Based On A True Story

Nancy ♦ March 8, 2012 ♦ 20 Comments

Back by popular demand, it’s time for another episode of

This is gritty reality at its realest realness…in the place where it’s cold enough for the men to wear jackets but warm enough for the women to wear nothing.

In this week’s episode, there’s this guy out on one of those standup paddle boards. It’s like surfing, only slow. This dude has a problem though, because he’s being toyed with by a shark. The shark bumps the board – playfully, I’m sure – because when the dude falls off the board, the shark doesn’t eat him right up.

The guy sees a boat coming towards him and he’s relieved. Actually, he probably relieved himself right when the shark pushed him overboard, but anyway, here comes the boat. Only it comes really fast and runs the guy over.

If you’re thinking that now the shark has a fast food treat, you’d be wrong. Because in the very next scene, Horatio and his folks are looking at the body on the beach. The corpse is pretty intact, except for the feet, which the CSIs immediately know were ripped off by the propellers. They see a lot of propeller amputations in Miami.

CSI finds the murderous boat right away. And the owner shows up, “Yay, you found my boat.”

There’s grease on the steering wheel. A greasy killer.So they go find Dead Guy’s son, who races motorcycles (or dirt bikes – I didn’t get a good look). That’s a greasy job, so he could certainly be the killer. And he didn’t even like his dad, who didn’t appreciate cheating the way his son did.  “He didn’t know how to have fun,” says Kid (who would never get to pretend he’s a teenager on “21 Jump Street” – he looks about 35). So paddle surfing must be a real drag.

But Kid also says that Dad had a fight with the neighbor lady. And the neighbor lady retaliated by trying to kill the family dog,Tiberius, with a hershey bar. The dog’s name is the only name I remember (besides Horatio), but that doesn’t mean these characters aren’t memorable or anything.

So the team goes next door. There’s a guy leaving and a guy on his way in. The lady’s trash is conveniently out front and there are chocolate wrappers in there. CSI knows immediately that this lady is a hooker and a dog-poisoner. Because CSI understands Evidence.

She may be a hooker, but she’s not a boat-running-overer. Hooker didn’t like the barking dog (who was just upset with all the foot traffic), but she wasn’t worried about Dead Guy turning her in. He thought she was busy because she was a notary. Everyone knows that notaries have lines of middle-aged men a-knockin’ on their doors.

However, Hooker Lady provides services to one of DG’s co-workers. and she heard DG tell ‘John’ that there’s a big problem at work. Lives are at stake. Dead Guy must have been impressed by how often his co-worker needed a notary.

They get a subpoena (I’m certain they did) to search DG’s files. Only there’s a ton of ’em. But no problem. They don’t have to read every file. They just dust for fingerprints to see which file has the most prints.  Handled the most = Biggest problem. This actually makes sense, but I usually take my biggest work problem and hide it in the bottom drawer, and NEVER take it out. But that’s just me.

CSI LabCops find a file that has fingerprints everywhere…the guy must have picked it up from the middle, and practiced his piano scales. But inside, the only fingerprints are the boss’s. Immediate proof-positive that the boss has replaced the real file with dummy papers.

Dead Guy’s shoes (in his gym bag, not on his de-footed body) have green gunk on them that turns out to be chromium and copper arsenic (CACA). So CSI heads right out to the housing development the guy seems to work for (I don’t exactly know what he did for a living; they either didn’t say or I was in the bathroom). Horatio sees that the construction crew is spray-painting the grass. Obviously, the ground is contaminated, and Dead Guy must have threatened to blow the whistle – because grass-painting is Evidence. This is also evidence to me that DG must have been an accountant. On TV, accountants are murdered all the time for threatening to expose crimes. I’m an accountant. It’s a dangerous profession.

The boss turns out to be a gorgeous sexy lady, and she swears that she would never have killed DG. She just figured she’d bribe him. Well, that’s okay then.

Back to the lab. They have DG’s car. And his phone is in it, and it starts to ring. “Help me,” the voice says, “I’m at the coffee shop.” Or maybe that was voice-mail.

CSI has the coordinates and they quickly find that the whole route has surveillance cameras, including a taxi surveillance camera that followed the dead guy’s car for miles. They can watch the DG’s whole last day, except of course for the part when he becomes dead. There’s a dearth of surveillance cameras at the crime scene, although the rest of Miami is loaded.

Anyway, DG was following a sick kid who was with a guy who looked menacing – he was tailing them just because he is a Good Samaritan; not because he is an accountant. Only he was cut off by a careless trucker.

The “help help” phone call must have been the sick kid, who probably got the DG’s phone number in the two seconds they interacted. LabCops find the kid’s duffel bag (where I don’t know, but these guys are very good), and there’s a travel itinerary from Nicaragua. Aha – this is almost too easy for the investigative skills of CSI. The kid was a drug mule and he’s sick from swallowing big bags of drugs. So they have to find him before the Scary Guy cuts him open.

They need a description of Scary Guy, so they get the trucker who cut the dead guy off. They find him in like half an hour. They’re that good. Trucker remembers the Scary Guy’s tattoo, I guess when he cut off the Dead Guy, he also got a really good look at the guy in the car in front of the car he almost hit. And the Trucker also knows where the Scary Guy is.Trucker evidently got a great view of Scary Guy’s GPS.

So Horatio and the lab-guy-who-is-also-a-cop (and who looks like Forest Whitaker) go to an abandoned diner. Forest pulls his lab tech gun, but the bad guy gets the drop on him. Good thing Horatio can sneak up on anyone, even from the front. “Your life is about to change, my friend” Horatio hisses. Horatio hisses in every episode, but this was a particularly good hiss.

Oh, and they find the kid (not dead yet, which is nice, but it’s only a subplot, so they call an ambulance and split.)

Back at the police station, Horatio notices that the Trucker has grease on his sleeve. Hey wait, there was grease on the boat’s steering wheel!  And the Trucker has sand on his shoes. He’s been to the beach! Hardly anyone in Miami does that. He must be the killer!

“Have you been to the beach?” asks Horatio. And the trucker confesses. When he cut off the Dead Guy, DG called the “800-How’s My Driving” number on the truck’s bumper sticker. And the operator said they have zero tolerance and the trucker gets fired right away. He’s pretty mad. He finds DG, who’s out standup surfing (Miami is a small town and so is the ocean). So the trucker sees a boat just hanging around, and so he takes it and runs the guy over.

“I lost my job,” cries the trucker.

So it wasn’t the Shark, the Angry Son, the Hooker Neighbor, the Contamination-Hiding Developers, or the Cocaine Smuggler. It was the Bad Driver.

"Your life is about to change, my friend."