The show eschews the normal shots of neon to give us a moody, sun-rises-over-Vegas shot. It's too bad it's an aerial shot and therefore too far away to see the gangs of people standing on the sidewalk pressing Dial-A-Hooker pamphlets into the sweaty palms of passersby, and the drunks stumbling up the street weakly saying, "Vegas! Woo! Omigod, omigod, I shouldn't have had the steak and eggs. Or those four giant Eiffel tower daqui -- BLEARGH."
So then we go from the shot of the strip through an aerial tour of the relentlessly bland suburbs to a construction site. The camera gets all arty as it lingers on the sight of a nail driven into a board.
From over on the couch, I get harassed with:
MABELL: Aren't you spending an awful lot of time writing about a nail?
ME: It's not just the nail. It's --
MR. SOBELL: There was a shot, and then there was a shot, and now there's a nail.
MABELL: I see.
MR. SOBELL: Yep. You're watching the sausage being made now. Shot by shot.
MABELL: And to think, by 10 PM tomorrow night, I might actually find out how this ends.
So. Someone nails the nail, and then we see someone sawing, and someone using a measuring tape, and then there's drilling and stapling, and it's all making me really want to head back to Home Depot and get a few more power tools, because I could so totally use one of those laser-sighted levelers, and maybe a stud finder.
Some non-hardhat-wearing guy goes wandering into an unfinished room ("OSHA would close them down in a heartbeat," snorts Mabell) and sees a body lying on the floor. He drops the box and calls, "Boss! Boss! We got a problem." Boss gets off the ladder, and we see that it's David Silver. I think the job site's problems have been compounded.
Within mere seconds, the place has been festooned with crime scene tape, and Gil is ducking some of it to enter the crime scene. He looks like he's taken the appellation "bug-man" to heart and found the pair of sunglasses that most makes him look like a fly. Gil finally walks into the room -- i.e. an unfinished structure hung with plastic sheeting, which makes me, 1980s MTV viewer, automatically look for a one-hit-wonder rock band because I'm conditioned to expect videos in settings like this. Anyway, Brass is sitting on his haunches. They both look at the body -- a teenaged male lying prone, with his pants around his knees and a lot of blood around his head. Gil takes the glass-half-full approach with, "Well, clean surfaces make for clean analyses." Brass thinks that's probably the only bright spot in this tableau, as the dead kid has no ID on him and he was killed some time this weekend. Gil hunkers down and notices a piece of red fabric clutched in the kid's hand; Brass asks if Gil's going to pry the cloth out of the kid's hand. Gil's going to wait on that. Brass asks if Gil has any ideas on what happened. Gil replies, "Well, based on the pants around the knees, I would say a crime of passion. Given the brutality of it, it seems to me an act of rage."
The Who are pretty mellow when they ask us who we are. No rage there.
Brass goes out to talk to a cranky construction foreman type, who grouses that he spends an hour a day picking up cigarette butts and beer bottles, since These Darn Kids think any house that's not nailed shut belongs to them. Brass is all, "Well, it's a crime scene, so it belongs to us now," and the foreman points out that he and his teenaged kids are the ones taking it in the shorts thanks to the job site closing down, as opposed to those good-for-nothing boozing-and-smoking kids. Brass mumbles something to the effect that virtue is its own reward.
Warrick and Sara have showed up to work the scene with Gil. Gil raises his eyebrows and bids his underlings, "Take a look at his head. Tell me what you see." Sara leans down and says, "Well, I see he's got some fabulous volume at the roots, and whatever conditioner he's using, it's moisturizing the ends while letting him control his natural waves." Gil and Warrick cough and stare pointedly at her scalp. Oh, they do no such thing. But they should: whoever thought it was a good idea to beat Sara's hair into submission should be checked into a 12-step program for straightening products. Warrick checks out the gaping hole behind the kid's ear and decrees, "Definitely blunt force." Sara adds, "That's a hammer head." Gil's all, "I thought you might say that." But why? Because Sara's an expert on Sears Craftsman-related homicides? Because she's been reading up on them in some forensics journal? I liked it when these smartypantses explained how they knew stuff, because then, plot advancement also doubled as character development, like when we found out Nicky mainlines the Discovery Channel. Anyway, Gil says they all know people commit crimes in familiar places. Sara gives him a look and wanders out into the hall. She turns her head as she goes, and her hair tries to move, but her hair is so dully straight, it defies normal forces. Man, if she got her hair chemically straightened, she should sue; that hair looks terrible. However, that won't matter to the mob of construction men awaiting Sara's fine forensic touch. Sara turns back to Gil and snaps, "You got to be kidding me." Gil indicates that he is not. Is he trying to cure Sara of her crush on him through extraordinarily tough love? Like, "Oh, sure, Sara -- you'll hate getting harassed now, but you'll thank me in the long run." Gil continues snapping pictures while Warrick decides to swab blood and make sure it's all the dead kid's. The two of them work in relative quiet until Warrick points out a bloody footprint. Gil's pleased by the discovery.
Meanwhile, Sara's off getting sexually harassed by the guy who found the body. Well, people do cope with shock in various ways -- maybe after a long day of saying idiot things like "I'll trade you a hammer for a screw," the guy heads home, drops a bath bomb in the tub, and eats spoonfuls of Chunky Monkey between the sobs.
Nicky's working solo on the B-plot. We see what looks like an interrupted move in progress -- "Look, honey! It's our move," I crack, since we did have the cops come along at one point, the cats did carry on as if we were murdering them, and I believe someone whose name might or might not rhyme with "oh, hell" may have exchanged a few homicidal threats with someone whose name might or might not rhyme with "Blister! Oh, hell." However, our move only required the presence of uniforms and not Det. Vega and Emergency Backup David. Also, we eventually spoke to each other again, whereas the woman lying dead on the ground with a gunshot wound to the chest will be doing no such thing. Nicky's all, "Do we know who shot her?" No, genius, it's the 9:09 mark. Vega says he patted down Marlene Mitchell's friends, and nobody's packing heat; he adds that she was breaking up a fight when she went down. Nicky makes sure nobody saw or heard anything. Vega says nobody did, and Nicky says confidently, "Somebody's lying." We see that Marlene's current and ex-husbands happen to be hanging around. Vega explains, "The Mitchells were moving in. The ex stopped by to say hi." Nicky asks, "Don't you hate it when hello leads to gunfire?" Oh, God, so many jokes, not enough time -- the NRA and their difficulty getting the UPS guy to deliver, the hazards of dating snipers, the perils of hitting on someone in a concealed-weapon permit state. I could go on. Y'all pick your own. Nicky heads out to GSR the husband and the ex. The husband's none too sanguine: "You think I shot my wife the day after our honeymoon?" Well, shooting her before it would be a waste of nonrefundable tickets. We establish that they were moving Marlene's stuff when the ex, Todd, decided to come by and violate his 100-yard restraining order in the name of happy housewarming. Naturally, this led to a wrestling match, and Marlene headed over to break it up. Do none of these people listen to opera? This is precisely the kind of tragic situation that leads to the object of their affections staggering around downstage left while singing that they're dying. Only in this case, Marlene's having too much trouble breathing to manage a middle C, much less a complete aria. Meanwhile, in the background, Vega is saying, "Yes, but there's a restraining order. You shouldn't be here. Now come here while I slap you on the wrist." Or something to that effect.
Now Gil has seen fit to handle the cloth. He lets a bloodhound sniff it while the handler orders, "Distinguish...are you ready to run?" Gil looks up and says lightly, "She does all my running for me." It is unclear to me whether he's referring to the dog, or to the dour-looking Sara who's making a face like she just checked out her hair for the first time. Anyway, the dog whines urgently and the handler, Sara, and another uniform take off. The dog leads them to a nearby mall, as they're heading down a conveniently stopped escalator, Sara comments that it's a "hell of a place to get lost." Sara should just be glad it's not Black Friday, or else she'd be wading through a crowd of people all edgy from the mob scenes at their local Wal-Mart. The handler explains, "We have five million olfactory receptors. Penny's got 220 million. She sees the world differently." What follows a Penny's-eye view of the world: all shades of gray, with the trail she's following in vivid red and other exciting odors swirling in different colors. Well, they got the dog spectrum mostly right: dog eyes are different from human eyes in that the central retina of the canine eye contains only about 20 percent cones, or visual receptor cells sensitive to color, compared to the 100 percent cones in the center of the human retina, and only two different cone types (it's called a dichromat) compared to the three humans have, with each cone type mapping to a different photopigment sensitive to a specific light wavelength. Researchers think dogs see like a deuteranope, or someone who's red-green colorblind, and therefore see mostly in yellows, blues, and grays. (Neitz, J., Geist, T., and Jacobs, G. H. (1989). "Color Vision in the Dog." Visual Neuroscience, 10, 119-125. ) So I'm kind of bummed Penny's not going through a mall decorated for the holidays, because I'd love to see how a dog sees the usual color scheme.
Eventually, Penny leads the crew to a dumpster behind the mall, and Sara discovers a bag of discarded clothing, including the sweater from which the original scent sample was ripped. Sara checks the stack of receipts in the discarded bag and says, "So, we're looking for a girl who bought a new outfit, a latte and some earrings." And who is also not too much of a criminal mastermind to leave everything in one place: why wouldn't she shred the receipts and flush them, then backtrack through the mall and bury her original clothes at the crime site?
David the down-to-business coroner tells us that Marlene had congealed blood in her pericardium, on account of that having taken the bullet. David tells us two useful things: Marlene died very quickly, and the bullet what killed her dead is still in her heart. Nicky notes that it looks like a 9MM, and he'll pass that information right along. He then does that thing which squicks me out -- i.e. sticking Marlene like a cocktail olive to determine the bullet's trajectory and depth. Nicky notes, "Four inches. That's shallow. Standard handgun bullet penetration's twelve." David confirms this. Nicky notes the 85-degree angle, which seems fairly standard.
Warrick, meanwhile, is off in another section of the labitrail getting hammered. He swabs and swabs while the music gets all high-tech-remix-y. Eventually, he finds a hammer with traces of human blood on it; the hammer belongs to Gregory Curtwell.
Archie is explaining to Sara that we are all living in the transparent society David Brin got all excited about, what with the idea that being constantly watched by any number of surveillance cameras is something we should get used to. Mint! Sara expresses her reservations over trying on shirts in dressing rooms now, and David points out, "There's legal, and there's what people do." The two of them scan the footage and find the girl striding on out in her new clothes. Archie notes that the girl did a "walk-out," and explains to an uncomprehending Sara, "My girlfriend does it all the time. She finds something she likes, rips the tags off in the dressing room, hands them to the clerk, and walks out wearing the new stuff." Sara smiles and razzes Archie for shopping with his girlfriend. Archie exposits, "You can get her prints from the receipts, DNA from the sweater, and you've got a face." Sara points out, "Look at her -- she's a minor, she paid in cash, she's not going to be in any database. Without a name, we don't have much." Warrick comes in to provide more clues: the hammer has blood on it, and Liam's analyzed the clothes in the dumpster to discover more blood. Sara wonders, "The question is, what is the connection between this girl and a construction worker?"
Ah, we're about to find out. Mr. Curtwell of the bloody hammer is none other than David Silver of Beverly Hills, . Y'all, that was the show that led me down the primrose path to where I am today. Brass asks David Silver where he was this past weekend, and David answers that he was fishing in Tahoe. He went alone, he was gone Friday to Sunday, and he didn't catch anything. David sounds kind of testy when he adds, "Look, I thought I was just coming to pick up my hammer." If your TV character was shackled for all eternity to cloying ex-virgin Donna Martin, I can see where your temper would begin to fray around the edges. Compared to David Silver, Prometheus got off easy. Brass asks David if he ever leaves his tools on the site -- Mabell, who wrangled construction workers before embracing a vocation harassing the Marines, points out that no self-respecting construction worker keeps his tools on-site, because she or he either owns them outright or is responsible to their employer for them. David Silver reiterates this. Brass asks about the band-aid across David Silver's nose and his bloody knuckles, and David points out pissily, "It's a construction site. People get hurt." Warrick tells him that the blood on his hammer matches the dead kid's, and shows David a picture of the kid. David is rattled, and explains, "I-I never got a good look at him. I didn't go inside." Warrick shows a picture of the girl in the dressing room, and David gives a disbelieving smile as he tells us it's his kid sister Ashley. Then he catches Warrick's Oh, crap! expression and adds, "Why? What's she got to do with it?" Brass snaps back, "You tell us."
When we get back from commercials, it's The Battle of the Bedraggled Tresses as Sara and Ashley get to talking. Seriously -- is there a reason these two attempted to plaster their roots to their scalps? Anyway, Ashley plays the orphan card up front, and we find out David Silver is her legal guardian, and "he goes away a lot." Which seems kind of odd, because it seems like these two would have a caseworker to check on Ashley, and a brother who was also acting as guardian would be mindful of what kinds of behavior would and would not fly with the courts.
Anyway, Sara's all sympathetic and "why don't you tell me what happened?" and Ashley spins a tale of attempted rape, complete with set-up (she helps classmate Brian Haddick look for his missing cat, per his request), tears, and recrimination ("I'm so stupid"). All of Sara's buttons get pushed during the recitation -- she's compelled to point out "rape is not about sex" -- and then Ashley tells Sara that some anonymous hero bludgeoned Brian. Sara is still oozing sympathy as she asks, "After all that happened, you went shopping?" Ashley sobs, "He was all over me. I just had to get him off me." Yeah, 'cause she looked so distraught in that video footage. Sara adds, "But you got some coffee, and some earrings." Ashley's all, "What? I bought that stuff?" Oh, Roxie Hart could take lessons from this girl. Ashley lays on a final dollop of pathos with, "Why does this bad stuff keep happening to my family?" Inside the little observation booth, Brass expresses the conviction that Ashley is covering for David Silver. Brass needs to watch more Beverly Hills, , so he can learn that all brunettes are lying, scheming minxes. Warrick's been suckered by the orphan pitch: "I'm sure she doesn't want to lose the only guardian she's got."
David and Gil are checking out Brian's dented skull. David's explaining that the initial blows were to the head, and Gil replies, "According to Sara, that's consistent with the girl's story." Yeah, but the best lies have some grain of truth in them, because that makes them both more plausible and more difficult to discredit. David says, "Whoever attacked him kept going. Used some real force, severed his spinal cord at C1, C2." Gil points out, "That would have rendered him immobile." David replies, "Right. So why keep hitting?" Now would be a fine time for Gil to trot out that act-of-rage line again. He says nothing; David continues by pointing out all the wounds that reached straight down into the dermis but showed no blood, so he was beaten postmortem. Gil, who clearly never watched a day in his life and is therefore unaware of The Law of Scheming Brunettes, hypothesizes, "So Gregory Curtwell sees Brian attacking his sister, his adrenaline starts going, and he can't stop." David shows us Brian's bloody knuckles and points out that he got in a punch of his own; he'll match up the pattern of contusions and scrapes, plus the blood and skin samples, later. He then hands over a relatively non-gory set of morgue photos so the Haddicks can identify their son.
In the shot, the Haddicks are confirming that it's their son on the slab. Gil looks appropriately somber, yet noncommittal. Kudos to whomever figured out that having Sara break the news would probably not be good, given her usual "so, the fruit of your loins is probably assaulting women" approach. Mrs. Haddick wants to know who did this to their baby. Gil's still cordial. He introduces a picture of Ashley, whom the Haddicks don't recognize. Mrs. Haddick explains, "He got a little out of hand for a while. We couldn't keep track of his friends." Gil prods for more info on the out-of-hand thing. Brian smoked a bowl or two, busted curfew, and then, his mom said, "The nipple-piercing was the last straw." Mr. Haddick steps in and says, "I told him he could do anything he wanted with the body God gave him once he moved out. Until then..." Until then, Brian was reforming, what with being grounded and getting a job at his uncle's restaurant. Mr. Haddick adds, "Five hundred bucks under the table every two weeks. Pretty good for a kid who can't drive." Mrs. Haddick loses it again. Gil does look stricken.
Nicky's now talking to Bobby in the Bobcave. Seriously -- it's dark there. Bobby could elect to spend all his time running around in tights and a dark cape, and nobody would be able to see. We learn that neither the husband nor the ex tested positive for GSR, and the bullet's in pristine condition. Nicky then utters a line that's uncannily appropriate in several different contexts: "The only reason for shallow penetration is loss of momentum."
Bobby adds that the bullet was a standard full metal jacket, so we can assume it inflicted upon its victim hours of interminable Viet Nam footage. Nicky actually assumes that the bullet did not come into contact with any intervening object, and asks instead, "What slows it down?"
Warrick comes in to get lab results from Liam the lab tech, and invokes Gil in order to make Liam hop to without any of the Ty Pennington-style mugging that passes for comedy on this show. Nice tactic, but I do miss what little levity there used to be on this show. Everyone's so darn serious this year --it's like they finally caught on to fact that, like, 85 percent of their cases involve gruesome sex crimes, senseless kiddy murders, or some combination of the two. Anyway, the sludge decorating Brian's knuckles matches neither Ashley nor David Silver. Liam concludes, "Construction worker didn't do it." "Or he didn't do it alone."
And now Sara, Gil, and Warrick are back at the crime scene. Within moments, they've mapped out the series of events that led to Brian's pulpy demise, complete with flashback. Warrick calls everyone's attention to the very high blood spatter on three walls -- much too high to be spatter from the beating the paralyzed boy took on the floor. Sara points out, "Assailants tend to move in reaction to a target. Brian was stationary. Why would the attacker keep moving? It doesn't make sense." Gil points out, "It does if there were three hammers and three attackers." The three CSIs stand there thinking about that.
Nicky wanders by a darkened room -- what, did Clark County follow President Bartlett's lead and make everyone work in the dark? -- and notices Catherine filing inside. Or misfiling since, you know, the room is dark. He enters and asks, "Hey, Catherine, feel like doing some real work?" As far as questions go, it lacks the satisfactory punch of dialogue like, "Where have you been for the last 34 minutes?" and Catherine's reply, "Trying to find the door to the file room in the dark." Instead, she asks dryly, "And leave all this?" Nicky tells her he's got a woman who DFO'd in her front yard, and he'd like to know why. Catherine asks, "And you want me to cook?" Nicky replies, "Would you mind? And could you wear, you know, the outfit with the little apron and the heels?" Oh, he does not.
In the montage, Catherine mixes a big batch of ballistic gelatin while Nicky makes bullets. He's awfully practiced at this. I wonder why...
Anyway, Catherine wheels in the big blocks of ballistic gelatin and announces cheerfully, "There's always room for Jell-O." Bobby points out that, cinnamon oil notwithstanding, "Technically, that's just gel." Catherine says, "I wasn't planning on eating it." Oh, it's all fun and games when you're discharging firearms into jiggly blocks of goo. There's a little smirky-smirky after Catherine announces that the first bullet had a 12-inch penetration, and after Bobby fires some more bullets at 40 percent, they get the desired 4-inch penetration at 550 feet per second. Nicky and Bobby now have the speed and velocity, so they can calculate the distance, i.e. "How far does a 9MM bullet have to travel before it slows down to 550 feet per second?" The answer: 1800 feet. Nicky and Bobby then take me on a flashback cruise to physics class, but given that I spent my high school physics classes ordering pizzas for delivery during finals and my college physics classes making up and playing a drinking game with my friends, all I can tell you is that I'd really kill for a thin-crust pepperoni pizza and some vodka in a water bottle right now. The main point to this: Nicky's going to be knocking on some remote doors, and Marlene was likely shot after one of her two swains had shoved her to the ground.
Back in the A-plot, Brass and Gil are doing laps through the Labitrail as Brass attempts to advance exposition with, "I'm looking for three guys, but you only found one hammer with blood on it, so which one do you want me to follow?" Gil thwarts him with, "Me." They go visit Warrick, who tells him he's nailed down the bloody footprint to a size-11 skate shoe. He adds, "Screams teenager, I know." Gil asks, "Why is Gregory Curtwell hanging out with teenaged boys?" They're all watching gladiator movies together? Actually, the three make the connection to Ashley, and note that she and Brian were both students at McKinley High -- which should be familiar from its bully problems and teen murders.
Cut to all the kids wearing Brand X skateboard shoes as they sit in the bleachers; Warrick walks down the bleacher steps making sinister small talk about the kids' assorted taste in clothes and bags. You know, this whole set-up seems predicated on the idea that kids won't have more than one pair of shoes, and will therefore be wearing the telltale kicks to school. The principal walks by with Brass, saying nervously, "We're treading a razor-thin line of illegal search and seizure here." Brass points out, "Shoes are a plain-view item." Tell that to the yappy attack lawyer parent behind you. He gets all blah blee blah lawsuit blah blee blah insufferable parent who plans on using his JD blah blee blah on the authorities -- you just know he's the type of sociopathically self-centered, Hummer-driving prick who screams at his kids' soccer refs because the rules don't apply to his Taylor, Tyler, and Tippecanoe. And Gil goes off. He says, "You know what I hate? People who hurt kids. And you know who those people sometimes are?" "Cops?" shoots back a lawyer who's going to discover that law enforcement gets "lost" on the way time someone breaks into his house or car. Gil replies, "Kids. If it'd been your son whose skull had been smashed in with a hammer, you'd be asking me where I was when I should have been protecting him. Kids bring guns to school to shoot other kids. So who are you protecting?" "Let's discuss it in court," Richard Weed replies. Hah! Gil will eat him for breakfast. However, the principal dismisses kids whose parents are present as Brass grumbles, "Way to clear a room."
The only kid who's left is one whose shoe just happens to have blood all over it. How convenient. We find out the kid's name is Benny, and his dad didn't show up at school on account of an urgent appointment with his friend Jim Beam.
Cut to Benny bringing home Brass, Gil, and Warrick. "Dad? I've picked up these three older men and we're going to be hanging in my room, okay?" Well, not really. Dad more or less stumbles into a room full of law enforcement, and so responds by berating, then smacking around, his kid in front of said law enforcement. Way to begin building the case that you're a law-abiding citizen, sir. Warrick and Brass correctly surmise that they've got two of the few people in America who have never watched a law-enforcement show and are therefore innocent of how DNA tests work, and therefore bluff Ben into believing a test for human/non-human DNA turned up Brian's DNA instead. "DNA doesn't lie," intones Warrick the liar. "You wanna tell us how a dead kid's blood ended up on the bottom of your sneaker, Benny?" Brass asks. "Yeah, Benny. Why don't you tell us that?" Ben's drunk dad helpfully adds. Ben claims that sometimes he goes to the construction site just to hang out, and last time he did, he stumbled across the body, and left again. Brass isn't buying this for a moment. Warrick heads into the garage with his dad's permission: he sees some orthodontic rubber bands and a boatload of smashed watermelons. He realizes that someone hammered the hell out of these, and says darkly, "Practice makes perfect."
And now Brass is talking to Benny in the interrogation room; the kid's waived his rights to basically everything. In many ways, Benny appears to be the missing link, and I'm not just referring to evolution: he knows both Brian and Ashley. "I'm a friendly guy," he deadpans. Brass bounces back, "You're looking at murder. And if you're friendly, and you cooperate, and you tell me what happened to Brian Haddick, maybe I can cut you a deal." Benny's not having it; he says he's no snitch. Brass continues, "You wanna tell me about those melons at your house? You looking to be another Gallagher? You know who that is?" "Since when is whacking fruit a crime?" Benny responds. So he doesn't know how criminally unfunny Gallagher is. Brass tells us all that Benny's hammer had Brian's blood all over it, and makes one final pitch for cooperating in the interest of getting a reduced sentence. However, Benny's fine with getting three hots and a cot in juvie because he figures there's no dad and a clean record at the end of it. This is where I begin to root for a prosecutor to try him as an adult.
In the scene, Warrick asks if Benny rolled, and Gil sardonically replies, "Brass says the kid is looking forward to going to jail." The team does their standard recap of the evidence and explains to viewers who may have been up getting snacks what's significant and why. Hey -- it beats the Tru Calling deal where, at the half-hour mark, they recap what you just watched for thirty minutes. Because, you know, watching Eliza Dushku roll her eyes and ask stupid questions is the televised equivalent of Dostoevsky. Anyway, Gil sees the rubber band and asks if they're Spaghetti-Os. Gil, please. Don't make me think you can't even tell the difference between pasta and elastics. Liam says, "Those would be orthodontic rubber bands. Hook 'em to your braces -- upper, lower, helps align the jaws in the right direction. Also great for flinging. Yeah, I had it all -- palate expander, braces, retainer, head gear. Ah, five years of misery, but worth every penny, don't you think?" Yes. Liam has quite a nice smile. ["Wow, that's the first person I've ever heard of besides myself that had a palate expander. Awful, awful device." -- Sars] Sara, however, is back to glowering for no good reason. Liam offers to test the rubber bands for saliva residue, since they still haven't managed to match the samples on Brian's knuckles to anything. Gil figures that the third kid has braces. Then Warrick reasons that Benny's quite the music collector since he's the party host, and thus consumes a lot of music. However, instead of relying on peer-to-peer programs to collect his MP3s, Benny prevails upon his friend Aaron Gilbert to provide the tunes via a Columbia House-type record club. Consider it another clue that these aren't exactly criminal masterminds here.
Hey, remember that subplot with Nicky and the bullet that fell from the sky, and the not-really-burning question of who did it? Well, Nicky finds out whodunit. After a helpful woman talks about her idiot neighbor Johnnie using his back yard for target practice, Nicky visits Johnnie. He and Vega check out Johnnie and the gun he swears he only fired "one time," and promptly prove him wrong with the empty clip and the backyard target with only nine holes in it. Nicky points that it's kind of hinky that the ten-round clip only yielded nine holes, and Johnnie snots, "I must have missed one." Nicky's replies with barely concealed irritation, "Oh, you didn't miss." In the flashback, we see that when the neighbor hollered at him not to shoot in a residential area, she did so when he was in mid-fire, so he swung the gun up and away, and off the bullet went on its 1800-foot journey. Vega handcuffs the guy as Nicky explains how Marlene died. Johnnie protests, "It was just a little target practice." Nicky replies, "And that's why it's illegal to discharge firearms within city limits, genius." Nice one! And good for Nicky for handling this case. I see a calmer, less wrathful CSI this season...at least until he gets passed over for promotion.
Meet the Gilbert kids, Aaron and Jared. Their mom handed over the hammer and a blood-stained $20, and now they're being questioned by assorted CSIs. Warrick is busy telling brace-face Jared that his orthodontia links him directly to the victim, courtesy of Brian's knuckle soup. Jared seems startled by this news.
In the scene, the CSIs are meeting again, and Sara says gloomily, "We have three hammers and four suspects." Yes. Because despite there being nothing to link David Silver to the crime, they're more willing to believe he astrally projected himself from Tahoe for a little juvenile murder than they are to entertain the idea of anyone else. Warrick says the Gilbert boys are ready to go down, and Brass adds that Benny's practically carving jailhouse tattoos in his forearm already. Sara wonders why, if the boys were just protecting Ashley, they haven't said so; Gil points out that they weren't protecting Ashley at all, and adds, "The smashed watermelon suggests the whole thing was premeditated." Sara's almost convinced. Brass points out that the three boys had $125 each; Gil does a little math and realizes another $125 will put 'em at $500 -- the same amount Brian was getting paid under the table. The David Silver question is raised one more time, and Sara finally jumps on the Ashley train with, "Clothing, $85; earrings, $30; coffee, $4. Getting away with murder...""Priceless," Gil finishes.
Sara's sitting across from Ashley now, saying, "The hand that holds the wallet is the hand that rules the world, huh, Ashley? Your fingerprint in Brian's blood, on Jared's money. This is what we call 'completing the triangle.'" Ashley tries to play the "okay, so my friends defended me" card, and adds, "And the money was for, like, like pain and suffering." Sara points out that, "You weren't attacked, Ashley. Brian was." She throws out a telltale lip gloss found at Benny's house (hint: not Benny's color) and we flash back to Amy whipping the boys into a frenzy. Sara realizes that Amy went and blew her bloody money in celebration at the mall, and that Ashley was trying to indirectly implicate her brother. Sara snaps, "I'm done with the Ashley pity party. My guess is Aaron and Jared only had one hammer, but you had access to your brother's tools." Sara then asks why they decided to beat Brian to death, and Ashley replies it's because Brian went straight. Girl, please. That answer barely flew when I read Go Ask Alice in middle school. I was more likely to believe that two teenaged runaways somehow managed to run a store in Berkeley than I was to swallow the idea of so-stoned-as-to-be-immobile kids somehow pulling together the brainpower and the momentum for a complex revenge scheme.
Anyway, Sara's kind of repelled: "You were not a victim. You were a lure. Do you know how many people don't report a rape because they're afraid that no one would believe them?" Ashley intones, "Of course. It's what I was counting on." I'm sure the actress was aiming for dispassionate and remorseless, but she's coming across as zombified. Sara threatens, "I'm going to do everything in my power to make sure you get tried as an adult." Ashley invites her to try, pointing out that she's planning on playing the Little Orphan Ashley card. So then Sara shoots back, "And I'll be sure to have the prosecutor play our taped conversation during the first day of the trial, o legal mastermind." The camera cuts to a horrified-looking Ashley as she realizes her youthful hubris has condemned her to a life behind bars, and then Sara says, "You should have considered anger management counseling," before heading out the door to take her own advice.
Oh, that doesn't happen. Instead Ashley snots about how she'll get off using the "juries are gullible and easily manipulated by strong imagery" defense, and we get the credits, because this is now the new, edgy CSI where we get unsettling endings so we can ask ourselves, "Why should we give a crap about the hard work forensics investigators do, when it will all be undone by lawyers?" and "Why is this show messing with a formerly satisfying formula now?" Maybe I'll get some answers for Christmas. If it I do, it'll be merry indeed. And now, have a happy -- see you in '04.