We open with shots of the MGM Grand and the Excalibur (huzzah!), then flash to a woman's bare back as she wraps a towel around her torso. Ethereal music plays in the background; the camera pulls back, and we see that the woman, her back still turned to us, is standing in a lavishly appointed bathroom. There's a nearly full bathtub with suds, several candles burning, and the general impression that she's ten minutes from a Calgon experience. We see the woman slide her underpants down (she's covered by the towel) and kick them off; I'm getting the impression that we're supposed to notice how attractive she is. The water continues to fill the tub, the music continues to play, and we see her hand pouring some scented oil into the tub. The camera switches to an impressive manicure kit in a leather case -- there are implements here that those dentists-cum-torturers on Alias wouldn't be able to identify -- and then we see her sit down and pin up her hair. Again, this is all from the back. She then selects a pair of scary-looking tweezers. The camera switches to a now-full bubble bath, and we see a copy of Vegas magazine lying on the floor to the tub (and oh, how I want that tub; it's the proper claw-footed kind, not the crappy little rectangle thing in most apartments). We switch back to the view of the woman as shot from the back, and we see her plucking intently. Back to the tub and the magazine -- you think this will be important later or what? -- and the water begins to overflow.
Cut to my closed captioning saying, Phone begins ringing. We see Gil sitting in what looks like an office chair. My closed captioning says, Phone continues ringing. At this point, a receptionist looks up with concern. We finally hear the cell phone ring and Gil starts, then gets the phone. After assuring the party on the other line that he'll be right there, he crosses the office lobby to tell the receptionist, "Please tell the doctor I have to reschedule my appointment. Thanks." The receptionist protests that the doctor won't be a moment, but Gil's already heading toward the door. The viewers' interest sufficiently piqued -- what doctor? Why must Gil go to a doctor? -- Gil strides off. His work here is done.
We're then at a highway underpass outside Vegas; the sight of a man huddled over a burning trashcan provides the visual indication that this is where Las Vegas's homeless population lives. We see Brass and Gil meet by a shopping cart; they're hemmed in by a perimeter of yellow police tape marking off the area surrounding the cart. Brass dons the cape of his alter ego, Captain Exposition, and tells Gil that the body hasn't been ID'd. The body in question is a woman, blonde, wrapped in a blanket and stuffed into a shopping cart. Her face is covered in open sores of various sizes. There is literally no information about who this woman is and how she came to be resting in a shopping cart under a highway overpass. Brass says, "Whoever she is, she's not talking." Gil focuses the flashlight, then leans in to study the face. We get a close-up -- some of the wounds appear to be recent, some of them are scabbed over -- and then her mouth begins moving around, accompanied by wet, muffled sounds. Gil watches as the skin around the woman's mouth ripples and bulges, and then a dry, clean-coated rat emerges from the woman's mouth. Gil leans back, but keeps his eyes trained on the rat; Brass starts in disgust. As the music shrieks in a minor, discordant key, the camera returns to document the rest of the rat's exit, and lingers on the sight of the rodent's naked tail slithering across the woman's lips, just in case you're not sufficiently grossed out yet. Gil then turns to Brass and says, "I think she just ratted herself out." Brass looks back at Gil, his face mirroring disbelief. And maybe, just maybe, relief that this is the last time he'll be on the end of one of these pre-credit punchlines for the season.
Cue The Who. And now, I think, would be a perfect time to revisit the science from last week as the credits roll and we go into commercial. If the geeky digressions distract you from the recap, skip the four paragraphs.
Let's take a road trip to The Wide World Of Diabetic Ketoacidosis, as per the scenario in "Cross Jurisdiction". Our first stop on the tour: Diabetes 101. There are two broad types of diabetes -- Type 1 (which we had in the episode), and Type 2. The latter typically affects people as they get older, and is usually the result of a peripheral inability to tolerate insulin coupled with a reduced ability to create one's own insulin; as a result, if someone who has Type 2 diabetes doesn't get their insulin on time, they don't develop diabetic ketoacidosis (DKA). Someone who has Type 1 diabetes -- which is usually the result of the pancreas losing the cells which help it manufacture insulin -- has no ability to generate insulin, so they are a) dependent on external insulin for their health, and b) vulnerable to DKA. So, a greatly abridged definition of diabetes would be someone who cannot manufacture sufficient insulin.
Why is insulin so important? It's the anabolic hormone helps the body's tissues take up glucose. This is a good thing, as it means that assorted body tissues can then digest glucose (typically, most tissues have receptors for insulin; the insulin is connected to the glucose, and the tissues then uptake both the insulin and glucose). When there's an excess of glucose (because it's not being absorbed, thanks to an absence of insulin), counterregulatory hormones kick in, which leads to the increased formation of ketone bodies. In other words, someone undergoing DKA switches from a normal, carbohydrate-fed metabolism to a fat-fueled fasting-state metabolism. The reason the ketone bodies are so deleterious is because, being acids, they wreak havoc on the body's pH. As a result, the body's normal state -- where cellular osmosis (i.e. the movement of liquids in and out of a cell) is regulated by maintaining a specific pH -- is thrown out of whack as well, and owing to the ensuing diuresis, affected people lose water, as well as the minerals (sodium, potassium, phosphates) which regulate their body's pH. In a nutshell, DKA is a state of insulin deficiency leading to acidosis, dehydration, and hyperglycemia (abnormally high blood sugar).
And now, on to the fun stuff. DKA is a complication from diabetes; its underlying causes may be concomitant infection, missed insulin treatments, or newly diagnosed, previously unknown diabetes. How can you tell when someone is experiencing DKA? Here's a partial list of symptoms: dry skin, labored breathing, dry mucous membranes, decreased skin turgor (i.e. the skin begins to look saggy), and decreased reflexes. People with DKA typically experience the ketotic (fruity) breath, confusion, abdominal pain, and, in extreme cases, a coma. In order to treat DKA, one must address the body's aberrant functions; the patient needs to rehydrate, reverse the acidosis and ketosis, reduce plasma glucose concentration, and replenish electrolytes. Somehow, this seems a little more complex than shooting some Novalin and chugging a Gatorade. Indeed, treatment is usually a combination of an antihyperglycemic agent to lower plasma glucose and ketone levels (your insulin shot), a mineral solution like potassium chloride, which moves potassium out of cells (reversing ketosis), along with intense observation at your local hospital, as the rehydration typically throws a patient's potassium levels into flux, which could lead to further metabolic complications.
That our erstwhile serial killer was able to run around in a state of sustained ketoacidosis, apparently without it impairing his ability to woo Kari Wuhrer or execute complex schemes on a tight schedule, suggests one of the following: there are some things modern medicine can't explain; there are some things the episode could have handled better; or we have proof that in addition to their masterful command of time management, serial killers also have the ability to regulate their metabolisms. I'll leave that call to you.
Meanwhile, back in this week's episode, Gil's now working the entire crime scene, going over the entire underpass area and noting things like a bloodstained rock. He then walks back over to the shopping cart and begins poking under the blanket; he finds a red nylon Kate Spade bag. Curious, he opens it and pulls out a Day Runner, then peers in the bottom of the bag. There are several syringes in there.
Cut to Gil and David the Somber Coroner standing over the body. Gil inquires as to whether or not the woman used drugs; David replies, "No track marks. Tox screen came up empty except for botulin." Across America, women instantly say, "Botox." Gil wonders if it's food poisoning; David replies that he'll know more when he cuts open her stomach. So that rat got in elsewhere? (I had thought that perhaps the rat had gnawed its way through her entrails and followed her esophagus to her mouth, but that's because I was somehow attributing both a basic knowledge of human anatomy and a modicum of logic to an animal with a brain the size of a Pez candy. I should reevaluate my own cranial capacity.) Anyway, David says to Gil, "Heard about the rat? Hope he didn't have any children." I'm thinking we have a case of pronoun confusion here; unless David's concerned that the rat has someone left behind a tiny rodent summons to pay child support, there's no chance of a male rat leaving behind a litter. Anyway, Gil gives David a sympathetic grimace that speaks volumes. David invites Gil to take a look at the tiny puncture wounds in the dead woman's forehead, and tells him that they indicate repeated injections -- "You sure she's homeless?" he tries to confirm. Gil replies, "Sometimes, I'm not sure of anything." David then confirms what we've all suspected: "My guess: beautification. She was injected with pig botulism -- Botox. The ultimate wrinkle cream." The TMICam shows up and demonstrates how a syringe plunges into the skin and releases its load of nerve-freezing goodness. Gil wants to know how the botulin got into her bloodstream; David replies, "Bad doctor. Missed the muscle and shot directly into her supratrochlear vein." As he explains this, his finger traces the vein's path. Gil replies, "Amazing -- the advances we make in science and the primitive uses we find for them."
Amazing how we're only eight minutes into the episode and I'm derailed for yet a second time. The Botox thing is particularly timely, what with its recent approval by the FDA, its appearance on the cover of Newsweek, the New York Times Magazine profile of Patricia Wexler, MD, who helped popularize the treatment, articles about Botox parties, and the recent spate of print ads promoting 1-800-BOTOXMD -- and as I watch the acceptance of Botox as a cosmetic indulgence creep into pop culture, I get progressively more horrified. If you want to use a denatured botulism toxin to freeze nerves in order to treat severe facial spasms or to alleviate migraines, fine. It's a medical treatment; it eases suffering. But ads that read, "It took forty years to get it and ten minutes to do something about it -- your toughest wrinkle," plant the impression that any woman who's not consenting to inject chemicals into her nerves is letting herself go, and will have only herself to blame for not looking her best. The premise that women with wrinkles are unattractive only serves to promulgate an unrealistic and youthful beauty standard, and it also reinforces the notion that women are under some sort of obligation to work hard on appearing as conventionally attractive as possible. Pardon my profanity, but fuck that. There's nothing wrong with wanting to feel foxy -- I myself love a good pedicure and am something of a maniac in any Aveda spa or salon -- but there's no reason to feel as though you're obligated to strive for some aesthetic ideal that refuses to acknowledge, much less celebrate, anything resembling personality or life experience.
Okay, then. David keeps his temper considerably more in check than I did when he says, "People are still animals." He then turns his attention back to the woman: "Possible signs of torture. Lots of scarring -- some old, some new." Gil asks about the crater in the woman's cheek. David tells us, "The dovetail abrasion at the margins was caused by the scraping of the handle of some weapon. Tells me the blade was completely inserted more than once." Both men look squeamish. Gil then gently picks up the woman's wrist -- one thing that impresses me about the CSIs is how respectfully they handle the victims, and it's a wonderful detail that surfaces over and over in different episodes -- and points out that there aren't any ligature marks, then wonders aloud if it isn't unreasonable to expect someone to have to be restrained while having a crater gouged in their skin. David promises to look into it.
Cut to Sara examining the Day Runner on an overhead projector. Warrick walks in, saying amiably, "Show and tell!" Sara replies, "Showing, but not telling. I found a day planner in the shopping cart. It's written in code." Sara then zooms up on the projector. For the record, the page format appears to be the Day Runner Week In View layout, where the days are piled on horizontally (e.g. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday on the left, Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday on the right); there's a dividing line down the center of the page, and the subsequent columns are labeled with plus and minus signs. The entry at top reads in the plus column "T3 C 1023," and in the minus column "-10 OK, =0." Warrick comments, "Looks like ginkwork; it's the kind of thing speed freaks do when they've been up for ten days straight and they've already taken apart the radio." Sara replies, "Yeah...I write everything down in shorthand. You couldn't read it." Warrick gives her a skeptical look: "Shorthand." Sara: "Keeps things in order." Warrick asks, teasing, "You're not a control freak or anything." Sara rolls her eyes a little and gives a guilty smile before replying petulantly, "No." Meanwhile, I'm wondering when it became so wrong to code the information in your calendar: I have an entire system of abbreviation and color codes so I know what's going on. It works, dammit. Anyway, something finally clicks in Warrick's brain and he asks, "Sara, what's a homeless woman doing with a day planner and a $300 handbag?" A very good question. Sara asks, "That handbag costs $300? How'd you know that?" Warrick tells her he once bought one for an ex-girlfriend. Sara's amused by that. I'm impressed.
Meanwhile, Catherine's walking into Dusty the photo tech's lab and telling her that she's come up empty on missing-persons report and fingerprints. Dusty replies, "If she's not missing, she's in my world." We then see Dusty at a sleek silver laptop; the side-by-side photos of the dead woman's face are on the screen and projected on the wall in front of her. Dusty then begins airbrushing the image, section by section, and we see an attractive face begin to emerge, courtesy of a few different Photoshop effects. "She actually had a really nice complexion, a porcelain face," Dusty notes. She then goes nuts with the cloning stamp and we see a perfect face emerge -- milky complexion, elegantly arched brows, flawless bone structure. Catherine wonders if the corpse wouldn't be prettier if she could just do something with her hair. Dusty responds by giving the dead woman Courtney Love's 'do. "I said prettier!" snaps Catherine. Kidding. Anyway, they give the woman a curly, tousled blonde coif and blue eyes. Dusty studies the image and says, "I know her from somewhere." Catherine asks incredulously, "You do?" "Yeah," Dusty says thoughtfully. Meanwhile, I'm wondering if the actress playing Dusty is somehow related to Allison Janney (same general style of delivery, same general cast of facial features, especially around the nose and mouth), or if she's merely a by-product of the Hollywood Gene Project.
It's a magazine! Up close! We see the August 2001 issue of Showbiz Weekly, with the flag reading "Exclusive: Las Vegas Uncovered." Gil looks down, then looks back up at Catherine, asking somewhat shortly, "Why are you showing me this?" Catherine explains, "The cover girl, Ashleigh James -- she's your woman in the shopping cart." Interested, Gil picks up the magazine, and we see a lot of Ashleigh (she's not wearing a top, and her arm is strategically positioned so the magazine can still look prurient without being relegated to the Over-18 rack. For the curious, the cutlines on the cover read, in order, "Vegas.com," "Marvin Mancia, The Man And The Moves," "Samantha Coy, Soft-Spoken But Shrewd," "Brian Joseph Banks On Success," and "John Russell, R&B's Rising New Star." There are also some red headlines, but the contrast is such that they're unreadable. That's going to hurt newsstand sales.) Catherine tells Gil she's got a query in to Ashleigh's agency; she finishes, "Somebody wanted her dead." Gil picks up the autopsy photo and compares it to the magazine cover. He concludes, "They also wanted her ugly."
Cut to Gil and Catherine getting out of a CSIMobile in a less than optimal neighborhood. Brass informs them they've arrived mid-gentrification. Catherine looks at the local homeless and remarks, "It's not doing anything to gentrify them." "Tell that to the mayor," Brass replies. And let's hope he's more effective when it comes to alleviating the homeless problem than Willie Brown has been in San Francisco. Brass continues to provide exposition: "The landlord's on vacation. It's a good thing because he's got a swimming pool in his basement." The three then enter Ashleigh's apartment -- it's your typical urban industrial loft, i.e. random acts of concrete and bare floors. Catherine and Gil look around. The loft is decorated with a lot of professional-quality photos of Ashleigh. Gil walks past a triptych of three Ashleigh posters, mounted and lit gallery-style, and comments caustically, "Well, Narcissus would be proud." Catherine, who's wandered over by a Warholian pop-art collage of colored Ashleighs, is still taking it all in. She notes the stuffed dolls on the bed and comments, "Very much a woman, yet still a little girl." Gil notices a side table nearby; to the partially melted candles is a small pile of white powder. He hunkers down so he can get a sample, saying to Catherine, "I thought Doc Robbins said her tox screen came back empty." Catherine's going through a cleverly recessed cabinet to the pseudo-Warhol; she hypothesizes that a boyfriend -- as inferred from the presence of a male dopp kit in the cabinet -- may have been the user. Gil's inspecting the powder, and he comments that it smells like mint.
Brass, meanwhile, has wandered out to hang with Warrick and Nicky, who apparently have the job of searching the great outdoors. They're at Ashleigh's car now -- it's a frightening cache of food wrappers. Nicky takes in the mounds of junk food wrappers and comments, "You sure this is the vic's?" "You are what you eat," Brass replies. If Jerry Stahl was trying to make a point about how judgmental even casual comments about food and diet can be, he's succeeded.
Gil is still focusing on what he found on the table; he's scraping up a caked brown substance now. Catherine is wandering around the spacious bathroom we saw at the beginning of the episode. She notes blood in the sink, but none on the floor, then finds a Costco-style pallet of enemas. Gil comes in, picks up an enema, and says dryly, "The secret life of women." "Don't generalize. It's not very scientific of you," Catherine chides. Gil repents. As she continues to go through Ashleigh's bathroom cabinet, Gil continues to inspect the trash. He then pulls out a bag filled with a thick and murky reddish-brown fluid. "Catherine..." he says. She registers the bag, quickly deduces the contents, and looks away, shaken.
At the car, Nicky and Warrick are still sifting through wrappers for clues. Warrick extracts a magazine from the backseat -- it's another Ashleigh James cover, this time for the August 2001 issue of Pout magazine. Pardon me for the nitpick here, but I was always under the impression that most consumer magazines with a nationwide circulation do their edit and artwork out of New York, especially since the big newsstand publishers (Gruner+Jahr, Hearst, Condé Nast, AOL/Time Warner, Hachette) are based out of there. Therefore, since the print work tends to be in NYC, so do modeling agencies. What's this model -- who was apparently the flavor of the month in August 2001 -- doing working out of Vegas? I realize that Las Vegas is a beauty market unto itself and has some regional publishing, but really, it doesn't make sense. This is what I get for working in media. Anyway, Warrick flags Nicky, who looks at the cover and squeals, "Oooooooh! Pretty girl!" Og want female! Og want female badly! Og want rock! Smashing rock impress female greatly, make up for size of Og's club! Warrick declines to dignify that with a response, and continues to photograph what might have been the entire inventory of an AM/PM at one time. He does note, however, that being a pretty girl in Las Vegas is dangerous. Warrick declines to elaborate, though; perhaps the pretty girls are at risk of having Nicky chase after them. Then again, it's not so safe to be Nicky in this town either. Speaking of which, the man's made himself useful, finding a note that reads, "Babe -- he's not good enough for you. He doesn't have the history we do. You mean the world to me. I know you'll live to regret this decision." What -- dumping a melodramatic semiliterate? Warrick and Nicky stare at each other, the gears grinding.
Inside the house, Catherine's poking around Ashleigh's closet. Gil is photographing things in the apartment, including a bloody handprint on the wall. In the closet, Catherine notices a lot of swanky threads hanging up, and on the floor, a crumpled old coat with a fragment of coral-colored scarf tucked in the collar area. Meanwhile, in the kitchen, Gil's inspecting the fridge; it contains only a box of Sweet 'n' Low, nearly two dozen plastic bottles of water, and a flat of small glass bottles in a box labeled "BOTOX." Catherine is examining the coat, noting a rip in the shoulder. In the kitchen, Gil opens a drawer and sees a pile of syringes -- so it would appear that Ashleigh was giving herself Botox injections. Catherine picks that moment to appear, holding up the coat and quipping, "Not exactly the victim's style." Gil stands there, visibly cogitating. It's apparently a trendy look among the CSIs in tonight's episode.
Outside, Nicky and Warrick are walking with two trash bags full of the stuff from Ashleigh's car. Warrick's teasing Nicky, "What, you don't like cupcakes? Candy bars?" Not if they have peanut butter in them, he doesn't. The two men see Gil walking out of the loft a few yards in front of them, his back turned to them, and Warrick begins calling Gil's name. When Gil fails to respond, Nicky joins in. This also fails to have an effect. The two shrug, then go back to mocking Ashleigh for her dietary habits. It's a good thing they haven't been allowed inside yet.
And off Gil goes, toddling back toward the crime scene. Perhaps the reason he didn't hear Warrick and Nicky is because there's this moody, atmospheric music playing in the background. Gil keeps going, studying the faces of homeless people intently, then abruptly turns, and he's on the Strip again. He somehow traverses the length of the Strip, crosses a major highway, and ends up at the underpass where Ashleigh was found. Surprise, surprise -- Sara's there. Gil asks what she's doing there. Sara replies, "Contextualizing -- shopping cart in the lab is like a lion in the zoo" -- or at the Mirage, if you're in a Las Vegas frame of mind "-- I needed to see it in its natural habitat." Gil's not surprised. He moves on: "Question: how did Ashleigh James get from her loft to this underpass?" The peanut gallery at home suggests that there's a reason for the cart. Sara replies, "She didn't walk." Gil's all, "I'm pretty sure she was pushed." A shopping cart? Used for pushing? You really can't get anything past these two. Gil and Sara glance at around, but they fail to notice any more herds of shopping carts thundering across the savanna. Sara then notices something to her right, and calls for Gil's attention. We all pan up to a big billboard welcoming people to Las Vegas -- and Ashleigh is the woman driving the welcome wagon. Gil turns to look. Sara says, "She was under her own billboard." Gil asks, "Coincidence?" Sara replies that somebody was making a point. The point being...what? "You're dead under your billboard, ha ha ha"?
After the commercial break, we're back in the lab. Sara is laboring to crack the code in the Day Runner; she's got a sheet of paper divided into plus and minus columns and is currently looking at the plus column, puzzling over "CC/4, 242 BC, 304 BF, 900 S, 55 TC." We see a shot of the planner -- there's more of the same, all the way down the page. Sara's looking stumped. Just then, Gil comes in, and Sara says, "Hey! You like crossword puzzles -- how about deciphering codes?" Gil, demonstrating that his favorite form of wordplay is actually the pun, says puckishly, "Aren't you putting the shopping cart before the horse? To decipher the code, you need to know the alphabet for the code. In order to know the alphabet, you need to know the author." Or you need Alan Turing to drop by with that Enigma machine. Sara gives him a thanks a lot, o cryptic one look and bends back to her deciphering. Maybe it's in Navajo and she'll have to bring in Nicolas Cage to help decrypt it. Maybe I'm laying on the pop-cult references to cryptography a little too thickly. Y'all should be glad I haven't run to the bookshelf and pulled down my copy of Cryptonomicon yet.
Gil wanders over to the cart and asks what it's telling us, then answers his own question by pointing out that the only relationship between the victim and the cart was as commuter and transport; he's more interested in the contents of the cart. Sara says, "Well, aside from the leather Day Runner [TM] and the Kate Swan bag [not TM -- perhaps Kate Spade didn't give trademark clearance], which appear to be from Ashleigh James's world, you appear to have mostly collectibles -- newspapers, Las Vegas Review-Journals, the Sun, various editions going back several months, a couple of tennis rackets, a broom, an umbrella, a pot, I guess some kind of glove or something..." As she's been talking, Gil's been perusing the periodicals. He stops when he notices a full-color ad on the back of a section, with Ashleigh's face all over it. "I stand corrected," he says. Sara then begins looking at all the other papers -- each one has an Ashleigh ad in it. I'm not even going to begin wondering about whether these are national department store ads or regional ones, because then we're back in the world of publishing, ad agencies, et cetera, and we've already visited that territory. Gil says, "I have a feeling whoever owned this cart was an Ashleigh James fan." In response, Sara holds up the "Oooooooh! Pretty girl!" cover of Pout and another cover for Spa Fashion and replies, "Or a fanatic." I bet the CSI props department had a fun time knocking these things out -- "Try to come up with several different, distinct designs, make sure none of them are grounds for suits by real publishers, and, um, have fun!"
Out on the street, Nicky and Warrick are at a dilapidated bungalow, trying to contact the author of the sad little missive they found in the car. The author is not in. As they walk toward their car, Warrick notices that it's trash day. Nicky's all, "We don't even have a warrant." Warrick, who seems to be well-versed in the law, probably to make sure that he can conduct justifiable searches anywhere he darn well pleases, snorts, "It's on the sidewalk. Fair game." The two head over to the trash can and begin digging. This is probably one of those on-the-job moments where they wonder why they went to college. Anyway, Warrick finds a brown paper bag; it contains several pieces of photographic paper. The two men use the hood of the CSIMobile as a flat surface for assembling the puzzle and -- surprise! -- it's a photo of Ashleigh.
Speaking of photos, we're now looking at a fashion shoot taking place in a gondola outside the Venetian casino. The camera swings from the model in the boat to a guy in the usual fashionista uniform -- i.e. well-tailored and all-black -- who looks like a shrinky-dink version of Quentin Tarantino. He comes over to a model who's struggling with a particularly rigid bathing suit bodice and bellows in a bad accent -- so bad, incidentally, that I couldn't decide if he was supposed to be British or Australian; that kind of bad accent transcends your normal bad accents and moves into Laurence Olivier "I haf no son" territory -- anyway, Marky McManglevowels snaps, "Cow says moo!" Oh, thank God he had that accent. Otherwise I wouldn't have known he was evil. Except, you know, the part where he berates a lanky young miss for being a cow. He grabs the model's arm and leads her to the craft services table, ranting, "the fitting was two days ago. Are you telling me you couldn't keep your face out of the bloody trough for forty-eight hours? You want me to be your agent, then start doing your part, all right?" The model flees, near tears. Catherine and Brass approach; Brass calls out, "Rod Darling?" No, it's his cousin Rod Asshole. Anyway, the guy is identified as Rod Darling (evil, foreign, bearing an unfortunate resemblance to a tiny Tarantino) and he tells Catherine and Brass, "Sorry about Ashleigh. She wasn't a client anymore. I dropped her a couple of months ago." Catherine asks pointedly, "Did you forget to pack? We found men's clothing and personal items in her place?" Rod struggles vainly to remember what "altruistic" looks like and how to feign it: "She was a screwed-up kid, looking for a father figure. One minute I'm booking a photo shoot, the minute, she's screaming for Daddy." Rod attempts to look baffled by the burden he bore voluntarily; the effect is akin to watching a snake try to look cute and fuzzy. As Rod is talking, the camera shifts to a vantage point somewhere over Brass's shoulder, the better to see some man in a hideous plaid shirt and sensitive-coffeeshop-guy hair glaring at Rod. After Rod finishes his speech trying to convince Catherine that he was offering the uncurdled milk of human kindness, as opposed to a nurturing bosom that leaked venom (to mix my milky metaphors), the guy charges forward with bad intent. He throws Rod to the craft services table, then shows everyone that he's not really such a bad guy because he brought his own tableware. Oh, wait. That's not a spork. Brass reluctantly separates them -- this is probably the part of the job he hates -- and Rod nurses his flesh wound (a scratch on the palm) while the guy is wrestled to the ground and cuffed. He screams about how Rod killed Ashleigh for a while; Rod eloquently rebuts that his accuser may be having reality perception issues. I kid! He's all, "He's a psycho!"
Cut to the fishbowl, where the man is explaining, "Rod did everything he could to make her totally dependent on him." It's worth nothing that he's combed his hair back and, combined with the goatee and the designer eyeglasses, he looks as though he met Ashleigh when she happened by Uncommon Grounds during Open Mike Poetry Slam night. Warrick asks if Ashleigh's leaving him for Rod prompted the man's attempt to make a deconstructionist photo collage with Ashleigh's face. The guy sneers, "You just don't get it, do you?" Brass is all, "No. Enlighten me, Einstein. I care about a woman, I put her picture in a frame, maybe put it up on my desk. Then the boys in the lab find it. Within an hour, it's on the internet and I've got an attorney on speed-dial." No, no. Brass merely wonders why men such as himself like to display photos, while others seem to be fond of cutting them up. "If you were in love with an amazing woman, and you knew she was throwing away everything amazing about her on some scum...would you still want her picture on your desk?" asks the man. "Well, no, because my love is highly conditional," replies Brass. Oh, he does not. Brass is busy playing both bad cop and good cop: "What'd you use to cut up the picture? The same knife you used on Rod? The same knife you used to cut up Ashleigh's face?" The man looks stunned. I'm stunned too -- since when did Brass become Exhibit A in How Not To Interrogate Someone?
Meanwhile, Rod's being all, "If you're suggesting I was sleeping with her, I wasn't." Because they were never sleeping, if you get what I mean. Catherine wonders if there's another explanation for the presence of his stuff. "I was protecting my asset!" he protests. Catherine asks him to elaborate -- was he using Creme de la Mer and he wanted to make sure his roommate didn't steal a fingerful? -- and Rod explains, "You can't drive a mile in this town without seeing her face on a billboard, on the side of a bus, up in lights. The mantra in this business, is you protect what's bankable in this business." Catherine, who's still back at the "why did Rod sleep over?" portion of the conversation, ignores Rod's philosophy of human beings as bankable assets. Rod clarifies, "She needed constant attention, supervision. Leave her alone for a minute, fill in the blank." Catherine is left speechless.
Meanwhile, Sara's peering in a microscope, examining the coat Catherine found while Gil gives it the magnifying glass treatment. Abruptly, Sara announces, "I got crabs." Gil looks worried. "I got crabs -- take a look," Sara invites. Gil checks out the microscope and cites, "Pthirus pubis. Feeds on human blood." We see a shot of the lice in question; interestingly enough, they appear to have fourteen appendages. This must be an artist's rendering of the abdominal spiracles below the legs.
Gil watches them zip about and immediately wonders if he can train them to race. Nooooo. Gil then looks up from the microscope to look Sara in the eyes and say, "They prefer the pubic and peri-anal regions. Their legs are adapted to grab hairs which are widely spaced. They don't usually nest in clothing. But when the clothing is being worn by someone with substandard personal hygiene --" "Like one of the victim's neighbors," Sara notes. Gil begins to put together the pieces: "We have a high-end handbag found in a street person's shopping cart, a jacket covered in crabs in a closet full of designer clothes -- what does that tell us?" I don't know -- I'm still hung up on the most TMI of TMICams yet, the shot of the Pthirus pubis happily scaling hairs as though they're doing some Outward Bound program for exogenous parasites. Sara thinks that Ashleigh had a homeless visitor; Gil speculates that whoever is missing their shopping cart is also missing a jacket.
Cut to Gil returning to the alley he was walking through previously. He watches a man digging in a trashcan to a dumpster, then casually sidles up. As the man digs, Gil pokes through the dumpster and amiably says, "Good stuff in here." The man looks up -- the lights from the Strip are in the background -- and asks Gil for some smokes. Gil doesn't have any. "So what good are you?" the man asks. Gil, noticing that the long, lush-looking scarf the man is wearing appears to have a bloodstain, says, "Depends." He begins to walk toward the other man; the homeless guy wheels and says, "Don't even think you can play me, my man." Gil protests that he's not -- "I got a gal named Sara, and she would love that scarf." Across the country, Geek Love Groupies melt in delighted little puddles. Gil then proposes swapping his jacket for the scarf. The barter commences.
The man wanders off, and now, the tedious performance of the evening begins; a young woman, en dishabille, wanders over, saying, "Hey, hey, hey mister, that was Tookie's scarf, I gave it to him, that is Tookie's, are you a taker or a giver, mister?" "I'm a trader," Gil says, deflecting the question lest it reveal any personal detail about him. Heaven forfend we should look too closely at the mystery that is Gil. Gil explains the trade, and the girl replies, "Yeah, and fleas can tell time." It's an entomology shout-out, and Gil gives it full props with, "I think fleas can tell time." The homeless woman -- who, by the way, has some of the best teeth I've ever seen, leading me to wonder if the Vegas homeless have a dental plan or something -- begins muttering that Gil is crazy. Aren't we all crazy in our own ways? Isn't there a platitude I can invoke about the sane people being locked up while the insane roam freely? Wouldn't it be as clichéd as what we're watching unfold on screen? ["Not nearly." -- Sars] Gil notices the pricey little bauble the woman is wearing and volunteers to trade his Maglite for her ring -- and for the leather grooming case she's got. We've seen that case before, in Ashleigh's loft. The woman makes the trade -- Gil's all about the bartering, but he's not above exploiting the crazy woman's lack of pricing acumen -- and as she pulls off the ring, a tiny speck rapidly runs across her finger. For future reference: it's an epithelial. Now that Gil's got more evidence and she's got a flashlight, both are delighted. The woman sways back and forth with the flashlight, saying dreamily, "Now I can see what the dark looks like." Does it look like overacting? 'Cause it does from this angle. Gil tells the woman, "I've been trying to do that for years." That Gil, so deep.
After a shot of the Strip, we're back in the lab. Liam has run tests on the blood in the scarf; the blood matches Ashleigh's. Unfortunately, Warrick reports, the blood on the knife matches Rod's, owing to Bitter Dumped Ex's little incident with craft services. Gil sighs, and we see another shot of Ashleigh's post-mortem face.
Cut to the implements, spread out on a lit lab table. "The tools of a trade, the weapons of beauty," Gil says. Warrick looks up and snorts, "If people inflicted as much torture as women inflicted upon themselves, there'd be lawsuits." He does not finish that up with, "This is why I can totally understand how a woman would decline to get a bikini wax." Back on the screen, Nicky chimes in with, "Someone forgot to clean these too -- for a long time. Positive for blood all over the place." Gil is intrigued. He is then hailed by Liam, who's done tests on those epithelials that came off with the ring; to quote Liam, "It's like The Prince and the Pauper. Well, The Princess and the Pauper. The princess is a dead supermodel." Gil looks up, sporting the usual expression he's got when talking to Liam: "Yeah. And her pauper sister could be the killer."
Naturally, this is Gil's cue to spend some one-on-one quality time with a possible killer. We see him offering a hot dog to the crazy girl -- now shot so we can see her classically pretty bone structure -- and she accepts. Gil offers relish, and she goes into Sagacious Crazy Girl mode: "No, no...no, no...with all those preservatives, no, no, I don't want to be preserved. Thank you very much -- no. I mean, do you know what relish can do to your insides?" Gil deadpans that he'd have to investigate. Sagacious Crazy Girl tells him that he should, because "our insides can kill us." Gil asks if she has to be careful about what she eats. I'd snort about homeless people perhaps adapting to a more opportunistic dining philosophy, but I remember when I worked in DC, I used to give the homeless people by my Metro stop vouchers for the Health Zone over on K street -- you'd pay $1 per voucher, give out the voucher, and the recipient could head over to the Health Zone and get a hot vegetarian meal. So anyway, there I was, being careful and conscientious to be part of the solution, and not part of the problem, and one day, as I'm handing a guy a voucher, he lunges after me, screaming, "BITCH! I want meat or money!" And that's how I learned to begin asking panhandlers if they'd like a vegetarian meal instead of just giving them the coupon. I am surprised, however, when Sagacious Crazy Girl adopts the supermodel eating strategy -- "Everything's gotta come up -- out -- up -- out." Gil comments that she's just pretzeled Newton's Law. Sagacious Crazy Girl puts on a lucid expression and opines that everybody's twisted. Gil asks, "How about your sister?" Sagacious Crazy Girl replies, "My-my sister didn't have a sister." She then lays the Zone Diet on Gil. Gil takes all this in with his usual equanimity, then says casually, "Hey, Cassie, you know that scarf you gave Tookie?" Cassie acknowledges that she does; more importantly, she doesn't freak about Gil knowing her name. Thus emboldened, Gil continues, "Did your sister give that to you? Or did you steal it from her?" Cassie looks up from gnawing on her hot dog to say contemplatively, "I should have stole it." She gets angrier as she elaborates, "Because she-she stole from me." Gil watches Cassie nod emphatically and asks gently, "What did she steal from you?" "My life," Cassie asserts.
Cut to the modeling agency, where Rod is explaining that he "washed my hands [of Cassie]. Ashleigh was the only one who gave a damn. Get together with her every couple of weeks, make sure she had a decent meal, shower, clothes on her back." Catherine wonders what Rod did for Cassie; Rod replies, "Let me tell you something: for every piece of meat, there has to be a butcher." And for this guy, there has to be a subsequent episode in which he's filleted like a side of beef, if only to provide Catherine and Gil an opportunity to crack jokes about the butcher becoming the butchered. Catherine snorts that Rod led Cassie to the slaughter; Rod counters that Cassie went of her own free will. Rod then leads the CSIs to a blow-up of a Spa World magazine, with a January 2000 cover; the cover girl is Cassie. Ironically, one of the cutlines is "Bread: Can We Ever Eat It? (Diet Foods)." I wonder if that's intentional, based on the last scene. We find out that the cover was snapped three years ago. Rod explains, "See, Cassie got deep into freebase. No shortage of scumbags around to keep her supplied. I knew she had the sister in Witchita Falls..." Of course she did. This wouldn't be a clichéd storyline about the modeling industry chewing up America's guileless lovelies otherwise. We flash back to one of Cassie's last shoots, where she alternates between a whacked-out apathy and a coke-fueled hissyfit. You can see the abacus in Rod's head sliding the beads and concluding that Cassie's return rate just dropped below acceptable yield; then he turns to look at the stricken Ashleigh (who's sporting that fresh-off-the-bus look) and the light bulb goes on over his head. Back in the present, Catherine's saying, "So, in Cassie's mind, she was the victim here. Makes sense she'd be angry." Rod snaps out of his reverie and corrects Catherine: "Angry was five flights up. Cassie was an obsessed basehead. Cocaine already had her paranoid. Once Ashleigh started modeling, everything became this big conspiracy. Naturally, yours truly was Satan." It's kind of amusing how Rod says that like it should surprise anyone. Gil muses, "Cassie threw her life away and her sister Ashleigh recycled it."
Back at the lab, Sara's still puzzling over the code; the page she's working on has the entries "QP 2, 1256 BC, 35 BF, 2095 S, 116 TC" in the plus column; the one below it has "NAGD, BFJ3 EVEN." It's like Bridget Jones' Diary was written by someone over at Bletchley Park. Gil comes over and comments, "It's like a crossword puzzle, isn't it? Once you pick it up, you can't put it down." Sara explains what she has so far, based on the details she has about Ashleigh -- "BFJ3 -- BF, Bellagio Fountain." Gil supposes the J3 is a date; Sara corrects him with, "What's one thing a model always knows? Who's shooting her. Three Js -- J. J. Jarrett." The name fails to ring a bell with Gil; Sara explains that he's a famous photographer, and she picked that up based on Ashleigh's employment contracts for the last year. Sara also notes, "As an aside -- she stopped working two months ago." Gil wants to know why; Sara concurs that that's a good question.
Off in another room, Brass is going 0-for-2 this episode as he tries to get Cassie to admit that she killed Ashleigh in a fit of rage. "Your sister took your career, and you wanted to get back at her. If you couldn't have success, she couldn't either. Isn't that right?" Cassie only replies, "The victims, the victims have victims too." Brass asks Cassie to clarify who the victim is here; Cassie replies, "I tried to warn her, the in-ing and the out-ing and the pick-pick, and the counting, and the counting, and the counting. I mean, I did, I tried. That's why I tried to really really save her." Enter Grandmaster Gil into the session: "You tried to save her...?" Cassie hisses, "She could never be pretty enough, and she could never be skinny enough, and she could never be perfect enough, and she could never be anything enough." During this sad litany, Cassie's eyes have been darting to the side, and now we see her going into a sort of flashback montage. It's fairly rapid-fire, but it starts with Ashleigh at a shoot, in tears, and Rod coming up to her crooning, "Hey, fat girl. I got what you need," before giving her a line of blow. Cassie whimpers in the box, and then we go back into the flashback, where Rod is bullying Ashleigh; then it flashes to Cassie, to whom he did the exact same thing; then back to Ashleigh, then back to Cassie, over and over, indicating that these seemingly interchangeable girls went through identically painful experiences. Cassie is near tears as she keeps telling Gil, "I tried to stop her, I tried to stop her, I tried to stop." We flash to Ashleigh bending over and vomiting, then more flashes between both girls looking wasted and miserable. Brass then interjects, "She's a needle freak, she doesn't know what she's talking about." Gil begs to differ. He then asks Cassie, "You tried to stop yourself, didn't you? But you couldn't?" This is one time when Gil's curiosity gets him in trouble; Cassie snaps and flies across the table at him, wailing incoherently. A few uniforms rush in and pull her off Gil -- now is probably not an appropriate time to note that she's got a set of abs to die for, nor to wonder if she's doing Pilates between fits, is it? Anyway, Cassie is carried off to a cell where she can calm down.
Then we're down in the morgue again, with one more shot of Ashleigh's face before noticing Ashleigh's innards resting in a steel bowl above her head. I don't notice anything that looks like bite marks, which saddens me, as I was hoping for answer to the "But how did the rat get in her body?" question. As Gil comes in, David says, "I found blisters in the back of her throat." "What? Forced oral?" Gil asks. David answers, "That's what I thought, until I noticed worn enamel on the tooth in conjunction with this red mark on the knuckle of her middle finger." Unfortunately, there are probably a lot of people watching who are hardly shocked by this revelation. "Eating disorder," Gil says, and then we see the TMICam shot of the vomiting in action. Boy, the TMICam crew really went all out for the finale, didn't they? But wait, there's more. David says, "She was bulimic -- and anorexic, which explains the down on her skin. Lanugo." I suddenly recall every YA novel I ever read that featured anorexia, like The Best Little Girl in the World and the countless others at the library; I still wonder if they were meant to be fiction or how-to manuals. Gil comments, "She doesn't seem that skinny." David says, "Not this week. Last week or the week before -- who knows? Binge and purge." Gil replies, "Until her entire system is in a state of shock." David says, "You know what's ." Gil says that the body begins feeding on its own muscles, and wonders if that's what killed Ashleigh. David replies, "Starving and purging weaken the immune system, but the cause of death -- failed kidney fueled by septicemia." Gil then wonders if the blood infection was a result of the injuries to Ashleigh's face. David wouldn't bet against it, then adds that Ashleigh had been septic for at least a month. Add to that anemia, a low red blood cell count, low iron, and high ESR (erthyrocyte sedimentation rate, typically used to assess acute and chronic inflammation, and often indicative of anemia), and, in Gil's words, "She didn't just die. She's been dying for a long time."
Gil has since retired to his office, and he's watching his office toy -- those balls that do the perpetual motion thing -- as the balls swing back and forth, concentrating hard on the sound they make. Catherine comes in and asks, "What do you know that's good?" Gil stills the balls, then extends a folder in Catherine's general direction, saying, "Cassie James's psych profile." Catherine reads; Cassie's apparently a classic paranoid schizophrenic. Gil explains that Cassie's mental illness explains why the interrogation room was too hard on her -- "the tighter the space, the more unbearable the feelings tend to become." Catherine counters that it wouldn't have hurt to take a look at the state of Ashleigh James' psyche either. Gil agrees. They puzzle over how Ashleigh got those facial wounds, and come up empty.
Meanwhile, Sara is going through all the stuff found in the car. She's sorting food wrappers by type and the back of a Tweenks snack cake (mmmm...golden brown cake with creamy filling and no unlicensed trademark use, just like the Donuts Donuts boxes!) wrapper catches her eye. We practically see the light bulb go off, then Sara mutters, "TBC, 48 BF, 870 S 90 TC." Sara reads the nutritional labels, then writes, "TBC, 48 BF, 870 S 90 TC" on a clean sheet of paper. She then turns to the minus side -- "2 EVO'd, 8 g, 1 TU, 7 G." There's a moment where we realize Sara's cracked the code using basic nutrition labels as the key, and then Sara looks shaken as she says, "You must have been so desperate."
Meanwhile, Catherine and Gil are establishing that Cassie's prints place her in her sister's apartment.
Nicky catches up with Liam in the hall; Liam's slurping some Ramen. Nicky, who apparently has made it his goal in life to extract revenge for all those awkward office moments by giving everyone a complex about their dietary choices, comments, "That stuff will kill you, you know." Fortunately, Warrick comes in before Nicky launches into a soliloquy on the perils of sodium and asks if Liam's run tests on the scrapings under Ashleigh's fingernails. Surprise, surprise -- the skin there is her own. Warrick looks a little uneasy at this; he's beginning to put the pieces together.
Cut to Sara telling the staff how she cracked the code: "So what I realized was, bulimia's a zero-sum disease; that's why she has a plus sign over here [on the left] and a minus sign over there [on the right]. Whatever went in had to be exactly cancelled by what went out." Catherine says, "You're talking about BDD -- body dysmorphic disorder." Actually, no, she's not. They're typically considered two very different maladies. In the words of clinical psychologist Steven Pittman, "Body dysmorphic disorder is a type of anxiety disorder. The disorder is different from eating disorders because it involves other factors besides one's weight or body size. Physical features or attributes are what provokes the person's anxiety and negative beliefs. Those with BDD have several 'cognitive distortions' about how they look. Cognitive distortions are distorted beliefs about a perceived flaw." According to the DSM-IV, symptoms of BDD include preoccupation with an imagined defect in appearance; if a slight physical anomaly is present, the person's concern is markedly excessive; the preoccupation causes clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning; the preoccupation is not better accounted for by another mental disorder (e.g., dissatisfaction with body shape and size in anorexia nervosa). It's hard to come up with hard numbers for any appearance-related disorder -- I'm sure I can't be the only one who remembers the dust-up when Christina Hoff Sommers alleged in Who Stole Feminism? that Naomi Wolf had fudged her numbers in The Beauty Myth (Wolf later checked and, sure enough, had gotten the numbers wrong) -- but Katharine Phillips, M.D., director of the Body Dysmorphic Disorder and Body Image Program at Butler Hospital in Providence, R.I., and assistant professor of psychiatry at the Brown University School of Medicine, puts the number at one in fifty people.
Anyway, Sara claries BDD for the rest of her colleagues: "One theory suggests it's neurological, another that it's neurobiological, another that it's psychological -- people with extreme sexual or emotional anxiety unconsciously displace their feelings into the arena of appearance because it's more manageable." Nicky boils it down: "You feel like crap, blame your face." Warrick jumps in with, "Or your skin, or your hair, or that zit on your forehead." Or the sentiment that pops up in commercial media frequently implying that there's nothing wrong with your appearance -- and, by extension, you -- that a little old-fashioned Protestant work ethic can't fix. Sara explains the gouges in Ashleigh's face with, "Meticulous grooming when a person suffers from BDD becomes a destructive compulsion. One line that keeps repeating again in her daybook, over and over and over again -- 'I'm not even.'" Funny, but I've spent a lot of time staring at those Day Runner pages for accuracy's sake tonight and I haven't seen it once. I'll just have to take Sara's word for it. Warrick asks, "So you're saying she knew she was slipping." Sara clarifies: "No -- she literally means even. A large number of BDD sufferers are convinced that they're not symmetric, that one side of their face doesn't match the other." "All animals prefer symmetry in their mates," Gil says, helpfully fanning the flames of self-consciousness among his staff, all of whom are secretly wondering if they're really not all that symmetrical. ["In Gil's defense, studies have been done on this phenomenon, and apparently symmetry does play a huge role in how adults rank the attractiveness of potential mates." -- Sars]
Gil then cites a bug example, prompting Warrick to say, "We're really not talking about being beautiful at all." Gil defends himself: "In terms of entomology, being beautiful is about being even. It signals the fitness to procreate." Nicky tries again on Warrick's behalf: "So we're not really talking about looks, we're talking about survival of the species." Sara settles the debate with, "The bottom line is the same: control and perfectionism. That's what her code was all about. Let's take HBWC/BC 90 BF 3930 S 114 TC. Three hamburgers with cheese, calories 530, five-thirty times three is where she gets 1590 BC. That's BC for bad calories, and at 30 grams a pop, that's 90 grams of BF." "Bad fat," Nicky says, picking up on the general theme. Sara continues, "The rest of her formula involves sodium, total carbohydrates, and the actual weight of everything she ate." Catherine looks pained. Gil says, "So she was operating like a scientist, seeking the perfect formula to take her pain away." Sara replies, in a subdued voice, "Or disappear all together. Which brings me to the minus side of the equation. She would write down the number of times she TU'd -- threw up, in this case, twice -- or EVO'd." Nicky asks about EVO'd. Sara replies, "Moving her bowels. The directions on her disposable enema box use the term 'evacuate,' so after her burger binge, she 3 EVO'd 14 G, 2 TU'd 9 G and 3 #1. She evo'd three times, but her calculations didn't stop there. G stands for grams." We flash back to a shot of Ashleigh weighing her feces (they're in a sandwich baggie). Warrick says, "Wait a minute -- you're telling me she weighed her bowel?" "Yeah. We bagged it," says Catherine, disgusted by God knows what.There are so many places to start. I could happily dive into a rant about the institutional nature of eating disorders, the apparent commercial success of a body type that may compel some to adopt eating disorders, et cetera, but this recap is already running long and you can read other people's much better pieces elsewhere. The only thing I'll comment on: the phrase "bad calories" is a reflection of the completely dysfunctional relationship Americans have with food. People's eating habits are judged in terms of "good" and "bad," people "cheat" on their diets, and if they're trying to get their nutritional information from the popular media, chances are high they're getting it in a way that sends the message to regard food as a necessary evil laden with substances standing between the consumer and pulchritudinous happiness. Even in women's magazines featuring "Artery-Exploding Triple Fudge Cookie Bar Surprise," you're going to find an article on walking off your fat -- sending the message that if you enjoy your food, you better get rid of any and all evidence, you bad girl. There's no denying that some foods are less nutritionally beneficial than others, but casting items and eating behavior in terms of morality -- "good" and "bad" as opposed to the more physically accurate "healthy" and "unhealthy," or "delicious" and "unsavory" -- only reinforces the screwed-up idea that food is something to be feared. Again with the profanity: fuck that. And pass me the Scharffen Berger.
Anyway, Sara sums it all up with, "Input, output." Warrick drops the news on the skin under Ashleigh's fingernails, and Gil sums up the obvious: "She attacked herself. Ashleigh was convinced that everything about her needed to be fixed. The real problem was inside her head -- that's why she tried to fix the outside." And in the most affecting flashback of the episode, we see Ashleigh sitting down before the mirror, as in the first scene; this time, we see her face from the side, features twisted in anguish as she digs into her skin over and over. Gil explains, "Hence the digging and picking and purging and bleeding -- to us, it would be some kind of torture. To her, some sort of release." Catherine realizes that this is why Rod cut Ashleigh loose -- once she began scraping at herself, she was no longer bankable. Warrick adds that Ashleigh's malady also ignited the vendetta her ex had against Rod, and Nicky pipes up, "Yeah, he destroyed Frank's vision of her." I would have hoped that the vision extended beyond Ashleigh's surface qualities, and that the ex was also distressed over Ashleigh's personality gradually becoming subsumed by her disorder. Gil wraps up the case with, "So the victim and the killer became one and the same. The very nature of addiction, whether it be self-medicating or self-mutilating, is that the behavior we use to survive it becomes the behavior that ends up killing us."
Nicky keeps us from floating out on a moment of Zen by asking, quite correctly, how Ashleigh's eventual resting place in a shopping cart near a billboard of hers came about. And the rat -- we still haven't explained the rat. Gil answers one of our questions: "Well, the fingerprints explain that." We see Ashleigh stumble across her loft post-mutilation and collapse on her bed (why didn't we see blood on the pillowcases or coverlet before?). We then see Cassie standing over the bed, rocking back and forth in evident distress as she looks at her sister, then washing her hands so she can drag Ashleigh off the bed. Gil continues, "I think Cassie was trying to take care of her sister. She pushed her to a place where she thought she'd be safe. Where she thought she could see herself for how beautiful she really was." We flash back to Cassie wheeling (unconscious? dead?) Ashleigh over to a place where she would have been able to see the billboard of herself if her eyes had been open. Back in the office, Warrick is looking at Cassie's mug shots and a copy of Ashleigh on Dernier Cri magazine (hee! I love that name!). He asks, "What happened to these girls?" The camera rests of each CSI's face for a moment; all wear expressions of rueful contemplation, because everyone knows the answer to that question. We do not, however, ever resolve the rat issue.
In the shot, Gil is pushing Cassie's new cart up and over a curb as they walk through the blocks straddling respectable society and neighborhoods nobody drives through with the doors unlocked. Gil tells Cassie he's sorry about her sister. "The dead don't bleed," she responds. Gil mulls this over: "True. Death does have some advantages." There's a pause while he watches Cassie look around at the crowd nervously, then he asks, "Would you like me to help you get into a shelter?" Cassie's not too into that idea: "No, I would need shelter from the shelter. No, no. No. Out here, I can hunt, and I can range, and I can find the things that I need out here. I mean, you never know what you need until you find it." Gil says, "Or until you lose it." This appears to punctuate Cassie's consciousness and she turns to look at him before saying, "I mean, all we are is what we try to get rid of -- fat and newspapers and loneliness and cat food cans. And there are going-away people, and there are left-behind people, but you know, everybody's secrets, everybody's secrets are the same." Gil, bless his heart, asks, "Were your and your sister's secrets the same?" Cassie says, "My sister didn't have secrets, her secrets had her. That...I told you...I don't know. I mean, you can pick through a million lives, and never have one of your own." This is approximately when the camera swings away from Cassie to Gil. He smiles in recognition, apparently not hearing the anvil whooshing down behind him as the parallel gets driven home at 9.8 m/s^2. Gil slowly says, "Looking for things, analyzing them...trying to figure out the world. That's a life." Cassie's moved on from that portion of the conversation, both figuratively and literally; she and Gil begin walking down the street as she says, "You never know what you need until you find it. The thing I find, it might be the thing that changes everything." Gil, struck by this idea, asks, "What will you do when you find it?" Cassie closes her eyes, and her expression gets unexpectedly serene and joyful. "Sleep," she says, and Gil looks at her, clearly beginning to linger in his own thoughts. "The most perfect sleep," she says softly, still smiling, then she pulls away from Gil and walks down the sidewalk to continue looking for the thing that will change everything.
We then see Gil on a busy patch of sidewalk. The crowds are vague and fuzzy blurs, and the sounds of the street fade in and out as he stands and looks around. Gil walks over to a fountain and very consciously makes an effort to listen to how the sound of the fountain changes as he walks toward it, then around it, then away from it. But mere seconds later, he almost gets hit by a car that he didn't hear coming. We hear the background noise of a street in Vegas fading into a muffled roar; as all the sounds that tell us where we are relative to other things dull into an aural blur, Gil's face grows progressively more haggard. As he keeps walking through a muffled and blurry landscape (punctuated by the occasional high-speed blur I'm going to assume is the anvil of metaphor plunging towards the Rue de Enough-Already), Gil voice-overs, "Obviously, most of crime-scene investigation is about seeing, but much of it is about hearing as well. Listening. Knowing how to listen. Not just to what people are saying, but how they say it. How their tone of voice matches their facial expressions" -- here, the camera perspective shifts so we see Gil standing alone on a sidewalk, the stream of cars and muffled background noise hammering home the point that he feels physically isolated from the flow of society -- "or body posture. So even if I read lips and know what they're saying, it's not enough."
And now we're in a doctor's office. I'm going to go out on a limb here and hypothesize that the scene's emphasis on sound, Gil's response to it, and the giant sculpture of the inner ear the good doctor is using as a bookend in this scene are all building up to some revelation about Gil's hearing. And here it is: Gil's got otosclerosis, the hereditary auditory impairment that rendered his mother deaf. The malady is irreversible. BUT what the doctor did not say is that it's untreatable. She also doesn't answer Gil's question: "How long, do you think?" "I don't know," she replies, thus tying the thread that will leave the plot dagger of Gil's impending deafness dangling over the series' head until the end of the summer break.
And that's it for Season Two. Please direct a deafening round of applause towards editor extraordinaire Sars ["as always, the pleasure is mine" -- Sars], and then towards yourselves for a) signing up for the email list, b) reading the recaps, and c) posting in the forums; your participation rocks my world. Yay, everyone! See you in the fall.