CSI"The Case of the Cross-Dressing Carp"
Original Air Date:
October 18, 2007
Jillyree - TwoCents Staff Writer
This week’s episode starts off with a water montage: running tap water, a shower, toilet flushing, someone watering their lawn, and ends up with a fisherman out in the lake, who spots a mutilated body hanging from a tree.
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ReplyDelete"The Case of the Cross-Dressing Carp"
Original Air Date: October 18, 2007
Jillyree - TwoCents Staff Writer
This week’s episode starts off with a water montage: running tap water, a shower, toilet flushing, someone watering their lawn, and ends up with a fisherman out in the lake, who spots a mutilated body hanging from a tree.
Grissom, Nick, SuperDave, and Brass arrive to remove the body and to start collecting evidence. As SuperDave is completing his first assessment, he realizes that this “Dude looks like a Lady”. (TM Aerosmith) Is this a hate crime against a transvestite? We’ll soon see.
As Nick processes the scene, he finds the victim’s shoes and cell phone, with text messages between he and a Paul Syden. In these messages, the victim asking for more money. He also finds a broken, bloody beer bottle.
Doc Robbins does the autopsy, and Griss looks at the ID of the victim - Bryan Towne. He’s only 18 years old. Doc rules cause of death as suffocation by hanging. Grissom asks him to run extra tox panels to see if the kid was indeed starting the process for a sex change operation.
In downtown Vegas, Catherine and her mother Lilly reminisce over Sam Braun standing at the site of his new hotel, and my hopes of a Cath-Drama-Free season go down the drain. (Get that? Another water reference!) Cath’s mother still loves Sam, even though he tossed her to the side for another young thing after Cath was born, and she throws the lucky $5 chip he gave her into the site of the new casino. Just then, Cath notices police cars and walks down onto the site, where they notice a body buried in the dirt. In a first for Catherine Willows, she calls HQ and asks for another group to run this case. She has a conflict of interest.
At Bryan’s house, Warrick finds several boxes – a box of bullets, a couple filled with vials of liquid, and one full of cash. While he searches, Brass speaks to the boy’s mother, who is suffering with cancer. They find out through her that Bryan worked at the local wastewater treatment plant, and that Paul Syden is a close family friend, and was like a father to Bryan. They then ask if he was saving money for a sex change operation, and angering the mother, she asks them to leave.
Sara and Ronnie (Ronnie is the new girl) are working the case at the Casino site, and as they process, Ronnie finds what appears to be Native American jewelry. Sara halts all processing; this could be an Indian Burial Grounds.
The lab results come back on the tox panel on Bryan. He does have high estrogen counts, but no other drugs that would show that he was going through the motions for a gender reassignment.
Catherine is now working on the hanging case, and she and Brass go out to talk to Paul Syden, who they find fishing off the pier. They ask if Paul knows anything about the money, and he tells them that Bryan was helping him with a project, which he was paying him for.
Meanwhile, Bryan’s Mom visits the morgue and asks to see her son’s body. After checking with Brass, Doc Robbins lets her see him, and she mentions that he needed a haircut. She then peeks below the sheet and notices his enlarged mammary glands. She gasps and cries.
Nick loiters outside Wendy’s lab waiting on test results. She pulls information on a possible suspect from both the rope and the beer bottle: Larry Ludwig.
Nick and Warrick visit the water treatment plant and find Larry. His palms show rope burns, so they take him in for questioning. He drives a car that matches the tire tracks at the scene, so he fesses up that he was at the lake, but he was cheating on his woman, and Bryan was there. They all went in swimming, and once they noticed Bryan’s chest, it weirded them out, so they left.
Sara talks to Doc Robbins about her victim, and he says that the body could be any of Pacific Islander, Indian, or Asian descent. She goes back to the layout room and starts to look over the blueprints for the Rampart, and Greg wants to help, using his extensive knowledge of “Old Vegas” (Kiss Kiss, Bye Bye, anyone?)
Sara, Ronnie, and Greg all go back to the construction site, where they find a rib bone with a bullet in it. Could this be a late ‘60s mob hit?
Catherine and Brass go to Paul Syden’s house to talk to him one more time, but guess what? He’s DEAD! They find a frozen carp beside his body, and a torn up paper with an offer to buy his house from Jonah Quinn, the manager of the Water Treatment Plant. They also find several vials full of liquid at his house, like the ones found at Bryan’s, along with a freezer full of frozen carp, all numbered. It appears that Paul was checking the hormone levels in the fish he was catching, and cataloging them with the vials.
Back at the lab, Sara asks Hodges to try and date the time of death of her corpse using isotopes, while Ronnie and Greg flirt in the lab. Greg has taken some of the broken cement found at the construction site and made a mold of the Indian’s hand. He was holding something – an old can of film.
Archie processes what he can of the old film and sure enough, its pictures of the grand opening party for the Rampart. There is one picture at the end of the roll, showing the take for the casino that day, along with a line that reads “Fergis”.
It’s now fangirly squee-time for me! Sara visits Grissom out in their(?) greenhouse, where he’s tending to the bees he found last week. (If I had done my review last week, you’d already know about these.) Anyway, as they are talking over the bees, Grissom proposes marriage. Just out of the blue. Like that. “You know, maybe we should get married…” Sara gives a stunned look, and then gets stung by one of the bees. As Griss is tending to her hand, he asks what she thinks. Not even half a heartbeat passes until she gets this goofy grin and says ‘YES’. GSR fans across the world say “awww” all at once, and then get flustered because the bee helmets prevent us from getting the on-screen kiss we’ve waited 8 years to see. Stupid CBS!
Back at the lab, we see Sara walking around, still stunned by the proposal; visibly happy, but stunned nonetheless. Hodges interrupts her thoughts of wedded bliss and tells her that the body they found is SE Asian.
Cath walks into Grissom’s office, startling him. What is he doing? Looking up romantic honeymoon sites? Writing his vows? Who knows? But, Catherine knows she’s caught him doing something, because he has that look a man has when he’s been caught. She shows him a cooler full of frozen fish, and he’s more than happy to volunteer to test them.
Nick interrupts Warrick’s dinner break to let him know that Larry’s alibi pans out. Warrick shares some new information with Nick, and tells him that he’s convinced Bryan killed himself – the DNA found on the broken bottle proves that the wounds were self-inflicted. It was a hate crime alright – he hated himself.
Grissom fillets the fish as Hodges watches, and Hodges reflects on the times the two worked on the Miniature Killer cases. Grissom lets Hodges remember how it felt to work with him once again as he leaves Hodges to complete the removal of carp organs, along with the clean up.
Greg and Lilly look at old pictures from the opening of the Rampart to try and figure out what happened. Lilly remembers a photographer who was dressed like an Indian that night who was snooping around Sam’s office. “Fergis” was Ferguson, then Gaming Commissioner, who was skimming off the top of the Casino’s take. The photographer got wind of this and was going to expose him and Sam Braun for their little deal, so Sam’s bodyguard killed him, or so they think. The crime will never be solved, and as we find out that Greg is writing a book on “Old Vegas” he offers to take Lilly out to dinner to get the inside scoop.
Grissom figures out that the groundwater near Bryan’s house was contaminated with pharmaceutical waste, mostly personal products loaded with estrogen, which was leaking from the “grey” water supply and into the drinking water. Syden was working with Bryan, and was about to blow the whistle on the Water Treatment plant.
At the cancer clinic, Catherine goes in to talk to Bryan’s Mother as she receives her treatment. She confesses to killing Syden, because she thought he was trying to harm her son. Catherine lets her know that he was indeed trying to help her son, and the Mother shows remorse.
The DA talks to Grissom and Catherine and tells them that this case will be wrapped up with the EPA and litigation for years, and that there’s no way she’s going to try to take a widowed, breast cancer survivor who’s lost her only child to trial. There’s no way a jury would convict her of anything.
Catherine wants to get this story out into the media, but Grissom warns her that she can’t release case information to the press…she’ll be fired.