Previously on CSI: We meet Gil and Catherine, who love a good crime scene; Warrick, who loves a good bet; Brass, who loves pissing in everyone else's cornflakes; and Holly Gribbs, who's not loving anything about her new job. A young thug shooting her in the back does nothing to change her mind, but it does provide the opening premise for this episode. And now...
We open on a nighttime shot of the Stratosphere, zoom across to the Rio, and move up the strip toward the Luxor. ["Oh, that's a shout-out." -- Sars] The camera angle shifts into a typical casino -- carpet patterns that make your eyes bleed, the kind of blinking lights and electronic chirps that trigger seizures in children, and lots of slack-jawed yokels working the slot machines. A middle-aged guy with a buzz cut keeps pulling the lever on one machine with relentless precision. As he plays, a skinny woman who would have made a fine Skid Row groupie back in the day is watching the slot-monkeys play. She grabs her boyfriend's arm as he's cleaning his glasses:
"Forty million. Could you imagine?"
"It'll never happen. You gotta better chance of going to the moon."
"Hey, gimme $20."
"You got your own money."
"Yeah, but I left my purse in my room. Hurry!"
As the two of them are conducting this complex financial negotiation, the buzz-cut guy takes a drink, then walks off in defeat. He leaves his slot card -- a debit card that casinos hand out to people who don't want to haul around plastic cups full of quarters -- behind. The boyfriend walks over to the machine, inserts a $20 bill, and yanks the handle twice. The first time and second time, nothing happens. The girlfriend looks on eagerly, and Prince Charming says, "Your little premonition cost me $20. You happy now?" He gives the slot one last petulant yank, then snipes at the girlfriend, "Watch out, here come the millll-yuns!" Fortunately, she's ignoring his antics and noticing that the millions did, in fact, come. "Oh my God!" she shrieks at eardrum-splitting level. Great -- they can use some of that money to buy her elocution lessons.
Cut to a shot of Prince Charming and Skankerella holding a giant check aloft for the cameras. Both are wearing tacky t-shirts reading "Giga Million." Skankerella has not stopped shrieking; fortunately, her boyfriend is saving himself from hearing damage by ignoring her. We then see them walking down a hotel hall as a chunky security guard comments that they'll be having steak tonight. Prince Charming is holding the check in both hands; Skankerella is holding her boyfriend in both of hers. "They gave us the presidential suite," she coos, as Prince Charming fumbles with the key. "Here, Richard Gere, let me get that for you," the guard says, then ushers them in.
"Oh, look at our view," Skankerella says, tripping over to the window that opens several hundred feet above the strip. "Take a hike," Prince Charming says. "Get lost. I'm a millionaire now. Why would I want to waste any more time with you?" Because, Charming, she's the one who had that premonition leading to your new fortune. Who knows what else she's good for? As Charming's opening up about his issues with intimacy and social class, Skankerella's jaw hits her clavicle and she reels. Fortunately, room service arrives just then, saving us from seeing the rest of the ugly break-up.
In the scene, it's daylight and Gil's on the cell phone saying, "All right, the minute you hear anything on Holly Gribbs's condition, I want you to page me." He then ducks under police tape to view the crumpled body of Prince Charming. I guess the jackpot thing happened as our C.S.I. squad was busy nailing yuppies and terrorizing Holly Gribbs on her first night on the job. Gil looks at Prince Charming and inquires, "He pulled a Louganis?" Nice. One can imagine the kinds of deaths that earn the nicknames "the Strug," "the Chastain," and "the Thorpe." A young man in a tie, who goes unnamed in both the show and its closed-captions and thus shall be dubbed Exposition Lad, plays his role: "The Giga Millions curse strikes again. The last four winners have ended up missing or dead. Some say there's a conspiracy here." And the actor who played a Kennedy is just the man to solve it.
Exposition Lad then tells Gil that the girlfriend is upstairs in police custody. "Do you want to talk to her?" "Not yet. Right now I want to talk to him." "How do you talk to a dead body?" asks Exposition Lad. "I let him talk to me, actually." That Gil, dropping the Zen forensics science. Exposition Lad is suitably awed. "In fact, he just spoke. Didn't you hear him?" Oh, Gil -- now you're just showing off. "He just told me that he didn't commit suicide," Gil continues, holding up Prince Charming's mangled eyeglasses. Exposition Lad again advances the plot: "You lost me." Gil explains that anyone cowardly enough to take their own life wouldn't be brave enough to watch the changing view on the way down; most jumpers take off their glasses before leaping, whereas people who are pushed don't have time. "You can tell all that just by looking at a pair of eyeglasses?" Exposition Lad inquires incredulously. "You have no idea," intones Gil. You're right! Thank God we have you, Gil.
Cut to the opening credits. One big change: Jorja Fox is now listed as a principal cast member. We see the closing line "And Chandra West as Holly Gribbs," which doesn't bode well for her future on this show.
Gil walks into the police station and asks for his messages. The secretary hands him a stack an inch think. As he heads toward the lab, he notices that all the lab techs are staring at him silently. He enters Brass's office and says, "I just got off the phone with the sheriff. He says he wants me to run the unit." Brass turns around, his brow furrowed but for the giant dent where the boomerang of karma hit, and tells Gil he's the boss now. He then informs Gil that he'll be working in the homicide department. "So I guess this might put you and me at odds." Brass, give it up: you're already at odds with anyone who walks upright. This little move is simply a device meant to exacerbate your ongoing antagonism with everyone in C.S.I. Don't try to pretend otherwise. Gil, however, is playing Zen mind games and replies, "Cop versus scientist. It's interesting, huh?" See? See? It's all about setting up ongoing tension, not Brass's inability to relate to tool-using primates. After Gil asks for advice, Brass tells him to cover his ass and hide. Clearly, this is a man who read the One-Minute Manager and knows that he needs to keep his communications short and to the point.
In the scene, some shellacked television anchorperson is talking about Holly Gribbs being brutally gunned down on her first night on the job. Warrick winces as if each word is stabbing him; Nick looks concerned, and Catherine's face is drawn in harsh lines of guilt and grief. "Weren't you supposed to be shadowing Holly?" she asks. "Warrick, man, what happened?" asks Nick. "I hooked up with Grissom on that toenail case" -- and never in the history of television has such an ordinarily hilarious phrase been delivered in such an agonized tone of voice -- "then I came back here." "You let her go solo?" asks Catherine, conveniently forgetting that Gil did too. Warrick tells her he already feels awful and she should just lay off him. She does, since it's now Gil's turn to start in. As he enters, he recaps last week's whereabouts of the C.S.I. team with considerably more brevity than I did, then tells everyone Brass has now been moved back to Homicide, where he can begin leaving the body of evidence his colleagues will no doubt use to justify his demise. Nick asks, "Who's going to run this squad?" and I realize either Nicky's not very bright, or he's a teacher's pet. Gil tells it like it is: "Me. We'll just play it by ear."
He then begins parceling out cases. We learn that Prince Charming was staying at the fictitious Hotel Monaco; there is no Hotel Monaco in Las Vegas, although there is a very nice one on Geary Street in San Francisco. I highly recommend the bar there. But I digress. Gil's working Prince Charming's unhappy ending. Nick's working the Gribbs case -- something Catherine takes immediate exception to -- and Gil justifies the decision by pointing out that Nick's the only one in the C.S.I. group who didn't have personal contact with Holly. Catherine quibbles some more, and Gil tells her she's emotionally involved. "Yes. She was going to walk. I convinced her to stay. If anyone's to blame here, it's me and I want this case," Catherine says heatedly. "Fire me!" She heads toward the door, presumably to go track down Gribbs's shooter, as Nicky looks on uncomprehendingly. "I'm not going to fire anyone," says Gil -- undoubtedly allaying many of Warrick's fears -- and goes on, "We're all on edge because of Holly. I just want everyone to stay calm and do their jobs for the ten hours." The camera cuts over to Nick, who's making his jaw extra-firm in an effort to look calm and competent. Gil then looks over at Warrick and explains that as of now, the C.S.I. department is short of help, so he's bringing in old friend Sara Sidel, a C.S.I. out of San Francisco, to lead the investigation. Catherine huffs about having someone sniffing around, then departs. Nick looks even more clench-jawed, and not at all pleased to be told he's going to be working the jumper with Gil. That's probably because he was wondering two things: did Sara Sidel ever hit the bar at the Hotel Monaco, and where does the San Francisco C.S.I. rank relative to the Las Vegas department? Or maybe I'm projecting a little. Warrick asks Gil what he can do; Gil tells him to take some personal time and get his story straight before Sara shows up.
Cut to the apartment where Gribbs was shot. Catherine walks in, toting her crime-solving suitcase, just in time to have a uniform ask her, "What do you think happened here?" Catherine stares at the overturned furniture and imagines the crime; we switch to the hypothetical vignette as it's being played out in slow-motion, echoey sound, and red-soaked colors. The assailant tells Holly not to move, she pleads for her life, and he shoots her with enough force to send her, and a few pieces of furniture, tumbling to the ground. Catherine snaps back into the present and begins looking around. She sees Holly's gun and empties the clip. It's partially empty, and Catherine murmurs, "She shot back." Stooping to peer beneath the furniture, she notices a beeper lying on the floor.
Cut to the morgue and a female coroner cheerfully saying, "He's all rigored up. Pull it like a slot machine." It's Prince Charming -- how heartwarming to see that life's small ironies continue into death. She goes on to talk about the three-week dry spell between jumpers while Gil works at the arm. A Band-Aid swings off the arm, and Gil notices a set of long, deep scratches on Prince Charming's left forearm. He comments that they look like defense wounds. Nicky, displaying that stunning insight that makes him a CSI Level III while Warrick rots in cheap casinos, deduces that "someone came after him with something pretty sharp. Got any idea what it might be?" The coroner speculates that it might be glass, based on the tiny shards they found in the wound. Gil notices it's not just glass, but black glass.
Nick and Gil are now in the Hotel Monaco's presidential suite, combing through the evidence again. Gil notices a pile of bloody towels, and Nick points out a broken champagne bottle. "I missed that," Gil says, thus satisfying Nicky's need for validation. Nick salves his superior's ego by asking, "What do you think, boss?" Gil tells Mr. CSI III to call it. "What, you want me to play it blind?" Nick responds, and Gil tells him, "What does the room say?" That Gil, always holding conversations with inanimate entities. I bet he had a rich, full fantasy life as child. Nick takes us into flashback -- complete with stylized bluish hues and echoes -- and we're watching Prince Charming and Skankerella break up all over again. Room service comes in and drops off a cart with champagne. As soon as he leaves, Skankerella demands tearfully, "So what was I then, just someone to bang?" "Yeah," responds Prince Charming. I'm guessing that he's not terribly interested in remaining friends with his ex. He better hope they're not sharing a cab together when they get back to Newark. Skankerella takes this revelation poorly, seizing the champagne bottle and breaking it while screaming, "Why?" She slices Prince Charming's forearm, he calls her a crazy broad -- clearly, the writers are toning down the language in the wake of the PTC's statement condemning the show -- and storms out. Nick takes us out of flashback and into the interrogation room, where Skankerella is finishing the story for him and Gil. Gil asks if the fight was the last time she saw Prince Charming; she replies that she cut him up pretty good and he probably went to the lobby to get some first aid. Gil asks if she's sure, adding that the presidential suite is a secured room and there will be a record of any entrances -- trying to scare her by thinking he's documented a lie of some sort -- but Skankerella's a cool customer. She shoots back, "Well, if they keep a record, check it for yourself. Why are you bothering me?" Oh, I don't know, missy. Perhaps because there's a little thing called motive? Gil asks Nick to check the log; he confirms that Skankerella is not lying. "Can I go now?" she asks, with the kind of eye-rolling impatience most fourteen-year-olds would dismiss as too obvious. Gil nods, and she gets up from the chair she's been straddling -- a class act just like her ex -- and struts out. Nick and Gil brainstorm possible explanations, and decide to go see how sturdy the "perhaps-he-was-flung-from-the-roof" hypothesis is.
Meanwhile, Warrick is on the phone to the emergency room, inquiring as to Holly's status. Judge Cohen beeps in on the other line and upbraids him for betting the 49ers instead of the Packers, as per last week's episode, and commands Warrick to meet him "at the spot in fifteen." Hmmm. Could Judge Cohen and Warrick have a long-running relationship wherein they conduct a less-than-ethical exchange of goods and services? Or am I jumping to conclusions, only to discover that "the spot" is a café where the two meet to discuss the implications of Plato's Republic when read from a twenty-first-century perspective? Hey, in a show where grown men talk to corpses and hotel suites, anything is possible.
The camera swoops over a hotel roof, presumably the Hotel Monaco's, where Nick and Gil are standing over a pile of crash-test dummies. Gil announces the beginning of Operation Norman while Nick paws at his pants. "You'll never get that off. It's Meyer's roof dust. All the hotels use it now; it diverts the sun's rays." Nick asks how Gil knows all this crap -- his word, not mine -- and Gil tells him it's their job to know stuff. A second later, a voice on the walkie-talkie tells the two men the coast is clear; we then see Gil standing on the Hotel Monaco's driveway and watching the dummies fly off the rooftop as a crowd cheers behind him. Oh, please -- this is Las Vegas. There are Elvis impersonators and showgirls all over the place. Who's going to stand behind a police line and watch mannequins fall from the sky? ["I would have. Then again, I don't live in Vegas. I also don't get out terribly often." -- Sars] Gil logs the progress while waving beneficently to the crowd. "Norman jumped." He muses. "Norman pushed. Norman fell." "Wouldn't you if you were married to Mrs. Roper?" a female voice sasses from the crowd. Ladies and gentlemen, we have just met Sara Sidel, a.k.a. Gina the Secret Service Agent on West Wing, a.k.a. Maggie Doyle on ER. Can't you feel the MBTV synergy here? Gil's feeling something, but it's not exactly synergy. The two chat for a while; she derides his methods as old-school, while he defends his work in what sounds like the latest installment in a long-running argument. Then Sara brings up Holly, asking how she is. We find out that Holly's still in surgery. Then Gil goes abstract on us, saying, "I have so many unanswered whys..." Sara states that the only why she's interested in is finding out why Warrick Brown left the scene.
Because he had to get to the spot, that's why. Warrick and Cohen meet in a parking garage. The bad news is, they're not discussing Plato. The worse news is, Cohen demands ten thousand dollars in an hour. The good judge is looking considerably less like a mischief-loving scamp of the bench and more like a corrupt S.O.B. in every scene.
Back in the lab, Sara comes in on Catherine tapping away on a laptop. "Do you know where I can find Catherine Willows?" "She's out in the field," Catherine replies, since she's all about thwarting internal investigations. Sara and Catherine spar with each other. Catherine tells Sara that she's not horning in on the Gribbs case. Sara replies that the two of them can stand around and yammer, or they can combine their efforts to get the shooter. "Two sharp women are better than one," she says, neatly placating Catherine while broadcasting that she's no dummy herself. Catherine sizes her up, then shows her the pager found at the crime scene. Sara admires the pager tracer -- obtained by Gil on an eBay auction -- and tells Catherine that pagers are great if you can rely on the suspect's honesty. Catherine reads the tracer screen: "Ehh. Desmond Tutu." Sara responds that her last four pagers came back with "Eminem." There's a cheap shot to be made here, but why bother? After Sara concludes that Catherine has everything under control, she asks where she can find Warrick. Catherine directs her to any one of the casinos on Blue Diamond road.
And then we see a shot of the Rio, then Mandalay Bay, both at night. Remember, we're still in the middle of the day immediately following Holly's shooting. Can't the producers get some day footage of Vegas? Maybe the dancing waters at Bellagio or something?
The scene show Gil and Nick in the security booth at the Hotel Monaco, checking the footage immediately before and immediately after Prince Charming won his $40 million. Gil notices the buzz-cut middle-aged man; after a few moment's fast rewind, security tells him the guy was at that one slot machine for 11 hours, 13 minutes and 15 seconds, and he probably blew through ten to twenty thousand dollars. Gil blinks, nonplussed, then notes that Buzz-cut had left his slot card. He asks Nick to call the casino and get the name off the slot card. And that, my friends, is why you always stick to cash -- you can't be traced as easily in casinos, as our buzz-cut buddy is about to find out.
Catherine's in the ballistics lab with a zealous tech. He explains to her -- and to us, the viewers at home -- that each gun barrel has a unique cast that leaves grooves on the bullets it fires, and thus we can match bullets to guns by comparing their striations. ["Because nobody in the viewing audience has ever seen so much as thirty seconds of a Law & Order episode." -- Sars] Catherine fires the gun in a tank of water, giving us the bullet's-eye view of what's going on for a moment, and then the tech retrieves the bullet and checks the striations against the striations in one of the bullets retrieved from poor Holly's body. He notes that they match, and Catherine shakes her head. "He shot her with her own gun." She then imagines the scene, complete with the sounds and camera work: Holly trying to talk her way out of it, the assailant telling her to put down her gun, Holly clocking the guy with a rotary phone, and the guy grabbing her gun and shooting her a few times. Catherine blinks again, clearly upset. I suspect that everyone on this show is going to develop eye ticks if they continue to sublimate their emotions and express them only by blinking. Or perhaps the actors are trying to send us Morse code messages, blinking out key plot points or an up-yours message to the PTC. So many whys...
Gil's on the floor of the Hotel Monaco, preparing to go over and meet Buzz-cut. He tells Nick, "I think I'll play a little," and strides over to the bank of video poker machines where Buzz-cut is playing. Gil and Buzz then have this exact conversation:
"Double down now, baby. The winner."
"Yes, the winner!"
"Jacks or better."
"Double nine."
"You're under arrest."
Gil then informs the poor guy that he's under arrest on suspicion of murder based on the roof dust visible on his pants. As security hustles Buzz out, Gil directs Nick to collect his video poker winnings. That Gil. Is there anything he can't do?
Warrick is playing blackjack in a crappy little casino -- one that makes the Excalibur look swank -- and is up eleven grand when Sara sidles up behind him and tells the dealer he'll stay. The two of them discuss Warrick's gambling strategies in a café; we find out that Warrick can count cards and keep track of them in his head, a handy skill to have when playing blackjack. Sara nudges the conversation around to other types of betting Warrick might be doing, noting that Sunday morning is a fine time to flout the departmental rules and regulations in order to place NFL bets in Las Vegas. Warrick snaps, "Do you know how many times I was left alone at a crime scene as a rookie?" Sara says, "Well, this time it's different." "Oh yeah? Why is that?" he shoots back. "Holly Gribbs died on the operating table twenty minutes ago," Sara says quietly. Warrick snaps out of his self-righteous snit and looks at Sara with a face full of disbelief and remorse; she meets his eyes with a hard, level gaze.
We see the rest of the C.S.I. squad responding to the news. Catherine's back in her lab, standing very still and exhaling slowly, her face frozen. Brass stares at his new desk, absent-mindedly pushing the desk chair back and forth with his hand. Nick splashes some water from a water fountain onto his eyes, then braces himself against the wall with a stricken look. And Gil watches a man embracing a woman outside the O.R. -- probably Lt. Gribbs and some -of-kin -- and we see him in profile, slouched with grief.
Sara walks into the break room and asks Catherine if she can grab a soda from the fridge. Catherine absent-mindedly moves away from the fridge and makes a crack about needing a drink. Sara goes to respond, then the pager from the crime scene goes off. Catherine punches the pager number in her cell phone as Sara asks, "What are you going to say? Hi, I'm a criminalist, I was in the neighborhood..." Catherine shushes her with one hand as the phone picks up. We see a young black man in a hotel room, naked from the waist up, saying, "Hello?"" "Uh, hey," Catherine drawls in response. Like an idiot, the guy says, "Who's this? I just dialed my own damn beeper." "Uh-uh," Catherine says, getting into this phone persona. "I's my beeper now. I found it." The guy then makes the argument that the beeper is necessary for his business; Catherine extracts from him the nature of his business, i.e. slinging a little something-something. "A little something-something, huh?" she drawls. "How about a little..." She rolls her eyes, trying to come up with whatever street jargon phrase is not verbal shorthand for I'm a cop and I'm about to bust you: " ...bling-bling." Sara rolls her eyes in disbelief as the self-identified businessman says, "What you know about a little bling-bling?" Catherine wangles an invitation to his crib with promises of bounteous bling-bling. As soon as she hangs up, Sara asks, "What's a bling-bling?" Good question -- and like so many of Gil's, it's destined to go unanswered.
Buzz cut -- who, we find out, is named Red Carlton -- is telling Gil and Nick that he did go up on the roof, but it was to jump, not push anyone off. He says that he did talk to Prince Charming -- who, we learn, is named Ted Salinger, and spent his last hours purchasing antiseptic, a $30,000 designer watch, and several drinks. In flashback, Red tells Ted, "Hey, you won my money. That was my machine. I put everything I had in that machine." Ted, doing his best to earn the Prince Charming moniker, shoots back, "So you're a degenerate. What do you want from me?" A few minutes later, he generously offers to buy Red a drink; Red has an amaretto sour and drinks to second place. Two hours later, Ted was still knocking back drinks, but Red was not. Ted insincerely wishes Red a nice life, adding, "I know I will." Then he mutters sotto voce, "Loser." Ass. Red heads up to the roof and stares down to the street below for a while -- something, by the way, that would never happen in Vegas, as the roofs are secured against just this possibility -- then backs down. He's near tears as he tells Gil and Nick, "I couldn't go through with it. I'm a born failure. I failed at my work, my marriage, and my suicide." Gil looks on impassively as Red finishes, "One pull away -- the story of my life." Gil lets us all have a moment of silence to absorb this tragic character, then launches into a speech about his role as a crime scene specialist, talking about how he tends to ignore spoken accounts and focus on the evidence. Nick leans in, eager to be just like Gil. After telling Red all that hoo-ha about listening to the evidence, Gil does add that he believes Red, he warns that he'll be testing Ted's shoes for dust, and if he finds any, Red's going to be arrested for murder. Red cracks, "I like this guy," and Nick smiles, just gosh-darn thrilled to be learning at the feet of the master. Or thinking, "I like him too! But not, you know, that way."
Cut to a cheap weekly motel. We see cops hustling one woman to a cruiser while Catherine and Sara slink up the stairs. Brass barrels past them, cocking his gun, and Catherine asks, "What are you doing here?" "Guilt therapy," he tells her, then kicks in the door where the bling-bling slinger is staying. The man tries to escape, but is quickly wrestled to the bed by a bunch of cops. Catherine notes that the man has quite a lot of flesh gouged out under his eye -- which we get to see in a TMI close-up -- and asked him how that happened. He won't answer, but Sara quickly says they'll convict him based on DNA. As the man is hustled off to the car, Brass mutters that they'll take a saliva sample. Catherine takes to the walkie-talkie to tell whomever is listening that Holly Gribbs's suspect is in custody.
Warrick is listening to Catherine as he walks over to the judge's car and hands him his ten thousand dollars. Warrick prepares to beat a hasty retreat, and the judge snarls, "You don't leave until I tell you to leave." He then informs Warrick, "I own you, pal." You'd think a judge would be aware of the Fourteenth Amendment and its prohibition on owning people, but Cohen's not going to let a little thing called the law get in his way. Cohen tells Warrick to keep his cell phone charged for all that future business the two will be doing together. Oh, Warrick. See what the vice of gambling gets you into?
Gil is leaning against the wall to the morgue as Catherine and her crime-fighting suitcase walk toward him. He came to offer her moral support as she inspects Holly's hands for the skin she presumably scraped off. Catherine thanks him, and heads in there alone. She pulls out the drawer containing Holly's body, unzips the body bag, and gently draws out Holly's hand. She scrapes under each nail, then folds Holly's fingers, slips the hand back into the body bag, and whispers, "I'm sorry."
Gil and Nick are checking Ted's shoes for red dust. Nick cracks, "Will the real Red Skelton please stand up." Gil notes that Nick's too young to remember Red Skelton, and Nick responds that he boned up on classic comedy by watching Nick At Nite. Hey, it's synergy between Viacom-owned properties CBS and Nickelodeon! The two men don't have time to reflect on media monoliths, however, because they're too busy noticing that there's no dust on Ted's shoes; therefore, Red didn't push him. Gil takes this the opportunity to make a labored joke about red herrings. He then turns back to the rest of Ted's belongings, noting that his swanky new watch has fibers wrapped around the stem. Nick immediately offers to go back to the suite and get a swatch of carpet to test; Gil asks him to round up Skankerella as well, noting that the dark cloud of suspicion has settled once again around her permed and moussed head.
Gil then heads back to see the sassy coroner from a few dozen scenes back. She tells him that when she shaved Ted's head, she noticed the deep, diamond-shaped impression in the back of his head. In other words, Ted didn't die from being pushed, but from getting whaled in the back of the head with something that has a diamond-shaped insignia on it. "You find that, you find your killer," she says. Gil looks at her and blinks, trying to figure out where he can find a blunt object sporting the symbol of a suit of cards in Las Vegas.
Sara and Catherine are sitting in the break room, sprawled out like a pair of seventh-graders. "Nicorette?" Sara offers, but Catherine responds by opening her mouth and showing her own wad. They're sharing gum? It's only a matter of time before they start using police ledgers as slam books and making paper fortune tellers to determine how suspects offed their victims. Liam Gallagher comes in to tell Sara and Catherine that he's tested the DNA and "the stats are about eighty-four quadrillion to one that this guy is your killer." Good thing he's a scientist and works in exact numbers, not hyperbole. Catherine and Sara celebrate for a moment, and then Catherine imagines for the last time how Holly's death played out: she pleaded with her assailant, then threw a rotary phone at him. He disarmed her, but she tore off one of her latex gloves and scratched at his face. Gribbs may well have been suited for this line of work after all, if she remembered in the panic to grab at her attacker for evidence. Either that, or it was dumb luck -- the show, to its credit, doesn't make her intention clear.
Nicky is sitting at a microscope, matching carpet fibers to his sample. At the same time, Gil walks into the presidential suite, notices the pizza-box-sized swatch of carpet Nick cut, then walks over to a table where he sees...a lamp with a heavy base, each side sporting a different card suit. He then walks out to the balcony and sprays it liberally with luminol, that nifty stuff that fluoresces when it reacts with the iron in the blood protein hemoglobin. Since that protein can stay behind when large, evident blood stains are cleaned, luminol's an excellent tool for figuring where the blood was and how much is there. Nick calls just as the deck begins glowing with evidence of lots of blood, and confirms that the carpet swatches match. "I'm beginning to believe that, Nicky my boy," Gil replies as he watches the deck glow crimson.
The last order of business before busting Skankerella is to test the door of the suite to see if it logs passcards or not. As Nick slides the card, the security man radios down and discovers that the card isn't registering the entrance. Gil smiles as he realizes how Skankerella killed Prince Charming, and the security guard blathers on about the door's failure as a sign of the curse. "Gotcha," Gil mutters as he strides toward the elevator, lamp in hand.
"Got me with what?" demands Skankerella. "Capital murder," replies Gil. "You're kidding," she says. "I never kid about murder." We then flash back to the elevator scene where Ted is wishing Red a nice life, adding, "I know I will. Loser." Dude, if ever an undeserving millionaire deserved to die, this is the one. Ted struggles with the passcard in the door as Skankerella paces in the room, lamp in her hand, agonizing over what she's going to do when he comes in. Had it not occurred to Ted that perhaps leaving an ex-girlfriend with a demonstrated lack of impulse control alone in a hotel suite is not the best of ideas? What an ass. Anyway -- Ted comes in and Skankerella whacks him with the lamp. He drops to the ground, and she drags him over to the balcony, flings him over, then scrubs the blood away. Gil notes that she had a fail-safe excuse in place: she could claim the blood-soaked towels got that way from the forearm she sliced up. "How'm I doing so far, Nicky?" Gil asks. Nicky's grinning like a kid on Christmas morning. "I'm into it so far." Nicky, get both your hands up on the table where we can see them. Gil then moves back over to Skankerella, whose face has hardened into a bitter mask, and says, "According to your statement, you felt slighted because he had just won $40 million and dumped you within half an hour. You exercised that motive." Skankerella curls her lip at him and offers up her wrists. She does not, as I expected, flip him the bird as she does so. Gil blinks, then heads for the door. Nick speaks up: "Can I ask you a question?" Skankerella nods. "How are you so cool? You took someone's life. Don't you care?" Skankerella says, "No," sulkily and Nick leans back in his chair, looking stricken. If this is how he reacts to the death of a major jerk, I don't want to be around when he has to grapple with the senseless death of Bambi's mom. As Skankerella is led off to prison, she asks Gil, "How'd you rattle off all that stuff?" "Your boyfriend told me," he replies. That Gil, talking to the dead people.
Warrick is sitting on a pleather chair in the hall as Gil walks by. Gil dismisses Nick and sits down to Warrick. "They say I have to let you go. You violated policies and procedures. I read Sara's report." Sara's already had time to write a report? I thought C.S.I. people were up to their ears in paperwork, per Brass's bitching last week. Anyway, Warrick's saying his mea culpas, turning in his badge and confessing to his gambling. Gil then pulls out another Zen management move, "If I let you go, I have to let me go too." This sounds like something people say in therapy, or on retreats where they feed you gruel at 6 a.m. and force you to meditate outside. Gil goes on to say that everyone in C.S.I. bears part of the burden of Holly's death owing to their own poor judgment, and he doesn't want to lose Warrick. The camera swings back on Warrick, whose face is now bathed in sunlight -- no overt redemptive symbolism there, no sirree -- and he stands up and vows not to let Gil down again. This should make for an interesting episode or two when Cohen leans on him to do something antithetical to C.S.I....but I digress.
Everyone is now standing in the parking lot, watching Brass strong-arm Holly's shooter in a minivan headed for jail. As the minivan passes by, we get a shot of the C.S.I. folks in the credits -- Warrick, Catherine, Sara, Gil, and Nick -- all standing in a line, watching the perp roll by. The episode closes with everyone standing apart from one another, not looking at each other and staring off into space with hard, pensive looks. Nobody speaks until Gil says, "Let's go home." Then the C.S.I. folks peel off silently, one by one, and head off in separate directions without a parting word or a second glance.