Too Tough To Die

Hey everyone, it's the fabulous MGM Grand Hotel and Casino! How else are we to know we're in Vegas? Other atmospheric shots take place establishing that CSI has not stealthily switched locations in the interval between last week and this one. We see a shot of McCarran Airport in the rain, then the camera settles on a near-deserted parking garage. The elevator opens and we see a soigne young woman get out and begin walking to her car on the far side of the garage; the security guards don't notice her at all because they're gathered around a basketball game showing on TV. The woman crosses the deserted garage, disarms her car alarm, and prepares to open the door. Then every woman's worst nightmare happens: a man attacks her from behind, pushes her up against the car at gunpoint, and carjacks her.

Cut to a car winding through a deserted road outside Las Vegas; it's still raining, so presumably this is the same night. The camera switches to the woman from the shot: her suit jacket is gone, her pants are crumpled around her hips, and her blouse is ripped open. The car pulls over, and the occupants leap out to verify that yes, that is a human body by the side of the road.

Cue a battalion of crime-fighting vehicles speeding over to the crime scene. Sara, Gil, and Nicky get out. "Fulfill your contractual obligation as Captain Exposition," Sara orders, and Brass complies: the victim is young, well-dressed, black (or African-American; pick your ethnic designation of choice), and being taken to Cedar Palms Hospital after being shot in the head a few times at point-blank range. Gil orders Sara to go to the hospital with a sexual-assault kit and do a complete workup on the Jane Doe. Sara protests that she'd rather be shuffling through mud with Gil and Nicky, the better to provide one or both of them with another tedious opportunity to clumsily hit on her, but Gil nips that plot disaster in the bud and tells Sara to get the evidence before those clods in the ER do away with it. "Walk in the park, guys," Sara replies bitterly, leaving me to wonder if perhaps she has personal issues about working with sexual assault victims. The boys resume analyzing the scene; Nicky notes the profusion of footprints and wonders aloud how this happened. "Locard's Principle," Gil counsels, continuing, "He took a piece of her with him, and left a piece of himself here. We get to find it."

We get to ponder exactly what Gil means throughout the credits. Well, those of us who are not married to people screaming alternate lyrics about Gary Dourdan's hair as the credits roll get to ponder.

Back at CSI Central, Gil, Catherine, and Warrick are humping a series of file boxes through the halls. Have they been fired? No -- these are boxes of evidence for a murder case. A guy named McCall shot and killed his neighbor over a motorcycle; the DA assigned to the case can't make heads or tails of the evidence. Catherine testily inquires as to why the CSI assigned to the case can't make heads or tails of it either, and Gil tells her that the CSI in question -- one of Ecklie's merry men, by the name of Franovich -- conveniently quit the day before, citing burnout. Warrick responds by looking beleaguered. It's only 9:09; I shudder to imagine what he'll be doing by 9:51 tonight. Gil continues to bear glad tidings: it's a murder one case that's changed hands so many times, the DA can't make heads or tails of the case as a whole, and the trial's preliminary hearing is in four days. Catherine snits about pressure; Warrick kicks up the suffering a notch and stares at the boxes before him miserably. Gil then asks Catherine to step outside, and Warrick's expression shifts from acute pathos to intrigued-yet-baleful.

Gil's telling Catherine that the bank called. Apparently, her former husband Eddie -- whom avid recap readers will remember as the duplicitous, pancake-making bastard who slapped her with a Child Services investigation -- has taken out a second mortgage on the house he still jointly owns with Catherine, and the bank called to verify that Catherine was gainfully employed. Gil reminds Catherine that the bank's within its rights to grant the mortgage, since Catherine and Eddie are not yet divorced and the house is still tied up in the marriage. "We didn't want to sell it until the market went back up, and then we were going to split the profits on the house," Catherine spits, clearly livid with herself for not getting out while the getting was good and furious with Eddie for putting her investment in jeopardy. I do wonder: she lives in Las Vegas, where getting married and getting divorced are, like, twenty-minute processes. What's taking so long? God knows it only took thirty minutes for me to get my marriage license there, and that was on a Friday night with a holdup in the line when the guy in front of me had to have his bride-to-be produce a note from her legal guardian stating that it was okay for her to get married while still a junior in high school. How long can it take to get a divorce? Anyway -- Catherine and Eddie are still not divorced, so he can do whatever he pleases with the house.

Cut to Sara heading into the hospital room. The detective at the door drops a little more exposition: there's still no ID on the woman, and she's got two bullets in her brain which cannot be removed without surgery. Sara does a head-to-toe sweep of the Jane Doe, noting that she's married. After taking the woman's hand, Sara says, "She's warm." "Feels different, huh?" the detective lobs back, and Sara looks dismayed. She prepares to do the sexual-assault kit and tells the detective she wants him to leave: "We're going to need a little privacy here." The strings kick in, the light gets a quality I can only describe as Zwick-Herskovitzian, and we settle in for some character development vis a vis sexual assault examination. After a montage showing Sara doing a fairly thorough head-to-toe, the action slows again, and we see Sara positioning the woman's legs, then fetching a speculum from her kit. "I never really liked this part of my yearly exam," she muses as she sets the speculum. "These things are always freezing." So she breathes on it to warm it up -- something I can appreciate for the intention, but I do wonder about the sterility -- and begins to do the vaginal exam. Through the entire scene, Sara looks like she's steeling herself to stay in the room and do the job.

Back at the crime scene, Nicky's snapping photos of the bullet casing on the ground. Brass and Gil have been standing over him; Gil's Spidey senses tingle, and he sees something on the ground. He -- and we, by extension -- zoom in and we see what he sees: a belt loop. Gil orders Nicky to get a shot of it. After the three stooges establish that the belt loop belongs to the perp and not the victim, Gil announces, "I'm going to use scent pads." Nicky looks puzzled. That's our cue for the Forensics Fun portion of today's episode, where we get to learn a little something about crime-solving while enjoying the show. Today's lesson: "A dog's sense of smell is about 40 times more acute than a human's. A dog's nose is packed with dense rolls of membranes that absorb odor. Stretched out, these membranes extend about a third of the length of the dog's body. The membranes in a human nose? About the size of a postage stamp." As Gil is regaling us with comparative anatomy stats, he's futzing with something that looks like a government-issue Dustbuster. Nicky says as much, and Gil continues educating: "You place absorbent pads in the chamber, then run the machine over the suspected item. Then you take the pad, seal it in an envelope, and freeze it." Nicky's getting it: "Yeah, yeah. Then we pull them out when we know enough about this denim guy to get a proximal location." Yeah, that's about as clear as mud, Nicky. Thanks for trying. Gil steps in to rescue me from my own confusion: "There's a caveat." "You wanna explain that caveat?" Brass grumps. "Later," Gil says. I take back the rescue comment. Gil's leaving me hanging, and that's just wrong.

Meanwhile, the sunshine 'n' rainbows team is wading through all eight boxes of evidence. After some preliminary nattering about Eddie's latest duplicitous moves, Warrick shares the particulars of the case with us: "Two 25-year-old guys, Chuckie Hastings and Roy McCall, lifelong neighbors, one step up from a trailer park, got into a beef over a motorcycle in the owner's backyard." Catherine tells McCall's side of the story: he claims to have returned a smashed-up motorcycle to Hastings, Hastings lost his temper, and in the ensuing melee -- which we see in flashback -- McCall killed him in self-defense with the automatic he conveniently stored in his BVDs. Meanwhile, Mrs. Hastings claims that McCall shot Hastings in the back; the coroner's report confirms that Hastings was shot in the back. Catherine frames the key question in the case, asking if Hastings did attack McCall with a screwdriver -- warranting some measure of self-defense -- or not. "Well, we would need the screwdriver with McCall's blood on it to prove that now, wouldn't we?" Warrick snipes, and goes on to reveal that Franovich lost the key piece of evidence in the case before a single forensics test could be run on it. "We know why Franovich left. He quit before we could fire his ass!" Catherine fumes. Warrick gives her an amen. She continues, "You know who the DA will blame for this." "The same people Homicide will blame," Warrick concludes. No wonder the two of them have such long faces. They're about to get an interdepartmental ass-whooping for something they didn't even do.

Some ballistics goob is pressing Gil and Nicky for the details of the Jane Doe case while he matches bullets for them. Gil gives the generalities: raped, shot, and left for dead. Nicky warmly thanks the would-be murderer for being so thoughtful as to leave behind two cartridge casings. Nicky needs to work on his sardonicism; it comes off as naive gloating here, which is really kind of inappropriate given the circumstances. He continues to annoy me by babbling about the relative stupidity of felons: "You think the bad guys would figure we'd eventually start a database on cartridge casings, huh?" Yes, Nicky. Because bad guys are like that, spending all their time fretting about data warehousing and sandwiching actual crime in between Powerpoint presentations on content management systems. You big dork. There's a possible match; the bullet casings match those found at a crime scene in North Vegas. Gil instructs the lab tech and Nicky to keep working on confirming the match, and bows out to see Sara.

She's still in the hospital room, going through Jane Doe's belongings for clues. She picks up a medal, noting it's a St. Catherine's medal. Sara talks to Jane Doe about her medal: "St. Catherine? She studied science. She was tough and very outspoken. Went against the Emperor himself, chewed him out for persecuting Christians." The Concertina for Character Development kicks up in the background, and Sara continues her speech: "Took him two or three tries to execute her. She never gave up. She was brave." In a show devoted to upbeat endings, this would be the point where Roma Downey comes in and shares a story about the time she had lunch with St. Catherine up in Heaven, then reassures Sara of God's love here on Earth. But this is the godless CSI, so all that little scene did was establish that Sara knows her martyrs, and she now identifies with Jane Doe. Gil ghostly visage hovers in the doorframe as Sara presses the St. Catherine's medal into Jane Doe's hand; you can practically hear him thinking, "Don't touch her hand! She's evidence!" Then he barges in to interrupt Sara as she's solemnly promising to find out who did this. Sara composes herself and talks to Gil about the sexual assault kit. She then gestures over to Jane: "She's breathing." "She's evidence," Gil replies. Ow! Gil! I was only kidding! If there's a point to be made about professional detachment here, you're not really making it well. Speaking of making your point poorly, if at all, Gil follows that warm assessment of his fellow woman by reminding Sara, "If you chase two rabbits, you end up catching none at all." Yes, Gil. And forces prize victory, not protraction. Lay off the Sun Tzu before bedtime, okay?

Warrick and Catherine are walking through a neighborhood that could charitably be described as "dilapidated." They head over to one dingy little house and ask the widow Hastings to please help them understand what happened the day her husband engaged in his fatal fracas with McCall. She provides her own interpretation of events: she was doing laundry, she heard noises, she rushed outside and watched McCall shoot her husband. Catherine tries to reconstruct Laurianne Hastings' timeline with her own assessment of events; she and Warrick conclude that Laurianne was perhaps recalling events erroneously. The giveaway? McCall used a semiautomatic, which pulls off shots in two-tenths of a second; it would be awfully difficult for Laurianne to run out and survey the scene between shots one and two. The rest of the scene is Warrick and Catherine brainstorming likely scenarios.