Identity Crisis

It's raining in Las Vegas. Chris Isaak, or someone with his coiffure, is out for a drive. As plaintive country music wails -- something about a lonesome highway drive -- our intrepid motorist keeps winding along those twisty rural roads. Yes, you read that right: the twisty, rural roads outside Las Vegas. I don't question it anymore. So far as I am concerned, Las Vegas is a magical place with enchanted forests and bubbling brooks. Anyway, the driver notices a man garbed in a hooded black raincoat and holding a sign that reads, "Vegas." Naturally, he pulls over, because who wouldn't pick up a hitchhiker who takes his sartorial cues from the villain in I Know What You Did Last Summer? He asks the hitchhiker if he needs a lift; the vagrant silently gets in. Clueless McVictim asks, "So where are you headed?" The hooded visage turns and Paul Millander peers out, saying ominously, "It's not where I'm headed..."

Cut to the aforementioned babbling brook. We're literally two camera shots away from woodland creatures singing catchy tunes about forensics. Hi-ho, hi-ho, it's off to dust we go! The evidence rests in the prints, hi-ho, hi-ho. And now, back to the recap before Disney dispatches a squadron of attack lawyers -- Catherine and Gil get out of a car and walk toward what I presume is a crime scene. A trench-coated official greets them with, "Welcome to Good Springs." "Long drive," Catherine says wearily. I bet Gil made her listen to Maggots, Murder, and Men: Memories and Reflections of a Forensic Entomologist on tape, as narrated by Crispin Glover, on the drive down. Trenchcoat says apologetically, "I know it's out of your jurisdiction, but it is your name on the tape." Uh-oh. We establish that the victim is inside, the recorder on the edge of the tub; Trenchcoat hands over the victim's wallet to Gil. He palms it and follows Catherine inside. Catherine takes the wallet and identifies Clueless McVictim as Pete Walker, lately of California, born August 17, 1957. Catherine then provides backstory for all of you who began watching this show in Season 2: "That's got to be the work of Paul Millander." We see Walker in a tub, shot in the sternum, with a small hand-held tape recorder propped on the tub's rim. Catherine continues expositing for those of us who haven't been playing along at home: "The M.O.'s the same. Kills men with the same birthday as the anniversary of his father's murder." Gil swings in for the harmony: "In descending order. First victim was August 17, 1959. Second victim, August 17, 1958. 1957..." He trails off, and the dynamic duo exchanges a meaningful look. Catherine picks up the tape recorder and asks, "Ready for this?" Gil says, "I have a pretty good idea what it's going to say." Catherine presses play, and we hear, "My name is Pete Walker. I reside at 715 Lady del Sol and I'm 44 years of age. I'm going to kill myself. I'd like to say 'I love you' to my mother. I'm so sorry. I never wanted to put you through this. I just can't do it anymore..." Walker's voice trails off, and we hear a gunshot. Catherine starts. After a moment of silence, Millander says menacingly, "Happy birthday, Mr. Grissom." Gil looks less than festive. Catherine looks up -- and here, with the bangs pulled off her face and the mega-eyeliner, she's like the crime-fighting version of Margot Tenenbaum -- and breathes, "Isn't your birthday in August?" Gil replies, "August 17, 1956." Catherine gapes as Roger Daltrey comes in with Pete and John to sing a special version of "Happy Birthday." Or, as classic rock fans know it, "Who Are You?"

Gil is taking prints -- sadly, unaccompanied by singing bunnies -- as the young Turks burst on the scene. Jesus, Nicky's lost a lot of weight; his little legs look like pipe cleaners. Did the wardrobe department cop some kind of deal with George Eads where they stopped dressing him funny so long as he forswore solid foods? Nicky and Warrick ask Gil if it's really the work of Paul Millander. Sara jumps in and tells 'em all yes, citing the gunshot wound, the suicide script, and the body in a bathtub. Funny -- I didn't see her in the earlier scene. We get a nice aerial shot of the tub -- which Millander hauled into a room that is not a bathroom, as proof of that superhuman work ethic with which psychopathic killers are evidently bestowed -- and then Gil takes us on a tour down Memory Lane, asking us if we remember Royce Harmon and Stuart Rampler. Sara says, "Grissom, Catherine briefed us about your birthday." Warrick chimes in with, "Yeah, what's up with that?" He's probably all miffed because Gil gave every evidence of being a Virgo, and now we all find out he's a Leo. Gil dismisses him with, "Coincidence. Make anything more of it, it gives Millander power he doesn't deserve." Catherine, who is printing over on the opposite side of the tub (no bunnies there either), gives Gil a skeptical eye-roll. Nicky, in the first knee-slapper of the night, says, "We work together. [Millander] can't outsmart all five of us." He can when four of you are handicapped by the fifth. Anyway, Gil quickly refutes Nicky's fallacy of majority resources. The young Turks look uneasy at being corrected by Dad. Catherine steps in and outlines the assorted duties everyone else will be performing this episode: Nicky is locked in subplot subbasement A with the A/V tech, off analyzing the tape; Warrick and Sara are relegated to the satellite campus version of the subbasement, sent off to inspect the perimeter of the warehouse to determine how Millander got in and out. Catherine and Gil will keep the body company. After the Turks clear out, Gil thanks Catherine. It's a sweet little moment, and very telling as to their long-time friendship and collaboration. Catherine shrugs dismissively and says, "Big night..."

Cut to Sara, bemoaning the rain. This is turning into something of a theme with her. Warrick fared slightly better by finding some mud prints. The two stoop down to investigate, and Sara notes, "This is the point of origin. They stop at the threshold." Warrick clarifies, "He must have taken off his boots before he stepped inside." Sara swings the flashlight down to take a look and muses, "Only one set of prints..." Warrick swings his torch over to another area and tells Sara to check out the depth of the print impression as compared to his own prints in the mud; Millander's footprints are much deeper. Sara says, "He carried the body in. The extra weight explains the deeper impressions." Hey! It's like that parable about the beach, and the two pairs of footprints, except that here we have mud, and also the one set of footprints means that some psycho's killed you and begun hauling your body inside to set up a labor-intensive tableau. I'm betting this version isn't likely to make it onto inspirational plaques. Warrick and Sara record the prints for posterity. One camera snaps, and then we transition into another snapping flash as Catherine shoots the tub-leau. Gil looks up and asks her to check something out. "He's got stippling on the side of his face," Catherine notes. For those of us unfamiliar with brushstroke techniques, here's what stippling is: to engrave or paint using a series of dots and flicks, thus creating an even or softly graded shadow. In this case, the medium of choice is Walker's cheek, and the dots and flicks are created by gunpowder sticking to tiny abrasions. Gil wonders how that came to be: "From what I can tell, he was shot once in the chest. Unburned gunpowder wouldn't plume this way." Catherine notes that there are no entry wounds near Walker's face. Gil says he'll have Robbins -- I presume he means David The Transitively Named Coroner, who is, as it turns out, also going by the name "Al" -- check for leaks under the theory that perhaps there's a hidden bullet. Catherine goes back to peering in the tub and finds a long strand of brunette hair. "Hello, Dolly!" she crows. She and Gil bandy about the possibility that the hair belongs to either a victim or an accomplice.

We hear the suicide message again, and the camera focuses on an audio monitor catching the sound waves of the tape. The cute audio tech from a few episodes ago (his name is "Archie," by the way, which makes me wonder if he has a cat named Mehitabel at home) says assertively, "This wasn't recorded in a warehouse. There's no auditory echo." Nicky deduces that the recording was made in contained quarters. "Yeah, a car. A small SUV. The tape recorder was an inch from his mouth. Sibilant pops bear that out. Helps that the killer uses hi-fi mini-cassettes. Picks up everything ambient." Archie then proceeds to rid himself of some pesky ambience, like windshield wipers, but a whirring noise grinds on. Nicky asks what the noise is; Archie doesn't have any answers for him yet. But Archie does think Nicky can help him with something on the recording: he lifts out a track, and the country-western song plays. In three bars, Nicky's pegged it as Willie Hank's "Don't Pay the Ransom." He plans to call the local C&W stations to see when their Infinity- or Clear Channel-mandated playlists commanded they play that song; it will help establish a timeline. It will also keep him from getting sucked into my rant about how megalithic media corporations have scrubbed the FM dial clean of anything resembling personality, innovation, or regional flavor. Whoops! Turns out we all got sucked into my editorial tangent there. Sorry. Before Nicky can run off and deal with some poor DJ, Archie draws his attention to an imbalance in one of the color displays -- it indicates an imbalance in background sound during the recording. Archie, crack audio tech that he is, ascertains that it's the left speaker that's blown out. Nicky uses this information to determine that somehow, Paul Millander happened to be driving while the recording was made.

Back on satellite subplot location, Sara is telling Brass that it's apparently illegal to hitchhike in Clark County; Brass puts down the "Vegas" sign -- the sign he has been holding without bothering to put on gloves first, thereby contaminating it as evidence -- and says amiably, "Yeah, you got me." It turns out that Sara and Warrick are now at another scene: Walker's retrieved car. The Nevada State Patrol found it. Sara muses on the unfairness of life, what with the driver trying to do a good, if illegal, deed and ending up dead. Warrick asks the question that's been bugging me for the last thirteen minutes: "How would Millander know that the guy who'd pick him up had a birthday August 17, 1957?" Sara and Brass glare.

Cut to David The "I'd Be More Fun If My Name Weren't Suddenly 'Al'" Coroner x-raying Walker and confirming that the victim only suffered the one gunshot wound. Gil is not happy about this, noting, "The others didn't have stippling on the side of their faces. Unburned gunpowder doesn't change direction and stick." We see proof of this, courtesy of a TMI shot illustrating a gun firing a bullet into an abdomen. Gil keeps thinking aloud: such stippling might be possible if Walker turned his face away from the gun; David dismisses this as unlikely, due to the origin of the facial burn. We see Walker wincing away from a gun's barrel as it fires. Gil continues, noting that few people miss at close range, and it's possible the stippling burn was intentional on Millander's part. We flash back to Gil and Millander's International Coffee moment in the special-effects warehouse, where Millander had brought out the obvious prop du jour -- a latex mask that was half-man, half-monster -- and stammered, "I call this one 'Good Vs. Evil.'" Back in the present, Gil peers down at Walker's dead, stippled face and intones, "He's telling me he's going to show me both sides." Yes, Gil. Because it's all about you.

Across town, unencumbered by symbolism, Sara and Warrick are ripping apart Walker's car for clues. Warrick has found some gunshot residue on the ceiling above the passenger seat -- thus lending credence to Nicky's "Millander was driving" thing and Gil's "Millander winged Walker with a bullet because it was more expedient than whipping up another latex mask" thing. Warrick lifts some GSR from the ceiling fabric and tells us all the reason nobody's found a second bullet is that it went out the window. We flash to poor, doomed Walker haltingly reading his script while Millander trains a gun on him, then Millander deliberately grazing Walker's face as he shoots, the automatic window lowering in time for the bullet to exit. Warrick says, "I'm going to call Nick, tell him we found out what that unidentified whir sound was -- the bullet going out." It says something for Warrick and Sara that neither of them have exited the vehicle overcome by the screaming heebie-jeebies. The idea of knowing one was going to die, and being forced to play along with whatever one's would-be murderer wanted, absolutely horrifies me; clearly, people who deal with this stuff on a regular basis have learned how to take their imaginations in hand much more adeptly than I.

After an unsettling close-up on a narrowed brown eye -- belonging to Liam, not to Millander -- cut to Liam gushing to Catherine over the quality of the hair she found in the tub. Lucky them, it's got a full follicular tag, which means it can be tested for DNA. Catherine dismisses the idea of the hair coming from Walker (wrong hair color); Gil muses that it could have come from Millander. "That's impossible. The amelogenin on the follicle came back XX -- that's female," Liam replies. Brief digression: for those of you who are curious, amelogenin is the major enamel protein in teeth; it stabilizes newly formed enamel crystals and helps direct their subsequent growth. Owing to its role in tooth development and maintenance, amelogenin is a hot protein, and much research is targeted toward developing an amelogenin-like substance that will stimulate tooth regrowth in adults. So what does a tooth protein have to do with forensic testing? Much forensic DNA testing is done using Short Tandem Repeat (STR) testing; an STR is a sequence that contains repeat units comprised of two to six base pairs (bp) of nucleotides (the four building blocks that make up DNA, i.e. adenine, thymine, cytosine and guanine) that can be easily detected via PCR. Amelogenin has an STR that differs sharply, depending on whether it's expressed by an X chromosome or a Y chromosome; if it's expressed by a Y chromosome, it has a six-bp sequence that's missing from the X chromosome STR. There -- now we all know why the amelogenin test matters in the context of determining gender, just because I was curious. Catherine and Gil take the news in stride; Gil notes that the tag for the hair is aged. Catherine counters that it's nearly impossible for an aged tag end to be in such good condition. "Not if he nurtured it, kept it in a freezer," Gil suggests. "That'd work," Liam agrees, as if we've all thought about chilling our hair for posterity. Catherine wonders if this planted hair means that Millander's trying to tell them that he kills women. "Maybe just one," Gil says, in a manner that suggests foreshadowing. However, neither he nor Catherine can say anything that will portend means or motive.

Meanwhile, Walker's car has made it to CSICentral, and Nicky's going through it. After a cursory inspection of the glovebox, he snaps open the top of the between-seats drink caddy. It's a smart move -- he pulls out a sheaf of receipts and other tiny slips of paper that have a habit of collecting in cars. As Nicky's sorting through the papers, Liam's disembodied voice floats out, asking, "Is this the car the guy was killed in?" Nicky starts, then replies, "He was killed in a warehouse, and don't go sneaking up like that!" Hee. It's nice to see the investigators getting a little spooked out by their jobs. Liam has no pity, since he's the scapegoat of the squad: "Now you know how I feel, like, ten times a day. So what's this Millander guy's thing?" Nicky fills Liam in on Millander's thing -- saw his dad killed over a money dispute as a kid, ends up killing guys as a result -- and Liam hunches over in the passenger seat, trying to figure out if there's any relationship between correlation and causation in Millander's case. As both men are sitting there ruminating on the mysteries of life, Nicky sees a number imprinted on the plastic lining of the drink caddy. Liam offers possible explanations -- it came from a PEP Boys receipt or dry-cleaning bill -- and Nicky reasons that whatever the number came from, it originated in the summer, as that's the season for burning ink into plastic. Liam asks what kind of paper item you'd shove into your drink caddy in the middle of summer. "Something you didn't want. Or something you'd have to keep," Nicky replies. Before they can brainstorm what that might be, Nicky gets called to a meeting of the brain trust.

Cut to Gil, lost in thought as everyone else outlines the evidence found on the case so far and what it probably means. What this means is that it sounds as though everyone's speaking underwater. Sara recaps her mud country adventure with Warrick, and Nicky describes his trip into the heart of broadcasting darkness, i.e. finding out KWV had "Don't Pay the Ransom" playing from 1:47 to 1:51 AM. Ah, so it's an AM radio station. There's some hope there for idiosyncratic play. Anyway, Gil's not paying attention to Catherine, Warrick, and Nicky's construction of the timeline. He comes into the case just in time to tell everyone that all their hard work isn't worth diddlysquat: "None of it matters. This is one of the few cases where physical evidence isn't helping us much. I mean, look at context: the victim's birthday is always on the anniversary of the murder of Millander's father. Staged, like his father's death. A planted hair, a planted fingerprint, it's all biographical. [Millander]'s using the evidence to tell us a story." Then, frankly, he needs a better editor; the pacing stinks. Before everyone can let the impact of Gil's words sink in, Brass comes in to drop a major turning point in the case: Walker had a job driving newly-released film reels between Valencia, CA and Las Vegas. He took a regular route and, aside from a speeding ticket issued in July, had a clean record. At the words "speeding ticket" and "summer," Nicky lights up noticeably and begins to grin. This is not lost on Gil.

Cut to Nicky rattling off the number burned into the plastic -- -23 -- as Brass types it into a computer. Bingo! Gil commands Brass to run the names of the other two vics for traffic records. Royce Harmon had a terrible driving record; Stuart Rampler had tickets. All three were issued their tickets by the same cop, Kevin Yarnell. I realize the powers that be had to set up this scene for expository purposes now, to show how all three men happened to have some common factor that possibly alerted Millander as to their birthdays, but wouldn't it stand to reason that after Stuart Rampler, someone was motivated enough to begin combing official records for some sort of connection? Anyway, we meet Kevin Yarnell -- played by Neil Flynn, the wonderful Evil Janitor over on Scrubs and apparently the go-to man whenever someone wants a cop on their show, as his IMDB entry lists no fewer than eight cop roles in the last ten years. After Gil asks how many speeding tickets Yarnell issues a day, the cop looks down his nose at Gil and sneers, "Why is it any business of yours?" Gil says, "You issued tickets to three people who ended up dead." This doesn't frighten Yarnell: "You think I had something to do with it?" Gil quirks an eyebrow in the universal physical shorthand for I don't know, jerkweed. You tell me. Yarnell does: "Look. I'm a good cop. I protect and serve. I even go to court on my day off." Catherine clarifies, "You mean court dates for speeding tickets." Yarnell replies, "Yeah. Sometimes, believe it or not, people actually contest it. And I'm there fighting them tooth and nail." After a few more rounds of questioning, we learn that there are three regular traffic judges, and it would make Yarnell really happy if Gil and Catherine were to go bother the judges instead. They do. We see the bailiff commanding everyone to rise for the honorable Judge Mason who -- could it be? -- happens to be Paul Millander. The bailiff continues, establishing that we're in the city of Mulberry in Nevada. Mulberry...just like Mayberry, only with a homicidal law enforcement apparatus in place. I bet Mulberry's version of Aunt Bea is a priestess of Ashtoreth and Opie spends his time sacrificing cats to Cthulu. Anyway, as Judge Mason/Millander sits down, Gil's eyes bug out, his jaw drops open, and he has a little freak-out. Mason smirks, "You may be seated." Catherine remains standing, uncertain, watching Gil have the big meltdown.