Butterflied

Due to adult content
Viewer discretion is advised.

Hey, don't blame me -- I'm not the one who forgot the comma between the dependent clause and the independent one. It's almost poetry, isn't it? You could go e.e. cummings-style with it:

she said
        (or believed she did)
that �
                discretion
(does anyone have anyanyanyfreethought now, we all listen to TV)
is
advised.

Or you could just go with a haiku:

You under 18?
Then don't watch, unless your mom
Gives you the okay.

In any event, the warning isn't meant to make you think of poetry. It's supposed to warn you that tonight's episode is all about being able to vote and drink legally, since it has adult content in it. Oh, wait�"adult" is a euphemism for "sexual," isn't it?

Let's get on with it! There aren't nearly enough sex-related murders on this show. The episode starts off with some really atmospheric piano music, if by "atmospheric" you mean "hitting two minor keys at measured intervals to make everything sound creepy," and Gil in a pristine, sleek house. Naturally, he's alone and it's dark. We see his bootie-clad feet carefully shuffle down the hall, and he trains a flashlight on everything as he goes. The victim's house is, of course, spotless. Not that murder victims will be relieved about much, what with meeting a violent, involuntary, and untimely death and all, but maybe knowing that their houses are spotless for the CSIs might be good for some peace of mind in the afterlife. For Type-A murder victims, anyway.

The piano plunks, we see two wine glasses laid out as if the victim was expecting company, and Gil continues on down the hall, carefully noting the footprints in the carpet. He reaches the boudoir, which could double as a rest stop on the annual Danaus plexippus winter migration circuit, notes something red spilled on the carpet, then heads into the bedroom, where there are clothes on the bed and closet opened so we can see that the victim's almost as much of a Container Store fiend as I am. And then we head into a bathroom the size of my guest bedroom, where the victim is doing balasana, a.k.a. child's pose, in the shower. There's a lot of blood on the floor, but we're really supposed to notice the butterfly tattoo on the small of her back, peeking above her thong line. I send up a small prayer that the victim does not behave like notorious butterfly-loving celebs Drew Barrymore or Mariah Carey -- both of whom maybe grasped the whole emerging-from-the-cocoon-of-addiction-into-the-beautiful-wings-of-sobriety metaphor a little too fervently to their pneumatic bosoms --or else we're looking at a plausible justifiable manslaughter here.

Anyway, Gil checks out the thong, the butterfly tattoo, and the woman. She's brunette and youthful. He hunkers down and stares at her for a while until her features begin to look like Sara's. Yeah, that'll help him work on the case.

Gil comes outside and stares at Sara until Brass comes over and asks if Gil's ready, and Gil replies, "For now, nobody enters this house except CSI."

And then The Who kick in, wondering who this hallucinating stranger who doesn't issue punchy taglines before the credits is.

When we get back, Gil is handing out assignments. Warrick gets to go through the cars, since that will give him something to do without actually giving him screen time, thus fulfilling the unwritten Law of Subplot Subbasement on this show. Brass tells Warrick to skip doing the VW, as it belongs to the victim's friend, who apparently called it in. Warrick comments sympathetically, "That's too bad. This'll be a day she'll never forget." Gil then tells Sara to take the perimeter. Naturally, she decides to disagree with him in front of everyone else: "What? You just did a one-hour walk-through. The perimeter can-not be a priority." Gil repeats himself: "I need you to work the outside. Catherine and I will work the inside." Sara heads off without another word. Way to go, Team Player. Catherine tells Gil she'll go talk to the friend. Is this happening before or after she works the inside with Gil, or is there another Catherine Gil was referring to? Whatever it was, Gil directs Catherine to find out where the friend walked and what she touched in the house. Before she does, she gives Brass a heads-up on a guy hanging out across the street with, "He looks like he has something to say."

Brass heads off to talk to the neighbor while Catherine talks to Kelly McNeil, the victim's best friend and discoverer of the body. Kelly explains, "Deb and I were best friends. We were supposed to get together yesterday. It was our day off." Catherine takes in the scrubs and asks if Kelly and Deb are nurses. Yep -- they work at Desert Palm Hospital. Anyway -- Kelly and Deb made lunch plans, but Deb ditched her for Michael, this surgical intern she's been seeing for a month or so. Anyway, Deb was AWOL from work, so Kelly let herself in with the spare key and found the body. Catherine asks if Kelly touched anything, and Kelly replies, "NoI walked in, I saw her, and I ran out." We get the Osmont-cam view of Kelly beating feet, thus explaining the footprints in the hall. Catherine asks, "ThisMichael? Is he just a guy, or somebody special?" He was somebody special. Kelly hasn't seen him at the hospital either; she figured both Deb and Michael were playing hooky.

Meanwhile, Sara and her long scarf go ambling around the perimeter. Sara finds a whole lot of nothing interesting.

Meanwhile, back in the house, Gil has resumed squatting to the body and waiting for the hallucination to arrive. Catherine comes over, checks out the body, and comments, "One thing I can never get over with this job: anything can happen to anybody." "That's why we're here," Gil replies. That's deep, Gil. You just keep thinking -- that's what you're good at. Catherine checks the body again, appears to notice something, then notices Gil's face and wisely decides to swallow whatever it was she was about to say. Instead, she looks around the giant bathroom. I take it back: it's not as big as our guest bedroom. It's as big as our living room, plus our foyer and dining room. Catherine comments, "I bet the bathroom is the reason she bought this place." Or maybe she liked the idea of having really nosy neighbors. Gil looks around and crankily asks, "What am I smelling?" Catherine thinks it's bleach. She goes on to note that the arterial spray was neck-high, so Debbie was standing when she was attacked, and the highest gush of blood was where there was the most volume. We see all this in flashback. Gil notes, "Definite lack of lividity. She must have bled out." Catherine reasons that the killer had to be super-bloody, but there are no footprints or handprints. Gil comments, "She looks like she was placed in this position." Catherine wonders, "What's the message?"

Sara and Warrick have followed the food to the kitchen. They're now checking out Deb's fridge and making much of nonfat milk. Apparently, Deb unloaded and put away her groceries a bag at a time, which seems counterintuitive to me: why not bring them all inside, sort them by location, then go from station to station, so you only have to open and close the fridge, freezer, and pantry once apiece? Or am I a little too Type-A about my groceries? Mr. Sobell thinks so, since I have been known to sort my groceries by food group on the cashier's conveyor belt and give the bag boy (or bag girl) instructions on what should get bagged with what for maximum unpacking efficiency. Anyway, Sara checks out the Carr's water crackers, the no-doubt-rank-by-now Brie, and coupons with no receipt. Warrick and Sara then back-date the likely grocery trip by checking the date on the milk carton (Jan. 23), noting that it's "eight days from now," reasoning that milk is delivered daily and people reach back for the freshest in a ten-day window, so Deb was in Pendale's on the 13th, which was the last date anyone saw her boyfriend's car out front.

Back in the bathroom, Catherine is processing the sinks while Gil sits in the tub and tries to swab out the drain. They test the swabs for the presence of blood, and find it in both the sink and the tub. Catherine sums up, "So there's blood in all four drains, followed by bleach." Gil asks, "He kills Debbie in the shower, so he washes up in both sinks, and in the tub? Why?" "The answer is in the drains," Catherine replies.

Catherine begins snapping pictures of the mystery meat while Gil and Warrick make boo-boo-kitty faces. Then Gil says, "There's gotta be more," on the closed-captioning while Gil on the screen looks kind of wild-eyed, and then Gil wanders on down to see exactly how many more of these surprise packages are in other trash cans.

Answer: a lot. It's now full daylight, and the CSIs are finding that Ziploc seals in more than freshness. In fact, Warrick reports, "I think I found the victim's internal organs." Catherine gives him a hand -- someone else's -- and he concludes, "This guy meant business." Really? Because all of us civilian types were under the impression that dismemberment and Ziplocking were purely avocational pastimes. Catherine holds up another package -- as it were -- and calls out, "I think I can confirm the victim's male." It figures Catherine would be the one to fish out the tackle. Warrick looks over, horrified. Gil, meanwhile, has sworn off meat to examine a vacuum cleaner bag. Catherine continues fishing out bags of people parts as Warrick reports that they have the victim's clothes, neatly folded. And then he finds the guy's face, and then, only then, does he come to the conclusion that maybe Brass has been wasting his time looking for Clark elsewhere. Just then, Gil pulls out a particularly pink and chunky bag and sighs in disgust.

Meanwhile, back in the lab, Sara's filtering away. Well, she is the vegetarian who's totally off meat, so maybe Gil sent her there before she developed another work-related dietary condition. Wait, that makes no sense -- it's not like she's a cannibal and Gil's all, "If she fishes this guy's kneecaps out of the recycling bin, she's off animal-based protein forever!" So I have no good explanation for why Sara's missing all the fun. She's picking crap out of the filter and examining it when Liam comes over and says, "I heard about the shower. A nurse, huh?" Oh, not again. Sara sighs, "Multiple hairs, multiple donors." Liam leers, "Looks like she had a few 'friends' over." Where is he getting his impression of nurses -- the local adult video store? Someone needs to tell him that Naughty Nighttime Nurses isn't a documentary. Sara nearly does after Liam continues, "A little Nurses Gone Wild." It's too bad she stops short of pulling his lower lip over his head and snarling, "Let's see you ask a nurse to go wild fixing that."

Anyway, the two of them switch to all-business when Liam notices that the hairs are all blanched thanks to the bleach, and Sara adds that any DNA left has probably been denatured. We zoom in, courtesy of the TMIcam, to see the bleach sundering all the little phosphodiester bonds between the A/T and C/G base pairs. Back on the human scale, Sara checks the segment of pipe she took back to the lab, and happens to find a single hair with a skin tag. O! Happy day!

Down in the morgue, Emergency Backup David is busy shuffling the Ziploc bags around like he's assembling the world's wettest jigsaw puzzle. David the Sanguine Coroner is coolly noting, "[Deb] was exsanguinated. Time of death is anybody's guess." We find out Deb had a deep incised wound of the anterior and lateral neck, transecting both carotids and the anterior trachea, with a cut likely made by a scalpel. Then he loses interest and heads on over to Michael's body, saying, "Dismembering an adult male with this precision, without cutting through the bone -- 12 hours, minimum." Catherine comments, "Half a day -- that's patience." Or a serial killer's uncanny time-management skills at work. But I don't think we'll be seeing another multitasking murderer in this episode -- it's not sweeps yet. Anyway, David decrees, "There's a perverse elegance to this butchery." Catherine breathes, "I'm not so sure I see it that way: a killer with knowledge of anatomy, whose tool is a scalpel. I think the butcher was a doctor." She orders Emergency Backup David to do a ten-card for Jacqui to confirm Michael's ID.

Back in the apartment, Gil is playing with some glass butterfly statue and looking all Jamie Gumb with the butterflies and moths and what-have-you, before picking up a framed photo of Deb partying hearty like nurses apparently do. He shakes his head, studies the picture some more, then has himself an Osmont-cam moment where Deb's sitting on the edge of the bed with her back to him; he can see her reflection in the mirror. She turns around to look at him, and then there's a flash and it's an out-of-focus Sara staring at Gil in the mirror; he's trying not to look at her. Gil does some more staring at who-knows-what until his cell phone rings and snaps him out of it. Sara says, "Hey!" and Gil replies, "Sara. Um. Hey, listen, I'm in a bad area right now because I'm hallucinating something fierce and you're all over my subconscious. Can you call me back later?" Or something like that. Sara shares the skin tag news, and he's all, "Lob it at Liam, okay? Look, I gotta go -- the you I'm hallucinating is giving me the mother of all dirty looks. Don't mess with my head by showing up in person."

Sara deals with this apparent rejection by returning to the familiar -- i.e., taking the chance to destroy a car. It's Michael's car; Warrick informs us that it was found in the long-term parking at McCarran Airport. I'm not exactly spoiling you for the remaining 30 minutes of the episode when I tell you that we never find out exactly how it got there in any way that makes any sense whatsoever. Justgo with the car's discovery, okay? In any event, they don't destroy the car, but fog it instead so they can get prints, and discover that the driver wiped everything but the passenger seat clean, and whatever he put on the seat to prevent those all-incriminating Thigh Prints from getting laid down, he took with him. The "whatever" turns out to be a black plastic bag, handily rippable for adjusting the seat. Warrick and Sara realize the doctor was a relatively petite 5'9", and the seat's pushed back a little far even for the 6'2" Warrick, so they're looking for a really tall killer. Hey, remember that scene where Doctor Kyle Secor towered over Brass? I'm just saying.