Vegas. Night. Shiny buildings. I think you know the drill.
A well-heeled couple leaves a restaurant in Pasadena. No, really -- between the lush greenery and the Spanish-style buildings packed densely on the sidewalk, I'm flashing back to a rum-soaked evening I spent at the world's longest wedding reception in old-town Pasadena. But enough about me; let's get back to the couple: he's tall and besuited, she's shorter and besuited, and they're having a blandly pleasant time. "I had such a beautiful time tonight. Eight years!" she burbles. "People said we wouldn't last. Happy anniversary, baby," he smarms in response. They manage to pull off a simultaneous walk-n-kiss (degree of difficulty: 9.2), and as they're walking to their gargantomobile, we see a cigarette drop out of nowhere and roll away on the sidewalk. The husband deposits the wife on the passenger side of their SUV, crosses a few zip codes as he wends his way to the driver's side, then stops and stares at her expectantly. She gives him a come-hither look -- I hope she has all day, what with the amount of time it would take him to circumnavigate the SUV to come thither -- which changes to one of horrified surprise as a knife-wielding thug seizes her from behind and holds a blade to her throat. As the wife gasps in terror, the camera pulls in real close on a moderately appalled husband. "Dammit!" he's thinking. "They were right! It didn't last!"
In the scene, Warrick is reciting the specifics of the anniversary dinner gone wrong: "Two victims. She's on the sidewalk by the curb, and he's in the middle of the street." Sara comes over and notes that there's no car. Nicky notes that there's not a whole lot of unpunctured flesh left on the husband either; he's been stabbed five times. Gil comes over with Brass in tow and confirms that the couple was at Andre's. I'm in shock: Brass has yet to deliver a piece of expository dialogue. All he does is grouse that, for want of valet parking, two lives were lost. Gil notes mildly that typical carjackers don't use knives. "Never?" Brass teases. "They used to say 'never on Sunday,' then Pearl Harbor happened. Now I never say never," Gil replies. Somewhere, a viewer's head explodes from trying to track all those nevers and figure out if Gil is ruling out a knife-based carjacking, or allowing for its possibility.
Fortunately, we're all saved from pondering Gil's circumlocuitous speech patterns by the arrival of a torrential thunderstorm. Gil springs into action: "We've got three minutes to process this crime scene, after that it's all in the gutters. Sara, take overalls; Warrick, put a cone by anything you bag; Nick, we've got to get these bodies into the van!" Everyone hauls ass as the rain continues to pour down. "We're losing everything!" Sara wails to Gil, and he looks up at the heavens with a profoundly irritated look, muttering ruefully, "Yeah, our killer got lucky tonight."
Cut to the credits. The Who plays. They do not, to my sorrow, switch from "Who Are You?" to "Rain on Me."
The crime scene is logged, just in time for the rain to stop. Gil and Brass are discussing whether or not there are any witnesses to the double homicide. Long story short: no. Sara notes there's one person who happened on the tail end of the incident, and the CSIs troop over to talk to him. The guy is hunched over on the curb, looking like a textbook case of clinical shock. Gil walks over and introduces himself and Sara to the guy in question, one Justin Green. The CSIs ask what happened, and Justin fixes his eyes on some point in the middle distance and mumbles about how he tried to help the human pincushion out in the middle of the road. Justin takes us into flashback: first, an SUV almost clipped him; then, he noticed a body lying the middle of the street; finally, he performed CPR completely wrong. "If it makes you feel better, that isn't what killed him," Gil deadpans after listening to Justin's self-flagellating recitation. Sara, displaying her usual people skills, tells Justin she wants his clothes. "Why?" he asks dazedly, leading me to suspect that his wits -- like his CPR skills -- are dull. Sara tries to look sympathetic as she reminds Justin, "because there's blood on them." Justin begins unzipping his jacket, apparently nonplussed to be wearing actual evidence.
Cut to a collapsed building, surrounded by lots of emergency workers and the usual mob of neighbors trying to see what happened. Catherine, sporting a perky new 'do that makes her look like she's...well, that makes her hair look like it belongs to a younger woman, gets out of a CSIMobile and heads toward the wreckage. The burly buzzcut detective whom we see on roughly every other show comes rushing over to Catherine. After complimenting her on her hair, he asks what a nice girl like her is doing hanging around a dump like this. Catherine tells Buzz that she was assigned to the case. "What case? A building collapsed. There's no crime here," Buzz continues. "Right. That's why you were assigned. A homicide detective," Catherine ripostes. We find out that part of the building's basement caved in -- insert your own joke about Catherine going into the subplot subbasement here -- and killed three septuagenarian sisters. Catherine and Buzz continue their tiresome Socratic dialogue concerning the definition of "crime scene"; when Buzz points out that the little old ladies were killed by a building, Catherine snaps that the building is a suspect. Okay. We. Get. It. Dead people tell you clues, everything is a suspect in a murder, the world is a menacing place filled with inanimate objects that want to kill us. Lay off the dialogue -- it's shot past "hard-boiled" and landed somewhere in the moral equivalent of rubbery reconstituted scrambled eggs.
Back at CSI Central, Nicky interrupts The Lab Tech Formerly Known As Liam (TLTFKAL, or ยค for short) while TLTFKAL is peering intently into a microscope. "I might be looking at the mother of my children here," TLTFKAL says, indicating that perhaps he's surpassed the plushies crowd in weirdness and developed a sexual fetish for paramecia. "Somebody's been putting in way too much overtime lately," Nicky says, and TLTFKAL rounds on him, burbling, "I am serious. I had a date last night, and this girl has the most impossible green eyes. Just -- BAM! Shoulder-length blonde hair. Intelligent. And she smells so good..." "Cute toes?" Nicky asks, revealing a fetish of his own -- and there Warrick is, hogging all the shoe-investigating cases -- and TLTFKAL replies, "Oh! Ideal. And none are longer than the big toe." Nicky smiles appreciatively; I wonder what's more ridiculous: this scene, or my slavish recap of it. "But I need to know what's on the inside," TLTFKAL continues. "What's in her heart?" Nicky asks. "No," TLTFKAL says matter-of-factly, "her DNA. And let me tell you, this girl has some fine epithelials." Okay, this is coming from a guy who's tossed the Liam-Gallagher-does-PCR-gels hairdo for something last seen in America when Calvin was assuming the Spaceman Spiff persona in Calvin and Hobbes. This entire scene has moved into the territory usually occupied by German Absurdists, and when Nicky asks rhetorically, "Whatever happened to getting to know someone over coffee, letting a relationship evolve?" -- conveniently forgetting his most recent foray into dating territory, which involved two separate felony investigations and his date's untimely post-coital demise -- I begin checking the background scene for black-clad Teutons striking arty yoga poses. But the two lab geeks cease discussing their winning wooing ways and get down to business: identifying the hair found on the male stabbing victim (a.k.a. Kevin Shepherd). It's cat hair.
Cut to Gil and David: Coroner by Night, Enemy of Fun by Day. Kevin Shepherd was stabbed many, many times; his wife, Amy Shepherd, had her throat cut in one neat left-to-right slice. Since Amy's death was pretty obvious -- she had all her major arteries and veins laid open -- the two men turn their attention back to Kevin: he's sporting a nasty set of cuts and abrasions on his hands, indicating that he fought back. David muses that it was quite the tussle, and says that judging by the wounds, Kevin was attacked by a long, sharp double-edged blade and a blunt weapon. Lucky us -- we get to see how both weapons slice, dice, fold, spindle and mutilate human flesh, courtesy of the TMICam. Gil decides he's working on the two-weapons, two-attackers hypothesis.
Back in the subplot subbasement, Catherine's weaving around assorted chunks of building carnage in an interior shot. She's looking for the district engineer. She finds him -- a dark-haired man peering intently at something onto which he's trained a flashlight. It seems to me that a surefire way to infiltrate any one of these crime scenes is to grab a maglite and just stare at something like you're examining it, given how often people seem to be doing that on this show. Anyway, Catherine and the district engineer have a verbal sparring match that does not, as one might imagine, come off as feisty flirtatious banter but sounds instead like something David Mamet might have rejected as too hostile when he was writing Oleanna. Long dialogue short: district engineers are directly or indirectly responsible for the safety of buildings that have been inspected and/or maintained by the city. This district engineer does not take too kindly to having a crime-lab chippie poking around his slide of broken-down building, and when said chippie begins quizzing him on the building's composition and notes that things like collapsed buildings don't speak well of a man's building-inspection skills, well...district engineers get hostile and condescending, and recappers watching district engineers know fear in their hearts as they realize this character is probably being introduced as a likely love interest.
At CSI Central, Sara's giving us a thumbnail sketch of Kevin and Amy: he's a chiropractor, she's a dentist, they live in The Lakes (home of Citibank's billing department) and they have flawless credit. Nothing's jumping out as a possible motive for their demise. Gil and Sara briefly discuss the odds that Justin Green is a suspect, but his overall behavior -- performing CPR in clear view of witnesses, waiting for the police -- punctures holes in the "first witness, first suspect" rule. I have a feeling we'll be revisiting that theory later.
Cut to Warrick mixing plaster of Paris. Brass comes in looking for Grissom and gets a cool response from Warrick. The older man tries warming up the conversation a little, telling Warrick that despite all his years on the force, he still gets squicked out by touching dead bodies. Warrick says, "That's why you've got the badge and I've got the syringe." Actually, if you want to get pedantic about it, it looks more like a caulking gun, but whatever. Warrick begins digging into each of Kevin's stab wounds and filling them with plaster. We are treated yet again to the TMICam, which gives us the wound's-eye perspective of the whole process. Brass speaks for all of us as he gulps audibly. Warrick looks up, and his expression softens somewhat. "I'm casting the stab wounds. We can use the casts to identify the murder weapon," he explains. "You're getting more like Grissom every day," Brass responds, smiling. Warrick laughs a little. Brass then reveals his contractual morsel of exposition: the Shepherds' SUV has been located. Given how ginormous that thing was, I have a hard time understanding how it could have possibly dropped out of anyone's line of sight in the entire state of Nevada.
Cut to the requisite eight dozen assorted police vehicles descending like a swarm of locusts on the SUV. Gil and Brass natter on about what would possess a carjacker to kill two people, drive a car, then dump it in the middle of nowhere. As they stride toward the SUV, Gil's pulling on his latex gloves in full evidence-collection mode. Some random state trooper jogs up and tells Brass and Gil that he hasn't touched the vehicle, but the rain may have compromised the evidence. "Maybe there will be some evidence on the inside," Gil says as he opens the door. Out falls a body. Ask for evidence and ye shall receive, I guess. Gil shoves the female body back in the car and gasps, "I haven't felt that in a while." "You should date more," replies Brass. I kid! Brass asks, "What's that?" Gil takes a moment to answer, what with pounding on his own chest to restart his heart, but he does reply: "The element of surprise."
Having recovered from the shock, Gil and Brass are now looking through the SUV for clues as to how a third body ended up in the gargantomobile. The body in question -- one Jessica Hall -- left her cell phone off, indicating that she didn't call 911. The two men debate over the reason Jessica wasn't wearing her seatbelt; then Brass wanders off to go bone up on his expository monologue. Nicky pulls up in yet another law-enforcement vehicle -- I swear, the LVPD must have a three-to-one vehicle: person ratio -- and sprints on over to the SUV as Gil's extracting a clump of hair from Jessica's jacket. Nicky tells Gil that he's holding a hank of cat hair; it looks to match the sample found on Kevin Shepherd, but wife Amy didn't have any cat hair on her person. The two men banter back and forth as to what sort of connection Jessica, Kevin, Amy, the SUV, and the cat all have with each other. Nicky offers, "Wrong place, wrong time. She saw something she shouldn't." "Finally! A theory!" Gil offers. He really needs to work on that caustic delivery.
Back at the subplot subbasement -- now embodied in a literal fashion -- Catherine and the district engineer are busy doing what they do best: antagonizing each other in a ceaseless round of insinuations about someone's professionalism, intelligence, training, judgment, and marital status. Immediately after Catherine ceases dealing with Tall, Dark and Patronizing, Buzz the detective comes over to explain why everyone's so touchy about this case: the mayor of Las Vegas ran on a platform of urban renewal, vowing to clean out slumlords and create city-maintained low-cost housing. Should that city-maintained housing be found to be, say, prone to collapsing, it looks bad for the mayor. Therefore, Catherine's walking into a political trap at the same time as she's about to walk into a collapsed basement.
Sara and Gil go to visit David the unfun coroner -- who is, as it turns out, conducting a test via fluoroscope on Jessica's body on account of her setting off the metal detector -- and David reveals that he found something inside Jessica's body he thinks they ought to see. As he asks a lab tech also named David to lower the body, the lab tech gives Sara a pole-axed grin. Hey! It's the tech who openly admits to having a crush on Sara! How refreshing to see some continuity, especially since TLTFKAL has apparently dropped the girl he was cooing at during that same episode. I guess her epithelials weren't as nice. Anyway, that little moment passes, and David the coroner reveals that Jessica died due to a nicked liver. Gil notices something on the scan and directs David the love-struck technician to move Jessica's body back up again. "What's that?" Sara asks, staring in the general vicinity of the liver. "What do you leave your waiter?" Gil asks in reply. I don't know, Gil; it depends on the establishment. Gil apparently frequents more rough-and-tumble dives than I do, because he answers, "It's the tip...of a knife!"
Meanwhile, back in the plot nobody cares about -- least of all me, an avowed claustrophobe -- Catherine burrows through small spaces, collects a roach, deals with some tumbling debris as an F-16 from Ellis Air Force Base goes by, and finds ground zero for the collapse.
Sara and Brass are in a weapons store, listening to the soundtrack from a kung-fu film and handing over the tip of the pointy object formerly lodged in Jessica's liver to the guy behind the counter. "It's not a knife. The tip's double-edged, bevels on both sides, downward slope. That's a dagger." Oh, whatever. It's sharp and pointy and lethal. The Guru of Sharp Objects continues, "That means it's either carbon steel or stainless steel. I get asked this question more than you think." Again, Brass speaks for all of us as he rolls his eyes. Guru whips out a plastic lemon and Sara supplies, "Acid in the lemon juice should react to carbon steel, but not stainless steel." The three continue their cutlery course, with the guy continuing, "Daggers are rarely more than an inch at the base, we got the tip, so we can fill in the rest with basic geometry." He proceeds to draw the shape of the dagger -- five inches -- and produces the likely culprit, asking how Brass and Sara would like to pay for their purchase. Brass and Sara are amused.
Back at CSI Central, Warrick is displaying his plaster castings of Kevin's wounds. Gil is burbling effusively, Grissom-style -- "This is a nice job. You know, casting is an art!" -- when Sara comes in and shows off the dagger (a Fugasi model 502) that matches the tip found in Jessica's ribs. Gil muses about the possibility of the dagger matching Kevin Shepherd's wounds; Warrick does some quick matching and, voila, they've identified the weapon that made all the sharp entry wounds. The dull, bruising stab wounds have yet to be pinned to a source. Gil puts it together: Kevin was stabbed with one weapon. The assailant started stabbing Kevin first, turned around and stabbed Jessica with such force as to break off the tip of the dagger, then went back to finish the job on Kevin. "One weapon, one killer," Gil says, in direct refutation of his earlier hypothesis.
Subplot about which I could not possibly care less: the beetle (of the Anobiidae, or powder-post, variety) eats soft wood; the frame of the collapsed house is made of Douglas fir, which is to the Anoiibid set as Chubby Hubby is to me. Gil has a moment alone with the bug, then reviews the tape Catherine made. He points out that judging by the state of the posts in the basement, she's not looking for killer beetles, but killer people. "Gives a whole new meaning to the word 'homewrecker,'" Catherine cracks. The only thing that makes this scene interesting is that the closed caption played entirely in reverse. Man, CSI's deaf fans have got to be convinced this show's a piece of modern theatre.
Meanwhile, Warrick and Catherine are photographing stick shifts as synthesizer music pounds in the background. Warrick says, Oh, yeah," and I have a strange moment where I wonder if we've veered into forensic pornography. Sara's cooing, "Sweaty palms make the best prints," doesn't do much to dispel that impression. Gil comes in and demands, "Are you doing what I think you're doing?" and I have to put the show on pause and giggle. Because I'm twelve, people, and totally immature. Anyway, Gil comes in bearing Jessica's prints, Sara matches them to the ones Warrick lifted off the SUV, and the three CSIs stand around pondering why Jessica was in the SUV when she died. Nicky comes in and urges them to all join him in the evidence room as he debuts his new theory on Jessica. Whipping out Kevin's shoe, Nicky notes that the instep is covered in blood -- Jessica's blood. He bids Warrick to get on the floor and illustrate -- Warrick grumps, "Man, why you always trying to get me down?" -- and explains to us all: Jessica was kneeling to Kevin when she was stabbed, possibly helping the other assailant kill Kevin, when her liver was accidentally nicked. "So victim number three was suspect number two," Sara concludes. Nicky runs off to get a warrant to search Jessica's apartment; with luck, something in it will lead to suspect number one.
Back on the subplot to which I am supremely indifferent: district engineer and his capped smile come sniffing around Catherine's lab. Again, my apathy leads me to the rarified air of Mount Brevity: five years ago, someone took a sledgehammer to the post Catherine and Gil were looking at, but the district engineer didn't think the damage was worth reporting when he inspected the building. "Tell that to the women who were crushed to death," Catherine replies.
Over in Jessica's apartment, Nicky, Brass, and Gil observe a plethora of Post-Its tacked on every available surface. Nicky's bemoaning a new piece of evidence -- Kevin called Jessica from Andre's shortly before his demise -- that pokes holes in the Jessica-as-assailant-number-two theory, but they're about to discover some new information for yet another theory. Piece of information #1 is a gorgeous marmalade cat, thus explaining the presence of cat hair and suggesting that Kevin and Jessica spent time together. Piece of information #2: Jessica's online banking software -- with username and password stuck on a post-it in the corner of the computer monitor -- reveals a $35,000 deposit and a subsequent check written for the same amount on the same day. Interestingly enough, she got the $35,000 from Kevin Shepherd, but there's no information as to whom she wrote a $35,000 check.
Cut to the requisite scientific montage as Nicky and an unnamed lab tech run a series of tests to see what Jessica wrote on the notepad to her computer. What they find is a scribbled monograph instructing her to meet K at 9 am on Sunday, three days after the murder. Gil and Nicky realize what happened: "Kevin Shepherd took out a hit on his wife and something went wrong." The two CSIs return to the lab tech; after analyzing Kevin Shepherd's handwriting, they conclude that the written instructions on the notepad were from Kevin, and they constituted a blueprint for murdering his wife. Forgive me for doubting the cleverness of the plan here, but what kind of idiot gives $35,000 to a woman who's so forgetful she has to write her own name on a post-it to remember it in the morning, then instructs her to kill his wife? Oy. Brass comes in to confirm the Kevin/Jessica association: apparently the two were connected at the ear via telephone for two years. "They had a very healthy relationship," Gil notes. "He was cheating on his wife!" Nicky says in shocked tones. Oh, Nicky. When will you ever learn? Brass has one more piece of information, which lets us transition to Sara going into the drying room to look for Justin Green's bloodstained clothes. Sara and Warrick look at Justin's tee and note that -- surprise! -- there's a bloody handprint on the t-shirt.
In the scene, Gil matches a transparency of Kevin's hand to the handprint. Gil, Sara and Warrick then engage in a brainstorming session to figure out how the bloody print got there: Justin was stabbing Kevin, not offering him CPR. "Dammit. Justin sold me a lie and I bought it," Sara says.
Subplot of inconsequence. Catherine coming out of the collapsed building and passing the impromptu shrine that's sprung up around the detritus. The F-16s pass overhead, the candles in the shrine shake, and Catherine has a Eureka! moment. Fade to the lab, where she and the district engineer are looking at a bubble chamber filled with rubber balls. "What are you doing?" the engineer asks. "Proving that you're not responsible for the damage to that building," Catherine replies. "I'm growing on you, aren't I?" he leers, displaying all eight hundred Chiclet-capped teeth in a primitive mating display. Catherine wisely ignores him and moves on to the Science is Fun! demonstration; she plays Beethoven's Fifth at an ungodly level to demonstrate how low-frequency sound vibrations could have jarred some key nails in the building structure and caused the collapse. "So you're pointing the finger at the Air Force?" asks the engineer. "No. Point one finger and there's always four pointing back at you," Catherine replies. She ticks off the four fingers: "Beetles, sabotage, dry rot, and time." The engineer asks if he's off the hook, then wanders off with a rude goodbye. I pray to the network gods that we never, ever see him again.
Time for another CSI roundtable: Warrick, Gil, Nicky, and Sara have the Shepherds' banking records, Jessica's banking records, Justin's banking records, and all their phone records. The CSIs take turns reconstructing the chain of events that led to three people's deaths. Long story short: Kevin asked Jessica for help in taking out a hit on his wife Amy. Jessica pinged Justin for the job and transferred the $35,000 to his account. By all rights, Jessica should have steered clear of the scene but, to quote Nicky, "Jessica hired her ex-husband to kill her boyfriend's wife." Yep -- Jessica and Justin used to be married. Sara adds a new wrinkle: although Justin received $35,000 from Jessica on Wednesday, he also got a cash infusion of $70,000 on Thursday -- from Amy Shepherd. Warrick deduces that this is a result of the 3 pm Wednesday phone call Justin made to Amy, most likely warning her that he's got the money to take a hit on her and offering her the chance to reciprocate the favor for her husband -- which Amy does at twice the price. "Why kill one when you can take out both and clear over a hundred grand?" Gil asks rhetorically. "Makes financial sense," Brass grunts appreciatively. As for Jessica's fate? Entirely deliberate -- getting rid of her was wrapping up the loose end in his plan. We see the entire thing in flashback: Justin kills Amy, lulls Kevin and Jessica into a false sense of security, and turns on them.
Cut to Brass and Gil interrogating Justin. They lay out the entire case for him, then ask the one loose-end question: "Why was Jessica even there?" They're not going to find out: Justin stares ahead impassively. As Brass and Grissom exit the interrogation tank, Brass muses ruefully, "To the rest of the world, they looked like the perfect couple." "Yeah, well you know what they say about looks," Gil replies. Brass bites, "They're deceiving." Gil disagrees, "No. They can kill."
Whatever. That didn't make sense, but it's sure a hell of a line to end an episode on.