Oh, sure, Las Vegas looks super-glamorous with its fancy blinking lights and dancing water shows, but out in the 'burbs, you're lucky if your street light works. At least, that's the message I'm getting a scant 45 seconds into the show. You'd think the residents who actually live in Las Vegas year-round and nurture the businesses that bring in the tourons would be all, "Hey. Hey! You think this no-lights thing is funny? Start laughing when nobody's changing light bulbs in the giant lotus over the Flamingo's entrance, funny guy."
Anyway, the light flicks on again, and the camera cuts to what is presumably the interior of the house. We see a framed photograph of a happy couple, then pan over to the door, where smoke is rolling up smoothly and quickly. The camera pans back over to the bed, where an elderly lady is sleeping. Then we focus on the smoke again as it steals across the floor of a little boy's room. We see the boy. Are you alarmed yet? Does the sight of old people and children in peril make you all anxious? The people who put this episode together will be so disappointed if you answer "no" to either question; you might as well politely lie to spare their feelings.
We see one more shot of the smoke swirling around another bed -- this one unoccupied --and then in the shot, the fire practically explodes. We see the firemen leading out the old woman -- she's looking pretty dazed -- and the woman in the photograph (they plucked someone out of the "Mom" files at central casting) is freaking out and asking where Sam is. The fireman conveniently comes out with the child, who happens to be quite bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, and clad in PJs and slippers. I put the show on pause to wonder when Sam found the time to put on his slippers, because that detail is what's bugging me, and not, say, the part of this scene where a billion people are congregating on the front lawn watching the bonfire, as opposed to being knocked back from the heat and force of the fire as we saw it a minute ago. There's a brief mother-and-child reunion, and the fireman asks if anyone else was in there. Mrs. Abernathy -- that's the Mom lady -- says there wasn't. The firemen turn on the hoses, and the little boy turns back to look at the house. Oh, look. All the subtlety and suspense are crumbling into cinders, leaving us only with fifty-odd minutes to burn as we head toward an inevitable conclusion.
The firemen continue dousing the fire, and Catherine shows up with Nicky and Warrick in tow. Nicky's wondering why they got a 911 page, since the fire's not even out yet. Warrick replies, "Jack's an arson investigator. We were here on this same street ten days ago." Jack adds that it was a garage fire a few houses down, set deliberately. Catherine asks Warrick -- the non-arson investigator in the bunch -- if he thinks this is the work of a serial arsonist. Warrick's all, "I don't know, but I'm keeping my eyes peeled. Maybe they came back to take a look." Nicky and Catherine turn around to see if there's anyone in the crowd sporting an inappropriate smile and trousers in need of changing.
Just then, the firemen come out of the house shouting that they've got another person. As the fireman heads over to the lawn -- miraculously free of smoldering debris or sparks, for all that there's a house belching fire ten feet away -- he notes that the girl's not breathing. Mrs. Abernathy says shakily, "Sabrina?" The fireman bellows for a paramedic. Mrs. Abernathy takes this as her cue to crowd into her daughter's airspace. The paramedic pushes Mrs. Abernathy back as she exposits that Sabrina wasn't supposed to be in the house, and begins compressions. Catherine and Nicky both look like they know how this is going to end, and they're not too happy that they do. Warrick joins them in the looking-rueful department, and then Catherine recovers enough to say tartly, "I think our arsonist just turned into a murderer."
And now The Who want to know when the writers stopped making the effort to come up with a snappy one-liner during the credits.
Après commercials, Sabrina's being zipped into a body bag as her mother mournfully tells Catherine, "She wasn't even burned." Catherine points out that smoke inhalation happens really fast. Well, that's small comfort. Catherine passes on her condolences, then smoothly segues into interrogation mode, asking, "I heard you say she wasn't supposed to be here tonight. Was she supposed to be with her dad?" Mrs. Abernathy says that her husband died five years ago in a car accident, and Sabrina was supposed to be over at her friend Molly's; she adds that so far as she knew when she went to bed at 11 PM or so, Sabrina was at Molly's. Catherine asks if Mrs. Abernathy knows of any possible cause for the fire; Mrs. Abernathy does not. She mentions that she locks the doors and goes to bed, and that's about it. Catherine then asks if Mrs. Abernathy maybe has anyone in her life who might be inclined to set her house on fire; Mrs. A replies, "I go to work. I take care of my kids and my mother, and that's my life." For once, Catherine does not follow this up with a commiserating comment on how tough it is to be a single mother; this could be because she's been brainwashed by her little friend Krycek into believing that the short person she's sharing a house with is merely a domestic worker who can't dust the tops of bookcases. I'm just guessing this is how Catherine's handling the work/kid/paramour thing.
Nicky's snapping pictures of the crowd as it checks out the fire. Sure enough, there's someone there with a furtive smile on her face; the state of her drawers is as yet unknown. Nicky immediately channels Snicky and notes this without anyone else pointing it out. He's busy telling the crowd to feel free to give him a buzz any ole time they have information to pass on, when Grandma interrupts him to ask, "How am I going to get my Fosamax?" Somewhere in New Jersey, Merck's attack lawyers brace to make sure this is an innocuous product placement for their osteoporosis drug. Anyway, Nicky's totally in his element with, "I'll make sure you have your medications by breakfast, okay? You're going to be all right." A fireman guides the confused-looking old lady off-screen.
Warrick then approaches the fire truck where Sam is being all winsome and asking the fireman behind the wheel what button produces what result. The fireman is, of course, under the impression that children are also idiots, so he talks down with, "That's the siren. So we can get to fires real fast." Sam plays along: "To help people burning inside?" The fireman confirms that this is so. Sam then gets the sad face and twists the dagger with, "But not my sister." Warrick visibly cringes. The fireman looks like he's about to cry. "I'm sorry, buddy," he chokes out. Sam pats the man on the hand and assures him it's okay. I wonder if they made Sam a boy because a girl would have invited too many unsolicited The Bad Seed comparisons?
And then, we're back in shiny, sparkling downtown Las Vegas, complete with lounge music. We switch quickly to what must be a casino bathroom, its floor currently decorated with an obese dead guy. Brass is explaining to Sara and Gil, "So the morning cleaning crew found him. No ID, but this [piece of paper] was in his pocket." Sara notes that it's some kind of code. We get a gander at the piece of paper, and it's not unlike looking at those Word Jumbles certain comics sections run because they're approximately as wide as a Family Circus and a Marmaduke panel side-by-side. I tend to skip those things, as I find my eye inexorably drawn down to the lame comics below, and then I spend the rest of the day muttering, "Who went on a murder spree and axed four twee tykes. Not Me!"
Gil has no time to examine the mysterious paper. He purses his lips as he looks around, and turns back to the body on the floor. We get a nice shot of its blackened face, and the little pool of blood beneath the head. Gil reads off the tee with, "Seven-thirty-five?" "His goal weight," Brass cracks. Heh. Sara and Gil both give him an unamused look. Oh, come on. I know pining after your emotionally boss -- or being an emotionally constipated boss -- is draining, but you're in trouble if you've completely lost your sense of humor. Brass takes off so the two of them can humorlessly assess the scene. Gil whips out a camera and begins snapping the dead guy's livid face, paying special attention to the cut above one eyebrow. He tells Sara, "That's a nasty head wound." She elects to continue the conversation she was having in her head with, "It's always reassuring to see an empty soap dispenser in a public bathroom." Then she looks back at the mirror -- but not to admire her hair, which looks decent for a change, with waves that manage to frame her face and make her look like she's not about to go fill her pockets with rocks before heading out on a jetty somewhere. I guess all that beer Sara's having has been good for her hair too. Sara's actually examining the pattern of cracks in the mirror and guessing, "I'm thinking, this is how the vic got his head smashed in."
We get a shot of Sara looking in the mirror, and then Gil pops up behind her. The survivors of the S.S. Geek Love wreck all meet for a rousing round of toasts to the eternal ship. However, Gil seems more intent on imagining Mister 735 bouncing off the mirror forehead-first than he is on sneaking a furtive look at Sara. He then hands Sara a swab and sinks back down to the floor. After she swabs the blood on the mirror, Gil calls her attention to the puddle of blood on the floor, noting, "It's common to find something in blood, uncommon to find something on blood." Sara watches Gil pick up the mystery fragment, and then he peels back one of the guy's eyelids to point out the petechial hemorrhaging. Sara comments, "Head bashed in and asphyxiated. No soap was the least of his problems." Gil gives her a look like, How dare you demonstrate any sort of humorous perspective?
And now it's daytime. Looking at the spread of Vegas 'burbs across the desert always makes me thirsty; it's the Lawrence of Arabia effect. See sand? Need a drink. Jack the arson guy is leading the CSIs through the house; they're picking carefully around the debris and the heaping helpings of exposition he's leaving in his wake. We learn that the smoke detector batteries were all dead, and Sabrina's room is the only one that sustained serious smoke damage. We do not learn how close Sabrina's room was to the fire's point of origin. Everyone troops into a remarkably intact room -- not even any fire damage to the cuddly toys -- and Catherine notes that Sabrina wasn't even asleep. "Not in her bed," Jack adds. Catherine walks over and sees a book sitting beside a floor pillow, then flashes back to Sabrina sitting on her floor, reading as she listens to her music. Warrick reads Catherine's mind, then comments, "That would explain why the fireman didn't find her right away." "But it doesn't explain what she was doing down there," Jack doggedly insists. Catherine sighs, "If you can explain the behavior of teenagers, more power to you." How old is Lindsay this week? Thirteen? I ask because she's apparently aging like a Marvel comics character, which is to say, in a completely arbitrary and contrived way.
Then everyone walks out to the kitchen, so Jack can explain that beneath ordinary linoleum lurks a silent but deadly killer -- flammable adhesive. We get a TMIcam shot of the linoleum boiling as the fire gobbles the adhesive underneath. Then everyone goes back to waving their flashlights around and snapping photos of the detritus. Warrick notes that the kitchen door's unlocked, which is a little hinky, since the firemen only used the front door. That seems eerily formal. Did they wipe their feet on exiting and entering too? Catherine adds that Mrs. A said she locked all the doors before bed. Warrick speculates that maybe Sabrina left the door unlocked. He adds that she basically provided the arsonist with an engraved invitation. Or, in the case of an arsonist, cherries jubilee, molded together to read, "Come flame with me."
Anyway, Jack continues strolling through the house and going all Trading Spaces on it with, "A few cheap wood panel walls, polyester curtains, fake plants." I know the point is supposed to be that this place was a firetrap waiting to happen, but I'm guessing Mrs. A went with the mass-produced synthetic goods because she had to let the servants go following the car crash, and her hectic working/caretaking schedule left little time for ironing the damask curtains, cultivating the orchids, or renovating the house. Catherine then points out that "a bottle full of liquid fire with a low flash point" certainly didn't make things any safer. The two of them go over to look at the couch and wonder whether it's the fire's point of origin. I wonder how it's possible to take something as nifty as fire and render its investigation so deadly dull. They did this last time, too. I mean, the flashback's really pretty mesmerizing, what with the flames leaping hither and yon, and yet, they're all talking it to death. The upshot of the scene is that Jack thinks the fire started on the couch, then conducted its own protest against cheap décor as it moved toward the kitchen. Catherine watches Jack work, and in a shocking break with precedent, fails to immediately fall into bed with him afterward.
Meanwhile, Warrick dusts prints and wonders why he's stuck on the arson case yet again. Nicky's outside -- anyone else think Catherine pushed him out the door and told him, "Go play. Don't come back until you find evidence"? Fortunately, he'll get to come in for snacktime, because he finds a stack of newspapers that are only lightly toasted. He goes inside to share the news, adding that the papers were "completely out of the path of the fire. And the firemen said they didn't put them there." How do we know that? Did anyone else miss the firemen lurking around the scene? Are we to assume that Nicky called the station house and was all, "So, that fire? With the dead girl? You remember some newspapers that weren't really burnt?" Anyway, the whole point to this exchange is to launch the boys on the pointless part of the investigation, so Warrick remembers that the fire down the street was in the garage, so maybe the newspapers are linked to that. Nicky runs with it: "The fire started in the carport. Sabrina came home, provided access to the rest of the house." Catherine asks about accelerants, then muses, "Maybe part of the M.O. is that he uses accelerants that are present." Nicky's all, "Let's hope he stuck around long enough to view the damage."
Cut to Warrick and Nick back at the lab, going through the home movies from the first fire -- and really, I don't know if it's sadder that people take home movies of other people's personal disasters, or if I'm totally unsurprised that people do this sort of thing -- and trying to figure out who the arsonist is through process of elimination. I can't believe they haven't pulled up the names of the residents on the block and run then against county records to see if there are any firebugs in the bunch; it seems like you'd save some time that way. Anyway, we get some insight into the mind of the arsonist (hint: they like to stick close to home), and Snicky rears his head again to add, "If this is a serial situation, to go from an empty garage to a whole house full of people -- we're talking about major escalation here." Warrick points out that there was a match found on the scene at the first fire, and muses, "If we could find a match in the debris at the second fire, then we may know for sure." Conveniently enough, this is at the point where the home movie focuses on the grinning woman Nicky noticed at the Abernathy fire, and she's standing near the fire truck, jittery with a guilty excitement. Snicky's neurons fire, and he realizes that they've been attaching the wrong pronoun to their arson suspect. As it turns out, the woman -- one Viva Charles by name, which sounds less like a woman's name and more like the motto for some British monarch ["or a Warhol Superstar nom de weird" -- Sars] -- has a record for attempted arson.
Cut to Nicky's interrogation with the lovely Viva. He opens by pointing out that she was arrested for attempted arson, and she tells him, "I was exonerated." Snicky points out that he noticed her at both fires on Cell Crook Road. What a great name for a road! Seriously -- it makes me think of biotech espionage, and that makes me think of Count Zero, and then I'm in a happy place. Viva playfully tells him, "I am not an arsonist." Snicky shoots back, "That's not what your file tells me." Viva snots that the law doesn't make much of a distinction between arsonists and pyromaniacs, and the difference between her and an arsonist is that she doesn't set fires for money or with the intent to cause damage. She does it because "you go home at night. You feel a little lonely. You put in a racy video --" Nicky gets all uncomfortable: "No, no, no, no. We're not talking about me." Also, I imagine Nicky still feels vaguely unsettled if he's unwinding to the Discovery Channel and the apes are…well, doing it like mammals. Anyway, Viva handles her loneliness at the end of the day not by doing volunteer work, or perhaps trying to take care of a plant, but by opening her junk mail, then setting it on fire. Nicky watches her have some sort of orgasmic experience recounting this, and looks acutely embarrassed. Viva recovers, stamps down the impulse to light a cigarette, and claims, "It's an impulse control disorder, but it's private. I don't burn down houses or kill children." Nicky's looking somewhere at the middle of the table when he counters, "Maybe not on purpose, but accidents do happen." For the first time, Viva looks nervous.
The sun is setting, and Nicky's now hard at work in the lab. Liam the Lab Tech comes over and intones, "You rang?" Holy cow! He's been set upon by a band of rogue hairdressers, who clipped him, stripped all the dye out of his hair, and left him looking like an adult. It's unnerving. It's like watching an episode from the future. Anyway, Nicky asks him how he'd like to be listed as an assist on an arson case. Liam is all, "Is that a rhetorical question?" and Nicky takes that as the assent it's meant to be. He explains, "I collected these matchbooks from the pyromaniac's house, who was…kind of hot, actually." Liam snickers, "You dig chicks who dig fires?" Nicky replies, "No. I just said that to draw you out. It's time I acted on this simmering tension we have. By the way, your hair looks fabulous." Oh, he does not either. He just kind of cops to being weirdly attracted to this woman. I'm thinking that someone's trying to make us buy the idea that Nicky's got a knight-on-a-white-horse complex.
Anyway, Nicky shows the match that was used to start the garage fire, then upends a grocery sack filled with matchbooks and tells Liam, "See if you can find a match to one of those." The music of whimsical dismay plays as Liam gradually realizes that there's more to being a CSI than fending off the advances of the lab monkeys and issuing gnomic utterances whilst standing hip-deep in gore.
Down in the morgue, David the Pedagogical Coroner is standing over the body of Mr. 735 and calling on Emergency Backup David to recite the three most common ways to asphyxiate. For the record, they're strangulation, suffocation, and choking. Emergency Backup David then lays a bet that this guy choked. We then cut to an aerial shot of David working on the body, with its throat laid open. The effect is discomfiting, as it looks like someone laid a small cheese pizza between chin and sternum. I should know better than to eat anything with tomatoes in it when I'm watching this show. David makes a series of wet-sounding snips with the surgical scissors, then pulls out some esophagus. They snip it open, and find a small round tile imprinted with the letter "S."
Cut to Gil staring at the tile and saying flatly, "An S." "Cause of death," David adds. What, the guy died from an excess of alveolar fricatives? No -- it was not death by phonemes: the guy choked on the tile. Gil wonders, "So, he swallows a tile and tries to give himself a Heimlich?" We flash to that scenario, where the guy is desperately trying to dislodge the tile, only to knock himself out on the mirror, fall unconscious to the ground, and die from a remarkable confluence of improbable events. David then pulls out another six tiles and comments, "You don't swallow six of them by accident."
Cut to Liam looking grim as he works. He is so totally going to leave Icy Hot in Nicky's gym shorts for this.
Eventually, he finishes his task and reports to Warrick and Nicky that nary a match adds up. Nicky points out, "Doesn't mean she didn't do it." It's hard to tell what Nicky's more smitten with -- Viva, or the prospect of her committing the crime. He then busts another Snicky move by noting that arson's usually a property crime, and asks Warrick what the Abernathys' financial situation is like. The answer: fairly dire. Mrs. A was not rolling in insurance policies, and thus would not be paying off her substantial credit card debt with any benefits. Warrick then pulls out a photo of the departed Mr. A and notes, "Besides, people tend to remove mementoes when they know what's coming." Liam wonders, "So if the pyro didn't do it for love, and Mrs. A didn't do it for money, who's left?" Nicky, who's now reading the stack of newspapers he found, muses that maybe the high school baseball team did it. He explains that it's the McKinley High School Gazette, and editor in chief Sabrina Abernathy was about to blow the whistle on the baseball team's varsity hazing.
Given that McKinley High has already had issues with hammer-wielding killers, teenaged parent death trips, and bully problems, it's entirely possible that hazing -- especially that which involves hookers -- isn't even considered a problem. They're probably just grateful the players don't get all cannibal like the rival school's cheerleaders. Anyway, Sabrina broke the story (hilariously enough, the same two paragraphs are repeated ad infinitum, since the prop master went on the assumption that nobody would TiVo the frame and try to read it), and the three amigos conclude that maybe Sabrina's house was torched by the angry baseball boosters' club.
Gil is busy playing with the six tiles when Sara comes in to tell him that the lab results are in, and the blood on the bathroom floor matches Mr. 735, but the blood on the bathroom mirror does not. There goes the knocked-out-with-the-Heimlich hypothesis. Sara then asks what Gil's doing; he replies that he's doing anagrams. Ooh, I like doing those; I began doing them after reading Paula Danziger's The Divorce Express in fifth grade. Sara's all, "Do you think they're a message from the killer?" Yes. A very brief message. Anyway, Gil misses the most obvious combination from the letters E, I, N, S, V, and X: vixens. Sara points it out to him after musing, "Seven hundred and twenty possible combinations, not all of them words, of course." Damn, she's fast with the math. For those of you wondering how she came up with 720, it's simple series math: you can put any one of 6 tiles in the first slot, then 5 tiles in the second slot, then 4 tiles in the third slot, then 3 tiles in the fourth slot, then 2 tiles in the fifth slot, and the remaining tile in the last slot -- so, 6 * 5 * 4 * 3 * 2 * 1 = 720 possible combinations. After Sara points out to Gil what he missed -- both literally and metaphorically -- he looks…well, emotionally constipated. She, on the other hand, looks fabulous. Brass interrupts their moment to tell them he found an ID on Mr. 735 off his prints; he's one Adam Brenner. Sara's incredulous: "That guy has a record?" Whatever -- it's not like Brass came in and announced, "I matched his prints with a famous cat burglar's!" We find out Adam had prints because he was a postal worker from Orlando, and he was in town for a big ol' word-playing game tourney.
We cut to what looks like a Scrabble tournament, only with round tiles, no board, and the name "Logos." Sara and Gil are getting the 411 on Adam's mad Logos skillz from someone who mutters, "Logos has all the skill of chess combined with the cruel whimsy of fate." I bet you he reads a lot of Ezra Pound and listens to The Smiths in his spare time. This guy also explains that "Adam once set a tournament record by scoring 735 points in a single game." Sara recalls that the number was on Adam's tee, and the guy says, "Justifiably. It's a great achievement." Sara looks slightly taken aback. Brass steps in and asks how the other players felt about the sartorial smack-talk. The Logos nerd can't believe anyone who's playing would kill Adam; Brass shoots back, "Cruel whimsy of fate." At this point, I'm watching the show for Brass, y'all.
Back in the A-plot, Nicky heads out to the baseball field to harass the local minor leaguers playing there. Oh. My bad. Those are "high schoolers." I love how, on TV, everyone in the 20-35 age range plays people in the 15-45 demographic. Anyway, Nicky tells the overbearing coach/father figure he's there to see if there's any connection with Sabrina Abernathy's weekend death and the baseball story she was about to report. After the coach screams at Cody the player, he makes a notation in his book to go visit his cousin Dan in Tree Hill, North Carolina, so they can swap son-rearing tips, and tells Nicky that Cody was in bed at 10 PM on the night in question, as he was every night. "Except for the nights the team's pulling a train on a hooker," Nicky shoots back. Wow. I wonder who taught him that phrase? Cody gets distracted. The coach/father figure replies, "This is Vegas. Who hasn't been with a hooker?" I love that he asks Nicky that. It's just too bad Nicky doesn't reply, "Upstanding members of the clergy. The prepubescent. The occasional law enforcement employee…"
Anyway, Nicky laconically notes that high school seniors being scouted by Division I schools generally try to avoid those recruiting-season scandals. The paternal guy claims, "It's a tradition. It happens every year, with every team." This is the point where someone should whack him upside the head with a rock and say, "Brush up on your Shirley Jackson. It's a tradition. It happens every year." The guy continues by pointing out that Cody would be smarter than to burn down someone's house. What, he'd hire a hit man, now that he's familiar with Las Vegas's black market services economy?
Gil's at play in the fields of the nerd, observing the assorted word jumbles everyone assembles. The scoring system appears to be color-based, as there are discs printed with red, blue, and black letters. Gil ends up talking to one Wilson Janek over a game of logos. Gil opens the field with "abulia" (a loss of will power) and asks about Wilson's game with Adam. Wilson snorts at what he perceives to be Gil's trash talk, lays down "baht" (a unit of Thai currency), and says nothing. Gil builds "hadron" (a subatomic particle) off "baht," and says he's just there for Wilson's DNA. Wilson compliments Gil on being a quick study, but adds, "If you think I killed Adam, why don't you go ask Uncle Sam for my DNA. I served my country. Gulf War Senior. Memorized word lists as a sanity check. Some guys did ping-pong. I did this. I saw enough killing over there. I'm a 'Make Words, Not War' kind of guy now."
Sara skips the wordplay and heads straight into swabbing people. And then she begins talking to them while she's got a swab halfway down their throats, asking someone named Craig about what it feels like to lose to Adam, while he's in the middle of losing to someone else. "At least you're a good sport," she says, amused. Either Sara's become a really amiable drunk over the past few weeks, or the powers that be have forgotten that she's supposed to be surly and grim, because she's practically back to her old Seasons 1-3 self.
Meanwhile, Brass is talking to a milquetoast in a sweater vest who's doing his best imitation of belligerence as he asks, "So what if I was the last person who saw Adam alive?" He carries on about how killing someone for a $2000 prize isn’t worth the effort, and Brass deadpans, "You play for the glory." Walter Mitty replies, "You ever attempt the New York Times crossword, Captain? Nah, you probably wouldn't make it past Tuesday. I do Sunday, in pen." Brass replies, "Good for you. I wish I could derive my self-worth from solving someone else's word puzzles, but I have to settle for enforcing one of the social institutions that lets people do their crossword puzzles in pen without fear of random violence. Damn!" Oh, he does not. He merely turns around a tray with tiles reading "DNA" and says, "I can still spell this."
Back at the Labitrail, Hodges is explaining to Catherine that there's no trace of accelerant on the couch. Catherine is baffled by this, as she was convinced there was an obvious pour pattern, and Hodges replies, "Well, my dear, this is why you should never take the couch left for curbside pickup." Wow, that both civil and charming for Hodges. Is there no man in the Labitrail who is not beguiled by Catherine's many charms? Hodges goes on to explain that the couch was polyurethane foam, outlawed in 1988 due to its incredible incendiary properties: "You light that crap, it heats up, creates a burning pool of liquid, and acts as its own accelerant. Disaster waiting to happen."
So Catherine goes back up to survey the couch disaster that did happen with Warrick and Nicky, glumly prying charred lumps of couch off the coils with, "We've got no accelerant. We've got no match. We have no idea what started the fire." Cue the fortuitous discovery. Snicky finds a menthol cigarette butt. He comments, "Cigarettes are a terrible way to commit arson. Unreliable. They take too long. Possible DNA trace, but it just doesn't make any sense." Warrick points out that it does make sense if the fire's unintentional.
Cut to the surviving Abernathy clan members in an interrogation room. Sam's refusing a soda from Jack, and Mrs. A apologizes for him being there, faltering as she recounts how Sabrina was her regular babysitter. Old Lady A comes back from her mental field trip to 1968 to ask why they're all there. Warrick explains that they may have figured out what caused the fire, then asks if anyone in the house smokes. Old Lady A claims she quit twenty years prior. Catherine replies that they found a cigarette filter in the remains of the couch, and the lab wants a urine sample to determine who's got nicotine in their system. Mrs. A -- who still hasn't bathed since the fire, by all appearances -- chokes out, "My house burned down. And my daughter is dead. And now you want me to pee into a cup?" Well, yeah.
Liam tests the urine samples, then does a lap with Catherine through the Labitrail as he explains, "Everyone except for the little guy was getting high and getting by. The girl's on uppers, the mom's on downers, and grandma sucks on the cancer sticks." Catherine translates to English: "Ritalin, Valium, and Grandma's a liar." Nobody should be surprised by this. If television has taught us anything, it's that old women are not to be trusted.
And now Hodges gets quality time with Gil. You know he's highlighting this little block of time on his DayRunner, probably with a specially-colored highlighter. He explains that the fleck Gil picked out of the blood lo those many minutes ago is actually a mix of PVC resin and liquid plasticizer, and "when heated together, they form a solid elastomer film called Plastisol." For those of you who are all, "'Elastomer'?" Hodges is referring to a chemical phenomenon often featured for any resilient, stretchy compound: any of a number of natural or synthetic linear polymers that exhibit large elastic deformations when a force is applied; the stress necessary to deform an elastomer is relatively small compared to other materials, and the deformation is recoverable after the stressing force is removed. So now you have a fancy-pants way to say that something's stretchy.
Gil asks what Plastisol is used for, and Hodges replies, "Mostly [Liam the Lab Tech] wear." What, is this reply from personal experience? Actually, it's the gooey stuff that spells out a logo or slogan on a t-shirt. Gil sighs, "Well, that narrows it down to just about everybody in the tournament." Heh. Sara wanders in right then to dreamily inform Gil that she's got a match for the blood on the bathroom mirror.
Cut to the Walter Mitty guy sitting in an interrogation room and quaking over pictures of Adam's dead body. He points out, "Just because I was there doesn't mean I killed Adam." Brass asks the man to put his hands on the table, and after Sara registers the lacerated knuckles, she cracks, "That's seven years' bad luck." "More like seven to ten," Brass darkly corrects her. Walter explains that he's emotionally volatile, and after losing to a little old lady with a motormouth, he went into the men's bathroom and capped a self-hating monologue in the mirror by punching said mirror. Brass suggests that from there, it's but a hop, skip, and a jump to force-feeding someone killer Logos tiles, but Walter protests that even a losing match against Adam is "like getting art lessons from Picasso. I was honored to be even sitting at the same table with him." Sara and Brass look nonplussed at this.
Nicky tries to run a computer simulation of the fire, using the premise that the couch was the point of origin, but it doesn't match up to the actual fire.
Meanwhile, Warrick attempts to talk to Old Lady A and points out that they found traces of nicotine in her urine. "That's odd, because I don’t smoke," she replies. Warrick gently asks her to open her purse, and sees a pack at the top; Old Lady A seems as surprised as he, and says, "You know what? I do too smoke cigarettes."
In another interrogation room, Catherine's asking Mrs. A if Sabrina had ADHD. Mrs. A laughs and bitterly says that Sabrina had unbelievable focus. It's probably safe to say that Mrs. A's just entering the "anger" phase in grief. Pull up a chair, Jessica A. You'll be there a while. Catherine then breaks the news that Sabrina had Ritalin in her system, and may have been taking it as a stimulant. Mrs. A doesn't not take this too well: "Sabrina was taking drugs?" Catherine shoots back: "As were you. Valium." You know, there's no need for opprobrium if she's got a prescription, Catherine. Anyway, this sends us spiraling into the remorse and regret portion of events, where Mrs. A recounts, "Sabrina used to scream, 'I can't wait until I'm old enough to move out of here,' and I would scream back, 'Yeah, me either!' What kind of mother says that to her kid?" Catherine looks empathetic and replies, "One with a teenaged daughter. If I were to have a daughter, perhaps someday she'd be a teenager too. I can only imagine, apparently." Mrs. A continues that she had pictured this part of her life being one where she and the husband left the kids to fend for themselves on Saturday night while they went out for dinner, and instead, she's the overworked head of a household responsible for "two kids and a 70-year-old infant." Catherine finally addresses the elephant in the room with, "Are you covering for your mother?" Mrs. A replies, "Part of me just wants to say, 'Yes. Please take her away. Let her be the state's problem.' You know, she leaves the stove on, and she leaves the water running. I come home, and I find little burn marks in things. But I was with her the whole night. I never saw her smoke." Wow. Whoever wrote that monologue would appear to have been on that crazy ride. Kudos to the show for capturing the frustration that goes with being squeezed between children and parent like that.
Catherine suggests that maybe Old Lady A sneaked out past her bedtime for a smoke, but Mrs. A disabuses her of that notion by revealing that she locks her mom in her room for the night to keep everyone safe.
Catherine then leaves that depressing conversation to have another downer talk, this one with Nicky. He breaks it to her that the burn scenarios don't match the scene. He holds up a handful of magnets and drops them, saying, "Here's the problem: demagnetized." Catherine's not getting it. Nicky explains, "The Curie point is the point at which all materials lose their magnetic properties, yeah? For the iron in these, the temperature would have had to have been 932 degrees Fahrenheit in that kitchen. With the fire starting in the living room, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't get it that hot in there. It just doesn't make sense." Catherine realizes the fire probably started in the kitchen.
And so they fling themselves across the suburban sprawl once more, landing at the crime scene and examining the L-shaped light bulb in the kitchen fixture. Catherine points out, "An incandescent light bulb will soften at 900 degrees, and extend in the direction of the heat source." Why does it do that? Catherine then asked how they missed the bulb. The answer is that they jumped to conclusions. After a few minutes of shoveling, the two find the fire's likely point of origin: someone writing "Bitch" on the floor in something very flammable.
Hodges spends some quality time picking off pieces and analyzing them in the lab, and then the scene switches to Catherine asking Nicky and Warrick, "Do you fondue? The accelerant was ethanol, methanol and petroleum jelly. Chafing dish fuel -- like Sterno." We flash back to someone swabbing the word "Bitch" on the floor, then setting it on fire. I love how they took care to capitalize, and dot the "i." It's the details that count. Catherine sums up the trajectory of the case with, "So, it has gone from intentional to accidental to personal." She then asks who they've got for suspects. Warrick whips out a mug shot and quips, "Nick's girlfriend." Nicky grins. Ten bucks says he begins showing up for work with a few suspicious-looking first-degree burns. Catherine dismisses Viva because her name is dumb. Also, she has no personal connection to the family. Nicky points out the overbearing dad living vicariously through his hooker-using son, then adds, "He's an ass, but his alibi checks out. Surveillance at the Mirage has him playing poker the night of the fire." Oh, thank God, they went in that direction, and not "has him buying a set of strung-out underage tranny whores for the outfield." Bizarrely enough, Cody (the baseball playing kid) was there too, despite being under 21. Presumably. Maybe he was held back a few times. Catherine wonders about suspects in the house, and Warrick wonders, "Grandma? Aside from being on lockdown and arthritic, I don't see her writing on the floor. What about Jessica?" Catherine rules that out for no good reason whatsoever. Snicky wonders if Sam did it, but Catherine rules that out for an equally specious reason: "'Bitch' is such a teenage girl word." She's never seen a minute of South Park or listened to any rap, has she? Anyway, Warrick concludes that Sabrina's a suspect. Nicky reasons, "She did think the baseball team had it in for her. Her family life's no picnic…" Catherine can only gap at the heretofore unknown wine-dark mind of Nicky Stokes. Warrick's all, "You think she went kamikaze, trying to take down the whole family with her?" Surprisingly, this is the hypothesis everyone decides to run with for the few minutes.
Meanwhile, back in the B-plot, Sara is reconstructing the tournament play, using scoring pads, a Logos set-up, and the list of players to be matched up. Incidentally, both Les Moonves and Ted Bundy made room in their schedules for a round. I don't know who I'm more impressed with -- someone taking time out of running CBS to hang with the word nerds, or someone rising from the dead to do so. Sara plays out the game, and clearly stumbles across something significant.
Cut to her explaining to Gil that Adam was "a meticulous note-taker. He documented every turn of every game he played." So Gil asks, "How many words use the letters we found in Adam's body?" "None," Sara replies. She then reveals the key for solving this particular case: one of the games didn't add up, because in the Adam/Craig (a.k.a. "the guy Sara swabbed") match, Adam had 60 points written down that weren't accounted for in her game reconstruction, as well as an erased entry. So Sara ran the entry through ESDA, and found out that Adam played the word "exvin." Add the "s," and it's a 60-point word. Gil asks what an exvin is, and Sara says, "It's what I'll be season!" Actually, she replies, "I was kind of hoping you'd know. It's not in the OED." I love that Gil's colleagues regard him as both an entomological and an etymological reference tool. Gil looks pained for a moment -- oh, whatever. You know he's resigned to being the smartest one on the shift. And then he details the penalties for having a bluff called -- you take your tiles back, you get no points, you lose a minute off the clock.
Sara then points out that Craig later played an "x" in the game for "loxodrome" (a spherical spiral), and notes that there's only one "x" per game. She asks, "How did he get it?"
Cut to Craig having something of a nervous meltdown while Sara picks through his Logos box. She tells him she's looking for a six-letter word. Gil, who's been pawing through Craig's luggage, pulls out a gun and asks, "P-I-S-T-O-L? It's not the word we're looking for, but it's interesting." Gil notes that the gun is a replica, and it's got blood on it. Craig says, "I belong to a Communist club --" that sounds so quaint. It's like belonging to the Pet Rocksitters' Society. Anyway, Craig says his little group collects "replicas from the fall of the Soviet Union." Also baffling, as it seems like a Communist club would want to curate the movement's greatest hits, as opposed to its Gigli-like geopolitical events. Anyway, Gil sneers, "A fake gun for a fake word?"
We flash to the scene in which Adam played "exvin," and told Craig it meant "a wine aficionado who doesn't drink." I'd have been more impressed if he had used "oenophile." So Craig adds an "s" for "exvins," and Adam promptly challenges. A-ha! It was a big bluff, and Craig took it. I think I'd like this game. It's like Scrabble, only with an extra dash of evil.
Back in the present, Sara notes that Craig's game box is missing the letters "E, X, V, I, N, S. You made Adam eat his word." Yup. And it didn't go down easy, either. Craig says, "I just wanted to make it as hard for him to swallow as it was for me." Sara asks why he didn't help Adam when he began choking. "I thought it was another fake-out." Gil asks why Craig still did nothing when Adam passed out, and when Craig can only stand there and look guiltily remorseful, Gil snaps, "Out of words?"
And that ends the B-plot. Welcome back, Gil and Sara. Please feel free to stay.
Meanwhile, Catherine and Warrick are back in the Abernathy place, and Catherine's all, "This is old-school hydrocarbon detection." Oh-kay. It's basically waving around a UV light. The goal is to look for any other traces of Sterno, and then to see if it can be linked to someone else. And they discover it can -- Sam's room is filled with traces, and Warrick finds a cache of matches under the mattress. Catherine's all, "Mom was locking the wrong door."
Cut to Mrs. A and Sam in the interrogation room. She appears to be caressing the back of his head, but really, it's just an excuse for a vise-like grip at the base of his skull as she says, "They're going to ask you some questions about the fire at our house. And you'd better start talking, mister." Sam does not look like he's thrilled at the idea. Catherine escorts Mrs. A out, and Sam waits at the table. He's got his hands clasped in front of him; he looks ready to face a Congressional inquiry. Warrick comes in and puts a mug down in front of Sam. I know he didn't bring that kid coffee. He tries breaking the ice with, "You okay?" but Sam's not buying. So Warrick moves on to the questioning, flipping a box of wooden matches in his hands as he asks, "What kind of things do you like to do on the weekends?" Sam's eyes watch the matches spill on the table as he answers, "Watch TV. Hang out. Play." Warrick lights a match; Sam's eyes are drawn to it. Warrick asks, "You like to play with matches?" "Sometimes," Sam admits. Oh, who doesn't at that age? Warrick asks why Sam likes playing with matches, and Sam says, "Fire is cool." Yes, it is. Warrick drops the first match in the mug, and sits back at Sam pulls the matchbox over and begin lighting matches before dropping them into the mug, where they're extinguished with a tiny fizzle.
As Sam continues to light matches, Warrick gets his story out of him: Sabrina knocked on Sam's window and asked him to let her in, as she forgot her key. She thanked him and headed back to her room. Sam, awake and now hungry, went rooting through the kitchen cabinets for a snack and found the Sterno. "Mom uses it for the chocolate pot on our birthdays," Sam explains. Warrick thinks that sounds like fun, but Sam scowls, "Except stupid Grandma's not allowed to have chocolate, so we couldn't do it this year." This is where I wonder why Grandma can't have a nice strawberry shortcake while everyone else dips their angel food cake and strawberries into the fondue pot that's kept strategically out of reach. We used to have to come up with workarounds like that for my grandmothers, both of whom were saddled with both dietary restrictions and dementia. Then again, I love a good fondue, so I'm motivated to be creative with getting it whenever possible.
From there, it's only a short trip to Sam admitting, "Ever since Grandma moved in, we can't do anything fun." Warrick asks what happened . What happened is that Sam took out his grandma issues on the kitchen floor, set it on fire, and went to bed. He's thrilled to have all the firemen show up. Warrick looks mildly disturbed that Sam's so happy to be hanging with the firemen, and not at all able to comprehend -- or, if he is, not at all remorseful about -- killing his sister with his actions. Warrick says, "You know, Sam, that word you wrote on the floor…that's a really bad word." Sam lights a match and points out that he hears the word all the time from the womenfolk in his family: "My grandma says it --" Pssst! A match drops in the cup and fizzles out. "My mom says it --" Pssst! "-- and my sister says it." Before Sam tosses that match out, he stares at it a while and says evenly, "Well. She used to say it." Then he blows that match out. Warrick looks sick. And the camera zooms in tight on the smoke curling out of the cup as Sam drops the match in.
And we end the episode, all wondering, "Couldn't this all have been prevented with an electric fondue pot?" Ah, well. We'll never know. In the meanwhile, let's ponder how, once again, we're presented with a member of the under-18 set who treats taking lives like it's no big whoop. What on earth could be desensitizing our children to such an idea? Is it…increased exposure to televised deaths? Is it…an inability to write a plot where a child might actually comprehend the consequences of his actions? Is it…a dislike of children? We'll never know.