Our episode opens in 1983, as a semi-clad woman wanders off the set of Porky's and down the hall of a college dorm. The camera watches as she wanders, blissfully oblivious, past all manner of hoodlums carrying on with what appears to be your standard college debauchery. The towel-clad woman wanders past a group of priapic fraternity pledges, the pledges all get whiplash, and the camera swoops over to a pizza delivery guy winding in the opposite direction. The camera then focuses on a willowy blonde staring out of the window into the rainy evening, no doubt watching the multi-car pile-ups that inevitably ensue every time it rains in Vegas, what with there being no infrastructure designed to handle weather and all. Anyway, something vaguely MTVish and broody is playing. Don't the people who write this show know that the first two minutes alone are enough to frighten CBS's core audience, the over-55 demographic? The blonde's cell phone rings; she tells the caller she'll be right down. We get a shot of where "down" is and see a cab in a parking lot. We get a shot of the blonde at a window...
...and then it's a sunny day. The camera lingers briefly on a plane ticket, then zooms out to Brass and Gil walking down the hall of a considerably-more-subdued dorm. "Paige Rycoff, freshman," Brass is saying. Ah, so nice to see him donning the mantle of Captain Exposition once more. "Booked a one-way ticket to Boulder. Never got there. Four days MIA," Brass finishes. He refrains from commenting, "Gosh, this is so similar to the circumstances surrounding Chandra Levy's disappearance!" so I must refrain also. For now. "Missing persons, the first twenty-four hours are gold. After that, quicksand," Gil comments tersely. He and Brass walk into Room 410. Gil surveys the crowd of technicians and investigators, then says, "Excuse me, could everyone in this room do me a big favor and -- leave? Please?" They do. After the room clears out, Brass asks, "You want me to go too?" "If you're very still, you can stay," Gil concedes. Brass hunkers down and notes that Paige didn't take her suitcase, her purse, or the cab she called. We see another shot of the plane ticket to Boulder; it's non-refundable. Gil muses that there's no sign of struggle. Brass says, "One moment Paige Rycoff is here. The ...vanished." Gil turns back to him and says, "People don't vanish, Jim. It's a molecular impossibility."
And on that snappy note, we go to the credits.
Back at the scene of the investigation, Gil and Warrick are in a dorm doing a rundown of the security system while college kids walk by and eye the oldsters warily. There are apparently four security cameras per floor. Gil asks, "Did they have all this stuff when you went to school here?" Warrick snorts, "With all the stuff me and my boys got away with here, it's probably why they have 'em now." Well, that, or the university has discovered a lucrative second source of income by selling those college-girls-gone-wild tapes on the side. Given the dorm denizens' predilection for wandering about in towels, one imagines the surveillance-softcore business might be booming. Sara comes in and announces the imminent arrival of the scent dogs; her whole scene is meant to illustrate the turnstiles that prevent strangers from entering the dorms. You know, in my day, we just had dyspeptic room monitors who demanded to see your student ID. And doors propped open on the side of the building through which to sneak overnight visitors. Kids today -- no imagination.
Cut to Catherine and Nicky walking down the hall and estimating how long it will take to interview all 400 students in the dorms. Catherine's got a new coif -- it's a sleek bob and looks quite nice. Given the overprocessed mess on her head last week, this is a welcome change indeed. Nicky cracks, "Well, I'll take prints over people any day." Gil pops up out of nowhere and says, "How about taking video?" Okay, then. As Nicky hustles off to go through all thirty-two cameras' records, Gil says tersely to nobody at all, "In this case, more is less -- the more time goes by, the less chance we have of finding this girl." Catherine gives Gil a reality-check look, saying, "Four days, we'd be looking for a body already." "Well, hide-and-seek. Let's go," Warrick responds. Those two are just natural-born optimists. We transition into the scene by getting a security-camera's-eye view of the CSIs splitting up.
Sara is in Room 410 with Gil, telling him that Paige made a note to have all her mail forwarded, including her security deposit. Gil isn't really listening; he's peering at a spackled spot on the wall and wondering at the texture. "Minty," he finally decrees. Sara concurs, and tells us all that toothpaste is the poor man's spackle. Given how cheap spackle is, how hard up do you have to be to resort to toothpaste? Sara informs Gil that, for an 18-year-old, getting $500 back is a lot of money, with very small odds. "That's a huge college racket, like selling your books back." "Why would anyone want to sell their books?" Gil asks, honestly puzzled. Well, Gil, at my bookstore you got a coupon for a free Whopper. After a semester of dining-hall meals, that flame-broiled incentive was enough to make me say goodbye. Sara and Gil share a moment of mutual incomprehension, then Sara says, "Two beds...roommate?" Gil tells us that the roommate in question, Jennifer Riggs, left two weeks into the semester. Gil then flashes the light over the floor of the room and muses, "There's a void." Since this is not a science-fiction show, I'm going to assume he's speaking metaphorically. Sara muses that there might have been an area rug, which could have been used to haul a body out of the room.
Cut to the scene, where an anchordrone is reciting, "The disappearance of Western Las Vegas University student..." okay, excuse me. Western Las Vegas? As if the city is so vast and populated that it's spawned regional Las Vegas universities? I realize the good folks helming CSI might not want to pay UNLV the licensing fees and all, but couldn't they have worked harder at finding a plausible college name? Anyway, we see the scent dogs working the halls, then pan over to Warrick and Catherine all tricked out in some stylin' blue jumpsuits. Warrick is checking all of Catherine's assorted straps and gadgets before lowering her into the trash chute. They take note of the broken door covering the chute. As Catherine slides down, we transition to a split-screen shot of the hall as seen through a security camera, with Nicky telling some security guard, "I'm interested in any camera that covers Paige Rycoff's room." That would be Camera 2 -- Nicky and his security guard friend skip back four days. Sharp-eyed Nicky catches someone covering the camera with a piece of fabric and demands, "How'd you miss that?" "We don't catch everything," the security guard answers defensively. How reassuring. Nicky slows the recording down and does a frame-by-frame analysis. He geeks out: "Camera captures 13 percent more than what we're seeing on this monitor. Picture condenses to fit the aspect ratio...show me the under-scan." Ah, he's looking for the stuff that's not readily obvious on the screen. Nicky figures out that somebody pushed off the wall and tossed something on the lens.
Back at Claustrophobia Central, a.k.a. the trash chute, Catherine is slowly rappelling down and examining the walls while she chats with Warrick. At one point she notices a red splotch on the wall, and bids him to stop lowering her down. The camera zooms in -- the second TMIcam shot of the night -- and we see a viscous red substance on the rough walls. "It looks like something or someone smashed up against this chute pretty hard," Catherine says uneasily, "between the first and second floors, I think." Warrick, who's manning the rope at the other end, says, "If the body was dumped, it was moving pretty fast by then." Catherine extends a finger, swipes the wall, and smells the substance -- it's pizza. She continues down the chute until she hits the dumpster and notes that the trash must get picked up every morning. She then catches the scent dogs circling confusedly and says, "Hey, Warrick, looks like we're not the only ones chasing our own tails."
Back in Room 410, Sara's scoping out the room to synthesizer music. I have a Manhunter flashback, but recover in time to watch Sara suss out some stains on a mattress. She circles them with a Sharpie for further study. As the music continues, the camera switches to a shot of the four security cameras logging the activities of the dorm residents in frame-by-frame shots. In one of the cameras, we see Nicky looking up at the lens. The whole effect is very much like watching MTV back in 1984, when the videos from avant-garde German popsters would show up between John Cougar Mellencamp songs. Anyway, it's all very stylistic.
We then fade up to Nicky printing the exact spot where the mystery camera-coverer smacked his hand. As he's spraying the wall and the prints are coming through, Sara comes up and admires his work. "How did you know where to print?" she asks admiringly. "Knew where to look," he replies with an aw-shucks grin. Then he asks politely, "How about you?" "DNA, blood and semen," Sara responds casually. "We shoot, we score," Nicky responds, and the two high-five in congratulations.
Unfortunately, Gil isn't having such a festive time of it. There are muffled voices talking about evidence and leads, and he looks faintly disturbed, but deep in thought. Finally, the voices clear: it's Ma and Pa Rycoff, demanding, "What are you doing to find our daughter?" "I'm thinking," he replies, as if it's the most logical thing in the world. The parents instantly erupt into worried harangues, and Gil says, "When we get any new information, I'll let you know." "What can we do?" Ma Rycoff asks. "Just let us do our jobs," Gil replies. Pa Rycoff jumps in with, "This is our daughter, we can't just be observers," and, helpfully, Ma Rycoff picks up the slack, saying, "No! We won't! We're part of this." Gil says patiently, "What no one's telling you is the only tangible link left between you and your daughter is the evidence my team is collecting and how we're interpreting it. So please -- let me think." The Rycoffs are nonplussed.
In the shot, Gil's looking at the split-screen video surveillance in his office; Catherine comes in, and Gil says without looking at her, "You showered." Catherine snorts, "Thanks for noticing, Gil, you're very observant." Gil grunts that he can't tell what he's seeing on the screen and moves in closer, prompting Catherine to crack that she sees a 5'11" workaholic. Gil starts and jumps back; then the two of them return to staring at the surveillance tapes. They decide that it looks as though somebody was carrying out a rug. Just then, Nicky comes in, announcing that his printing has borne fruit: "I know who covered the cameras." "Good," replies Gil, "we know what they might have carried out." We soon meet the brain trust responsible for carrying the rug: it's some whey-faced frat rat who looks at the print Nicky lifted and smirks, "It's a hand." "It's your hand," Gil clarifies. "If you say so," Frat Rat replies. "Your fingerprints say so," Nicky snaps. Man, he must really be regretting that trout incident right about now. "Okay," Frat Rat says finally, "I'll cop to it. But I'm not copping to it alone." We then get the exposition via flashback -- a bunch of fraternity pledges stealing things from Room 410. And, since this is an exposition, Brass magically appears to ask, "This is a pledge prank?" Gil simply looks stunned that people took potential evidence for fun. "We borrowed some stuff from the lounge, but we were going to return it," clarifies Frat Rat. "When? After you graduated?" snorts Brass. Go, Brass! The boys then establish that Frat Rat knew Paige; they had dated once or twice, and then it ended. Frat Rat says, "In case you hadn't noticed, I'm in the system now. The talent pool's pretty deep." I suddenly have a premonition that we'll be seeing him again in future episodes, possibly as a date-rape suspect or a petty dope dealer. "She dumped you," Nicky guesses correctly. Frat Rat's face falls. After Frat Rat leaves, Nicky and Gil bemoan how their hot lead just went stone-cold.
The Rycoffs have taken to the airwaves, which is absolutely not intended to be a parallel to the Chandra Levy case at all, I'm sure. Gil is watching the Rycoffs provide the six o'clock news with their lead story when Sara sidles up to him and says, "I need you in the lab." Naturally, Gil acknowledges her by launching into a parable: "You know, when a tree falls in the forest, even if no one's there to hear it, it does, in fact, make a sound." Demonstrating that she's recently engaged in the Grissomian mind-meld, Sara says, "Yes. Someone must have seen or heard something." I do like how this show is working more quirky little interactions into the scenes. Cut to the king of quirky coiffures, Liam the Lab Tech, who is looking very Rob-Thomas-from-Matchbox-20 this week. I'm wondering if his rotating hairstyles are temporary, or if this is going to be like Melissa Joan Hart on Sabrina the Teenaged Witch where there's never the same 'do twice. Anyway, Liam surveys a staggering array of grooming implements laid out on a table before him and grouses, "You want DNA, you bring me her whole life." "It's called zeal," Sara informs him. "Or overkill," he continues. Apparently, this week is Cranky Week for Liam. "It's called protocol. Now let's get on with it," Gil says. Man, he's turning into a stern father figure for Liam. The results: the tox screen from the blood, semen, and DNA Sara picked up off the mattress show rohypnol (a.k.a. "roofies"), and the DNA in question isn't Paige's. Sara tells Gil, "We may have two victims: one missing, one raped."
Catherine and Nicky are watching the tape of the parking lot to see what vehicular traffic is like. They have to recap the night, frame-by-frame. I have great empathy for them.
Moving on to the day, Brass, Gil, and Sara are visiting Jennifer Riggs, erstwhile roommate of Paige Rycoff. Riggs dropped out earlier in the year. Sara comments on the room being cursed. When Brass mumbles that there might have been a possible sexual assault, Sara says, "You thought you'd wait for a female." Brass doesn't dispute it. As tapes of Paige play in the background -- looking nothing at all like the media strategy the Levys used in the days after Chandra's disappearance -- Jennifer asks tremulously how the police found out about her. She haltingly recites what happens -- or at least what she remembers, thanks to the roofies; there's a brief, harrowing flashback scene of an unconscious Jennifer being carried into her bedroom by a male assailant. Jennifer tearfully notes that whoever did this to her lived in her dorm, and the assault and resulting fear for her safety were what prompted her to leave campus.
Cut to Sara, Warrick, and Gil in the dorm elevator. Sara is asking -- rhetorically, I'm sure -- why a rapist would willingly give us his DNA; Gil reminds her that, ostensibly, they're looking for a connection to the Rycoff disappearance, and any rapist apprehension is a benefit. Warrick clarifies, "So as long as we get their DNA voluntarily, we can use it as we see fit." Wow! How sneaky! How...man, that raises some disturbing civil rights issues. Let's leave those alone and continue recapping, shall we? Gil says they're hoping someone refuses, thus giving them a de facto suspect. A fun-filled montage of swabbing young men ensues. One guy refuses, on the grounds that he hasn't brushed his teeth. Warrick snaps, "Hey, mouth-boy, she's not going to kiss you. She just wants your DNA." The camera pulls back, and we get the herky-jerky frame-by-frame shot of the swabbing.
Cut to Liam pipetting happily, processing all the little DNA samples, probably via PCR. Gil comes in, reading his beeper and asking, "Frederich Miescher requests my presence?" The German name amuses me nearly as much as it does Liam, and he turns back to Gil, saying, "Figured out my code, huh? You know my boy Freddie discovered DNA." "He's been dead a hundred years," Gil snaps. Is it just me, or is there a new undercurrent of hostility to the Gil/Liam relationship? Gil gives me more fuel for my suspicious little fire when he interrupts Liam's recitation of his methodology to snap, "Are we paying you by the word?" Oh, so it's okay when Gil carries on ad nauseam about trees falling in the woods, but poor Liam gets three expository sentences and all of a sudden he's Strom Thurmond filibustering against civil rights? Whatever. Liam wordlessly hands over a lab report, and Gil says, "Thirteen markers, thirteen matches, one suspect. Thank you."
After a token shot of the Vegas skyline at sunrise, we go to...a baseball diamond. Brass fills us in: "Kevin Watson, 19, Room 407." That would be our rapist, I'm thinking. After the two of them rattle off a whole lot of nothing -- Kevin, in addition to being a rapist, also has a 1.33 GPA and a right-handed batting style -- they corner Kevin in a dugout. "We know that you assaulted Jennifer Riggs. Why don't you just tell us about Paige Rycoff?" Gil starts. Kevin pleads ignorance. With a 1.33 GPA, it's not hard to believe him. Gil fills Kevin in on how DNA analysis works; Brass then steps in to play bad cop by insinuating that Kevin got mad because, unlike Jennifer, Paige fought back when he assaulted her. Kevin has an alibi -- he had three baseball games in Fresno -- no doubt against that Division I-A monolith, Western Fresno University. Brass could care less; he arrests Kevin for Jennifer's rape. Warrick then materializes, saying he's just checked the alibi and it's solid. What a disappointing scene -- last year, we learned that Warrick played baseball in college and it would have been nice to see him talking to his old coach in a professional capacity or, alternately, expressing his surprise at how much the team has changed.
I use the commercials to recover from my disappointment and come back in time to watch Nicky and Catherine recapping the traffic tape. They do not, however, offer any commentary, except for Nicky's "you know it's easier to get a master's degree than a parking spot on campus?" Catherine makes a whatever face and sends Nicky off to cross-reference all silver Volvos like the one they noted circling the parking lot over and over again. The day, Catherine and Gil are walking up to a silver Volvo with a university tag dangling from the rear-view mirror -- the tag was what caught their attention on the tape -- and Gil comments, "A world of possibilities, reduced to a single car?" Yup. Nicky fills us in: the Volvo is registered to Robert Woodbury, philosophy professor, tenured. A team of techs is busily breaking into the car as he speaks. They look at a blanket-covered lump in the back seat and see...golf clubs. Gil then compounds the car and exiles Nicky to the chop shop. He sends Catherine off to deal with the good professor.
In the shot, we see Catherine with a sport-coat-wearing weenie who's working that whole sensitive-guy vibe. This must be Dr. Woodbury. He cops to being around the parking lot, and Catherine nails him: "Professor Woodbury, you circled the parking lot six times." The professor looks taken aback. The camera switches perspective so we're getting the Woodbury view of Catherine eying him skeptically from one chair, Brass glowering from a second, and Gil wandering about the office in a happy little observant haze. Just as the interrogation gets interesting, a curvy undergrad pops in and gives Woodbury goo-goo eyes; he nervously dismisses her by telling her he'll see her tomorrow. The exchange is not lost on anyone present. Gil notices a broken shard of pottery on the floor and picks it up with a pair of forceps, saying casually, "Some circumstantial evidence is as strong as when you find a trout in the milk." You know, it seems very funny on television, but I'm betting anyone who had to work with Gil would probably be creeped out if he were perpetually barging into conversations with his non-sequitorial statements. The professor, who has undoubtedly endured stranger phenomena at yearly MLA convos, merely replies, "Henry David Thoreau." Oh, so I'm guessing he's a closet Transcendentalist, or a scholar of American Pragmatism. Gil notes that his perception of the shard is a sign of struggle. Then he struggles with his temper and loses: "Okay, look, it's been six days. If you have a legitimate reason for being outside of her dorm, tell us. If you have an illegitimate reason, tell us that. Tell us something so that we can move forward...again, my perception. [Your] silence confirms guilt." All three CSIs rise to go and Catherine, whose adultery beacon is now pinging full force, says menacingly, "We found you. We will find what you're hiding." Brass just looks tired. The professor snaps and admits he and Paige were conducting an affair, but only in his office. Apparently, the vase was a casualty of one assignation. Catherine snidely notes that Woodbury didn't care about Paige enough to come forward. "And tell you what?" he snarls. "That I cheat on my wife with my student who is missing? And I have absolutely no information." Before I can make a joke about voter redistricting in Modesto, Gil says, "If it's important enough for you to hide, it's important enough for us to know." Woodbury crumbles like a cookie and admits that he went to the dorm the night Paige was to leave town, to say goodbye, but she didn't come out.
While Woodbury's off to explain how the family car came to be compounded by CSIs, Liam is showing Nicky that the hair they found in the Volvo matches the hair from Paige's hairbrush, and the skin tags on the end -- shown in TMIcam -- indicate that her hair was ripped out. The CSIs share the news of the hair with Woodbury, and he expresses shock, vigorously denying that Paige had been in his car. A phone call from his house to Paige certainly isn't helping his case. Fortunately for Woodbury, he was in a faculty lunch at the time of the phone call, so everyone quickly reaches the conclusion that Mrs. Woodbury was the one who made the phone call and took a little car ride with Paige. Mrs. Woodbury confirms the story. Gil ceases witnessing the marriage in crisis as the cell phone goes off; it's Warrick, telling him they may have found Paige's body. Turns out they did -- and she's somewhat more compact than she used to be, given that she was found in a junkyard, post-trash-processing.
David the unfun coroner is looking down at Paige's obviously pretzeled body, commenting, "I've seen things like this before. When I worked in Arlington, Virginia, every winter, some homeless guy trying to stay warm would take a nap in the dumpster, wake up the trash compactor." Catherine is distraught, repeating that she searched the trash chute and it was clean, so she didn't think to check the dumpster. Gil asks David if he's saying the compactor killed Paige. David refutes that and tells them she was killed by massive internal bleeding; Paige's spleen ruptured from some sort of blunt force trauma. Her ribs broke -- which we see in TMIcam, ick -- and he has no real idea how it happened. "Now what?" Catherine asks. "We followed a lead, it went cold, now it's hot again," Gil says. The CSIs promptly descend on the dumpster. Warrick finds blood; Nicky finds a fresh dent on the dumpster with vehicle paint chips. Sara's all irked that she didn't get to be Gil's star pupil, so she says, "There's no reason to think there's any connection between the paint transfer and Paige." "No reason to think there's not," Gil replies. Nicky, who is on a roll during this episode, hypothesizes that the whole thing might have been a hit-and-run courtesy of a vehicle with a high ground clearance, like an SUV. We see the whole thing in flashback. Warrick wonders if someone tossed Paige's body in the dumpster after hitting it; the rest of the CSIs bandy about possible suspects and motivations.
After IDing the paint and somehow -- miraculously -- narrowing down the possible cars to one courtesy of unique paint jobs, Gil heads out of the lab where he and Nicky were looking at color samples and into CSI Central. "Where have you been?" Warrick calls as Gil strides by. "I can't be everywhere, Warrick, and they banned human cloning," Gil snaps. Wow, this missing-persons case has him feeling awfully cranky. Warrick points out that the blood he found matches Paige's; Nicky steals Warrick's thunder by pointing out that Brass has the SUV suspect in custody. The suspect is an average schmuck; it turns out he was hurrying home in response to his nine-months-pregnant wife's pager summons. He swerved into the dumpster to avoid a van. The CSIs peer at the SUV and note that there's no hair, blood, or fibers to be found; they gloomily conclude that he didn't hit Paige. "Oh, we have tons of motive, but not a stitch of evidence," Warrick says gloomily. "H.L. Mencken once said there's an easy solution to every human problem -- neat, plausible, and wrong. So if the solution to our problem is not neat, plausible and wrong, then it could be messy, unlikely and right. A butterfly flaps its wings in Brazil, we get a hurricane off the coast of Florida -- chaos theory. Random events, the wholesale rejection of linear thought," Gil starts. "Here we go," mutters Nicky. "Physics meets philosophy," Warrick says, as if he's seen this before.
At this point, Gil decides that the best way to figure out what happened is to re-enact it, wrapping up the "how did Paige die" question with the "why did she happen to be in a dumpster when she did?" question. He convinces the others by saying, "If we apply [chaos theory] to the Paige Rycoff case, then we can say it's because life is unpredictable." "No one can predict more than a few seconds into the future," Catherine says, catching on. "I predict I'll be standing here a minute from now," Nicky says. I predict that his streak as CSI stud is about to come to an end. "Where we going with this?" asks Warrick. "Paige was in her dorm room, and she ended up in a dumpster. Somewhere between her dorm room and our dumpster is our answer. Let's go. Coming, Nick?" As everyone peels off, Warrick smirks, "Nice try, Nostradamus."
Everyone returns to the dorm. Sara plays Paige, and in one of the neatest effects of this infant season, Sara's monologue of what she sees transforms into Paige reciting what she'll do; Paige and Sara morph in and out, as do their voices. It's neat. Sara, grooving on Paige's stream-of-events, notes that the trash can is missing. Gil borrows an RA's trashcan; Sara tries dumping it. She nearly loses the trashcan. Gil wonders aloud if Paige's reflexes were so fast, and enlists a jug-eared freshman to help them play out the what-if game; Jug-Ear is to count to a hundred and then drop the can down the chute. Gil and Sara are waiting for it as it comes down. As all five CSIs gaze upon the trash can in the dumpster, they reconstruct the events. Paige dropped the trash can down the chute. She wanted her security deposit back, so she came back down to retrieve the can. She tried to walk her way up the dumpster and the back wall, and leaned into the dumpster -- it got hit with her pinned behind it, and she got crushed, then fell into the dumpster, horribly injured. Paige apparently bled to death in the dumpster. Gil relates this to the Rycoffs (off-screen) and Pa Rycoff says, "Let me get this straight: you're saying a confluence of unrelated, unfortunate events conspired to kill my daughter." Gil nods: "Yes." Mrs. Rycoff wildly says that someone has to be responsible for this; Gil points out that the evidence says otherwise. The Rycoffs vow to hire an investigator and find out what really happened. They stomp off, upset. Gil watches them go and says tiredly, "We told them what happened." "Yeah, but we didn't give them what they needed. They needed some closure." "Truth brings closure," Gil insists, his faith in the evidence unwavering. "Not always," Catherine whispers, and we fade out.