The show opens somewhere outside Barstow on the edge of the desert; judging from the rolling green fields and lush foothills, the drugs have definitely taken hold. I remember saying something like, "I thought this show took place in Las Vegas. Maybe I recorded the wrong thing..." And suddenly there was ominous music all around us and the scene was filled with what looked like a woman riding horseback through those green fields. And a voice was screaming, "Holy Jesus! Who changed the setting of the show to the bluegrass fields of Kentucky?"
Then it was quiet again, in part because there is only so much one can crib from Hunter S. Thompson before one crosses the line from parody to plagiarism. Anyway, the woman notices that her horse is especially nervous, and asks her mount, "What is wrong with you?" Surprisingly, the horse fails to answer in standard English. She dismounts at the corrugated metal pipe that's making the horse nervous and looks inside; a very still female figure is hunched in the pipe. The horsewoman presses her hand to her mouth in horror. Some time later -- like, an entire day later, since the golden Kentucky afternoon appears to have given way to a dark Nevada evening. Gil, sporting a CSI baseball cap, peers into the pipe and makes a moue of disgust, then straightens up to tell Brass, "A girl in a culvert pipe at a highway construction site in the middle of an alfalfa field. You got anything to add?" Brass, who has been shaking his head in profound appreciation of Gil's imagery, sighs, "Nothing as poetic. Road crew took off at 3:30, body was discovered at 5:15." Gil asks who found the body, and Brass points a thumb back in the general direction of the horse, expositing, "Our friend Flicka." Gil notes resignedly that the horse stumbling across the body scotches his theory of "Whoever finds the body is the first suspect." Before Brass can comment, Sara calls Gil's name, and he walks over to the pipe where she's standing. Gil asks her what she's got and Sara replies, "The one thing you don't want to find at a murder scene." Gil shines his flashlight to an area slightly to the right of the pipe and says, "A second body."
The Who plays as I ponder how the corpse-finding horse managed to completely miss a body out in the open in favor of finding one in an enclosed place.
Back on the show. David The Occasionally Fun Coroner. We learn that both women died around the same time -- approximately 12 hours ago -- but Gil's not too happy that David's not being more precise, snarking, "My uncle Phil used to say you can't kill two birds with one stone." "All I can tell you is cause of death," David shoots back. The brunette has an injury to the cervical spine; in David's words, it "looks to be hands-on." We get to see how the cervical vertebra snapped, courtesy of the TMICam. Gil and David concur that yes, someone snapped the brunette's neck and she died instantly. The blonde, on the other hand, died in a much different matter, she had cut glass in all her many incised wounds, as well as abrasions on her neck that look a lot like fingernail marks. Thinking ahead, David's already swabbed the abrasions for foreign DNA. As for the cause of death? Severed brachial artery, leading her to bleed out. I should note here that we get to see the severing, and the resultant bloody geyser, in glorious TMI-o-Vision. Gil's brow furrows, and he decrees, "Something doesn't seem right." He goes on to point out, "Look at the brunette. Her elaborate tattoos, perfectly dyed hair. Multiple body piercings...it tells me she craved attention." David, thinking that these things could also indicate someone who slavishly followed prepackaged alt.culture trends, shrugs. Gil continues, "The blonde, however, seems almost prosaic. She doesn't even have pierced ears. She didn't shave her legs." David, who's riding that poetic vibe Gil began back before the credits, says, "A wildflower and a wallflower." Gil muses, "What do our dead flowers have in common?"
Meanwhile, on the forest world of Endor, the sound of Ewoks hooting is visible as the camera pans down and...I'm sorry. This is still CSI. It's just...CSI set in a deep green forest. Exactly how much territory does the Las Vegas CSI jurisdiction encompass? Like, up to Lake Tahoe? Idaho? Alberta? Anyway, Nicky and Catherine have wandered from the desert to this verdant glen, and a random park ranger type is explaining how he happened to stumble over the seated corpse we are all looking at. "He should have been wearing his orange vest," opines Ranger Rick. Yes, but at least the dead man is not wearing the beret Catherine currently has perched atop her head; it's as if she's going to leave the crime scene, then head down to City Lights to listen to Allen Ginsberg read Howl. Nicky notices that the bullet went straight through our dead hunter; Catherine adds that the man bled out. I snap my fingers in appreciation of her observation. Nicky picks up the hunting rifle and notes that it's a Winchester 70. As he's admiring the stock of that fine weapon, he notices Emergency Backup David The Coroner (not to be confused with David The Variably Fun Coroner, despite the two of them having the same job; apparently, the main David is kept in the morgue, while Emergency Backup David is appropriated for autopsies on-the-go) unsheathing what looks to be a meat thermometer and sticking it in through the bullet hole. Aghast, Nicky asks what Emergency Backup David is doing; Emergency Backup David replies that he's checking the liver temperature so he can gather a data point for estimating time of death. We see the entire process. Nicky muses that "there should be a total of five bullets; four in the magazine, one on the chamber. All five accounted for. This rifle was never fired."
Catherine is snapping photos of the blood-covered leaves. Emergency Backup David finally has a reading on his meat thermometer; the temperature is 88.6 degrees Fahrenheit (or 31.11 degrees, for you Celsius-using types), which means that the body's been cooling for about ten hours. The ranger does a little elementary math and states that the man would have died around 2 PM. Catherine then roots around the dead man's pants, finding a wallet for a James Jasper of Las Vegas, NV. Nicky asks when hunting season started; the ranger exposits that deer season started the week before, and he saw a record number of permits. Well, let's assume that they're talking mule deer -- as those are the only deer listed for hunting on the Nevada Division of Wildlife hunting schedule page -- and assume that we're using "any legal weapon" (the Nevada Division of Wildlife's words, not mine). Hunting season began on October 6 this year, so this episode takes place in mid-October. Or perhaps it takes place in TV Time, where things like hunting seasons, federal holidays, and other calendar-based conceits are all highly fluid. If y'all want to go hunting in Nevada in 2002, get your permits in now before wild turkey season starts. Anyway -- we're five minutes behind the episode, which is what happens when my curiosity gets the better of me, so it's time to catch up. So: Catherine muses that a hunter, properly clad in his safety orange, shot at a deer; the deer ran, but the bullet kept going until it hit the non-safety-orange clad hunter. Nicky prods at the theory and the body simultaneously by pointing out the conspicuous absence of a bullet in either body or tree.
Meanwhile, several hundred miles away in the desert stronghold where CSICentral is located, Sara is interrupting Gil's reverie to tell him she's finished processing the crime scene. Gil hands her a cookie. No, no, no. Sara tells Gil she's processed the crime scene, working from the victims out until she hit the highway, and she found nothing. This doesn't perturb Gil, as he has made an inquiry of AFIS and come back with the goods: the brunette victim is one Joan Marks, felony shoplifter and stay-at-home slacker. Warrick has been dispatched, off-screen, with a warrant to check out the address.
Back in the jungle, Nicky is using a pair of infrared goggles to look for things that might seem amiss out here in the thickly wooded Nevada forest. I'd go so far as to suggest that the thickly wooded forest itself -- and the attendant chirping of frogs and other small nocturnal wildlife -- is out of place, but I can only harp on the whole "I thought Las Vegas was in the desert?" thing for so long. Anyway, Nicky spots a bullet embedded in a tree trunk and calls Catherine over to look at it. "How do I get it out of there without damaging it?" he wonders. Catherine chirps, "You know what the textbook says: if you're not a hundred percent sure how to collect it, bring the whole thing in." I'm sure the people at Earth First! love that attitude. Nicky and Catherine crane their heads back to behold the mighty tree. "I'll figure it out," Nicky comments.
It's now daylight; Sara and Gil are walking up the driveway of a prefab suburban house. They enter the garage, and Sara slides behind the wheel of the car housed therein. "Twelve hundred miles and it's an older model. The driver doesn't get out much," Sara notes. Gil rifles through the glove compartment and discovers that the car is registered to Donna Marks. The two of them talk about how maybe it would be smart for one of them to go to the DMV and maybe see if Donna Marks and Joan Marks are somehow connected when, surprise! Warrick makes an appearance, saying he's already beaten them to the punch. Donna's the blonde wallflower corpse. She's also Joan's sister. Gil chortles, "Well. We now know what they both have in common. Genetics." And here I was going to go with, "They're both murdered." Silly me. Warrick -- who has used the thirteen minutes of this episode where he's been off-camera wisely and efficiently -- reveals that the house used to belong to Donna and Joan's mother, and Donna's been living in it alone since Mother Marks died. Joan apparently lived in Henderson. He then takes Gil and Sara to the back yard, saying, "The real action's out back."
Indeed -- nothing but shattered patio-door glass and a few numbered cones. "If the highway's the dump site, this is the primary scene," he tells his seasoned coworkers. Gil confirms Warrick's assessment, reminding us all that Donna's cuts were filled with glass. "She went through that door," Sara notes, in an unusually obtuse moment. This isn't the most subtle exposition. Warrick assumes the position -- beleaguered, that is -- and tells us all that he'll be seeing us at the 48-minute mark, as he's about to begin collecting glass and fitting it back into the door frame to work out the body's point of impact, force, et cetera. Gil asks Warrick if he likes puzzles; Warrick sighs in return that Gil's the puzzle guy. "Here's a hint," Gil says helpfully. "Work from the edges. Once you've got the corners, the rest is cake." Actually, no. What he says is, "When they cool sheet glass, they lay it out on tin." Warrick's no dummy; he quickly deduces, "So the side that kissed up to the tin will fluoresce under a UV." Sara notes with some empathy that Warrick's going to have a long couple of days in the lab. Warrick, choosing to avoid contemplating that thought, diverts the conversation by pointing out the bloody imprints he's found and logged. The three investigators share information; Sara found blood on Joan's shoe, so if the blood matches up, that places her at the house, possibly stepping in the blood, and thus helping set up a timeline for what happened. Sara also notes that if Joan stepped in Donna's blood, that implies that Joan was healthy enough to be walking around while Donna lay injured and bleeding. Nobody comments on that; Warrick is looking down at his puzzle while Gil walks over to the fridge and surveys the take-out menu collection. He then opens the fridge -- which is a veritable garden of take-out containers.
Gil and Sara do a sniff test -- the family-sized portions of sweet-and-sour pork in the front are still fresh, but the single-sized portions in the back are stale. Gil asks Sara: "Increase in appetite, or perhaps a guest?" Sara has no answer for him. They enter Donna's home office -- she's got quite a nice flat-panel display and several other expensive home electronics items. Gil leans down and grabs something off the desk: "Universal remote. She could do everything she wanted from this chair but cook a roast." Sara notes that Donna may cook like she does -- by calling takeout on speed dial. There are other similarities: "She's a catalog junkie. We're on the same mailing lists." And I'm right there with you ladies. I hate shopping malls, I hate recreational shopping, and I hate having to mash my schedule into someone else's idea of business hours, or battle the hordes in line, or duck salespeople when I'm not instantly making up my mind. So far as I am concerned, God invented catalogs and e-commerce websites as a boon to keep me from becoming some sort of retail terrorist. Oh, look -- I've digressed. Can you tell the holiday crowds are beginning to get to me? Anyway -- Gil begins putting the pieces together: "Catalogs, the internet, takeout, 1200 miles on her car. Agoraphobic maybe? Or she just doesn't like people?" Coming from Gil, this is a rich assessment. Sara tweaks him for it while I stare at the screen, wondering what the world has come to when those of us who are moderately introverted and/or misanthropic are being mocked by bug-racing, roller-coaster-riding Gil Grissom of all people. Sara says she'll haul in Donna's PC, go through her email, and check in on her social life. She then wheels toward the bathroom off the office and notices, "Hey, the toilet seat's up; there was a man here." Well, there's one piece of data for your social-life investigation.
Back in the B-plot, Catherine and Nicky have returned from Sherwood forest and are roaming the halls of CSICentral unencumbered. She's barreling down the hall in a smart black leather blazer (oh, I so totally want her leather jackets) and the side-parted hairclips of someone who's growing out her bangs (and I so totally commiserate on that front). She runs into Nicky -- who's having another good wardrobe day in a turtleneck J. Crew would undoubtedly call "aubergine" -- and Nicky tells her that one of the Davids called James Jasper's death cut-and-dried: the bullet severed an abdominal artery, and he bled out. Nicky further exposits that the bullet went front-to-back; Detective Vega (who has apparently replaced Buzz, much to my lamentation) has the widow. It's time for Catherine and Nicky to talk to her. Cut to the widow in question telling everyone in a tear-hoarsened voice that her husband left early before she got up, and when he failed to appear before suppertime, she assumed he had bagged a deer. Vega asks skeptically, "He took a day off in the middle of the week," and the widow Jasper admits that she and the spouse had both been laid off recently; James had worked as an auditor in the insurance business. Catherine asks how James had taken his recent unemployment; the woman responds that he handled it fine, except when they had to ask his parents for money to pay the rent. She begins rambling, in the shocked way people do when they've just been told someone they love died, "That was hard on him. I...I have to call them. I haven't called them. I..." Mrs. Jasper rises, and Catherine puts a hand on her knee, grounding her, then asks if James was an experienced hunter. The wife reveals that he was, and that he had been hunting since he was a kid: "He always looked forward to deer season, but with the baby and all, he's missed the last few. It's me, isn't it? I encouraged him to go. I thought that it would help him take his mind off things. What am I going to do?" Mrs. Jasper breaks down again. The menfolk exchange deeply uneasy looks, clearly uncomfortable with this display of grief. You'd think, in their line of work, that they'd figure out how to handle it after a while. Nicky valiantly tries to return to a line of questioning and asks about James's safety vest; the wife supplies that James was usually very careful, so not wearing a vest doesn't sound right.
Meanwhile, Gil is off to harass Liam The Lab Tech, hovering over the younger man until Liam peers up from him microscope to say, "If you're here about the blood on Joan Marks's shoe, I already told Sara, I'm backed up." Gil acerbically corrects that he's here for the DNA samples from Donna Marks's neck. Liam can deliver -- he ran a DNA profile on the victims, and he asks rhetorically, "What do all sisters have in common? DNA." Gil asks incredulously, "You're saying that Donna's sister scratched her?" Liam meows and hisses until Gil's unamused glare causes him to stop. Liam recovers with, "So. Did I solve the case?" Gil disabuses him of any notion that he did. In another part of CSICentral, Sara and Brass are walking down the hall and swapping legal research. Apparently, Joan Marks and her boyfriend Gavin Pallard swapped more than bodily fluids; they also swapped restraining orders. "Want to find out why?" Brass asks. Sara grins back, "Don't mind if I do."
And here's Gavin to tell us. He's pointing to a shallow scar bisecting his cheek vertically and drawling, "See this? Didn't get this French kissing. Joanie had a temper. Punctuated her sentences by throwing furniture. Made it hot, you know? We'd break up to make up." Brass asks about the last break-up; Gavin reveals that despite the restraining order, Joan came back over to Chez Gavin three times because his sexual magnetism surpassed even the boundaries of municipal law. Sara asks when Gavin saw Joan last; he replies that it was the morning before, if by "saw last," you mean "caught out of the corner of my eye as I ducked a flying coffeepot." Gavin then exposits that Joan took his T-Bird when she left, but now that she's not exactly in a state to be hitting the highways, he'd like his car back. Sara and Brass respond to this in their own inimitable fashion. Sara then pushes to find out if Gavin knew Joan was going over to her sister's house; Gavin can't conceive of Joan doing such a thing voluntarily, adding, "Oil and water. Joanie liked action. She was a partier. Last party Donna went to was her third birthday." Sara asks if Gavin's been over there recently; he replies in the negative, since apparently he finds computers, and the people who spend inordinate amounts of time on them, boring. Before Sara dismisses Gavin, she asks to see the bottom of his shoes. "I like the shoes. I like them enough to get a warrant," she grins. Unfortunately, we don't get to see Gavin's response.
We're in the ballistics lab with Bob The Jovial Texan Tech. After some ribbing over the pros and cons of felling a cottonwood for a bullet buried within (they didn't do it, for those who were concerned), Nick bids him to "tell us about the bullet -- lands, striations, grooves," and Bob complies. Unfortunately, he is the bearer of bad news; the end of the bullet is discolored, which indicates oxidation -- and thus indicates that the bullet is older than the crime scene. As if Catherine and Nicky's day couldn't get any worse, along comes Vega. Just as Catherine and Nicky are telling Vega how they're preparing to write off the case because nothing they have points to anything more than an accidental death, Vega shows them a two-month-old insurance policy for two million dollars for James Jasper, with his missus as the beneficiary. "She was crying poor when she was in the money?" Nicky asks incredulously. Actually, if you want to get technical about the way most life insurance policies work…the beneficiary is required to produce documentation that the insured party is, in fact, dead (usually a death certificate), along with any attending autopsies, police reports, or other documentation that supports the claim. Given the speed with which most paper-heavy bureaucracies work (hint: glacially slow), it's entirely possible to have someone die in, say, February and have insurance companies only beginning to pay out six months later. All of this is a long-winded way of saying that it seems wrong for someone who has investigated all manner of deaths to assume that the moment someone dies, their beneficiaries are quietly cackling into gags made of thousand-dollar bills. Oh, look, I've ranted again. Sorry. Anyway, it doesn't look good for Mrs. Jasper, since the policy was paid for on her credit card.
Meanwhile, down in the basement, Warrick is piecing together glass. It is every bit as riveting as it sounds.
Aboveground, Sara and Gil are going through Donna's computer. They're looking at an interface that looks just enough like AOL to evoke murmurs of recognition without being so apparent as to invoke lawsuits. For the record, the service is called "Internet Online." There is literally nothing I can say to make that even funnier than it is on its own. Anyway, Sara exposits, "Donna was a telecommuter. Liked to shop, mail order over the phone. I retrieved lots of email confirmations." Gil asks why Donna ordered over the phone, if she got her order verifications online. Sara offers, "Need for human contact?" "Without physical contact," Gil replies. He's leaning in just close enough for the faithful on the Gil+Sara thread to begin reading subtext into this scene. Sara points out that Donna spent time in chat rooms -- she participated in book clubs and collected fountain pens. Gil asks if Donna had any personal emails; Sara either takes advantage of his ignorance of internet technologies or assumes ours when she ignores the question and opens an AIM-like interface to note, "Only one buddy on the internet buddy list, screen name Apollo." Gil and Sara pull up their most recent chat, and Sara begins reading: "'I know it sounds weird, but my life began when I first heard your voice. When you said my name, it felt so right. Did you feel it too?'" Sara and Gil look at each other, then quickly look away; Sara says hastily, "It's easy to wear your heart on your sleeve when you're not looking in his eyes." She deduces that if Donna and "Apollo" were talking, they'd moved beyond computer chats. Gil asks Sara what they know about Apollo; she explains that they tracked down Apollo's IP address -- Western Nevada Correctional Facility, Ganza Avenue, Ely, Nevada. Gil says, with disproportionate glee, "Her Greek God is in the slam!"
Cut to the aforementioned slam. Gil is walking with the warden, who is pointing out that correctional facilities are, in fact, businesses and this privately-owned facility wants to keep its client happy. "Criminals are cutting deals to get sent here," the warden says. Gil looks around the facility and comments, "It's like a theme park." The warden does not disagree: "The more guys through the turnstile, the more money we make." Gil asks, "So as long as I'm in business, you're in business?" "Ka-ching," confirms the warden. The two men then enter a bank of desks, where inmates are working at terminals handling mail-order business. Gil says, "Something tells me state funds aren't your only source of revenue." The warden points out that his several contracts with retailers are all perfectly legal. And not unprecedented: in June of 2000, 20/20 ran a report on airline carrier TWA using prisoners to man their purchasing line; what's more, the Las Vegas-based business Inmark International LLC runs their business by using prisoners as telemarketers, and there are between 17 and 33 states in the US using prison labor to man phone banks, depending on the age of the statistic and who's giving it. Somehow, this is all news to seasoned law enforcement employee Gil, who asks angrily, "I'm giving my information to a 'Hello, I'm doing Time-Life' operator?" The warden offers his assurances that nobody is passing around Gil's credit card numbers willy-nilly, and Gil cuts to the chase; he's investigating the murder of two sisters, one of whom had a relationship with an inmate here who used the screen name Apollo. The warden checks a clipboard and tells Gil that Mickey Rutledge, a.k.a. Apollo, was released three days ago. Gil is not happy about this. Fortunately, he has an entire commercial break to recover.
Warrick is taking a break from fitting glass shards together to pick fibers off of Donna Marks's clothing. After Sara swings by, Warrick shows her one fiber that's piqued his interest -- a short, coarse triangular fiber. The shape excludes clothing; Warrick guesses it came from car upholstery. Sara and Warrick muse over whether this means anything; Warrick asks if the color matches the upholstery in Gavin's T-Bird, and Sara says she'd be delighted to ask Gavin and his lawyer. After all, she wants to know what he was doing at the house stepping in Donna's blood, and why he lied about it. Cut to Brass and Sara talking to Gavin about his whereabouts; Gavin's attack lawyer says, "My client went there after the fact. He was looking for his girlfriend. He didn't find her." Brass and Sara note that Gavin took in the broken glass and pool of blood, and neglected to call 911. Gavin counters that he was scared. The last useful piece of information in this scene is the color of Gavin's T-Bird -- blue with black upholstery.
Back in the B-plot, Nicky and Catherine are searching for a bullet in a forest. The similarities between their quest and the needle-in-a-haystack adage aren't lost on any of us. Cue a lengthy searching montage. Ranger Rick appears to let them all know that James Jasper didn't buy a hunting license. Nicky wonders if that's because Jasper couldn't afford the fee; Ranger Rick counters that when one weighs a $24 fee against a $1000 fine, the fee seems perfectly reasonable. "Maybe...he wasn't up here to hunt," Nicky says slowly. Catherine jumps in, noting that she hasn't heard a single shot all day, and Ranger Rick says that could be due to hunters only coming out at dusk and dawn. And yet, Jasper died around 2 PM. Something's tricky here. Or, to quote Nicky: "That's an odd time for a hunting accident."
Sara is ambling down the hall, about to give Gil an update on the case; specifically, she wants to tell him she's about to process the prints on the toilet seat to see what man left it up. Gil tells her he's already processed the prints. Sara looks taken aback. Gil eases the pain by telling Sara the prints belong to Mickey, a.k.a. Apollo. Mickey is currently in custody, thanks to his parole officer.
Cut to Mickey telling Gil and Sara, "You're fishing. I just got out of the joint. I was never at Donna's house." Gil counters that he found Mickey's fingerprints on Donna's toilet, and Mickey smoothly switches gears with, "What are you going to do, arrest me for flushing a toilet?" Gil snarks, "Well, unfortunately, I can't arrest you for lying." Mickey turns to his parole officer and pleads, "Help me out here." The suit says, "Mickey, you have the right to an attorney. But I suggest, if you're not hiding something here, that you answer their questions." Mickey caves. "Look. We met over the internet. We had a lot in common. Donna understood my situation. When I told her I was getting out...well, she invited me over." And I veer off again: according to press releases I read from assorted prison work programs, apparently, the big security reassurance is that inmates don't handle local or near-local calls, the idea being that a) they're not released into a neighborhood where they can pick over past customers, or b) they can't keep in contact with folks from the 'hood on the sly. So the idea of Mickey and Donna hooking up more or less shoots that whole safety-reassurance thing in the foot.
Anyway, Mickey recounts their meeting -- he brought her flowers -- and her subsequent romantic dinner of take-out. Sara and Gil are impassive. Sara says, "She invites you for lunch, everything's great. And somewhere between fortune cookies and sunset, she and her sister are both murdered. Thoughts?" Oddly enough, Mickey's thinking about the fortune cookie that said, "You will be interrogated by bug-man and sidekick." Funny how accurate those things are. Mickey spins a story about Joan the attention-seeking sister picking a fight with Donna. Gil presses Mickey for information about his first meeting with Donna -- six months ago, over the phone -- and Mickey recalls, "I don't get to meet girls like Donna. She was nice." Sara sees it differently: "She was vulnerable. No friends, no social life, not even a cat. All she had was her work. She ordered from catalogs to give herself something to look forward to." Not that Sara is reconstructing this profile from personal experience or anything. Gil tries to play less-overly-identifying-with-the-victim cop, and says he's sure Mickey didn't mean to do any harm. Mickey's not biting. He leaves; the parole officer trails in his wake, offering to keep an eye on him. Yeah, 'cause that's effective. Sara muses that what they have are two dead sisters with stellar taste in men, two men who lied until confronted with the evidence, and not a whole lot else. Gil asks, in his inimitable quasi-profound way, "We know we have two liars. Do we have a killer?"
No. But we have Warrick, toiling in the basement. Gil pays him a visit to see how Warrick's doing with the glass. Not too bad -- they have a point of impact, roughly sixty-five inches from the base. Gil asks, "What does that tell us?" Warrick thinks it tells us that a 5'6" woman like Donna would have gone through the glass at a point much lower to the ground. Gil notes that Donna's wounds suggest she was standing upright when she went through the door: "She walked through it." Science apparently says so. Sara stops by to lavish praise on Warrick's work, then alert them all to the discovery of Gavin's car five miles from the dump site.
Cut to Sara under the car, wincing as something drips on her. She rolls out from under the car, noting, "Radiator's cracked." Gil says that probably explains why Joan bought coolant twice in the last week. Sara takes that and runs with it, noting that whoever filled up the radiator this time around used water instead of coolant. Gil muses, "Either someone who's unfamiliar with the car or someone in a desperate situation maybe." Sara gets the idea of printing the radiator cap. Gil bids her run a sample of the fluid in the radiator too.
Back in the B-plot, Nicky and Catherine have found gunshot residue on Jasper's shirt, indicating that he was shot at close range, as opposed to being winged by a random bullet. Nicky asks if they're now thinking murder; Catherine thinks it could be suicide. Nicky poses the obvious question: since he didn't fire his rifle, what did he shoot himself with? Catherine begins thinking aloud. There's no evidence of a murderer anywhere on the site, and given the proximity of the shooting, there would be signs of a struggle -- which there aren't. Nicky muses that it could have been someone Jasper knew. He then says he's going to call Vega and see how Mrs. Jasper's alibi checks out. Incidentally, the closed-captioning says he's planning on calling O'Reilly instead. If only. Nicky heads out and passes Sara in the hall; she looks disgruntled. He asks how her case is going, and Sara's all, "Have you ever tried to print a radiator cap?" "Smudge city," Nicky sympathizes. Sara's not taking this development well. Nicky's comment that "it's only a radiator cap" goes over like a lead zeppelin. And then -- astute observation skills rushing to the fore -- Nicky stops and says, very sincerely, "You gotta get out more." Sara is nonplussed. Nicky moves on, and Sara wheels off toward her destination with a peeved look.
Meanwhile, Gil's giving Liam an encore dollop of harassment. Liam asks, "You got this water from a radiator?" Gil affirms, and Liam says, "Nasty sodium count. Potassium, phosphorus." Gil gets a eureka look. It does not pass unnoticed. Liam says, "You've got that look. What'd I say right?" Gil declines to tell him. Ah, Liam, forever seeking approval from Gil. You should talk to Nicky about that sometime, should the occasion arise.
We switch to the B-plot, and fatigue sets in. Catherine and Nicky are back in the Yukon, or wherever the hell it is they are where there's a big pond set in the middle of the leafy deciduous forest. Nicky tells us that Mrs. Jasper's alibi checks out; she was at work (I guess she recovered from being laid off fairly quickly) and ate at her desk, so no way she hopped in a car and drove several hundred miles to the nearest forest on the off-chance that she could maybe murder her husband on her lunch break. Nicky muses, "Murder for hire?" "Pro would have shot him in the heart. This was in the gut. Bullet didn't even come close to his spine," Catherine says dismissively. Helpfully, the TMICam steps in to illustrate her point with a bullet's-eye view. It will be a long time before I look at meatloaf the same way. Nicky thinks that it might have been an intentional wound: "Abdominal wounds take time to bleed out. It would have taken at least ten minutes for hemorrhagic shock to set in. But he would have been mobile." Catherine agrees, but she doesn't quite see all the pieces. Nicky says, "I see where you're going here. His injuries and his behavior aren't consistent with murder, but they're not consistent with suicide either." Catherine continues thinking aloud: "Ninety-nine out of a hundred suicides by gun...muzzle to the forehead, bullet to the brain. But there's always just that one..." Nicky plays devil's advocate, saying, "Look, suicides want it quick and painless. Bleeding to death is slow and painful." As is recapping, but I won't bore you with the parallels at this time. Nine minutes! So...close... Nicky points out that Jasper never fired his rifle. Catherine corrects him; the weapon they found was never fired. Nicky thinks the idea of Jasper packing two guns is something of a stretch; Catherine ignores him. "He shoots himself in the gut, leaving himself enough time to hide the weapon," she says. Nicky's all, but where did the weapon go, conveniently ignoring the body of water ten feet to his left. Catherine steers him in the right direction. Cut to the two of them in waders -- raising the dual questions of why they happened to have waders with them in the first place, and how on earth someone approved that purchase at the LVPD -- searching a pond with a bottom that in no way reflects the ecosystem surrounding it. I give up. Anyway, Catherine and Nicky find a gun. They then imagine what happened: Jasper shot himself, threw the pistol into the pond, and staggered back against a tree, trying to make it look like an accidental death. "The wife's out a million bucks," Nicky says, with no small amount of satisfaction.
Cut to the two ghouls getting ready to deliver the bad news to Mrs. Jasper. Catherine begins by telling Mrs. Jasper that she had purchased a life insurance policy in which she was the sole beneficiary. Mrs. Jasper has no idea what Catherine's talking about. Catherine says they have the policy application, with the signature. Vega helpfully leaps in to clarify that most life insurance policies do not pony up if the cause of death was suicide. Catherine says slowly, "Your husband staged his own death to look like a homicide. As a beneficiary, if you knew of his intentions to take his own life, that would constitute fraud." Mrs. Jasper tearily says, "If I knew, I would have stopped him. Jimmy was everything to me. I didn't buy the policy, I didn't know about the plans." And along comes Nicky with evidence verifying this: apparently, James Jasper had forged his wife's signature on the application, and paid up without her knowledge. To clarify things: James Jasper forged the application and opened the insurance account in his wife's name in order to prevent anyone from noticing something amiss if he just happened to die a few months later. Then he planned how to kill himself in a way to make it look like anything but a suicide. Were it not for Nicky and Catherine -- who, until a few minutes ago, were under the impression that the broken woman weeping "my husband killed himself for me?" was behind some sort of insurance scheme -- his plan would have worked. As it stands now, Mrs. Jasper has only the CSIs to thank for telling her that her husband died for naught. That'll be a comfort to her. Pfffft.
Gil, meanwhile, has returned to alfalfa country, where he is listening to some farmer wax rhapsodic about his new combination irrigation-and-fertilization system. He agrees with, "How 'bout that -- economical and practical." Thus appeased, the farmer directs him to a faucet, saying that many motorists on this stretch use his water. Gil looks at him, asking, "What do you use in your fertilizer -- nitrogen, phosphorous, potassium?" "Standard 6-10-10 mixture," replies the farmer, not puzzled in the least that this black-clad city slicker happens to be hip to agricultural fertilizer. The love affair explodes as Gil asks, "Would you mind if I fingerprinted your spigot?" "No one's ever asked me that before," the old codger replies coyly. Indeed.
Back at CSICentral, Gil pushes a pitcher of the 6-10-10 slurry toward Mickey and asks if he'd like a drink. Mickey declines. Gil says, "Yeah. I wouldn't put that in my radiator either. I don't have all the pieces yet, Mickey, but I'll tell you what I do have..." We flash to Joan -- she of the restraining orders and felony conviction -- telling Mickey to leave her house on the grounds that he's an ex-con. The two sisters then begin arguing. Gil continues, "We know that Joan scratched Donna. We also know that Donna died first." Mickey says, "I didn't kill her." We flash to the sisters going at it Jerry Springer-style. Gil says, "Donna's death was an accident." Sara leaps in with, "But Joan went off on you." We flash to Joan telling Mickey that she's going to make sure he goes down for Donna; this causes Mickey to snap and decide that it's better to have a dead witness than a live one. He goes after Joan and snaps her neck. The CSIs conclude that he then used the T-Bird to hide the bodies, but the radiator gave out, so he filled it with the water from the alfalfa farm. Sara says, "You could have just backed off, let Joan make the call." Mickey wonders obliquely what fantasy world Sara's living in: "I would have landed myself right back in the joint...who's going to believe a guy like me?" "A guy like me," Gil says.
Cut to Sara coming home. Her apartment is like the anti-Gil; it's smallish, with a counter island separating the kitchen area from the living area, and the surfaces look a little cluttered. Sara looks around, then grabs a trash can. She throws out all her takeout, then trashes the menus. go the catalogs -- Sara! No! Catalog shopping is not a fast track to death! -- and she checks the answering machine, noting that nobody's called. Sara then picks up the phone, dials a number, and sighs sadly. As the phone picks up, she puts on a nervous smile and says brightly, "Hey! It's Sara. I was thinking...you wanna go out? Somewhere?" And then we fade out, as piano music tinkles in the background and Sara presumably makes plans with her phantom caller to go out.