Night has fallen over Las Vegas and its surrounding environs -- including a forest that looks awfully familiar. We see a flashlight's thin beam pass over a pond, then some detritus, then the inert body of a nude woman. Because this is network television and not cable, she is, of course, strategically covered in leaves. Her skin is a mosaic of white flesh and livid bruising. The flashlight -- brandished, we see, by Gil -- passes over the woman's figure and pauses on her outstretched arm, the better to study the insects hanging out there.
Gil then passes by the body and heads toward the cab of a broken-down old truck. He shines a flashlight in the passenger window; the beam rests on the slumped body of a man behind the wheel. There's a rat sitting on his shoulder, looking considerably more adorable than the filthy rodents I've seen slithering in and out of gutter grates in San Francisco. I wonder if the blow-dried rat in this scene came about per someone's request: I won't do the scene unless the rat is having a good hair day. I also wonder if the show has some sort of vermin wrangler on call to style the animals ("Mr. Petersen, we're sorry, but one of the hissing cockroaches refuses to do the scene until I've buffed his carapace to a glossy sheen. Would you mind waiting?"). Anyway, Gil studies the body and the rat, then moves on. He continues through the woods and stops at a third body, then hunkers down to look at it. A bespectacled middle-aged man bends down as well, and murmurs, "That one's not ours." I instantly wonder if Gil has somehow stepped into the middle of a cult crime scene -- an anal-retentive cult crime scene where, after everyone else drank the Kool-Aid (tm), one person stayed behind to organize the bodies. Gil asks for confirmation. The bespectacled man says, "I authorize all cadavers and associated research. He's not ours." My dreams of recapping Jonestown: The 24th Anniversary DVD Special Edition dissolve.
The camera pulls back to reveal that Gil and company are in an enclosed area, surrounded by a fence bearing an expositorily convenient sign reading, "Anthropology Department. Private Property. Keep Out." No word on whether this anthropology department is affiliated with the University of Western Las Vegas. Anyway, Brass -- who apparently did not bother to acquaint himself with the local forensic landmarks during his prior tenure as CSI head -- walks into the body farm with Catherine. "People donate their body to science and end up submerged in a pond? Crammed in a car?" he asks incredulously. Catherine looks around and decrees, "Body farm. Creepy." The reaction these two have confounds me: knowing Grissom, he probably throws the office's Thursday night get-togethers out here. Gil steps in to correct his colleagues: "It's not creepy. It's a controlled study of situational decomposition. All in all, a very healthy place." I wonder if he practiced that speech in front of a mirror to make it appear more natural. Catherine invites Gil to keep working on that speech's delivery with the skeleton hanging from a nearby tree. Gil doesn't have time to respond, as Brass has donned the mantle of Captain Exposition and told the audience precisely why we're at the body farm: "Whoever dumped the body here knew about the body farm. What he didn't know is that each body is tracked by a bunch of scientists." Because this is Vegas, Catherine brings the gambling metaphor: "You can't slip a card into the deck." David The Emergency Backup Coroner interjects with some of that pesky science, adding that there's no rigor mortis yet, so the death of the body farm transplant took place less than six hours ago. The CSIs roll the body over -- cause of death: a gunshot wound to the chest -- and peer at the corpse. Catherine murmurs to Gil, "Well, look, one of your friends," as a beetle climbs out from under the victim's shirt and begins scaling the placket. Gil leans in to see if it's someone he recognizes from the Bugmont Stakes. He picks up the little insect and sputters, "It's a carpet beetle. It shouldn't be here!" Catherine asks, "He looks more like a hardwood floors kind of guy to you?" No, that would be the Christopher Lowell beetle. Gil is not amused; he explains, "Carpet beetles are the last to arrive at a corpse, when it's almost a skeleton. This guy's still fresh." He swings the flashlight around -- evidently looking for the source of the carpet beetles -- and looks no further than the swinging skeleton which is, upon further TMI-errific inspection, wreathed in shreds of flesh and covered in carpet beetles. Gil puts two and two together and shouts, "David, get this body out of here now. We've got cross-contamination!"
And that would be our cue to go to the band that knows a little something about cross-contamination of substances.
Back at the show, Sara and Catherine are loping through the Labitrail as Sara gushes, "You got to go to the body farm? I've always wanted to go there." I'm bowled over by yet another wave of incredulity; I really can't believe Gil didn't organize a staff picnic out there or something. Can you imagine what the hayrides must be like? As they head into the break room, Warrick looks up from the strenuous task of posing like a male model while reading the newspaper to comment, "I hear Grissom goes there all the time. Like, even on his nights off." See? I rest my case. Gil would so totally set a staff retreat out there. Nicky, who's looking massively cranky (I blame the olive-colored pullover; the wardrobe streak is thus ended), crosses toward the refrigerator and asks rhetorically, "Why does that not surprise me?" He then hunkers down in front of the tiny little staff fridge, and we go to a fridge-eye view of Nicky glaring disapprovingly at numerous plastic storage containers before complaining, "Something stinks in here!" Sara accuses the dairy food group. Nicky explains that this smell is worse than rancid milk, and demonstrates by ramming his wax-paper-covered sandwich in Sara's face. Why does it not surprise me that Nicky not only brings in his lunch, but goes to the effort to wrap it neatly? Sara hunkers down to the fridge, and then we see her fridge-cam shot as she sniffs, and finds the offending container. She straightens up and tells Catherine, "He's got one of his experiments in there again." I love this sentence. Nicky says, "You're kidding me!" Catherine barks with a here-we-go-again weariness, "Bugs or blood?" "Not bugs," Sara clarifies. Warrick weighs in with, "Oh, that's not cool. That's a community fridge." This is probably why Gil's not on coffee-buying duty for the staff. Nicky, brandishing his besmirched sandwich, proclaims that someone needs to talk to Gil about this -- naturally, right as Gil walks in.
Nicky recovers by saying indignantly, "You're putting your experiments in our refrigerator." Gil explains, "The lab fridge was full. I put it in last night." I can only wonder what menace Gil will introduce to the men's room once he decides that a toilet will make a fine centrifuge. Nicky makes a chuffing noise and rolls his eyes at Sara and Catherine, both of whom are looking miffed at Gil's weak reasoning. Gil is oblivious to this, explaining how he's going to be testing horizontal bloodstains vis-à-vis surface textures. He then registers the people around him long enough to ask if anyone has any linoleum at home that they can donate to the cause. He does not, however, register the lack of enthusiastic response. Having failed to win his point by invoking the spirit of The Tragedy Of The Commons, Nicky goes for a gustatory argument, saying, "That blood is rank." Gil mistakes the argument for a query and says, "That's why the Red Cross gives it to us, because it's past its expiration date." If only Bernadette Healy had had Gil Grissom around last fall... Anyway, now that Gil's brought everyone into his little world of in vitro improvisation, he puts the rank blood back in the fridge and turns back to Catherine, somehow managing to miss the stunned and repulsed expressions on everyone's faces. Gil asks Catherine for an update on the body farm case; Catherine's got a query in to AFIS. Just then, a beeper goes off and everyone does the gadget-check. It's Gil's; he's off to autopsy. As Gil leaves, Warrick's all, "Way to go, Nick. You really told him." Whatever, Wingman Warrick. Nicky rebuts that he did tell Gil; Gil just didn't hear it. Catherine and Sara exchange significant glances.
Down in the autopsy bay, Gil and David The Confounded Coroner are looking at the dead guy. The wound in the front of the body's torso would indicate being hit by a projectile, and yet there's no bullet fragment to be found in the body, nor an exit wound. Gil asks if David would care to explain that phenomenon. David does, replying, "Bullet wounds usually leave bullet evidence," as the TMICam shows us what happens when a bullet enters the human torso. The results are not pretty: the bullet breaks apart and punctures assorted organs. David reiterates that there's no evidence of a bullet anywhere in the wound tract. Gil counters that they can slice out the wound area and do a more thorough search. David gets a twinkle in his eye as he says that was his suggestion. Gil eagerly asks what the best tool for excising tissue for John Doe is -- but the tooltime talk gets derailed by Catherine, who delivers the news that John Doe is actually one Mike Kimble. Catherine gives a few more basics: Kimble's 38, and has a townhouse in Summerlin which Brass and Catherine are going to go check out, as Catherine suspects it's probably the primary crime scene. Gil's all dismissive, and as Catherine heads for the door, she asks Gil if he won't be coming along. Gil has other plans: "We're excising a wound tract!" "Sounds fascinating," Catherine deadpans. "It is," Gil says, completely missing the sarcasm. The scene ends by focusing on the whirring blade of a hand-held rotary saw, leaving us all to wonder, gosh, does Gil's love of scientific inquiry blind him to the finer points of human interaction?
Meanwhile, over at Casa de Kimble, someone's been playing with matches. Catherine and Warrick arrive at roughly the same time as the fire department. While they're trying to confirm that yes, the inferno really is their hypothetical primary crime scene, there's a flare-up, and things go exploding outward. In one of the nicer moments of characterization in the episode, as Warrick and Catherine turn away, Warrick wraps his arm around Catherine and shields her from the blast. Awww. Catherine says, "Looks like somebody beat us here." "You think?" Warrick deadpans. While this is going on, Brass is interviewing the -door neighbor. Since she was wearing headphones, she's to useless in providing much testimony as to odd comings and goings, but she does mention that Kimble had a fiancée, Jane Bradley, with whom he spent a lot of time.
Meanwhile, Gil and David are busy poking around a cross-section of Kimble's torso -- the wound tract, I suppose -- and David pulls out his tweezers, commenting that he's found a metal fragment, but it looks very un-bullet-like. This is because it looks like a threaded screw, and how it ended up in someone's torso is anyone's guess. David notes, "Here's the manufacturer's number; I should have bought stock when I first started finding all these medical implants." Gil's not listening: he's distracted because he just sighted a maggot and he's pulling it out. As he holds the squiggling larva up, Gil exclaims, "Bovine...genus Hypaederma. These are normally found in the intestinal tract of cows. These maggots aren't found in humans." David gives him a skeptical look and says, "Foreign tissue -- cow. Makes absolutely no sense." Gil notes that the body farm studies animals other than humans. David wonders if the maggot is proof of more cross-contamination. Gil smiles and says, "Only one way to find out." I bet the rest of the staff will just love the latest experiment.
Back at the Crispy Casa de Kimble, Nicky walks past the sodden, scorched entryway and into the dripping-wet interior, greeting Warrick as they prepare to walk through the house in search of any evidence. Is that safe? I would have thought that the structure would be seriously weakened. They don't have to look too hard: Warrick notices a set of blackened marks on the wall and notes, "Fire burns upward. This burned downward." "Defied the laws of physics," concurs Nicky. "Fire is drawn to fire," Warrick says. "Well, you know what we gotta do," Nicky prods. "Check out the upstairs," Warrick finishes. Yes, and then scream in pain as the water-weakened floorboards give way and cause you to plummet down to the basement and break a few bones. Or not. Nicky and Warrick head into the bedroom, flashlights a-bobbing in the sooty darkness. "Well, the guy who started the fire wanted to make sure the bedroom got it worse," Nicky says. Warrick questions Nicky's choice of pronouns: "How do you know it's a guy? Why're you jumping the gun?" Nicky replies, "Well, according to Sara, 94 percent of all arsonists are male." Warrick's not surprised that Sara's the source of that fun forensics factoid. The two men turn back to the bedroom, finding the point of origin -- but not finding any evidence of accelerant. We see the likely path the fire would have taken as it moved from the bedroom down to the first floor in pursuit of an accelerant. And then we see Warrick and Nicky demonstrate why they're the B-squad on big cases. Upon seeing a bloodstain on the floor, their reactions are as follows:
Warrick: Something bad happened here.
Nicky: This fire was just a cover-up.
You think?
Catherine and Brass are walking up to a nice suburban colonial-style house -- with white picket fence, natch, atop which march several little squirrel statues, in an unbridled display of terrible taste -- and ring the doorbell. It's answered by a blonde teenager with a phone attached to her ear. The words "I'm with the police" fail to trigger any alarm, as she ushers the visitors back to the kitchen without changing expression. The camera then pans by a dozen or so pictures of Kimble and Jane -- we get it; they were happy together -- before zooming up to check out the blonde Jane in profile, saying, "This can't be happening. Mike is dead? I don't know how I'm going to tell my kids. They love Mike." As does she, presumably, but she's not saying so. Catherine prods her about the engagement; Jane reveals that she was to have married Mike in a week at the Tangiers. I hope for their sake that the wedding chapel wasn't some tacky pink monstrosity like they had at the Monte Carlo, but something that's either so campy that it automatically makes a wedding memorable by association (the Excalibur, the Tropicana) or so tasteful that guests may actually forget for a moment they're in Vegas (Mandalay Bay, the Four Seasons). Before Catherine and Brass can continue probing, an adolescent boy comes in and begins rooting around the fridge; Jane stops what she's doing long enough to engage in an argument over whether or not the kid can have sweets after 10 PM. Her son's snack attack blocked, she manages to reveal that the dead fiancé was a photographer -- and then the ex-husband, Russ Bradley, shows up to pick a fight about getting the kids ready for the joint-custody jitterbug. There's a brief who's-on-first conversation, and then Bradley finds out that Mike's dead. Jane's reaction -- a wan smile where she refuses to meet his eyes -- is baffling. Catherine asks to see Bradley's hands, and as she inspects them for evidence of burns or gunshot residue, he says, "I don't mean to be rude, but I stop paying alimony the day Mike and Jane get married. I'm the last guy who would have killed him." Uh-huh. Brass asks how they can get in touch with Bradley, and he fishes a card out of his wallet, saying, "You can get in touch with me at any one of my four grocery stores. I'm going to go get the kids." Jane raises her eyes to say curtly, "They're in the den." Yes, probably overhearing the conversation and wondering why their mother couldn't be bothered to clue them in to their would-be stepfather's sudden demise. The dynamics in this family make the families in The Ice Storm look like the Huxtables.
Back at the Kimble house, Nicky's following the chemical traces of the accelerant. As the diagnostic tool beeps, Gil pops in and demonstrates that he's magically intuited what's going on by saying, "Accelerant." Nicky looks up -- I guess Gil must have made a noise or something, thus alerting CSI's most skittish investigator -- and says, "Yeah, Warrick said the fire was orange. Low-temperature fuel. Something accessible, gasoline, kerosene." Nicky rehashes what he and Warrick found out, and then Gil heads into the mysteriously unharmed home office. There's photography equipment scattered about, plus prints of all sizes. Gil surveys the walls and surfaces of the furniture, then zooms in on a framed shot of Jane, Mike, and Jane's two kids; all four people are clustered together, Jane and the kids holding a poster board with the magic-markered sentiment, "Mike, welcome to the family." Very sloppily tucked behind this photo is another one. Nicky comes in just in time for Gil to intone, "Sometimes, it's about where the fire isn't" -- my, but Grissom has a knack for denigrating his underlings' work -- and then Gil pulls apart the picture frame so we can see a handful of snapshots of Jane's daughter, each one in a progressively more compromising position. Gil doesn't say anything. Nicky settles for saying in a tight, controlled voice, "Sometimes, I hate this job."
And it looks as though Catherine and Brass aren't having a career-affirming day either. They're in Brass's office with Jane, telling her that they have "definitive and photographic" evidence that Kimble may have had inappropriate relations with her daughter, Jody. Jane is disbelieving. Then again, Jane is a head case who gets stranger in every frame she's in. Catherine says that sometimes, this sort of thing happens under everyone's noses, and they need to talk to Jody. Lucky Catherine gets to be the one who does this. We see her sitting Jody down and very calmly explaining that the CSIs found pictures in Kimble's house. Jane leans down over Jody and says urgently, "Tell her Mike would never do anything to hurt you." Yup -- stranger in every frame. Strange enough, in fact, to leave one with the impression that Jane has had an out-of-network experience and in fact believes that she is currently in a Lifetime movie starring herself. Catherine ignores Jane and starts again with, "In some of the pictures --" before Jane leaps in with, "He truly was a father to both of the kids." I can't possibly plumb Jane's rationale from an experience-based perspective, but I can't help but wonder what kind of a mother would, when told that there's definitive evidence her fiancé was abusing her child, react by denying it, steamrolling the investigator, and asking the alleged victim, her kid, to testify to the stellar character of the alleged attacker. Jane has yet to address her daughter in any way that vaguely channels human empathy, much less parental concern. Anyway, Jody tells Medea to button it until Catherine's done with a simple sentence. Catherine tries to walk Jody through the pictures -- and we get the CreepyCam perspective of Jody having her picture taken -- but Jody's denying the whole thing. Catherine leans in and emphasizes, "Anything he did to you was not your fault." Well -- good thing someone's saying that to the kid, because it's not like her mother ever will. Jody only answers with, "I loved Mike, and he loved me." Jane looks disturbed by this. Perhaps she is now beginning to grasp how her fiancé could have traduced her daughter. Catherine walks out and apprises Brass of what's going on: "Daughter clammed up; seems to be in a protect-the-abuser trap. We're going to take her over to the hospital for a SART exam." Brass gets straight to the point, asking, "What are the chances the mother knew what the boyfriend was up to?" Catherine's not willing to quantify the odds, but she does say, "I've seen it happen. As a mother, I hope not." The scene ends with Catherine watching Jane silently sit on the arm of Jody's chair, leaning against her in a comforting posture.
Cut to Warrick who -- lucky him -- gets to analyze the most compromising of Jody's photos pixel-by-pixel. Well, he's lucky it's CBS anyway, and the most prurient thing anyone's going to show is a blurry shot of Jodie, bare from the waist up with her back to the camera, turning around to give a deeply unhappy look to whomever is shooting the photos. Nicky comes in just as Warrick's blown the photo up for close inspection, and we find out that the photo was taken by a camera that matches one of the kinds Kimble was known to use. Warrick explains that he's trying to clear up the picture: "The blur equals the length of the light. If I can compress this light back into a point, the picture gets clear. That's how they got Hinckley's image when he was shooting the pres." I wonder if it's a coincidence that the object of obsession here is also named Jody. Sharp-eyed Nicky notices a smudge at the bottom right-hand corner of the photo; the two men deduce that it was a finger. Nicky asks, "That's unusual, isn't it? A professional photographer gets his finger in the shot?" Warrick replies uneasily, "Maybe his good hand was otherwise engaged. I'm going to work on that for a while, see if I can get some ridge detail, maybe even a fat print." Correctly sensing that watching Warrick futz around with filters in PhotoShop will be about as exciting as watching paint dry, Nicky takes off.
Meanwhile, Gil's playing Beelzebub to a pound of rotting ground beef under a fine mesh netting. Sara asks over the buzzing flies, "So this is your experiment, huh? So because you found beef in one of the wound tracts of the victims, you think the beef might be from one of the body farm cows." As she asks this, she scootches over so she's got a front-row seat at the Fly Cinema right to Gil. Gil is oblivious to Sara's hovering, and asks, "Did the fly find the beef in the wound and lay its eggs, or did it bring the beef with him?" Sara tries to make herself useful to Gil by telling him about a similar cross-contamination experiment she did while living in San Francisco. Gil is supremely unconcerned, and blithely brainstorms about beef without even acknowledging Sara's comment. He then mentions that Bradley has a gun, and he's off to go see it. As he leaves Sara standing by the fly-infested beef, Sara calls out, "Um, Grissom? Aren't you going to tell me anything?" "About what?" Gil asks, genuinely uncomprehending. Sara answers, "About the case, the meat, what you found..." Um, no. Gil says, "I'm working it." Sara says, looking a little put-out, "I thought I was working it with you." Gil seems to comprehend for a moment, then demonstrates that he totally can't read the living when he tells Sara, "So take some photos of the experiment for the D.A. and then get rid of that stuff." Wrong thing to say, Gil! Sara goes off: "That meat. That raw meat, meat. How many meals have we shared together?" Gil has no idea where this is going: "I don't know." Sara, shaking her head in disbelief: "Take a guess, over a year of working together." Gil does: "Thirty." Sara swoops in for the kill: "I'm a vegetarian. Everyone here knows I'm a vegetarian. I haven't eaten meat since we stayed up that night with that dead pig. It pains me to see ground beef, forget about cleaning it up." Gil, demonstrating that he has no idea the issue here is not really beef, says calmly, "Okay. Have Nick do it." Or Liam, I guess, as it's been a few hours since his last pummeling. Gil walks off; Sara looks unhappy.
She's not the only one: Brass is talking to a pissed-off Bradley, who claims he never liked Kimble's behavior. He constructs the kind of testimony investigating officers routinely pray for: "Touchy-feely. It wasn't normal. I told Jane when she started seeing him, 'He is not a good guy. He is not good for our family.' But you can't control who your ex-wife dates." Before the two men can commiserate over the miseries of dealing with ex-spouses, along comes Gil to inspect Bradley's firearm. He notes, "It's been cleaned." Bradley replies, "Of course. You never store a dirty firearm." Gil asks what kind of ammunition Bradley uses. Brass answers first, flatly, "A .38 special. It takes .38s." He and Gil then pull out the dueling eyebrows as Gil tries to indicate nonverbally how Brass's statement of the obvious undercuts his little Socratic inquisition. Bradley, fortunately, is oblivious to the Groucho-esque waggling. Gil smirks at this.
Back in the Labitrail, Sara's filling out paperwork with tightly controlled fury. Along comes Warrick, trying to get Sara's attention about something from Trace, but Sara blows him off until she can finish whatever it is she's writing. Warrick cocks his head to look at the paper, and Sara irritably smacks her hand down over it. Now that he's got her attention, Warrick can tell Sara that the lab isolated the accelerant. He pulls out a spec chart, and Sara reads, "Acetone, methyl methacrylate? Nail polish remover." Warrick comments, "Guess that's the six percent no one talks about, female fire-starters." He walks off, and Sara looks thoughtful. Either she's realized that everyone else pays more attention to her than Gil does, or that everyone's fed up with the stat-spouting and has just been waiting for an opportunity to snark on her for it.
Jody's getting examined at the hospital, with Catherine hovering in the doorway, and the doctor notices a burn on Jody's forearm. She claims it's a result of a curling iron accident. And here I thought the only curling iron accidents were the ones that resulted in those giant bear-claw bangs. Catherine, however, imagines Jody getting the burn as she splashed nail polish remover all over herself when trying to light a fire. Before she can ask any questions, it's time for the rape exam; the doctor draws the curtain to give Jody some privacy. Catherine wanders away -- listening to the usual doctor noises about scooting down the exam table until your bottom is hanging in thin air, and the accompanying click of a speculum clicking open -- and catches the exam in silhouette. She then sees Jody's unhappy face wincing during the exam.
Gil, meanwhile, is drinking iced tea and pondering the metal fragment David found in Kimble. He takes a sip, makes a moue of disgust, and puts the glass down. The swirling ice cubes catch his attention, and Gil has a bona fide Eureka! moment: "It's melting." We then see an ice bullet (frozen around the metal fragment) enter Kimble's torso courtesy of the TMICam, with the ice fragments melting as they hit warm internal organs. Cut to a montage of Gil making bullets out of beef, cramming the little bits into an ammunition mold. Catherine walks in just as Gil's putting his experiment on ice, and comments, "Sara's not going to be too happy with you putting that experiment in the fridge." "I'm putting it in the freezer," Gil says, delighted to focus on specific details so long as it means that he can dodge the large, complex issues they frequently comprise. Catherine gives him a whatever look and launches into her news. The doctor finished the exam on Jody and found evidence of chronic sexual abuse. Gil sighs dispiritedly and comments that it's time to dispatch Brass to round up the necessary warrants. Catherine mentions that Jody might also be the arsonist, owing to the second-degree burns on her arm, and Gil says, "One thing at a time." He then bends back to his work. Catherine asks if he's coming along, and Gil declines. "Right. Experiment," Catherine says, packing a lot of subtext into two words.
Cut to Catherine and Nicky tearing apart Jane's house. They finally hit pay-dirt -- as it were -- in the bathroom laundry hamper, when Nicky finds one of Jody's nightgowns covered in semen stains. As he barrels out the front door, telling an anonymous correspondent on the other end of his cell phone, "We got some samples coming in, they're priority one," Jane catches at Catherine's sleeve and asks, "What is it? What did you find?" Catherine doesn't answer directly; she replies, "Child services will be remanding Jody to a foster home." Jane persists, "Was my fiancé involved in any way?" Brass teleports into the scene to tell us all that Kimble was not, in fact, Jane's fiancé, owing to Jane canceling the wedding five days ago. He says to Jane, "You didn't like the way he looked at your daughter any more than your ex did." Jane denies this, saying that she called off the wedding on account of cold feet. Catherine comments on how convenient the timing was. Jane protests some more: "When Russ and I got married twenty years ago, you couldn't find two happier people, and now we can barely stand to be civil. I didn't want to make another mistake." She then continues that Kimble wouldn't have done whatever he was accused of. Catherine's all, "I'll believe the DNA."
The DNA, as it turns out, surprises everyone. Liam tries to wring some drama out of the proceedings -- "You guys all fanned around the table, holding your breath" -- but is quickly brought to heel after Warrick reminds him that they're all there for an abuse case involving a minor. After apologizing to Gil -- apparently, every young man on this show regards Grissom as something of a father figure, albeit a slightly strange one, from whom they must earn approval -- Liam reveals whose semen is on Jody's nightshirt. Surprise! It's her brother Jake's. Cut to the mortified young man protesting vigorously, "No! No! I never did anything like that to my sister! No!" Brass leans in and uses his most intimidating growl to ask, "How do you explain your semen on her nightgown?" The poor boy -- flanked by his horror-stricken parents -- stammers that he can't. Brass informs Bradley and Jane that the county will be providing Jake with an advocate, and the rest of the questioning will proceed from there.
Warrick's still cleaning up the picture. Gil comes in for a progress check and Warrick grunts, "It's kind of frustrating. This picture takes place at the scene of the crime, but we can't see what she's seeing." Gil recognizes this conversational opening for what it is: a gold-plated opportunity to dispense some Grissomian gnomisms. "They say the eyes are the window to the soul." Warrick tells Gil that his gramma came up with that one first. Gil continues, "In a way, it's true. The aqueous fluid and the vitreous in the human eye allows for an image to be reflected in it." I seem to remember this conceit from Twin Peaks. However, it's done a little more wonkily here as Warrick says, "If I enhance the reflection in her eye with the right combination of algorithms..." His work in the image lab done, Gil bolts off to check on the bulletsicles.
The advocate has apparently arrived, as Brass is now asking with his customary directness whether Jake took pictures of his sister and planted them in Kimble's house. Jake protests this idea; his advocate jumps in on behalf of the terrified kid to say peevishly, "He didn't take the pictures, he didn't plant them. He has no idea how his DNA got in his sister's nightgown." Brass snaps back, "Maybe a little hobbit put it there." Jake's bottom lip trembles; the advocate prepares to bolt with his charge. Before they can leave, Nicky charms everyone into letting him talk to Jake alone.
Cut to Jake and Nicky on a bench, with Nicky explaining, "Everyone does it, Jake. You just...you feel like you're the only one. Then when you don't do it, it happens in your sleep anyway, right?" Jake isn't recoiling in horror, but averts his eyes in embarrassed empathy. Nicky, correctly interpreting this as a sign to go on, continues in a good-natured way, "Yeah. And then you go to take a leak, dust off the equipment, you just grab the first thing that's handy, hmmm?" Jake sighs and croaks, "It was just on the hamper." Nicky clarifies, "Your sister's nightgown?" Jake nods, and puts his head in his hands, breaking into relieved chuckles. Nicky begins laughing at the absurdity of the whole situation, especially after Jake says, "thing I know, I'm getting questioned by the police, and my parents are looking at me like I'm some sort of pervert." Nicky concedes that Jake's experience is unusually rough relative to other teenaged boys who masturbate -- only not in so many words, since God forbid we speak about sex using unequivocal or clinical terms when innuendo and implied shame will do. That scene ends with Nicky reminding Jake, "Even if the situation's embarrassing, honesty is probably the best policy there." They laugh and bond. Nicky then pushes -- subtly -- to see if Kimble acted odd around Jody. According to Jake, the behavioral quirks were not with Kimble but with Jody -- "It was always 'Mike's coming over here,' 'I can't wait until Mike is here.'" Nicky processes that information. You know, he may not be the fastest deductive thinker in the west, but insofar as getting people to talk, Nicky's not bad. And it's always nice to see an episode where he's not playing the role of Idiot Investigator.
Gil is assembling his meat bullet for test firing. He's temporarily distracted by David The Relaxed Coroner, and asks, "What are you doing here? Isn't this your day off?" David's all, "On the day you plan to expend a meat bullet?" I can't decide if that's cute 'cause he's excited about it, or sad because his life is so empty that he must derive all joy from work-related activities. Gil loads the gun and fires. The two go over to inspect the results; David notes the gunshot-wound-like entry and muses that the meat would dissolve into the soft tissue upon entry -- which we get to see in TMICam: Variations On A Gunshot Theme.
Cut to Gil and Brass outlining their case for Bradley -- who is, oddly enough, unaccompanied by a lawyer -- and pointing out that they found meat in his gun loader. Bradley immediately launches into the I-had-to-kill-that-scumbag-who-touched-my-daughter routine, claiming that a shouting confrontation escalated into accidental homicide after Kimble made a tasteless crack along the lines of "like mother, like daughter." I can see motive, and yet, I do have wonder about a man who apparently makes meat bullets for no premeditated reason and -- whoops! -- ends up using them over the course of an argument. Brass then lays out the rest of the homicide: Bradley's grocery store chain routinely drops off meat carcasses at the body farm, which explains both his inside knowledge of the place and the ease with which he could drop off a body; then he returned to the house to burn up the evidence. Bradley's playing the self-sacrificing paterfamilias card, being all, "I'd like to make a formal confession." Brass hurries off to don a tuxedo.
Gil and Brass have a water cooler conversation -- literally -- that points out that while they have a murderer, they're still not clear on who molested Jody. Brass is more than willing to speak ill of the dead; Gil argues that the evidence may tell him otherwise.
It'll have to do so after he deals with a pressing managerial issue: Gil's looking at Sara's request for a leave of absence from CSI. He looks up from the paper to ask Sara (who's in his doorway), "What is this?" Instead of giving a Grissomian answer like, "It's a piece of paper," Sara says, "It's just what it says -- it's a request for a leave of absence. Six months. A year, maybe?" Gil asks curtly, "Why?" Because she got tired of people telling her to get a life, maybe, so she's going out to do so? Sara says she was thinking about checking out the Federal government system, possibly the FBI. Gil laughs, knowing full well that she'd only get stuck in the Secret Service. Actually, he laughs because "we have the best lab in the country." Going from the look on his face, he thinks that because he's presented evidence to undermine Sara's argument, she can drop it. Sara's not having it. She replies, "I need a different work environment." Gil is honestly baffled: "What does that mean?" Sara tries to put into words something that will not sound like, "It means that I have the hots for you, but realize that, owing to your socially stunted human interactions, wooing you would be like banging my forehead against a stucco wall, and I don't even want to imagine what a relationship would be like." So she settles for, "One with communication...respect." Gil immediately counters, "Everybody here respects you." Sara reflexively replies, "You don't." Gil looks miffed and asks, "Is this about that hamburger thing?" Way to minimize her concerns there, Grissom. Sara smiles, resigned, and says, "No, Grissom, this is not about that hamburger thing. I don't believe you! How can you reduce everything I've said to some kind of single quirk? Do you think the problem here is just about me?" Well, at least she left out the part with the stucco. Gil gapes, clearly thinking, "The words, they are in English, and yet...the order they are in, I do not grasp their meaning." Sara caps the scene by telling a gawping Gil that if he doesn't grant her leave, she'll quit. As she's making a dramatic exit, Gil calls out, "The lab needs you here." He nods, pleased that he's said the right thing. Sara smiles sadly and says, "Great." Gil watches her leave, extremely puzzled over what just happened.
Fortunately, by the time we get back from the commercial, Gil's recovered enough to march down to the lab where Catherine's working and tell Catherine, "Did you hear the dad copped a plea to the murder and the DA expedited it?" Catherine -- who is wearing not a whole lot of tank top, which I find odd in a lab environment where she's busy wielding hot curling irons in the name of science and could burn herself to a crisp -- recites, "Voluntary man [slaughter]. First offense. Out on bail. Free in four. No jury was going to convict a father for killing his daughter's abuser." Gil shows Catherine Jody's nail polish remover, which happens to match the accelerant used in the fire. But the Jody-as-arsonist theory dies a quick and painful death as Catherine produces a charred little protolimb and, comparing it to a photo of Jody's burn, concludes that Jody really did burn herself on a curling iron.
Meanwhile, Warrick is still working on that photo, zooming in on Jody's iris and pupil to amplify the reflection in the eye. Nicky comes in, and Warrick shows him the results: there's a porthole of some sort, thereby demonstrating that the photos were taken on a boat. Warrick dashes out to the lobby to talk to Jane about whether Kimble owned a boat -- and Jane reveals that he didn't, but Bradley does. Warrick heads over there (I'm assuming it's docked at Lake Mead, and Las Vegas has not become a marina town overnight) and snaps photos of the boat's porthole for comparison.
And, since it's now 53 minutes into the show, everything will wrap up at once. Catherine talks to Jody: "We know that Mike gave you his camera. We suspect that your father used it to take pictures of you on his boat. We believe that he then placed the camera back at Mike's to implicate him, along with the pictures." Jody finally speaks: "He said I was like my mom, when she was young and they were happy. He said having me was like having his family back." Catherine listens empathetically, then takes a moment to steel herself before asking, "Did you ever tell your mom?" Jody replies that she tried, indirectly. Catherine leans forward to tell Jody, "We have strong forensic evidence against your father. But cases like this are very difficult to prove. A victim testifying makes all the difference." Jody refuses to look at Catherine as she explains, "He told me if I ever told anyone, he'd kill me." Catherine tries again, and Jody cuts her off with, "I told Mike, and he was going to fix things. And my dad killed him." You can't blame the kid for being scared. Just then, Warrick comes in and quietly calls for Catherine; she comes over and inspects the contents of the big brown paper bag he's holding. Warrick explains, "DNA just ran it. She's under fourteen, right?' "Yeah, twelve," Catherine exhales incredulously.
Cut to Bradley's attack lawyer refuting all allegations that Bradley assaulted his daughter. Gil and Brass are not having any of this; with some pleasure, Gil lays out the evidence Warrick found on the boat. It's a sleeping bag stained with vaginal and seminal fluid, matching Jody and Bradley respectively. Bradley begins to explain with, "Okay," but his lawyer cuts him off with, "Don't say a word." Brass replies, "He doesn't have to. The sleeping bag's talking loud and clear." Bradley then turns to his lawyer and pleads, "Brad, make me a deal." "I can't," Brad the Lawyer responds. Bradley doesn't buy it: "You got me four years for murder, you can get me something." This back-and-forth goes two more rounds, with Bradley insisting, "You can get me something!" before Gil acrimoniously interrupts, "No, he can't. In the state of Nevada, we're all bound by a legal statute" -- and here, I register my shock at Nevada having anything resembling a stringent legal statute of any kind -- "the sexual assault of a minor aged fourteen and under is a mandatory life sentence with no possibility of parole." Bradley looks dismayed to learn this; Gil looks grimly satisfied at Bradley's growing despair. Good to see that Gil does occasionally hew to the whole "only three things make me mad" speech he gave last year.
Out in the Labitrail, Catherine pulls Jane aside to apologize for treating her so harshly earlier -- "I owe you an apology; I have an eight-year-old daughter" -- when Jane cuts her off. "It's okay. You were looking out for mine." The two women have a Blonde Mothers In Solidarity moment, and then Jody and Jane walk out of our lives, thus ending this week's case.
But wait! There's more! Gil and Catherine are at Gil's place having dinner, and he asks her, "Tough case, huh?" Catherine would prefer a straight-up murder any day of the week. Gil consoles her with, "You wouldn't be human if it didn't affect you." Catherine decides the "let's talk about me" portion of the evening is over and immediately lobs back, "I heard about you and...Sara." Gil shakes his head and says, "Sara. You know...she gets very emotional." Catherine is floored by this evasive maneuver, sputtering, "Are you in denial? No...that's way too analytical. Wow, you got burned bad, huh? Welcome to the club. I-I got third-degree burns from my marriage. Happens to everybody. Everybody just moves on." Going from Catherine's relaxed body language and the way she's waving around that drink like it's a baton and she's a bandleader, I'm thinking that alcohol has loosened Catherine's tongue a little. Gil takes in Catherine's off-the-cuff analysis with, "Good. Let's move on." His entire expression screams, "I'm avoiding this! I really am! I have bugs on the wall! Pretty bugs! Let's talk about them!"
Catherine is not ready to move on -- she insists with the genial stridency of the happily schnockered, "You have to deal with it! You have to deal with it! You have to deal with it first before it...goes away. You are the supervisor. You have responsibilities and people are making a family around you whether you like it or not, whether you give them permission or not." Gil shifts -- his body language telegraphing his growing unwillingness to admit to any of this -- and Catherine puts the family metaphor in relatable terms for him: "We don't have to go to the Grand Tetons together. Just...every now and then you gotta lift your head out of that microscope." Gil relaxes as he concurs, "Yeah." Exhausted by her drunken aerobic pep talk, Catherine goes over to hang out by the window and collapse on Gil's couch, the better to watch Gil stumble through the following phone conversation: "Yeah. Hi. I-I'd like to get some flowers for a girl. Oh, no. Not flowers. Um, uh, uh, a plant. A living plant. She likes vegetation. Yeah, that'd be fine. To a Sara Sidle, delivered at the CSI division of the Las Vegas Police Department, the one out on North Trop boulevard. Yeah, you can bill me at the same place. Gil Grissom. The sentiment? Oh, oh, on the card. Ummm. Uhhh. Have, have it say...uh, have it say, uh, 'From Grissom.' Thank you." And the screen goes dark.