We're just going to skip over the desultory Vegas-at-night-shots. You know they're there, I know they're there; let us never speak of them again.
The episode opens at night, starting with an exterior shot of a stately colonial McMansion. This is the type of place where the occupants probably have at least one kid named after a county in Ireland, a leased BMW in the garage, and the sort of subconscious suburban anhedonia that spawns movies like American Beauty. Or I could be reading too much into one pristine exterior shot. Anyway, the camera pulls in to guide the viewer through a house that's one part Pottery Barn, one part Restoration Hardware, and eight parts Martha Stewart Living. Oh, crap -- we're in for an hour of Dark Family Secrets, if the usual signs and portents are correct. Remember, readers: the neater the house, the more dysfunctional the occupants. It's all ironic, see?
Anyway, we end up in the master bedroom, where a woman flings back her flax-and-cream linen comforter and sits up, face screaming nameless dread. Perhaps she was awakened by the ominous background music. She leaps out of bed and races down the hall to a baby's nursery; we see a shot of the crib through the doorway, and the window facing the crib is open with the curtains blowing menacingly. I roll my eyes at the heavy-handed symbolism of it all, then decide that I should probably cool the skeptical expressions; it's only 9:02, the credits haven't rolled yet, and I've got another fifty-eight minutes of show to get through.
So, the woman barrels on through the doorway, heading for the crib while making little panicky noises. She rips apart the eight hundred yards of bedding in crib. Doesn't excessive bedding constitute some sort of hazard for an infant? It's not like they're capable of flinging off a comforter if it drifts over their faces. This woman's not going to be worrying about asphyxiation yet; the crib holds no baby. It does, however, have a neatly-typed ransom note. Mom lets the note flutter from her frozen fingers and heads over to the window, mouth working in silent panic. She looks down at the ladder propped to the window and screams, "No!" over and over while the camera pulls back.
Cue the husband, who runs in looking mildly alarmed. Either he's not too bright, or the prospect of his wife standing in a nursery and screaming doesn't raise the proper alarm bells. He walks over to the empty crib and picks up the note; the expression on his face practically says, "I don't get it. Someone traded our baby for a letter?"
In the scene, Gil is threading his way through the inevitable gross of law-enforcement vehicles that precede his arrival. Just as he walks through the front door, Mom flings herself into her dim husband's arms. Gil awkwardly introduces himself, and she says, "Please help us." "I'll certainly try," Gil says in a rare moment of actual human empathy. He looks over at Dimbulb Dad and asks, "Is that the ransom note?" "Yeah. They don't even tell us how much money they want. They just tell us they're going to call in six hours," Dimbulb Dad replies. Gil reaches over and takes the note; it reads, "I have your son. I don't want to harm him. Don't make me. I'll call in six hours with instructions. I advise you not to call the police." Okay, so Mom and Dimbulb Dad aren't so good with instructions, if the eight hundred police cars out front are any indication. Let's hope that kidnapper talks slow when he calls. Dimbulb Dad asks why Gil, who is investigating the kidnapping, might want to actually see the ransom note. Gil patiently answers, "Because the last person who touched this note is the person who has your son. And he's just left us the first piece of the puzzle."
Cut to The Who, doing their part to knock CBS's demographic out of AARP target territory.
We now return to the scene of the crime in broad daylight. Catherine's walking up the driveway. She's having a really bad-hair episode -- so bad, in fact, that the all-black outfit and the sunglasses make her look like Ron Wood. Catherine walks over to Brass and bids him play his role as Captain Exposition. Brass complies; there's no chance this is one of those disgruntled-divorce custody kidnappings, as Mom and Dimbulb Dad are college sweethearts. "They have a security system. Never put it on," says Brass. "They say how come?" Catherine asks. Brass replies, "They feel safe in the neighborhood." It's so unfortunate that his back is to the camera as he says this; I would love to see the eye-rolling expression on his face. Brass confirms for Catherine that they've checked all the extra spaces and an infant has yet to turn up. "Nice digs," Catherine comments as they continue their journey up the driveway; it's such a long driveway, and so steep, that I half expect to see a team of Sherpas trekking in with microscopes while Jon Krakauer trails along behind them. "Yeah," Brass replies. "Guy got rich off some dot-com outfit, moved here from Oregon two years ago." I will heroically refrain from making snide comments about the dot-com bubble in this, the website that keeps me in Reaction shoes, because I'd like to not rock this particular boat. Anyway, Brass and Catherine finally make it to the front door; there's a statue of Tenzig Norgay there, commemorating his achievement in hiking up the driveway back in 1953.
Inside the house, Gil is watching Dimbulb Dad prepare for the ransom call with a grave, gray-suited agent. "Are you sure he won't hear a click or something?" he asks, and the agent reassures him: "He won't. Question him about your son. Ask to hear him breathing, anything to keep him on the line." Gil hovers around the table, looking like the Angel of Death on casual Friday. Dimbulb Dad is nattering on about how he can handle pressure, what with working in the dot-com industry and all (must...heroically...refrain...from...picking...low-hanging...fruit), and Gil homes in on a half-drunk bottle of Coke on the counter. "Was this yours?" he asks; Dimbulb Dad starts, then stammers, "Yeah." "May I ask when you opened it?" Gil continues. Gil, why ask if you can ask if you're already asking? I mean, really. That sort of question is up there with asking someone if they're asleep. Dimbulb Dad tells Gil he opened the soda bottle some time after he and the missus called 911. "You mind if I, uh ...?" Gil asks, and Dimbulb Dad gives his permission for Gil to take the open bottle away. Gil clamps a hand over the top and walks around the kitchen, eyes bulging inquisitively. God, he's unsettling. Gil notes that the thermostat reads about 72 degrees Fahrenheit -- 22 degrees Celsius, for our friends outside the US. This will undoubtedly come in handy later. Dimbulb Dad looks over at Gil, then back at the tape-recorder jockey; his jaw visibly slackens as the giant question mark begins flashing over his head. "You have any more of these?" Gil asks blithely. "In the fridge," answers Dimbulb Dad, and Gil flits off to join Generation Pepsi.
In the living room, Mom is asking peevishly, "Do my boys have to be here? It's hard enough for them without having to hear all the facts." "I understand, but it's best for our investigation if we keep the whole family together," Brass replies, not unkindly. The older son tells his mom it's okay; the youngest son, who looks to be about three or four, plays with a cell phone in his lap. Mom -- whom we find out is named "Mrs. Anderson" -- replays her version of events: she got up at 4:30 in the morning to feed baby Zack, since she's still breastfeeding, and when she went into his room, he was gone. Dimbulb Dad -- a.k.a. Mr. Anderson -- smoothly picks up the story, claiming he came in to see what happened, and called 911 from the upstairs hallway. Cue the moppet punching 911 on the cell phone; the older brother takes the phone from young Robbie. Catherine's looking over at this collaborative storytelling effort a little suspiciously. Gil, meanwhile, asks for a piece of Zack's clothing, preferably from a hamper, so they can use scent dogs through the neighborhood. Dimbulb Dad -- people, this guy is such a goober; he really doesn't deserve to be given a first or last name -- offers to pick something out, but his wife cuts him off. She knows what the baby wears, so she'll pick something out. Catherine attaches herself to this little expedition. Gil tells the room's remaining occupants he'd like blood samples from all the family members. "Why?" asks Dimbulb Dad, forgetting yet again that as the investigator on the case, perhaps Gil might actually be interested in collecting evidence. Gil explains that collecting the family's samples will allow him and his team to eliminate their hairs and fibers from the house that much faster and detect outsiders.
The dogs are being led into the house, and the handlers pass Sara, who's also sporting the all-black ensemble (a look I personally know and love) and pulling on some stylin' latex gloves to match. Gil comes out, still holding the two bottles of soda, and commands Sara to take the ransom note to Q-D. "Typewritten ransom note. Kidnapper was organized," she says. "I think it's inkjet, not typewriter," Gil says. "I'll get it to Questioned Documents, check for origination, prints the works," Sara replies, thus answering the foremost question in my mind, i.e. what is Q-D? Gil tells Sara to take any computers and printers she finds in the house with her for testing. He then moves on and gives Nick one of the most thankless investigative tasks in the history of thankless, ancillary tasks Nicky's had on this show: "Take this [unopened soda] to the lab, in a controlled space, 72 degrees Fahrenheit and open it. Keep this [opened soda] in the same room temp space." Nicky understandably asks what happens , and Gil says, "Process, Nick, process." He moves on down the line of investigators -- good Lord, they're lined up like airplanes on the tarmac -- and addresses Warrick, who's sporting the same giant mirrored shades Nicky had on and a rather scruffy Van Dyke. "Canvas the whole grounds from outside to in," he commands. Warrick looks at the extensive property and says, "See you at 9:54!" No, he quips something about being all over it like a cheap suit and takes off. Having dispatched his troops on their assorted errands, Gil prepares to hike back up the driveway.
Warrick is walking around the porte-cochere, looking not at all suspicious in his all-black threads (okay, I'm sensing a theme here; did Gil institute a dress code or something? "I'm tired of that recapper making fun of our wardrobe. From now on, it's neutrals or it's nothing!") and his camera. He noses around the ground where the ladder is resting and snaps a photo of a shoeprint at the base of the ladder.
Cut to Gil walking up the stairs and into Zach's nursery. As Gil pokes around the crib, Warrick's disembodied voice floats up: "You see this spider-web?" Gil starts visibly and gasps, "Damn, Warrick!" Heh. Gil's creeping himself out now. The camera shifts over to Warrick atop the ladder, inspecting a spider-web in the corner of the open window and pointing out, "Kind of hard to get a baby out this window and climb down a ladder without messing up this web, don't you think?" Gil muses that it's possible the spider-web was spun after the kidnapping, what with spiders being remarkably good at spinning webs and all. Warrick finishes snapping pictures of the web and prepares to heave himself through the window; Gil chides him indignantly to go around, then returns to peering intently at the crib. He notices a long, dark hair among the bedding and picks it up for further study.
Catherine and Mrs. Anderson are in the laundry room, going through the hamper in search of Zach's clothes. Catherine makes small talk, commenting on how nice it must be to live on the golf course; Mrs. Anderson replies that golf isn't her game. Mrs. Anderson pulls out a tiny printed garment and says, "That one's my favorite. But Zacky, he, uh, liked another one." "Liked"? As in past tense? Way to hold out hope for your son there, lady. She pulls out another blue jumper thingie and hands it over to Catherine, saying, "He liked the way the fabric felt on his skin." Again with the past tense? Mrs. Anderson buries her face in the jumper for a moment, inhaling deeply, then says, "Oh, God..." It's time for her to breastfeed. Catherine says sympathetically, "It used to happen to me with my daughter if I didn't get to her right on time." "I can't believe this is happening to us," Mrs. Anderson sniffles; Catherine takes the jumper thingie and says, "I'll get this to our guys."
Warrick comes in to talk hair with Grissom. No, not the ever-expanding coif on his own head -- the two distinct hair samples found in the crib. As they're debating the finer points of tonsorial forensics, Gil begins making faces and asks, "You smell something?" Warrick offers the suggestion that the diapers may be messing with Gil's nose; Gil's nose apparently can filter out the Eau de Diaper Pail and detect Pine-Sol in a corner of the room. A quick luminol test reveals that there was a lot of blood in one corner. "Baby was killed before he even left the house," Warrick grunts, and both men look really solemn.
Back at CSI Central, Sara is hectoring a lab tech: "What do you mean you haven't tested it for prints yet?" The tech rolls his eyes at her; clearly, she drew someone in the rotation who's not nursing a hot and throbbing crush on her. The two of them engage in hostile bickering, and the only productive information we get out of the entire debate is that the printer used to print the ransom note has a spot on the drum, which would produce the three vertical dots found on the ransom note. So they've identified a quirk in the printer; now all they have to do is find the printer in the greater Las Vegas area. No problem.
Warrick's filling Gil in on the probable origins of the shoeprint at the base of the ladder as they walk through a long, open porch area. God, this house is huge -- like, Tara-sized. Gil smacks down Warrick's observation, noting that a gardener's boot-print in a garden is not all that unusual; Warrick parries that it's unusual when you consider that the gardener's been on vacation for the past three days. Gil's cell shrills, and he switches over to Sara, where they have a staticky conversation; Sara's standing to the copy machine outside the ballistics department, and that apparently has the power to warp cell-phone reception for miles around. Sara tells us the tests prove that whoever wrote the ransom note did it outside the Anderson house; Gil tells her to check all the printers at Anderson's company. She's listening intently, and then she hears dogs barking. "Are those our dogs?" she asks, but Gil's forgotten their conversation already and is sprinting toward the dogs with Warrick. The music thrums ominously.
The dogs are going nuts over on the golf course; Gil and Warrick trot over with looks of great concern on their faces. "Get those dogs back, get 'em back!" Warrick shouts, and the handlers rein in the excited animals. Gil and Warrick stare down at one ghastly-looking baby doll wrapped in a white blanket and lying on a plastic drop cloth at the foot of a statue. Ooh, it's all unsettling. The ancillary crime enforcement types hovering behind them all do the manly-grief thing -- sucking in their breath sharply, looking acutely betrayed, covering their mouths with their hands. Warrick looks devastated, but he looks toward Gil. A photographer leans in, and Gil literally smacks him back. "We gotta have pictures; the coroner will be all over us," the photographer -- a dead ringer for Drew Carey -- protests. "I'll get the pictures," Gil snaps menacingly. Cut to Warrick, who's trying very hard to stay cool and failing mightily. Gil starts snapping pictures of tiny, traumatized baby parts as vague, choir-ish music moans in the background. Warrick looks like he's fighting tears. As the coroner steps in to pick up the doll -- I mean, the body -- Gil slaps him away too, saying irritably, "I'm going to take him."
Catherine is sprinting across the golf course now, Mrs. Anderson and her stupid, stupid spouse in hot pursuit. Everything goes into slow motion, just in case we haven't seized upon the gravity of the situation yet and how it will affect the participants' perception of time. Cut to the desultory scene of Mrs. Anderson seeing the baby and losing it, Catherine reining her back, Gil gazing sorrowfully into the middle distance.
And it's commercial time. There's a special place in hell for the ad agency that's responsible for Martin Luther King, Jr. flacking Alcatel.
Back at the no-fun show, Warrick is doing the slides for the hair samples while broadcast news plays in the background. The anchordrone is saying, "The Andersons, who own a profitable Internet company" -- heck, that alone is worth leading the ten-o'clock broadcast -- "are said to be devastated over the death of little Zachary. As for leads, the police will only say they have widened the investigation to employees of Steve Anderson's company. Employees are being asked to give DNA samples. By all accounts, the employees are complying voluntarily; one of them is quoted as saying, 'Anything to help Mr. and Mrs. Anderson in their time of grief.'" Warrick shakes his head ruefully and goes back to gazing at hair follicles.
David the no-fun coroner and Gil are reviewing the many, many things that contributed to Zachary's death. Chief among these is smothering; the baby's retinal hemorrhages more or less give that one away. Gil wonders, "Smothered how? Did you find hand marks? Trauma around the eyes and nose?" David replies in the negative. "He was in a blanket when I found him. Wrapped pretty tight..." Gil muses, trying to figure out how the asphyxiation happened. "Positional asphyxiation? Maybe. The kidnapper tried to protect him from the cold, suffocated him by mistake. I'm going to run some tests on a microscopic fiber I found in his throat, but I don't think his death was benign, Gil, or accidental. Sternum was cracked. X-rays show the fracture's fresh. Manhandled and suffocated...this little guy didn't have a chance." Both men look appropriately grim; I'm guessing there will be no Taster's Choice moments in the morgue tonight.
Cut to Gil going on a rampage: after upbraiding Sara for failing to test two hundred printers right away, he barrels down the hall and hectors Warrick for failing to cudgel The Lab Tech Formerly Known As Liam (TLTFKAL) into performing blood work on all the samples this minute. Gil snarks at Warrick, then heads into das Liamhaus. He susses out TLTFKAL's workload -- twenty DNA samples from a gang-related drug shootout that the sheriff (a.k.a. Evil Ike) wants cleared ASAP -- and sweeps the test tubes off TLTFKAL's counter dramatically, barking, "There. Now they're off your counter. Zachary Anderson: date of birth 01/23/01; date of death, three hours ago. Until we find out how and why, this is the only case you work on." Gil slams down an impressive rack of test tubes onto the counter; TLTFKAL nods dumbly and gets to work. Nicky, who's been watching this little scene unfold from the doorway, comments to Sara, "Never seen him like this before." No kidding. Given all the guff he's dished in everyone else's general direction whenever they let a case get to them personally, I'm looking forward to the group comeuppance that will take place in his office once he's done making other people work overtime putting his personal demons to rest. Sara attempts to fire a warning shot across his bow: "You told me a few weeks ago that nothing is personal. No victim should be special. Everyone follows your lead --" "Everyone didn't find that baby. I did," Gil rasps back, and as much as that's gotta suck, I do have to point out that the canines, their handlers, the photographer, and three or four other assorted extras were all standing around by the time Gil trundled on to the scene. He babbles on about the senselessness of this death and uses it to justify the idea that the victim is special. Gil, that argument's pretty weak; it's a classic case of irrelevant conclusions. Now is not the time to be poking holes in Gil's reasoning, however; he's now dealing with Catherine, who fills us all in on the Andersons' disquiet over their son's body not yet being released for burial. What part of "we're investigating" do they not understand? The actual investigation, which would involve gathering data and testing it? Anyway, Gil rolls his eyes and sighs plaintively. Dealing with the living overtaxes him. He tells Catherine, "You better drive," then stalks off to a waiting CSIMobile. Catherine and Sara share a Significant Look before Catherine turns to follow Gil.
Back at the McMansion, Gil is indeed attempting the impossible, i.e. explaining to Dimbulb Dad exactly what an investigation entails. He says, "I'm very sorry, but we have to preserve the evidence in a case like this. And as difficult as this sounds, Zachary is evidence." Mrs. Anderson asks if they have leads, and Gil lays out the entire case for us, the audience at home. And it's only 9:24; whatever shall we do for the remaining 36 minutes? Gil notes, "Your child was found 500 yards from your home, wrapped in a clean white blanket and carefully laid under a statuary. That suggests care." Catherine steps in with, "A stranger wouldn't treat a victim like that." Well, there you go. My work here is done. Dimbulb Dad, however, decides to draw this out for those of us who might not have better things to do with the remaining 35 minutes of the episode, blustering about how his attack lawyers warned him that this would happen and they'd be made suspects. Well, son, when you hamper an investigation at every turn and act surprised when people insist on analyzing evidence, you're going to attract a little suspicion. You big, dumb dimbulb. God, I can't conceive of a world where this man could have possibly made money off the Internet. I mean, smart people haven't been able to figure out how to turn a profit online yet; there's no way this mouth-breathing dullard could have pulled it off.
Gil manages to hide his contempt for Dimbulb Dad better than I, pointing out, "The FBI tells us you never received a call from the kidnapper. What kind of a kidnapper forgets to call the family?" "The wealthy family," Catherine helpfully adds. Dimbulb invokes his attack lawyers again, laboring under the delusion that saying their names three times will cause them to appear. Warrick interrupts this tense tableau to deliver DNA results: the blood they found in the baby's room some 1500 words back belongs to the oldest Anderson boy, Tyler. His parents look stricken.
Cut to Tyler explaining how his blood got in Zachary's room: he broke a window playing ball, cut himself trying to clean it up, and leaked blood all over the floor. Brass presses for a more substantial confession, noting that Tyler's got quite the history of misdirected temper -- which Tyler takes as a cue for refining his target detection by mouthing off to Brass -- and his parents rein him in. "People are calling us killers and I miss my little brother," broods Tyler. "That still doesn't mean you didn't kill him," Gil helpfully supplies. Everyone glowers as we go to commercial.
In the scene, Gil and Catherine are at the empty Anderson house, about to toss it top to bottom in pursuit of clues. "So what are we looking for?" Catherine asks; Gil replies, "I don't know." These two are the most seasoned CSIs in the unit? The two of them commence searching and I sigh gratefully, as we go into an unrecappable montage of the two of them peering intently into drawers and rifling through closets. The fruits of their labors? A pair of grass-stained pantyhose and an empty blanket wrapper.
Looping back around to Nicky's thankless subplot, Gil goes in to quiz our boy on the results of the great soda experiment. Nicky had to keep a log of the pressure released from the control bottle every quarter-hour -- oh my God, how tedious -- and noted the presence of ethanol (a.k.a. booze) on the lip of the already-opened bottle. This is going somewhere, but not anytime in the thirty seconds. Gil then leaves Nicky with the stained nylons and commands him to disappear back into the subplot subbasement until he can identify what the green substance all over the hose is. Goodbye, Nicky! See you around 9:46!
Gil then goes to visit Sara, whom he can no longer accuse of being overly empathic toward the victims. They're gazing at the prints lifted from the ransom notes; there are three sets: Mrs. Anderson, Dimbulb Dad, and an Anderson employee named Needra Fenway. "And who is Needra Fenway?" Gil asks, since he doesn't want to wait the two or three minutes the rest of us have to before Needra shows up on screen. "Steve Anderson's secretary," Sara spells out. "So of course, I checked out her printer. As I'm sure you know, all printers have their own unique signature on them. These three tiny vertical dots from Needra's printer match the ransom note perfectly." Gil and Sara share a nice, smiling moment.
Needra, a willowy brunette, is cradling a cup of coffee in the tank as she faces Gil. After exchanging a few pleasantries, Brass jumps right in: "Maybe you can explain why your printer was used to create the ransom note found in the Anderson home." "What?!" Needra responds. I'm thinking that's an alternate way of saying, "No." Gil brings the science, noting that they've got evidence from the printer and that the hair found in Zach's crib matches hers. "I'm Steven's secretary. I go [to his home]." Catherine puts it all together, since she does possess a sixth sense for adulterers and their enablers: "You two were having an affair." "We ended it," Needra says, sounding hurt. "Because his wife got pregnant," Catherine shoots back. "I'm not going down this road," Needra replies. "What? A new baby screwed up the office romance?" asks Brass. Do they keep him around during interrogations to make Gil and Catherine look kinder? "It was more than an office romance, much more," Needra says intently. Catherine muses, "Well, a lot of women would understand if you went over there and got rid of that baby." A lot of women where? Medea's encounter group? Needra cuts the conversation short and tells Gil to take the pantyhose question to Steve; as she leaves, Catherine muses, "[Dimbulb Dad] asked her to do it to get out of the obligation to a newborn?" Sounds about right; he's stupid like that. However, I'm hung up on the part of the plan that would require a woman to be so sufficiently besotted with his idiot ass as to commit infanticide, so let's dump that possible scenario.
Gil's now wearing his bug-eye shades -- appropriate for a guy with a knack for forensic entomology -- and sitting poolside with Dimbulb Dad, listening to him explain that "Needra didn't kill Zach anymore than I did." Judging from the conviction in that statement, I'd say that Dimbulb knows who did kill Zach. But we've got twenty-five minutes to fill, so we'll continue pursuing the Needra thing to its inevitable dead end. "How do you explain her hair in the baby's crib?" Gil asks, and Dimbulb Dad launches into an improbable tale of Needra being so crazy in love with him that she had to see Zach to get concrete sensory evidence that the affair was over. Me, I'm just wishing we'd get some concrete evidence that one woman, much less two women, would be able to get past the sucking vacuum between Dimbulb Dad's ears -- to say nothing of the perpetually slack jaw or vacant expression -- and find him attractive enough to either embark on an affair with him or bear his children. Anyway, Needra needed to see the baby; Dimbulb Dad invited her over while his wife was shuttling the kids between extracurriculars, that was the end of the story. Gil's giving him a righteous glare. "You don't believe me," Dimbulb Dad says. "You've lied to me before," Gil snaps. "You told me you opened that cola bottle the morning you reported Zach missing. We had tests done. You opened that bottle six hours before you said you did, around 11 p.m. the night before. The lab is still testing it; I also believe that you cut it with alcohol." "Rum and cola, what does that prove?" Dimbulb Dad asks. Well, consider the evidence: 1. You drink girl drinks. 2. You fool around on your wife with your secretary. 3. You still don't grasp the basic meaning of the word "investigation." Conclusion: You're an idiot. "Was Needra Fenway in your house that night? Did you catch her suffocating your son?" Gil asks -- and we see the scenario in flashback -- and Dimbulb Dad retorts, "That's not how it happened!" Oh, really? Then why don't you share with us how it did happen, you girl-drink-drinking idiot? Gil asks the same thing, only with less contempt than I. Just then, across the pool where this conversation is taking place -- since what better place to conduct a private dialogue than to a large body of water that will carry the sound far and wide? -- the toddler Robbie drops a glass. Mrs. Anderson says, "Robbie, what did you do?" and he overreacts, crying, "I'm sorry, I'm sorry!" No subtext there, no sirree.
Just then a reporter from a Las Vegas paper comes by to pour a little gasoline on the Needra Fenway fire; Needra's sold some photos of her with her boss to a tabloid to cover her legal expenses. Again -- Dimbulb Dad is a dolt; he could have prevented this whole tacky scenario by a) making sure that there were no pictures of him with Needra, and b) offering to pay her legal bills so she didn't sell him down the river. He stammers something abut loving his wife very much, and the reporter takes the brush-off with alarming ease, then skips on over to ask Mrs. Anderson if she'd like to comment on those same photos. I'm thinking the Anderson family's ride home from the pool promises to be a fun one.
In the scene, the in-house psychiatrist is invoking the Medea theory to explain why Mrs. Anderson killed her baby. Catherine's not having any of it: "A guy cheats, but the wife commits murder. How come Mom's always the bad guy with you Freud types?" Brass materializes out of nowhere to answer, "That's because this mother is the bad guy. CNN just dug up a thirteen-year-old charge against Gwen Anderson. It's called shaken-baby syndrome. The oldest boy, Tyler, when he was a baby, she shook him so hard he had to go to the hospital. She shook the kid unconscious." Catherine asks about the authenticity of the report, and Brass produces a report faxed from Oregon.
Cut to a dazed Gwen Anderson getting out of a police cruiser and getting engulfed by a howling mob of people screaming, "Baby killer!" For a moment I think I'm watching Soldiers in the Army of God again, what with that documentary being about a group of people who have taken it upon themselves to devote their lives to screaming baby-killer insults and obscenities at people and this scene replicating that scary phenomenon. By the way, watch that documentary if you get a chance; anyone who maintains the impression that we live in a country where a woman's reproductive options are her own damn business should see exactly how many people disagree with that idea. And now, back to the recap: Gwen Anderson runs the gauntlet of public spectacle, and Gil eventually wades in to help her to the door. He gets beaned in the eye with a boom mike for his troubles. After Gil hustles Gwen Anderson inside, a blow-dried reporter shouts, "Gil Grissom! You found the baby -- how hard is it for you to look at Gwen Anderson?" Gil blows a gasket and pontificates to the madding crowd: "Let me tell you something. People are presumed innocent until a court of law can examine all the evidence and prove otherwise. Until then, everything else is...gossip." Sadly, that little homily chastens no one.
Catherine is holding ice to Gil's owie and complimenting him on his speech, but asks, principles of the American justice system aside, how does he really feel about Gwen's probable innocence or guilt? Gil declines to answer, and the two head in to talk to Gwen. She gives them the lowdown on the Tyler thing from way back when -- she was a twenty-three-year-old mother (!), the baby was choking, she panicked in trying to get the food out of his throat. The rest of the conversation goes equally unproductively until Gil mentions, "Did you know that your golf course paints its grass? They've been using vegetable dye." "What's your point?" Gwen's lawyer demands, and Gil replies, "I found a pair of nylons in the back of your husband's closet. We have a receipt that links them to [you]. The exact same dye on the golf course where Zachary was laid to rest is on your nylons." The lawyer replies, "She belongs to the club." "But she doesn't play golf. Remember our conversation, Mrs. Anderson? It's not your game?" Gwen looks unhappy; the lawyer calls the CSIs' bluff on the evidence, and Gwen takes off. Gil and Catherine watch her head out to her husband and kids. Robbie reaches for her and she stops short, then ignores his outstretched arms and pleading voice to get in the car. Tyler steps in, takes Robbie from his dad, and begins soothing the boy. It looks like another fun family car ride home. Catherine asks, "Did you see that?" "A mother repelled by her young," Gil intones, using the same voice that documentary narrators affect when they're chronicling something like, say, scorpions eating their own larvae. "She doesn't seem like that type to me," says Catherine, then excuses herself to unwind to old 911 tapes. She passes Sara in the hall, and Sara steps up to Gil to tell him that David isolated the fiber found in Zachary's throat; it's a flame-retardant fabric called Metamarid. It's not a common fiber for flame-retardant infant clothes (that's Vinyon), but something stronger, commonly used on things meant to be used near fire and flames.
Gil races off, and in the scene, we see him rifling through the Andersons' kitchen. Guess they're still on that family car ride or something, what with the way he so blithely burst into the house. Gil finds a potholder and has a eureka moment. Sara, who accompanied him, notes that it's the same color as the fiber in Zach's throat.
Catherine, meanwhile, is hanging with Warrick as he breaks down the Andersons' 911 call. He's separated out the voices on the 911 call; Dimbulb Dad is reciting facts while Gwen screams in the background, "Oh, God. What are we going to do?" "She was standing two meters from the phone," Warrick tells Catherine; she replies, "It's a legitimate comment. That doesn't make her guilty of anything." Warrick has anticipated this, and patiently explains, "I know. So I checked to see if she was, like, faking her concern. This program measures the stress levels of the speakers" -- he fiddles with quite the telegenic-looking graphics display -- "the stress is real." Catherine is quiet for a moment, then asks, "Are you familiar with the Jon-Benet case?" "A little," Warrick replies, leading me to wonder if I should be pleased that he's not a regular reader of The Star or worried that he's not keeping on top of one of the higher profile child murders in the 1990s, what with him being a forensics professional and all. Catherine continues, "The police went back and they found an earlier call to 911 placed from the hall phone. The audio tests separated out the son's voice. Now I'm not saying that Tyler's our guy but...we need to check into every avenue." Warrick notes that he's already backtracked in his search for earlier calls; Catherine asked if he checked Tyler's cell phone, reasoning that a kid like him would have a phone independent of his parents.
The Andersons meet with the CSIs at seven the morning and Gwen gives a confession: Zach wouldn't stop crying, she snapped, and she suffocated the baby with a pot holder. Gwen spills the real story only after Gil and Catherine have put on the science show-and-tell: based on Nicky's soda-bottle work, they conclude that the Andersons came up with a baby-disposal plan at 11 p.m.; Gwen wrapped Zach and placed him under the golf course statuary -- and here we snap back to a wrenching scene of Gwen dropping the baby (doll) and crawling backward from the body, braying in huge, heartbroken sobs -- and then they did the 911 call. The folks over at Q-D decreed that a parent had to write a ransom note because there was no dollar amount on it -- "too hard to put a value on your own son?" Catherine asks rhetorically -- and the rest was simple inference. Gil goes on to state that Zachary died while in Tyler's babysitting care earlier that night, but before he can continue, Gwen leaps in with her story. As she details how she suffocated her baby, Tyler drops his head in his hands and shakes it no repeatedly. "You may not believe me, but I loved him very, very much," she finishes. There's not a dry eye in the room.
Cut to CSI Central. Gil and Catherine are slouching in the building as Warrick approaches. "I was just coming to meet you guys. I thought you were at the Andersons'." "We're done," Gil says, "she copped." "What?" Warrick asks. "Guilty people do that when you corner them with the evidence," Catherine says tiredly, and Warrick cuts in incredulously, "Guys, the mother didn't do it. Listen." He followed up on Catherine's earlier suggestion. Sure enough -- there's a call from Tyler's phone to 911. And even worse, it's got Tyler screaming, "Robbie! What did you do? What did you do?" over and over again.
In the scene, Tyler's reciting what happened: he was watching the boys, but he got on the phone with his girlfriend and when he turned back, Robbie was suspiciously quiet and Zach was already dead. Robbie had somehow suffocated him by dropping a pot holder on his face. When the parents arrived home, Tyler was doing CPR on his brother -- the wrong way, I might add, since with infants you're only supposed to used the fingers of one hand, but losing your head in that situation is entirely understandable -- and there was a melee as everyone tried to figure out what to do . "One of you worked on him so hard you cracked his sternum," Gil says accusatively, which is pure hogwash. Nearly anyone who has CPR gets at least few broken ribs from the process; breaking an infant's sternum is not outside the realm of possibility. "Why didn't you just tell the truth [about what happened]?" Brass asks, voicing the first sensible thought anyone's had all night. "We wanted to protect Robbie. We didn't want him to grow up with the stigma of 'the boy who killed his brother,'" Dimbulb Dad says. Cut to a shot of Robbie, looking happily oblivious as only toddlers can. "He's three," Gil points out, continuing, "he's clinically unaware of his actions. No court would hold him accountable for that." This argument doesn't wash with Dimbulb Dad, who argues that everyone else would know, and "my wife would rather go to prison than have anybody know what Robbie did." Okay, setting aside the bothersome question of why it's the mom who takes the fall here as opposed to the dad, let's stop and examine the logic behind that so-called protective strategy. On second thought, let's not. Everyone stops and looks over at Robbie; he looks back up at the crowd with a genuinely sweet, sunny smile. Damn the producers for being so manipulative! And damn it for working!
Catherine is springing Gwen from the pokey, saying, "Now I know why you didn't want to hold Robbie when your husband handed him to you outside the police department. I'm very sorry." Gwen gets sniffly, saying, "I always used to tell the boys...I'd tell them, 'Gentle, gentle…' He didn't mean it, I know he didn't mean it." It sounds like she's trying to convince herself. "Of course he didn't," Catherine says, looking a little watery around the eyes herself. She then walks Gwen down the hall; Gil joins them, and the two CSIs flank Gwen protectively as they steel themselves for letting her back out to face a mob that will never really get the truth.