Cut to a uniformed cop wading into the now bystander-free pool and fishing the dead woman out, taking care to jostle her neck and spine as much as possible. Well, if she weren't dead before, she'd be a goner now. Gil conveniently arrives on the scene where Brass and Evil Ike have been conferring. After complimenting Evil Ike on his tux, Gil gives us a little exposition: "To know this town is to know its celebrities. [The woman who owns the house] was a showgirl in her day. But that's not her." "Maybe thirty years ago when she was headlining at the Lido de Paris," Brass replies. The two men then grump about having to interrogate a few dozen society snobs to figure out who found the floater, and Gil sighs, "Come for the hors d'oeuvres, stay for the interrogation." Okay, so it's not his best line.
After the credits, we're back at stately Richmond manor, and Gil's walking toward the driveway where the CSImobile is parked. Warrick, Nicky, and Catherine get out. Gil notes that the house is huge, the witnesses are plentiful, and the most shrewd strategy is to divide and conquer. I cheer, since I am an ardent proponent of having the entire team work on different facets of one case. Nicky gets sent to do a general sketch of the crime scene -- something that, on most nights, translates into "Nicky gets locked in the subterranean basement known as 'Plotline C'" -- and Warrick and Catherine are to suss out the pool area. After Catherine calls the shallow end of the pool, Warrick mutters, "I'm in deep." Oooh, that's all metaphorical and stuff.
Cut to Catherine wandering around the pool, surveying it for anything that looks out of place. Warrick is snapping photos when he espies something glittering at the bottom of the deep end. Nicky is sketching the landscaping around the house; when he comes to a pond filled with ornamental fish, he muses, "I wonder how much it costs to feed all these fish?" Gil gives him an exasperated look and trains his maglite on Nicky's pad. "Right," Nicky gulps, and goes back to making a line drawing of the crime scene. Back on Catherine's patrol, she happens to notice a bright red piece of fingernail lodged in the flawlessly manicured grass. She picks it up and gives it the patented CSI Stare of Great Scrutiny.
While all this is going on, CBS proves it's been analyzing its viewer demographics and has decided that that demographic wants beefcake. Cue Warrick stripping to the waist before plunging into the pool to retrieve the glittery thing. Man, oh, man -- first Nicky with the whole dead-hooker plotline, now Warrick taking a swim for forensic science. I'm looking forward to seeing what further plot permutations will unfold as the CBS suits continue to treat George Eads and Gary Dourdan as so much eye candy. Can't you just imagine the calls back and forth between the set and the CBS headquarters? "It's Mel again: he wants to know if we can write an episode during sweeps where Warrick and Nick have to go undercover as resort lifeguards." But I digress, and while the night is young now, it will not be if I keep this up. Anyway, Warrick gamely dives in, swims over to the cufflink -- which is the only thing on the bottom of that pool, something I have a hard time believing given that I lifeguarded for eight years and can, with some authority, state that the more leafy matter is around the pool deck, the more detritus floats about the pool and clogs the filters. As he surfaces, Nicky calls, "Marco!" "Polo," Warrick replies. I flash back to interminable afternoons spent listening to the dulcet tones of little children as they played that game, if by "dulcet," you mean "calibrated at a pitch that reverberates inside your skull, increasing in frequency and force until you're forced to relieve the pressure by screaming at them to stop, just stop, for the love of God!" Nicky continues his jovial lifeguard riff, and the CSIs gather around their dripping-wet colleague to ogle...the cufflink. It's turquoise and silver, with the initials "CM." Catherine notes that the make pegs the wearer as hailing from the American Southwest. After tossing some desultory praise in Warrick's general direction, the dry CSIs disperse, leaving Warrick to shiver ruefully.
Cut to Gil entering the morgue. He ribs David the unfun coroner about "detecting a bitter alkaloid" -- it turns out David's bought himself a industry-quality gourmet coffee maker, courtesy of the city, and he quips, "When the coroner asks for something, they don't question it." The two men have an International Coffees moment, then get down to business: the body in question has had submalar augmentation (cheekbone work), rhinoplasty, and breast implants. Gil offhandedly remarks that they can just run an ID on the serial number in her implants and get her name. Eeeuw! Eeeeeeeeeuuuuuuuuuuw! My God! That's creepy. What's ? A GPS locator permitting Hugh Hefner to track the breastally augmented by region? While I'm getting all squicked out over the idea of a police state monitored by breast men, Gil and David are going over what actually killed implant # -670b. She was strangled, something we see courtesy of the TMIcam, which is truly going places -- like a crushed trachea -- never before shown during prime time. Gil says, "Strangling's a man's crime." That's probably correct from a statistical point of view, but from a TV-plot POV, that's kind of ruining the surprise ending here, Gil. Anyway, David concurs, the better to give us all the idea that only men crush windpipes so we'll all be surprised later on if that's not the case. As Gil goes to leave, David plucks the coffee cup out of his hand and notes, "This will be our little secret." Gil nods and gives him an unexpectedly intense look. One interesting note about the whole scene: David the coroner is now sporting a Kerry Weaver-style crutch. I wonder if this little accessory will go as unexplained on this show as it has on ER.
Warrick is changing into dry togs when his ungrateful coworker Catherine tells him he's on a 419 (a death) at the glass elevator downtown. For the Vegas Virgins among us: that elevator is on an L-shaped walkway connecting three casinos: the MGM Grand, the Tropicana and the Excalibur (huzzah!). I highly recommend staying at the Trop; you get a room in the towers, you get mirrors on the ceiling. Who wouldn't want that? ["Another recommendation: avoid the Excalibur like the plague. Seriously." -- Sars] Anyway, Warrick protests being taken off the big case and Catherine tells him to suck it up. He calls her on it, saying, "Whatever happened to, 'you cross the tape, you go the distance.'" Catherine replies, "I was probably saying it to get you to service my needs at the time." I guess that Child Protective Services Investigation is getting awfully lonely and wants a Sexual Harassment Investigation to keep it company. Either that, or this is an attempt at character development and we're supposed to think that Catherine's one sultry little science kitten. Anyway, Warrick looks dismayed. As well he should: he took the bullet this week on Beefcake Patrol and it's him, not Nicky, getting sent to subplot hell. Catherine flits off to ruin Sara's night via cell phone.
Brass has been exercising his people skills on the assorted society guests. I imagine the exercise was mutually delightful. He comes over to talk to Gil and Catherine and perform his role as Captain Exposition: most of the guests plead ignorance as to how a surgically enhanced young woman came to be floating in a pool, and the home-owner, Portia Richmond, is conveniently out of town. "She's been romancing some young stallion," Brass says, and I begin shouting Margaret Lesher's name again. Her tacky younger husband actually used to ride buffalo, and kept a stuffed one in his living room. Anyway, Gil, Catherine, and Brass walk over to see the tonsil-sucking couple what hosted the deadly shindig, a Mr. and Mrs. Patrick and Amanda Haynes. Apparently they met Portia at the Murado, a private club in the Mediterranean with a membership fee of $50,000 -- "but worth every penny," Patrick says -- and hit it off instantly. "Have you ever met someone and felt like you've known them all your life?" Amanda coos and Gil answers honestly, "No." She looks rattled for a moment, but the two continue their well-rehearsed patter -- they hit it off with Portia, she took them under her wing socially, and they're repaying her by hosting the charity event. "We know how to throw a party," Patrick says, in a tone that implies Gil and company would sooner use fish spoons to scalp their foes than they would be able to conduct themselves at one of his wingdings. Brass isn't biting, and grunts, "You can say that again." The two smoothly disavow any knowledge of the dead body, then look startled when Gil informs them that yes, corpses do indeed constitute something of an inconvenient situation.
Cut to an exterior shot of the Rio, then a backstage where some gruff manager type is saying, "Lacey Duvall murdered?" Ah, we've got our floater. Catherine asks if Lacey had any intimates in the chorus line; the manager directs her to one Rachel Carson. Gil misses the opportunity to make a crack about the young miss penning a sequel to Silent Spring between dance numbers, possibly because he looks as though he's slipped into catatonia. I'm guessing he's only comfortable with nudity when the bodies in question are inert. Catherine sits down with Rachel, and we discover that Lacey was involved with someone, but she was deliberately fuzzy on the details and the guy wouldn't give her any personal information. Catherine comments on how the mystery and the sex can be exciting; the unspoken implication seems to be if you're young, and a nitwit. While she's bonding with Rachel, Gil is poking around Lacey's dressing-room table. He whips out a pair of latex gloves and prepares to examine the contents further when a showgirl ambushes him. "Hi!" she chirps and Gil straightens up, eyes growing larger while evidence of all higher thought diminishes in proportion. "Do you need a hand?" Gil tells her breasts, "No thanks, I'll be fine." "Are you a doctor?" she asks playfully. "Of sorts. I'm just looking around," Gil hedges, still searching for evidence that her implant numbers might be visible through her epidermis. "See anything you like?" the showgirl simpers, and Gil replies in the affirmative before sitting down with a music box. The showgirl rolls her eyes and huffs off. Gil opens the music box -- which begins playing Tchaikovsky's "Waltz of the Flowers" -- and notes the brass plaque on the bottom, which reads, "To my beloved Portia, your husband B, March 7, 1969." Gil hails Catherine and, after she rightfully inquires about his weirdly ecstatic grin, he replies, "It's playing our song."
Down in subplot hell, Warrick's examining what looks to be Walter Mitty's body. After noting that the Mob has become somewhat country-western in the message they send to the public -- as demonstrated by the quaint habit of wedging a quarter in the bullet wound a la that old classic, "Here's a Quarter, Call Someone Who Cares" -- he weighs in on the verdict: professional hit (which we see in flashback, and which looks like eight million other hits taking place in countless Vegas shows and movies). And then he reveals how much his life sucks tonight: he has to print the entire elevator in the name of protocol. "It's like a circle bar on a Friday night -- three million people on top of each other," Gil says.
Gil and Catherine are mulling over what it would mean for Lacey Duvall to have a music box belonging to the as-yet-unseen Portia Richmond. Gil notes the date, and muses that it has to signify something to Portia. Catherine counters that it was probably an anniversary of some sort, noting that her ex used to give her a lace teddy on the anniversary of their first meeting. Gil handles this revelation with the same sanguinity he displayed around the showgirls, then recovers, noting, "Music box, lace teddy, it's all the same thing -- tradition. And the joy of tradition is in the constant repetition."
Cut to Sara and Nicky walking down the hall. Sara's complaining vociferously about her profound sleep deprivation. Girlfriend, you're playing my song, and at about the same volume and tempo as I do. Nicky's amused by this. He shouldn't be: when you're that overtired, the urge to kill is amplified, as is the ingenuity born of desperation. He could end up suffocating on his own mock turtleneck. Anyway, they head to the lab, where Liam the Lab Tech -- who is now sporting a haircut that makes him look nothing like Liam Gallagher, thus permanently deflating my self-indulgent little fantasy that the notoriously high-profile Oasis band member was slumming in between tabloid appearances by running enzyme analyses for a crime lab in Las Vegas -- anyway, Liam is spinning around the lab to what sounds like a cover of Hole's "Violet." "You're awake. I hate you," Sara declares. This is when I decide that Sara and I are probably related. Liam beams the beam of the well-rested and shares his tale of dormant largesse. Sara reiterates her acute hatred and Nicky tries desperately to grab her attention for himself, pleading for pity by saying, "I've got Sunshine here all night." Both parties ignore him; Sara requests a battery of tests on the evidence collected off Lacey's person, and when Liam inquires about who will be authorizing his planned overtime, Sara snarls, "Suck it up, Greg. You're well-rested." As Sara stalks off, Nicky flashes Liam a rueful smile; Liam replies, "You want a Valium for her?" "I heard that!" Sara calls off-screen, and Nicky departs before seeing if perhaps that kind offer of drugs, sweet soothing drugs, can be extended to him instead.
Catherine and Gil are over at stately Richmond Manor, jimmying open glass cabinets and checking Portia's music box collection. As they're confirming that yes, March 7 was a special date for Portia and her husband, they hear a noise upstairs. Actually, they hear a raucous, rhythmic thumping. After confirming that the crime seal on the door has not been broken, the two CSIs go upstairs and toward a closed door where, in addition to the thumping, sounds of panting and moaning are now audible as well. Gil knocks loudly on the door, shouting, "Las Vegas Police Department." The noise increases in intensity, and as Gil pushes the door open, we see Patrick and Amanda having extremely photogenic-looking sex. Gil hastily backs down. "Caught. In the act," Catherine snips. "I think that was the point," Gil says. "Oh, yeah," she replies, and the two head downstairs to await the curtain call.
Sara is complaining that she can't possibly handle drinking another cup of coffee. She wants a steak and a shot. Nicky offers her $1.99 steak and eggs at Tut's Tomb, and Sara's so addled with exhaustion, she takes him up on it. Then Liam bursts through the door, burbling, "You're not going to believe this! It's what I live for!" Sara's visions of Grade-D beef and rubbery eggs over hard dissolve, and she demands that Nick reinstate the coffee offer. As she's slurping, Liam reveals that the rape kit yielded fruit, as it were, by turning up semen that matches the DNA on a ten-year-old case in Texas. He's positively buoyant with glee over finding such evidence, and Nicky beams, "Two for one!" Liam makes an inarticulate grunt and sprints out the door in a fit of gaiety. This is an unprecedented amount of Liam screen time; I wonder if the writers are setting him up to be a regular year.
Gil's on the phone with Evil Ike, trying to placate him, when Brass lets himself in. How much do I love that they're setting Brass on the performance-art fornicators? He's really grown on me, I tell you. The two parties in question come downstairs in the kind of satin robes you see those couples wearing in the "watch our videotapes and find out how to have better sex" ads in the back of magazines; Amanda looks weirdly triumphant. As Patrick wanders over to the bar to get him and Amanda drinks -- gotta replace that electrolyte balance, you know -- Brass begins asking a few more questions as to where Portia Richmond might be, how one might get a hold of her, and when one might expect her back. The couple is extremely elusive in their answers. Gil is paying them no attention; his attention is trained on Amanda as she sips her mineral water through a straw. Not only are her shiny red fingernails of the other night now trimmed down to neutral stubs, but she's fondling the straw like there's no tomorrow. Gil stares at Amanda long enough to unnerve her. When she asks what he's looking at, he guilelessly asks, "May I have your straw? I...I collect them." Amanda is amused by this, and apparently ignorant of the abundance of physical evidence she's left all over the straw. Brass and Catherine, however, are not, and exchange wry looks while Amanda hands over the straw.
Gil and Catherine head into Portia's bedroom -- where Patrick and Amanda were taking their afternoon exercise -- and note that Portia's possessions will tell whether or not she's really gone. After a few minutes in Portia's spacious closet, Catherine muses, "We've got a bathing suit, lingerie, jewels, wallet, bags -- I'm not so sure she's gone anywhere." This cues Gil and Catherine's searching the room top to bottom for evidence. I love these montages because they give me a respite from the play-by-play duties. As Catherine's going through the closet, Gil wanders over to the fireplace; it's something out of Architectural Digest, a sleek column of stone and wire mesh in the center of the room. As Gil peers into the hearth -- which is covered in fine, polished gravel -- he notices a human tooth among the stones. He whips out a pair of tweezers and pockets the tooth. "I guess we now have two cases: we have a body without a murderer, and a murder without a body," Catherine replies.
Liam's back on-screen, this time fending off the requests of Gil and Catherine to match the tooth to Portia Richmond, stat. He claims he has nothing to compare the tooth to, and when Catherine coos, "How about the toothbrush and the hairbrush we took from her vanity?" he counters, "Ask the dead-end twins over there." Gil and Catherine head over to the brushes in question, and it's like something out of Gattaca: both implements are absolutely sterile. "If you want to know if it's Portia, you've got to get the DNA somewhere," Liam says solemnly.
Cut to Catherine and Brass walking though the Liberace museum with an elderly guide: as florid piano music twinkles in the background, everyone's squinting to deflect the glare of a couple million bugle beads and sequins. The guide -- who is possessed of a dignified comportment that's quite touching -- tells Catherine about the shows in the 1950s, waxing rhapsodic about the attention to detail in showgirl costumes and Las Vegas's civic identity as a town that perpetually invented itself from whole cloth. As he's talking, the CSIs are looking for showgirl costumes; they finally find one that Portia wore. The headdress is incredibly big and heavy, and the tour guide notes that the toll of wearing it on her head for two shows a night, fastened with over 15 kinds of combs, epoxies and glues, caused Portia to lose all her hair. Well, that explains the hairbrush. As Catherine peers closer, she notices a lot of long blonde hairs tangled among the headdress's mesh cap and combs. "DNA heaven," she breathes.
Over in subplot exile, Warrick's going through his victim's possessions. Long story short: there are a lot of casino markers in there, and Warrick's rattled to realize the guy was a hard-core gambler. There but for the grace, blah de blah. Whatever -- I'm just irked that the poor guy strips for the case and still gets booted to the basement.
Nicky is slicing open a FedEx box while Sara peers at a computer screen. While he's grappling with the Tab-A/Slot-B dilemma, she's noting that Patrick Haynes' Social Security number matches that of a eight-month-old infant that died ten years ago. Nicky, meanwhile, has finally wrestled open the box and is waving around a sheaf of papers that he promises Sara will like.
As va-va-voom music plays, Liam high-kicks into the hall, clad in his usual lab ensemble and Portia's headdress. As he finishes his number with a flourish, Catherine comes up to him and acidly inquires, "You wanna get that thing off your head, Greg? It's evidence." Liam tells her, "Cool your jets, Catherine. I got all the evidence out of it. Now, it's all woman…" He flips the beads off his shoulders with a flirtatious wave, and asks, "Did you ever wear one of these when you danced?" O-ho, Liam's got a crush on Catherine. She doesn't help matters by leaning forward and purring, "I wore nothing but skin." Liam moans audibly. Gil chooses that moment to sneak up on Liam and clear his throat, staring in disbelief. Liam hastily removes the headdress and pushes it behind his back, gulping that he's matched up the DNA from the tooth to the DNA in the hair follicles and he thinks they may have a homicide. "Excuse me," he finishes, then marches hastily back into the lab, headdress held stiffly behind him. Gil gives Catherine his Huh? face, and she looks extremely bemused.
Cut to Warrick. Subplot hell. Brain cells opting to commit suicide in self-defense instead of finding riveting way to string dead-end evidence in dead-end case together.
The three senior CSIs are at some swanky restaurant, watching Patrick and Amanda eat. As they prepare to leave, Amanda gets up, lays her coat over a chair at the table -- one that happens to already have a much nicer coat on it -- then kisses Patrick before picking up the two coats. It's official: they're grifters. As the couple leaves the restaurant, Gil leans into their path, notes their fading smiles, and grins himself, quipping, "Hi! May we check your coats?" Amanda looks especially perturbed.
Patrick is now in the interrogation room, where Brass is inquiring as to whether the Hayneses are merely kleptos, or perhaps murderers too. Gil steps in and tells Patrick that he ran a rape kit on Lacey and found semen. With only a little prodding, Patrick cops to having an extramarital affair with Lacey, but claims it was only about great sex. When Catherine asks about Portia's music box in Lacey's dressing area, Patrick vigorously denies ever giving it to her, alleging that Lacey must have stolen it on one of her assignations with Patrick. Gil asks why Patrick thinks that. "Human nature," Patrick smarms. "We always covet what we can't have." This is Gil's cue to step in and press his point toward confession: "What did you covet from Portia Richmond?" Just as Patrick seems about to answer, Nicky bursts into the room, blowing the mood and permitting Patrick a few extra moments to fabricate his story. Gil charges out into the hall and slaps Nicky down, saying angrily, "Are you looking for work? The sign says 'Do not enter,' Nick. You can't read anymore? You're blind? What?" Nick replies that he's got something he thinks Gil will need, but Gil just plows over him: "This is important, Nick! Sometimes in an interrogation, you get one chance, one answer, and while I'm out here screwing around with you, he's in there thinking up an answer that he didn't have before you walked in!" Nicky's got his pouty face on; he tells Gil that the DNA from the Duvall case matches the decade-old case in Texas, and the Texan suspect was one Chad Matthews -- which fits into the CM on the cufflinks. "Okay, I'm starting to forgive you," Gil says. Nicky fills Gil in on the SSN scam, and Gil notes with glee that Patrick Haynes, neé Chad Matthews, just ran into them.
Speaking of running into, Gil and Evil Ike run into each other at the MGM lobby and have an informal confab. Gil apprises him of the revelation that Patrick Haynes is actually Chad Matthews, and may be responsible for the death of Portia Richmond -- if they can find the rest of her body. Evil Ike stresses the importance of ascertaining that they'll find Portia dead, not alive. Gil counters, "Evidence is like fine wine, Brian. You can't just open the bottle and drink it. You've got to let it breathe." Evil Ike isn't down with the oenophilic imagery and commands Gil to solve the Portia Problem ASAP.
Gil swings back by the CSI lab, where Brass is bending over a microscope. After a brief exchange over what a pain in the ass Evil Ike is, they discover that Chad Matthews is also five other people, and he stalks rich widows for cash. He apparently kept a journal compiling statistics on these women -- height, weight, cash reserve -- leading me to wonder why his criminal mastermind didn't think of perhaps keeping this as an easily-renamed, easily-erased Excel spreadsheet.
Nicky, Catherine, and Sara are sorting through a mound of paper evidence, looking for clues as to Portia's recent activity or lack thereof. Catherine notes that Portia's had no activity on her credit cards, which sparks a debate as to whether or not men actually still foot the bill on dates. Sara, surprisingly enough, is all for the guy paying; Nicky counters that he goes dutch if a girl asks the wrong question. For the record, that wrong question is: what kind of car do you drive? Sara says defensively that it's a perfectly reasonable question. Nicky begs to differ, arguing that it's a sign that a woman is sussing out a man's economic viability and his willingness to support her. Catherine referees this Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus argument by noting that Portia's cancelled checks are yielding proof of forgery. She explains: in order to forge someone's signature, you need to be able to replicate the pattern of loops and whirls. The easiest way to do that is to take a sample of the signature, lay it on top of a sheet of paper, then prick a pin in all the distinct segments of the signature. The second paper provides what amounts to a connect-the-dots template, and the forger can use that as a frame for fraudulent signatures.
Warrick. Subplot. Lack of evidence. Lack of interest. Oh, the perils of gambling. Oh, the possibility that perhaps he has an addiction. Here's a quarter, call Brandon Walsh. !
Brass, Catherine, Nicky, and Sara are at a restaurant, having lunch while the camera pans in RotatoVision around them all. As they chatter about motive, Gil goes to Portia's and peers in the landscaped pool where Nicky had been pondering the price of fish food fifty minutes earlier. A gardener yells, "Hey! You might want to take your face away from there!" As Gil asks patronizingly, "Really? Why is that?" a piranha lunges for his nose.
Cut to Sara mowing down on some sea bass while outlining the basics of the case: a wealthy, missing widow; a tooth found in her own bedroom; "her bedroom occupied by two moes --" "Moes," Brass interrupts, and continues, "I'm rubbing off on you." "No, you're not! And stay away from my sea bass!" As the CSIs continue eating seafood and recapping the past fifty-odd minutes for the viewers at home, Gil barrels into the coroner's office. He checks over the photos of Lacey's neck and notes that one of the finger marks is less vivid than the others, implying a broken fingernail. So much for that "strangling is a man's crime" hypothesis.
Meanwhile, the lunch bunch is outlining Patrick's scene for those of us too dim to have figured it out ourselves: he skipped after the rape charge, and tends to bop around the country, committing sexual assault and stalking rich widows. Apparently the reward was worth the risk; the only thing nobody at the table can get is why he killed Lacey. They're also struggling with the check; Nicky conducts an impromptu analysis on who's eaten what and what they owe on the tab.
Cut to Gil hectoring Liam -- in his unprecedented fifth scene for an episode -- for the fingernail evidence. After warning Gil that the DNA on the fingernail doesn't match Patrick Haynes, and getting waved off, Liam continues, "But here's where you bust out the can of creep repellent. The fingernail and the semen have fifty percent of their DNA markers in common." "Possible first-degree relative?" Gil gasps. Liam nods in a daze, clearly recalling all those V.C. Andrews books he probably read on the back of the school bus in sixth grade. Gil then whips out Amanda's straw and asks Liam to swab and test it.
Patrick and Brass are playing a little game of cat-and-mouse. Brass tells him that in the state of Nevada, he's been cleared of charges -- but he's being held for extradition to Texas. Gil enters the room, carrying a covered jar; Amanda enters a few moments later. "Now I see it," Gil muses. "See what?" Patrick counters, still stinging from the fact that Brass refuses to believe that he's merely a con artist and a rapist, not a killer. "The family resemblance," Gil continues. "Brother and sister. Donny and Marie." Catherine, remembering that the show Amanda and Patrick put on was nothing like the Donny and Marie hour, looks a little ill. Amanda looks a little loosely wrapped; Patrick, somewhat panicky. Gil then drops another little bombshell: Amanda killed Lacey. We flash back to that scene, where Lacey's taunting Amanda with cries of "no more faking love," before Amanda counters, "it's as real as it gets," and kills Lacey. Patrick stands up and asks Amanda, horrified, "You killed Lacey because I told her about us?" The hair on the back of everyone's necks stands up as they watch this brother/sister/husband/wife thing unfold. Catherine interrupts, asking if the two of them could put the psychodrama on hold and fill us all in on what happened to Portia. This is Gil's cue to dramatically reveal the contents of the jar -- a piranha with high cholesterol, the kind that comes from eating people.
So: case solved. The brother/sister duo killed Portia and fed her to her ornamental fish. Someone should tell Nicky about that cost-cutting tip for the fish-food budget.
Cut to Warrick handing over the casino markers to the pit boss and telling him the guy with the IOUs is dead. Their hard-boiled conversation is interrupted by a slot jockey screaming frantically over winning the jackpot. As gaspy complaint rock plays, Warrick wanders to the center of the casino floor and watches everyone feeding money into the machines, losing it at the tables, and generally getting sucked into the casino's money-sucking maw. As he watches this, all the gambling comments made about him over the fourteen episodes echo in his head and he finally comes to the conclusion that he might could have a gambling problem.
time: It's all Sidle, all the time as Sara gets righteously wrathful pursuing a rapist.