Brass continues by telling Gil the first class passengers are sequestered in an airport lounge -- you know, so they have time to collude on their stories before being interrogated -- and according to everyone they've interviewed so far, the deceased had a panic attack and died before landing.
As Brass is telling us this, the camera is panning up from the dead guy to the carnage behind him -- a smashed serving cart, broken dishes, a shattered wine bottle. It should be interesting figuring out what that had to do with the panic attack. Usually, the food is good enough in first class to allay any irrational fears about mystery meat. Gil peers intently at the dead guy's neck. Welcome back, Grissom! We've missed that look.
He and Brass continue to move through the world's most capacious airplane, noting that there was a point of disturbance through the galley, on the cockpit door. The bloody handprint there kind of gives it away. Gil crouches down and takes a picture of the deep foot impressions on the bottom of the door, size 10 or 11. He straightens out, gives the door the patented Grissomian Gaze of Contemplation, and heads back into vast, echoing space of the first class cabin.
He and Brass go back to looking at the dead body, which is lying between rows 1 and 2. As Gil snaps pictures of the bloody figure -- which I swear seems to have flipped directions in the interval between going into the galley and coming out -- he notices a CD by his knee. He picks it up and notes the edge. "Is that blood?" Brass asks. At this crime scene, you have to ask?
As the two men exit the plane, Gil orders the entire plane taped off: "Nose to tail and wing to wing." "That's going to take a lot of tape," Brass deadpans. Gil's having none of it: "I got a dead body, a crime scene with wings, and something very wrong." Yeah, I'll tell you what's very wrong: this isn't a local crime. Someone gets killed at 30,000 feet, the problem belongs to the FAA, and the FBI, and whatever other Federal agency happens to feel like getting involved that day. Given that Las Vegas is crawling with Feds, the odds that Brass would have beat the FBI out to the tarmac are pretty slim, and the odds that the Feds wouldn't have immediately whipped out a court order and used it to bitch-slap the local investigators into submission are even slimmer. Still, an hour of Gil and Brass sitting in McCarran and lamenting the loss of a crime scene to the Feds would be a pretty boring episode, so we'll let this slide. For now.
Cut to the credits, and then the commercials. Christopher Lowell asks me, "Could you die?" If I had to watch you on a regular basis, Mr. Lowell, death would be a sweet and welcome relief.