Sex, Lies, And Larvae

As with all episodes of CSI, this one opens with establishing shots of the Strip, first during the day, then at night. After the writers have confirmed that yes, the show takes place in Las Vegas, they then confuse the geographically challenged by showing a couple tromping through wooded foothills. Those of us who maintained the impression that Vegas was in the middle of a desert try hard to reconcile the deciduous scenery with the opening shots. Failing that, we can always turn a critical eye toward the couple: a man and a woman who look like they're trying to buy an outdoorsy lifestyle from REI.

"Isn't it great to get back to nature?" the guy burbles. "You want to set up camp here?" "We can camp on the moon, just give me the shovel!" his distaff counterpart replies, hopping back and forth in classic Dance of the Full Bladder mode. "Chill, chill," the guy says, and I instantly suspect we're going to see the woman seize the shovel and beat her boyfriend to death with it. You don't tell someone doing the Dance to chill; you hand her the shovel and some toilet paper and pat yourself on the back for being a sensitive, back-to-nature kind of guy. This nitwit finally catches on. The woman runs to a wooded thicket, intending to dig herself a privy. I flash back to my last primitive camping experience, where we happened to be camping on a cliff opposite Half Dome in Yosemite -- which had fabulous views but absolutely no trees whatsoever, thus bringing out my hitherto unforeseen ability to sprint in the dark, cross-legged, for about half a mile toward a semi-private collection of shrubs. The woman here has it better; it's daylight and there are trees a mere twenty feet away. As she runs over to relieve herself, we hear the low and vibrant thrum of insects going about their business. The woman gets closer, unfolds her shovel, and screams, "Oh my God!" The smile leaves her unsympathetic boyfriend's face and he comes over to see why she's freaking out. He leans over her shoulder and the buzzing intensifies; perhaps she's just realized that she's camping with Beelzebub and his loyal subjects have invited themselves along. Again, I'm just wildly hypothesizing here, and again, my hopes are defeated: the couple stares at a bug-covered corpse, and the man confirms, "That's a person," before joining his girlfriend in chundering.

Cut to night, where an army of forensics technicians have brought out a floodlight, the better for Gil and Sara to view the body. They walk down a path that the couple in Scene I managed to completely miss, and meet Brass on their way to the crime scene. We learn that the body is female and sporting a bullet wound to the head; Gil asks Brass if they found a weapon, and Brass gives him a look implying that Gil has perhaps spent a little too much time sniffing formaldehyde if he's asking stupid questions like that.

The two CSI techs head over to the body, which is now hosting what looks to be the Mardi Gras of the six-legged set. "I hate these," Sara mutters, and Gil cheerfully replies, "They're just paper wasps, and they're having too much fun to be worry about us." Gil hunkers down, the better to begin cataloguing all the detritovores mysteriously left out of that Lion King circle of life tableau, and Sara continues by saying that she means she's never gotten used to the whole bugs-eating-the-dead thing. Gil, again missing social cues like explicit statements of dislike or Sara's body language, which is screaming her desire to run in the opposite direction, babbles about insects just doing as God intended and recycling us back to the earth. He then ruins yet another food group in the pursuit of forensic justice by asking a uniform for his coffee; Gil then uses the coffee as preserving fluid for the bugs he's picking out -- "John, Paul, George and Ringo." That's going to preserve the bugs? When he lets them out of the sample jar, they're going to vibrate their way across the lab bench after absorbing so much caffeine. Sara distracts Gil from his beetles reunion by pointing out the lack of alkali compounds in the soil beneath the corpse, thus indicating that the woman was not killed here, but merely dumped here. Gil responds by asking Sara for some of the beef jerky she's always gnawing on. "You can eat?" she asks incredulously, given that her throat is working convulsively. No, it's not for Gil -- who, so far as we know, regards food as a means to convey forensics metaphors -- but for the beetles.

Cut to the credits. I wonder briefly what the likelihood of hearing "Who Are You?" is if C.S.I should win that Golden Globe they've been nominated for. Are there royalty issues? Do Anthony Zuicker et al. have time to come up with an alternate C.S.I. theme, preferably one gloating over how this show is trouncing Nash Bridges in the ratings?

Enough. Back in the squad room, Catherine is carrying on about how she likes her coffee -- without bugs being preserved in it, I'm guessing -- while Nicky moans about the empty fridge. Catherine tosses him an apple and Nicky rolls his eyes. Come on, Nicky. It's not like you're going to get cast out of the Garden of Eden if you eat it. As Gil comes in, apologizing for being late, Catherine asks, "Hey, how's the body with the bugs?" Gil looks nonplussed, then turns to glare accusingly at Sara, who is, as befits her new-girl-with-no-friends status in the department, sitting on the opposite side of the room from the other investigators, slouched in a chair and reading the paper. "Hey! Don't look at me!" she says. Nicky steps in, saying he played a hunch and checked in with the homicide department. "What do you have for us?" asks Catherine, sounding like she's itching to work on the body with the bugs. Gil gives her and Warrick a case in the swanky, swanky neighborhood of Summerlin where a Richard Zeigler lives; a Paul Sorenson is missing. Before sending the two on their merry way, Gil asks Warrick if he's got a court date coming up; Warrick responds, "Yeah, the DA asked me to testify on chain of custody. I could do that in my sleep." Gil doesn't agree: "Juries need to have confidence in the evidentiary process, so work with Catherine and break off when you need to appear." "Yeah," Warrick replies dully. He's wearing his careworn face, which is a cue that Warrick is about to screw up, or already has in some way. And here I thought we were in the clear on that whole gambling/crooked-judge/investigator-on-the-edge thing.

Gil turns his attention to Nicky. "Need help with your homicide?" Exposition Lad asks eagerly, sensing a fun-filled hour of stating the obvious in the service of viewer education. Gil tells him that no, Sara's on the case, since she totally hates bugs and therefore should have no problem spending her time poring over a larva-filled corpse for clues. Nicky gives Sara what is probably meant to be a flirtatious look; Sara winks and points her index finger at him, pistol-style. Oh, whatever. Gil gives Nicky a missing person -- Sheryl Applegate, whose husband notified the police that his wife was supposed to head for LA, but never showed. Her minivan was found at the bus station in town. "She took the bus instead of the car. Case solved," says Nicky, clearly dying to work with Gil and Sara. He shoots Sara a wide, goofy grin, and she laughs at him. I reiterate: whatever. Gil, completely oblivious to the waves of hormones emanating from Nicky toward Sara, deadpans something about Nicky hopefully being right, but sends him off to treat Sheryl's car like a crime scene. As Nicky swaggers out of the room, he tosses Sara the apple Catherine tossed him; Gil finally parses a clue and realizes that Nicky's crushing on Sara. He looks at Sara, who only caresses the apple and smiles enigmatically.

Cut to Catherine and Warrick striding up the walkway of a chic modern home, all big glass windows and spare white furniture floating over polished hardwood floors. As the two are waiting to be let in, Catherine inquires after Warrick's well-being, noting that he's been quiet all night. Warrick looks even more fretful than in the scene and sighs a beleaguered sigh. "I got a call earlier today from Child Protective Services, asking about you and Lindsey," he finally says. Catherine's face folds in on itself and she turns away, shaking her head in anger. "I don't believe this --" "They told me they notified you earlier," Warrick continues slowly. "Some investigation, Eddie made a charge or something." "Yes. He's pissed off because I won't let him back into my life. So he sics Child Services on me," Catherine snaps. Boy, Eddie's transcended normal idiocy and scaled new heights of willful stupidity if he thinks that harassing his ex-wife with spurious child-neglect charges is the way to woo her. I shudder to imagine how he persuaded Catherine to marry him the first time around. "I never expected them to talk to my friends," she continues, voice low and throbbing with tension. "What did they ask? What did you say?" Warrick is shaking his head and sighing -- one hopes it's with sympathy, and not with the knowledge that he said something Child Services will use against Catherine -- and before he can respond, a dapper middle-aged man, Richard Ziegler, lets the detectives in. He leads them over to a gallery wall and notes ruefully, "Well, this is where the Sorenson was displayed." Warrick and Catherine look vaguely stricken to realize that they're investigating a missing painting, not a person. "Paul Sorenson was an artist, early 1900s," Ziegler notes condescendingly. "How dumb are we?" Catherine comments to Warrick, and he mutters back, "What does he know about the forensic analysis of a friction ridge?" Ziegler ignores this slam and fills in Catherine and Warrick, pointing to the divot-shaped hunk of plaster missing from the wall and recalling, courtesy of the patented C.S.I. flashback technique, that he surprised the thief in mid-heist when he came down to read in the middle of the night. Catherine and Warrick prepare to dust for prints; before Ziegler leaves, Warrick asks about the alarm and Ziegler responds that it was somehow disarmed. As soon as he leaves, Warrick snorts, "Inside job." "Oh, yeah," Catherine responds.

As the two dust for prints, Catherine presses Warrick for more details about his interview with Child Services. "Was it a disaster with Child Services?" "Disaster?" Warrick hedges. "What do you mean?" Catherine continues. "Well, my job does take me away from my daughter. Nobody knows that better than you." "You think I'd say that?" Warrick asks, seeming hurt by her implications. Catherine rushes to assure him that she thinks he has good intentions, but the questions can still come back to haunt her.

The bald coroner is standing with Gil and Sara, telling them that the body -- which is female -- had a terrible last day on Earth, what with getting a .38-caliber revolver flush to her scalp. "Shot clean through right to left, bullet coming out the other side," he notes, as we see exactly what happened courtesy of the TMI-cam. Eeeeyuck. Sara steps in, notes the shape of the wound, and concludes that this was an intimate killing. Gil, who has been staring intently at the body, quips, "Full of sound and fury, signifying what?" Well, if you're a Danish prince, existential malaise over the realization that your intellect has doomed you to indecision in the face of moral outrage, thus rendering your life meaningless since you can't adhere to your own ethical compass. But if you're a dead woman in the mountains, probably something much different, Gil. As Sara and the coroner go off to inspect x-rays of the body, Gil moves down to the legs, noticing something that interests him. Sara's looking at the x-rays of the skull, observing that a lot of facial bones had been broken a long time ago. As she rattles off the names of assorted fractured bones, she gets progressively more stricken-looking; the coroner confirms that the dead woman was in a long-term abusive relationship. He goes on to say that owing her exposure to the elements, there's no telling how long she's been dead, unless Gil can use the insects to date the time of death.

This is Gil's cue to pick a fly carcass out of a boggy area of flesh on the dead woman's leg. As he holds the bug in his tweezers, Gil chants, "The worms go in, the worms go out, the worms play pinochle on your snout." Okay, Gil just went rectilinearly weird. Sara and the coroner -- who, the closed captioning just informed me, is named Robbins -- turn to look at Gil. "Shakespeare again?" Sara quips while Robbins asks, "A very special kind of bug, Dr. Seuss?" Yes -- it's a musket fly, found only in urban areas, as opposed to the hinterlands where the body was found.

Cut to Catherine asking Ziegler how many people have access to his home and security codes. He mentions his wife and three kids; as Ziegler's introducing us to the list of suspects, Warrick finds something while dusting. He calls Catherine over, and she recites, "Helix, antihelix, rim, tragus, antitragus." Warrick theorizes that the thief pressed his ear against the wall to check the painting for wiring; Catherine snorts about using an earprint to nail a case. Warrick reminds her of a murder case in Washington that went down on an earprint.

Cut to a sequence of Gil pinning a series of bugs to a white board. As he works, Sara asks him to walk her through what he's doing, since Exposition Lad is noticeably absent and thus cannot fulfill his customary role. We learn that insects arrive at a body in a specific order, and you can pinpoint time of death based on linear regression -- backdating the bugs' maturity cycle based on bug size. Brass comes in to comment on the general creepiness of using the bugs, and to share the news that he's identified the body using AFIS and located the woman's husband. Gil cuts in to ask whether it's in the Fremont district; Brass looks taken aback by Gil's overt display of entomological witchery. Gil responds, "Synthosiamia nudoseta is the Latin name." Sara fills in Brass, telling him that they found a musket fly -- which only breeds in urban areas -- on the woman, which means she was probably killed downtown, then carried into the woods. Brass tells us that the neighbors reported a gunshot five days ago; he sends the CSI techs to talk to Scott Shelton. Sara gets a troubled look on her face and softly asks, "What was her name?"

We find out in the scene -- Kaye, whose character is being assassinated with impunity by the not-so-grieving widower. Gil is giving Scott the hairy eyeball as Brass leads Scott through his story about not missing Kaye despite her disappearance five days ago. After Brass innocently inquires as to what might compel Scott not to fill a missing person's report, Scott smoothly answers, "I keep my personal business private." What a tool. Brass continues to ask questions, poking at Scott's story, while Gil continues to stare balefully and Sara gets progressively more tense-looking. Sara skips an envelope down to Gil, who stops it with one hand and finally speaks: "Mr. Shelton. Did your wife drive racecars?" Scott laughs. "You're kidding me." "No," says Gil, all business, "the two most common causes of facial trauma in adult women are motor vehicle accidents and domestic violence." That's right -- women getting abused is on Gil's infamous list of three things that make him lose his cool. This should be interesting. Gil puts on his specs and opens up the folder, getting out the x-rays. "Every face and neck fracture your wife sustained over the last six years is highlighted," Sara says from the corner of the table where she's been standing, hunched over into a tight defensive posture. Scott claims that Kaye was a wild woman, and he's had to wrestle her in self-defense; Brass notes that Scott's got three complaints of spousal abuse in the last two years. Scott counters that Kaye was excitable, but "I never, ever laid a hand on her." "How about a gun?" Sara asks. Scott gives her the kind of look that requires a scalding shower afterwards to wash off the slimy feeling. He looks at Gil conspiratorially and chuckles, "You have your hands full with her." Gil is not amused. He cracks, "So do you." Scott looks weirdly thrilled by this. Sara presses for the team to toss Scott's apartment and asks if he's going to require a warrant; Scott cracks, "I've got nothing to hide." "We'll be the judge of that," Sara shoots back as Gil continues to glare.

It's Nicky! He's over at the bus station, ambling over to the car. A leggy blonde detective is leaning against it; when she sees our boy, she comments ruefully on the rotten luck of getting stuck with this case. "Lady took a trip. Didn't want the husband to know where. Not too much of a mystery." Nicky asks a few desultory questions to make sure the alleged crime scene hasn't been compromised. As Nicky opens the door and peers inside, he asks, "Is something wrong?" The detective leans in and says, "We had dinner last week. I thought it went great. You never called." Nicky leans back out and gives her his most charming grin, saying, "That doesn't mean I wasn't going to." Nicky, you dumb dog. This whole waiting-to-call thing is a relic that should be burned at the stake along with your copy of Swingers, and doing it to someone who is your coworker is just plain stupid. If you're such a ladies' man, how are you so thick? Are you taking dating advice from Tim Meadows? Nicky moves around to the back of the car and finds a hank of red hair; it's enough to justify a towing to the CSI garage. Hey -- maybe he can hijack Sara to strip another car and continue their supposed flirtation.

Catherine and Warrick are explaining how unique ear prints are to the assembled members of Clan Ziegler. Two dissolute youths on the couch get squicked out over the possibility of taking ear molds; their dad lays the smack down, and everyone gets their ears printed. Cut to the usual montage of the investigators doing science-y looking things -- all in the Ziegler household. Catherine matches the earprints, and it turns out young Jason Ziegler's earprint matches the one lifted from the wall. We get a flashback of him committing the crime. His father is not handling this well, spitting out, "Why did you steal from me?" Jason's taking the fifth. Warrick asks if Pa Ziegler wants to press charges, and he answers, "God, no. We'll get Jason help. We don't want court records." Catherine presses Jason for the whereabouts of the Sorenson. "What if I told you I sold it?" he taunts. Not too quick on the uptake, this Jason kid. "Well, that would be selling stolen property and you would be arrested, no matter what your dad says," Catherine answers sweetly. Jason, realizing that his boyish good looks won't exactly do much for him in prison beyond making him the wife of the guy with the most cigarettes, folds, mumbling, "It's in the trunk of my car." Sadly, we do not see his father stroke out as he realizes a multimillion-dollar painting is broiling in some Las Vegas parking garage.

Cut to Scott, offering Brass, Gil, and Sara something to drink as he shows them into his militantly masculine apartment. It's all pictures of Scott beaming in assorted sports uniforms, plus trophies and chain-link fence walls. "Not a lot of room for Kaye," Sara observes as she looks over a wall of photos featuring nothing but burly athletic guys. "She's shy," Scott counters. Yes -- one can see how that introverted personality would lend itself to Kaye's habit of attacking her husband. Brass checks under the bed and finds a gun and bullets. Gil, meanwhile, is asking whether the apartment gets cold in the winter, because based on the fibers he's found wedged in the leather cushions, there's a green blanket that's now missing. Brass, meanwhile, is peering at the firearm. "Looks like your gun has been cleaned," he grunts. Scott's cool facade melts a little. "I, uh, cleaned it before I left town. Took out the garbage too. Does that make me guilty of something?" He flashes a grin at Gil, who rolls his eyes in disgust. Brass notes that there are bullets missing from the cartridge; Scott babbles about taking his gun to the firing range the month before. Sara, meanwhile, is walking down a scuffed hallway and taking samples of something along the baseboard. She asks Scott if the door leads to his car; he answers that it leads to a car, and owing to his work as a car dealer, he has his pick of the lot. This fails to impress any of the CSI squad. Sara then turns to Gil and asks if he smells what she does; Gil turns to Scott and innocently inquires, "Did you do laundry back here today?" Ahh...bleach. Sara fills Scott in on the wonders of luminol. Scott looks pretty tense; I'm betting the minimalist soundtrack, with its plinky piano and discordant strings, isn't helping.

The luminol works its wonders, and Sara and Gil are looking at a big, long splotch of blood on the wall. Gil turns to Scott, looking none too thrilled. Sara, who's still crouched by the baseboard, is looking pretty upset. As Gil cocks an eyebrow, Scott stammers, "I have no idea how that got there." "It got there when you shot your wife in the head! Then you wrapped her in a blanket and you dumped her in the mountains!" Sara yells; as she delivers these sentences, she uncoils and heads toward Scott until she's inches from his face, pointing an index finger at him. Scott smacks at her, shouting, "Get your finger out of my face, bitch!" Sara lunges for him, bellowing, "You touch me and you'll be drawing back a stump!" Gil restrains Sara, shouting her name, as Scott yells, "I told you she was a handful!" As Gil urges Brass to get Scott out to the car, Sara wrestles an arm free and hollers after Scott, "You don't know a handful!" It looks like Sara has some issues with domestic violence; I hope to God we're not treated to some teary monologue about how this happened to her or someone she loved. Gil manages to scrape Sara off the ceiling and asks, "What is the matter with you?" "I am a woman, and I have a gun, and look how he treated me," Sara spits. "I can only imagine how he treated his wife." She stalks off, leaving Gil to stare worriedly after her.

And now, let me trot out a complaint: Gil gave that little homily lo those many episodes ago about how he goes postal over only three things -- drugs, pedophilia, and spousal abuse -- and yet we've only seen him lose it over one instance. He didn't blink over the Collins murders -- precipitated by child abuse -- and he's not exactly losing it here. Continuity, people!

Warrick and Catherine bring a painting into the evidence room; it's your typical Early Modern Ugly thing. Nicky comes in and makes some sort of crack about checking Lindsey's artwork into evidence; Catherine ripostes that should Lindsey's paintings bring in the kind of scratch a Sorenson does, she wouldn't worry about college tuition. Nicky goes to bust on the two of them for having to deal with a missing painting as opposed to a missing person, and Warrick shoots back, "At least we solved our case." Burn! Nicky keeps on walking, and Catherine shares her hunch that the whole case was solved a little too quickly. Given that it's only 9:27, I'd say she's right. Warrick grouses about overtime, then checks his beeping pager. He mumbles his excuses for bolting; Catherine assumes he's going to court, but it's a fair guess, based on his hangdog expression and absent-mindedness, that he's headed somewhere else. As Warrick heads out the door, Catherine asks him to tell her what he told Child Services. "Oh!" he replies, more animated than he's been all night, "I told them as far as mothers go, you're the bomb." "Really?" Catherine asks. "Yeah," Warrick reassures her. "I also told them your ex is pretty screwed up."

Now that we've dispensed with that heartwarming moment, it's time for some of Sara Sidel's justice, Old Testament-style. She's barreling down the lab corridors, interrogating Brass and Gil as to what kind of evidence they need to put Scott away. Brass tells Sara that they need to find out that Kaye was killed five days ago; Gil pipes up that the insects will tell the time of death, and Brass reiterates that Sara and Gil need to prove that Kaye died five days ago. Gil says, "Jim, please don't compromise my end of the investigation," and Brass heads off, irked at Gil's implacable sense of evidentiary justice. Sara shoots Gil a mischievous look, then heads to the lab with Scott's gun and bullets. Cut to a science montage, wherein Gil spends a lot of time logging insectoid measurements in an effort to pinpoint Kaye's time of death and Sara goes over the evidence in the apartment. As Gil is comparing some bug against a chart of insect measurements by lifespan (as measured in hours), all I can think is that some poor graduate student probably had to grow thousands of bugs, kill batches at proscribed intervals, and come up with a median measurement for each species. Say what you will about the thrill of scientific discovery, slogging through the trenches collecting data is mind-numbing.

Sara pops into Gil's lab and tells him Scott's bullets are unusual, so she's having them sent out for tracing. She asks Gil what he got, and he sighs -- based on his bug measurements, Kaye's only been dead for three days. Sara takes it much better than expected. Cut to a strident lawyer feigning incomprehension at Gil's linear regression bug-dating methods, in yet another example of C.P. Snow's contention that there are two academic spheres, the sciences and the humanities, and never the twain shall meet. Gil glowers in the lawyer's general direction, pausing only to glower in Scott's general direction when he gets tired. Sara and Brass try to poke holes in the story and fail. Scott waltzes out of the box, and his lawyer turns to warmly thank Gil.

Gil's day then gets exponentially worse when he runs into Conrad Ecklie, who, let me remind you, is so creepy as to give one the impression that meeting him would prompt one to step into an autoclave afterwards for sterilization. Ecklie clucks about Gil's getting Scott off the hook, then notes that not only did Warrick skip his court date, he had one of Ecklie's guys fill in so he could go to the Hotel Monaco casino. Gil manages to get through the conversation without giving in to the urge to poke out Conrad's eyes with a blunt object.

In the scene, Sara's sleeping over a book. As a teakettle whistles, Gil comes in to take it off the burner and ask about Sara's sleeping habits. She tells him she was in the lab until four, combing over every demo car Scott's driven, and she's come up with nothing. Gil stares impassively, then asks her, "I need you to do some background on Warrick without him knowing why." "Oh," Sara says, still groggy, "Warrick. Your favorite CSI." "That's why I want you to do it, so that Ecklie can't accuse me of favoritism if it turns out Warrick's clean." Well. This is interesting -- not only did Gil not deny that he has a favorite in the department, he's exhibiting a rudimentary awareness of office politics. Our boy is growing up.

Cut to Warrick pinwheeling the presumed Sorenson around and inquiring incredulously of Catherine, "The painting's a fake? Where does it say that?" Catherine answers that she did a little Web research on Sorenson and found a site noting that 15 percent of all museum art is fake. Aww, Catherine. You can't believe everything you read on the Internet! Anyway, Warrick snits about the case being closed and how it's not his job to authenticate art. Catherine points out that since the Sorenson is a forgery, the two of them are looking at a new crime. In the scene, an unnamed forensic art appraiser is whipping out an electrothermal atomizer, which is cued to the electron frequency of titanium. We learn that painters were not using paints with titanium in them at the turn of the twentieth century, so if there's titanium, that's a surefire indication of a painting created well after the 1950s introduction of modern oil paints with titanium. The paint will fluoresce if it's hit with the atomizer -- which this painting does. After Catherine establishes that Pa Ziegler would have been canny enough to buy the painting from a reputable auction house which would have conducted its own testing, Warrick connects the dots: "The kid stole the original from his pop and gave us back a forgery." Catherine suggests they check Jason's dorm room, to see if they can find either a stack of canvases or a giant sack of unmarked bills from fencing the paintings.

Cut to Nicky vacuuming the minivan. This is about the point where I lose the will to live, and therefore must reluctantly conclude that it was George Eads' turn to draw the sucktacular subplot. To spare all of our delicate sensibilities, permit me to wrap this dismal little story up now: he finds blood. The detective finds Sheryl handcuffed to a hotel headboard -- something, it turns out, Sheryl was 100 percent behind until a platoon of uniformed cops broke down the door. The blood came from an injured dog, thus proving that luminol is helpful but not infallible. Nicky has not made any more moves to appease his former dinner date, and has absorbed yet another lesson on the perils of adultery. Perhaps he'll understand how this sort of dishonesty thing applies to his own life sometime during sweeps.

Back to the bugs. Gil is in his office listening to some strings adagio, and Sara approaches him to talk. "You know you say we're the victim's last voice?" Sara starts. Gil nods for her to continue. "I thought it was our job to speak for Kaye Shelton." "You don't crunch evidence to fit a theory," Gil replies, then makes to go back to his book. Sara swallows hard and asks, "What if you hear the victim's screams? In the car. At the store..." "You have empathy for her," concludes Gil, who is now chowing down on something in a jar as he listens to Sara. "You want someone to pay for what was done to her. That's normal." Sara thinks about that for a moment, and it's pretty obvious from her facial expression that she's weighing what to say , which is: "You want to sleep with me?" Gil drops his spoon and looks up. He wipes his mouth and takes off his glasses, all the while not taking his eyes off Sara. He looks moderately stunned. "Did you just say what I think you said?" he finally manages. Sara gives him a hard look and replies, "That way, when I wake up in a cold sweat, under the blanket, hearing Kaye's screams -- you can tell me its nothing. It's just empathy." She leaves, and Gil watches her go, looking thoughtful.

Cut to another science sequence where Gil pores over the blanket Kaye was wrapped in, then to the back end of a butcher truck dropping off a pig. Brass hovers by the fence, cracking about Gil's plans to throw a luau. Gil tells Brass that he's actually running an experiment to see if Kaye was wrapped tightly enough to stop bugs from colonizing her immediately after death. "You killed a pig just for this?" Brass asks. "This poor ham was already on its way to someone's Christmas dinner table," Gil replies. "Wouldn't a rabbit be better?" Brass continues. "Gotta be a pig," Gil tells him. "Interestingly enough, they're the most like humans." "I've been saying that since I was a rookie," Brass says. Oh, the cynicism. Gil resumes setting up his experiment, which apparently includes training a videocamera on the carcass and taking all sorts of notes as the pig gets progressively grosser. At one point, he's shivering on a crate as he observes the pig. Sara shows up. Gil pushes over a second box, and Sara sits down. She then opens a large bag and hands Gil a thermos. He smiles at her -- something that really does peel about ten years off his face -- and Sara continues by wrapping a blanket around him. She then hunkers down to keep him company, and the camera pulls back to show them huddled together, reviewing lab notes. It's really kind of sweet, except for the festering, vermin-riddled pig decomposing at their feet. Young forensics investigators in love, I guess.