The show opens in Vegas, which should surprise nobody at this point in its history. Someone impossibly hip is busy singing about how they woke up with a head full of snow, a phrase which is either a metaphor for modernist alienation or an allusion to some sort of controlled substance. Then we see the skater punks who are busy scraping the paint off the handrails of Las Vegas's civic accessibility ramps with their little stunts. As one guy prepares to do something that will undoubtedly leave him sterile if he screws up, the other offers encouragement via "Don't puss out on me!" When did that become acceptable to CBS's standards and practices department? And when did I become old enough to begin entertaining the opinion that network censors are too lenient? That's kind of horrifying.
However, my encroaching old age is nowhere near as horrifying as what happens onscreen, namely, a body falling from the sky and landing on the plaza by the skaters' feet. Quoth the skater: "Oh, my God." It's an appropriate sentiment; in the following shot, we see that the falling man glanced off something on his way downward, as his right side is pulverized relative to his left. A crew of paramedics is wheeling an empty stretcher away from the body; I have no doubt that it's all part of protocol to check and make sure the person's still alive, but there's something faintly ludicrous about the sight of a bunch of EMTs rolling out the stretcher, looking down, confirming that the guy is dead, and rolling the stretcher back again. As the EMTs clear the scene, Nicky and Warrick stride up. Nicky quips, "We beat Grissom here? That's a first." "Maybe for you," Warrick replies, blissfully unaware that he's talking himself into a starring role in Nicky's latest Rage Diary entry. Brass greets the boys with the cheerful news that the jumper's a John Doe. Nicky assesses the pile of broken parts John Doe is currently comprised of, and concludes, "That's the least of his problems." Nicky needs to think about the wisdom of pointing out the obvious, especially around his coworkers. Brass checks out the building -- done in a relentlessly bland civic style -- and wonders if it's a six-story building. Warrick says, "Six stories, sixty stories, it's not how you fall, it's how you land." In other words, the fall isn't what killed this guy; it was the sudden stop. Nicky notes, "If he landed headfirst, there should be more blood." Warrick adds, "And more brain matter." Just then, Gil's disembodied voice rings out: "He didn't jump." Okay -- either Gil's learned to throw his voice, he's developed long-range telepathy skills, he's been assumed into Heaven and is now solving crimes from beyond the veil (and won't Horatio be jealous?), or...wait. It's only a walkie-talkie. For what it's worth, it takes Warrick and Nicky a moment to figure out where the voice of Gil is coming from too. At least they don't check for a burning bush first.
It turns out that Gil's somehow stealthily made it up to the roof already, and has been peering down at his crew for some time. We see Gil running his flashlight over the ledge at the top of the roof, where John Doe apparently deposited a few pints of blood and a spare body part or four before heading down to the plaza. Gil quips, "It's never the fall that kills you."
And we go to The Who. Wow, that was a howler of a parting shot on the teaser. I'm disappointed.
Après-commercials, we're back at the plaza, which is now clear of all but two figures. I can't believe there wouldn't be a crowd attracted by the lights from the dozen or so rescue vehicles present in the pre-commercial scene, or a reporter who's got access to a police scanner poking around the place, or random skate rats coming back out after their friends text-messaged them about the dead guy. The crowd control methods the LVPD uses must be brutally efficient. The camera pans back up again, and we see Gil up on the roof. Nicky approaches, shines a flashlight over the big splotch of red, and says, "Rain or not, I'm not finding any shoe prints." Rain? What is the point of setting the show in the desert city of Las Vegas when you're building the plots around a Seattle-like climate? Gil points out, "High-velocity spatter usually implies a gunshot." Nicky shakes his head and shares that he's not found the usual bits of evidence that accompany a shooting. Gil begins forming Hypothesis B: "Severe head trauma. It happened before the fall." The bits and pieces of brain matter on the rooftop ledge might support that theory. Nicky thinks Gil's on to something and asks, "Hand-to-hand combat?" Gil thinks not: "Kill and dump." We see a flashback of this likely scenario, but it misses the part where John Doe's head bounces off the ledge on its way down. As the body falls, the Osmont Cam kicks in, and Warrick "watches" -- or rather, imagines -- it falling down. The camera cuts out the funny stuff and we're left with Warrick standing by the body, imagining its trajectory from roof to plaza. Warrick begins taking pictures, and hones in on the grains that are trapped in the guy's pants cuff. Emergency Backup David comes over, they exchange greetings, and Warrick says, "I think the prints are out. Bones burst right through the skin." David picks up the bloody, droopy hand and says, "Compound fracture of the long bones, including the phalanges, and extensive laceration." Warrick asks about making an ID from dental records, and David opens the non-wrecked-by-meeting-the-pavement part to conclude that there might be enough to work with. Before they can get too excited about dental potential, Warrick notices the tattoo on the guy and says, "You might have something else to work with. Check out that artwork." David positions it for optimal photography, Warrick snaps a photo, and we all have a flash of insight that the tattoo will end up being important to the case.
Meanwhile, Catherine and Buzz are at a tacky stucco bar that actually looks like it belongs in a desert town. Buzz is providing exposition tonight, telling Catherine, "Wallet was with the vic -- money, cards, IDs. Roger Edmonds. Car's his too." The two of them finally reach Roger, and Catherine notes how he's got a single gunshot wound to the chest. It's quite massive, and the unburned gunpowder indicates that Roger was shot at close range. Catherine also notes how the car door was closed but not locked; she and Buzz ponder whether Roger was in a hurry to get into the car, or to get out. As Catherine walks around the car, looking for clues as to what happened, she notices a smudge of dried blood and hair on the upper left-hand corner of the license plate. "Maybe the victim got a piece of the perp," she muses. Buzz tells Catherine, "Waitress phoned it in," and Catherine looks startled for no reason whatsoever.
Cut to the waitress -- a pretty actress whom they've uglified Hollywood-style by putting her hair in a sloppy ponytail. That move's right up there with putting a pair of Larry King-style spectacles on a girl to signify that she's ugly/cerebral/nerdy, or making the actress walk around in a baggy shirt because she's supposed to be fat or dumpy. Girls with bad hair have lousy jobs and poor social pedigrees! Thank you, Hollywood, for pointing that out! Anyway, the waitress snits, "I gotta get out of here, okay. My kid's with a sitter, and it's not like this gig covers daycare." Wow, if Catherine weren't already on this case, that line would have brought her in like a tractor beam. Catherine instantly attempts bonding: "Yeah, I know what that's like. I got a kid at home myself." The waitress snits some more with, "Now we're, like, related?" Catherine's undeterred, and bonds through empathy: "You know what? Get it off your chest. It sucks. You're living for everybody but yourself. But you know what? You're still breathing." Well. That magnificently banal speech has blown down the barriers of weary cynicism, and now the waitress is ready to share. "So, I'm out here busing tables, and I hear loud voices. It's nothing new around here, pretty routine for this part of town. And it's like a bomb goes off, I thought I was deaf." Here, the waitress is alluding to the point in the flashback where she heard the shooting. She continues, per Buzz's prompt, "Then one guy's on the ground, and the other guy's taking off. No, I didn't see his face." Nor did the waitress catch the shooter's license plate, but she can tell Catherine that the vehicle in question was a pickup with a camper top on it. After rolling her eyes some more, the waitress finally gets around to the real relevant information: "Roger was a regular, okay. Draft beer. Tonight he's drinking JD straight up, six in an hour. If you ask me, he was looking for trouble." Catherine gets that startled look again. I have no idea why.
Back on the rooftop, click, click, click, we're looking at evidence with CSI Nick, checking turbines for stray clues, or helpful prints from strangers' shoes. Nicky walks over to Gil, saying, "I've been searching high and low for a blunt object, a crowbar, brick, something like that. Nothing. But I did find this crack pipe. I'll get it back to the lab and see if I can get some prints off it." As Nicky's talking, Gil squints, focuses his flashlight on the pipe, and we get the Distorto Sound Effect indicating that Gil's hearing is taking a little break right now. We hear Nicky's voice fading as he says, "This roof's not that accessible, you know…" He turns his head, oblivious to Gil squinting intently at him, and his voice fades even further as he continues, "Besides, who's going to come up here just to get high, you know. Don't you think?" Interestingly enough, the closed captioning reads something completely different from what Nick said. Talk about your situational irony. As Nicky turns back to Gil, there's a sharp popping sound, and Gil attempts to cover for his confusion by saying loudly, "Swab it, print it, bag it. See if you can find out who smoked it." Nicky gives Gil an extremely confused look -- either because he said he was going to do so in the moment where only his mouth was moving, or because Gil seemed to completely ignore his question. Gil walks off, leaving Nicky to wanly call after him, "Ohhh-kay?"
Meanwhile, Catherine's walking around the parking lot of the restaurant looking for clues. She finds one in the form of a .50-caliber round. "You need a cannon to fire a hunk of lead that big." Buzz asks Catherine if she's up to finding said hunk of lead, and she replies, "Anything it might have hit, it would have ripped right through. Thing's probably still moving." Buzz wanders off, ending the scene and beginning to raise questions about what on earth is going on with this plot.
Now we're in the Labitrail, watching Warrick walk into a lab and purr, "Leah! Good to have you back on nights." Leah -- whom some will recognize as Valentina from The Sopranos, while others will ask what happened to that nice honor student Maria Borges -- drawls, "I know. I hate days." Because she's dark, you see. And dangerous. And probably uses Emily Strange icons in the online diary where she writes about how dark and dangerous she is. Warrick and Leah have a little moment where they stare at each other, wondering if they're supposed to be manufacturing sexual tension, and then get down to work. Warrick tells her he came to her for her expert opinion on tattoos. She whips out a magnifying glass and notes, "Use of only black and gray ink is known as fine-line. Not a 'scratcher' job." Warrick asks if she recognizes the artist, and Leah replies, "Signed by the artist himself -- take a look." She moves over the magnifying glass, and we see the block letters "II." Leah explains, "Roman numeral II, as in tattoo. Premier skin artist in Vegas, also Ph.D in psychology." Warrick asks, "He's a shrink?" Weren't you listening? He's a tattoo artist with a psychology doctorate. You think that's bad, you should hear what people who can't find jobs at the annual MLA conventions are forced to do. Leah stares at Warrick some more until he says, "You're a gem. Thank you." As Warrick turns to go, Leah calls out, "I got a new one." That captures Warrick's interest. Leah responds by whipping off her lab coat and showing Warrick the pretty butterfly on her shoulder. Warrick says, "Nice. The rose is still my favorite, though." And now, we're all left to ponder two implications: Leah is covered with girly tattoos like dolphins and hearts, and Warrick has conducted an extensive dermal survey of Leah. Warrick gives Leah a flirty little look and heads out, leaving Leah to vamp for the camera, since she's the dark and sexy lab technician.
And now we're off to visit II himself. In what must be Gil's idea of a practical joke, it's Nicky who accompanies Warrick on this jaunt, and he's the one who calls, "Is the doctor in?" "Yes I am," the good doctor replies, without looking up from his needle. Cut to Nicky taking a book that could be a dead ringer for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Monstrous Manual down from a bookshelf which sports little plastic skulls as bookends, before pulling down the skull in question. Good lord, could this whole "dark" subculture thing be more clichéd if it tried? All we need now is an offhand reference to a Neil Gaiman work -- any of them, but extra points for The Tragical Comedy or Comical Tragedy of Mr. Punch: A Romance, someone in a Weatherman Records tee, and a woman wandering around muttering, "People used to think that when someone died, a crow carried their soul to the land of the dead..." Nicky plays with the skull, catches the tattoo artist staring at him, and puts back the skull in an I'm cool, oh, yes, I am kind of way.
The doctor intones, "Skin and ink, ink and skin. One makes the other one live." He then begins explaining the complex symbolism behind his tattoo, running a finger along the splayed wings of the figure and explaining, "You see, that's strength, and that's superiority, and that's ambitious without limit. See? It's the chosen one." From over in the corner, Nicky hmmphs. The doctor gives him a look that plainly says, philistine. He then rolls his chair over to fetch his book, and we find out that the guy's name was Jimmy Maurer. Going from the picture, in which Jimmy's pointing to his intact tattoo and making the universal "Duuuuude! I am so drunk!" face, I'd conclude that Jimmy's something of a jackball. Nicky notes that the doctor is referring to Jimmy in the past tense, and the doctor replies, "He died, didn't he? His fate was inevitable. I simply gave it form." Warrick and Nicky take a moment to recover from the breathtaking arrogance of that statement, or to maybe squelch the urge to smack this guy on general principle. Warrick finally comments, "Superiority and ambition, huh? Not exactly the characteristics of an angel." The doctor assumes an air of peeved didacticism and points out, "It's not an angel. It's Greek mythology. Icarus. He flew too close to the sun on wings of feather and wax --" Warrick cuts in, "And when the wax melted, he plunged to his death." "Hubris -- is that what brought Jimmy down as well?" the doctor -- who seems pretty well versed in that attribute his own self -- asks. Yes, doctor. Hubris was Jimmy's hamartia. See? You're not the only one who read Bulfinch's Mythology. Nicky says, "Hey, man, you tell us." Mister I-just-made-his-destiny-manifest-in-ink-and-skin shrugs and says, "How should I know?" Punk.
Labitrail, Liam's Lair. Catherine comes in and asks if Liam The Lab Tech has had any luck on the blood and hair samples she passed on, and he says, "Don't insult me. Luck is for those without skill." Catherine replies, "Spoken like a man who's never hit a jackpot." Liam concurs that this is "sad but true." He then tells Catherine her samples came back negative, as they belong to a non-H. sapiens animal.
And now, Nicky's back on his home turf and sharing the news that the good doctor's a crackhead with a record. That's just who you want working on your skin with a needle. He and Warrick then head into the autopsy bay, where David The Tutorial Coroner quizzes them, "Cause of death -- any takers?" Like the teacher's pet he always strove to be, Nicky says, "Blunt force trauma." Warrick, who has won the booby prize in this game far too often, lets Nicky in on a little secret: "You know if he's asking, we're not going to get it." David concurs: "Nicely played. It's suffocation. After I cleaned him up, I noticed bluish discolorations on his lips, and on what's left of his nail bed." We zoom in to see the bluish nail beds up close and personal. Nicky muses, "Cyanosis. Body was starved for oxygen." Warrick theorizes, "Strangled and then thrown off the roof." Warrick's wrong; David says, "Found no ligature marks on his neck, no petechial hemorrhaging -- hence, no forcible suffocation." Nicky muses, "Not beaten to death, not strangled to death, but something bad went down on that roof -- he left half his head up there, man." David points out that it's really not that bad: "More like twenty-five percent." He's always been a glass-half-full, body-only-quarter-decapitated kind of guy. Warrick looks at Jimmy's exposed cerebrum and says, "So he died with his brains still in his head." Nicky leans over and says, "Yeah, but there's no evidence of anyone else at the scene. How do you suffocate alone on a rooftop?" I am amazed that neither one of them has thought that Jimmy only bounced off the rooftop and on to the plaza -- don't they remember Sara's gorilla-from-the-sky case? David cuts off the roof debate with, "You don't." Warrick moves in a different direction: "High impact from a high altitude." David points out, "15,000 feet, hypoxia can occur in minutes." Nicky and Warrick finally get it: "He died in the sky." "Yeah. The rest is gravity." We see the flashback in which Jimmy is falling down, glancing off the roof, and continuing to the plaza below.
When we get back from commercial, a deputy is escorting a handcuffed showgirl -- her spangly uniform covered by a blanket -- to a cell as Warrick and Brass walk by. Brass tells Warrick, "Your vic was an interesting guy. He had no home address, just post office boxes in California, Utah, Vegas..." Warrick asks if Jimmy drove a car. He did -- a Nissan Xterra. Warrick grumbles about how none of that explains how Jimmy dropped out of the sky. Brass says, "The possibilities are limited. He was pushed out of a plane, or he stowed away in the landing gear, or sky-diving gone bad." Warrick says, "None of that works. I talked to air traffic control, and they had no aircraft operating in that area at that time." Brass wanders off for a moment, and then comes back to say, "La Lluvia de Peces." Warrick says, "What?" and his eyebrows shoot into orbit. Brass explains, "The raining of fish. Occasionally, usually in early spring, in Yoro, Honduras, it rains, um...sardines." Warrick's all, "Oh, sardines. That's funny." Brass continues, "Really. I've seen it. I mean, the scientific explanation is, um -- this sounds like a Grissom thing -- is they get sucked out of the ocean by these waterspouts that are, like, you know, tornadoes, and then the...look, the point is, Rick, they've got to come from somewhere. They gotta come from somewhere." Warrick ponders this as Brass walks off and The Kooky Strings Of Scientific Quirkiness play. Too bad neither one of them mentioned Charles Fort, he of the teleportation hypothesis and inspiration for The Fortean Times. Which, incidentally, gets play in the Neil Gaiman/Terry Pratchett collaboration Good Omens, proving that occasionally, everything ties together. After Brass has walked off, Warrick recovers enough to ask, "What the hell were you doing in Honduras?" Wouldn't we all like to know.
And now, it's time for Bobby The Ballistics Babe to flirt idly with Catherine while he tells her exactly what kind of .50-caliber gun she's looking for. It turns out that Catherine tells him what kind of gun it is -- a Desert Eagle -- because she had O'Reilly run Roger for registered firearms, and it turns out he purchases a Desert Eagle a mere three weeks ago. Bobby comments, "I know the gun. Idiot-big and shiny." I once had a blind date with a guy like that. Catherine replies, "Some men feel the need to compensate." And some people feel the need to go for the obvious joke. Bobby, who's still grinning, says, "Actually, a gun like that intimidates. It makes a statement." Yeah, and it's a statement that involves the words "idiot-big and shiny," so do you really want to make it? Catherine begins musing, "Beer-drinker switches to bourbon. He's got himself a brand-new gun. He's looking for a fight. Statement is, bring it on. So, filled with liquid courage, he hauls out the big iron. But a drunk is not hard to disarm..." Bobby stops staring at Catherine and thinking nice hair long enough to say, "Vic got shot with his own weapon." Catherine concludes that the shooter walked away with the weapon.
Cut to Nicky and Warrick in front of a computer, with Nicky saying, "According to Trace, the yellow dust on Jimmy's leg was pinion pine pollen." Warrick snorts, "Say that three times fast." Nicky shelves that dare and uses the beautifully rendered computer simulation they're staring at to explain that, owing to the pinion pine's high-altitude habitat, it grows in an extremely limited area -- in this case, Mt. Patosi. Nicky says he thinks Jimmy was there before he died. Warrick says, "That's on the ground. Let's get on the 'net and figure out how he got in the air." Nicky snorts, "Look under what? Hot air balloons? There was nothing in the air." Warrick ignores him and types "Flying" in a search engine. Nicky's all, "Flying? You're a genius," and Warrick replies, "Of course." Nicky then says "pinion pine pollen" three times fast. I wonder how many tongue-twisting takes that took.
And now, the B-plot. We find out that the camper-top truck in question belongs to a Ned Bookman, neighbor of Roger, and although it's abandoned, Mr. Bookman never reported it stolen. Catherine and Buzz survey the truck, determine that they smell something fruity (Catherine rebuffs the suggestion that it's her perfume with "I never wear perfume at work; it dulls the sense of smell"), then wander around to the back where, lo and behold, the truck bed is filled with mulberries.
Gil! Long time no see! The reason he's not in the field is that he's taking a hearing test.
Cut to people paragliding while someone pretending to be Lee Miller takes pictures. Nicky and Warrick walk by and Nicky says, "It's amazing how simple it is. Air fills the canopy, and you're off." Warrick grouses, "It sounds like you want to go for a spin." He's not the only one; as Nicky says, "It looks like it might be a rush." Cut to an instructor -- yes, it's Richard Burgi, a.k.a. FauxYork -- saying, "Paragliding's a two-piece system. Harness and canopy. The canopies are fitted to you according to body weight, so if anyone has dropped a few for vanity, speak up now, please. No? Okay. You're going to want to look around, take in the sights -- do it, enjoy it, best view in the world. Don't forget, we weren't born with wings. We had to make them. So respect the equipment." And try not to get hit by the anvil with the word "Icarus" painted on the side. Or the one with "Daedalus, maker of faulty aviation equipment." Cue Nicky and Warrick, ready to interrogate this clown.
In the scene, the instructor has apparently released his clients to fly too high on borrowed wings while he flaps his jaw with Nicky and Warrick. He says, "Yeah, I know Jimmy. Guy's got an attitude. Cocky. Might be able to handle his own in the air, but I don't care for his style." Warrick asks about said style, and the guy replies, "He likes to grandstand. This sport's about soaring. He's about showing off." So you're saying that Jimmy is the Terrell Owens of the paragliding world. Warrick opines that the sport should be about having fun. The Flying FauxYork agrees, "Yeah, it's supposed to be fun, but there's also etiquette." Now that's a tattoo I can get behind. The Flying FauxYork is on a roll: "A guy breezes in from nowhere, does things his own way...maybe the walk back will humble him a little." The word "walk" is apparently baffling, so The Flying FauxYork clarifies: "When you fly, you need thermals, or upshots of air used for lift. On a good day, you can stay airborne for hours." Nicky asks how high the thermals get, and The Flying FauxYork tells him, "You can take them as far as they take you. One time, I was above 18,000 feet. I came down, I was about thirty-five miles from where I launched." Nicky and Warrick are properly awed. Then The Flying FauxYork points out Jimmy's truck and inquires, "What kind of trouble is he in, anyway?" Well, since he died unshriven, some might say he's in the worst kind of trouble, although Dante tends to backpedal on that point and only stick the unshriven in the second terrace of ante-purgatory. How comforting to know that the adage "location, location, location" is as true in the life as it is in this one. But...what? The scene? Oh, yeah. It's over.
Now we see a garage door opening, and a man saying a loud and rehearsed-sounding, "Ah, crap!" Yes -- it's Ned Bookman feigning surprise over the missing truck. Buzz asks Bookman why he didn't report the truck stolen, and Bookman, instead of trying to stick to his original lie and say, "Because I didn't know until now," stammers out a lot of feeble excuses. None of them fly with Catherine and Buzz, especially after they notice the empty hide-a-key in the garage. We find out that Ned didn't know Roger all that well; Ned points out that just because he lived across the street, that "didn't make us pals, just neighbors." Catherine points out, "We found mulberry branches in your pickup, and there's a mulberry tree in your dead neighbor's yard. I'm starting to like you, Ned, and not in a good way." Ned freaks and stammers, "F-f-frank Kraft stole my truck. I mean he borrowed it. He borrows my stuff. I-I-I don't mind." Catherine quickly deduces that Frank is Roger's -door neighbor, and the two of them didn't get along. As Catherine and Buzz walk off, Ned begs them not to tell Frank that he talked to them.
Meanwhile, Warrick and Nicky are surveying Jimmy's car, and Warrick notes with some envy that Jimmy has a surfboard for California and a snowboard for Utah. Nicky adds, "And a paragliding canopy for Nevada, ripped to shreds. It's mine now. I'll swab it for epithelials." Warrick asks a sensible question, i.e. "If his canopy was ripped to shreds, what the hell was he flying with?" Perhaps the note Warrick found will help. Not really -- it reads, "Guess you can fly with anything. Find me when you get back. T." The "T" is turned into a sort of logo, and there's a phone number underneath. Nicky says he'll check it out.
By "check it out," Nicky means "have an exchange with someone who's nearly as irritating as Leah." As footage of a hummingbird the size of Mothra flutters on the wall behind the two, T tells Nicky, "Jimmy once told me, 'Only a paraglider knows why the birds sing.'" This will come as a surprise to both Maya Angelou and a few thousand ornithologists. Nicky opines that Jimmy was feeding T a line, and she confirms that this is the case, and that this line is apparently epidemic among would-be swains in any air-related field. When Nicky asked if it worked, she replies, "My art is an attempt to express what it feels like to fly. Jimmy was helping me feel that." Insert reference to Erica Jong's Fear of Flying here. Nicky surveys pictures of Jimmy paragliding and asks why his leg loops are unbuckled; T replies that Jimmy never buckled them because he felt he didn't have to. She says, "It wasn't enough for him to be a great flier; he had to show everyone he was fearless." Nicky muses that Jimmy's philosophy must not have sat well with Rick "The Flying FauxYork" Weston. We then focus on pictures T took yesterday and learn that someone had messed with Jimmy's rig, but that wouldn't keep him out of the air, and the competition between Fred Dacks (another flier) and Jimmy got pretty ugly.
Speaking of ugly, meet Kraft. He's had a dozen complaints filed against him, for everything from property line disputes to petty theft to assault. And here I thought my neighbors were bad, what with the one whose bedroom abuts ours blasting her television from 6 PM to 2 AM daily, and her kids playing Kitchen Bowling Alley with what sounds like a set of free weights at eleven at night, or the ones across the hall who leave trash outside their door all weekend as if expecting the Refuse Fairy to pick it up, or the family who not only puts crayons in the dryer and then neglects to clean out the lumpen waxy mess, but routinely sends the kids to play -- loudly -- at all hours of the morning and night, or the mystery person who reads our newspapers, then leaves the unfolded pile in the planter downstairs, or...you get the idea. Swear to God, all these people moved in during a three-week period this summer and it was like we had suddenly relocated to Hell. And still, all these people are more palatable than ol' Frank Kraft, who apparently confuses his lawn with a parking lot. Catherine notices a chain under the tree, then follows Buzz to the door. What follows --
Kraft: What do you want?
Buzz: Frank Kraft?
Kraft: So what?
-- will not go down in the annals of public record as being the most helpful police interaction in Las Vegas. Catherine asks about the bruise on Frank's chin and asks how he got it. Frank replies, "I sent away for it. You want one of your own?" Catherine keeps her cool and replies, "Recoil's a bitch, isn't it?" Catherine then shows that she doesn't miss a trick by remembering the chain and asking, "Do you have a dog?" "Do you have a warrant?" Frank replies. Then he slams the door.
This gives us the perfect opportunity to segue back to Warrick and Nick, who are at a sporting-goods store where Fred Dacks has been a model employee for three years. The last month was probably not the best for him, however, as that's when Jimmy got hired at the same store. Warrick and Nicky walk over to Fred -- who looks like a smarter version of Jerry O'Connell -- and tell him that they want to ask a few questions about Jimmy. Fred immediately says, "Jimmy. Jimmy was a punk. Other than paragliding and working here, we had nothing in common." How interesting that Fred's using the past tense. Word must travel fast in the paragliding community. Perhaps Fred read an obituary in Paragliding Today. Warrick finds another thing Jimmy and Fred had in common -- their choice in tattoo artists. Jimmy says, "Only 'cause that fool bit it off me. This was a one-of-a-kind around here until he rolled in here with his little birdman or whatever." The tattoo, for the record, is of three naked women with leathery batwings, arranged in such a way that their faces aren't visible for the swirling masses of hair they have. Warrick asks, "You mean Icarus, right?" Fred replies irritably, "Dude, whatever. It doesn't change a thing. He was a mouth. Threw shade all over the place." Nicky, who's looking at some sort of glue, mentions offhandedly, "Funny. That's what we heard about you." Fred ripostes, "Is that right? From who? The artsy chick? He was sticking it to her -- what'd you think she was going to say? Plus she was still pissed at me that I didn't take part in her little masterpiece." Nicky replies evenly, "That really doesn't concern me, Mr. Dacks. What I want to know is, did you fly with Jimmy on the day he died?" Fred replies, "Hell, no, I wouldn't fly with him. Dude couldn't match my skills. Nothing but a menace." Warrick whips out a photo and says, "Try again. Your yellow canopy." Nicky adds, "We know it's you, man." Fred tries to make lemonade from lemons by pointing out how very skilled the guy in the photograph is, so it has to be him. We flash back to a recreation of the day, courtesy of a blue screen and some hilarious acting on the parts of Fred and Jim. As Fred wraps up the conversation, an observant Nicky notices Fred yanking on the cord of a sleeping bag and decides to take the bag along so he can test for epithelials.
B-plot, and it's official: I've lost my will to recount this. Catherine is standing in Kraft's lawn, and Buzz comes over, looking dejected. "Citizen Ned doesn't want to get involved?" she asks. Well, yes. He's evidently quite frightened of Kraft, as evidenced by the fact that the man more or less treats Ned's possessions as his own. We also find out that Kraft and Roger feuded frequently, and Kraft's stealing cable from Roger probably didn't help any. The other salient piece of information is that Kraft did once have a dog, which he kept chained up in the yard at all times. Oh, that's no good. Buzz says, "The dog wouldn't stop barking." Catherine looks at the tree, the track marks, and then imagines a car coming and mowing down the dog in the middle of the night. "I'm starting to think the victim might have taken care of that," she replies. I'm starting to sympathize less with the victim. You don't take out your issues with a person on their pets, and if the dog is barking, that's when you call Animal Control, as opposed to running down the animal. Since Catherine can't check out the tire tracks, she decides to attack the case from another angle, cutting mulberry branches down on the Roger side of the property.
In the meantime, Warrick and Nicky are hanging out in Liam's lair until he tells them that the epithelials on the sleeping bag drawstring match those on the slashed canopy, and that both belong to Fred. Liam hands over the results and says shortly, "Thank you and good night." Warrick and Nicky stay put, with Warrick theorizing, "Fred does a number on Jimmy's canopy to keep him from flying." Nicky adds, "He's threatened by the guy. It's to keep him from showing him up, you know?" Warrick says, "He needs to be the top dog, huh?" Nicky grunts assent, and Warrick vaults to the top of Nicky's Justice Day list with, "That sounds like you." Nicky looks up and asks somberly, "Who?" "You," Warrick states again. Liam comes back in and snaps, "That sounds like both of you. Can you take this somewhere else?" Warrick, intent on asserting his top dog status by being the alpha annoying guy in the room, speaks more loudly, saying, "So, Jimmy gets a new canopy, flies, dies, comes down unattached. We got no canopy, we got no harness --" Nicky looks over at him and says, "If we want to find out what happened, we need to find that rig." Liam shoves the rolling chair Nicky's in, and says, "Well, you won't find it here." Nicky leaves with minimal protest; as Warrick walks off, he gripes, "Have you taken your medication today?" Why, yes, he has -- it's the assertiveness pill, per Gil's pep talk a few episodes ago. Liam just needs to remember that the man who maketh the prescription can cut him off too.
Speaking of Gil, he's currently conferring with the doctor who performed the hearing test. "120 hertz, " he says flatly. "Minus thirty decibels. That's a significant decline from your last visit," she clarifies. Gil says, "Most human speech is above 300 hertz. My midrange is still clear." The doctor points out, "If it were clear all the time, you wouldn't be here." Gil has no reply to that. She continues, "I think it's time to consider something like surgery. Think about it." Oh, but surgery would entail taking medical leave, and that would involve actually telling people what's going on. Gil clearly thinks concealing his hearing problem from his coworkers and (in some cases) friends is a smarter move. The doctor repeats herself: "Think about it, let me know." Then she walks off, leaving a stunned Gil to stand alone and contemplate what happens .
Warrick and Nicky have moved on to other locations for rig-finding and brainstorming -- namely, the same computer simulation where they detected the pinion pine pollen. They enter in variables for wind speed and direction, and conclude that the rig must be somewhere in northeast Summerlin. Within seconds, they're in Summerlin, looking over the rig. Nicky comments, "Fifteen thousand feet up, no helmet, the only thing holding you in are two shoulder harnesses and a chest strap." Warrick says dryly, "Not the kind of rush you're looking for?" No, it is not. Nicky hunkers down and notices a broken piece of equipment. Warrick calls his attention to the stamp reading, "Property of Potasi Glide Center," and we all realize that Rick neglected to mention lending his rig to Jimmy. Nicky holds up the broken altitude monitor and the frayed cords and says, "Because [Rick] knew how it would end up. Jimmy never had a chance, man."
Cut to Rick saying, "No way. I wanted to see him get his ass kicked, not killed." Brass replies, "Problem is, he did get killed, flying your canopy." Rick has no idea how that happened; Warrick mentions the cut lines that typically lead to the A-riser. For those of you wondering when Warrick got so fluent in paragliding, join the club. For those of you wondering what an A-riser is, as near as I can tell, a riser is webbing that connects the harness that the user wears to different suspension lines in the canopy. Risers are commonly labeled A through D, with each riser corresponding to a different position on the canopy and a different role in steering the canopy, and the A-riser is the one that connects to the canopy's leading edge. This is important because it means that Jimmy couldn't really steer. Anyway, Brass tells Rick, "Your rig, your responsibility. This is your chance. [whispering now] I'd take it." Rick does: "Fred said he just wanted to teach Jimmy a lesson." We see a flashback where Fred is suggesting to Rick that he give Jimmy a big, slow canopy, and Rick says, "Ten minutes later, Jimmy showed up all hot. He asked, I gave, he took." Warrick comments caustically on how Jimmy couldn't let Fred get the better of him; Rick replies, "He lacked discipline. He needed to be brought down a peg or two." Brass stares at the unrepentant man and replies, "You brought him all the way down."
Warrick escapes that conversation and finds Nicky in the lab. Nicky says, "Don't tell me -- Rick pleaded ignorance." Warrick replies, "Right before he lawyered up." Nicky says cheerily that Rick's wasting money, and hands Warrick the end of the line he had been working on. Warrick says, "It's frayed. You're telling me if it had been cut with a tool, it would have been clean?" Nicky replies, "These lines are spun polymer. Lightweight, strong as well, covering a plastic sheath. Now, over time, that plastic coating wears down, protected lines rub against one another, weakening, fraying until...snap! It's normal wear and tear, man." Warrick morosely says that Rick knew the canopy was in bad shape, and here they are without any evidence that suggests sabotage. Nicky invokes the ghost of episodes past by recalling the hiker who dry-drowned in a rainstorm, and says, "You fool me once, shame on you. You fool me twice -- shame on me."
Meanwhile, Catherine's busy trying to match mulberry tree pieces to one another to see whether the pieces in the truck were deliberately cut, and to see if she can match those pieces to the ones she took off the tree. It is every bit as riveting as it sounds. Not even Sara coming in and explaining her extreme absence in this episode (a surfeit of overtime has her grounded and on regular hours), then pleading with Catherine to let her work, or failing that, to see why Gil's being even more uncommunicative than usual, can enliven this scene. For those of you keeping score at home: Sara denies again that Hank is her boyfriend.
In another part of the lab, Warrick and Nicky are cloud-gazing. Warrick asks, "That's the cumulus right there, right, formed by warm air rising? The thermals?" Nicky replies that the cloud really just looked like a bunny to him. Oh, he does not. He says, "The bigger the cloud, the more air that gets sucked in, the stronger the thermal. And check out our boys, heading straight for it." Warrick cynically comments, "[Jimmy's] probably getting the ride of his life." He then continues in a more expository tone, "He's rising fast, air's getting thinner, 15,000 feet and he passes out and suffocates." We see this via flashback. Nicky then comments, "You catch a good thermal, you take it as far as it takes you, dead or alive." We then see Jimmy, passed out and getting a wicked case of frozen face shortly before his body slips out of the harness and drops to the ground below. Nicky continues, "And to show Fred up, Jimmy had to fly higher." Warrick asks the $50 question: "He had an oxygen tank on his harness. Why didn't he use it?"
And now, we wrap up the suburban passion play. We're in Kasa de Kraft, and Catherine walks over to explain the whole thing to those of us who began sleeping in self-defense every time this plot aired: "The key here: retaliation. Roger Edmonds cuts the cable that you stole. So then you chop up his tree, borrow Ned's truck to dump the branches. While you're out dumping the branches, Roger comes home, sees what you've done to his tree, ups the ante. You return home, find your dog, start looking for Roger." We see all this in flashback -- including a scene where Kraft drops to his knees and pets his dog, stricken, before heading out to the bar to pick a fight with Roger. Roger then whips out the idiot-big, shiny weapon, and in the melee, Kraft disarms him and shoots him with his own weapon. As Catherine's talking -- interrupted by assorted excuses that she eventually shoots down with a contemptuous "shut up" -- the detectives find the gun in the sofa cushions. Catherine turns to Kraft for an explanation, and he says brokenly, "He killed my dog." And, irrational as this sounds, I completely understand why he went ape. I have no doubt I'd be in a blind rage if I found someone deliberately harming one of my pets. Yeah, Kraft's an ass, but you don't bring the pets into the argument.
Time to dot the i's and cross the t's on the A-plot. Warrick and Nicky discover that the reason the oxygen tank gauge reads full is because it is full, but the altimeter which would have clued Jimmy in to when he needed the oxygen was broken, and guess whose fingerprints are all over the altered hardware? It's our boy Fred, who tells everyone in the interrogation room that his prints are there because he fixes everyone's gear all the time. Warrick replies, "Oh, you fixed it all right. You decalibrated it -- it was off by two thousand feet." Nicky and Brass fill in the rest of the dots: in the air, you rely on your instruments for an accurate altitude reading, which Jimmy couldn't do with a busted altimeter. Fred shakes this off as Jimmy merely being stupid and not turning around when he began to feel lightheaded. Brass counters that Fred knew damn well what he was doing -- using Jimmy's personality against him and setting him up for an "accident." Warrick concludes, "You played him against himself." Nicky, who knows from seething resentment, adds, "You couldn't stand the fact that he was better than you." Fred's all, "I called him out, he took me on. Bigger air, higher altitudes, push the limit, dude -- that's why we fly." Warrick replies, "That's not why you fly. The truth is on your arm." And then, closet classics guru Warrick elaborates further: "Alecto, Mageara, Tisiphone. The three Furies. Unceasing anger, vengeance and jealousy. That's what you're about." Fred looks back at Nicky, Brass, and Warrick, and Nicky says, "Sorry, dude."
And now, Warrick's proving that he's down with Eros too. He's in the locker room preparing to go home when Catherine comes in. Warrick warmly greets her, and she replies, "I heard you know your Greek mythology. I'm impressed. Who would have guessed?" Warrick replies, "Yeah, I'm a mystery." Catherine says, "Ye-ess, you are." They both share a laugh, and she gives him a flirty smile. Catherine then asks where Nicky is. Warrick says wonderingly, "He bugged out early." Catherine compliments them both on their work, which causes Warrick to swivel around and look at her. Catherine asks, "Would you let [Nicky] know?" Warrick, who's actually almost smiling, says, "Thanks. Yeah. I will." Catherine stops, and she and Warrick then exchange the kind of soaked-in-subtext goodbyes that more often accompany an extremely successful, albeit cordial, first date. At least, I think that's what they're doing. My screen fogged up from a cloud of pheromones, so it was kind of hard to see what was happening after Warrick and Catherine began smiling at each other.
Catherine then stops in to see Gil; it's nowhere near as flirtatious. She shares her night -- "I closed that murder I was working on. A man's life, for a dog's life, for a mulberry tree" -- and concludes, "Sometimes I wonder if people are meant to live together." Gil replies, "You know what they say: good fences make good neighbors." Soundproof walls and your own washer/dryer help too. I'm just saying. Catherine smiles and teases, "Then you'd make a great neighbor." Gil ponders that, then turns back to the Web page he's reading on otosclerosis. Catherine looks down at the screen and asks, "New case?" "Ongoing," Gil replies. Catherine leans around to see what Gil's looking at, and he hastily alt-tabs (or apple-~) to a new window displaying long-horned beetles. This has the desired effect of killing Catherine's interest, so Gil's left alone to think about how to handle his ever-deteriorating hearing.
But what of Nicky? We see him strapping in and launching himself off Mt. Potasi in a paraglider. As he slips the surly bonds of Earth and begins wheeling and soaring and swinging high in the sunlit silence, a particularly unfortunate choice in background music begins playing, and I start singing, "Ator flies, and so does my heart/In his kite made of string and sticks and bamboo..." So much for poor Nicky putting out his hand to touch the face of God. At least the episode ends on an up note -- literally -- for him.