Tonight starts off with a networking promo, complimenting C.S.I. on its Golden Globe nomination for Best Drama. I'm torn: on the one hand, yay C.S.I.! On the other -- does this mean I've lost MBTV cred since I'm recapping a show that the critics actually like?
Previously on CSI: Nicky dealt with some hooker who was stupidly smearing Scopalamine on her nipples in an effort to knock out her johns; Warrick bailed on a case with Catherine in response to his pager, thus precipitating an alpha-male showdown between Gil and his scabrous counterpart Conrad Ecklie; Gil requests of a straight-haired Sara that she furtively follow Warrick around, the better to confirm or deny Ecklie's accusations of Warrick's gambling (people, just read the last recap); Sara has a tape showing Warrick entering a casino.
Now on with the show! We open with a few scenes showing Las Vegas during the day -- first the Strip, then acres of prefab suburban houses, then a tacky little strip mall with a grocery store anchoring it. We see a nondescript woman in her forties steering a shopping cart through the pallid fluorescent aisles; one of the wheels on the shopping cart skids wildly. The camera goes all you-are-there on us, giving us first the cart's-eye view of the groceries and then the ankle view of the grocery-gathering matron. Then we hear a jar of mustard crash to the ground.
Cut to the grocery store at night, with Gil striding inside. This raises a question I've had for a while: there are an awful lot of these crimes taking place in broad daylight and not getting investigated until night falls. I can see this daylight disjunction thing being a problem in, say, Alaska in, say, February, but we're in Las Vegas a couple of latitudes down. Why? Why is the night shift investigating crimes that took place during the day? Does it really take that long to block off a crime scene and call out the troops for inspecting it? Someone on the forums please tell me.
Once Gil is in the store, Brass calls out, "Well, if it isn't the Boss himself! Where's your E-Street band?" This, faithful readers, is the first sign that someone has taken it upon themselves to mess with the series' continuity: Gil was made the head cheese (to employ a food metaphor, in keeping with the tradition on the show) some nine episodes back, and this is the first Brass has commented on it? I don't think so. My sharp forum posters already confirmed that this episode was in fact the third, which raises a series of troubling questions. Are we to assume that this episode lays to rest the whole troubling Warrick-is-back-in-casinos situation from last episode? Are we to assume that Gil and Sara's strange professional relationship will continue to progress based on whatever interactions they have tonight? Are we to continue to watch the tedious pseudo-flirtation between Sara and Nicky with the same level of disinterest, or with a whole new level of contempt now that we know he's been throwing her coquettish hand signals for far longer than we suspected? Most importantly -- what about the hair? Do I ignore all the dramatic tonsorial changes that have transpired over the course of the series? Thank you, whomever decided to play fast-and-loose with the continuity here. You're making my head hurt, and it's only 9:02.
Anyway: back to the episode. Gil blows Brass off and defangs him nicely, complaining about the increased volume of cursing he's doing now that he's running the CSI department at night. Brass plays Captain Exposition, telling us that the nice missing lady is Margaret Shorey; Margaret lives with her sister and had been at the grocery store picking up assorted victuals and analgesics, what with her sister being laid up with a broken wrist. Gil notes that Margaret's purse is still in her cart, but there's no wallet. After performing a cursory survey of the stuff in Margaret's cart -- which is really so picayune as to not merit mention even in this, the recap of the show, but goes a long way in confirming my theory that everyone at the grocery store is judging you by the contents of your cart, which is why I always overcompensate for buying a pint of Chubby Hubby by putting, like, five pounds of leaf spinach in my cart on top of it, but...well, I've really wandered off topic here and thus do not really have the time to relay the story about the time I was in Costco and all I was buying were a few cases of cat food, a few cases of Diet Coke, and a shrink-wrapped package of Lean Cuisine dinners, and the guys behind me began snickering and laying bets on the probable state of my love life while the cashier was ringing me up, therefore fueling my contention that everyone plays judgmental anthropologist when it comes to other people's groceries and...oh, look. I did tell the story. Sorry. I'm feeling digressive tonight.
Okay -- Gil notes that there's a smear of yellow goop marring the bottom rim of the shopping cart, and swipes his ungloved finger through the stuff. He then surveys his finger with clinical interest -- it's not bubbling and melting, so all must be well -- and then licks the goop. Brass speaks for me when he says, "Oh, that's sanitary."
"Mustard," Gil muses, then asks the conveniently hovering grocery store manager if he had any mop-ups in this particular aisle of the grocery store. The manager answers that as a matter of fact, they did. "Life holds no surprises," sniffs Gil, and settles his steely gaze on the shelves of French's finest. He selects a jar of mustard, hands over two bills to the manager, saying, "$1.98 for the mustard, plus my two cents" -- oh, ah ha ha ha, whatever -- then drops the jar on the freshly-mopped aisle. Well, I guess if you can't collect the evidence that's already there, create more of it yourself. Brass notes the condiment flying all over his shoes and sputters, "What are you doing?" Gil asks rhetorically, "Now where would you go?"
Cut to the bathroom, where Brass is using one of those so-coarse-it-still-has-large-chunks-of-mulch-in-it paper towels and that soupy pink soap found in your more plebian restroom establishments. Gil is peering into the stalls -- I hope they cleared out the bathroom first, or else someone might be startled when Gil gives them the fisheye while they're going about their business -- and looking for clues. Gil calls Brass's attention to a freshly-Brillo'd bathroom door, noting well the circumference and asking how recently the door has been scrubbed. The manager tells Gil the door was scrubbed that afternoon, in response to a user complaint.
Gil gets a persecuted look on his face -- damn these grocery stores and their pesky insistence on keeping a sanitary establishment! -- and asks, "Can I borrow a hammer?" Cut to the lab, where Brass is waving a black light over the door while Gil takes photos of the scrubbed-out writing. Once the photos are assembled, he and Brass assemble them and read the caption: "I've killed five women. Catch me if you can."
Cut to the Who, doing their part to make forensic science seem as cool as rock opera apparently was in the 1970s.
After a series of shots designed to impart how very busy and aseptic and downright scientific a forensics lab is, we pull in on our intrepid crew getting their assignments. I'm pleased to note that this back-in-time episode has one big perk: I can confirm that the last n episodes where I've been laboring under the misimpression that Sara's last name was Sidel (pronounced "Sigh-DELL" and spelled Sidel in the closed-caption) is, in fact, Sidle (as in "she sidles up to Gil and undresses him with her eyes"). Now that we've cleared that issue up, we can gloss over Sara's curly hair (a holdover from the early episodes) and move on. Gil hands Sara a dead-body assignment, causing her to trill in girlish glee and Catherine to snark, "Well! Somebody likes their job." Nicky gets to check out a disturbance at the Bellagio. Gil hands over the slip, saying, "She says she's a friend of yours." "Ex-girlfriend, Nick?" Catherine snits, apparently in some sort of mood this episode, and Nicky blithely replies, "Depends. Is she the assaulter or the assaultee?" I'd say she's the harbinger of yet another mind-numbing tertiary subplot for you, Nicky. Gil merely gives Nicky an indulgent grin; Sara decides to tease Nicky and says, "You tell us -- you like leather or lace?" Oh, Sara. Don't encourage him. Nicky plays coy for a moment, but as he leaves the room he turns and looks at Sara, blurting, "Lace." Sara gives him quite the arch little look and turns back to reading over her assignment. Gil tells Catherine she's working with him on the Margaret Shorey case, and says he'll meet her after he deals with Warrick. Catherine pats him sympathetically and heads out the door; Sara lingers, glaring at Gil. He gives her the patented "what?" look and she says defiantly, "I filed my report." "I read it," Gil replies, not rising to the bait. Sara rolls her eyes and flounces out.
Cut to Warrick, clad in a wife-beater and a beleaguered expression. He's decided to multitask, combining his work preparations with assuming the cares of the world on his shoulders. Gil comes in and starts fishing for the real story on Warrick's doings. He asks, innocently enough, "How was court?" Warrick tries to concoct a cover story and fails magnificently. We've seen him do this before, back when he was trying to cover for Catherine while she was tromping all over due process. The question is: are we supposed to realize now that Warrick's a lousy liar, or were we supposed to realize it in Episode 6?
Anyway, Warrick claims that he passed his whole I-had-to-miss-court story on to Sara, and Gil says, "Right. Personal reasons." I decide that William Peterson deserves some sort of professional plaudit for managing to enunciate "personal reasons" in such a way as to imply the skeptical quotation marks he's putting around it. Warrick continues to get nervous. He also continues to get more dressed. Gil then tells Warrick that he's got footage of Warrick at the Monaco Casino -- which the closed-captioning identifies as the "Crusty Nickel," thus compounding my confusion even further -- and Warrick gets all righteously indignant on Gil. Gil makes with the disappointed-dad act, saying, "I thought we had a deal. What you do on your time is nobody's business. What you do on my time is my business." Warrick looks even more put-upon than he did three minutes ago, and sighs in such a manner as to imply that he's permanently deflated a lung with the effort. He eventually admits that he was at the casino, but adds that he wasn't gambling. Gil sits down, waiting to hear why Warrick was at the Monaco, or the Crusty Nickel, or wherever the hell he happened to be.
Meanwhile, in another plot thread, Sara walks into a relentlessly beige house with her big box o' crime-fighting tools. The writing credit for the episode pops up, and I realize that I've managed to write approximately 2000 words before the credits have finished rolling. Such feckless bloviation! I'll strive for brevity from now on, what with it being the soul of wit and all. I swear, I think that's from Hamlet, but I've been spectacularly wrong on the Shakespeare attributions before, so now I'm all wary. ["Ware not; the quotation is indeed from Hamlet." -- Sars]
Anyway, Sara continues to scope out the House of Beige, where a khaki-clad corpse is sprawled out over a carpet the Pottery Barn would describe as "sand." She stares at the body, then moves over to talk to a gawky young man who, in his pale pink oxford shirt, stands out like a sore thumb in this eggshell-and-taupe spread. We find out the guy's name is Kenny Berlin; he's the brother of the body. Sara says clinically, "Sorry for your loss," then asks Kenny to tell her what happened. Kenny starts doing that I'm-stammering-with-shock-and-grief thing, and begins with, "I came in and saw my brother lying there --" which, frankly, should be a big clue that something's up, because it's damn hard to see any body whose outfit blends in so seamlessly with its stone-and-ecru background. Anyway, Kenny stammers about just finding the alleged break-in and the dead body, and we're taken in flashback to the presumed murderous burglary as committed according to Kenny's story. The one benefit to the flashback is that we find out the body's name was Jeff. Kenny then claims to have stumbled into the house the minute the crime ended; he then called 911, and hordes of police descended upon the house like so many uniformed Mongols. A nameless, faceless detective thanks Kenny for his patently false and useless story, and Sara begins poking holes in the robbery conceit by pointing out a wad of cash sitting on the bar, the flat-panel monitor and PC with CD-R drive sitting on the desk, et cetera. "He was interrupted," the detective offers, and Sara shoots back, "Before or after he used a bedsheet to transport the silver? Pillowcases are the norm; you know that." Sara looks around the room some more, then voices her conviction that something's not right.
Cut to a montage of assorted casinos at night. Since, you know, we're in Vegas. Now, we're presumably at the Bellagio. Nicky makes nice with the cops and asks about this "special request." "Go ask Catherine Zeta-Jones over there," a nameless cop grunts, and Nicky wanders over to where a woman sporting a poufy shag is kind of staring off into space. As she turns to face him, Nick grumbles, "Oh, I don't believe this." "Hey!" the hooker from Episode 1 chirps. "You probably don't recognize me with the shorter hair" -- she's right, she no longer looks like a low-rent Elizabeth Hurley. Now she looks like a low-rent Gina Gershon. And here you thought such a thing wasn't possible. The hooker continues, "My nipples are all better. Wanna see?" Nicky, thank God, demurs, demanding, "Kristy Hopkins, what are you doing here?" The security guard breaks in with his opinion that Kristy was cruising for customers; Kristy indignantly replies that she was "shopping for a dress, spending my hard-earned money -- okay, semi-hard-earned money," as if we're supposed to be impressed with her "I'm a post-feminist empowered sex worker with ironic detachment" attitude. A verbal match ensues; I spend most of it not focusing on the allegations being flung hither and yon, but on the fact that Kristy's voice sounds like it was dubbed in at a much later date. It's kind of disturbing, because now I'm wondering if it's me, or if there was some other plot that went in here and got rewritten later. See what distrust CBS has kindled in me, now that I know I can no longer rely on them to air episodes in a linear fashion?
Anyway, Nicky hauls Kristy off to collect evidence. "I need your shirt," he says, and Kristy sasses back, "Why is it every time we meet you ask me to take my clothes off?" "Because every time we meet you put yourself in a position where you have to take them off," hisses Nicky. Good for him. It almost redeems how tiresome this subplot is already. Kristy does a lot of back-arching and other behaviors meant to indicate that she's a feisty post-feminist kind of sex worker, and hands over the shirt.
Back at House of Beige, Sara is terrifying the of kin. She's looking for blood on him -- something he doesn't take to graciously -- and checking his clothes for clues. She notices some glass caught in the cuffs of Kenny's tweed pants. As she extracts the shards, she says, "Well, that's good news: there's no blood, bud." She does not, to my eternal disappointment, continue, "But I found glass, you ass." Sara then requests both Kenny's clothes and the broken window. Kenny's not looking too pleased, and who can blame him?
Cut to Gil and Catherine listening to a graphologist. "The person who wrote this is left-handed." Gil asks how he knows this; the graphologist replies that the t-bar on the letter T tilts down toward the right. The graphologist continues his analysis, pegging the bathroom-door writer as uneducated based on a misplaced apostrophe, and possessed of criminal tendencies based on large arches in the letter L. And here the graphologist could have just inferred all that from the lefty allegation, what with there being a body of research devoted to the contention that left-handed people have a marked propensity for criminal tendencies and all. Let me pull out my copy of Stanley Coren's The Left-Handed Syndrome and note that page 180 reads, "The evidence linking left-handedness with criminality and delinquency has been accumulating," and "the attitudes of left-handers were more similar to those of known and convicted lawbreakers." And here I thought all of us southpaws just had problems finding scissors to make collages in kindergarten. Anyway, the graphologist helps Gil and Catherine compile a profile: poor impulse control, criminal, female. The gender thing throws Catherine and Gil for a loop.
And if that weren't enough to make one go hmmmm, the emaciated visage of Christine Baranski in a promo for Welcome to New York ought to. But enough about the commercials.
Sara is wielding a power tool -- again, this is a woman with a demonstrated tendency to use Black and Decker in a destructive fashion -- when Warrick appears over her shoulder, asking if she plans on taking the whole window. Warrick, approaching Sara when she's got a big saw and a bigger problem with you is perhaps not the most savvy survival move you could be making. Sara more or less confirms this by flatly stating, "Grissom reinstated you." "And you have a problem with that," Warrick states. Oh, yes she does: Sara goes off and begins yelling about Warrick forsaking court duties to satisfy the empty vice of gambling, and I get annoyed with CBS all over again. Continuity-wise, this makes no sense: Warrick's been toeing the straight-and-narrow for a while, the two now have a civil working relationship, and he hasn't managed to get any rookies killed while he makes bets for corrupt judges for weeks. If Sara's got gambling issues, they're not going to surface now. But if we view this episode while pretending that the other eight don't exist...then okay. Warrick correctly points out to Sara that his problems have nothing to do with her, and she resumes carving out the window.
Cut to the morning; Sara comes charging into the lab where Gil is bent over a microscope. After leaping into tirade mode -- something Gil acknowledges by saying, "And good morning to you too, Miss Sidle" -- Sara reasserts her opinion that Warrick has A Problem and Gil is An Enabler. "I see the whole puzzle, Sara. You're only seeing one piece." This piece of Zen wisdom is lost on Sara, who demands that Gil take Warrick off her case. He declines her request, saying, "I trust him. Do you trust me?" Sara declines to make a crack about emotional syllogisms, and Gil runs off to see something Catherine wants to show him.
As the two of them walk toward the garage, Catherine asks him, "You know how you're always pushing that holy trinity stuff?" "Father, Son, and Holy Ghost?" Gil asks. "Victim, suspect, crime scene," Catherine replies. "Oh. That one," Gil mutters. Hee! Catherine continues by saying that they don't have a victim or a suspect, but they do have a crime scene -- one that states that the killer has struck five times. Gil excitedly inquires as to whether or not Catherine's found four other victims. "No," she replies eagerly. "I found four other crime scenes." Catherine had Brass run a few requests through VICAP, and the results are four other bathroom doors, all of which bear inscriptions testifying to the killer having murdered anywhere from one to four women. In his own way, Gil is thrilled. The two investigators note the locations -- Victorville, CA; Salt Lake City, UT; San Bernadino, CA; Mesquite, NV; Las Vegas -- and deduce that the lack of physical evidence at each podunk grocery-store location means that the toilet-stall inscriptions were statements of intent, not fact. There's a crack in here to be made about what this means per those "for a good time, call" graffiti, but I need to move on. Gil gradually rearranges the doors in such a way as to mimic the path Interstate 15 takes through their respective locations; as he reads them off, a highway map draws itself.
It's Liam the Lab Tech, testing Kristy's shirt for amylase. It would be impossible for me to care less about this plot, but I like Liam. He comments on the challenge of testing such a flimsy shirt, noting as he draws the garment up to his chest, "It's very see-through, very Jennifer Lopez." No, it's actually a lot more tasteful than something she'd wear. Moving on...Liam points out that when people talk, saliva flies fast and free. The computer graphics helpfully illustrate this. Nicky sums up my feelings with, "Gross." Yeah, really. I don't need to see effluvia issuing forth from people's mouths. The two guys move over to the blotter paper that will prove whether or not Kristy's shirt has more than the usual amount of saliva on it, and Liam asks Nick for an introduction to Kristy, a request Nick emphatically denies. The two resume doing actual work, noting that there's a huge gob of spit on the shirt; now the only question is: whose is it?
Sara, meanwhile, is devoting her morning to passing on her bad mood to Kenny in the box. He's a little stunned that Sara found glass in his pants; he feebly offers the explanation that "I must have been wearing those pants!" when he discovered someone broke into his car. Sara asks about a police report, and Kenny counters that no, he didn't file one. But he did file an insurance report, so she can check that. I'm wondering what lax insurance company he's got; both times my car was broken into, I needed to file a copy of the police report to get them to pay my claim, so you can be damn sure the first thing I did was get on the phone with the police and demand the paperwork. Warrick comes in to play good cop -- or less-pissy cop, at any rate -- and drops some science on Kenny, pointing out that the glass in Kenny's pants had approximately the same floating point as the glass from the window, meaning that the samples were similarly dense and therefore likely from the same source.
Kenny tries to deflect everyone's attention from this damning chain of evidence by rolling his eyes at the mention of the word "density" and smirking, "I was never any good at science." Then isn't it funny how you personify density itself, Kenny? Warrick and Sara have no sympathy for the science-impaired and eventually browbeat Kenny into giving another flashback scene in which he blunders around the glass for a while. They grow tired of his mewling and order the police to take him away. Then Sara decides to lay into Warrick about his gambling habit some more; when he grumbles, "You just don't let up," she rolls her eyes skyward and snaps, "It's a flaw."
Catherine and Gil are in Moapa, preparing to check a crime scene. Before Gil and Catherine can do so, however, Brass comes over and tells Gil, "So my guys tell me your guy Nick was helping a working girl over at a five-star and it was quite a commotion. And if I know, other people know." Gil is moderately nonplussed. Brass goes out to explain exactly how not-good it looks to have someone from a crime lab doing favors for a hooker. Gil, whose face is shifting from nonplussed to annoyed, says, "Yeah, well, I'll get into it." "I bet that's what Nicky said too," Brass cracks, and Gil rolls his eyes. Catherine shouts, "you two ladies done talking over there?" and the three of them prepare to check out a found body. Said body is not Margaret's; the woman is blonde, and blue with cold, which is odd since it's a very hot day. "And she's stiff, like a two-minute burrito that's only been nuked for one minute," Gil notes. Attaboy, Gil! It's not a C.S.I. episode if food hasn't been violated in the name of forensics in some way.
Cut to Jenna the cool chick coroner, telling us, "Meet Joan Sims from San Bernadino, California." She's been missing for a while, and she died of strangulation, judging from the ligature marks. And then, Jenna continues, "This one's weird, like I-may-use-her-in-a-lecture-weird. Her decomp's completely backwards; it's supposed to happen from the inside out and yet her organs are in better shape than her skin." We then get the TMI shot of Joan's heart tissue sample; it looks like smooth muscle intersected with icy crystals. I think it looks like a thawing turkey gizzard; Gil, however, opines that it looks like the Planet Krypton. "More like kryptonite," Jenna shoots back. "Those are actually ice crystals, Superman." The upshot: Joan was refrigerated until very recently. The lightbulb goes off for Gil: the women are being kept in an refrigerated truck that's going up and down I-15. "That's our crime scene," Gil breathes. "And it's mobile."
Back in the office, Gil pulls aside Nicky to talk about his work on Kristy's case. "Is she a friend of yours?" Gil asks. "Are you asking what I think you're asking?" Nicky shoots back. "Are you doing anything that could compromise the unit," Gil amends, and Nicky, who's getting a little more hostile, replies, "I don't believe this. You've always been so cool." About what, pray tell? dalliances with working girls? Other ethically ambiguous on-the-job behavior? Gil points out that he's now required to be uncool, and Nicky storms off. Catherine comes over, chirping about how she's got a list of all the refrigerated trucks that made a delivery to the Las Vegas supermarket yesterday and that there's a female trucker on it. The two grin and go off to interview this woman to see if she is indeed their left-handed, atavistic culprit.
Meanwhile, Warrick is getting some aggression out by swinging a baseball bat into a plate of glass. Sara purrs, "Not bad," and Warrick gives us backstory, telling her he passed up a chance to play semi-pro baseball and elected to go to college instead. Sara points out that she could care less about him and that she was interested in the glass; the shard Warrick created and the shard Sara took off the crime scene have the same Haeckels, or angle marks, indicating that they were broken in a similar fashion. What this means for our boy Kenny is that the window was not broken from the outside, as he claimed, but from the inside. Sara and Warrick share this science with Kenny in the box, explaining how the angles form and calling Kenny a peckerwood in the process. I'm left stunned -- not by the marriage of observation and theory, but by the apparent ability to say anything you want on prime-time these days. It's only a matter of time before Brass is calling someone a dickweed.
In the scene, Sara and Warrick are walking down the hall and managing a civil conversation with one another, something of a first for this episode. They outline their problem: they have evidence that proves Kenny could have killed his brother, but they don't have motive. Sara muses that Kenny may have done it for money; he's a day trader, and God knows that's not the world's most secure occupation. Warrick picks up her conversational thread, noting that the computer is still at the house and that they do have a warrant and probable cause. They're off to go hack Kenny's hard drive.
In another part of the building, Nicky tries to sneak up on Gil in his office and is thwarted by a Billy the Big Mouth Bass singing fish. If we still needed proof that this is an earlier episode, that fish could deliver it: the tacky thing's so summer 2000. Nicky manages to look a lot more amused at Gil's kitschy watchfish system than I would be -- I hope for the actors' sakes here that they nailed the scene in one or two takes so they didn't have to listen to that thing over and over again -- and apologizes nicely to Gil for his temper tantrum a few paragraphs back. Gil innocently inquires why Nicky doesn't put a rookie on the case, and Nicky stammers, "I can't. There's something about her...she doesn't have anyone else." Oh, now this is just too much. Gil misses a gold-plated opportunity to tweak Nicky on his rescue fantasies, and instead counsels him on his difficulties in obtaining a saliva sample from the truculent security guard: "If Mohammed won't go to the mountain, the mountain must come to Mohammed. Think about it." Nicky does. In the scene, he's lying like a rug to the security guard about how the girl means nothing to him and "between you and me, I thought I might get lucky." The security guard enthusiastically agrees. Nicky ladles on some more male-bonding hogwash and the guard agrees to write a statement and lick the envelope sealing it since "us guys have got to stick together." Oh, whatever.
Out on some godforsaken stretch of highway, an extremely tough-looking woman in a sleeveless flannel shirt, combat boots, and short hair is busy confirming with Gil that yes, she did graduate from high school and yes, she'll give him a writing sample. In fact, she'll even throw in a urine test, gratis. Gil thanks her for her enthusiasm; Catherine comes over, and the trucker gets a little less cooperative. Catherine sasses back and gets the trucker (or truckeress? I can never tell when it's appropriate to use those gender-specific suffixes) to write the following: "I've got a kite. Can you see the women? Kill the lights." The trucker looks disbelieving, but complies; Catherine thrills to note that she's left-handed. She scampers off with the writing sample, and the trucker takes off after her, hollering about being late; Brass manhandles the woman -- who looks like she could take him in a fair fight -- onto a police cruiser. Catherine scans and faxes the writing sample to a waiting graphologist, who checks it against the bathroom doors. It's not a match. The trucker goes back to her boyfriend -- which, frankly, is a surprise, given that she looked like she should be sporting a Lea DeLaria t-shirt and a pink triangle tattoo -- and takes off. Gil advances the theory that perhaps they should look for a male trucker, and reasons that he might be getting his girlfriend to write the notes on the stall door for him. "Only three percent of multiple killers are female, and a woman wouldn't need a trophy," he says, noting that nothing says trophy like carting around a body on ice.
Nicky's tendentious subplot is wrapping up, and it's only 9:43! There is a God. As he's geekily explaining the assorted enzyme tests he used to exonerate Kristy, she's laughing vacantly and feigning interest until Nicky parses a clue and realizes that she's only humoring him. There's a little awkward banter about whether or not the charges have been dropped -- they have -- and over the course of the conversation, Kristy and her annoying, quite possibly dubbed voice have moved into Nicky's personal space. "I would ask you out for coffee," she coos, "but that's not a good idea." Nicky agrees. Kristy then jokes about how she can just call him if she gets into trouble, and Nicky goes into rescue mode, saying, "Maybe you should try not getting into trouble. But you do owe me one." "I owe you two," she simpers, and plants one on him. Nicky mumbles, "You know where to find me," then flees. Kristy does some more tiresome, I'm-a-cat-on-a-hot-tin-roof writhing and watches him go. Boy, good thing Nicky didn't notice Gil giving him the fish-eye as he drove by five minutes ago; it would have made his farewell scene with Kristy all the more awkward.
And yet another subplot comes skidding to a halt: Warrick and Sara go to rifle through Kenny's computer, only to discover that it won't boot up. Warrick muses that when computers won't start, there's usually a reason -- undoubtedly causing a lot of Windows support personnel to hoot in amusement -- and lifts off the cover. Surprise! There's a gun lodged where the motherboard usually is. Boy, is Kenny stupid. Especially since the gun has a piece of glass in it that, if matched to the window glass, will more or less prove that Kenny broke the window from the inside using the gun with which he then killed his brother. Within minutes -- of episode time, not real time, I imagine -- Sara and Warrick have proven their case, and we find out that Kenny killed his brother because he wanted control of the trust fund Bro was managing.
Two down, one more to go: Warrick and Catherine are sitting to a woman who looks like she's been mainlining amphetamines since, oh, 1995 or so. She gives our investigators a giddy, pop-eyed grin and enthusiastically notes that her facilities are state-of-the-art in tracking trucks as they move across our nation's highways. Gil turns to Catherine and asks, "Do you ever worry that technology is going to make us obsolete?" "No," she shoots back, but declines to add, "I worry that technology, when coupled with a business culture that rewards the collation and sale of consumer data in the name of profit margins, will make the notion of 'privacy' obsolete in a matter of months, and this example of tracking traffic and sorting it by assorted criteria is a paradigmatic example of my fears." Because she's not as prone to digressing as I. Anyway, the two investigators turn back to the scarily-wired woman and ask her to narrow down her database: eliminate all trucks that were not refrigerated? Done. Eliminate all trucks that were not in Las Vegas yesterday? Done. Eliminate all trucks that only travel in one state? Done. Eliminate the trucks that don't deliver to supermarkets along I-15? Done. Grissom delightedly says, "This is very cool," thus confirming that while he may worry about obsolescence, that whole technology-and-privacy thing means nothing to him, then asks to eliminate all trucks that did not deliver to Marty's Market. The field -- which has been dramatically shrinking with each request -- narrows to one truck. They've got their guy.
Cut to an innocuous-looking delivery guy checking off things on a clipboard, then looking up to see a dozen police cars surrounding his truck. Brass handles the whole deal, rousting the guy's skittish-looking girlfriend from the cab and corralling the couple to his car. As Gil walks over to the truck, the delivery guy yells, "Hey! Get away from my truck!" Way to divert suspicion there, pal. Gil coolly replies, "It's not your truck anymore; it's our crime scene." He and Catherine commence their search. After winding through countless frozen sides of beef, they find a closed freezer; there are three women's bodies wrapped in plastic inside. None of the three is Margaret. It's a very affecting sight, those pale and jumbled bodies. Gil storms out and faces the delivery guy, demanding, "Where is she?" The trucker draws himself up and replies, "Screw you, man," in a way that's meant to be all derisive and menacing, and yet comes off like he really had a hard time reigning himself in from using one of the Seven Dirty Words. Gil outlines how the killer and his girlfriend worked: the girlfriend lured out "decent, trusting middle-aged women" for her boyfriend and wrote the letter for him. Brass jumps in and grabs each half of this fun couple by the scruff of their necks and offers them a deal: whoever talks first gets life in prison as opposed to the death penalty. The girlfriend folds; Brass is surprisingly civil with her.
Catherine and Gil race back to the cab of the truck where the two killers -- you have to agree that the girl was guilty by commission -- lived, and tear it apart. They find a locked compartment beneath the bed; once they get it open, they find Margaret, still alive. For once, a storyline ends on something of an up note. Yippee!
Aaaaaaaand to round out the show…Sara's walking through the lobby when she sees a kid who could be Warrick at age 11. Same unruly hair, same slightly uncomfortable expression. "You look lost," she notes -- remember, this is the same Sara who expressed a fear of short, young people, which I guess she developed some time after this episode took place -- and the kid stammers that he's waiting for Warrick Brown. Oh, please, let the resemblance only be a coincidence. Please, let this not be some bizarre attempt to spring the "Surprise! Warrick's a father!" revelation on us. Sara loses her composure and asks if she should go get Warrick; the kid chirps, "Oh, no. He's probably working. He works really hard. If you see him, just tell him Jason says thanks." Okay, then. I think we dodged a bullet -- unless Warrick's so casual as a parent as to conduct his fathering on a drop-in basis. Just then, Warrick comes by and calls Jason by name; the two are apparently close and, we find out, not close in the "we have 50 percent of our DNA in common" kind of way. Thank God. Apparently, Jason got himself in juvenile for pulling a fire alarm; Warrick bailed him out somehow -- pulling strings in the Hotel Monaco to do so -- and will continue to act in some sort of role model/mentor capacity to young Jason for an indeterminate period, though not apparently a period that includes any of the episodes that have already aired on CBS. It's all very heartwarming and absolutely out of the middle of nowhere. Sara's been watching all of this with an expression approaching amusement; once Jason leaves, she says, "You went to the casino to win bail money." Warrick takes offense, as I do, at the implication that now she knows he was gambling for a good reason it's somehow okay. He replies, "You're a CSI, Sara. You saw me enter the casino. Did you see me place a bet?" "You didn't?" she counters. "I don't have to tell you anything!" he replies, then continues, "Look. I went to collect a debt that was owed to me. We're supposed to be working together. time, try talking to me instead of going around behind my back." He walks off, leaving a chastened Sara to watch him leave.
And that's it. My God, it's the most upbeat episode of C.S.I. ever. Ever! I'm in shock. See you all in a week or two when the new one airs.