Ignore the glamorous neon lights in Las Vegas. Tonight, our business is not on the Strip, but off it, in one of the sprawling suburbs outlying the city, where SUVs thunder across the asphalt plains in search of the big-box stores oasis.
Or in search of the "Best Bargain" grocery store, which looks like the kind of grocery store where even determined bargain hunters who are not at all queasy about buying dented cans with a bit of sticky Mystery Liquid on the top might think twice before entering. A patrol car pulls up, and "Clay" the police officer asks the grizzled Officer Fromansky, "What do you need to get?" Fromansky reminds him that rank has its privileges, and young Clay the rookie will be picking up a few things for him. Clay protests that they're off duty, and Fromansky snaps, "You're off when I say you're off."
Clay heads inside the abandoned store. He grabs some milk, and heads towards the checkout counters. A cashier calls that she can help him, and he points out, "That's not what your light says." She flips it on, and there's some small talk about it being a slow night, which is, on this show, roughly the equivalent of waving around the red cape in anticipation of a charging bull. Nothing that happens before the credits is ever innocuous. Anyway, as the woman rings up the milk and prepares to ring up the peanut butter, El Rookie remembers he needs to fetch Fromansky his Ho-Hos. As he's heading back down the completely-inorganic foods aisle, a tell-tale click makes him raise his head, and he checks one of the local security mirrors to see a gun-toting, black-clad figure scooting down one aisle over. Poor, doomed Clay pulls his gun…
And in the shot, Catherine and Gil are glowering their way into what is now a bustling crime scene. Warrick is hovering morosely on their tails. Did they pick the three CSIs most capable of looking angrily sad? Is that what's going on here? Anyway, as the Downer party heads into the grocery store, some yahoo is being restrained by the cops as he hollers about how he has to get back into the grocery story to check on his wife. We see a woman being wheeled out to an ambulance. She's looking pretty gray, but nobody's pulled a sheet over her head yet, so that's something.
Gil glowers, ever closer to the grocery store. If he keeps this up, he could pull something. Brass steps forward and says curtly that the body count's up to five. Gil glares some more. Over on the steps of an ambulance, Fromansky glares. Someone's face is going to freeze that way, and it won't be pretty.
Brass leads the way into the grocery store. At least they've gotten the sickly green pallor right: I've long preferred to do my grocery shopping at night -- not because I need to thrill to the possibility of getting gunned down over Ho-Hos, but because I totally detest crowds and will go to extra effort to avoid them (and no, e-commerce is not an option, because I am control-freaky about picking my own produce) -- and it always amazes me that these places, which sell food, manage to bathe their goods in the least appetizing light possible. Anyway, Brass hunkers to poor doomed Officer Clay's body and exposits, "Officer Clay entered the store unaware that there was a robbery in progress. Officer Fromansky came in after he heard a shot fired, engaged two suspects, lit the place up." Gil makes a boo-boo-kitty face; it's like he's never seen a dead body before or something. Catherine looks stricken. Warrick tries to look stricken, but lands somewhere around "Shit! Did I leave a load of darks in the washing machine at the Lucky Laundromat?"
Maybe Warrick's all freaked out because Brass teleported over to another body. He tells us the two guys in ski masks are currently John Does, but the other two bodies have wallet IDs. The camera does a neat little zooming thing back to Gil, who is now taking pictures of the dead bodies. We also see Catherine taking photos: she's snapping dead Tangiers cocktail waitress Julia Reed, while Warrick snaps cab driver Rufus Sanders, gunned down in the dairy aisle. There's a joke here about lactose intolerance, but really, you can make it yourselves. Rufus, by the way, is lying in a pool of bloody quarters. Warrick wanders on back to the juice section and snaps a photo of a Hefty bag full of cash, mostly $5 and $20 bills. Eventually, Gil and Catherine gravitate on over there, and Warrick asks how Gil wants them to "handle this" -- I'm going to assume he means "a five-body crime scene" by "this" -- and Gil replies, "Same way you'd eat an elephant." By hiding from outraged animal-rights activists who are torqued over your chowing down on a threatened or endangered species? Oh, wait: "One bite at a time."
Gil then checks out a tablecloth-clad display table and notices the round drops of blood leading to it. As he heads on over, he calls, "Hey, Jim? Did you know that Charles Manson is only 5'2'"?" Brass deadpans, "Yeah, little guys tend to overcompensate." As Gil creeps up on the table, he says casually, "Do you remember the story about how and where the marshals found old Charlie when they raided Barker Ranch?" Brass has finally caught on, so he prods Gil to continue with, "Yeah. I always, uh, I always liked that story." Brass pulls his gun, and the music swells all Psycho-like, and then we see a bloody little kid in the fetal position. Gil and Brass forget to mention that Charles Manson was found in a cabinet, and just kind of look shaken. Then Gil screams, "We need a medic!"
The Who have no idea who a screaming Gil is. They're more used to his bellowing counterpart in Miami.
As the kid gets wheeled out, Gil and Brass are standing over by Fromansky's perch. Brass is all, "Tell me what happened," and Fromansky says dully, "I was in my radio car when I heard shots fired. I called for backup, and I went in." We go to flashback -- the lighting in the grocery store is much better here -- and see Fromansky looking somewhat alarmed at Clay all prone and bloody on the floor, then getting shot at. And then the flashback turns into a John Woo flick with the screaming and the bullets and the mayhem, and all we need is a dove flying around, but as there's no plausible excuse for introducing live birds into the store, we have to settle for popcorn exploding everywhere instead.
Back in the present, Brass asks Fromansky how many shots he's fired; the officer thinks he's fired four. He continues, "I saw my partner on the floor. I went towards him. Then I saw the second gunman." And we flash back into another confusing gunplay sequence. Back in the present, Brass asks how many shots Fromansky got off at the second gunman, and Fromansky thinks it was maybe five. He was a little distracted by the slug buried in his vest. Gil stops looking as though he's been standing downwind from a pig farm and rearranges his features in an approximation of neutrality -- and by "approximation," I mean "only slightly hostile and supercilious" -- and comments, "Hard to count in those conditions. Are you sure?" Fromansky snaps, "No, I'm not sure. That's why I said 'maybe.'" At last! Someone calling Gil on his interrogation style! Gil looks slightly taken aback. Fromansky reiterates that he shot four times at the third man. I need a scorecard to figure out who shot how many bullets at whom. Fromansky elaborates on how he was going to check on his partner -- probably to tell him to stop bleeding on the Ho-Hos -- when he saw a third black-clad man with a ski mask and a gun, and began firing. Brass asks if the third gunman fired at Fromansky, and he replies, "I didn't give him the chance." Brass asks for, and gets, Fromansky's piece, and then Fromansky's all, "My partner…I want to be the one to tell his wife." What exactly is he going to tell her? "He died for my Ho-Hos"? Gil still looks like he's standing knee-deep in pig offal. Anyway, Fromansky and his bruised chest hobble on out of there (presumably to practice breaking the news with lines like, "I'll bet you $5 you're the Widow Clay" or "All those who aren't the Widow Clay, step back. Um, not so fast…") and Brass checks Gil's expression, then sighs, "All right. If you're not going to say it, I will. Fromansky said he killed three, and there are two dead ski masks in there. Now, you cranked him up pretty good on that vigilante case last year. Is that going to be a problem?" "No," Gil lies through his teeth. Then he sulks off.
Catherine, meanwhile, is chatting with the crowd of employees and shoppers all huddled in the store's stockroom. After the usual blah-blee-blah about the ordeal they've all been through, Catherine informs them that she's going to talk to them one at a time. She skips an offer to talk to Julia Reed's husband right away.
And then, enough time passes so that it's apparently high noon. Warrick is hanging out over by Clay's body when Sara comes breezing in. As Warrick puts evidence markers down by Clay's gun (still in the dead man's hand) and a spent bullet shell, Gil shouts over the piano of poignancy, "What happened to your assault in Henderson?" Sara replies that she closed it, and she's up for working. Gil tells her there are two bodies over by the beer. Sara heads on over. For those of you who care about these things: the straightening iron is back. It must be stopped.
Warrick trains a flashlight on the body (yes, in broad daylight) and notices that the holster's frayed in the area where the gun would have been pulled out. Warrick notes that Clay barely cleared the holster; Gil wonders if maybe Clay didn't pull the trigger before he had a target. Warrick pooh-poohs that idea because Clay was "not quick enough." He looks up to the row of blood-spattered Suzy Qs, then drops another evidence marker by Clay's presumably punctured head.
Catherine is now talking to a guy played by someone who is evidently in a lot of commercials. I wouldn't know: I TiVo everything precisely so I don't have to watch commercials, and violate this rule only if I'm desperate for entertainment (see also: the weeks I watched Las Vegas) or trying to determine exactly how old and unhip I am (as when I watch The Real World or Newlyweds). Anyway, this guy is busy telling Catherine that the gunmen herded everyone into the dry-goods corner of the stockroom, then grabbed Celeste the cashier to have her work the front of the store. Catherine presses for details, and the guy snaps, "I was looking at his piece, not his face, okay?" Catherine rolls with it: "Shotgun or handgun?" It was a shotgun. Anyway, Celeste opened up the register under the gunman's watchful eye, she pulled out the cash, and then Fromansky rolled up. And then, because the robbers were churchgoers uncomfortable with taking the Lord's name in vain whilst robbing people, they apparently demanded that everyone "get down and don't say a frickin' word." Catherine prods, "And then?" The guy replies, "And then? Ankles and flashes and booms." That's almost beat poetry, that is. Catherine's all, "And you never moved from that spot?" No, he did not. Catherine catches the guy shuffling and dancing and asks, "Do you have somewhere you need to be?" and he nearly sobs, "I got to change my pants." Where's Nicky with the crapped-in-his-pants line now? Just in case we missed the meaning in that subtle bit of dialogue, we go to a crotch shot of his soaked cargos. Catherine's a little embarrassed.
Gil is now swabbing one of gunmen (he died as he lived: surrounded by tortilla chips) while Sara swabs the other (who died as he lived: to the cold cuts). The surveillance guy and Nicky watch them for a moment, and the security guy notes dolefully that they're not the most modern store around. Nicky asks how long the security loop is -- about 24 hours -- then asks about the tapes that should be linked to the four security cameras on the floor. The security chief tells him, "They got busted. We never got them fixed. Cutbacks, you know." Not knowing jack nor squat about retail floor operations, I may be entirely wrong in wondering this, but why on Earth wouldn't the company's insurance policy be contingent on a yearly security inspection where it was determined that all the things like, oh, I don't know, locks and security cameras were working? You'd think it would. Anyway, the security guy smirks that they kept the cameras for the door and the registers; all they really need to watch are the employees, since "they steal worse than the customers."
Meanwhile, Warrick the ex-gambler is running his fingers through the large pile of quarters in the slot machine up front and crooning, "Myyyy preciousssss…"
Sara is picking a lead slug out of a pool of rapidly drying blood, and Warrick leans in behind her to say, "This guy hit a $75 jackpot. Probably shoving quarters in his pockets when this whole thing went down." Sara notes that the door was twenty feet away and Rufus could have made a run for it. Warrick replies, "You know, after the MGM Grand fire, they found people fused to the slot machines. Never even made it out of their seats." We know. Then the ex-gambler, who seems to have conveniently forgotten how he was all about the self-destructive behavior vis-à-vis his wagering, comments, "He thought it was his lucky day. He wasn't going to leave without his money." Well, there are a lot of quarters there -- 36 loads of laundry's worth.
Catherine is still interviewing employees. This woman says that everyone hit the ground running the minute the gunplay began. She saw two guys go down, and she says, "I took a first-aid course about a hundred years ago, so I tried to keep direct pressure on the wound, but it just kept bleeding, you know? I couldn't leave Rufus all alone, scared, dying." Catherine asks if they were friends; it's more like situational acquaintances. She then asks if maybe the kind-hearted cashier saw Officer Fromansky. The cashier asks, "The cop who saved us?" If by "saved," you mean "endangered your lives further by firing a hail of bullets down every aisle" -- then, yeah. Anyway, she saw nothing; she just heard gunfire. Catherine puts on the sad face.
Warrick is wandering down an aisle -- and I wonder, now that we've seen the CSIs raid the fridge in a victim's house, what's to stop them from picking up some produce and a few salmon steaks before they go home tonight? -- when he notices a puddle of caustic drain cleaner and the shot-out bottle from whence it came. The camera gives us the ingredients list -- sodium hydroxide (NaOH), for those of you playing along at home -- just in case we've missed the significance of this, and Warrick gives the bottle a thoughtful look before putting it down and turning his attention back to the bullet holes pocking the freezer section doors. Yeah, well, call me when you get to the ice cream section; I want to see if maybe this fictitious grocery store stocks Chubby Hubby. That flavor has become my white whale: I have stalked through the aisles of grocery stores in both northern California (Safeway, Albertson's, and Andronico's) and southern California (Gelson's and Ralph's -- the others are off-limits on account of the endless grocery strike) and come up empty on every single trip. I have sidled into bodegas and inquired in a weird pidgin patois about my beloved Chubby Hubby and found…well, the odd pint occasionally, which leads me to stalk the place for a month afterward demanding to know, "When are you getting more Chubby Hubby in? What day do you order the ice cream? Why must you fill its sacred spot with the bastard Chunky Monkey?" That the grocers of the Golden State have not clasped the chocolatey, vanilla malt-y, pretzel and peanut buttery goodness of this ice cream flavor to their (union or nonunion) bosoms is a mystery to me, and I am now obsessed with wondering whether other people suffer similarly. And this mania extends to wondering if fictional people suffer from a lack of easily-available Chubby Hubby too.
And how boring and non-geeky does this episode have to be if we're fifteen minutes in and I'm carrying on about an ice-cream flavor I can only get at a Ben & Jerry's store?
Anyway, Warrick decides it's time to amble on over to the frozen peas section, where Emergency Backup David is examining Julia Reed's body. We see the sticky black entry wound on her left side. Warrick asks where the exit wound is; Emergency Backup David rolls the body over, and we see the bullet kind of pressing against the skin on the right side. Warrick comments, "Skin's thicker on the back. [It] captured the bullet." Emergency Backup David says they'll retrieve the bullet during the autopsy.
Catherine's apparently decided that Mr. Julia Reed is ready to talk about the circumstances in which his wife died. Long story short: it's kind of hard to sprint for safety in high heels. Catherine looks devastated. Mr. Reed says, "They didn't have to shoot her. They were wearing masks; we didn't get a good look at them." Catherine's all, "You can't look for reasons here. That's my job, and I've got another 44 minutes before we get to the big why -- 32 minutes if you believe in the plot-accelerating power of the 48-minute mark." Or something to that effect.
Meanwhile, over in the morgue, David the Squeezably Gruff Coroner is extracting the bullet from Julia's back using a highly technical process called "popping it out like it's a lead zit." Warrick speaks for us all when he snots, "Is there something wrong with tweezers?" David explains, "They can mess up the striae. You've got enough to deal with without my tool marks in the mix." David's so thoughtful like that. He manages to pop the bullet out, eyeballs it with a "Hunh," and then whips out two different types of specimen envelopes to ask, "Paper or plastic?" Warrick grins in appreciation of his dark humor.
We then move over to a monitor's eye view of Rufus's body -- and I am fighting the urge to add "T. Firefly" to his name every time I type it -- before zooming back to the morgue at large, which is looking a little full with three men laid out. Gil comes in, and Emergency Backup David tells him that Officer Clay was already processed because they wanted to get him to his family quickly. Gil is not impressed with this talk of human families; he wants to know if Emergency Backup David thought to take prints off the two suspects. What's he going to say? No, because he's never worked around the CSIs before? Of course not -- he's already got the prints ready for Gil, as well as the bullets. Gil then checks out their forearms and remarks, "Prison tattoos. They weren't virgins." That's a very personal assumption to make. Emergency Backup David says nothing; perhaps he's afraid Gil will begin commenting on everyone else's virginity as well.
Catherine's gone to Desert Palms (or so we can assume, what with it being the only hospital in Las Vegas and all) to talk to Celeste. The woman behind the counter snaps, "Right. Curtain three. Just got out of surgery. Stable. She's still pretty doped-up. You're going to have to come back later." It's nice to see a nurse who's thrown off all that Clara Barton-this and Florence Nightingale-that baggage. Or maybe the nurse has had one too many neighbors snigger, "You know what they say about nurses…" However, the nurse does redeem herself by handing over the bullets. Catherine thanks her, and presses for information on the little boy. Clara Nightingale manages to wriggle free of the pole which had previously been responsible for both her uncommonly good posture and her attitude, and reports with some relief that the kid is fine except for shock. The nurse then grinds in an extra dose of working-mom guilt with, "Hell of a night, huh? You take your kid to work, you both end up shot." However, this line does not send Catherine down her usual primrose path of I'm-a-single-mother-so-tell-me-about-it empathy-spewing. She's more interested in figuring out that the boy's mother is Celeste Turner.
We then go to a shot of the two of them in bed with the boy snuggled up to his mom. Catherine decides to gaze at that tableau for a while, in a surprisingly subtle allusion to her own situation.
Then she goes to review the security tape, which shows Celeste manning the cash register while some black-clad guy hovers behind her like a malevolent Sprocket. Catherine muses, "Bastard was behind her the whole time." Our friends who rely on the closed-captioning read, "Son of a bitch was behind her the whole time." Potato, po-tah-to. Nicky agrees, then catches us all up on exactly how this thing went down by narrating to the limited tape footage: "There's our two DOA suspects -- looks like they just walked in off the street." And then proceeded to do God knows what. Catherine wants to know if Fromansky's mystery gunner showed up, and Nicky replies, "Nope. All the cars in the parking lot were accounted for, and the loading dock out back was deserted." He punches up the eagle-eye shot of the cash register again and emphasizes how it's the only view of what went down. Nicky gets to the point in the footage where doomed Officer Clay was getting his milk and peanut butter on the belt, and he notes that the robber was "three, four feet away and he didn't even see him. The thing I hate the most is the bad guys always know if there's going to be a gunfight." We then see the bad guy in question wheel around the cash register so he can prepare to shoot Officer Clay.
And then we switch to Gil, Warrick, and Sara loping through the Labitrail as Warrick explains that Clay's one bullet went into the floor and fragmented, which was probably how the kid got hit. Anyway, the conversation quickly steers into who shot whom with what.
Warrick: Officer Fromansky's Beretta and the suspect's TEC-9 -- they both had hollow-point 9mm. Between the two of them, they shot off 18 rounds.
Sara: Shotgun was a Mossberg, model 500. Eight rounds fired. Ammo was double-aught buckshot, nine pellets per shell.
Gil: Eighteen bullets. A total of 26 shells, 72 pellets. Enjoy.
I hope you enjoyed that -- it was all pretty much pops and whistles for me. I would have rather have been writing about ice cream. I do like how Gil delegates -- never apologize, never explain.
And now comes the montage where Ballistic Bob fires a mess of bullets and compares the striae, and Sara swabs bullets to ID all the goop on them, and we could, you know, benefit from explanatory dialogue here to tell us what's being done and how, instead of squandering all the expository talkety-talk on things like, "You! Seasoned lab tech! Take a sample! You! Seasoned coroner's assistant! Give me a ten-card!" Warrick is busy trying to figure out who shot whom via a handy computer model (and again, having someone stand over his shoulder so he could explain what happened, as opposed to simply having some boring dance music throbbing in the background, would work wonders) and it's all…if there's a point here, it's eluding me. I don't find watching people grind at their jobs particularly riveting; I find people telling a story through the ingenious application of information to a puzzling situation to be interesting, and it's not happening here.
Eventually, the soundtrack comes to a screeching halt when Bobby comes up. He hands Warrick a printed-out report, and Warrick makes a boo-boo-kitty face at it. Way to advance the plot line through the judicious use of exposition, guys.
In another room, Gil and David are poring over autopsy photos as Gil tells him that the AFIS hits on the two men turn up two convicts recently released after serving five-year sentences at Lompoc. Oh, those darn Californicators, coming over the state line to commit crimes. David shakes that off and begins putting the story together via autopsy photos: "Officer Clay was killed via a short-range shotgun blast to the back of the head. Excessive penetration and laceration in the brain. Suspect Clyde Tremmel [the TEC-9 guy]: two distant-range, medium caliber gunshot wounds to the front of the chest, with penetration of the lung and heart. Suspect Jack Delver [shotgun guy]: one distant-range, medium caliber gunshot wound to the forehead. The bullet penetrated the brain and was recovered in the occipital lobe. Rufus Sanders, bystander: scattered buckshot perforations on the outer thigh. One severed the femoral artery, resulting in massive hemorrhage. And Julia Reed, cocktail waitress: single medium-caliber gunshot wound to the left chest. The bullet perforated the lung and thoracic aorta, then perforated the opposite lung. And that's it." That's it, indeed: we have a veritable carnival of carnage, and none of these wounds rates the TMIcam shot? They can't even give us recycled TMIcam footage of bullets ricocheting around and tearing up assorted body parts? Where have the special effects gone? Surely Catherine's voluminous new 'do isn't breaking the bank with its styling product demands. Catherine looks at Julia's picture one more time and makes a serious face.
She's got a hunch, and she's playing it in the scene when she talks to Julia's husband, asking him, "You said your wife fell during the gunfight -- that's how you got separated. Do you recall exactly how she fell? How did she land? Did she land sideways, backwards…?" Mr. Reed's pretty sure Julia fell forward. Catherine's all, "So her hands broke the fall, and landed on her knees?" That sounds about right to Mr. Reed, so naturally, Catherine pulls the a-HA moment with, "Well, there weren't any bruises or scrapes on her knees or her elbows, which is leading me to believe she didn't fall." Reed snaps, "What's the difference? She's dead." Catherine gets all high and mighty by reminding him that none of the details help her nab whodunit if the details aren't accurate. Reed changes his story: the wife got the deer-in-the-headlights look, froze up in the middle of the aisle, and got shot. It's all very wrenching, and yet, I can't really be bothered to care.
It finally hits both these geniuses to head through the exit door and see where it goes. Answer: to a loading dock. Warrick points out that the tape shows nothing going on, but Gil counters, "Well, just because it shows nothing doesn't mean that it's seeing everything." That's the gnomic Zen master we've come to know and love!
In the shot, Gil's checking out the security camera in the office while Warrick calls up, "You can see me now, right?" Gil commands him, "Keep moving to your left." The folks who rely on closed-captioning will all maintain the impression that Gil told Warrick to move to the right. So glad that directional detail isn't important or anything. Oh, wait -- it is, as it shows that if Warrick moves far enough to the left, he's out of the camera's lens line. While Warrick's hanging out in the camera's blind spot, he notices a streak of paint on the wall: someone peeled out in a hurry and left their car's paint job behind. Up in the security booth, Gil commands, "Tell me what you see," and Warrick replies, "A getaway."
Once Warrick's back in the Labitrail, he and Nicky are doing laps with Catherine, and Warrick's explaining how they found both metal scraping and skid marks, samples from which are currently wending their way through the trace lab. Nicky embroiders the "these guys had a wheel man" theory, and the end result is that Fromansky did not in fact confuse a cocktail waitress with an armed robber, and the wheel man's using the blind spot more or less suggests that the whole thing's an inside job. Nicky adds to that theory by reporting that the cash register receipts finally came in, and they're missing $878 of the cash. Catherine concludes that someone went home richer. Nicky's off to run background checks on all the employees, then take their credit reports, use them to get a raft of credit cards, and go nuts at Restoration Hardware buying overpriced drawer pulls. Or maybe he just stops at the background checks.
And then we're in Hodges's office; he's the lucky guy assigned to identify the paint smears. He gets a hit with Aegean Blue. He tells Warrick that he ID'd the chip as coming from an Aegean Blue Honda Accord. Hodges adds, "Popular color -- they carried it over for four years. Go figure. I'm a teal man myself." It takes a tough man to admit to liking teal. He then pushes it a little too far: "You?" Warrick just glares at him because snapping "I like broody colors" would take too much time. Hodges concedes, "Stupid question." Anyway, it's a Honda made sometime between 1984-1987. The teal makes a lot more sense now, doesn't it?
Catherine heads back to the grocery store to figure out where $900 in small bills could have scampered off to. Since the trash bag full of cash happened to be in the cereal aisle, she begins looking there to see if anything's amiss. Catherine notices an ocher stain on the floor, runs a finger through it, and sniffs. She then recoils. Good thing she didn't taste it, huh? She then flashes back to the guy whimpering about needing to change his pants, and makes an intuitive leap…into a shelf full of Puffios. Shouldn't they be called P. Diddyos now? Catherine pulls back a box and finds another cereal box on its side, stuffed with bills.
Cut to her telling Captain Underpants, "You left something in the store beside a urine stain." (And here's where that gets murky for me, as it were: wouldn't there be urine spots leading to or away from that one area? Why wasn't that covered?) After a few minutes of tired moralizing (on Catherine's part) and lame-assed justification (on his part), Catherine attempts to pin the inside job on him, but he quickly disabuses her of that idea. Opportunistic thief, yes. Criminal mastermind, no.
Gil's monkeying around on a microscope when Warrick comes in and says, "You know, Hodges already analyzed traces on the bullets." "I never trust a man who admits to liking teal," Gil replies. Or maybe he just wanted to eyeball the evidence his own bad self. "[Hodges] will take it personally," Warrick cautions. "Good," Gil replies. He's not petty or anything. Gil asks Warrick, "The report says the waitress was wearing a black wool sweater. Was she also wearing polyester?" Warrick answers in the negative. Gil bids him look at what he was eyeing in the scope: "Black fibers, probably synthetic, mixed in with the wool." They're waiting until there are five minutes left to bring the science on the show? Warrick concludes that the now-no-longer phantom third gunman was wearing a black polyester jacket. Gil concedes, "Fromansky claims he was 'tunnel-visioned' on the gunman, so it's possible he never even saw the cocktail waitress." We see how this could be in flashback, and get some more TMIcam shots of poor Julia Reed getting perforated. Warrick comments that Gil has probably just saved Fromansky's ass.
Nicky and Catherine do a quick lap through the Labitrail so we can nudge the plot toward closure by finding out who the inside person on the job was. Nicky tells Catherine he was reviewing the surveillance tapes again, and instead he found that somebody moved the camera.
We now hurtle towards the wrap-up: Catherine is talking to Celeste, explaining for our benefit that, thanks to Celeste's old part-time gig at the Forum shops, they had her prints off a work card; they matched those prints to the camera, and figured out that she moved the camera. Brass tags in and explains that Raul Valdez passed on some names of people who could knock over the place. Catherine points out that everything was going according to plan until Celeste's ex dropped Henry off. Brass tells us all that Celeste tried to call everything off after that, but nobody was picking up on the cell. The two CSI folks do a full-court press on Celeste to confess, but she says, "I think I need a lawyer."
Cut to Brass and Catherine outside, watching as Celeste confers with her public defender. "All that evidence…" Catherine muses. "She'll make a mistake. She doesn't have the head for details," Brass predicts. "I hope you're right," Catherine replies, and then turns around, only to see wee Henry standing in the lobby, looking like he's about to cry. For a moment, it looks like Catherine's going to tear up too, but then we go to credits.
Kidding! That's what would have happened in a world where the CSIs knew what the Miranda was and worried about getting cases thrown out in court if they just plowed on over a suspect's right to an attorney. What actually happened is this: Brass mows on over Celeste with, "What you need is to come clean and cooperate. You better hope and pray the DA doesn't want to put a needle in your arm for killing five people including a cop."
We then get into motive: Celeste has been working at that store for five years, and she puts in 38 hours a week -- almost full-time, but not quite, so she's not eligible for benefits. It's a deliberate cost-saving move on management's part, and she hit a breaking point. Frankly, I'm not surprised: the grocery business has historically been a low-margin business, and it's becoming even more so as Wal-Mart enters the retail market and begins reshaping the competition by setting the price points consumers expect to pay. If grocers want to stay competitive, the money has to be cut somewhere -- and since WalMart stays lean because of their aggressive overhead-cutting measures (some of which are currently under investigation, like the subcontracting to illegal immigrants or forcing people to work off the clock), other stores have felt the pressure to cut employee overhead too. And so you get workers who scrape by on their hourly wages, but get no benefits. And, since this is TV, they snap and plan a robbery to fund their children's dental trips.
In the final scene, we see a tense and unhappy-looking Fromansky being subjected to a grip-and-grin session for the press as he gets a commendation for killing a few people deliberately. One presumes he's not being lauded for killing a civilian too. Gil sums it all up when he says, "I don't know what to think." Me neither, Gil.