Primum Non Nocere

The bright lights of the Las Vegas strip quickly fade to the cool glow of a hockey rink at face-off. We catch some stick-work, a guy going into the boards -- apparently the protective glass has been replaced by a highly abrasive substance, in order to facilitate more dramatic nosebleeds for the spectators -- then the bloody-faced guy going down on the ice. He looks up and barks hoarsely, "What are you waiting for? Call it!" The ref calls for a stoppage of play. A burly man in a jersey with a rat on it rolls his eyes; a woman on the opposing team, long hair flowing down her back as she skates off, chuffs in response. The arena doctor elbows his way down the bench and greets the injured player: "Let me have a look...okay, you're out. Myles will have a go from the second line." The player snarls in response, "Forget Myles, I'm going back in. Stitch me." The doctor replies, "It's a weekend league, it's not the NHL." "It is to me," replies the player. Going by the look on his face, it's also the equivalent of the medal round, and he's due to relieve the equivalent of Mario Lemieux. The doctor attempts to thread a few sutures through the raw hamburger on the guy's face and notes that the player's not a hundred percent; the player's all, "Dammit, Jim, you're a doctor, not a coach. Now stitch me up so I can hit the ice again and pretend I'm Theoren Fleury." The doctor gives him a skeptical look, thinking, "Of all the Canadian hockey players to fantasize about, why would you want to be him?"

Play resumes on the ice, and our boy prepares to re-enter the fray. The woman -- who is on the opposite team of the burly glarer mentioned previously -- glides by, giving the recently-sutured man a dark look. The burly guy, it should be noted, was watching the woman watch the guy being stitched. Such intrigue! Is the ice in danger of melting from red-hot scandal? Anyway, Burly Guy resumes glaring at his teammate, and then the melee begins anew. Cue a montage of ice skates, the assorted flying elbow, stick-work from a distance, and anything else that makes NBC's Olympic coverage look positively competent by comparison. The recently stitched guy pulls away, takes control of the puck, and drives it down the line; the goalie deflects it in a failed glove save. The camera tracks the puck flying up and down in a tight parabola, the stitched guy commits an interference call by charging into the goalie, and that's our cue to begin the brawl. The crowd fails to go wild. In fact, they look positively alarmed. Clearly, this was Hockey Newbie Night at the Las Vegas Arena -- or the regulars at a Caps game. There will be no people screaming, "Come on! I want to see blood!" then leaving in the third period when no fisticuffs are forthcoming (you can laugh, but that actually happened at a game the husband went to in Arizona ["and I was those people at a Devils game once" -- Sars]). Anyway, as the audience looks shocked and concerned, we notice that the stitched player is unconscious on the ice. It may just be a ploy to avoid time in the penalty box for that interference call. Or it may be that he's seriously injured, what with the pool of blood rapidly spreading below his skull. "Get the doctor!" the referee implores. Since, you know, doctors help people. They do no harm. Right?

Cut to Gil and Catherine entering the rink. Oh, watching William Petersen pigeon-toe it across the ice promises to be one of aesthetic highlights of this episode. I'm agog with anticipation. Gil steps on the ice, slips a little, rights himself (sadly, we don't see the feet in action), and asks Brass where the body is. Brass, whose flowing Captain Exposition cloak puts Gwendal Peizerat's gold medal ensemble to shame, tells Gil that they moved the body from the net to the bench. As the three of them move down the ice, Brass exposits, "Apparently, the guy was responsive enough to be helped off the ice. He died a few minutes later." Scott Hamilton pops in to rate Brass's performance: he gets high technical merit marks, but his artistic scores were hurt by his failure to nail a triple axel. Oh, wait. This isn't ice dancing; it's ice detecting. Catherine charges across the ice; Gil is considerably more tentative. I was right -- the pigeon-toes work wonderfully here. I give him a 6 for aesthetic merit.

The CSIs hop into the recessed area where the team bench is and look down upon the weekend hockey player. In addition to the gobbets of flesh that formerly comprised his cheek, the guy's also sporting a nasty slash across the throat. Gil points to the sticky wound and observes, "This looks fresh." Brass fills us in some more: according to the team doctor, the dead guy took one across the cheek in the second period. Catherine sticks her fingers in the laceration and deadpans, "I guess this must be from the third period. Looks like that other team worked him over pretty good." Brass comments on how hockey's a rough game. Gil deadpans, "Yeah, it's murder."

And now, The Who, which is good because it means I can stop humming "Through The Eyes Of Love."

In the bleachers, Gil is reading a litany of the dead man's penalties: "Two minutes for elbowing. Four minutes for high sticking. Ten minutes for unsportsmanlike conduct." Sara, who's sitting to him (and back in the black watch cap), deadpans, "Boys will be boys." That's pretty sexist. Just because the women's game doesn't allow checking doesn't mean it can't get rough out there. Gil proves he's no fan of the sport by saying, "Sounds like these boys went to a fight and a hockey game broke out." Miles away, somewhere from a palatial Beverly Hills estate, Don Rickles emerges, screaming, "Someone get me a lawyer! I said that first!" Sara's all, "You just don't like sports." Gil rebuts with, "That's not true; I've been a baseball fan my whole life." Sara replies, "Baseball. Well, that figures. All those stats." Oh, Sara. My opinion of you goes down with every passing moment. Baseball is so much more than the stats. Gil sets her straight with, "It's a beautiful game." As the husband and I loudly cheer this sentiment, Sara asks, "Since when are you interested in beauty?" Still staring at the ice, Gil replies, "Since I met you." Sara turns from the ice to look at Gil, clearly startled. Gil looks at her and says, "So, we'll start at the opposite goal, work our way across the blue line and stop at center ice." It's a shame that international rules aren't in play, because then Gil and Sara wouldn't be in danger of being called for a two-line pass. Ba-da-bump! Sara, who's still searching Gil's face for some sort of context in which to place that beauty remark, replies, "...Sure."

Cut to a montage of them walking over the ice. I am impressed anew by their diligence and observational abilities as they find bleached-wood splinters embedded in the white ice. Gil heads over to the boards to take a blood sample, then crouches before the goal to scrape up some frozen blood. As Gil's busy storing the blood samples, Sara ruefully notes that they don't have a lot to go on, and perhaps should consider taking their investigation off the ice. Gil is about to reply when he and Sara hear the whir of an engine. They turn around to look at the Zamboni driving on to the crime scene. Wuh? Who cleared that sucker?

In the men's locker room, as players in assorted states of undress wander around, Catherine begins interrogating people. I sense a Lisa Olsen incident in the making, but I shall fight my sense of misgiving to recap Catherine's questioning. She's currently asking the doctor why he moved the patient; the doctor's all, "You ever try treating someone on the ice wearing street shoes?" Catherine does not reply, "You ever consider strapping on a pair of skates and administering first aid?" Instead, she establishes that the victim (named Terry Rivers) was breathing when carried off the ice, but failed to respond to CPR once he was on the bench. Catherine inquires about the stitches, and the doctor goes into his "Dammit, Jim, I'm a doctor" routine again, pointing out that he had advised Rivers to stay off the ice. Catherine asks pointedly, "If he'd listened, he'd still be alive." The doctor's rueful expression passes for agreement. Having established that the deceased was something of a bonehead, Catherine then moves on to trying to get inside his thick cranium: "What do these guys play for? A little money? An imitation Stanley Cup?" The doctor elaborately rolls his eyes, as if to say, "I only treat these people; I don't pretend to understand them." Behind Catherine, Burly Guy mutters, "We play for the pride of it." Catherine wheels around, bemused and skeptical, and adds, "And the joy of kicking ass. You are...?" Burly Guy responds, "Tommy Sconzo. Right wing, first line. Hitting's part of the game. Take away the physical aspect, you've got ice skating. Guys out there doing triple lutzes." Actually, you've got something more tedious than ice skating, since hockey lacks the sartorial excesses that keep figure skating amusing. Catherine asks, "Is that how you lost the...?" while pointing to her teeth, and laughs a little before continuing, "The sit-spin?" Sconzo replies, "Second period, number nine. The guy's a real McCracken...he gave me a high stick to the mouth. That's why my guys crashed the goalie. An eye for an eye." Catherine asks if that's why his guy ended up dead. Sconzo gives her a searching look and replies, "What can I tell you, lady? It all happened so fast, you know?" Catherine rightly calls that line for the clich it is by saying, "It usually does."

Meanwhile, Gil and Sara are heading toward a Zamboni -- this one off the rink and parked in a maintenance dock somewhere. They stop in the doorway, and Gil says, "There are three things in life that people like to stare at: a rippling stream, a fire in a fireplace, and a Zamboni going round and round." Sara nods in recognition: "Charlie Brown. I love a Zamboni." Gil replies solemnly, "We all do." He's right -- I just entered "I love a Zamboni" on Google and got 6,080 hits. Gil wheels a mirror under the Zamboni, looking for anything caught in the undercarriage. He's in luck: there's a tooth embedded in a chunk of ice on the horizontal screw. He calls for Sara's attention by saying, "The thing I love about Zambonis is that they pick up everything." Sara comes over and Gil says, "I'm afraid the other part of this tooth might be in there." He nods over to the mountain of shaved ice that the Zamboni produced between periods. That makes sense: a Zamboni's going to have to dump out the holding tank between runs. At least Gil and Sara will have time to ponder the marvel of Zamboni while they wait for the ice to melt.

And now, let us ponder the marvel of Zamboni. If geeky digressions bore you, skip this paragraph. A Zamboni's got a few parts: a blade that shaves the ice, followed by a horizontal screw that gathers up the shavings; the shavings are pushed into a holding tank by another, vertical screw. Then, a water tank soaks the ice with water, and a wiper-like blade flushes dirt from scrapes and gouges in the ice. The now-dirty water gets sucked back into the water tank (it's filtered for re-use) and a second tank, filled with hot water (140 to 145 degrees Fahrenheit, or 60-63 centigrade, depending on your measurement system of choice), spreads a little water on the ice. The hotter the water, the smoother the resultant surface. And that's how a Zamboni works. Who wouldn't love that kind of engineering when it comes packed into something you can drive?

(Note to everyone who skipped the Zamboni explanation: it's safe to read again.)

Gil says, "Time to combine Fourier's Law of Conduction with Newton's Law of Cooling." Sara's taking the dimensions of the ice pyramid: five feet high, nine feet wide, and nine feet deep. She says, "Without the calculus, I'd estimate a hundred cubic feet, temperature one degree Celsius." She's not too far off the mark -- the basic formula for the volume of a pyramid is (1/3)b*h, the base is 81 square feet...I got 135 cubic feet. Of course, Sara could probably kick my ass when it comes to writing a proof for that formula, but we'll just stop the math digression before all of us suffer a collective flashback to eighth-grade algebra. Gil replies, "The heaters max out at ninety degrees, but the variables are constantly changing." I'm just geeky enough to wonder if he meant ninety degrees Celsius or Fahrenheit. Sara challenges Gil to ballpark the estimate on how long it will take the ice to melt. Gil estimates that it'll melt at about fifty cubic feet per hour. Sara deadpans, "One hundred and twenty minutes for a tooth, the whole tooth, and nothing but the tooth." Gil glares at her for making the pun. I glare at both of them because, thanks to that scene, I'm trapped in my own algebraic hell, trying to calculate the volume of the ice pyramid, add the Fourier's Law equation (the rate of heat flow through a homogenous solid is directly proportional to the area of the section of said solid that's at right angles to the direction of heat flow and to the temperature difference along the path of heat flow) based on the results of the volume and a heat flow of 90 degrees (I went with Fahrenheit) and the Newton's Law of Cooling (the surface temperature of an object changes at a rate proportional to the difference between its temperature and the temperature of the surrounding environment).

I give up. I try to confirm the science Gil and Sara are using to come up with that two-hours-to-melt-the-ice thing, and I only end up curled in the fetal position, rocking back and forth in front of my television.

Fortunately, we've arrived at the B-plot, so I can let my brain relax for a little bit. Nicky and Warrick are walking through what looks like Caesar's; they register the excited shrieks of a woman who's apparently just gotten lucky, comment on the fickle nature of gambling, and keep on rollin'. And then we go to a female lounge singer who, frankly, is probably there to drive the patrons to drink. She's in a gauzy black cocktail dress and a scarf, kind of bobbing and weaving and providing atmosphere, and it's making me glad my TiVo comes equipped with a few different fast-forward speeds, plus a mute button. Naturally, Warrick is mesmerized by the slinky siren, leaving Nicky to introduce himself to homicide detective Lockwood, who tells Nicky the DFO's in the back. Warrick stands there, kicked in the butt by love.

Meanwhile, Nicky's getting the 411 on the guy -- Stan Grevey, 35, backup sax player -- who's lying slumped over the table. Warrick decides to make an appearance and join Nicky in bending over to examine the body. Nicky comments, "Tiny scrubbing bubbles," while the camera zooms in for an extreme close-up of Grevey's mouth. Warrick points out that the tiny bubbles have been wiped down. Nicky then notices a tiny scrap of cowhide between Grevey's teeth; Warrick turns over Grevey's arm and explains, "He tied himself off. All the signs of an OD, without any of the paraphernalia." Nicky asks Lockwood if the waitress happened to mention cleaning up Grevey's works; Lockwood answers in the negative, and finishes, "Said he reminded her of Coltrane." Warrick responds to that somewhat skeptically, and gathers up some of the white powder on the table for further analysis back at the lab. While still sitting at the table, he asks Nicky, "Two coasters, one glass?" Nicky asks Lockwood if the waitress and Grevey were having a small soiree; Lockwood replies the waitress was just coming on shift. Warrick's not paying attention; he's found a contact lens on the table. After Nicky and Warrick come to the conclusion that Grevey's problems probably didn't include a missing contact lens, they're distracted by the chanteuse coming back toward the crime scene, asking, "How's he doing?" Warrick avails himself of the opportunity to fling himself toward the woman by halting her progress and preventing her from contaminating the crime scene. She has cognitive difficulties processing the news: "He's dead? What are you talking about? They told me he wasn't feeling well. He was backing me up an hour ago. What happened to him?" Warrick takes it upon himself to calm her down, pulling her outside.