Big, massive props to DragonScribe, who gave me a crash course in Japanese artifacts and history. Everything correct in the recap is due to her; all errors were introduced by me.
We open with a shot of the south end of the Strip --
Me: Hey, look! It's our view from the suite we stayed in this weekend.
Mr. Sobell: No, it's not. Because there's the Trop.
Me: It's our view except for the Trop.
Mr. Sobell: Except we were in the Trop and --
Me: Silence!
Mr. Sobell: That's not our view --
Me: You're ruining my story.
Mr. Sobell: I'll shut up now.
Me: Too late. The moment's over.
And I would have regaled you with a story about how we decided to go to Vegas last weekend on a whim, and that whim landed us in a massive traffic jam outside Barstow for almost two hours thanks to a four-truck pileup, and by the time we finally dragged ourselves into the Tropicana's lobby at 2:30 AM Saturday, seven and a half hours after leaving from L.A. after work on Friday, we had lost our room, but then the manager gave us a complimentary upgrade to a suite, where we had a fabulous view and an in-room Jacuzzi, and I had the opportunity to sit in the Jacuzzi with a drink in hand and ponder if I was wrong to make fun of the Montecito for comping everyone. (My well-considered, if slightly tipsy answer: No. No, I was not.)
But the moment's passed. So no story for you! Direct your complaints to Mr. Sobell. He's used to dealing with mine.
But you're not here to get travel updates from me. You'd rather read about how the camera swoops around to the Bellagio and someone with an indeterminable accent declares, "People say that Lass Vegass hasnoculture. No hisstory. That we ahmulate, not create. They forget [beat] that this was once a dessssert [beat] from which thisss city [beat] wasscreated. Millionss come every week [beat] and sharetheirmoney with uss --" If, by "share," you mean "lose." "Well, tonight, we give back [beat] an exhibition of rare and valuable Japanese antiquities [beat] shown in the U.S. for the firsst time. The sseventeenth century is owned by one of the Mediterranean's most special guessts. Mr. Yuri Yamamoto. Who ssahdly cahn't be weeth us here tonahght. To hiss impeccable taste. On buhhahlf of mah hotel and the city of Lass Vegass, Ithankhim." Y'all, I only transcribe this stuff phonetically; I don't tell the actor to speak like this. The well-dressed crowd makes a polite, murmuring toast. Everyone drinks the bubbly, and then there's a big dramatic scream.
We switch to a woman standing at the edge of the pool, gasping, "The cable fell! He was electrocuted! Oh my God!!" She flings herself on the nearest man in a show of horror. People mill around, the security guard checks the body floating face-down in the pool, and there's general mayhem, or at least as much mayhem as a bunch of entirely-too-sober society types can generate by shuffling around muttering, "Peas and carrots, rhubarb, rhubarb, crime scene, peas and carrots, guy floating in pool, rhubarb." The live wire crackles, and Bloviating Accent Guy ("Ask me [beat] about the Kim Delaney schooloftempo!") just stands in the middle of the crowd looking really casual for someone whose party just got blown by a fuse.
Cut to the CSIs coming in: Gil must have called Sara in on a personal day again -- a personal day she spent on Ice Station Zebra. The two of them pass Brass, whose "Watch yourself, Gil" goes totally unheeded. Gil checks out the body, which is floating in a face-down, spread-eagled position while the wire still snaps, crackles, and pops merrily. I can't believe nobody's tried to cut a circuit and take that thing out yet. Gil comments, "This is odd: arms and legs become dead weight in the water. He should have sunk to the bottom of the pool." Sara gleefully adds, "He wouldn't float until after putrefaction." Gil replies, "Nice try, Sara, but the promotion's off the table, so can the fancy talk." Oh, not really. I just figured since the writers have a big hate-on for Sara this season, why not just draw all that passive-aggressive interaction out into the open? Anyway, speaking of passive-aggressive interaction, Gil asks Sara to head toward the danger (i.e. the snapping power cable) so that he can stick a non-conducting metal pole in the pool without danger.
Sara comes over, hauling the car battery fueling the "power cable" with her. Gil looks a little appalled. Perhaps that's because Sara's hefting a car battery like it's a bag of groceries, and Gil's realized that she has super-strength, so she can snap his neck like a pretzel if she ever stops moping over The Love That Won't Be and gets good and angry instead. Anyway, now that Sara's eliminated the chance for Gil to get electrocuted, he's okay with fishing the body out of the pool, and the music does this little Psycho strings shriek as Gil lifts the head and finds out that he's cradling a CPR dummy. Brass shakes his head, and Gil shrugs, "This is not a crime scene."
Fortunately, the alarms goes off. They must have detected a plot point in the vicinity. Everyone heads inside where, sure enough, some presumably priceless sword is missing from its case. The security guard rolls his eyes expressively from behind his duct-tape cocoon. Gil raises his eyebrows and say with just a touch of asperity, "This is a crime scene!" Well, thank God for that. We'd hate to see Gil waste his time, wouldn't we?
The Who would like to know who you are.
When we get back from commercials, Gil is about to give the security guard the equivalent of an industrial-strength Biore strip rip-off. He apologizes and says that there's no gentle way to rip off a duct-tape gag. Brass goes by in the background, grumbling at someone to turn off the alarm. Sara's standing in front of the display case, saying, "They only took one piece -- a seventeenth-century samurai sword." Brass asks whether anyone said how much it was worth; Sara replies, "Worth the risk of walking past a hundred guests in a crowded room." Strangely, finance.yahoo.com's currency converter lacks the theft-risk-to-dollars option. Brass heads over to talk to the security guard and ask him if he saw anything. The guard replies that he did not, because he was beaned from behind. The blood spatter on the table corroborates this. The guard moans that he feels like an idiot, and Gil says sharply, "Well, you may have a concussion." Someone should tell Gil that IQ points don't fall out every time you bop your gourd. He's not likely to step on any lying around on the floor.
Meanwhile, Sara wanders over and checks out a suit of armor with a small card telling us it's a suit of armor from the seventeenth century. She notices a puddle on the floor in front of the display.
The security guard comes in and mumbles the token CYA nonsense about a lack of suspicious characters and how the security cameras aren't actually trained on anything valuable. The guard then grumbles, "They got the sword -- the most expensive piece in the collection. That's all Mr. Caulfield needs right now." Brass is also over this cue. The casino security guard's all blah-blee-blah, recession, blah-blee-blah, terrorism kind of puts the damper on massive public gatherings, blah-blee-blah, Indian casinos are getting a lot of business, blah blee blah. Brass heads off to find the chick who found the body.
Gil and Sara are swabbing their way around the room. Sara notes that her water puddle actually smells sweet, and adds that there's no food or drink allowed in the museum. Gil helpfully tells Sara to take a sample back to Liam, since she would have never known to do that on her own, what with only working crime scenes for at least four years. Gil goes back to noticing the cardboard roll that used to be in the middle of a duct-tape roll, hanging right on the velvet-rope-pole-thingy.
Gil will be contemplating that for a while, because it's time to switch to the B-plot, where the matter-of-fact cop from "Invisible Evidence" is commenting that this is the third time she's hit this house, and that she thinks the house is cursed. Catherine wryly comments, "You don't strike me as the type who believes in curses." The tough-talking cop lady shoots back, "I'm not the type to believe in coincidences, either." Warrick asks if the house is abandoned. No, the owners are just super-casual about both the décor and the security. Actually, the bank foreclosed a few years ago, and the long-suffering neighbor door heard a scream. That house looks like the Addams Family's cottage up at the Vineyard. What the hell are all those turrets and cupolas doing in a town better known for its adobe and stucco?
The CSIs grab a flashlight and head inside. As Catherine walks in, you can see a glowing crucifix in the background over her left shoulder. It looks like the lights from a church or something. The CSIs tromp around the hardwood floors making a lot of noise, yet still manage to scare the living bejeesus out of Emergency Backup David while he hovers around the dead body. He eventually recovers and tells us, "Jugular's been punctured. Ah, two marks. Possibly bite marks." Catherine's having a hard time with this idea. Emergency Backup David explains, "Punctures are thirty-two millimeters apart. That's the average distance between the eyeteeth in an adult male's mouth." Catherine comments that those puncture wounds don't look like teeth marks, and Emergency Backup David gives an embarrassed sidelong glance as he asks, "What about fangs?" Warrick shoots him a dirty look and asks, "Fangs? Come on." Emergency Backup David shoots him another dirty look and opens the dead girl's mouth to reveal -- tah-dah! Fangs! Catherine looks taken aback. Warrick looks like he's not looking forward to apologizing to Emergency Backup David. Anyway, the dead chick bled out, and yet, the blood is nowhere to be found. Well, then all Warrick has to do is look for the fat vampire, right? Catherine decides that her time would best be spent looking freaked out. Warrick still looks extremely wary and freaked out. He tells the room at large, "I'm going to go look around." Years of watching horror movies have given me an unwanted fluency in the conventions of the horror-film genre; suffice it to say, I'm just glad Gary Dourdan's under contract so he can return week. Catherine finally recovers, or suffers a fit of possession by the wandering spirit of Johnnie Cochran: "If she's bit, there's spit." And if there's spit, there's DNA -- so backup coroner, swab away.
Warrick calls, "Catherine! Take a look at-- AIIIGH!" Oh, he does not. He summons Catherine, she heads in, and they look at the Fayke Gothick symbol painted in red on the floor boards. Warrick says, "Please tell me it's not blood." "Okay. It's not blood," Catherine replies. Oh, no she doesn't. She moves in to swab the livid red symbol while creepy music plays and confirms that it's paint. Warrick states the obvious with, "Well, we know one thing for sure: this place wasn't vacant." It's shrewd observations like that which made Warrick Gil's favorite.
Back at the primary crime scene, Brass is busy wondering why a private security chief is stupid enough to let all the guests take off right after a crime was committed. In the background, Nicky's engaging in a battle of wits with the CPR dummy. So far, it's a draw. The security guard ambles off to go hang around the periphery of another casino crime, and Nicky looks up and comments, "Weird night." Brass snaps at him and the CPR dummy, "That's not the only dummy around here." Nicky screams, "BITCH! I KILL YOU! Oh. Wait. You were talking about the security guard. I get it. Ah -- heh. Ha. Hem. Forget I said anything, okay?" Oh, he does not. The rage diaries are so over now that he has the promotion. Also, Nicky's smarter now that he has the promotion. Should we start calling him Snicky, for Smart Nicky, a la Newsradio's Smatthew? Snicky tells us that the fake body is the kind of premium CPR training dummy all the hot professional rescue types use. Brass asks if there are any prints, and Snicky dismissively tells him that all the prints would have washed off in the pool by the time the dummy was pulled out.
Back in the morgue, David the sanguine coroner looks up from the vampire victim and cracks to Catherine and Warrick, "I heard you found evidence of vampires in North Las Vegas." Oh, so that's how they're explaining the Addams Family mansion. And the big, green lawn. And the trees. Maybe "North Las Vegas" is a euphemism for "Tahoe." Warrick pooh-poohs the vampire talk by ascribing it to "occult, ritualistic activity" instead. That's much more reassuring. Anyway, David's IDed the vic as Angela Sommerville, age twenty, from Henderson, NV. It helps when the vic has her license in her pocket. Unsurprisingly, the cause of death was exsanguinations. Catherine asks about the fangs, and David says blithely, "Her bark was worse than her bite," and snaps off the fangs with a grinding crunch. He explains that they're acrylic, and that if you check out her gumline, "thin grooves carved into the canines' enamel -- fangs are clip-ons. Multiple bite marks on the tongue suggests she was still breaking them in." Ha! Nobody talks about the vampire dorks who bite their tongues.
Catherine deflects attention further south -- to Angela's ankle, where she's got a big, fat ankh tattooed. Catherine only knows it as "the same symbol painted on the floor of the crime scene," but Warrick's been hanging with the goth-lite Leah and catching up on his Sandman comic books because he correctly pegs it as "The Ankh --Egyptian symbol of eternal life." Warrick adds, "I went online to find it's also the universal insignia for vampires." In what newsgroup did he unearth this tidbit -- alt.vampires.pretentious-dork or alt.vampyes.remember-the-internet-is-filled-with-freaks? David gets in on the vampire act: "Dracula didn't drink all the blood -- I made sure to send a sample to tox. I'm not sure if it's probative. Multiple incised wounds on the anterior of both shoulders. Some are fresh." Warrick notes that the shoulder area is rich in blood, and I have a weird imaginative burp where I imagine Count Alton Von Brown whipping out an anatomy chart and telling people where to find the best veins on Good Bites. Warrick points out that if you're into drinking blood, doing so in an easy area that heals quickly is a good place to start. Catherine asks why anyone would switch to the jugular, and both men give her their best serious looks. You know they're both biting back the reply, "To recruit into their army of the undead. Duh."
Gil's futzing with all the duct tape, trying to lift evidence from it. Sara comes in and asks if he's got anything. Gil replies, "Some Phomollient, and tapes of ER's early seasons, back when your hair looked seriously good." Oh, he does not. And Sara's hair doesn't look as bad as it normally does, but would it physically kill the hairdresser to give the roots a little volume? I'm all for verisimilitude, but this hat-hair look is a little too much. Also -- this lighting? Makes Sara look more like a dead crime victim than the so-called "Hey, she looks like you" victim two weeks ago did. You've got to work hard to make someone look that tired, especially in an episode that's given Catherine big, Farrah Fawcett-Majors-style hair. Anyway, Gil tells Sara he may have a partial print of whomever taped up the security guard. He also notes that the duct tape was cut; Sara tells us that means someone planned to use it in trussing someone up. Sara shares her big find: the liquid she sampled per Gil's request is glucose syrup, a.k.a. sugar water. The two narrowly miss a culinary discussion on the merits of sugar water so that they can talk about swords: Gil wonders why the thieves focused only on that, and Sara replies that it's the one piece in the exhibit a thief could slip down his or her pant leg. Gil asks, "If you're going to steal from a casino, why take an antique? Why not take money?" Because we've all seen Ocean's Eleven, and not even the promise of quality time with Don Cheadle, George Clooney, and Brad Pitt can lure would-be criminals into doing all that work? Capers are pretty resource-intensive, you know.
Gil then switches tracks: "How's your knowledge of Japanese history, particularly antiquities?" Sara says, "About as good as the writers'. Why?" Or something to that effect. Gil goes Zen: "To find the hunter, know the game."
Back in the B-plot, Catherine and Warrick are getting an eyeful of a young vampyre's home life by taking a tour of the Sommerville manse with the recently bereaved parents. They're remarkably upbeat for two people whose daughter recent bled to death on the floor of an abandoned house. Sure, Mrs. S cops to her daughter's hitting a rough patch during puberty: "It was like she couldn't get comfortable in her own skin," but what teen doesn't? And then, we find out, Angela went goth six months ago, wearing black clothing and only going out at night. What did she do all day? Write poems about the inky darkness in her soul? Hiss dramatically whenever anyone opened the curtains? Watch the episode of South Park where Stan goes goth and mutter darkly about how that show wasn't funny anymore? Anyway, Mr. S says that he and Mrs. S were very supportive of Angela's goth phase because they only wanted her to be happy. Catherine pulls out an elaborately decorated notebook and reads,"The Black Veil: 13 Rules of Community." Mrs. S explains that it's basically Angela's vampyre slam book, and that she wrote down her thoughts in the book. There are a lot of blank pages.
Catherine asks, "Your daughter believed she was a vampire?" Mrs. S explains, "She was eighteen! She wanted to stand out." She did -- by falling into a wormhole that compressed space and time, and aging at three times the normal human rate, if she was eighteen six months ago and twenty at the time of her death yesterday. Mrs. S continues, "I tried not to judge her, but I also wanted to know what was going on in her head. So I violated her privacy and read her diary. Non-judgmentally, of course." Or something like that; at least Mr. S calls it snooping. Mrs. S explains how each time Angela tried on a different subculture, Mrs. S would take a crash course. The folks at RE/Search probably knew her by name. Catherine keeps rifling through Angela's items and finds HIV test lab results. Interestingly enough, Angela is listed as being twenty in the lab test too. Mrs. S talks about how HIV tests were "the one thing [she and Mr. S] always insisted upon, no matter what." Oh, she is such a creampuff. If I had been swanning around the house in black tulle and ankh tattoos after graduating from high school, the folks would have immediately brought down the "my house, my rules" hammer instead of reading up on my wacky new subculture and insisting on HIV tests.
Warrick has already written off the Sommervilles as well-meaning do-nothings and opened the closet door, where we see that Angela's erected a shrine to James Haven (a.k.a. Angelina Jolie's Most Notorious Oscar Date). Warrick wants to know who the guy is. Guess he missed the Oscars that year. Mrs. S doesn't know, but explains, "The statue's an incubus. According to the legend, incubi seduce young women as they sleep, and drink their blood." She sounds so calm when talking about how her daughter erected a shrine to a total stranger with statues depicting nepenthean assault. Harkening back to the waning days of my own adolescence, if my parents had discovered that business in my closet, I would have been out on the lawn with the statue while my dad stood in the doorway brandishing a crucifix and screaming, "The power of Christ compels you! The power of Christ compels you!" Not that it would have actually happened: I was too lazy and frugal to acquire any the necessary paraphernalia for any subculture, and I never really understood the point to any scene that set up a social structure as Byzantine as the mainstream society it purported to reject. ["If that's College for 'all this vampire shit is smurfy in the extreme, and Angela should at the very least have been mercilessly teased out of acting so lame, then I agree." -- Wing Chun]
And that explains why I'm recapping this while Catherine is giving the Sommervilles the 411 on how Angela died. Catherine mentions that Angela wasn't alone when she died, and asks who might have been with her. Subculture scholar and part-time parent Mrs. S replies, "Her court. I can give you their names." So they don't know who that creep their daughter worships is or what she was doing in an old house, but they know her court? How did that come up in conversation? "Mo-om! You're making me look bad in front of my court." Anyway, we learn that a court is like a coven for the vampyre set.
Back in the A-plot, Gil and Sara wander into the collection's display area and see all the empty cases. Sara --whose hair looks much better in this scene than in did in the ones -- quips, "Don't tell me: they came back and stole the rest?" Given the geniuses guarding this collection, I wouldn't rule that out. The security guy explains how Mr. Yamamoto requested that the collection be moved to Mr. Caulfield's vault, and since this wasn't really a crime scene or anything, nobody saw a problem with moving stuff first, and telling law enforcement later. Since the CSIs aren't trustworthy enough to be let in the vault, they'll have to settle for looking at photographs that the currently-vacationing hotel registrar happened to take when she logged the collection. You know, I find it hard to believe that the collection didn't come with its own copy of a log book for insurance purposes, but I could be more paranoid than your average multimillion-dollar art collector. Gil notes that he's just looking at a list, and asks for a copy of the insurance; the security guy says that Yamamoto packs his own policy, so it never occurred to the hotel registrar to ask for anything. The security guard snots that the Mediterranean was taking security precautions, but refused to assume any responsibility, adding, "We're a casino, not a museum. For that, you want the Venetian or the Bellagio." Or maybe I embellished there. Gil looks suspicious.
Meanwhile, Catherine's holding the court. She says to one dead-eyed makeup ad waiting to happen,"Alice, answer the question," while the girl stares off into the middle distance. Another vampire -- clearly the outreach coordinator for the group -- helpfully points out that Alice only answers to "Luminessa." Catherine and Warrick try and few more questions, but these sullen young women aren't answering anything. Clearly, Warrick and Catherine should have picked up a braid of garlic at the local veggie stand and waved it around threateningly. Catherine finally says, "I've had enough. Your friend is dead. This is a murder case. If you're not willing to help us, we will split you up and treat you as murder suspects, hold you for twenty-four hours. Is that what you want?" Evidently, the vampyres prefer to do their suffering in the luxury of their parents' suburban pads, as opposed to the holding tank. The sulky Alice tells us that Angela preferred to be known as "Daegonna." Apparently, she was hectoring the rest of the court last night about how being a vampyre wasn't about making up elaborately morbid names and wearing a lot of pale matte makeup, but about actually drinking blood. The rest of the court looks appalled at this idea during the flashback. We learn that Angela's been going to a "blood bar" -- yes, it is exactly what it sounds like -- and called the rest of her court "gajas," which is vampyre for "poser," because all they wanted to do was dress up like vampyres. The girls are all piqued at this slur, but emphatically stress that they think drinking blood is icky. The outreach coordinator solemnly asserts, "You don't have to drink blood to be a vampyre. For us, it's spiritual." That's like saying you're a spiritual vegetarian who eats hamburger because you can't stand the taste of tofurkey. ["I was going to make an analogy about saying you're a lesbian but not eating...well, anyway, yours was much more polite." -- Wing Chun] Alice adds, "We feed off each other's energies." "Energy," the third one vapidly echoes. She's so totally the joiner vampyre. You know she'd jump over to the werewolves if it meant she could still shave her legs. Anyway, these vampyres "voted [Angela] invisible and kicked her out of [their] court." Being condemned by fake vampyres doesn't seem like something that would bother a real vampyre.
Sara's reading off the inventory while Gil wanders among the empty cases. Gil calls out, "Seventeenth-century suit of armor." The card reads: "Suit of armor. 17th c. Lacquer, horsehair, iron, beading, silk cord, wood. Collection of Yuri Yamamoto. The Japanese suit of samurai armor was only worn by the highest military class and emperors. Oda Nobunaga played a key role in shaping the course of history in feudal Japan. His policy of unifying a country controlled by many feuding daimyo was furthered in a series of victories characterized by brilliant war tactics and firearms." Gil asks, "Wasn't the Japanese military established long after that?" Sara whips out a book to check: "1868, by Emperor Meiji."
Note, however, that Gil is making the mistake of assuming that armor exists in tandem with an army, and not as something a samurai or head of a family might have kept around as a heirloom of the pitched battles that the Tokugawa Shogunate more or less put the kibosh on in the early seventeenth century. Armor was part of Japanese military culture from the fourteenth-sixteenth century. So Gil should have probably questioned why the suit wasn't older, as opposed to it being too old, if he's at all up on his Japanese military history. I'd like to state most emphatically that I personally am not, but apparently his reasoning here is driving more knowledgeable people batty, so I figured we'd go into its crazy-making potential. The upshot is that the suit of armor is apparently not of the same time period as the other pieces, i.e. "out of place." "Just like the sugar water we found nearby," Sara replies. Incidentally, that sugar water's still there, not having evaporated in the time it took for these two to run back to the lab, futz around with the duct tape and swab, hit the library for a book on Japanese military history, and head back to the crime scene that's been packed up and moved out.
Gil's cell phone rings just then: it's Nicky, who's all excited about reporting a hit on the partial print. It's from the duct-taped security guard, Brandon Miller. Gil says, "I thought he was unconscious. How does his print end up on the tape?" "Do I look like I'm standing at the scene of the crime? You tell me, Beardo," Nicky shoots back. Oh, he does not. He leaves it to Gil to figure out: Gil borrows Sara's duct tape and sits in the chair, mounting the tape on the rope-pole thing and rolling himself into a taped embrace. Well, it lacks the zing of their duct-tape adventures, but this is after the S.S. Geek Love hit the plot iceberg and sank, so I guess Gil tapes himself now, if you know what I mean. Gil lets Sara cut him free while he muses, "We've been conned." Sara points out that it's not like Brandon Miller could have smuggled the sword in his pants and had it elude the paramedics' attention. He probably could have if Hank was attending to the scene. Just then, Gil hears a faint rattling on the very periphery of human hearing, and, thanks to his post-op, superhuman ears, is able to pinpoint its exact location and determine that the purloined sword was, in fact, stashed in an AC duct. Gil finds it and mutters, "Domo arigato."
Cut to Gil and Sara walking out with the sword while the security guard says, "So Brandon Miller never made it to the hospital. Concussion, my happy ass." Gil explains that it's one of the oldest cons in the book -- to steal the item, stash it in plain sight, and come back for it after the heat's died down. The guard's all, "Feel free to tell it to Mr. Yamamoto, since he's busy handing Mr. Caulfield a piece of his mind right now."
In any event, we're in Mr. Caulfield's office, with his blinding giant teeth and his weird accent, and the whole scene is just laying the groundwork for how slimy Caulfield is (how ironic that he shares his last name with one of the most famously anti-phony heroes in American letters) and how Mr. Yamamoto doesn't have a suit of armor in his collection. Mr. Caulfield looks all dramatically dismayed, while Gil and Sara just glare around the room suspiciously. Mr. Yamamoto asks, "What is going on here?" Gil continues giving everyone the stink-eye as he says, "Mr. Caulfield, we'd like to take a look at your personal vault."
Mr. Caulfield keys in a euphonious sequence, and the door clicks open. Mr. Caulfield immediately pulls the Captain Renault number: "The cash! It's gone! How the hell did they get in here?" Gil checks out one of the bill wrappers laying around like so much confetti and asks exactly how much mad money Caulfield kept on hand. Turns out he's tucked $10 million away for emergencies. Gil notes the suit of armor and flings his metaphor across a continent, calling the suit a Trojan horse. The idea, of course, is that a slight and felonious person could hide out in the suit, get bundled into the vault, and then work from the inside. Caulfield continues the righteous histrionics: "Get my lawyers! Assemble everyone! I need answers!" Given the importance of the case, he'll round up twice the usual number of suspects. Gil watches all the fuss depart the room and remarks to Sara, "And the con goes on."
Back at the lab, Gil and Sara are taking apart the armor; I guess now that it doesn't belong to the wealthy and mysteriously accent-free Yamamoto, it's okay for the CSIs to play with it. Gil finds plastic bags with tubing: one for the sugar solution, and one as the slimmed-down Stadium Pal. Sara continues playing with the bands, while Gil plays with the digital recorder he found, concluding that the thief used it to log the code so he could escape. Gil heads over to the keypad and presses a few sequences, humming under his breath until he matches the keys to the notes they play, and taps in the code. It swings open, and Caulfield looks surprised. He wants to know how Gil opened the safe door. Gil holds the recorder aloft and says, "The same way the thief did -- using your musical code." Caulfield smiles slightly. Gil asks if Caulfield has video surveillance. Oh, not in the vault -- there's no reason why a safekeeping location should be secure. But Caulfield will be happy to get Gil a lot of irrelevant footage. Gil ends up doing some more suspicious glaring.
Catherine and Warrick head into Liam the lab tech's lair; he's got a wooden stake ready for Catherine, and an extra crucifix for Warrick. You know he sees himself as a cool slayer type, but in reality, Liam would be sucking down the spiders as a modern-day Renfield. We're here to talk about Angela's tox levels: she had a blood alcohol level of .14, and the tox panel detected traces of thujone, the psychoactive chemical found in absinthe. Warrick is all, "I thought absinthe was illegal," and Liam confirms that, yes, the U.S. banned it in 1912, since "apparently, toxic byproducts are released during the distilling process. Stuff's supposed to make you a little crazy." Catherine asks how Angela would have gotten hold of the absinthe; Liam says you can get it in some underground clubs. I personally wonder why a blood bar would serve it; you'd think having a few different serotypes on tap would be sufficient.
You'd be wrong. The blood bar has the usual roundup of sinuous leather-clad twonks all grinding sensuously. You never see plus-sized vampires. Why is that? Why do you also never see nerd vampires, with overbites and bad skin? Anyway, master incubus James Haven is busy making himself a contrivance cocktail. Catherine asks if she may sit down, and he's all, "Sure. What are you into? " Warrick pops in and says, "We're in to crime scenes." Catherine asks, "And you are..." "Lazarus Cane," the incubus replies. There's some silly back-and-forth about Angela née Daegonna, and then Lazarus carries on about how Angela was hot for his hemoglobin and was his blood-bank bitch until he dumped her for getting too clingy. Catherine asks, "That pendant around your neck -- that wouldn't happen to contain blood?" "Oh, this old thing? I borrowed it from my sister," he replies. Oh, he does not. Actually, it turns out to have Angela's blood -- or "psi," or "life force" -- in it. He gladly hands it over, and Catherine then turns to the sticky issue of how to swab a fang-packed mouth for saliva.
Back on the A-plot, Nicky's checking out the surveillance footage and saying of the waddling thief, "He's walking like he crapped his pants." Well, shoving $10 mil in loose bills down your shorts will do that to you. Why the thief didn't elect to take the more portable banded bundles of bills is beyond me. The CSIs continue to survey the tape and find that Brandon Miller's happy ass is in the driver's seat of the getaway car. Gil orders Nicky and Sara to figure out who the mystery thief is, reasoning, "If he is a thief, you should be able to find him." Nicky points out that there are more than 3,000 employees at the Mediterranean, and that the obscured profile shot isn't exactly doing Nicky any favors. Gil smarms, "Technology is a wonderful thing." Someone should tell him that time the Cyranose catalog circulates around the labitrail. And then Gil walks off. A subtly smirking Sara pats Nicky on the shoulder and heads out too, presumably to hit the ladies' room and marvel at the way her hair is actually improving from scene to scene.
Meanwhile, Liam's explaining that for all his posturing the bar, Lazarus wasn't kidding when he said he'd never knock over a blood bank; his DNA was inconsistent with that found in the saliva around Angela's jugular wounds. Warrick's disappointed. Catherine asks about the pendant, and Liam cracks, "Nothing says 'doomed, headline-grabbing nuptials' like a vial of blood." Oh, not really. He actually says, "Nothing says 'I love you' like an ounce of fresh blood. It is Angela's blood, and it's mixed with a polyester base. [The] polyester base is an inert fluid prepackaged in test tubes for HIV testing. It helps prepare the blood for centrifugation by forming a barrier between the blood cells and the serum." Warrick flashes back to the conversation he had with the Amazing Spineless Sommervilles, and figures that Angela must have gotten the blood from the local health clinic.
Cut to Nicky chanting, "Technology is a wonderful thing, technology is a wonderful thing. technology is a wonderful thing..." as he takes that sliver of profile, extrapolates the front view, gives the half a face the whole face, and adds pieces and parts until he gets a face. Within seconds, he's hanging with a lifeguard at the Mediterranean. The guard says, "Yeah, that's Nathan. Do me a favor? When you find him, let him know he's fired. He hasn't shown up in four days." Nicky will oblige. Sara will just stand there and think, "Ahhh, curly hair. The way it was meant to be." Yeah, I'm harping on it a little --I'm just so stunned that the hairdressers didn't beat her hair into flat-ironed submission this go-round. Anyway, Nicky finds out that Nathan lifted the CPR dummy from the pool; the guard says, "We had to cancel class on Sunday because we couldn't find Macaulay." Sara asks, "Macaulay?" The guard says, "Culkin. Our dummy. You know -- because his mouth is always open?" And then he does a hilarious Home Alone mime. Some time -- like during the opening credits of a tense home-abduction episode or something -- I'll have to talk about the time I very nearly got beaten by an usher as he evicted me from that movie for heckling. In any event, Nicky laughs and Sara glares, because we can't have an episode unless she's glowering in it, and that's about it.
In the lab, Gil's dusting the sword for prints while Sara watches and hypothesizes that the prints Gil's about to find belong to Brandon Miller. Nicky walks in, and Gil asks, "You want to do me a favor and tape-lift that [print]?" Nicky's all for it. As he goes to lift the print, he lifts off some of the lacquer, too. Nicky's eyes go golf-ball-sized, and Sara's gaping in horror, too. Nicky swallows once and asks fake-casually, "Grissom, how's our insurance?" Gil looks over and notices the bare patch. Nicky protests, "I was being careful! I swear!" Sara walks around to look at the shiny red hilt of the sword. Gil asks, "Should four-hundred-year-old lacquer look this good? And smell like acrylic?" Now, why ask questions you know the answer to? The brain trust quickly concludes that the sword's a fake. Gil comments, "So far, nothing's what it seems." That's deep, Clem.
Cut to the CSIs quickly figuring out that the entire collection is worthless. Ah, the plot thickens. Gil breaks the news to Caulfield, and the other man goes off so he can brood dramatically under a sunken light fixture. Gil and Sara admire his positioning for a moment, and then Gil says, "Your head of security said that Mr. Yamamoto's collection was documented by an internal registrar." Caulfield stops the brooding so he can look frazzled as he's all, "Didn't you speak to her yesterday?" Gil says, "She was on vacation. But even though she's an informal appraiser, she should have been able to tell these things were fake." Why? And how? Hell, according to my ace tutors, Gil didn't get this Japanese military-artifact business right, so where does he get off telling other people what they should and shouldn't know? Anyway, Caulfield broods some more.
And then he sprints over to Yamamoto's suite, only to discover -- dramatically, of course -- that it's empty. The ever-present security head points out that there's no luggage in the room. Caulfield eyes a vase, makes sure it's not terribly valuable, and then makes a show of throwing it to the ground and saying, "Sonuvabitch!" Gil gives him the hairy eyeball of skepticism. Caulfield orates -- and yes, it is a conscious effort at oratory as opposed to normal conversation -- "What a fool I've been!" Gil says acidly, "Well, we have that in common." Caulfield is now barking out orders to find Brandon Miller and Vanessa Green. Gil helpfully adds Yamamoto and Nathan Pollard, saying, "Three of your employees and one whale all evidently disappear." Caulfield's a little worked up over the $10 million. Security Guy helpfully points out that Yamamoto never checked out, and that Vanessa Green never checked in for her reservation at the Princeville Resort in Kaua'i. Mmm, Kaua'i. I want to be back there, swimming off the Na Pali coast before heading someplace to drink mai tais until I can't stand up straight. And I could always do with more tiki glasses.... Anyway, Caulfield toothily points out that Yamamoto left without his antiques; Gil points out that, unlike Caulfield, Yamamoto knew they were worthless.
Catherine and Warrick walk into the health clinic, blundering right in on a woman whose right to confidential and private testing seems to be getting a little trampled on with the audience in the room and all. Anyway, they step out while a woman gets her blood painlessly drawn by what we can only presume is a master phlebotomist. Anyway, Catherine and Warrick come back, connect the dots between Angela's HIV test last month and this here blood lab, and the phlebotomist says, "Actually, we don't do the testing. It's a common mistake. I'm contracted by AdminaLab to withdraw the blood, and the lab processes, and the whole thing is confidential, so...." Nice spiel to reassure people that the person who draws your blood won't be the one directly testing it. Catherine says that they're not actually after Angela's HIV results, since (a) they know them, and (b) Angela's confidentiality privilege expired when she did. She wants to know which tech drew Angela's blood. Miracles of miracles, it's this phlebotomist. Or if you elect not to believe in miracles, believe in the forty-eight-minute mark on the episode. It's time to begin sharpening the stake that will kill this plotline.
Anyway, now that we've all beheld the power of the forty-eight-minute mark, let's marvel at how quickly it moved to compel the phlebotomist to admit that, yes, he's familiar with Angela, and yes, he's the one who squirted her extra blood into the little vial she gave Lazarus Cane. Catherine gets all uptight about the rules: "I bet [giving Angela some of her blood back] is against the lab's policy." Phlebotomist is all, "You going to report me?" Then he turns around to tell Warrick to stop rooting around the fridge. Warrick shoots back, "You going to report me? Doesn't feel so good when someone says it to you, does it, funny guy?" Oh, he does not. But I wish he did. Anyway, Warrick's got a warrant. The phlebotomist protests that Warrick's rummaging around his personal fridge, so he should feel free to leave that big, horking Rubbermaid tub of human blood alone. Sorry, they can't do that. The phlebotomist looks miserable. Catherine's all, "Mr. Jones, I'm going to need a sample of your DNA." Jones says, "I bet you don't have a warrant for that. "Warrick is still looking at the giant tub of blood; he cracks, "I think we have all we need here."
Sara and Nicky have been tracing back the art fraud to its plebian origins, and they've just gotten a lucky break from an emu. The "ivory" inlaid on the sword was imported by one of only six possible U.S. suppliers; one supplier happens to have made a sale to a Las Vegas-based business, and that business happens to have bought all the materials needed to whip up a collection of chronologically incorrect Japanese artifacts. The business in question is Chen's Scenic Prop House, owned by one Graeme Chen, who's MIA. Gil drones, "Call Brass. Get a warrant." Then he scares the hell out of Sara by unsheathing the sword centimeters from her nose.
Warrant in hand -- see? Pass the magic forty-eight-minute mark and everything moves double-quick -- Brass and the three CSIs currently not dealing with the Extreme Liquid Atkins crowd head into the Scenic Prop House. It's not very scenic. As they walk down an aisle stuffed with oddments, Brass quips, "I always imagined your house would look like this, Gil." Heh.
Nicky finds a table laden with many more swords, and he calls everyone's attention to it. Brass wanders off among the aisles as Nicky inspects the prototype frauds and Gil comments, "Well, he certainly does beautiful work." Brass, meanwhile, has been unearthing actual useful evidence, like a wallet with a photo of Mr. Chen. You may remember him as Mr. Yamamoto. Gil testily says, "He's not even Japanese!" I don't think you can make charges of ethnographic fraud stick, Gil. Anyway, Brass snorts derisively about Ty Caulfield's high-rollers living on a cot in a warehouse, and Gil replies, "Well, I'm guessing he spent all his money on the baccarat tables, buying himself a reputation." We flash to Chen doing just that while background music with fake-Asian accents plays. Brass mutters that you've got to spend money to make money -- or what we in one of my fourth-grade math units called "seed capital" -- and then Sara calls everyone's attention to a Mikado poster. Oh, that's my second-favorite Gilbert and Sullivan operetta; I'm afraid I'm a slave to duty first. And hey! The play just happens to star Brandon Miller, Vanessa Green, and Nathan Pollard. The team's crafting a theory about how Chen whipped up the whole scheme when Gil hears the opening bars of "Three Little Maids" in recollection, sings, "Three little maids from school are we," and gets a pair of deeply freaked looks for his performance. Gil asks, "You listen to Gilbert and Sullivan, Nicky?" Nicky looks like he's about to answer, "Only every night!"but catches Sara's look and thinks, "Easy, boy. You're still getting over the Discovery Channel hazing. Don't make them hang the Bravo label on you too." So he too-casually says no. And I love how Gil just assumes that Sara has no interest in the performing arts at all. For all he knows, she collects torch music, or twirls around the living to Stevie Nicks's Belladonna album. Anyway, Gil tells all the folks playing along at home that the security code on Caulfield's vault corresponds to the opening bars of "Three Little Maids." And then he makes Sara and Nicky go fetch the money bands so that they can do the math on how much $10 million weighs. I can't believe it's the bands that would be providing the bulk of the weight there, but my money-smuggling experience is limited, so what do I know?
And now, we're on the windowless, soundless set of a Stanley Kubrick film. Oh, wait -- it's an interrogation cell for Jones. Catherine is telling us that, yes, the giant vat of blood belonged to Angela, and she adds, "We found a lip print on the rim of the container we confiscated." Well, she'd be more disturbed if she found blood-soaked Krazy Straws nearby. We go to a hilarious flashback -- probably more humorous than intended to be -- where Jones knocks back some O-neg like he's drinking milk from the carton. He points out that it's not a crime to drink someone's blood. You know, it's people like that who make it tough for me to warm to the libertarian view of "the fewer laws, the better," but then again -- you know, some laws shouldn't need making. Warrick asks, "How did her blood end up in your fridge?" How did they end up on the set of 2001? All this scene needs is Keir Dullea and a shrieking monkey. Jones claims that he was merely keeping the blood for Angela as a favor. Catherine still can't quite get her head around the whole drinking thing: "What? You just got thirsty?" And then she drops some science: Angela got tested thirty-two days ago, but the blood from the fridge is less than a week old. Catherine wants Jones to explain.
Jones does: "Most girls start to turn away when I stick the needle in. She was into it. I started...watching over her. She was dating this wannabe, a total Hollywood freakshow." Oh, meta-heh. Warrick says skeptically, "So you're the real thing." Jones grins for the first time so we can see his fangs, and says, "These don't come out." He's kind of a dorky-looking vampire. I'll bet the other vampires make fun of him behind his back. Catherine's all, "Mr. Jones, give me a file and I could sharpen my teeth into fangs." Jones insists that he was born with the fangs. Catherine's all, "Whatever you say, Nerdseferatu," and moves on to ask about the night Angela was murdered.
As we see it in flashback, Lazarus is breaking up with Angela rather inelegantly, and Jones is peeping in the window. And then we see the reality of the crime compared to Jones's perceptions as he recited events and we see then in flashback:
"She invited me in." = Angela opens the door and in the fine tradition of women everywhere who have been dumped, snarls, "Yeah?"
"She was glad to see me?" = Angela asking, "Who are you?"
"We kissed." = Dorkula grabbing Angela and going for her throat as she protests, "Get off me!"
"She, um, offered herself to me." = Jones bearing down on Angela as she screams for him to stop.
Warrick wants to know if Angela offered her blood, and Jones grins, "Yeah." The flashback, however, tells a different story. And some MFA candidate somewhere can go nuts with the rape and penetration metaphors inherent in the vampirism myth. Catherine hammers home that point: "She may have offered her blood to you, but you took her life. You murdered her." Jones thinks they can't prove anything; Catherine introduces him to DNA evidence. Jones argues, "I released Angela from her body. She's inside me now. A part of me. And she's very much alive." And that same MFA candidate can now add a whole section to her thesis on the duality of delusion: how the court had claimed that being all vampyre-y was about sharing energies, but the one vampire freak who followed through on this philosophy would have been rejected as a freak -- and both sides are completed deluded about their little life force/energy-sharing deal. I mean, that MFA candidate's gonna have to say something, because Catherine and Warrick are clean out of words.
And now it's time to wrap up the A-plot. Gil plops a sack full of bill wrappers on Caulfield's desk and says, "This is what's left of your $10 million." Caulfield thanks him for the memory jog. Gil asks if Caulfield knows how much $10 million weighs, and tells us all, it's 220 pounds. He then points out that Nathan is only 5'6" and 140 pounds. "Strong little bastard," Caulfield says. Heh. Gil then patronizingly asks for $10,000 in $100 bills. Caulfield's not forthcoming with the moolah, so Gil's brought his own model. He explains, "Money bands are wrapped tightly around stacks of bills. They're very difficult to slip off. In fact, the only way you can get them off is to tear them." Caulfield asks if Gil will be getting to his point some time during the episode's three remaining minutes. Gil tells Caulfield, "None of your money bands were torn. Now, I don't know how much money you had in your vault, but I'm pretty sure I know how much you're going to be asking your insurer for. You see, that's why you had your 'thief' leave the money bands behind. You hired Mr. Chen and his merry band of actors to rip you off. I'm sure you paid them, but nothing close to $10 million." Caulfield bares his choppers and quips, "Your notions, though many/ are not worth a penny." Gil gives a shout out to the Mikado. Caulfield then overplays (what? Overplaying? I'm as shocked as you are) his hand with the whole you-have-nothing- to-go-on- or-else-we- wouldn't-be-talking deal. Gil can't be having with that, and points out, "I'm going to be handing my findings over to your insurance company. I wouldn't count on receiving a payment." Gil walks off whistling "Three Little Maids," and we go out on that up note.