to Gil, asking, "Do you get these haikus out of a book, or do they just come to you?" Gil gives her a look and says, "Every time you have to find a body, you have to choose a path. And when you take that path, grasshopper, you risk destroying evidence." And a gong sounds in the back as the bamboo flute of enlightenment plays. Actually, what happens is that Catherine sighs over the prospect of having to break out the trowels and some fine-mesh screens as they go panning for evidence. What follows is the miracle of time-compressed narration: Gil and Catherine carefully digging the body out, running each trowelful of sand through the sieve and peering at the results. Eventually, they've dug a trench around the body and uncovered it; we get an aerial shot of the corpse on a makeshift bier of sand while Gil and Catherine walk around, studying it.
Naturally, this is when the powers that be introduce the B-plot. Oh, my kingdom for an episode where they all work together on one case. Anyway. The C.S.I.Mobile pulls up in front of a check-cashing place in one of Las Vegas's seedier neighborhoods. Sara and Warrick leap out, and are promptly met by a new detective. A not-Brass, not-Buzz, kind-of-annoying detective. "Gunshot victim, shipped to Desert Palms. Sante Cherna, thirty-two," Annoying Detective rattles off. I refuse to learn his name on principle. Oh, hell, it's Sam Vega. But he'll always be "Annoying Detective" to me. Anyway -- Sante was shot in the leg as he was leaving to take the store's deposit to the bank. Apparently, Sante is something of a moron, what with taking the money to the bank at the same time each week. "He's either stupid or suicidal," Warrick snorts. "We can't arrest people for that. Unfortunately, " AD says. AD is doing nothing to endear himself to me -- his diction is mushy at best, and his phrasing is off. Feh! We establish that Sante's sister saw the whole thing go down, and then Sara and Warrick split up -- she's going to do a once-around on the premises, and Warrick's going to begin checking out the parking lot. No word on what AD is going to be doing, and I could care less. In fact, the only things keeping me from writing up the B-plot in fifty words of less are Sara and Warrick; given that we haven't seen too much of Warrick lately, I feel as though I have to log every minute we get, even if he is exiled to the subplot. But I'm not happy about it.
Back in the land of the A-plot, the victim is laid out on the morgue's autopsy table (not, unfortunately, the table David the Increasingly Fun Coroner coveted). Gil is taking photos of her; she has livid bruises all over her back, with a tiny piece of a sticky black substance embedded in one open wound. Then he dons special goggles before flicking off the lights, picking up a UV lightbox, and running it over the body, presumably to look for bruises or other evidence that won't show up in ordinary light. Then he picks up a portable showerhead and commences washing the body -- what's kind of interesting about this is that he tests the water's temperature before he begins; I wonder if that's a subtle character quirk or if there's some sort of specific temperature range for washing corpses. As Gil's rinsing, he continues to catalogue the bruises that mottle the body, and he notices lacerations and contusions around the wrists. He then swabs the wounds with putty, presumably to take molds. By the way, the unearthly music playing throughout this scene is by the Icelandic band Sigur Rós. You can thank attentive forum poster J DTZR for that contribution.
Meanwhile, Warrick gets no cool soundtrack. He gets only the scutwork of stuffing the deposit bag in a sack, then noticing a flyer on the ground. When he looks up, he sees the same flyer still firmly tucked under the windshield wipers of the other vehicles. Curious about this discrepancy, he turns to AD and asks whether AD has run the vehicle yet. AD mush-mouths something about it being the victim's car. Warrick snorts in disgust, then walks over to Sara. "We're dealing with some criminal geniuses," he deadpans. Sara backs him up: "Grab the money bag, slice it, and run." Warrick chuckles, then adds, "You forgot 'leave the evidence on the ground.'" He whips out the deposit bag, and he and Sara thumb through the stack of checks and a deposit slip for $22,500 left in the bag. During this brief interlude, I'd like to say that while I find Sara's watchcap and pea coat fetching, I do have to wonder if she's on shore leave from the British Navy. She and Warrick conclude that either someone was casing the joint, or this may have been an inside job.
Cut to the interior of the check-cashing place, where an intense-looking Latina woman, Mrs. Delgado is explaining, "this morning, everything was fine. Then some pendejo attacks my brother, and we're out God-knows-how-much money, and I'm stuck running this place alone." Sara tries to head off a tirade: "Mrs. Delgado, I know you're upset --" "'Upset'? Upset is for white people, lady. I'm pissed off," Mrs. Delgado clarifies. Way to circumvent that hot-headed Latina stereotype there, Delgado. Warrick steps in, and we learn that Mrs. Delgado has insurance on the place: "You take six percent of a man's paycheck just to cash it? People use us, but they don't like us." Many of us here at Mighty Big TV can commiserate. Anyway, that scene ends with a thud: Sara floats the idea that Mrs. Delgado's brother might be behind this, and Warrick responds, "I'd bet my own paycheck on that." Yeah, well, you would except you gave that up, remember? AD strives for relevance by stating the obvious: if this is an inside job, not only does the perp get the insurance money, he or she also gets to pocket the cash from the theft. Warrick gives him the "whatever" look and lays out his take on the case for Sara: he holds up the flyer and asks Sara the first thing anyone does when they see these under the windshield. I personally stick it in my car and throw it out when I get home, but that's because I was exposed to the "give a hoot, don't pollute" campaign a little too much as a kid. Apparently, normal people simply toss them on the ground. In this case, the only car that's missing a flyer is the victim's -- which means that the leafleteer stopped by shortly before Sante was shot. Sara notes that the leafleteer is a potential witness. Oh, joy -- what are the odds of finding a leafleteer in Vegas? Hint: pretty high.
And back at the A-plot, we're still looking down at the mystery woman. David the coroner (not to be confused with David the Lab Tech from the pre-credits scene) is saying that although he's determined that the victim died two to four hours before she was found, he's still not certain what the cause of death was. But, "considering the whip and ligature marks, it's no stretch to say it was violent. Some of those scars on her back are years old; some are fresh." Gil's not liking the evidence; apparently, it's not talking to him yet. He asks whether the marks on the body can be pinned to any cause of death, like violent rape. David calmly replies, "That's the strange part. Her body's a road map of abuse, but there's no sign it was sexual. She hasn't had intercourse in months." Catherine speculates, "I'm thinking trade-in. Some lowlife gets tired of beating on the old model, so he punches her ticket and starts shopping around for version 2.0." But something about the abused-woman theory isn't sitting well with Gil; as he explains it, she's been beaten, but she's a well-groomed punching bag, with a manicure and pedicure. What's more -- and this is the scene that justifies the "partial nudity" warning preceding tonight's episode -- she sports an impressively expensive surgical modification or two. Or, to quote Catherine: "That is not a Tijuana boob job. Those puppies are top of the line." We then get to see the puppies -- God, typing that gives me Jerry Lawler flashbacks -- all TMICam-style, the camera zooming in on the nipple, then boring down to the implant beneath. Catherine notes that, on the bright side, the serial numbers on the top-of-the-line breast implants will help them track down the doctor who performed the operation, then ID the victim. She requests that David extract an implant from the body. "You want left side or right side?" he asks. She shrugs: "Dealer's choice." 'Cause it's Vegas, you know, and it's all random, and...and I'm done straining for mammary-based metaphors here.
While the saline follies are unfolding belowdecks, Nicky -- who is having one the best wardrobe days he's had in a while, with a charcoal t-shirt and black pants -- comes in and greets Liam the Lab Tech with a "What up, Einstein?" Liam is annoyed enough to cease grinding whatever it is he's grinding in his mortar and pestle to ask, "You think Einstein had people hovering over his shoulders all the time? If he did, do you think we'd be walking around with E equals MC-squared t-shirts?" Well, given that Einstein was a physicist and thus was used to working on blackboards, giving papers, and generally participating in peer review...why not? But we'll never know. Liam's question will go wherever it is Schrodinger stows his cat. Nicky shrugs off Liam's delusions of grandeur and leans in to see what it is Liam's working on; Liam snaps at him to step back and let his genius have its breathing room. Then he gets down to business, telling Nicky what the sliver Gil plucked from the body several scenes back was. After putting a dropperful of the solution he's been mixing with the mortar-and-pestle on a slide with an absorbent surface, then runs it through a spectrometer. The results? The fragment is tempered steel with an aluminum coating. Nicky wonders if the woman was chained up; Liam responds that whatever the scenario, she was wearing something pretty funky -- tree sap, ammonia, and water, a.k.a. liquid latex. Nicky hasn't heard of this substance. Why does that not surprise me? Liam explains: "It's all the craze right now. Girls paint it on guys, guys paint it on girls, you can paint it on yourself if that's what you're into...if you can't get a date. Not like I would know..." Nicky, mercifully, cuts that monologue off before it wanders into TMI territory.
Back in the B-plot, AD and Sara -- where the hell is Warrick? Why have the powers that be chosen to erase Warrick from this scene and replace him with AD? Why? -- are questioning a diminutive pamphleteer about what he may or may not have seen the night before. Sara asks whether he's seen anything unusual, and he replies, "I don't know what city you live in, missy, but here in Las Vegas, unusual is what happens when you leave the house." AD is not nearly so amused as I am, and tries to move the conversation forward. He fails. Take that, AD.
Sara presumably continues to labor with the AD albatross hung around her neck. We don't know, because we're now in a doctor's waiting room peopled by comely young things in spandex mini-dresses. As a balding man walks toward them, Catherine calls out, "Dr. Cornfeld! Catherine Willows, Las Vegas crime lab." The bimbo platoon looks concerned for a moment, then goes back to thinking about whatever it is one thinks about shortly before getting bags of sodium solution stuffed into your chest cavity. Catherine then whips out the breast implant -- in a specimen jar -- and hands it over to the good doctor, who notes, "Ah, the four-fourteen series. Firm, but plenty of give." Catherine's not in the market; she simply wants to know if the owner of this specific implant had a name. Dr. Cornfield whips out a PDA where he evidently keeps his patient list sorted by implant number (I said it before, and I'll say it again -- creepy!) and exposits that the billing address was a third-party place that sends a lot of business, but the girl in question was one Mona Taylor. "Mona"? In this day and age? She was born in the seventies -- that makes her a Jennifer, a Michelle, a Kim, or a Lisa, not a Mona. ["There's a Mona on Friends this season, too; maybe there's a Mona Advisory Board that's been doing some lobbying." -- Wing Chun] Catherine's not terribly thrown by the naming discrepancies; she's on to body-image issues instead. "I'll tell you what's a shame. That she was so pretty, and perfect, and still thought she needed implants." Dr. Cornfeld defends his work: "You shouldn't judge a woman for wanting to improve herself. Competition's intense, especially for a young woman living in Las Vegas." Call me old-fashioned -- perhaps from the era where "Mona" was leading the list of popular baby-names, even -- but wouldn't improving oneself typically involve, say, breaking bad habits and acquiring good ones, as opposed to subjecting oneself to surgery to meet a statistically improbable beauty ideal? I'm just asking. Cornfeld exhorts Catherine to exhibit a little empathy: "Why don't you put yourself in her shoes?" Wrong answer, Cornhole. Catherine shoots back, "Trust me, I've been in her shoes. I got out of them." Like an idiot, Cornfeld follows up: "Oh yeah? Why is that?" Catherine gets the last line: "Trust me, they were killing me." She then makes an exit while the good doctor sighs and wonders why he'll only have an appropriate comeback two hours later when it does him no good.
Now that Catherine's got an address, she's hauled Gil and Brass there with her. As they're walking up the walkway to what looks like a Gothic manor, Gil's skeptically inquiring about the veracity of Catherine's data. "Maybe she was a domestic?" offers Brass. "No domestic has a ten-thousand-dollar rack -- not even in Vegas," Catherine replies. As they climb the stairs -- flanked by stern-looking iron candelabras complete with dripping tapers -- Brass adds that Mona hailed from South Dakota three years ago; he figures she hooked a sugar daddy. One with particularly overdramatic taste in decor, by all appearances. Catherine pooh-poohs this theory, asking, "How much plastic surgery business can one sugar daddy generate?" Gil chimes in, "The eternal question, to which we're about to find an answer." Oh, my God. Was that...a joke? From Gil? Now I'm all atwitter. Heaven only knows what will happen .
What happens is that a dominatrix opens the door and purrs, "Let me guess. Three police officers looking for respite from having to control and dominate our big, bad city." Brass smiles -- a sight that's even more intimidating than the dominatrix -- and replies, "Close. One police officer and two criminalists. May we come in?" They all do. Catherine looks amused, Gil less so. As they enter the foyer, we hear a whip cracking and a man screaming in pain. The dominatrix says coolly, "Another happy customer." Gil's head does a 180 and he fixes her with an incredulous look. She registers this, then asks, "Now, would you prefer individual sessions, or would you like to enjoy each other's submission?" When she puts it like that, it sounds like staff evaluation time. Gil still looks nonplussed. Catherine, on the other hand, is quite amused. The dominatrix continues, undeterred: "You don't have to decide now. Make yourselves comfortable. And welcome to Lady Heather's dominion."
Cue the commercials, when the Parents' Television Council no doubt blew out several major communications grids in North America while planning their protest.
Back at the House of Pain, Catherine and Nicky are looking at Mona -- or should I call her Mistress Mona? -- anyway, Catherine and Nicky are looking at Mona's car, which sports a personalized license plate reading "IM4FUN." I guess "2FLOGU" was taken already. As Catherine looks at the car, Nicky rummages through the trash, finding several bottles of Wesson, a dull blade, and a stretch of liquid latex. The latex has a watch impression on it; Catherine and Nicky decide to bag it in the eventual likelihood that they can get a mold of it which may lead to a suspect.
Inside the House of Pain, Lady Heather is taking Gil and Brass up a flight of stairs. She says, "I've never lost one of my girls." "You don't seem too upset about it," Gil counters. "What you see and what I feel are two different things," she rebuts. They wind around another bend in the stairs, the two men trying not to look all weirded out over the assorted grunts, moans, and screams of, "Harder!" emanating from behind closed doors. Brass casually asks, "So. Last night, did you hear screams?" After he asks this, a particularly loud chorus of wails and groans issues forth. Lady Heather says dryly, "It's when I don't hear screams that I start to worry." Brass attempts to recover, and fails: "Can you tell us what time Mona got off?" Lady Heather proceeds to drive a truck through the opening he's given her with, "Knowing Mona, every couple of hours. She enjoyed her work." Gil drops his eyes and smirks a little; poor Brass is stuck playing cop while he ascertains that there's no sexual contact or anything else illegal going on. We then find out that Mona's last client of the evening was booked for 11 PM, and she would have left at midnight. There's a little tiresome back-and-forth where Brass continues to prod for details on names and addresses and Lady Heather tries to bait him, but eventually, she agrees to move some clients around so that the C.S.I.s can inspect the poolhouse where Mona met her clients. She swans off, presumably to deliver the news in inimitable house style, and Catherine and Nicky come in. Nicky's looking a little wide-eyed at all this -- leading me to wonder if he was in the world's most sheltered fraternity in college. Didn't those trout-wielding Greeks ever watch porn? Gil sends the two of them back out to begin inspecting the poolhouse; Catherine inquires as to his planned whereabouts, and Gil deadpans, "I'll be with Lady Heather." Oh, he wishes. She'd eat him alive. ["Though I have to say that given Gil's temperament, he'd really enjoy licking a tough woman's shoes." -- Wing Chun]
In Lady Heather's chamber, she's slinking around while Gil inspects the assorted props lying around. It occurs to me then that it must be hell to be into this stuff if you're something of a minimalist; you'd probably have a nervous breakdown having all the assorted trusses, restraints, masks, whips, and whatnot lying around. Then again, if you're both a minimalist and a masochist, stepping into Lady Heather's done-in-shabby-chic-Dominatrix-style chamber may well be what pushes your buttons. And I've wandered off-track. So -- Lady Heather sidles over to Gil and asks, "Does all this fascinate you?" "Yes," he answers honestly. "I find all deviant behavior fascinating in that to understand human nature we have to understand our aberrations." Lady Heather wants to know if he thinks her brand of business is aberrant. "I would say that whip marks and ligature contusions on a young woman are aberrant," Gil remarks. So I'm guessing it's okay once you have The Change? "Every job has its peculiar hazards. Rock stars damage their eardrums, football players ruin their knees. In this business, it's scars," Lady Heather rebuts, although she's looking mighty scar-free herself. She then points out that (a) nobody who works for her has ever sustained a serious injury on the job, and (b) Gil's assumption that Mona's work led to her death is currently only an assumption. After using Gil's old argument against him, Lady Heather goes on to make a speech to the effect that she's basically in the dream business, "bringing people's fantasies to life, making them real and acceptable." Yeah -- her and Walt Disney. Gil's not terribly receptive, and Lady Heather changes tactics, saying that she worries more about people who don't frequent the House of Pain, since they may be in dire need of outlets for their fantasies. She then cites Gil as an example. Gil responds, "Oh, I have outlets. I read. I study bugs. I sometimes even ride roller coasters." To her eternal credit, Lady Heather does not break into side-splitting giggles. She merely spits, "And your sex life?" "Non-existent!" Gil replies. "But if you ask the forum regulars, they're about fifty-fifty on whether I should jump my subordinate trapped over in tonight's B-plot, or whether I should risk years of camaraderie with Catherine to become yet another in her long line of boy-toys." Actually, he says nothing of the kind, but so long as I'm recapping a paragraph about making fantasies come true and all that, surely I may be permitted to indulge one of my own.
Anyway, Lady Heather continues to bait Gil, saying that she's all qualified to figure out whether "some men" require control or submission. Gil's apparently content to live with the uncertainty. He says, "'No man is a complete mystery except to himself.' Marcel Proust." Lady Heather replies, "I bet he'd have enjoyed himself here." Probably, but not so much as his countryman Michel Foucault. Gil thinks so too -- the part about Proust, anyway -- and adds, "no crime is a complete mystery either. The whip marks on Mona Taylor were fresh." This gets a rise out of Lady Heather: "That can't be. Mona was dominant with her clients. I know...she sometimes saw clients off the books. I let her, because she brought in so much business, but I just assumed she knew what she was doing." Gil hypothesizes that one of Mona's off-the-books clients was a regular. He and Lady Heather then resume trying to weird each other out.
Meanwhile, Nicky and Catherine are heading into the Poolhouse of Pain. Nicky's eyes are the size of saucers, especially when he takes in one particularly stylish dominatrix in leather and librarian-style specs who's set off by a blackboard reading, "I'm a dirty little stink boy" over and over again. She gives Nicky and Catherine an imperious look, then says, "All right, Randolph. You may lick my boots, then go." "Is it because I'm naughty?" the unseen Randolph asks eagerly. "Shut up!" she barks, and whacks him with a short whip. As they walk around the perimeter of the Poolhouse of Pain, Catherine remarks, "I feel like I'm trapped in the Marquis de Sade's brain pan." We look down and see the dom leading Randolph off an elaborate schoolhouse set. Catherine and Nicky watch those two vacate, continue down a hall where another dom is whipping a client as he hangs tied up in a shower (going by the vigor with which these women are working, I'm going to speculate that this job keeps you in fabulous shape. Has anyone thought to come out with The Dominatrix Workout yet?), then stop in a bare room where a chain hangs from the ceiling, and assorted paddles and studded whipping devices hang from the walls. They work the room, finding a few chipped links in the chain (the silver flecks Gil found) and liquid latex tucked into a crevice on the wall. But the forensic evidence is secondary; the real point of the scene is to give Nicky and Catherine a chance to talk. As usual, Nicky makes like he just tumbled off the back of a turnip truck, saying, "You know what I just realized? None of this weirds me out anymore." Catherine challenges him: "People are just as twisted in their own living rooms. The props are different here, though." Nicky rebuts that not everybody's twisted and Catherine laughs cynically, saying, "Wake up and smell the species. If there's one thing you learn on this job, it's that human beings are capable of anything." Nicky's not buying it; in his mind, there's a line between "those freaks out there running around getting spanked" and non-deviant folk like his parents. Awwww. It's kind of sweet, really, but I would love it if just once, Nicky was fully fluent in some unsavory aspect of human nature, instead of professing shock every time he stumbles across something slightly subversive.
Hey! It's the B-plot! Remember the B-plot? No? I don't blame you. Anyway, Dionne from Clueless is giving Warrick the 411 on the tireprint he lifted off the crime scene. It matches the car description the leafleteer gave. Then, in what promises to be one of the speediest resolutions of a B-plot ever, Sara and some nameless tech determine that -- quelle coincidence -- the bullet they dug out of Sante's thigh just happens to be from the same caliber gun the victim owns. Could it be...an inside job? Maybe. Could I care less? No.
Evidently, the people running this show share my sentiment; they're back on the A-plot with Gil and David the Conditionally Fun Coroner reveals that Mona died from asphyxiation and she had curious red circular marks on the inside of her nose. Lucky us, we get to see these marks up close and personal, courtesy of the TMICam. Gil asks David if the marks could have been made by something like a straw. David replies, "Maybe I lack imagination, but why would you need a straw at a sex club?" For the frozen fruity drinks, of course. Gil clarifies, "It's not a sex club actually; it's a fetish club." David -- who is definitely leaning toward the unfun side of the scale in this scene -- quips, "There's a difference?" Gil chooses to ignore that gibe and educates us all on how the straw might have been used: for air.
Back at the House of Pain, Lady Heather is escorting Catherine to a potting shed area and explaining, "Anything from last night would be in here..." We pull back to see an impressive array of rubber hoses and assorted black masks. Catherine smiles a little self-consciously and says, "We don't technically have a warrant." "That's okay. I want to help," Lady Heather says softly. Somewhere in the middle distance, an ACLU lawyer bolts upright in bed, haunted by the vision of a consensual violation of civil liberties. The two women then putter, having this conversation:
Lady Heather: Go ahead, ask. How can I do this for a living?
Catherine: Oh, that's not what I was thinking. How much does this place clear a week?
Lady Heather: Ten grand.
Catherine: I'm not with the IRS.
Lady Heather: Okay. Twenty.
Catherine: I don't make that in three months.
Lady Heather: Sex pays a lot better than death.
Catherine: Plus the outfits are cooler.
Lady Heather: I have this genius tailor. Worked at the Desert Inn, back in the day. I let him come in weekends and play human ashtray, he designs for me and my girls. It's a fair trade.
Catherine: You got a good thing going here. And the best part is, these guys think getting slapped around and humiliated is their fantasy.
Lady Heather: It's like I always tell my daughter --
Catherine: You have a daughter?
Lady Heather: Eighteen this month, a freshman at Harvard.
Catherine: Really? Mine's seven.
Lady Heather: Oh, that's a great age...when I thought Zoey was ready to hear it, I told her, "Honey, there are a lot of things you can give a man. Your body, your time, even your heart. But the one thing you can never, ever, ever let go of is your power."
Catherine: [sighing] All my mother ever said to me was, "Cash up front."
Lady Heather: Don't take this the wrong way, but I think you've got everything it takes to make a great dominatrix.
Catherine: I'd take that as a compliment.
Lady Heather: Well, you should. It's just about knowing yourself, being strong, and not taking any crap from powerful jerks who are used to giving it all day long.
Catherine: Well, death is still a man's business, and I don't have to tell you about police work.
Lady Heather: So how do you survive?
Catherine: By knowing myself, being strong, and not taking any crap from powerful jerks who are used to giving it all day long.
It's a wonderful scene for many reasons, not the least of which being that it finally allows us to see Catherine as someone who's very conscious of the balancing act she does, and it has the bonus effect of having some very genuine-seeming female bonding. Viva the sisterhood!
And now, back at C.S.I.Central, Liam is surveying the array of masks and whips before him. They were all taken from the House of Pain, and none of them have been washed, which make them ripe for the evidentiary plucking. Gil muses, "My guess is she was a switch for her off-the-books clients." Liam begins laughing at codger Gil breaking out the hipster BDSM lingo. "You know what a switch is?" Liam asks incredulously. I have a feeling Gil would be willing to illustrate on you first-hand, youngster. "If Mona's DNA is in one of these masks, then she was the submissive on the night she died," Gil theorizes. I'm sure it makes sense from a plot-advancing perspective, but now I'm all caught up in wondering how on earth Mona's mask would have made it to the sink; wouldn't Lady Heather have noticed someone skulking about? Liam comments that Gil is so dialed into the case, he can probably magically intuit which mask Mona used. No, that only happens at the 9:54 mark. Here, in the mid-thirties, we're still in love with the individual steps of the investigation. Gil rather pissily clarifies that he needs all the masks and straws tested. Liam chooses this moment to try to lighten things up by ramming a Sharpie up each nostril. Gil and Catherine are not amused -- although his little exercise does let us segue nicely into a flashback detailing what kind of mask Mona was likely wearing. Hint: think of the Gimp in Pulp Fiction. And then we segue into results -- Liam's found DNA galore, some of it leading to a killer. Now if only they could find the man behind the molecules...
Gil and Catherine start by looking at the watch, comparing molds -- his from Mona's wrist, Catherine's from the latex scrap. They debate who's got the yin and who's got the yang in this case, then get down to business. The molds are similar -- revealing a pricey women's watch with a few diamonds around the bezel -- and after Catherine kicks up the Mideo system to see a computer-generated simulation, the computer puts together the top mold (from the latex) and the bottom mold (from the wrist) and spits out a fair simulation. Time to hit the jewelers!
Back in the B-plot, the B-plot, the doesn't-interest-me plot...sorry, I drifted off there...back in the B-plot, Sante is making a lot of noise about his pants as he lies convalescing in his hospital bed. Sara comes in, swaddled in the remnants of a curtain from a Ramada Inn c. 1975, with AD in tow. They begin to ask about the gun, then get waylaid as the rest of the Delgado family comes in.
And we have an owner for the watch! Maybe. Catherine is quizzing a seemingly mild-mannered househusband who's clutching his baby like a talisman again the C.S.I.s. He denies missing a watch of any sort. ["Speaking of Mona and Friends and such, he's Mitchell Whitfield, Rachel's ex-fiancé Barry from Friends." -- Wing Chun] The baby -- Dylan -- then conveniently empties his bowels; Gil makes a moué of disgust. The househusband -- Cameron Nelson -- excuses himself so he can change the diaper. Catherine stops him to ask whether he's bought a diamond watch at Maarten Jewelers in the Forum Shoppes (these are the mix of chain and swank stores appended to Caesar's Palace). Cameron laughs that idea off, since he's apparently too busy being Mister Mom to do anything beyond the basics. Thousands of single parents -- Catherine among them -- fall about laughing at this incompetent boob. Gil cuts her off mid-tirade by noting that they know someone in the Nelson household bought the watch, since Brass has the receipt. They figure it's the missus.
Cut to Eileen Nelson's office. She's less than thrilled to be talking with the C.S.I.s about a custom-made watch. Then again, she's less than forthcoming about her personal life. When Gil comments that her office is bereft of family pictures, she snaps back, "I know what they look like." As for the real topic of the visit: Eileen won't show the watch without a warrant, and then she punts that she lost the watch on a business trip. "Is that the trip to L.A. you took with your boss, Ronald? Let me refresh your memory: you shared a suite?" Catherine asks sweetly. She and Eileen are not really going to be bonding the same way she and Lady Heather did, I'm thinking. Eileen snips back, "I'm a corporate litigator. It's going to take a lot more than that to rattle my cage." Ah, but that's what Gil's for. He informs Eileen that Mistress Mona was found dead with an imprint of Eileen's watch on her wrist. Eileen spouts some legalese at them. Translation: don't even bother showing with a warrant unless you've got an iron-clad case.
Catherine and Gil are back at Nelson's House of Lies, going through the trunk of Cameron's mini-van. Eileen pulls up, stalks out, and spits, "This qualifies as a harassment suit." "Too late," Catherine sasses back. Gil then decides to do a little retaliatory head-messing: "Grains of golden sand." "What?" demands Eileen. "Another man who was familiar with murder," Gil clarifies. "Played in any sandboxes lately, Mr. Nelson?" Catherine calls out. Cameron looks up, guilt written all over his features.
We transition to the interrogation tank, where corporate litigator Eileen has suddenly developed defense attorney acumen as well. Cameron overrules her: "No, I will not shut up. I did not ask you to be my attorney." Eileen shoots back, "I'm looking after our family. I'm the only one who's qualified." Cameron fires, "Really? And how exactly is sleeping with Ronald looking after your family?" "Cameron!" she protests, shocked. Gil looks acutely uncomfortable to be witnessing this. Catherine is amused and unsurprised. Cameron's on a roll now: "You never gave a damn about me. And our child -- our child is nothing more to you than some yuppie pet designed to make you look better at the firm, which happens to be the only family you probably really care about!" Catherine tries to warn Cameron to ix-nay on the unloading and offers to get him a glass of water. "No! No water, no gum, no anything. If you think you can trick him into giving some DNA, you're mistaken," Eileen barks. Catherine feigns social hurt. Gil steps in to explain all: "Liquid latex...your husband made Mona Taylor wear it every time he paid to humiliate her." "Why would he do that?" Eileen asks. "Psychologically, she was a surrogate...Cameron would put a mask on her face and cover her body in liquid latex," Catherine continues. We see this process -- complete with putting on the watch first -- in flashback. "He made her into nothing, in order to make her into you," Gil says. "Cameron couldn't dominate you, so he dominated Mona. Only on his last appointment, he got carried away," Catherine clarifies. We then see a recreation of the act, where Cameron is screaming that he wants Eileen to beg for everything, and he clamps down on the air straws, suffocating Mona. Cameron mournfully says, "I had to pay some girl to pretend to be my wife." Eileen absently says, "Shut up, Cameron." That's her favorite sentence, I think. Eileen counters that if what she heard is what they've got, she's happy to go to trial. Gil says he will match the epithelials, and Eileen's preparing for a big fight when Cameron snaps, "Okay, I have an idea. Why don't we test little Dylan's epithelials, see if his daddy isn't really your law partner? 'Cause God knows you haven't let me touch you in three years. I'm out of here." Eileen demands to know where Cameron's going, and he replies, "Away from you. Other than that, I really don't care." Gil and Catherine just shift uncomfortably.
Minutes later, Gil and Catherine are walking down the hall as she muses, "I just realized that you and I have a very healthy relationship." "We do?" he replies. She offers proof of this by pointing out that she doesn't not react to problems with Gil by painting Liam in latex. Gil speaks for us all when he chuckles, "He'd probably like it." Catherine rolls her eyes and prods Gil to reveal something in return. He looks around and leans in, saying, "Okay. I never told anyone this, Catherine..."
And then the screen goes dark. What a typical Grissomian ending. Bravo!