Stalker

The episode begins with a phone ringing; as it rings, the camera pans out from the skyline to the outlying 'burbs, then to the dark interior of one house. After a few rings, a mechanized male voice says, "No one is available. Please leave a message." Someone does: "Jane, you there? Pick up. Okay...I'll call back later." We see that the answering machine is on a small telephone table in a darkened hallway, and it's crammed full with 64 messages. Then we see Jane. She's crouched on the floor, her back against the wall, clutching a baseball bat and sobbing in fear as she listens to the message. No sooner does that message end than the phone rings again. Jane starts, and breaks into fresh sobs. The message plays again; this time, the same male voice hisses, "Slut. You can't hide from me, bitch." Jane stops sobbing, clearly pushed into a new level of terror by the anger in the man's voice. She looks over at the machine. The message continues, "Jane, you there?" We see three deadbolts on the door. Still, the voice persists as Jane cowers, gnawing on her fingers for comfort: "Now, didn't I tell you not to bite your nails?"

Jane's fight-or-flight instinct kicks in. She pulls out the answering machine's power cord, ricochets down the hall, closes her bedroom door, then hides in the closet. The bedroom door opens; Jane watches with wide eyes, gulping down her sobs in a valiant effort to stay quiet. Her cute little dog comes over to the door, whimpering. She urgently whispers, "Go away. Go away." The dog keeps whimpering, and Jane eventually pulls him into the closet, cuddling him close. She backs into a corner of the closet -- and right into the legs of her black-gloved attacker. Jane has time to scream, and the camera fades up and out on the attacker wrestling Jane to the ground.

And now, I'm stepping away from the computer so I can turn on every light in the apartment and throw all the closet doors wide open. My cats are overjoyed about this -- every time I open a closet door, they bolt in as if they're expecting an express trip to Narnia, and here I am, thoughtfully providing them with multiple itineraries to magical places. It's almost too much for their tiny, walnut-sized brains to process. Fortunately, they rise to the occasion, and after watching them go into raptures over discovering that they can stand on the Igloo cooler and be taller than the other items in the hall closet, I've managed to stop babbling nervously in response to one of the creepiest things I've ever seen on CSI. So I lock the cats in the closet and resume recapping.

Jane is now very dead, and very redheaded. We know this is not normal, as we got to watch her last few moments as a live blonde, but Catherine, snapping photos of Jane slumped over a toilet does not. "Posed?" Gil asks her, acting as the lighting tech on this shoot by aiming a Maglite in Jane's general direction. "Reading my mind," Catherine responds. Gil and Catherine look at the tub, which is festooned with streaks of hair dye, and ponder the nature of the smears. Catherine's reasonably sure it's not blood, as it's the wrong color and texture. She swabs one of the smudges and concludes that it's hair dye. Gil is a little puzzled and asks, "Her hair's still wet. Do you think the assailant surprised her while she was dying her hair?" "Or maybe her assailant was Julia Louis-Dreyfus and this was a Nice and Easy dye job gone horribly wrong," Catherine suggests. Kidding! Catherine says no such thing. She only asks who called in the dead body; Gil responds that a neighbor heard the dog yelping and subsequently called the police. Catherine continues to look around the bathroom and notes that the bathroom window is nailed shut.

As Catherine and Gil walk down the hall, Gil inquires as to the whereabouts of the dog. Catherine notes the presence of canine paraphernalia, but no actual canine. Well, Catherine, rest assured: this is a shaggy dog, mentioned only as an extraneous detail. You'll not see hide nor hair of that dog in the fifty-six minutes, nor shall we. Catherine and Gil continue to explore the house; Catherine notes the triple door locks, the drawn shades, the state-of-the-art alarm system. She tells Gil, "As far as we know, her place was perfectly hermetically sealed until the cops batter-rammed their way in." We see the doorjamb, all sorts of splintered now. "Prisoner in her own home?" Gil queries. "So how'd he get in?" Catherine volleys back. "More importantly, how'd he get out?" Gil replies.

And we go to The Who, as I sit here in awe of Catherine and Gil's ability to intuit the gender of the perp with nary a clue.

When we get back from break, Nicky is looking down at Jane. He looks deeply shaken; for a moment, I have a Deputy Andy flashback. Gil comes up behind Nick, startling him. Not like that's hard. Gil apologizes, then asks mildly, "You've been staring at this girl for ten minutes. Do you know her?" Oh, Gil. Does anyone really ever know anyone? Nicky shakes his head. Gil suggests that Nicky take care of the bedroom; he'll wait for the coroner and finish the bathroom.

Nicky scrams into the bedroom, where Catherine is running an ALS over the comforter. He gallantly offers to step in, but Catherine declines, commanding instead, "Tweeze me." There are so many things to say to that, and yet I'd like to finish this recap before the deadline. Nicky hands Catherine tweezers, and she comes up with a thick, light-colored fiber. Catherine prepares to vamoose, but before she goes, she tells Nicky, "Don't forget what's under the bed." "What's under the bed?" he replies. "You would have gotten it eventually...crime-stopper," Catherine replies. Nicky chuckles wanly and asks, "They're never going to let me live that one down, are they?" Catherine straightens up and jibes, "Now that you're a celebrity, you may want to think about getting a new shirt." Nicky replies, "I'm short on options. Besides, the dry cleaners keeps losing my stuff." I wonder if they can be trained to lose the olive-colored shirts? Anyway, Nicky ducks under the bed and finds a plastic shopping bag. Gil comes in, asking, "What'd you get?" "A lot of crap from Catherine," Nicky shoots back. No, he doesn't. I wish he would -- Nicky's so good-natured, one of two things is bound to happen: he'll either become a doormat and start Season 3 with "WELCOME" written across his forehead, or he'll snap one day, and Gil will be forced to extract posthumous revenge after Ecklie investigates the night shift's stunning mass murder and concludes it was all a wacky accident. Ahem. Back in the actual episode, Nicky's telling Gil he found a shopping bag with a red smudge in it. Gil sends Nicky off to fume the bag and to recruit Warrick and Sara on this case too. Then he does a happy dance around the bedroom because he's the boss of them. Do I really need to tell you when I'm kidding about these things?

Nicky lopes through the Labitrail. As he passes a row of clipboards, each bearing a stack of papers that give the impression of being both official and utterly useless, he notices a color-copied article. The headline -- written in "Christ has risen!"-sized text -- boldly declares, "CRIME STOPPER: Nick Stokes." Nicky sighs and rips the paper off. Then he heads into the break room, where Sara's cackling mercilessly as she and Warrick read the article to each other. Nicky handles the heckling a lot more gracefully than I would, especially when Sara reads, "'And in his off-time, he enjoys creating and inventing toys.' That's fascinating...what kind of toys do you invent?" "I invent shut-up toys!" Nicky screams back. No, no, no. Nicky deflects the question and takes the high road by not inquiring as to whether or not Sara spends her free time ripping the heads of underprivileged children's dolls. He then says, "I thought I got my hands on all the interdepartmental newsletters. Where'd you get that one?" Sara and Warrick chorus, "Liam." Nicky's not surprised. He deftly changes the subject, saying, "Gris wants us to divide and conquer. Blonde hair for you, Warrick --" he tosses it over, and Warrick quips, "I do love a blonde." Sara's on phone records; she greets this with her usual enthusiasm. Nicky then leaves for parts unknown, taking the newsletter with him. As he balls it up and tosses it in the trash can, Warrick calls out, "Hey, I wasn't done with that!" "Yes, you were!" Nicky calls back, his good-natured laughter masking his boiling rage.

Cut to David The Respiring Coroner, starting to say, "I know two things for certain," prompting the husband and me to recite, "There's no way to tell good flan from bad flan, and there is no war in Albania." David knows two different things for certain: Jane Galloway died from suffocation, and she's a natural blonde. Cue everyone's eyes swiveling toward Catherine. Catherine responds, "You had your chance to find out ten years ago." I wish. She actually says, "What are you looking at me for?" Gil looks repentant and apologizes, then says cheerily, "So! What! Suffocation!" David and the TMICam -- now in Corpse Gray and Asphyxiation Blue -- walk us through the usual signs: petechial hemorrhaging, blue fingertips, blue face. Gil notes that Jane may have been suffocated, but there's no sign of strangulation. David replies, "If she had struggled with her assailant, that effort alone could have limited her oxygen intake, causing further O2 depletion of the brain." And then, in an unprecedented TMICam shot, we get to see Jane's neurons shorting out. There's no way they can top that, short of showing actual DNA base pairs screaming, "It wasn't me! DNA profiling is still an imperfect forensic tool! I was at the movies! Gattaca!" We establish that the unnamed attacker -- who we're all assuming is male -- murdered and posed Jane, but declined to either rob or rape her. "So what's his agenda?" Gil asks. You can tell Gil is yearning for a serial killer here, since those people have agendas complex enough to make the Franklin-Covey people beg for mercy.

Meanwhile, Warrick walks in on Liam shopping for new hairdos in the pages of Teen. The two banter back and forth about the fiber: Liam tells Warrick that he snipped a little bit of the fiber, ran it across immuno-electrophoresis (the premise: charged particles of anything migrate across an applied electrical field, and the distance of the migration is related to the particle's density; therefore, electrophoresis is used to separate items according to physical properties like density and electrical charge, thus identifying those items according to their properties. Immuno-electrophoresis identifies specific proteins, antibodies, and immunoglobulins), and it came up empty. Then Liam introduces to Warrick to Pink, stopping only to ask the cover rhetorically, "Do you know how hot you are?" Warrick warns that Nicky's even hotter. "Don't I know it?" Liam responds. Fan-fic writers across America swoon in ecstasy. Oh, come on. Liam asks, "How mad is he?" Warrick responds, "Watch your back."

Having decided that the best defense is a good offense, Liam hunts Nicky down, asking, "I heard you were looking for me?" Nicky's all, "Liam! C'mere, I want to talk to you for a second." Liam wisely hangs back, trepidation written across his features. Nicky insincerely assures him that no bodily harm is forthcoming. Liam foolishly comes over and asks, "What's up?" Nicky cracks. Seriously -- he gives Liam the Vulcan nerve pinch, snarling, "Stop invading my privacy, man. I don't like it. I'm just trying to do my job around here. I don't need extra attention." Liam nods, then foolishly points out, "You are the one doing the 'forensic spotlight' in the department newsletter." Nicky pinches harder -- you can see Liam's veins beginning to throb -- and gets downright scary-looking as he exposits, "I didn't do anything, man. Someone from the community wrote a letter of commendation, Public Affairs ran it. Cool?" Liam gasps assent. After that scene's over, Nicky's usual sunny smile is fixed to his placid expression, and Liam is left to tremble over having glimpsed the rage within. Or something equally dramatic. I actually think this entire scene was a little out of place: we've never known Nicky to be overly zealous about his privacy before, so we really have no idea what the motivation is here. Is Nicky feeling betrayed because it's his little lab groupie spreading the newsletter around? Is he worried that his coworkers will mock him even more than they do now? Is he dealing with some external threat to his privacy that has made him more sensitive to scrutiny in the workplace? We'll never know. ["I'm rolling the bones with 'jerry-built retcon in the writers' room,' myself." -- Sars] And now, Liam and Nicky conveniently forget that they even had that frank exchange of ideas. Liam asks what Nicky's doing; Nicky's fuming the shopping bag. He explains, "I'm trying to get lucky, see if I can get prints off it." Liam watches the bag intently, then asks, "Did she die of suffocation?" Nicky looks spooked at Liam's knowing this until he walks around to Liam's side of the lab bench, where the bag -- looking for all the world like the plastic shroud of Turin -- shows Jane's face. We hear her sobs echoing as we go into a flashback of the asphyxiation in question. Nicky looks spooked.

Cut to Brass practically skipping though the Labitrail as he burns off the excess energy accumulated by waiting fourteen minutes before delivering even one piece of exposition. It turns out that Jane had a temporary restraining order placed against her ex-boyfriend, Red. Sara excitedly points out that Red called Jane thirteen times on the day of her murder; Brass points out that this is thirteen more times than the restraining order permits. Gil takes all this in, and then the three split up: Brass and Sara run off to interview Red Herring, and Warrick collars Gil for some quality mystery-solving time together.

The shot is of a thick, smooth fiber under a magnifying glass. Warrick's explaining that he couldn't find a Becke line. Gil reminds Warrick, "Hair refracts light under cross-polarization; glass doesn't." Warrick connects the dots, concluding that they may have a fiberglass sample right there. Gil's all, "You'll figure it out."

We go to a montage of the team members asking separate utilities workpeople God knows what. Then Nicky and Warrick are walking up to a house with a cable van in the driveway. Nicky's all, "Luna Cable! Good company -- same as mine. A hundred and fifty channels. I'm telling you, you've got to get it, man. The last three weeks have been heaven." Nicky is, like, the only person in America who doesn't actively hate his cable company. Warrick declines to comment as the two men head up the stairs and knock on the cable guy's door. When the cable guy failed to materialize in 0.94 seconds, Nicky opens the unlocked door and calls out, "Mr. Crane?" Just then, Warrick's cell phone rings; owing to crappy reception, Warrick peels off and heads back to the stairs, leaving Nicky to enter the seemingly empty house all by himself. Nicky, whose 150-channel package apparently didn't include any channels that ever aired horror movies, blithely trips inside, shouting, "Mr. Crane, your door's open! Just want to ask you a couple of questions." As Nicky winds his way further inside the near-empty house, Warrick turns his back to the door and tells whomever he's speaking with, "I can hardly hear you. We're at the satellite guy's house that installed Jane's cable." (Note: This is the point where a friend of mine turned to me and said, "You recap the show. Why on earth would a satellite company be installing cable?" I couldn't answer, since I was hung up on wondering why Warrick said "satellite guy...that installed" as opposed to the correct "satellite guy...who." Frankly, I have no good answer to either question.) Nicky, meanwhile, notices a trail of dark red splotches. He whips out the latex gloves and opens the kitchen cabinet where the trail ends. The cabinet houses a recycling bin; music in the background begins to swell ominously, and not just because the guy mixed his plastics with his aluminums. As Nicky continues to look for the source of the trail, the camera zooms over to the pantry, where someone is lowering themselves to floor level silently. Just as Nicky finds a pair of latex gloves covered in hair dye, he hears a noise and looks up.

Cut to a shot of Warrick -- still facing away from the house and still jawjacking on the cell phone -- hearing the tinkle of breaking glass and turning his head just in time to see Nicky go flying out the window. He shouts, "Nick!" -- undoubtedly deafening whomever he was on the phone with -- and pulls his gun before heading into the house. Then he bolts out, pulling out his walkie-talkie and blurting, "Patrol, I need immediate back-up. Officer down, officer down. I need emergency medical assistance." Then he takes off, shouting Nicky's name and hoping to God he's not going to be ribbed back at CSICentral for his unfortunate habit of leaving people alone in houses while he carries on elsewhere. Warrick ends up over by Nicky's sprawled form, repeating his name and looking up as if expecting an explanation for what just happened to come flying out the window as well.