Forever

As this episode begins, I'm busy watching the blinking lights on my temperamental cable modem, so I end up hearing it before I see it. What I hear sounds like the product of a rave DJ being held, Misery-style, by a clan of backwoods Ozarks types. So imagine my surprise when I don't see an emaciated club kid being shackled to a turntable to a corn crib, but am greeted instead with a vision of a sleek airplane.

As the frenetic technocountry keeps playing, we get an unprecedented TMICam shot that begins at one of wings, winds through a propeller, follows a cable down, and zooms around some stuff that only diehard aerospace junkies would be able to identify. The upshot is that we eventually end up following a propane line which is providing the necessary heat for the cherries jubilee that's being whipped up by the chef on the plane. I'm guessing this is no ordinary Southwest Airlines flight. After seeing a blonde making a lot of dramatic gestures, we know we'll be seeing more of her later. (It's Elaine Hendrix, whom I remember fondly from The Chronicle, although more people may remember her from Romy and Michele's High School Reunion; I'm usually not good with Hey! It's That Guy actors, but you don't forget a fantastic pair of eyebrows like hers.) The camera pans around so we can see the in-flight masseuse, the smoking, and the general debauchery. However, there's soon a little turbulence, and so people are forced to sink into the chaise longues or loll about the beds; Elaine Hendrix toasts everyone. I believe that's our confirmation that she's the alpha female here.

The camera zooms up to a porthole in a door, and then we hear a horse whinnying. We get the other side of the porthole and more horse noises with a side of rattling chains, then a sweeping shot of the interior, which holds pricey-looking toys like motorcycles but nary a Vuitton valise. After a shot of a covered meal on a tray, we see the horse in its stall. I should point out that, unlike other little girls, I never went through a horse phase. I yawned through the first chapters of National Velvet before putting in down; I failed to comprehend why Trixie Belden thought riding horses was the keenest activity ever. So I can't tell you if this horse is a chestnut or a bay or what have you, nor can I tell you if it's a quarter horse, third-horse, or all horse. I can tell you it's kind of brown with white socks and a white splash on its face. It's also standing in a stall where the crumpled, bloodied body of a blonde woman is slumped against the wall.

Cut to the inside of what looks like a warehouse. The horse is now stashed in another type of portable stall. Gil and Catherine come ambling into the warehouse. Brass meets them by the horse's original travel stall, where the woman is still in her original position. He dons the mantle of Captain Exposition and says, "The victim's name is Lori Hutchins. Apparently, she chaperoned the horse on trips all the time. Baggage handler found the body in the cargo hold after the passengers had disembarked." Gil says a little peevishly that they'll need to process everyone on that plane. Brass shoots back, "They're being corralled as we speak, partner." Catherine wonders where to start. Gil -- who is not looking at her, so apparently his hearing is just fine right now -- says, "First witness, first suspect." On cue, everyone turns around to look at the horse. Catherine says, "The horse?" Gil replies, "Of course."

And on that Mr. Ed shout-out, we go to the credits.

Once we come back, Catherine is still in the storage hangar, standing in front of three men. I'm going to guess by their snotty demeanor that they're the flight crew on Air Elaine. Catherine prompts the three for their recall of Lori, and they describe her as sweet, polite, quiet, and utterly devoted to the horse. Catherine then asks whether anything unusual happened on the flight, and aside from a little turbulence, there wasn't anything. There was a call button if something went wrong, but Lori never used it.

Gil, meanwhile, is inspecting the horse stall, taking all sorts of digital photos of the blood. I thought they had to put rulers down for that sort of thing? Or markers on the scene? Gil also finds a bloodied pair of small scissors; I'd think they were manicure scissors, but they're actually medical scissors of some sort. Nicky comes by and asks where the horse is, and Gil tells him it's at a USDA facility, where it's under 48-hour quarantine. I'm sure I'm not the only one who thought, "USDA facility? What, are they going to slaughter it and serve it to prison inmates?" Nicky then comments, "A hundred-pound woman trampled to death by a 1400-pound horse? It doesn't seem very fair." Yes -- because man is constantly at the mercy of those bastard animals who are bigger than we are. It's not like we have a habit of systematically annihilating entire populations of big animals or anything. Oh, wait. We do, and Nicky's an idiot for not putting the whole thing in perspective. Gil then pulls out a tranquilizer dart. Nicky concedes, "That changes the odds a little." Gil then pulls out the gun used to deliver tranquilizer darts, and Nicky says approvingly, "Yeah, heavy artillery." You just know that his forebears on whaling boats said the same thing about harpoons. Gil comments, "There's more than one way to handicap a horse."

Catherine is now walking around the plane's cargo area. We do finally see our Vuitton valises -- swaddled in bubble wrap lest the leather get scuffed, along with a stuffed and mounted zebra head. Undoubtedly, it's only a matter of time before someone comes along and screeches, "Don't touch that couch! It's covered in genuine blue whale leather and stuffed with tiger fur!" Catherine notices some deeper brown leafy stuff mixed with the hay, and picks it up for study before she bags it. What? No photographing it? No evidence markers? Did they all just stop doing that? Catherine then looks up at the foil-and-insulated roof of the hold and notices a tranquilizer dart embedded in the ceiling. Without bothering to photograph it or anything, she just climbs right up and takes it down. This is driving me crazy -- isn't there a reason for documenting where evidence was found so that people can prove it wasn't planted? Isn't this whole show a procedural drama? Why skimp on procedure, especially when it's been featured so prominently in other episodes? Catherine then imagines a scenario where the horse is freaking out; Lori loads a dart in the gun, but turbulence causes her to misfire while throwing her into the pen, where she is promptly trampled. Yeah, I know, it seems like an unlikely string of coincidences, but knowing this show, anything's possible.

Nicky then comes in and asks Catherine what she's got. Catherine produces more evidence and says, "The trainer had all these small syringes. Why go for the big gun instead?" Because she shares Nicky's philosophy of using firepower as a way to level the interspecies playing field? Nicky suspects Lori just didn't want to get close to a spooked horse. The two of them turn to Lori's uneaten dinner. Apropos of nothing, Nicky notices, "Looks like someone stepped in horse crap." He then asks Catherine what kind of footwear Lori was wearing; Catherine thinks it was work boots. Nicky's thinking he's not looking at work boots. He's all, "That's a funky print." Catherine replies, "Oh, that's a JP Tod's driving loafer." Nicky's got a question mark over his head. Catherine replies, "I may shop the outlets, but I read Vogue." Hey, me too! The Vogue reading part, I mean, and I read it primarily for their food writer, the sublime Jeffrey Steingarten, which is roughly analogous to reading Playboy for the articles.

Hey, it's Detective Lockwood, walking with Warrick and Sara in Death Valley, which, last time I checked was about a two-hour trip from Las Vegas and mostly in California, but why let the facts get in the way of a good time? Warrick comments on the general hostility of the climate, and that leads us nicely into the discovery that kicks off the B-plot: a teenaged boy clad in a dark suit and lying on a blanket, quite dead. Lockwood explains that a helicopter tour pilot noticed the body as he flew overhead and called it in. Sara notes, "Deathbed. Casket-ready. Laying in the Hell's Gate section of Death Valley." The thing I love about Death Valley is the unadulterated morbidity of its landmarks' names: Funeral Mountains, Coffin Peak, Hell's Gate, Starvation Canyon. Incidentally, all those names are inside the boundaries of the Death Valley National Park, 3.3 million acres of fun which technically falls under federal jurisdiction, and Hell's Gate is on the California side of the park. Then again, if we wanted to get all "technical" about murder jurisdictions and stick with "facts," a murder that took place while a plane was in the air would be probably be investigated by the FAA, making this episode all of five minutes long and going something like this:

SETTING: The Break Room. NICKY, HODGES, GIL, and SARA are watching television. An ANCHORWOMAN appears on the screen and begins speaking.

ANCHORWOMAN: Both the FAA and the National Parks Service have their hands full this evening with unexplained deaths. Details are sketchy, but so far, we have learned one body was found aboard a plane after it landed, and investigators are keeping mum about a grisly discovery in California.

NICKY: Gosh, Gris, those cases sure look unique and challenging.

HODGES: Give it up, Texas. Does the word "jurisdiction" mean anything to you?

SARA: Does the word "civility" mean anything to you?

HODGES: I am civil. Stop looking at me like that.

GIL: Nicky, you know that we only work cases within Las Vegas. Anything that happens in the air or in a national park belongs to the Feds.

NICKY: Why do they get all the good cases?

GIL: It comes from being in charge.

Roll CREDITS, and then roll END CREDITS, since it's a slow night in Las Vegas and there are no relevant cases.

Anyway, back in an episode where "federal" is a collection of syllables about as relevant to this universe as "kairopan," Warrick looks at the forlorn tableau and deadpans, "Poetic." Sara replies, "More like suicidal." She begins snapping digital photos, and again, while I applaud the embrace of digital photography, I do have to wonder about the lack of rulers, markers, et cetera. Lockwood notices a white smear on the blanket, which Sara swabs for later study. Warrick finds an ID for the DB -- Toby Wellstone, McKinley High School, 12/12/87. Sara notices the transdermal patch on Toby's hand; Warrick tells her it's a fentanyl patch, and adds, "Absorbs faster through the pores of the hand. Intentional overdose." We get a TMICam shot of the fentanyl rushing into the bloodstream during all that. Lockwood says he'll notify the parents, and Sara says, "We're 85 miles from Las Vegas, one mile from the closest road. If this was a solo job, how did he get here?" Notice how she doesn't add that they're also in California. Warrick answers her question by pointing out some small tracks made by something with wheels.

Catherine's now working her way through the plane's cabin. Brass comes striding in, sighing, "Some days, it's tough to be me. You know, I wish the seats were as organized as that bar. We have the passenger manifest, no assigned seating, 12 passengers, 24 shoes, 36 lawyers." Nicky picks up a cigarette and asks naively, "Was this a smoking flight?" Brass rolls his eyes and replies, "I think we've established that these people do whatever it is they want." He storms off, and Nicky watches him go, a little puzzled by what just happened there. Nicky then looks back down at the violently rumpled sheets on the bed and begs Catherine, "Don't make me ALS." Heh. I've always wondered if the CSIs have days where they're like, "If I see another semen stain somewhere that semen was never meant to be..." Catherine demonstrates the perks of seniority with, "Hey, man. I don't want to go blind any more than you do." She then calls his attention to a spent condom and some bloody towels. There's going to be a hot time in the DNA lab tonight!

Catherine and Gil then head back to what is presumably USDA quarantine headquarters, which looks an awful lot like the same warehouse where the horse was originally kept post-landing. A thin brunette is hassling the USDA guard about getting in to see her horse, but since we never see her again and she has no bearing on the plot, there's no point in spending any more time on her moment on-screen. The two CSIs make their way over to the paddock where the horse is being held; the vet, Dr. Stevens, is busy petting her muzzle. We find out that horse is all shook up, but as Stevens explains, "Horses are incredibly sensitive to change. Travel's hard on them." And apparently, for a horse, losing your trainer is like losing your best friend. Dr. Smith tut-tuts over Lori's inexplicable death. Gil says he's going to need to pull samples from the horse, which cues a round of blood samples, hoof samples, and hair samples. Gil is near the tail when he notices that the horse's nether regions are sutured shut. He asks what happened, and Stevens explains, "High Folly is what we call a 'dirty' mare. Prone to serious uterine infections. Caslick stitching keeps out fluids and bacteria." As Stevens is talking, he's holding High Folly's gums so Catherine can pull some dark, leafy stuff from the horse's teeth. At the other end of the horse, Gil asks incredulously, "So you stitch her up until it's time to breed?" Someone should tell Gil that in some countries, they still do that to people before they're married off. Stevens is all, "It sounds bad, but I promise, having an acute infection is worse and there's no greater tragedy than a champion who can't breed." Well, I think the whole sewing-women-up thing qualifies, but I doubt that's a consideration here. I do wonder, however, if the whole "dirty mare" thing is a result of overbreeding horses. Anyway, Catherine asks about the leafy thing and gets no answer. We do, however, get some important information relevant to the plot after Catherine mentions the tranq gun. Stevens replies, "You'd never use a tranq gun on a horse. The impact energy would cause an immediate adrenaline response, make the horse more agitated."

Back at the lab, Sara's down in the morgue, finding out from Warrick that nobody's come to claim Toby's body. Warrick replies, "I don't know what's worse -- consoling a grieving parent or finding a kid with no parents at all." This is how we find out Toby's been bounced through seven foster homes in seven years, and the system lost track of him a year ago. Sara tells Warrick that her talk with the high school was similarly depressing, concluding, "The kid was a ghost." The forlorn quality of that statement is only exacerbated when David The Drawer-Pulling Coroner recites Toby's last meal: burger, shake, and fries. Sara gets in a Fast Food Nation-style slam with, "So that's what killed him." Warrick comments that the meal is haute cuisine to many in the Clearasil set. David adds sadly, "More like a last meal, I'm afraid. He took a synthetic narcotic, fentanyl, by patch and by pill." We find out that fentanyl's a painkiller commonly used in hospitals, post-surgery. Sara's still reading the postmortem report, and she asks what cisapride is. David tells her, "That's what separates the attempts from the corpses. It's a prokinetic agent that speeds up the body's absorption of fentanyl and keeps the stomach acids from going into reflux." Why, according to The American Journal of Gastroenterology (1991; 86/2 (135-149)), he's right! And for those of you who aren't regular readers (and why not? Their food writer's almost as good as Vogue's. I kid!), prokinetic agents stimulate or enhance muscular contractions or movement through the gut. So you can see where it might be used to speed the fentanyl along. Everyone quickly realizes that no stomach acid means no nausea means no vomiting means no loss of lethal dose, and that this kid did his homework. Warrick sighs, "A permanent solution to a temporary problem." David adds, "Maybe not so temporary. Eighty percent of all completed suicides have tried previously. From the scars [on Toby's wrists], I'd say twice before." This really rattles Warrick. As David draws the sheet back over Toby's head, he says, "Third time's the charm."

Catherine is busy processing all the evidence she collected to some complaint-rock soundtrack. There's a lot of pipetting going on. As she squirts away, a jump-suited Nicky comes by and says, "Hey, fashionista. You were right. Not only did we find a match, we also found trace elements." Stop and ponder what a job must be like when finding horseshit on the bottom of a shoe constitutes good news. Brass is bringing in the lucky woman now.

Down in the morgue, David and Gil are looking down at Lori on the slab. She's fairly beaten up, what with having been trampled by a horse and all. The only anatomical oddity not consistent with that are her pinpoint-sized pupils. We find out this is because she had a load of torphine -- a narcotic a thousand times more potent than morphine -- in her system. David adds, "One of those bruises contains a puncture wound about the same size as that dart you found." Gil studies the bruise, then asks, "How do you shoot yourself in the shoulder with a tranquilizer rifle?" You don't. David says as much. Gil suggests that someone was trying to frame the horse.