The show starts off much like my mornings do, with a cat shrieking in outrage at close range. We hear the cat before we see it -- at first, we see the Vegas skyline, then quickly telescope to a shot of the asphalt on a quiet, tree-lined street. Yes, you read that right -- a quiet, tree-lined street in Las Vegas. There's a privet hedge or two, and an impressive quantity of leafy, deciduous trees. Perhaps some quaint British village lost its climate in a bet to Las Vegas. That would go a long way toward explaining the landscape.
Anyhoo -- Pissed Off Cat In G-minor persists as the camera swoops ominously past the ivy-covered picket fences, moves into a backyard choked with greenery, trots up the stairs, and goes through a kitty door. Yes, we're seeing things from the cat's perspective. In that case, they should also be slightly blurry and tinted pastel. Anyway, the cat enters the house, meows loudly, and canters toward the living room, where several other feline silhouettes are slithering in and out of view. We hear different cats all making plaintive, hungry cries. Then the camera moves up for an aerial shot, the better to see a human body completely surrounded by cats. The cats commence eating. The background music goes into standard aren't-you-disturbed-yet mode, with lots of discordant strings meant to make us feel all unsettled. However, as I view these cats munching on assorted parts of this poor old woman's body, I'm not really horrified, in part because I'm not surprised. Should I die unexpectedly, my cats would begin eating me immediately. Hell, I take a nap and they're biting experimentally, just in case.
Cut to Buzz exiting the house. He'll undoubtedly lend the crime scene gravitas and empathy -- God knows I can't. Buzz greets Catherine and Gil at the sidewalk with, "Welcome to the Wild Kingdom." So much for the gravitas. We learn that the victim is one Ruth Elliott, eighty years old, and she had at least twenty cats. Buzz tells us that Animal Control is rounding up the cats now, and we see a hazmat-suited figure lifting one cat cage from a stack of four; its occupant doesn't sound happy. Oh, like that's a surprise. Catherine wants to know who called Ruth's death in; Buzz tells her that the mail was piling up, so the mailman looked in the window and called 911. Then he broke out his video camera and promptly sold the footage to Fox's When Animals Attack IV: Dinner Time! How sad that the mailman was the first to notice this woman missing, especially since her neighbors -- a tense-looking woman standing on the sidewalk, and a mother watching the scene with her two little girls from her picture-window seat across the street -- seem to be more than peripherally aware of her existence. The expository portion of this bumper over, Buzz cautions Catherine and Gil to take a deep breath before heading inside. As the dynamic duo heads toward the door, they pass an animal control officer coming out with two more caged cats. Predictably, the cats don't sound happy. My cats, incidentally, are beginning to look askance at the television as well. "Don't get any funny ideas," I tell them.
As Catherine and Gil enter the apartment, a cat mournfully wails in the background. Catherine's eyes go wide and she chokes, "Oh, God. I didn't think anything could mask a decomp." Then she's never changed a cat box. I kid! But there was the case of the cat woman last year in my neck of the woods: Marilyn Barletta of Petaluma, California kept more than 150 cats in a house last year, and police reported from the scene that the cats' collective excrement had warped the floor to the point of soaking into the sheetrock below. And that's not all -- the details were really quite grisly, but the most startling thing I remember seeing is the photo of one of the half-wild cats leaping out of the wall (yes, they had managed to insinuate themselves in the spaces between the walls) and toward an animal control officer. And then -- get this -- mere months later, Barletta was hoarding cats again. The smell's usually what tips people off to cat stashes.
Anyway, Catherine's taken aback by Eau de Cat Pee -- as anyone who's getting it at twenty times its normal strength would be -- and of course, Gil's taking it all in stride: "Male cat urine. To us, smelly. To a female cat, it must be like smelling aftershave." Well, there are aftershaves that smell like cat piss too, but I can see where Gil's going with this analogy. As Catherine and Gil prepare to suss out the scene, David the Emergency Backup Coroner comes over. Catherine notes that David's looking less than 100 percent; he responds that he's allergic to cats. And how -- you can practically see the histamines working overtime as he stands there. Shortly before drowning in a flood of his own lymphocytes, David gasps out that rigor mortis has passed, lividity is fixed, there's extensive marbling on Ruth's limbs, and she's been dead for three or four days. He then bolts off to take a Benadryl. We won't be seeing David for the rest of the episode; he's going to be lying on a spare morgue table, whacked out on antihistamines and rubbing cortisone into his knuckles while asking the world, "Have you ever looked at your hands? I mean, really looked at your hands?" Gil watches David go, somewhat startled by another human's display of weakness.
Then he and Catherine walk over to Ruth. The poor woman is chewed in a wide variety of places. Both Gil and Catherine look taken aback; Gil even comments, "Wow!" I get the feeling he doesn't do that too often. Catherine wonders aloud if perhaps Ruth died of natural causes and the cats, hungry for their meal, eventually fell too. Gil -- whose moue of disgust looks to be permanent -- says ghoulishly, "Meat is meat." A hissing noise makes them turn around, and they watch an animal control officer strong-arm a rather stiff and resistant feline into a box. It should be noted, the animal's got a collar and looks quite fat and happy; these were well cared-for cats. That's atypical among cat hoarders; by definition, ownership crosses the line into hoarding when the owner gets overwhelmed and cannot maintain baseline welfare for the animals. As Gil and Catherine watch the cat being shoved in a cage, Catherine says ominously, "Maybe they turned on her." Across America, cat owners laugh ruefully. The two CSIs then turn back to examining Ruth's chewed-on body. Gil notices a deep, flowing wound near the woman's heart. He hunkers down for a better look-see, commenting, "That's a deep wound tract." It sure is -- we see it up close and personal thanks to the TMICam. "This woman was stabbed," he continues. "I guess the cats are off the hook."
He'll have time to cogitate, as we've gone to the B-plot. Nicky and Sara -- him in a baseball cap, her in the watch cap that makes her look as though she's managed to dig out of Stalag 17 -- stride out to meet Brass by the smoking husk of a burnt-out car. Brass tells them they've got a 445; like the crime nerd she is, Sara's all, "Explosives. It's been a while." Nicky asks about fatalities. Brass looks genuinely grieved to report the loss of a $50K BMW. The BMW is driven by one Marcie Tobin -- played by the husband's TV girlfriend -- and she's wrapped in a blanket, looking dazed as she gives her report to a police officer. We then meet Marcus Remick, square-jawed mechanic and eyewitness. He's also talking to police officers. Sara eyes them both with suspicion. Brass asks if they'll divide and conquer, and the subsequent conversation breaks down thusly:
Nicky: I've got the rig.
Brass: I've got the grease monkey.
Sara: I guess I've got the driver.
They split up, and Sara comes over just as Marcie's saying, "This just doesn't make any sense. I mean, why would someone put a bomb in my car?" Sara then asks if she can ask a few questions. After Sara sends the officer off to see where Marcie's husband is and whether he's reachable, Marcie launches into her flashback-assisted tale of woe: "I was on my way to my father's office. On Thursdays, we have dinner and I help him with his payroll." We then see her noticing a knock under the hood of her car, and driving it into the conveniently located garage, where she tells an indifferent Marcus that her car's making a really strange noise.
Then we transition out of flashback and into Marcus's conversation with Brass, where Marcus is saying, "Lady's driving a brand-new Beemer, first service is 15,000 miles. Things don't go wrong." Brass notes neutrally, "You checked it out anyway." Marcus is all, "You know how women get." Actually, no, Marcus, I don't. Why don't you fill me in? We go back into flashback and infer that in Marcus's mind, women apparently get stupid under stress, as he's addressing Marcie by using small words and a tone of voice even my infant nephew would find patronizing. We see them gazing down at a ticking bomb, and then Marcus has to steer the oblivious Marcie to safety. The car blows up, reminding us all that verily, this show is produced under the Bruckheimer banner.
Back out of flashback again, Sara is quizzing Marcie and determining that the Beamer was parked safely in her garage prior to its untimely destruction. We learn that Marcie and her mysteriously absent husband are the only ones who had access to the car.
Meanwhile, Nicky's looking at the car. Sara comes over to ask, "Anything probative?" "Check out this displacement," Nicky replies. The two of them look at the steering wheel. Nicky notes that the bomb's detritus blew backward toward the driver. "That's intentional," he concludes, as if the entire conceit of a bomb on your car isn't. He and Sara conclude that maybe the bomber knew what he was doing, assuming Marcie was the intended target. "A hired hit on a housewife!" Sara says, thrilling in the alliteration of the moment.
Cut to David the Ailurophobic Coroner lifting a sheet off poor Ruth and commenting, "Glad I'm a dog person." Oh, like a dog in the same situation wouldn't do the same thing. Gil rises to the defense of the kitties by pointing out, "Housecats have only been domesticated for four thousand years. They still have predatory instincts." And there are those animal behaviorists out there who will argue that, as a species, housecats aren't technically domesticated at all, as it only takes a generation or two for domestic cats to revert to completely feral behavior ["as a multi-cat owner who just returned from a trip out of town, let me interject 'try ten days'" -- Sars], but Gil's point is well-taken: cats are in no way like herd animals or social pack animals when it comes to domesticity. We learn from David that there's no blood around the cats' bite marks, so "predation is all post-mortem. Cause of death: cardiac trauma. She was stabbed lateral to the sternal border, just below the fifth intercostal space, straight into the right ventricle. Muscle layers decrease with age; fascia and tissue layers are easy to penetrate." As David's explaining Ruth's violent cause of death, we get to see the ventricle get punctured and fill up with blood, courtesy of the TMICam. David continues, "I can't tell you much about the weapon, but the wound tract is slick." Again, we see this up close and personal via the TMICam. David's swabbed the substance that made the wound tract so slippery and sent it on to Liam for further investigation. He also notes that Ruth's lungs were filled with fluid. David dismisses it as "not relevant," which is practically television-speak for "this is the clue that will solve the case for you." The fluid, FYI, is the result of Ruth's severe staph infection. Gil's cell phone rings right then, and David's done detailing the variation of depredations Ruth suffered. From the look on Gil's face -- which started out uneasy and progressed to a deeper level of discomfort -- that call came in the nick of time. And what a convenient call it is, too: it's some anonymous person telling Gil that there's a witness.
And now we're at a two-story colonial house, surrounded by all sorts of greenery. This looks like Las Vegas only in the sense that this setting takes place on a planet with a blue sky and a breathable atmosphere. I realize the show's filmed in California and all, but it's not like Los Angeles is located in the heart of a rainforest -- surely the location scouts can come up with a suitably arid-looking suburb? Anyway, the mother who was previously gawping at the crime scene is prodding her child Jessica to tell the nice CSIs what she saw. Incidentally, the mother is played by Megan Gallagher, whom some of us remember from Millennium. I'm still wondering if it was immoral to be chanting "Die, die, die," at the end of "The Time Is Now" during Season 2. Anyway, the child chirps, "The lady over there, the one that died, she was nice. She had cats. She let us play with them." The child's sister nods, clearly used to backing Jessica up. Behind his mirrored shades, Gil glowers suspiciously. Naturally, because the case now involves children -- however peripherally -- and because, let us not forget, Catherine is a mother herself, this is the moment Earth Mother Willows makes her appearance, extending the kind of introduction that makes Megan Gallagher's normally über-maternal acting look like something from The Joan Crawford School of Parenting.
Moments after this intro, we've learned all sorts of things about Jessica -- her full name is Jessica Rachel Trent, she's eight-and-a-half, she's in the third grade, her teacher's nice, she hates multiplication, and she apparently has a mute, nameless sister. Whoops! I spoke too soon. After Catherine asks Jessica to recap what she told her mom, the sister Jackie pipes up: "I can. Jessica and I were playing handball against the garage door. We saw Mrs. Stein go into Mrs. Elliott's house, and they were yelling." Jessica picks up the thread: "When Mrs. Stein came out, she looked really angry. Kind of like when Mommy's boyfriend is late for dinner. She hates that." Because the child is eight, I'm going to forgive the garbled syntax. Gil asks, "And...ah, who is Mrs. Stein?" Buzz pipes up, "The -door neighbor. Ran a background check. The good neighbor filed three nuisance complaints against the victim." As the grownups are talking, we see Jessica lean in and whisper to Jackie, "Don't say anything." Sharp-eyed Earth Mother Willows asks conspiratorially, "Are you girls sharing secrets?" Jessica folds like a note in the back of math class, and whispers in Catherine's ear. Catherine thanks her, and the girl chirps, "No problem." For some reason, Jessica reminds me of Tracey Flick. Catherine then says brightly, "I think we're done here." Gil dryly thanks everyone for their help. As the three law enforcement folk walk off the porch, Buzz takes off, and Gil leans over to Catherine to coyly inquire, "Don't you have a secret to share with me now?" Catherine says, "Oh -- Mrs. Stein? She hates cats." Gil's glasses obscure his expression, but one can only guess.
Back at the lab, Sara and Nicky are sporting matching blue CSI coveralls and standing over a glass table, dumping paper bags full of bomb debris on the surface. Nicky picks out a spring; Sara asks conversationally, "Did you know there's a dozen moving parts inside a ticking clock?" "I do now," he replies. He then finds something infinitely more interesting than being reminded of his relative non-geekiness compared to his colleagues: "Hello, sweetheart," he coos. "End cap," Sara replies, looking up and getting excited. "Pipe bomb," he concludes. He continues, "End cap at both ends. Either one could have come into contact with the explosive inside the pipe. I'll swab it, see if Trace can identify it." Naturally, Nicky only gets a nanosecond to savor his victory before Sara's plucked something out of the clutter and said, "I will see your end cap and raise you a grommet." Sara explains that the wires in the timing device attached to the bomb enter the bomb through a hole in the grommet, and when the timing device is activated, it sets off an electrical charge leading directly to detonation. We get an illustration of this, but I'm much more interested in Sara's pretty necklace; it's almost a lavaliere-style thing with all sorts of tawny-colored stones like topaz and citrine interspersed with lengths of chain. Nicky asks Sara how grommets survive the bomb blast, seeing as how they're so pivotal to detonation. Sara replies, "I don't know, but they always do." "Just when I thought you knew everything," Nicky gently teases. Brass then comes in and inquires as to their progress; he then informs us that Marcie's husband is the junior foreman at her father's company, Tobin C&D Incorporated. "C" stands for "construction." "D" stands for "demolition."
Sara and Nicky walk onto the Tobin C&D shop floor as a harried-looking man -- let's call him William J. Macy, since he's basically a knockoff of the beleaguered-patsy-of-fate character William H. Macy owns -- is trying to reason with a burly and unreceptive type in a hard hat. We learn that his name is Jonathan Claddon. It doesn't matter: William J. Macy he is and forever will be. Nick and Sara introduce themselves, and they begin chatting. We learn that William J. Macy knows how to make a bomb there (it's apparently something you pick up by osmosis once you start working at a C&D shop), but he loves his wife too much to blow her up. Sara rebuts that by pointing out that William J. Macy's love apparently did not cover any appearances at his wife's side during the hours after her car blew up. Before William J. Macy can confute this, his father-in-law runs him off and proceeds to plant the seeds of suspicion in Sara and Nicky's fertile little brains by alleging that William J. Macy might be cheating on Marcie, or aspiring to. He then all but leads Sara and Nicky over to a copy of William J. Macy's fingerprints on file.
Fresh from his field trip, Nicky then strides into Liam's laboratory lair. Liam leaps up from his microscope to tell Nicky he's identified the substance on the end cap. He then whips out a marker and tells Nicky it's time to play "Name That Chemical Compound." Liam then draws out the chemical compound C3-H5-3(NO3) -- nitroglyceride, one of the components in explosives. Liam reminds him that the other component is usually silica or sawdust, and this sample contains sawdust. Continuing the game show theme, Nicky says, "Thanks, Liam. What'd I win?" Um. The right to hold that boy down and comb his hair into anything other than a faux-hawk?
Meanwhile, Sara's analyzing the other end cap for screw thread pattern and fingerprints. Anyone want to lay odds on whose fingerprints show up? I didn't think so.
Cut to Nicky and Sara talking to William J. Macy. When Nicky asks William J. Macy to explain how his fingerprints ended up all over that end cap, the reply is straightforward: "My father-in-law's company is the largest purchaser of end caps in Nevada. I log inventory." Unfortunately, that doesn't get him out of trouble; Brass has been checking the books and, per the ATF, every stick of dynamite is catalogued. William J. Macy checked out a case of twenty-four sticks and only checked twenty-three in. He replies, "It was stolen. Look, I'm the one who reported the theft. I kept the dynamite in my SUV, inside a storage magazine." Nicky asks if William J. Macy expects them to believe someone broke into his SUV and stole a stick of dynamite. Confusion shining across his features, William J. Macy replies, "Yes." Brass switches tactics and invites William J. Macy to chat about his girlfriend. William J. Macy immediately and correctly pegs the source of that misinformation as his father-in-law and adds, "Marcie's the best thing to happen to me. Plus I've got an ulcer. Do you have any idea what an affair would do to me. I work my butt off for her old man. I barely have enough time to sleep, let alone Romeo some other girl. And the truth is, nothing I do is ever good enough. Tobin wouldn't even let Marcie take my name." Brass isn't buying it. I wonder how he got along with his former father-in-law. William J. Macy protests, so Brass cordially invites him to present alternate hypotheses. "Marcie handles the payroll and she has a rep for short-changing overtime. Talk about pissing people off. Any one of those guys could have put that bomb in her car," William J. Macy responds. I take a little time-out.
Me: Baby, your television girlfriend is no friend to the working man.
The Husband: It's going to take a lot more than that to knock her off the roster.
Me: Exactly who's on the roster right now anyway? Is Nancy from Ed still on there?
The Husband: Yeah, but she might be removed.
Me: I told you to do that last fall when her hair went all funky. How about Rommie on Andromeda?
The Husband: Her new hair makes her look like she should be serving drinks at the Luxor.
Me: I had no idea hair mattered that much.
The Husband: But you know who made the list -- Becka, now that we've seen her looking all gussied-up on that show.
Me: Oh, my God. So let me get this straight: Diane here, no more Rommie, we've added Becka, and Nancy's on review.
The Husband: Don't forget that Nikki Cox is in the Television Girlfriend Hall of Fame.
Me: How foolish of me to forget. You still counting Linda Cohn?
The Husband: Yes. She's my senior sports anchor girlfriend. There's also the football reporter who looks like an easy drunk.
Me: And I was ashamed of my ten-minute crush on the Rock before this conversation started. I've got to get back to recapping.
The Husband: Incidentally, Marg Helgenberger's application for television girlfriend is currently being reviewed.
Me: You're more selective than Harvard, aren't you?
Okay -- on the show, the female CSI who is not on the short list for admission to the Television Girlfriend roster, i.e. Sara, is asking William J. Macy why he didn't volunteer this information earlier. William J. Macy responds that Marcie's attractiveness as a target isn't her fault; she is but her papa's puppet.
Back at the cathouse, Catherine's paying a visit to -door neighbor Debbie Stein and serving her with a warrant for her shoes. Debbie takes this more calmly than I would.
Moments later we're in the lab with a rather attractive collection of shoes. Warrick -- who is reverting to his shoe-loving ways from Season 1 -- is helping Catherine make prints off each shoe in the hopes of finding a match to the footprint in Ruth's house. They hit pay dirt with a rather nice black wedge heel that, perhaps not coincidentally, smells like cat urine. As Catherine puts it, "Eau de Match."
In the scene, Debbie's doing everything she can to simultaneously prejudice Gil and demonstrate his theory on the perils of isolation to Catherine by saying, "She was a pig. Her house stunk. She didn't belong in the neighborhood." Gil restrains himself admirably by replying, "So I guess it's safe to say you weren't friends." Debbie gives him an eye-roll, and Gil responds with his trademark guileless gaze. He then asks why Debbie was in her house; Debbie responds, "I wanted to give her a chance to find homes for her cats before I called the humane society. To report her. By law, you can only own three." Much as I'd like to sympathize with Debbie -- and I do think it's difficult for someone in the 'burbs to take care of more than four or five cats -- I'm wondering why she didn't have this talk with her neighbor some seventeen cats ago. Catherine points out that a witness heard Debbie yelling at Ruth; Debbie defends that by saying Ruth was irrational. We flash back to the scene in question: Ruth is clutching one cat as a few others loudly meow, and shouting, "These cats are my children and no one's going to take them away from me!" Debbie shouts back, "Then you've got to take care of them. I can smell your house from my kitchen!" Then she leaves amid a chorus of outraged meows. The smell thing makes sense; according to the Tufts Center for Animals and Public Policy, one of the natural results of animal hoarding is an increase in atmospheric ammonia, and cat urine's full of the stuff. Back in the interrogation room, we find out that Debbie talked to Ruth about six days ago, before taking a trip to Los Angeles. For those keeping track of the timeline at home, this means Ruth and Debbie had their frank exchange of opinions a few days before Ruth's death, and Debbie was out of town on the day of the actual murder. After Debbie leaves, Catherine comments, "She had an answer for everything." Gil replies with some asperity, "Mark Twain once said that the only difference between a cat and a lie is that a cat has nine lives." Catherine's not making the connection: "You think she's lying?" Gil replies, "Unless her alibi checks out."
Meanwhile, over in the B-plot, Nicky and Sara are analyzing the end cap to determine that the tool which secured the end cap to the pipe bomb was a vise grip. They scamper out of the lab so they can get warrants for William J. Macy's house and Tobin C&D. As they hasten through the Labitrail, they pass Warrick heading in the opposite direction, and we smoothly transition into a Warrick-centric scene. That's pretty stylish right there, that is. Catherine comes up, and Warrick tells her that Debbie's alibi checks out. Fortunately, Catherine doesn't have to be too upset over losing their primary suspect, as a new one has just entered the investigation courtesy of a stray fingerprint on the wall safe. Meet Tyler Elliott, Ruth's son. His fingerprints are on file owing to the non-gaming work card he had so that he could work at the Tangiers.
We meet Tyler seconds later as he's telling Buzz that no, he wasn't skipping town, but rather preparing to go camping at Red Rock -- hence the duffel bag in the backseat of his car. Gil notes, "Your mother died and you never claimed the body. How come?" Tyler replies, "Funerals are expensive. I'm broke." Buzz helpfully supplies that Tyler filed for bankruptcy a month ago. Tyler cuts in, "Let the county pick up the tab. No one was going to show up anyway." Boy, Gil's perils-of-isolation theory is becoming more depressingly accurate in every scene. There's a moment of shocked silence, and the camera focuses first on Gil setting his jaw in obvious disgust, then Catherine giving Tyler a flat, hostile glare, before Tyler says, "It's not like we were close." Buzz asks, "So how often did you see her?" Tyler responds, "Twice a month. Went over, made sure bills got paid, brought her medication, stocked the fridge. All the stuff any good son is supposed to do." Tyler's shaking his head, and there's a lifetime of subtext packed into that last line. Catherine redirects the questioning by asking about the safe. Tyler snorts, and explains, "About a month ago, she called me up. Middle of the night. Hysterical. Her precious tabby was locked inside. She couldn't remember the combo." Well, that's one minor mystery cleared up. Gil's still giving Tyler a silent, contemptuous look, and Tyler looks back, clarifying, "I didn't steal her money. She didn't have any. The only thing she had was the house, and she left that to some damn cat sanctuary." Gil finally speaks, saying slowly, "And so...that's it?" Tyler, looking down at the table, says, "I'm flat broke and she gives her house to complete strangers." There's a moment where he's almost teary; he meets Catherine's eyes, and while she doesn't look sympathetic, she does look understanding. He says, "Can somebody drive me back to my car? If we're done?" Well, the scene's done, but I'll be chewing on it for a while. Kudos to CSI for illustrating all the frustrations of dealing with a parent whose faculties are ever-diminishing, and for indirectly depicting the heartbreaking indignities of aging. What I also find interesting: Warrick's the one on staff who was raised by his grandmother. He'd probably have first-hand experience in what happens what the roles of caretaker and child are reversed -- and yet he's missing from the scene. That's a pity; it would have been nice to get his input and reaction to the situation Tyler described.
Back in the B-plot, Sara's talking to Marcie, who's apparently nonplussed at the law enforcement attention an exploding car attracts. Marcie finishes by chattering, "I think somebody put the wrong bomb in the wrong house because stranger things have happened!" Sara verbally slaps some sense into her by sharply saying, "Marcie!" She then suggests, "Maybe we should talk alone." William J. Macy looks a little perturbed by this. Marcie immediately attaches herself to her husband like a limpet mine to a submarine (look everyone! Foreshadowing in a metaphor!) and informs Sara that the two of them have no secrets. Sara stumbles into it when she says, "Listen -- about your marriage. Your father said --" Marcie immediately jumps in with, "Oh, my God, my father shouldn't have said anything," as William J. Macy protests, "Your father ran his mouth about our personal life?" Now Marcie's a little flustered over having to explain how Daddy Dearest got that information, so she stammers that a few weeks ago she got the idea that William J. Macy was stepping out on her because he was never home ("I was working!" he protests) and never interested (there's a snort from the husband's general direction; William J. Macy pleads, "Marcie, we talked about this! You know the pressure your father has me under!") and Marcie talks over it to say loudly to Sara, "You shouldn't put too much stock in this because every couple has their problems." This is William J. Macy's cue to step forward, gather the remains of his personal dignity around himself, and tell Sara to buzz off and leave them alone. It comes off as, "You have your warrant but please -- no more questions." Sara watches the two stalk off, wondering why Marcie's downplaying a car bomb instead of demanding to know who sabotaged her car.
She then heads back to the lab where Nicky has been testing all the Tobin C&D vise grips, provided courtesy of Pa Tobin. So far, no matches. Sara produces the vise grip from William J. Macy's personal garage. Again -- not a match.
Stumped on one front, Sara and Nicky move on to another by going down to revisit the wreckage of the car. Nicky recalls that shortly before he turned sixteen, he asked his mom for car; she bought him a twenty-four-volume set of Encyclopedia Britannica that he uses to this day. Then, he and Sara walk through the likely chain of events as the engine morphs from ruined to brand-new and back again. The bomb was triggered to go off sixty seconds before detonation -- and the trigger that started the countdown was the latch on the car hood. This immediately arouses their suspicions: how could a mechanic immediately spot a car bomb? And why would he close the lid on a bomb in a car? "Liar, liar, car on fire," Sara decrees. Nicky flexes his jaw in agreement.
In another part of the episode, Liam is taking advantage of the downtime between tests to rock out. The music's going full blast, he's got a latex glove atop his head, and clown-on-a-field-trip-to-the-seventh-level-of-hell-style decorations on a face mask and protective goggles. Naturally, Gil and Catherine walk in behind him, then move around the lab bench to wait for him to notice them standing in front of him, the better to maximize the inevitable humiliation. As he waits, Gil tilts his head, regarding Liam with the same academic curiosity he'd extend to a wound tract. Catherine is finally pushed past endurance and turns off Liam's music. Liam recovers by pulling down the mask and informing the two CSIs, "I could have been a rock star." Gil acerbically invites him to reconsider with, "There's still time." Liam's face falls; then he gets down to business, in a manner of speaking. After the usual digression into sexual habits he wishes he had, we find out that the substance in Ruth's wound tract was mineral oil. The question: how did it get there? Gil hypothesizes, "Possibly used as a preservative to prevent rusting of high-carbon steel?" Catherine replies, "Like blades of knives." Liam leaps in: "Old knives. New ones are made from stainless steel." Gil regards Liam with something akin to non-disapproval. Liam replies, "I'm like a sponge; I just absorb information." Gil says, "I thought that was my line." "Yeah. And I absorbed it," Liam shoots back. Gil continues to look less disapproving. Catherine struggles to get back to the day job -- excuse me, the night job -- by musing they're looking for a blade with a splash of mineral oil. She's off to grab the ALS. Liam expresses surprise that mineral oil fluoresces. Gil takes this opportunity to issue the contractually obligated intellectual beatdown with: "Mineral oil fluoresces at 525 nanometers when filtered through a KV590. A little more absorbing. A little less rock and roll." He leaves, and Liam sits there looking thoughtful. You just know that if Liam ever gets his mitts on a photo printer, he's going to be churning out homemade posters of Gil and Nicky for his locker, he idolizes them so much.
At the cathouse: Catherine and Gil ALS everything, to no avail. As they're wondering what to do , a verbal little tabby trots by and exits through the cat flap. This puzzles both Gil and Catherine because, to quote Catherine, "I thought Animal Control rounded up all the cats." The two then proceed to follow that kitty...straight across the street, where Jessica and her sister are cuddling the cat, whom they've dubbed Rascal. The girls are friendly until Gil notices the gaping wound on the cat's haunch. Gil asks in his usual careful manner, "Excuse me. May I hold your cat?" Jessica snaps, "No. He doesn't like you." At this point, Megan Gallagher comes out to call her bratlings to dinner; the girls agree to ignore her. I applaud the effort on one level, but on another, those kids need some manners beaten into them. As Megan Gallagher comes over, Gil raises the issue of Rascal's cut and offers to swab it, as the cat might need medical attention. Jessica protests, and Megan backs down with, "It's just a cut. It'll heal." Has she even looked at that cat's leg? Gil says pointedly, "For your daughters' sake, wouldn't you rather be safe than sorry?" Jessica opts for the sorry side, but Megan stops her. The cat gets swabbed, but only on the sufferance of the children, who insist that Catherine do it. As the family heads inside, Gil says, "One thing about my mother: even if she was deaf, she was always the boss." It's Catherine's turn to empathize: "Single mom, juggling a job, a boyfriend. It's just easier to say yes than no, then eventually, they stop asking permission." That out of the way, we find out why Catherine swabbed the cat: it's got an open sore and a missing patch of fur -- both indicative of a staph infection. Hmmm...Ruth also had a staph infection. What connection could she possibly have to the Trents' cat? I wonder indeed. Time to run a culture!
Meanwhile, Sara and Nicky are finally getting around to talking to Marcus the Wonder Mechanic. Surprise! He's got the vise grip that matches the one used to assemble the pipe bomb. The neat-o forensics trick here: not having had the foresight to bring a lump of modeling clay to Marcus's garage, Sara improvises by using cheese from a discarded sandwich. As Marcus walks by, Nicky asks amiably, "Hey, man, these yours?" Marcus replies, "Don't use vise grips. Pipe wrench has a better feel. Must belong to one of my mechanics." With a smile on his face, Nicky comments, "Boy, you just have an answer for everything, don't you?" Marcus is all, "I guess I do," completely oblivious to the disgusted glare that appeared on Nicky's face the moment his back was turned. Marcus, I wouldn't mess with Nicky: he's been stalked recently and that can't have put him in a good mood, plus we all know the relentless teasing he gets from his cohorts has created a boiling rage in desperate need of an outlet. Okay, so maybe we don't know that, but my point is that Nicky's the most likely to go off for no reason. Watch your back.
After a lab scene in which Sara finds a print she's looking for in the Tobin database, we're in the fishbowl with Marcie and the CSIs. Marcie's asking why she'd possibly want to put a pipe bomb in her own car. Brass provides the answer: because Nevada is a community property state, anything someone owns during a marriage is up for a fifty-fifty split during a divorce -- including the twenty-five percent of the Tobin C&D business that Marcie owns. If William J. Macy and Marcie were to divorce, William J. Macy would become part owner of the company. In the words of Brass, "That wouldn't sit too well with Dad, would it?" Sara jumps in to point out, "If [William J. Macy] goes down for attempted murder, he goes to jail and you get to keep everything because a criminal can't profit from his own malfeasance." Marcie tries to dismiss this theory as absurd. She is not successful. Brass pointed out that Marcus lawyered up; Nicky sharply adds that Marcie's prints are the ones on the vise grip. She and Marcus set up the entire bomb scene -- Marcie took the supplies that could be traced back to William J. Macy, then went to Marcus's shop to assemble the bomb. Faced with the evidence, Marcie says, "So what if I made a bomb. That's not a crime." "Really? You sure about that?" Nick asks, his smiling facade cracking as his face gets tight with anger. Loose cannon, I tell you. We then find out that Marcie owed $20K in repairs on a Volvo, her dad kicked in another $30K, and for a mere $50K, Marcus's collusion was bought and sold. Marcie, apparently not quite aware that the charges are piled higher than wingmen in an NHL playoff game, leans forward and turns on the girlish charm: "Look, I'm fine, and my husband is fine and it was my car that exploded, so does this really need to go any further?" Brass explains that since she and her dad were conspiring to frame William J. Macy for attempted murder, he thinks it does, yes.
Me: Your television girlfriend tried to kill her husband.
The Husband: So now she's my sexy, evil television girlfriend.
Me: Oh?
The Husband: Yes. She's a bad girl. She must be...punished.
Me: Oh, good Lord.
The Husband: Actually, I like her because she reminds me of you.
Me: Which part? Sexy or evil?
The Husband: Whichever gets me in less trouble.
Wrapping up the A-plot now...Gil and Catherine try to figure out how it is that Ruth and Rascal share the same staph infection when he's ostensibly the Trents' cat and the Trent family is staph-free. They conclude that it's entirely possible that Rascal was, at one point, a resident of the cathouse before being "adopted." After a brief visit to the Trent house -- where Catherine and an ALS light find a leaky novelty pen filled with mineral oil (it's one of those floaty pens), then test it to confirm the presence of staphylococcus -- it's time for a quick TMICam reminder of how Ruth died (stab in chest), then an interrogation down at the station.
The two children are in the tank with Catherine. She holds up the pen and tells the girls, "We know that Mrs. Elliott was killed by this pen. Can one of you tell me what happened?" The advocate asks the girls if they understand what Catherine's asking. Their silence is neither confirmation nor contradiction. Jackie eventually says in a little, quiet voice, "I'll tell." Jessica immediately elbows her and says, "No! You promised." Catherine cuts in with, "Jessica, in this room, the only promise you make is to tell the truth." Jessica immediately says, "She didn't mean to do it. I'm sure she didn't." Catherine asks, "Who?" and Jessica chirps, "Mommy." We see a shot of Megan Gallagher watching the questioning and looking horrified. Gil is with her, but he's watching the interrogation. Catherine takes a moment to figure out where Jessica's going to go with this ; clearly, this wasn't the response she was expecting. Catherine asks, "What did your mother do?" and Jessica spins a story of confrontation: the family goes over to ask to adopt Rascal, Ruth refuses, and Megan Gallagher sends the kids running away with Rascal so she can kill the old lady in an altercation. Jessica finishes her story with a confident flourish. Catherine chews on her lip -- something she does when she feels she's treading on treacherous ground -- and turns to Jackie. The other girl won't say anything. Catherine then asks, "Girls, do you know about fingerprints? When you touch something -- like this floaty pen, for instance -- you leave behind an invisible mark that's special, that's yours. I have a way to see these invisible marks, and we found these fingerprints on the pen. And they don't belong to an adult." As Catherine's talking, Megan Gallagher's looking horrified and Gil's glowering at the kids. It's hard to tell if Megan's growing progressively more horrified because she's realized that one of her children is more than willing to send her up the river on false testimony, or if she's processed that and moved on to the realization that one or both of her children is a killer. Jackie gives her sister a deeply unhappy look; Jessica shakes her head no. Jackie finally speaks up: "They're not mine." Her sister responds by spitting out, "Tattletales burn in hell." So do liars and murderers, but I'm betting they have slightly different accommodations than a little girl snitching on her evil sister. Jessica turns back to Catherine and her entire demeanor just changes; I half-expect her to pull a Linda Blair. Instead, she just brats, "The old lady should have just given me the cat. I lied before. She wasn't nice. She was mean." We see the real scene: the girls go over to ask if they can adopt Rascal, Ruth refuses gently, and Jessica flips out. She urges her sister to take the cat and run, then knocks Ruth over with a running tackle and stabs her with the floaty pen. One can only presume she told her mother the shirt was ruined due to a bloody nose or something. Back in the present, Catherine's looking kind of horrified. She then recovers, since they're going to have to charge Jessica with something, and we switch to Gil and Megan. Catherine's voice comes in tinnily over the speaker as Gil asks, "Did you know?" Megan did not. Instead, she says, "I told the girls they could have a cat if Mrs. Elliott gave them one. I knew she never would -- that's why I made the promise." Well. I'm not sure what parenting manual she got that strategy from, but she might want to consider returning the book for a refund. Shortly after Megan says this, it occurs to her hellspawn that she might actually be forced to experience consequences related to her actions, and she begins wildly weeping, "I need my mommy! I want my mommy! No! Jessica! Please! Mommy ..." Wait -- why is the kid crying out her own name? I'm a little confused. As Jessica cries, thus demonstrating that pint-sized killers can still have childish responses to adult situations, Gil listens, looking thoroughly disgusted. And that's it. Typical, eh?