Scuba Doobie-Do

The episode opens with someone preparing to show an apartment to a couple. The someone -- let's assume they're a building manager until the show or the closed captioning says otherwise -- tells the couple that the occupants moved out in kind of a hurry, but that in no way detracts from the charm of the empty apartment. Ah, but I'm thinking the blood splatters all over the walls might. "Oh, my God," says a woman whom we shall never see again. "Call 911."

Cut to Brass viewing the scene. To give a brief description of the setting: imagine your typical boxy rental apartment -- plain white walls, melmac cupboards in the tiny kitchen, dingy beige pile carpeting. Now imagine setting a blender in the middle of the apartment. Fill the blender with approximately four liters of blood. Neglect to put the lid on the blender. Then hit the "puree" setting. The result? The apartment. Brass surveys the apartment and mutters, "I worked in a slaughterhouse one summer, looked a lot like this." Not one for living in the past, he continues, "The lease is in the name of one Clifford Renteria. He lived here with his girlfriend 'til they snuck out in the middle of the night." Of course they did. When you know you're not going to get your security deposit back, why bother with the fuss of giving notice? Gil points out that the blood on the wall could be not-human. "Deer, sheep, llama," deadpans Brass. Gil continues, noting that perhaps someone went hunting, brought back a deer, and decided the prudent course of action would be to butcher and dress it in the apartment. As he's speaking, he's dropping a blood sample in what looks like a home pregnancy kit -- only one that tests for human blood. Really: it has the little window where you drop the sample, and a diagram indicating human vs. non-human results. I wonder what enzyme the test might be calibrated for -- presumably, such a test would look for a chemical reaction that takes place only in conjunction with something in human blood. Sadly, most of the legwork I did on Google only talked about using polymerase chain reaction (PCR) testing to suss out unique human DNA markers, so I suppose my question goes unanswered. Anyway. Gil surveys the apartment, apparently performs a series of complex geometric calculations in his head to calculate the surface area of the apartment and the volume of blood required to cover that area, then notes, "The human body has eight quarts of blood. So whomever our victim is...is dead." Brass does not look surprised.

After The Who and an interminable series of CBS promos, we're back in the apartment with Gil, Sara, and Warrick. All three are clad in baggy blue jumpsuits. Warrick is spraying down the place with luminol, and once he's done, Gil closes the blinds. The darkened room glows under a virtual blanket of blood. Sara opines that it could be a multiple, then notes she's still acquainting herself with the scene. Warrick jumps in, noting the few darkened areas on the carpet that are not glowing; he thinks the dark areas are the real evidence. Gil points to the long dark block where, presumably, the couch was, then cautions, "We have thirty seconds 'til this luminol disappears." Sara begins snapping pictures while Warrick continues to try to identify what may have been lying on the carpet. He calls Gil over, and they look at a long, rounded area. "It looks like an electric saw," Warrick says. He and Gil both look up from the splotch and at each other. "High velocity, small spray," Gil muses. The splotch fades away. It's a metaphor! I just don't know for what.

Meanwhile, there's a fire raging in the mountains. We see helicopters flying overhead, dumping water -- see, here it feels less gimmicky -- while radio commands crackle as background noise. As the camera pans down to the ground where, presumably, the fire is under control, Nicky and Catherine are walking toward a clutch of firefighters. Catherine, incidentally, is wearing white, which doesn't seem like the most sensible sartorial decision when one is about to enter a soot-filled environment. "Zero humidity, record highs, 'tis the season," Nicky says. They walk over to Buzz, who snorts disgustedly, "I don't even know where to start with this one. Take a look at that -- a scuba diver up a tree." They all stare for a moment. Nicky settles for "Wow." Catherine: "How the hell he'd get up there?" -- although the closed captioning reads, "I wonder how he got up there?" Small discrepancies like this amuse me. Nicky muses, "He couldn't have climbed up there with all that crap on." Buzz, displaying instincts honed by years of detective work, replies, "He got up there somehow." Nicky goes for the obvious: "Lake Mead is over the hill and the copters are dropping water..." We see a copter doing so. Catherine does a double-take and says incredulously, "You're serious." Nicky nods, grinning. Catherine sputters, "That's a total urban legend. We're scientists, Nicky! No way that happened." Nicky just nods and says, "Okay," while imagining the scenario in his head -- a scuba diver just minding his submerged business until a scoop descends from above. "I suppose you believe in Santa," Catherine continues, having abandoned the tactic of advocating the scientific method in lieu of the embarrass-Nicky-into-compliance strategy. Nicky, however, is unbowed.

At the apartment abattoir, Brass and Gil are getting a more well-rounded story on the tenants. While one of them -- Cliff Renteria -- did skulk away under cover of darkness; his girlfriend Allison disappeared without a trace a month earlier. The manager snipes, "If you find him, tell him he is not getting his deposit back. The blood will never come out." "Hopefully not," Gil says in his inimitable style. "That's the only evidence we have."

Back at the fire site, Catherine is crunching among the ruins, her shirt sparkling in pristine whiteness under the sun. She lays down a yellow plastic marker at a cracked pressure gauge from an air tank, then photographs it. She then walks over to Nicky, who's staring intently at an unburned patch of green and trying to suss out how that might have happened. Catherine tells us the fire has been labeled as a Class C -- "downed power lines, winds keep shifting, hot spots all over." Nicky's listening, but he's also scanning the ground, and he picks up on something: a cigarette tucked into a burnt-out book of matches. Catherine compliments him on his eye. Nicky picks up the mess with a plastic spatula, noting that the slow-burning cigarette acts as a matchbook time-delay device. "Well, don't touch it; it'll disintegrate," Catherine says. Nicky then whips out a giant can of Aqua-Net -- insert your own jokes about Texans and big hair here -- and disclaims, "That's the only reason I carry this stuff." He then coats the matchbook in the sticky lacquer (really, Aqua-Net is the aerosol equivalent of duct tape), thus ensuring it does not fall apart. Nicky continues thinking aloud: "The difference between walking and running. Guy lights a cigarette, tucks it into the matchbook, takes a stroll." We see this happening, and it's like the cigarette and the matchbook are suspended in some mood-lit room. They're doing that more this season -- random organs just kind of hanging in midair, TMICam shots where the salient detail is removed from the context of the crime scene (or body) and shot against a blank background. Again -- metaphor?

While Catherine and Nicky stare at the fire-starting device some more, we rejoin Brass and Gil as they head over to Monaco receiving -- the receiving area for the Hotel Monaco, scene for many first-season crimes -- to interview Cliff Renteria, platform manager. May I just interject here that "Renteria" sounds a franchise for apartment-hunters? Brass walks over and interrupts a DeLuise -- not Dom -- doing busywork. ["I knew he looked familiar! It's evidently one of Dom's sons, David." -- Sars] Brass confirms that this man is Cliff, then asks if he has any knowledge of the whereabouts of Allison Scott. Boy, Brass is making some mighty big inductive leaps there, if this is going where I suspect it is. Cliff says Allison has fled to the Great White North. "We just came from your apartment, and found some disturbing evidence there. Would you care to explain that?" Gil says. Looks like Gil's just joined Brass in the 100-meter Inductive Long Jump. Cliff does nothing to inspire confidence when he begins his explanation with, "He had it coming, I'll tell you that right now. Apartment stank, there were flies everywhere, no water. So I trashed the place." "Who had it coming?" demands Brass, casting about for someone who can lay claim to eight missing pints of blood. "The apartment manager, the lazy bastard. Serves him right," Cliff clarifies. Gil tries again: "Your apartment walls are covered in human blood. Are you aware of that? Do you have an explanation?" "It's my blood," Cliff says a little sheepishly. "You got a stigmata?" Brass inquires. Hee! I love Brass. "I got nosebleeds...from hepatitis C. I got blood to spare. My nose is like Old Faithful. Finally came in handy." Gil and Brass register this -- I'm going to assume that as a matter of workforce policy, they did not touch the bloody walls with bare fingers, what with Hep-C being transmitted primarily through contaminated blood and all -- and Gil recovers nicely, saying, "You expirated blood through your nose all over your apartment walls to get back at your apartment manager?" Cliff nods matter-of-factly. You gotta admire his sangfroid. Brass and Gil confer privately. Brass: "This guy blows ten quarts of blood from his nose onto the wall. You wanna ask for a demonstration?" Gil's not quite to the show-and-tell stage yet: "He's lying. Expirating from your nose would leave oval-shaped blood patterns. The ones we found in his apartment were v-shaped." Gil and Brass ask to see Cliff's apartment -- turns out Cliff's living out of an unused truck. Gil notes both an electric saw and a lamp with a blood-stained base, then says, "I'd like to move some of your furniture to my lab for a closer inspection." Cliff shrugs that Gil can take whatever he wants, as it will save him rental fees.