Precious Metal

Whenever I'm facing a looming deadline, a long night, or a long night caused by a looming deadline, I sometimes decide to psych myself into working by tackling the project in the middle and working toward the end, working from the back to the front, or generally mixing it up so that when I do return to the beginning of something -- a book, a project outline, an article -- and commence working linearly, I run across my already completed segments and am heartened by how much I've done already.

I'm telling you this deeply personal anecdote because...well, because I tried to recap this episode that way, and while the results were entertaining in the same way a Choose Your Own Adventure book was, it really didn't make a whole lot of sense to start off with something like this:

So Liam's standing in the lab, looking as though he deeply regrets wearing the skivvies he accidentally shrunk in the wash, when Gil comes in. Liam tells him they're nailed the guy thanks to his DNA.

Sadly, the recap is a long-form epic that doesn't lend itself well to nonlinear interval work. Fortunately for you, I figured that out before subjecting you to seventeen pages of experimentation.

And with that, I've managed to write an introduction that completely avoided mention of the Las Vegas skyline, thus overcoming a challenge that has begun to tax me since I've had to find a way to describe that scene some fifty-odd times in a thirty-month period. Instead, I can just skip to the part where two ATVs are whizzing through the verdant Vegas valleys, ripping up grassy swards and leaving tire tracks in the rich, black mud that we all associate with Nevada. The two riders -- who are dressed in color-coordinated suits like the Power Rangers -- engage in the kind of vehicular hijinks that so often end with someone exhorting us, the viewers at home, to Do The Dew. Then the rider dressed in blue does the Dew outtake -- i.e. flipping their vehicle and taking a dive into the dirt, knocking over a conveniently-placed barrel that veteran CSI watchers are already eyeballing in chortling expectation.

The red-suited rider rips off the helmet, and a lot of blonde hair cascades down as she screams, "Billy!" She runs over and helps the other rider to doff their helmet, and we see more blonde hair as it's revealed that Billy is a Billie and the last minute has been devoted to hot girl-on-girl motocross action. The two girls gape at the barrel which tripped Billie up, and we see the hazardous waste sticker on the side, along with the skull and crossbones.

Within seconds, night has fallen, the barrel has been righted, and Brass is explaining, "According to the girl, one second she's riding along, having fun, everything's great. thing she knows, she's lying upside down in the dirt, staring at chemical waste." And then wondering why she can't feel her legs. Or maybe Captain Exposition declined to tell us what happened to the two girls. Brass does tell us that Billie had the wherewithal to call the local Hazmat unit, and "it's not toxic. They saw the barrel was buckling, they thought it might explode, so they opened it." So Catherine smells. She makes a noise halfway between a groan and a retch, which Brass heartily seconds. Gil is undeterred -- perhaps he's losing his sense of smell in proportion to his hearing. He heads toward the barrel and trains the flashlight on it. In the background, Catherine chokes out, "Soap mummy." Gil goes with the lingo, "Adipocere, a.k.a. mortuary wax." Hey! I've covered this territory before. Gil covers it now: "This is what you get when fatty tissue decomposes in an alkaline environment with limited oxygen." Catherine tags in: "All it needs is a little moisture and enough time. Anaerobic bacteria digest body fats, turning them into a waxy solid. Kind of like the way they make vegetable shortening." Brass deadpans, "I'll never eat another freedom fry." Well, if that won't do it, Fast Food Nation will. Brass asks for an estimate of how long the world's most gruesome molded soap has been sitting in the barrel. Gil challenges Brass's use of the generic male pronoun; Catherine elects to ignore that and estimates a saponification time of five to six weeks minimum. Brass obliquely references the fact that it's pouring rain yet again with, "With all this wind and weather, any evidence in the dump is long gone." Because it's been washed away in a flood? Because, at this point, they've been transported to an alternate dimension where global warming combined with the San Andreas fault giving America a new Pacific coastline around Primm, Nevada has conspired to give Las Vegas that rainy, temperate climate we see so often here? Because I can't harp on the rain thing enough? Anyway, Gil delivers a painful stinger with, "We got evidence -- signed, sealed and delivered."

The Who demand to know who we are.

Once we're back from commercial break, David The Edifying Coroner wheels the mystery soap guest into an autopsy bay while telling two young men, "Gentlemen, saponification most frequently occurs in infant burials. That's because their bodies have more fat and their bacterial flora aren't fully developed." As David's waxing enthusiastic, he and the less nauseous of the two lackeys are decanting the body. We get a shot of a gush of fluid filtering through a mesh screen. A ring rests atop the mesh. Then a leg heavily falls out of the barrel, and David cautions the others to hold it. It turns out he's only now noticed the ring, but when he picks it up, we get a nicely gory shot of the leg covered in brown viscous goo. David begins pulling the rest of the body out and resumes his lecture with, "Historically, saponified corpses who maintained their physical features were looked upon as incorruptible, even saintly. When it happened to children, it just reinforced that notion." The unnamed lackey who's getting squeamish could not care less about the role post-burial decay played in folk beliefs; he's busy watching the murky goo trickle out of the barrel at a molasses-like rate and thinking about what that goo used to be. The kid begins backing up slowly, probably to make a run to the nearest trashcan. I hope he lifts his splatter guard before he hurls. Otherwise -- eeeeuw.

The final touch is when David requests the easily-detached foot. The kid runs. David hardly notices, so caught up is he in the oral tradition of forensic epics: "Interestingly enough, since formaldehyde is alkaline and American caskets are sealed, there are more bodies in this country turning to soap now than at any other time in human history. We are, in fact, the adipocere capital of the world." As David's talking, his speech is punctuated by squishing noises and the occasional wet thud, none of which he seems to notice anymore. David finishes by grunting, "U! S! A! We're number one!" and prying a hand -- with index finger extended -- off the tight and slimy knot the rest of the dead body has become.

Incidentally -- because I know some of you were as curious as I about the infant microflora thing -- most babies develop their gut microflora during the first year of life, most often with bifidobacteria (which generate a lactose-metabolizing enzyme), which is a good thing as these bacteria are thought to be inhibitors of gut pathogens courtesy of two of their metabolic by-products, acetate and lactate. And infants with low bifidobacteria numbers are not only more likely to have clostridia and Staphylococcus aureus in their systems, as well as a higher rate of allergic reactions later in life (Bjorksten, B.; Sepp, E.; Julge, K.; Voor, T.; Mikelsaar, M. -- Allergy development and the intestinal microflora during the first year of life, Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology: Vol. 108/4, 2001). But all that presumes that said infant is alive and playing host to microflora and not turning into soap somewhere underground. Back to the episode.

Gil and Warrick are doing laps in the Labitrail and we join them in progress as Warrick says, "Are you serious? David lost a body?" Gil's sanguine about it: "It happens. When I was working in Minneapolis, we had two John Smiths come in on the same day. [We] sent the wrong one back to Canada. Anyway, the body's still in the morgue; David finally processed his ten-card. Guy's name is Keith Mercer." Warrick wants to know when Mercer came in; Gil tells us, "Eleven days ago. Found him in an alley off Fremont, in a pile of garbage to a dumpster." Warrick's thinking that the late date means a lack of a crime scene to process. Gil obliquely contradicts him: "Initially, the police thought he was homeless. He hadn't bathed, he had no watch, wallet or keys, and he had scars on his lower legs." Warrick pegs the cause of death by noticing the "nice laceration with ecchymosis on his left temple." Gil points out the obvious: "Cause of death was blunt-force trauma to the head." The two men bandy about possible hypotheses, and Gil sums up the dilemma with: "Evidence without context is ambiguous at best." His instincts, however, lead him to ponder a smear of yellow powder on the deceased's belt buckle.

Meanwhile, David's on a roll, asking Catherine if she's ever split a log. She hesitates before answering that she's seen it done before, and David counters, "You should try it some time. I find it...relaxing." There's a positively puckish twinkle in his eye as he shares that. What gives? Catherine's obviously wondering too. David elegantly segues from that into an explanation of what killed the Vegas Soap Guy: "The blow here was delivered in a similar fashion [to a wood-chopping blow]. Temporal bone was hit, driven down hard, upper palate smashed, most of the teeth gone." Catherine moves down to the bottom of the skeleton, and we learn that the foot was sheared off by something fast, powerful, and clean. Catherine suggests an ax -- naturally, given the conversation she was having with David -- and he tells her he'll cast the tool marks shortly to see what did separate the foot from the body. Catherine then begins brainstorming: "Body in a drum in the middle of the mountains. If the head and hands were missing, I'd be saying Mob hit." David helpfully adds fetish murderers to the list of suspects. Catherine then concludes that thanks to the cranial damage, using dental records for this guy won't work, so she'd like to try DNA courtesy of a bone marrow sample. David practically giggles in delight as he fires up Bessie the bone saw and says, "My thoughts exactly. The best sample is a large bone with a portion of joint. Then we freeze, grind, and sequence. Want a breast or a thigh?" Catherine does not give David a taste of his own medicine with, "Wing." Instead, she shrugs and tells him, "It's your kitchen." Wearing an expression that clearly says, "I'm the luckiest boy to ever be in a morgue!" David commences sawing.

Upstairs, Sara and Nicky are both refueling with coffee. Nicky pours a metric ton of sugar in his cup as he says, "Hey, Sara, I don't want to cross any lines but I've got this buddy who's not going out with anybody..." And his name is Liam? It's so typical of Nicky to try and play matchmaker. Sara quickly cuts Nicky off with, "No, no, no, no, forget it." She's gracious about it. Personally, I think someone needs to take Sara aside and tell her, "Look, the best revenge is living well -- you can be all wounded and sulky on your own time, but you need to get you some public scandal that'll make its way back to Hank so he can cry the bitter tears of regret into the pillow of remorse as he realizes what a chump he is." Then again, that strategy assumes that Hank's developed the capacity for higher thought and/or the ability to link actions to consequences, so Sara might be wasting her time on the revenge angle too. Anyway, Catherine comes charging into the lounge, then announces, "Grissom bailed. You guys are with me." She seems a little ticked; I wonder if she's reached the point where she's going to begin poking Gil to see if he spills why he's ducking out on cases, or if she's just going to snap at him one day. We won't get to find out today. Nicky and Sara saddle up and ride out. As they walk out of earshot, Nicky tries again: "He's a cool guy." "No!" Sara insists. "You don't even have to --" "No, Nick!" "Just hear me out a sec..."

Once inside, it's Robot Wars. This is the point where I give a big shout-out to sorcha mise and her fabulous man-thing, as they're the ones who provided me with any and all accurate details below (the mistakes are my own doing): Ronin (bot with a horizontal spinning cutter) attacks the tire of Overkill, while Diesector moves in the background. Then another robot, Dreadnought, moves to the foreground while the red robot Tazbot and Diesector attack Overkill some more. Since Tazbot is a Heavyweight and Diesector is a Super Heavyweight, they would never be in the same fight. Both belong to Team Mutant Robots. There's a woman calling the fights -- she's like the Lillian Garcia of the gears set -- and then we see the CSIs walk toward the fenced-off fighting pen, with Nicky explaining, "Robot Rumble. Demolition Derby by remote control. They got a show on cable TV." We go back to the pen as a yellow robot named "Spiker Chuck" -- a.k.a. "Overkill" -- spins around. We pan to a bank of intense-looking men manning the remote controls, and the announcer woman says, "The deathblade goes up and the deathblade comes down!" Random pieces go flying, and then we see the announcer -- who, frankly, looks like she should be doing manicures at a strip-mall beauty parlor called Hair and Now -- giving a play-by-play on the mechanical carnage. There's a lot of it over the few seconds. Then the camera pans to the three CSI folk -- Brass and Catherine both look faintly appalled, as if they just walked past a bank of grown men dressed like Boba Fett and camping on the sidewalk outside a movie theatre two months before Star Wars III: Come for the Mace Windu, Stay for the Obi Wan. Nicky, however, is up on his toes and angling for a better view. I bet you he still plays with his Rock-'em Sock-'em Robots at home. There's a lot more fighting -- suffice it to say that many robots wreak havoc and nearly none of them are introduced via announcement in any way that corresponds with their actual names -- and once the fighting is over, Catherine muses that the sharp metal objects, betting, and testosterone-infused atmosphere could plausibly have led to Cutler's death. "We got a room full of murder suspects," Brass says.

Aprs commercial, a little blade mounted on what looks like a pair of roller-skate wheels goes whirring around while the blonde announcer tells the CSIs, "Bots fight all over the country, on TV, around the world. This is an informal venue where competitors can come to hone their skills and their machines." As the four people wind their way through the considerably diminished post-match crowd, avoiding the hunched-over competitors doing maintenance on their machines, Brass asks if Blondie has a gaming license to cover all that money changing hands. She replies, "I don't need one. See, I just put on a show; if people bet, that's their business." I can't believe Las Vegas law enforcement would share that perspective, what with the regulation of gambling being such a huge revenue stream for the city's businesses. Brass makes a comment about Blondie's lack of business acumen, and she gives us a backstory overload that culminates in one critical fact: she's the one that owns the warehouse from which the barrel containing Cutler came.