Hey, everybody! It's the missing recap for CSI! And guess what? The show still takes place in Las Vegas.
We start the show with a daytime shot of the Strip, panning out over the eye-numbing acres of ticky-tacky suburbia surrounding said Strip, and then into the mountains. We see a human bone fly up into the air and come back down again. It does not turn into a monolith, nor does a tribe of apes cluster 'round to begin evolving to the strains of "Thus Spake Zarathustra." Instead, a golden retriever catches the bone in its mouth and returns it to the stock moppet who is, in the fine tradition of someone we will never see after the opening credits, about to stumble across something grisly. The boy hands over the bone to his dad; Dad takes command of the situation by asking the dog, "What do you have here?" Because the dog is going to answer -- this isn't Lassie, you idiot. Stock Moppet asks Dad what he's holding. Dad replies, "Nothing, son. It's just an old...bone. Probably from some dead animal or something." He then looks around the rocky desert plain, as if expecting the rest of the body to magically appear. Some woman caterwauls mysteriously in the background, and a hawk cries; it's all very mystical.
Cut to the same desert, at night. Gil is waving a flashlight up and down the length of bone, noting, "It's a tibia...or most of a tibia." Catherine and Gil try to peg how long the leg has been in the desert, and conclude that time is irrelevant; what matters is that it's been long enough for the animals to pick it clean and the elements to wash away any evidence. Gil mildly inquires of Catherine as to why she's assuming they need evidence; she points out that tibias typically don't go on unaccompanied vision quests to the desert. Gil comments, "It's interesting how you usually assume the worst." "See, that way I'm never disappointed. And sometimes I'm nicely surprised," Catherine ripostes. Well, that explains a lot about her dating life. They dicker over whether or not this desert is a crime scene, and then Gil says, "Do you know there's 206 bones in the human body?" Catherine, who's feeling awfully feisty tonight, snaps, "Yes, Professor. I, too, took osteology." Gil, demonstrating his eternal optimism, does a little math and concludes, "Well, 205 more bones and we have a complete skeleton. If we find the rest, then we can determine whether or not it was a murder." Catherine replies, "Well, I feel it in every 206 of my bones that this was a murder."
Aaaaaand we go to credits. The one nice thing about recapping a rerun is I get to see commercials for shows which have not yet aired, thus enabling me to pass summary judgment before the fall rush. Boy, does Wolf Lake look like a big bag of suck or what?
Back on CSI, Gil's handing out cases since Brass is otherwise indisposed to perform his usual exposition duties and set the assorting plotlines in motion. Catherine and Gil are on the bones with Nicky playing back-up; Catherine comes charging into the mobile meeting (my Christ, what is it with all these shows where everyone's striding purposefully through endless corridors? Don't these people have desks? Or conference rooms?) and breathlessly informs Gil that she's got an entire class of cadets meeting them at Mount Charleston; they'll do a grid search to find the 205 remaining bones. Catherine then mentions off-handedly to Gil that perhaps Teri Miller might be the kind of person who comes in handy in these cases. "Teri Miller?" Gil feints. "I don't think that's necessary." I'm guessing Teri Miller shot him down at some unspecified time after her last appearance; Gil's got the look of a man who's scared to run into someone. "Well, why not? She's a forensic anthropologist, specializes in bones, and -- hello -- all we've got is a bone." Gil blurts, "But she's a girl and she's not on a slab, and that scares me!" Actually, he hedges about how he'll call Teri if he hits an impasse. Catherine gets a crafty look on her face.
Gil retreats to safer ground: sending other people out to gawp at the dead. Warrick and Sara are to attend to a dead body at the Lucky Seven motel. "Is that the place with the weird pool?" Sara asks. In Vegas? What are the odds? Warrick -- who is no stranger to Vegas's finer aquatic venues -- actually reads the report; the maid found a dead male body in the hotel room. "Any chance it's old age?" Sara asks. "Guy's 23. Nope," Warrick responds.
Back in the desert, the junior crime fighters are doing their grid thing. One of the cadets finds something he hypothesizes to be a piece of skull bone. Gil elegantly refutes that hypothesis by licking the fragment. Eeeeew! You don't know where that's been, Gil. Catherine calls him on his oral investigation, and Gil says, "Bones are porous. They stick to the tongue. This doesn't stick." The grid walk commences; in the scene, Gil is turning a piece of something this way and that as he muses, "Could be a wrist bone." "Well, do you want to suck it? To be sure?" Catherine replies. That's a hell of a line, Catherine; imagine what damage it could do in the wrong context. Gil punts on that question by calling for the flag man to come over and mark the spot. Cut to a montage of everyone finding bones over a wide-ranging area. By the end of the scene, the desert's been turned into a field of flags; the camera swoops from the still-life up to the mountains and out, then comes back in on Gil and Catherine at night, standing in the midst of the plain.
"So!" Catherine starts. "You thinking what I'm thinking?" Gil replies, "How amazing the universe is. Everything out there made of carbon. From stars to trees, trucks to human bones." I bet he's a lot of fun on dates. You know, romantic and all. Maybe he tried that carbon line on Teri Miller. Catherine, however, has squelched all thoughts of love and carbon: "I was thinking we have about a hundred bones. We could ID this body before the end of the shift." Then she does a double-take: "Stars and trucks?" Gil doesn't answer; he's busy gazing skyward, beatifically beaming.
Cut to the weird pool -- it's vaguely reminiscent of the Wenatchee mermaid thing in Florida, where women dress up like mermaids and swim around for tourists in an underground restaurant. Sara and Warrick give it a small glance, then walk into the hotel room. It's festooned with Mylar balloons and streamers; Warrick bats his way through the tack and reads the dead guy's ID: Darren Pyne. Sara looks down at the shag carpet, kicks aside a few balloons, and notes a broken lamp: "Signs of struggle; I'll dust for prints." Warrick and Sara ruminate on the likelihood that the lamp did young Mr. Pyne in -- there's a noted lack of blood -- and speculate that maybe he was hit over the head in several discrete locations. Realizing they're not going to solve this one without an autopsy, Warrick turns to more practical facets of the investigation: "Who's the room registered to?" Sara replies, "Well, that would be Celine Dion." Hey -- she's committed to, like, five years at some tacky casino there, so it's not entirely out of the realm of possibility. However, Sara's leading us away from the celebrity-crime-spree angle by noting the room's bill didn't go to Canada's most maudlin national resource, but rather to Lynn Henry of Eau Claire, Wisconsin. Warrick dispatches O'Reilly the buzz-cut detective to find the last place Lynn Henry used her credit card.
And now we're in the Venetian casino; it's kind of evocative of the Renaissance -- provided the Renaissance had been bankrolled by Bootsy Collins. Sara and Warrick wander up and down the halls, finally finding the (presumably) murderous milkmaid (hey, Wisconsin is the dairy state). The two walk over to a trio of women nattering about veils and shoes and ask for Lynn Henry. A poor man's Selma Blair looks up and quips, "You know my name: what's yours?" Cagey much? Warrick introduces himself and Sara, and drops the news about Darren Pyne. Lynn checks out the Polaroid and does a totally fake, "Oh, my God. Yes. I do know him...sort of. We gave Meg a bachelorette party last night." Meg -- who really does look like the Swiss Miss with two ponytails sticking out from her head -- bleats that they did it over at the Lucky Seven because she didn't want her fiancé to find out. You know, since most solid marriages are based on deception and skullduggery, or at least aligning yourself with a partner who'd freak over a bachelor or bachelorette party. We find out that Darren Pyne was an exotic dancer the girls hired, and get the full flashback treatment, with Lynn saying, "No husbands tonight, ladies!" Oh, that's just so pathetic. Meg the Milkmaid corroborates Lynn's story about leaving the party at 3 a.m. and says, "He was danced out, but he was definitely alive." Warrick asks why they left the dancer alone in the hotel room and Lynn -- who appears to be the spokeswoman for the group, thus confirming the dramatic cliché that she is the closest thing to a mastermind these ladies have -- babbles about how the dancer was tired, and they had already paid for the room, so why not? As she's talking, she gestures casually, and Sara notices the bruises on her wrist. Lynn again feigns shock: "Omigawd, I don't know. I was totally tipsy last night, I mean falling all over everything." While she's carrying on, both Meg the Milkmaid and their third as-yet-unnamed friend both look alarmed by Sara's keen powers of observation. Warrick informs the ladies that he'll be seeing them again; they look a lot less pleased about this than I would be if Warrick were telling me that. Then again, I'm thinking Warrick wouldn't be telling me in a professional capacity.
Reluctantly tearing myself away from my vivid fantasy life and back to the show -- Gil and Catherine are sorting through bones in the lab. It's about as exciting as you'd expect. Gil cracks, "All the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't put Humpty Dumpty together again." Catherine is not amused. Gil, fortunately, is undeterred by her sour mien and continues to put the pieces together, stopping only to throw Nicky a bone -- literally -- by tossing him the jaw and bidding him to go looking for a match in the dental society database, then moving back into investigative mode, determining that the skeleton belongs to a six-foot-tall man. Catherine, who's still not terribly amused by this whole process, notes that there's some calcification on the ribs, thus putting the man's age at sixty to seventy years. As she's speaking, Gil's peering this way and that at assorted fragments. She asks, not unkindly, "Are the bones speaking to you?" No, but they appear to be speaking to the camera, bidding it to swoop in on a close-up so that we -- and Gil -- can see the hatch marks. "This guy was chopped up! That's murder!" Catherine says. Gil raises the point that the guy could have been chopped up post-mortem; Catherine's not buying it: "A seventy-year-old man found in the mountains, with clear evidence he was chopped to pieces -- that's a homicide!"
Before Gil can make any smart remark about misreading evidence, Teri comes in and points out that they should check for hemorrhagic tissue at the tool marks to be certain. Gil's smart response to this? (Insert lovesick tone here.) "Teri!" She looks slightly taken aback and says hello; Catherine warmly thanks her for coming, then turns to Gil with a cat-ate-the-canary look and says, "I told you I called Teri, didn't I?" She goes on to ask exactly what hemorrhagic tissue is, and Gil eagerly supplies the answer: blood in the bone tissue, which indicates someone being chopped up while still alive. Teri registers her approval, then turns to go, cooing, "Maybe you two don't need me after all." Oooh, subtext! Gil hastily pleads, "I would never turn away a scientist of your caliber," which I bet he says to all the ladies, then calls Catherine outside to upbraid her for bringing in Teri without approval. Catherine calls him -- correctly -- on being a lovesick dope around Teri, then says, "Here's the deal: we're using Cliff Notes to put that skeleton back together. Teri is availing her services" -- presumably because she's as twitter-pated for Gil as he is for her -- "and you said you wanted the best, but hey, if you want me to send her away..." Gil, his dignity and sangfroid floating about him in tiny, pathetic shreds, stammers something about Catherine checking with him in the future, then dashes back to the lab to swoon over the skeleton. And Teri, who's currently correcting his work. The three minutes are an exercise in anatomy...if you know what I mean. This being CSI, and Gil being Gil, I think you do know what I mean: Teri explains the difference between wrist and ankle bones.
Meanwhile, in another part of the plot, Nicky's telling Catherine that local dentist Sid Fisher has responded to the query Nicky posted. I wonder if he's any relation to Harvey Sid Fisher, the nightclub singer whose entire act revolves around singing tuneless astrology-themed ditties with lyrics like "Talking 'bout the Taurus, talking 'bout the bully bull bull." ["And let's not forget the fish-themed classic, 'P-p-p-pisces, P-p-p-pisces.' I actually talked to Harv on the phone once, trying to get him to appear on my public-access show. Nice guy. Anyway." -- Sars] Catherine promptly shoves Nicky away from the computer terminal and clicks a few keys, reciting, "Hairline fissure of the mandibular canine...oh, God, why didn't I learn Latin?" Nicky, who's apparently schooled in the classics, tells her, "It's lower level, third from the middle." He and Catherine continue to match up the dental records' unique characteristics with the records Sid Fisher posted and conclude the jawbone belongs to one Mel Bennett, age 70.
Back at the other end of this plot, Gil is gaping at Teri -- in a purely professional capacity, I'm sure -- and saying, "An electric saw? Are you sure?" Teri, who's brandishing a femur as if it's a baton, explains: "Look at the grooves along the median condyle of the femur. They're coarse, see? A reciprocating electric saw was used on this person." God as my witness, I only understand, like, every third word in that sentence. Catherine comes in to unsubtly hammer home the point that the person who was sawed up was Mel Bennett, and Brass is rounding up the troops to go charging over to the widow Bennett's residence to see what she might know about handsaws and her husband. Gil gives Teri a melting look and says, "I've got to go." Regret oozes from his pores. It's really kind of cute. Then he turns to Nicky and says, "Nickster, time for you to get locked up in the subplot sub-basement again. So, I'm going to pretend you're going to stay here and work with Teri on the soft-tissue diagnostics." Nicky, who knows he's not going to see daylight again during this episode, glumly consents.
While this is all taking place, Warrick is conferring with David the unfun coroner; our boy Darren suffered multiple blows to the head. David decrees, "One of those blows did enough damage to cause cranial bleeding. Did any of your ladies mention having sex with this victim?" Oh, please tell me the two aren't related. Warrick says the women only copped to lap dances, and David replies, "I think the dances might have been more...intimate. Penile swab's back from the lab. Vaginal cells." Okay, the words "penile swab" don't sound comfortable. Warrick leans in and we get to see what he sees -- green eggs, no ham. Warrick share my opinion: "Looks like fried eggs." "That's because they're fresh," David tells him. I'm stopping the food metaphors right now. Warrick gives him a look, and the two establish that Darren had sex right before he died -- hey, the blow to the head and the sex are related -- and he died around midnight, not three a.m. as the girls claimed. "Someone's lying," David said, since the stunned look on Warrick's face isn't doing much to endorse his ability to make logical deductions. The camera zooms in on Warrick's troubled face...
And zooms back out on Meg the Matrimonial Milkmaid rolling her eyes and saying, "I don't mean to be snippy, but I'm going to be late to my rehearsal dinner." Chill, Meg, you're the bride. Everyone already expects you to be late to everything, and it's your dinner. What are they going to do, start without you? I was late to my own Las Vegas rehearsal dinner -- the couple in front of us in line at the county clerk had to produce a note from her legal guardian saying it was okay for her to run off and marry a forty-something guy on a school night, and it took a little time to straighten it all out -- anyway, I was late to my own rehearsal dinner and it went just fine. This, however, will not go just fine, since Meg's Bridezilla act fails to demolish either Warrick or Sara. "We have forensic proof that Darren Pyne had sex with a woman right before he died," Warrick says. Sara picks up where he left off: "And as far as we can tell, you were the last three women with him. So who's lying?" Everyone averts their eyes from everyone else; Warrick and Sara settle back to wait out the inevitable crisis of conscience. Finally, the as-yet-unnamed woman says, "I have two small children and a husband. I can't be involved in this." Lynn hisses, "Joyce!" A-ha! We have a name! "Shut up!" Smart, Lynn, trying that three feet from two astute investigators. Sara sweetly inquires as to what, exactly, Joyce should shut up about, and Lynn thinks fast. After giving Meg a quick glare, Lynn spins a new, flashback-y tale of Darren attacking her after she went back for her purse, and the sex being less than consensual. "So you were raped," Warrick replies. Lynn makes a whatever face, and Warrick, continuing to pick up cues from her, asks if Darren was alive when she left. "Unfortunately," she replies coolly. Matrimonial Meg reacts to the news that her friend was raped at her bachelorette party by petulantly asking if she can get to her rehearsal dinner. What a pal! I bet she was equally compassionate when it came to picking out bridesmaids' dresses. Sara excuses Meg and Joyce, while Warrick very gently tells Lynn that she's going to the hospital for the standard-procedure post-rape exam. She nods, clearly not enthused.
In the shadow of the strip, Brass and company walk up to a modest cottage, ring the bell, and ask for Mrs. Bennett. She responds to the news that they're the fuzz by dithering sweetly about her license plates. Gil leaps in to make the situation more awkward: "Actually, Mrs. Bennett, we're here about your husband Mel." "Oh. Well, Mel isn't here right now," she replies. I'll say he's not. Catherine whips off the sunglasses and asks, "Well, do you know where he is?" Mrs. Bennett claims he's at the store, then asks if there's a problem.
Cut to Brass carefully walking Mrs. Bennett to a waiting police cruiser and telling her she'll have to wait at the station; he's quite calm and courteous with her, which is a nice touch for his character. As she gets in the cruiser, she protests, "I haven't done anything!" Gil notes that Mrs. Bennett looks distraught. Catherine wonders, "Is that because she just found out he's dead, or because she got caught?" Gil gives her a speculative look, then the scene shifts inside. Gil is peering at the phalanx of photos lining the walls, musing, "Interesting how people catalog their lives. Fifty years of marriage on the walls." Coming from a guy with fifty species of moth on his walls, I'm not sure that's the sort of observation he should be allowed to make. Anyway, Brass surveys all the happy-couple pictures and concedes that yes, fifty years is a long time, then adds, "Maybe a few too many for the missus." Ah, that's the Brass I know and love. Catherine, who cannot let any comment about marriage drift by unremarked-upon, replies, "I don't know. These two were good with each other. It takes a bad marriage to recognize a good one." Gil watches her sigh and wander off, then the three of them segue into searching the house. Catherine and Gil are in what looks to be the guest bathroom -- how a house that small can have two full baths is beyond me, but whatever -- and she's commenting on the state of the tub; Gil's too busy poking around the medicine cabinet to pay her much attention. Reasoning that the tub is the most logical place to cut up a body -- well, it is, especially if the neighbors are going to notice you feeding parts into the backyard wood-chipper -- Catherine wedges herself into one of those typically uncomfortable positions we all assume when we're trying to scrub the tub, then swabs the drain. We are lucky enough to see a TMI-cam shot of the grease-encrusted trap. And that's not all the drain has -- there's blood in them there pipes. Brass comes in to tell everyone he's found the saw.
And yet another pig goes down in the name of science: Teri is busy playing butcher to Gil and a stripped-down Catherine (I swear, someone on that show is manufacturing reasons to get her in a tank top as often as possible), explaining, "They're the most like humans, you know." We know. Now get Sara in here; the other white meat's role in crime-solving has become something of a specialty for her. Teri looks at the grooves in the pork bone and confirms that the saw did indeed fillet Mel Bennett. She then proceeds to explain how to implicate Mrs. Bennett: "How someone operates a saw is as personal as how someone operates a pen. Now look at the femur. The skipping marks of the saw over the bone tell us whoever used this saw was unfamiliar with its use. An amateur. Someone with a weakened nature or compromised musculature." Okay, not to interrupt Teri here, but let's hope that there aren't too many people who are pros at using saws to hack people to pieces. Catherine and Gil digest this news and Catherine gloats a little, now firmly convinced of Mrs. Bennett's misdeeds.
Warrick and Sara are in a motel room together, talking through the case. It's been a while since I've gone on a tangent, so let me just remedy that: I like watching Warrick and Sara together. There. I've said it. I think their personalities -- such as they are on CSI -- are complementary, and the two actors play well off each other. They're no Frank Pembleton and Tim Bayliss, but then again, who is? Anyway, Warrick argues for the possibility that Darren was beaned with a lamp; Sara disputes this, citing the coroner's report. "Maybe the materials didn't adhere -- that doesn't mean he wasn't hit in the head with a lamp," Warrick counters. Sara's quiet a minute, crawling around the floor on her hands and knees and combing the carpet. "What are you looking for?" Warrick asks. "I dunno," she replies tiredly. "Well, if you don't know, I can't help you find it," he says. Awww. These two have come such a long way since their early, antagonistic days. As Sara meanders around the room, brushing away Mylar balloon ribbons and other twee detritus, Warrick trains his flashlight on something and asks, "What is this?" Well, ask a leading question...Sara comes over and peers: it's a tiny, sparkly white stone lying atop the bed's velvet bolster. I'll say this for recapping CSI: how many other MBTV writers get to breathlessly document people standing around big, velvet beds in hotel rooms? Anyway, Sara and Warrick photograph and pick up the little stone with tweezers, and Sara comments, "Tiniest diamond in the world." Warrick expresses his skepticism about its 4Cs, and proceeds to demonstrate by scratching the stone across a glass-topped table conveniently nearby. Warrick points out, "Diamonds cut glass; this is cheap-ass cubic zirconia." The two agree that the logical step would be to interrogate Meg the Matrimonial Milkmaid as to where the cheap-ass cubic zirconium might have come from.
Meanwhile, Mrs. Bennett is asking irritably why Brass, Catherine, and Gil are asking her questions. Because it's a police interrogation? That's just my guess. Brass points out that they're asking because someone killed Mr. Bennett, and they're trying to figure out who was strong enough to wield the electric saw to do it. Catherine compounds the questioning by adding that whoever sliced up Mr. Bennett wasn't strong enough to do so cleanly. Mrs. Bennett looks appropriately appalled: "I didn't kill Mel! I loved him!" Ah, but note how she does not say she didn't slice up his already-dead body. Brass tries to figure out more about the Bennetts' home life, asking why Mrs. Bennett didn't report her husband missing and/or dead. "We had a perfect marriage. Perfect," she insists. Gil, timeless romantic that he is, inquires, "And you failed to report him missing because..." Mrs. Bennett rears back and says, "I don't like your tone, young man!" Hee! She then calls for the lawyer; Brass smiles and asks her to sign some forms, and all the sharp-eyed folks in the room notice that Mrs. Bennett must use one hand to steady the other while trying to pick up the pen and sign the paper. Well -- you've got her on the sloppy butchering job.
Sara and Warrick are in hot pursuit of the bridal party -- Sara's crossing the bridge between the MGM Grand and the Monte Carlo and grumbling, "Every time we try to find these girls, they're somewhere else. You sure you got that address -- the desk clerk was talking very quickly." Warrick says they talk quickly in sports book. Sara turns around and asks, "What?" "Old days," he replies adamantly. As they cross the bridge -- it looks like they're heading toward the Monte Carlo, since they just passed one of the big gold lions in front of the MGM Grand, but I can't be sure -- Sara asks, "Do you think we're dressed for a wedding?" "Not my wedding," Warrick replies adamantly. Hmmmm...could Warrick have been married before? Or has he taken a good, long look at what the wardrobe department did to his coworkers this year and decided that his wedding's going to have a dress code? We'll never know. As Sara and Warrick debate the finer sartorial points of Vegas nuptials, Sara's beeper goes off: it's Lynn's test results. Sara hands over the beeper to Warrick with a disgusted look. He reads it and says, "She lied to us!" Oh, like she hasn't been doing that every time she opens her mouth. Sara apprises Warrick of this observation, and Warrick decides he's got a matrimonial milkmaid to smack down: "Let's call homicide and have them meet us there. Put this case to bed before the honeymoon." They then head toward what appears to be the Venice hotel, thus confusing the hell out of me since the Venice is further down the street. How many walkways did they travel?
Cut to a montage of police cars pulling into a chapel entrance while scenes of chapel entrances flash by. Our favorite buzz-cut detective charges in and says, "Sorry, Elvis, the wedding party has to leave the building." Milkmaid Meg turns around, horrified. The bridesmaids react poorly; Meg, who is also moronic in addition to being a matrimonial milkmaid, asks, "What's going on?" Buzz informs them that they're all coming in. Lynn doesn't look too surprised. Meg's would-be husband asks, "Murder? Is this a joke?" Ah, how sweet -- a genuine marriage of the minds. Sara jumps in, grinning, with, "The clock's going to explain it all, believe me." Moron fiancé asks, "What clock?"
We go from one thwarted consummation to another as Gil chases down Teri in the hall. She tells him (and Catherine, who's hovering on his heels) that she managed to isolate some soft tissue in the vertebra and took it down to the subplot sub-basement to keep Nicky busy. Catherine checks out Gil's pop-eyed expression of dismay and Teri's nervous shuffling and decides to help those two crazy kids along by running off to see how Nick's doing off-camera. "Well, have a safe trip," he tries. Teri replies, "I need to apologize for not returning your call last month." Gil tries to play it cool, saying, "Teri, I admire your dedication to your work." She shoots him down by telling him it wasn't work that kept her from calling. Gil tries to recover: "I-I, it was nothing, I just called to see how you were doing." Awkward silence ensues until Teri asks, "Are you still interested in how I'm doing?" "Of course," Gil replies. The two then make eyes at each other while talking about mutilated bodies in the Everglades. The camera's pulling in really tightly on both of them, which is kind of annoying, even if it does afford us the opportunity to count the pores on the actors' faces. Anyway, Teri says she must be going, and Gil asks plaintively, "Do you have to go?" Awww. He stumbles and recovers, asking her out for dinner. "I think the bodies will keep," she replies.
Hey! It's Nicky! He's showing Catherine the blood-free tissue, saying, "It tells us blood was not pumping through Mel Bennett's veins when he was cut up --" "Which means he was already dead. So what does that leave us?" Catherine asks. Gil, who has apparently teleported into that scene after his tête-à-tête with Teri, burbles, "A spectrum of possibilities! The universe!" Catherine's rooting for the black-widow hypothesis. Nicky just grins mutely, having exceeded both his dialogue and screen-time quotas for the episode.
In the scene, Mrs. Bennett's attack lawyer is being all snide about Gil's work on discovering that Mel Bennett was dead before he was diced. "So she admits to taking an electric saw to her husband?" Catherine asks. "After he was dead, yes. As you know, in Nevada, there's no law against cutting up a dead body," the attack lawyer says. Gil asks, "Does your client care to tell us how her husband came to be dead?" The attack lawyer begins spinning a story, and Mrs. Bennett looks progressively sicker; she finally blurts out that she wants to tell the whole truth. "I couldn't afford the burial, so I got the saw and cut him into manageable pieces," she says. Oh, that doesn't sound very truthful to me. Gil and Catherine are digesting this idea when Brass comes in and reveals that, hey, Mrs. Bennett never reported Mr. Bennett's death, so she was still signing for his Social Security benefits. The lawyer is apparently blind-sided by this revelation. Gil and Catherine frighten Mrs. Bennett by pointing out that her actions constitute both fraud and motive, but the attack lawyer correctly points out that there's still no evidence of murder, then collects her client.
Gil and Catherine are then conferencing about the case as they walk through the food court in New York, New York; I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess this is one of those episodes where they did a lot of location work. Catherine says around a mouthful of food, "Typical Vegas wife. Offs her old man for the money and there's nothing we can do about it." Gil tells her that they're going back to the bones for clues. Cue the Science Montage.
And we see Liam the lab tech, doing an assay on the contents of the fragments of skeletal muscle Gil and Catherine scrape up. "Bioassay!" he says enthusiastically at Catherine, then admits, "I like saying that word: 'bioassay'! Sounds Nubian. So how are you?" God, does he have it bad. First Sara, now Catherine; doesn't he meet any women outside the office? "Never better," Catherine says, playing along. "Yeah, well, you look good," Liam manages. "I try," she modestly replies. Liam then tries to lead the topic of conversation around to Teri, but Catherine's not going there. Fortunately, he's saved by the bell -- the bioassay bell. Apparently, they've found something called digoxin. Cut to Gil pacing around his mood-lighting-intense office, noting that a little digoxin goes a long way in treating heart failure. Mel Bennett apparently took a lot of digoxin; it's now a question of how. Gil is talking to the widow Bennett in her house; after Catherine sweetly inquires, "Did you kill him for his pension checks?" Mrs. Bennett tells all. According to her, Mel extracted a promise from her to hide his body so she wouldn't lose Social Security benefits, then killed himself. He sounds like an idiot -- widows tend to keep at least partial benefits in most cases -- and why would he condemn his wife to disposing of his body if he loved her that much? Anyway, she claims Mel killed himself in the tub, and then she disposed of the body. I personally think that whoever came up with the "resolution" to this plot disposed of their common sense some 25 minutes ago. She gives a moving little speech about the sum total of their lives together and how heartbreaking this has been for her. Outside, Gil, Brass, and Catherine briefly debate whether or not she's lying. Since the evidence is no help, they release her, and all we have left to wrap up is the wedding subplot and Gil's dinner with Teri.
And we're on to the wedding party, where Sara is enthusiastically saying, "Ladies of the wedding party, you get a free course in the forensics of sexual intercourse!" Man, she must have been victimized by a bad bridesmaid dress in her past. She then goes on to explain the clock: "This is the vagina, and it does tell a monologue..." Cut to Buzz, looking all sorts of uncomfortable. After drawing a diagram of the cervix and ticking off clock positions, Sara continues, "Some bruising is normal during sex. Injuries at eleven, twelve or one o'clock indicate consensual sex, or what we call 'avid.' Injuries around the dinner hour -- five, six or seven -- indicate forced entry. The woman hasn't done anything to help her partner, thus sustaining serious bruising." This is the point where Buzz flees. The bride -- whose slouch does nothing for her chee-zee rent-a-dress and veil -- looks irritated, and Lynn looks dismayed. Sara then embarrasses Lynn by pointing out that not only did her exam show no evidence of sex in the last 48 hours, it's apparently been months. Joyce snickers into her hand. Sara then points out that Darren did have sex, and asks Meg and Joyce if they have something they'd like to share. "The clock is going to tell us what happened," she points out.
Milkmaid Meg spills all: she had sex with Darren. "I thought, I'm in Vegas, it doesn't really count." "Hey, honey," I call to my husband, "Since we got married in Vegas, does this mean it doesn't really count?" He doesn't deign to reply. Cue the flashback of Meg getting a private dance, and then she spins a story about how she suddenly saw her engagement ring, hit Darren with a lamp, and that was that. Warrick's not buying it, and manages to get Meg to reveal that Luke has a cubic zirconium promise ring. Cut to Warrick talking to the unhappy couple; he asks to see Luke's ring, immediately homes in on the missing cubic zirconium, and finally gets the details we've all been waiting for: Luke walked in on Meg and Darren, and reacted poorly. Meg offers what has to be the lamest line in any troubled relationship: "I'm sorry." Luke appeals to Sara and Warrick: "We were just hoping to get married and put it all behind us." Warrick, however, is having none of it; he puts the ring on the table and says, "Laws don't end when you come to Vegas." Cut to the unhappy couple being driven away in a police cruiser, all grim-parody-like.
Meanwhile, as a dramatic contrast, Gil and Teri are enjoying a romantic dinner; she's looking quite fetching in a 1940s-moll kind of way, and he looks...like himself. He says, "I'm surprised. I'm having a good time." Teri coos, "Were you expecting a bad time?" "I just thought we might be uncomfortable away from work," Gil fumbles. They establish that they're not uncomfortable, and just as things are about to get interesting, Gil gets a call on the cell -- which he ignores -- and then a page on his beeper. He finally addresses the caller, gives some instructions on how to deal with a bug-riddled corpse, and turns back to the table to discover that Teri's smart enough to escape from a date with someone who doesn't have the sense to turn off his phone or page before sitting down. Aww. Poor Gil. Better luck time!