Previously on C.S.I.: there is no previously this week; CBS has given us enough credit to remember what goes on from week to week. I will say, however, that I did see the last ten minutes of The Fugitive since my VCR taped it, and keckler has my sincerest sympathies.
We open on a close-up of a clutch of little clay rabbits peacefully grazing to a mailbox. As we hear the soft swish of the sprinkler system, the door creaks open and a teenaged girl runs out. She screams, "Please! Help me! Somebody help me!" and the camera pulls back from the silent rabbits to the screaming girl. All of a sudden, one of Homicide: Life on the Street's cameramen comes out of retirement and starts pulling shaky close-up shots of the girl as she howls and runs toward a neighbor's house. I wonder if perhaps Reed Diamond or some other unemployed Homicide actor -- I understand Kyle Secor's out of a job as of now -- will guest star as a detective. Do I dare dream? With my luck, it'll be Jon Seda.
Anyway, before we get into the investigation, let's find out about the crime. The teen scream queen -- who is really working that Method technique of putting pure terror into every ululating vowel -- runs toward another house and the windows gradually light up as the neighbors finish having this fight:
"I'm not going to get involved. It's those crazy kids!"
"Turn on the light! Do the words 'Kitty Genovese' mean anything to you?"
In the scene, the rabbits and the house they belong to have been wrapped in crime scene tape. Some buzz-cut detective greets Gil as he walks toward the house, and warns him that the press will be all over the case. Gil asks if the count has changed since he was called. "No," answers Inspector Exposition. "Mother, father, two teenage boys. The sisters were right up here. The teen girl" -- and here we flash to the scream queen, wrapped in a blanket and talking to two detectives -- "heard a noise and hid in the closet. The younger sister's over there." The camera pans over to a creepy-looking little blonde girl huddled on the driver seat of a police cruiser. Naturally, she's unsupervised, all the better for etching an indelible and traumatic picture in her head.
Gil glares at the kindergartner suspiciously, and Inspector Exposition says, "They couldn't have killed that family tag-team." Gil turns to look at the house, just in time to see a young cop rush out the front door and vomit into a nearby privet hedge. "What's the matter with your guys?" he asks. "They've been inside," Inspector Exposition answers. Gil, whose stomach is made of sterner stuff, takes that as his cue to march right in.
Cue the credits. I wonder if this show will make The Who very, very rich when it's syndicated and the band is receiving royalties from daily cable showings, or if some wretched W.G. "Snuffy" Walden knockoff will replace the theme.
Gil's collared some poor kid and instructed him to take notes as Gil does a preliminary walk-through. Why? Is this hazing of some sort? The two men walk inside, and Gil shines a mag lite over the foyer table; it's covered in trophies. The beam swings up, taking the camera with it, and we see a studio portrait of the world's blondest family. The young tech goes to turn on the light switch -- conveniently located right below the picture -- and Gil barks, "Don't touch that! I want everything exactly the way it was." Plus it's creepier that way; finding four corpses in a well-lit house doesn't have nearly the same nightmarish impact of stumbling over them one by one in the dark. The two guys, having established that this seemingly normal family would be the last one to end up exsanguinated in the middle of the night, head upstairs. Gil flashes his light up the stairwell, illuminating more portraits of the all-American family. We get it already -- people this good-looking and wholesome have to be hiding a fatal secret. Gil notes that the air smells like copper and informs us that it's due to an excessive amount of blood having been spilled. The kid looks a little green. They round the landing -- adorned by a few verdigris rabbit statues and an American Primitive painting of, you guessed it, rabbits -- and come across two bare feet sprawled in the hall. To quote Gil: "Male Caucasian, approximately 40 years old, lying in a pool of blood." Add "Olympic-sized" to the pool in the description and it's a pretty accurate description of the situation. That would be owing to the multiple stab wounds it's suffered; both jugular veins have been cut too. Gil is waxing enthusiastic about the precise latitude and longitude of the body when the young tech stammers, "Could-could you take your own notes? I'm going to be sick." "I got it," Sara tells him, materializing out of thin air. "Go get some fresh air." She tells Gil she heard about this on the police scanner and figured he could use some help; after rebuking her for her apparent insomnia, he turns the flashlight onto a spiral of blood painted on the wall immediately above the body.
Sara theorizes a cult, but Gil's convinced it's a different message. The two of them walk into a bedroom -- decorated with bunnies -- and find, to quote Gil: "Female Caucasian. Appears to be single stab wound to the throat. Transection of left and right carotid arteries." Sara studiously scribbles as Gil notes the lack of defense marks on the body; he deduces that the woman was killed in her sleep. Frankly, it sounds as if she was lucky. I can't wait to find out what the other two bodies had cut, transected, or removed. Actually, I can. The two resident ghouls suddenly stop as they pick up a dripping sound. Gil moves the flashlight down the woman's hand, and we see a few liters of blood running down the arm, diverting around her wedding band, and dripping on to the floor. Sara looks a little startled and Gil says, "Do you feel this?" "Her soul's still in the room," Sara replies. Oh, please: you two have that spooky feeling on the back of your necks because you're standing in a dark house listening to a woman's blood drip down her lifeless arm. She's not flitting about behind you moaning, "Avenge meeeeeeeeeeee. Find out whoooooooooo did thissssss." As Sara starts taking photos, Gil walks back down the hall, past the first corpse they found, and into a little girl's room; the sign on the door reads "Brenda." We cut away to another shot of Gil opening a bedroom door; his flashlight rests on the body of a young blond man lying on his back in bed. The sheet is drawn up to his chin, and it's soaked in blood. Despite this, the teenager's expression is serene; he must have been killed in his sleep. Gil draws back the sheet and winces, looking more than a little disturbed, then flashes his light over to the other, empty twin bed in the room. He moves the beam to the mirror, where a second spiral has been painted in blood, and notes a reflection in the corner of the mirror. As Dead Can Dance-like music wails in the background, Gil leans into the mirror and the image sharpens: two smallish bare feet, attached to relatively hairless legs clad in jersey superhero pajamas. Gil's face begins to curl into lines of dread; he leans into the corner and looks at the entire body: a preadolescent boy with a crew cut, laying on his stomach in a pool of blood. As Gil moves the flashlight up the wall, he sees two small handprints, trails of blood smearing down toward the body on the floor. Gil doubles over, very obviously imagining what happened to make those prints, as we all do at home. In the shot, he's marching out the front door onto the lawn again and demands of Inspector Exposition the following: the paramedics who answered the call for the house, his entire graveyard shift, and every forensics tool in the lab.
As Gil's glowering all over the lawn, the camera pulls back to reveal scores of flawlessly groomed anchordroids feigning concern over the death of Scott Collins (the man), his wife, and their two sons. Gil walks over to the teenaged girl -- whom we find out is named Tina -- and tries to preach the gospel of gathering evidence. She's not having any of it, telling Gil she wants to be with her sister Brenda, adding, "She's so scared." Gil looks over at Brenda who, frankly, doesn't convey "scared" so much as she does "catatonic," and immediately heads in that direction. He dismisses the woman who's now sitting with Brenda -- since, you know, all the male cops are too busy vomiting into the bushes to tend an orphan -- and tries to establish a rapport: "Hi. Is your name Brenda? I'm trying to find out who hurt your family. Do you think you can help me?" Like dogs, children, even catatonic ones, can smell fear; Gil's queasy, I'm-trying-to-be-non-threatening-here grin certainly doesn't help. Brenda's little elfin face remains as dumb as the bunnies. "Did anyone come into your room tonight?" Gil presses. Brenda remains silent. As Gil realizes his talent for creeping out humanity knows no age boundaries, he gets up and turns to leave; Brenda very softly says, "The buffalo." Gil whirls around: "The buffalo? Who's the buffalo?" But he'll get nothing out of the little girl.
Gil walks back over to the house where Catherine, Warrick, and Nicky are standing. "First rule of this case, no interviews," he commands, further instructing them to stay mum. Warrick asks Gil to confirm the body count; Gil does and then, since collecting evidence around four violently murdered bodies won't be macabre enough, adds, "The killer was here less than two hours ago. He left part of himself behind." Catherine goes in to map the case and take blood samples. Nicky canvasses the back of the house, Warrick the front.
In the shot, Gil's in the kitchen, looking for evidence. Inspector Exposition blunders in, earning a sharp rebuke from Gil, and plays his part by informing us that the kitchen was the only room in the house with no blood in it. Gil notices an open drawer, filled with knives, and concludes that the suspect had been in the house before since they knew exactly where to find a knife. Cut to a moderately boring scene of Gil using a UV light and a print lifter to get a few bootprints. Cut to another scene of Gil interrogating the paramedics; after barking, "Show me the bottom of your shoe!" he notices that his prints match up to the second paramedics. Gil can discard that evidence. And, since his night isn't complicated enough, Inspector Exposition's on Gil's elbow, corralling him to talk to the wall of anchordroids: "They like your look." Gil expression conveys an acute sense of persecution, but he manages to go over and make everyone else's life difficult by giving a bad interview in which he says nothing soundbite-worthy and everything worrisome. The Las Vegas sheriff draws Grissom away to ask him what he's got. "Nothing," says Gil, who, because he is more mature than I, refrains from adding, "since, you know, I've been on the scene all of an hour and I killed at least fifteen minutes creeping out a little girl who saw her parents get violently murdered. I've been busy." The sheriff, however, is too busy trying to remember what "nothing" means to read any subtext, and replies, "I'm not asking you to lay out your whole case here," which is fortunate since Gil doesn't have one yet. Gil replies, "As soon as I have something, you'll have something." The sheriff, clearly not a fan of inductive logic, snits that perhaps Eckley and his day crew of CSI guys would do a better job. Gil snaps, "I could speak volumes about Conrad Eckley, but I have a crime scene to process, so...you'll have to excuse me." Gil stalks off in one direction, and the sheriff goes in another to placate the press. Brenda looks on as Gil and Sara have a short and acrimonious conversation: he'd rather put the volatile and subjective Catherine on a sensitive task of collecting evidence while known kinderphobe Sara is charged with shepherding a little girl hither and yon.
In the scene, daylight has broken, so we can see Nicky, Catherine, and Warrick hard at work. It's the kind of montage where their work looks both nitpicky and gruesome, especially when Nicky's forced to crawl among a bed of impatiens to search for a soggy match head. Fortunately for him, the exercise bears fruit: a hand-rolled cigarette and the matches used to light it. Inside the house, Gil is instructing the coroner's crew to hand over all the personal effects on the bodies being carried outside. "If there's something under all this blood, you'll be the first to know," says the coroner delivery boy. He then goes to usher a white-sheeted bundle outside; Nicky turns down a corner of the sheet, glances inside, then sighs disgustedly and says, "This kid should be out playing Pop Warner." For the football-illiterate among us, apparently Pop Warner is to football what Little League is to baseball. Nicky then punches a door while Gil looks on. Unfortunately for Gil, he can't spend too much time watching Nicky stand on the steps and nurse his hand while he glowers over the unfairness of murders; he has to go back upstairs and check on Catherine. "Hi, Catherine!" he calls. "You're not thinking about hiding evidence or involving witnesses or ethically compromising this week's case, are you?"
Well, actually, he doesn't. What Gil does do is ask Catherine if the blood swirls do actually indicate a homicidal cult. Catherine doesn't think so. "I've studied pictures of the Manson murders. This isn't butter; it's imitation." Okay, writers? I can appreciate where you're going with this metaphor, but it doesn't work here. If you're trying to convey the ersatz quality behind this mayhem while communicating the genuine horror of the Manson murders, then go with the Beatles. These murders aren't the Beatles; they're the Monkees. They're not "Helter-Skelter"; they're "Last Train to Clarksville." Moving on...Gil and Catherine conference over the likely course of events: Gil thinks the mother got killed first; then the husband woke up to protect the children. Catherine muses that the husband gave his life for the little girl, since he was outside the room. As the two investigators are talking, they're retracing the likely steps of the killer. They stand in the hallway where the father was found, and muse that the teenaged daughter is the likely suspect, especially if she had a boyfriend. "I wonder if they call him Buffalo?" Gil muses.
The camera leaves the suburban house to focus on a crayon drawing of a similar house. Brenda's scribbling a picture while Sara pleads with Brass to pass off the child to someone who actually understands -- or at least doesn't fear -- children. "I am not good with kids," Sara finishes. "I'm not asking you to adopt; just take her over to Sunrise for a psych eval, will you?" Brass replies, and hustles off. Sara rolls her eyes, gathers her wits and sits down behind Brenda. "That's very pretty," she tells Brenda, who responds by picking up a black crayon and scribbling all over the picture. "Or not," Sara continues, sotto voce. "Wanna go for another ride?" she asks. Brenda stiffens her arms and sweeps them across the table, knocking everything off. "I'll take that as a yes," Sara continues, clearly at a loss as Brenda finishes her mini-fit by covering her ears and staring straight ahead.
Sadly, we don't get to see how Sara actually gets our traumatized tot out to the car because we're watching Gil and Brass talk to Tina in one of the tanks. They're no Pembleton and Bayliss -- although they could try since, you know, City of Angels isn't getting picked up for the season and Kyle Secor might just be looking for work. Anyway, they're asking Tina if she knows what time she heard the noises. "No," she says. "But they sounded like footsteps coming from the kitchen." She's a lousy liar; the first rule of misleading a line of inquiry is to never volunteer more information than necessary. That way, you can't be tripped up by a line of questioning you're not controlling. Every teenager knows that; if Mom and Dad ask you where you've been, reply, "Out." Make them drag the rest out of you. Brass is not buying the story, but Gil overrides him to pursue this line of inquiry: "Do you go out with anyone special?" She responds by telling him she dates casually, and Gil says with studied nonchalance, "Are any of them...called Buffalo?" "Buffalo?" Tina responds, clearly not expecting to hear that word, and clearly registering some significant, private meaning for it. Gil pushes a little more, then Brass swoops back in, "You live in a house with six people, right? You must be used to hearing footsteps in the kitchen at night. Why so scared last night?" Tina quavers about being able to hear the difference between her father's footsteps and someone else's.
Meanwhile, Nicky and Warrick are inspecting a tire track in the front lawn. Warrick determines that the tire track -- which is made in soft mud -- is fresh, because it was made as the sprinkler system was going off at around 2:45 in the morning. Nicky muses that the same guy who was smoking the hand-rolled cigarettes (also known as a bidi) was the same person who drove the vehicle -- which Warrick estimates as "a step down from a motorcycle" across the lawn. "Probably some teenager, they're always taking shortcuts," Nicky says. Yeah! And they play their music loud! And they wear funny pants! Whatever, junior. Warrick looks up from the track, which he has been making a plaster mold of while Nicky runs down Generation Y, and asks how Nicky's hand is. "It's cool," Nicky says, obviously embarrassed that his coworkers saw him getting so affected by the murders.
Back at Sunset hospital, Brenda's cradling a pink teddy in one hand while holding the hand of a doctor walking her down the hall. The two stop in front of a bench where Sara and another woman are sitting. "Hey, Brenda!" Sara says, trying to put her at ease in the hospital; it's the first thing she's done right around the child. The doctor asks who the family services rep is, and the other woman introduces herself as Connie Bellvue from family services. She's got an imposing no-nonsense demeanor. The doctor tells the two woman that Brenda needs another evaluation by a psych intern, and she'll be in the hospital for another hour. As he walks off, he leaves Brenda standing in the center of the hall, hugging the teddy to her chest with both arms and staring up at the two women facing her. It's a piteous image. Connie moves across the scene to Brenda and says dismissively, "I'll take it from here." Sara then testily inquires, "What's the head exam for?" "I said, I'll take it from here," Connie replies. Sara reasons that she needs to be present to hear anything that could relate to the forensic evidence; it's a flimsy excuse, and it's becoming obvious that she's uneasy about leaving Brenda with Connie. "Go back to your crime lab," Connie replies. "I'll keep you posted." As the two women are staring at each other, Brenda wiggles free of Connie and walks around to Sara; she clings to her hip and tugs on Sara's sweater urgently. "It's okay, Brenda," Sara says to her, then looks up at Connie. "I'm not leaving you." I have to say, I've seen many scenes where a self-identified kinderphobe has come around to protect the interests of a child, and it's hard to do it without making the kid cloying or making the adult look like a softie; I'll never forget the trauma of watching Eriq LaSalle go all Gooey Benton when confronted with Rachel Greene in the first season on ER. This scene was nothing like that; Sara stayed true to who she was and managed to grow believably as a character.
Catherine's in the bedroom, looking at the blood-soaked bed where the mother was; the camera zooms into the mirror, where a snapshot of a smiling, joyful Brenda has been tucked into the frame. We go into another montage where Catherine is shown staking numbers to different bloody areas of the house and taking Polaroids, reconstructing the scene. As the scene ends, she's sitting with her back propped on a closed door in the hall, regarding the splotch where the father was found. A grandfather clock chimes in the house and Catherine starts, snapping back into this world from the one she was in. She groans and knocks her head against the wall.
What has to be a few hours later, Warrick stumbles into the charnel house and reprimands Gil for cutting the lights. Gil, without looking up from the fabric he's inspecting via UV light and magnifying glass, mutters, "What are you, working for OSHA now?" Warrick ignores him and delivers the good news: he ID'd the tracks as belonging to a '93 Honda scooter, then did a DMV search for scooters and found one registered to a kid four blocks from the scene. "That's very good," Gil murmurs; the camera zooms in on his eye as amplified by the magnifying glass. "I may have just blown this case wide open, and all you can come up with is 'very good'?" demands Warrick, and rightfully so. Nobody denies my man Warrick the props he so richly deserves. Gil, however, has a line of inquiry all his own. "Tell me, Warrick, if your whole family was murdered, wouldn't you run back to see if they were still alive?" "Yeah," replies Warrick instead of saying, as I would, "Well, I don't know, Gil. I've never constructed elaborate imaginary scenarios in which my relatives were slaughtered like pigs." Gil continues by noting that there isn't any blood on Tina's clothes. "This is a Lady Macbeth," he says, and I yell, "Shout-out!" Warrick demands that Gil explain, and he does: "Out, out, damned spot. There isn't a trace of blood on this girl's clothes. Not a spot."
Before we can get too literary, we go into a strip-at-night montage backed by Peabo Bryson. Because, you know, every show about a multiple murder needs a lite-soul soundtrack. Actually, the music is supposed to help us segue into Catherine's place, where she's tearing into the room shouting Lindsey's name. As she runs into the living room, she sees Lindsey sitting on the floor with Eddie, whose hair has been dyed back to the original mousy brown-gray it was the first time we saw him. Catherine apologizes nicely for not picking up Lindsey from ballet, and thanks Eddie extravagantly for picking up her slack, noting that she's working a quadruple murder and it's time-consuming. Eddie says, "I figured that's what it was. When they couldn't reach you, they called me." Catherine tries to interject, and Eddie says, "It happens. She's my kid too." He moves around to rub her shoulders and offers her homemade pancakes. This apparently charms her, and they're having some sort of moment over the idea of pancakes for dinner when her beeper goes off. "That would be Grissom," she says wearily. "How is your boyfriend?" Eddie asks, and Catherine snaps, "Ed!"
How is Grissom? He's sitting in the dark, telling Catherine to come back right away, as the multiple murder case has just busted wide open. "I'll be right here. Let me put on some clean clothes," Catherine replies. "Please do," Gil says, and hangs up. What a weird thing to say to someone. Gil stares pensively and the scene switches back to Catherine who asks only, "Eddie...?" "She's going to wonder where you are," Ed chides. Catherine sighs; this is obviously a replay of another conversation. "She always does," Catherine says, then pushes past him and Peabo to change and go back to work.
Gil, meanwhile, is walking down the hall when he runs into Conrad Eckley. The man looks as though his last name should be Eckley. He just oozes a vague quality of repellence; if you shook his hand, your move would be to wipe the offending appendage on flaming wood to erase the touch of the Eckley. Anyway, Eckley = creepy in a bad way. Gil = creepy in that Grissomian way we've come to know and love. The two men go through a bunch of alpha-male posturing, where Eckley insults Gil's ability to solve a case and Gil points out that his shift's expertise extends beyond clearing cases and into company softball. As Eckley tries to dismiss Gil, Gil replies by reminding him of the 14-3 score. Whatever -- this was the wrong episode to introduce some intra-shift rivalry, what with all the other stuff going on.
Brass and Warrick are talking to some young kid, apparently the scooter owner. Warrick lays out the evidence, and the kid replies he was in Hoover when it happened. He lets loose that he knows Tina, and Warrick leaps on this: "You know Tina Collins." "A lot of guys know Tina. She's a freak," replies the sullen youth. "Sexually?" Warrick asks, for the benefits of those in the audience who didn't start singing, "She's a very kinky girl, the kind you don't bring home to Mother," the minute we heard this kid say, "She's a freak." Anyway -- yes, Tina gets around, and no, this kid has no idea where the scooter is. He bought it with three other guys, and they timeshare it. Brass leans on the kid to start writing his friends' names.
Sara hustles into the break room, greeting the glum assembly and noting they apparently have a suspect. For someone who's basically off the biggest, most gruesome case of the year, she's awfully sanguine. Ha ha, geddit? Probably not. Anyway, Warrick shares the news on the tire tracks, Gil talks about the pristine pajama top, and Nick mentions the bidi, and the fact that nobody in the Collins family smoked. Sara declares that the bidi more or less places an outsider at the scene; Gil starts saying, "Bidi? Bidi? I thought you found a cigarette and a match." Oh, that Gil, so not down with the youth culture of today. Nicky and Sara fill him in. Gil asks Sara about the results of the psych exam. Sara replies, "The shrink says she's in a catatonic state from the trauma. I could have told you that. But she did respond to the word 'buffalo.'" "Respond how?" Gil asks. "She freaked out," Sara replies. Gil says slowly and quietly, "And what are you doing about it now?" Sara gives him a look that would cower a lesser man and replies, "Going back to the girl. I left her in the car." Gil, a man who probably avoided children even as a child and thus has only the most rudimentary idea of how one should care for kids, knows enough to look taken aback. Catherine's jaw drops and she works her mouth, trying to say something. Sara continues, deadpan. "The windows are cracked." Gil looks even more unsettled. Sara snaps, "Give me some credit; she's at the hospital," then makes to rejoin her there. Warrick and Nicky laugh as Gil and Catherine struggle to regain their composure.
In the scene, Catherine and Gil are grilling Tina, pointing out that the odds of hugging her dead mother and tripping over her dead father -- as she says she did -- without getting a drop of blood on her are pretty slim. Tina replies that she saw her family dead and she ran to the neighbors for help, and these things are true. Ah, Tina's finally caught on to the talent of lying by omission. Gil drops his usual "evidence is telling a difference story" science. Meanwhile, Brass and Nicky are learning that the scooter isn't the only thing the boys time-shared, if you know what I mean. The third kid is apparently the one who had the scooter last; he can't remember what happened to it, and he wants a lawyer. "You want a lawyer? We'll get you a lawyer," Brass says, then assigns Nicky to look at him reproachfully until his legal representation gets there. The kid sighs a put-upon sigh, then whips out a pack of hand-rolled cigarettes and a matchbook. "There's no smoking in here," Nicky says. "Sharon Stone. Basic Instinct, dude," replies the youth, apparently feeble-minded enough to believe he's actually a sociopathic bisexual crazy enough to screw Michael Douglas. "I'm not your dude," Nicky replies mildly, which is a sign I have come to know and fear as Stage One of Nicky's righteous wrath. "This ain't a movie and Sharon Stone's fine. Let's go." Oh, that's right: flippant gibberish is Stage Two. The boy tosses the cigarettes and the matches at Nicky.
Cut to Brass saying, "His name's Jesse Overton. He timeshares the scooter." Cut to Tina, looking as though she's trying desperately to outthink where this is going. Brass continues, "He admits to having sex with the girl, and he wants a lawyer. I want a warrant to search his house." Brass goes, and Tina demands to see Brenda. Gil and Catherine snidely note that it's a little too late to coach the girl, and that all efforts would be futile since she won't speak anyway. Tina pleads that they don't understand. Catherine asks, "What happened, Tina? Did you catch your boyfriend killing your family?" Tina looks away, clearly sitting on the big secret she's about to spill a few scenes from now. I tell Tina that if she wants that kind of homicidal teenaged collusion, she's better off checking Lifetime, or the USA channel, since both are so fond of running that movie where Melissa Joan Hart is the sinister teen princess who gets her boyfriend to murder her family.
But I digress. Nicky and Warrick exchange high-fives over making the evidentiary match fit into Jesse's matchbook. "Who broke the case?" Nicky asks jokingly and Warrick shoots back, "If you believe what you heard in the halls, Eckley." Both men then express disgust for the day shift and all it stands for. Whatever -- this is not the episode where this should be introduced or explored. Save it for a week when all you have are seven-foot carp.
Brass and Gil are looking in the recycle bin where Jesse stowed the scooter, like the criminal idiot he is. They also notice the blood-stained jeans; Gil immediately quips, "Who would have thought the old man to have so much blood in him?" Brass gives the "huh?" look and Gil clarifies: "It's Shakespeare."
In the scene, they're giving Jesse -- who has just pleaded guilty and bargained for a deal where he doesn't get the death penalty -- a polygraph. He narrates the sequence of events for us as he takes the polygraph, and we're taken back in flashback. At 2 a.m., he smoked a bidi, then Tina let him into the kitchen to choose a knife. He goes up the stairs, clasps a glove-covered hand over Barbara Collins' face, and stabs her, then takes down the three males. Gil asks, "Was Tina mad at her parents for not letting you see each other?" Jesse replies, "Yes." The polygraph technician asks, "Did Tina Collins instruct you to kill her parents so you could see each other?" Jesse's jaw jumps involuntarily, and he seems on the verge of confessing something else before choking out, "Yes." The camera swoops to the actual polygraph, where the off-the-scale oscillations on the last two questions reveal that Jesse was telling the truth about killing the four Collinses, but he's lying about his motive. Brass reveals the results to the entire crew; Nicky opines that motive doesn't matter so long as they've got the killer. Gil says, "I care. I don't like holes. What are they hiding?"
Speaking of hiding, Eckley's been filching Gil's autopsy results. Another alpha-male confrontation ensues. Eckley is icky.
Gil is going through the Collins effects, and cuts open the Scott Collins envelope. He slides out a chain with a medallion on the end, and cleans off blood to reveal...a buffalo. I instantly know how this is going to end -- in a demoralizing way, as all C.S.I. episodes do, but especially so this time. Gil calls Sara and asks her to take ultraviolet photos of Brenda for skin damage. Sara hangs up the phone, and we see her holding a UV camera and explaining what it does to Brenda. "How about I take a picture of myself first?" she asks, and Brenda nods, still wide-eyed and silent. I haven't seen a little girl this grave since Ponette. Sara takes the photo, then gently unties and scoots Brenda's hospital gown down. "Ready?" she asks softly. Brenda nods, eyes fixed on Sara, and Sara begins shooting.
Catherine is revisiting her markup of the murder scene, retracing the steps. The one thing that doesn't make sense to her is the father's blood in relation to Brenda's room. She suddenly realizes, in vivid red flashback, that Scott may not have been rushing toward Brenda's room, but...coming from it. We see him stealthily exiting the room, buffalo medallion glinting on his chest; then Jesse stabs him. And I can't help but think that Scott Collins deserved it. Catherine runs to her cell to call Grissom. Just then, a Family Services worker named Ted Goggle comes by to tell Catherine that Eddie's filed a report against her, charging that she routinely neglects her child for her work. "I've already made a field visit to your house," Ted sniffs. "There will be an investigation into whether or not you've neglected Lindsey." Catherine is incredulous, especially after Goggle tells her she's on notice. Eddie, you duplicitous, passive-aggressive, pancake-making bastard. Catherine finally talks to Grissom and explains, "I filled one of your holes, Grissom. He killed the father, then the mother. The blood in the hallway is from the knife." She then slams down the phone and stares at Ted Goggle's report, eyes filling with tears.
Sara is developing her photos and muttering, "Dammit. Look at all these bruises." The camera pulls back to show black-and-white photos of Brenda, her shoulders a mass of dark blotches. "Somebody was all over this kid." I half-expect Gil to go postal, what with his whole "there's three things I have a problem with: guys that hit their wives, sexual assault on children, and the scum that deals drugs to kids" thing in Episode 5, but he manages to contain himself. Well, that, or someone on the writing staff isn't too concerned about continuity.
In the scene, Gil is showing Tina -- now sporting orange prison scrubs -- the photos, outlining the forensic scene for her and her lawyer. She faces him and Brass and weakly asks him to explain. Gil asks, "Something horrible happened in that house, didn't it, Tina? Long before the night of the murders..."
Tina draws a deep, shaky breath and begins to explain everything: "It was the last night he was going to touch her." "But why your mother?" Gil asks, "Or your brothers?" Tina is trying very hard not to cry, but something in that question makes her crack, then break into pieces. "Because they didn't protect me," she squeaks through a throat choked with tears. Gil gives her a level gaze, not quite comprehending, and says, "You." Tina says, " My father..." and we see a shot of Tina's mother closing the door on a delicate blonde little girl who looks a lot like Brenda. As the door, with a painted sign saying "Tina," swings shut on the mother's face, screwed tight in denial and fear, we see a bare-chested man in pajamas pad toward the little girl. As he leans in, his buffalo medallion swings into her face, and the camera swings back on Gil. Tina manages to collect herself and meets Gil's eyes with a challenging look. "I was young. I learned to deal. But when he went for my daughter --" Gil's mouth drops slightly open and he takes a moment to try and collect himself before saying, "Brenda is..." Tina nods, and her face crumples again as she thinks of Brenda. "And who is...?" "The father?" Tina asks. Gil looks ill as he realizes what the answer is. Tina spits out, "I was thirteen. And nobody noticed my clothes were getting bigger. Isn't that nice? Brenda may hate me for what I did. But I protected her!" She looks searchingly at his face, but Gil's shut down; he can't deal with her pain, or with what she felt she had to do. "I did that much," Tina says defiantly, and Gil softens a little, eyes getting a little red. Me, I'm a wreck. That was a hard scene to keep rewatching.
And, a little off-topic, but to address the forum, which has been debating the probity of a thirteen-year-old hiding her pregnancy from her family: it is more than possible for a thirteen-year-old to hide a pregnancy until it's nearly full term. In fact, I went to Sunday School with not one, but two, girls who did just that; judging by what both girls did, the trick is to wear a lot of baggy clothes and always carry a book or sweater you can hug to your abdomen when you're sitting. Not that I'm suggesting this as a survival strategy -- both girls and their infants ended up in the hospital after going to the emergency room during labor, and their children had a dozen different health problems that could all be traced to a profound lack of prenatal care. So my public-service message is this: if you're forced into sexual relations, tell someone. It's not your fault, and it's not your responsibility to keep quiet. And if you're pregnant, again, tell someone. Your health and your future are at stake. Thus endeth the public service announcement; all of you looking for snarky one-liners can resume reading again.
It's time for the show to wrap up. In the children's ward of the hospital, Sara and Brenda are sitting side-by-side, waiting for someone or something. Sara reaches over and gently takes the hand Brenda does not have wrapped around her teddy; Brenda turns to her and smiles, a sad and gentle little look, before turning back to stare off into space. Sara watches Brenda, looking concerned.
The rest of the squad are in the unisex locker room, getting ready to go home and try to expunge the last few days from their memory. Gil compliments Catherine on her work; she thanks him, then slams her locker shut and goes home, presumably to begin cutting up magazines for an anonymous note reading, "It wouldn't be hard to fake evidence framing you for something, Eddie." Gil walks over to Nicky and asks him whether the ice on his knuckles is helping any. Nicky replies, "Normal'd be nice." Tell me about it. Gil goes by the break room, then notices a half-finished crossword. He sits down to finish it; Warrick drifts by, gives us a look like, "Can I love him any more?" then the episode fades out.
Up week: Gil finally snaps when he realizes he's submerged his responses to gruesome cases for decades. Actually, no: it's the return of the bathtub serial killer, apparently taunting Gil between homicides.