CSI Episode # 903 “Art Imitates Life”

[ratings]Las Vegas wel­comes a new crim­i­nal­ist in “Art Imitates Life.” Riley Adams joins the team as Warrick’s replace­ment. We don’t know much about Riley, except that she’s new to the Las Vegas Sheriff’s Department, and an expe­ri­enced criminalist.

Unfortunately for Riley, her first day in the lab is when a grief coun­selor is brought in to help the team deal with Warrick’s death. Before Riley can even get set­tled, the coun­selor seizes the oppor­tu­nity to warn Riley how tough it may be to join an estab­lished team, espe­cially as Warrick’s replace­ment in the wake of his recent death. Riley tells the coun­selor that both her par­ents are shrinks, clearly unim­pressed with the psychiatrist’s drive-by psy­cho bab­ble. Riley just wants to get to work.

Let me first point out, the speed that the depart­ment got a replace­ment for Warrick is less believ­able than those patented CSI instant CoDIS (Combined DNA Index System) hits. You ever work with the gov­ern­ment? Things are SLOW. The hir­ing process is painfully slow. My first gov­ern­ment job took about a year from appli­ca­tion to actu­ally start­ing. Even in the best of cir­cum­stances you’d expect about a month to hire a qual­i­fied CSI.

Anyway…Riley is called out in the field on her first day, paired up with Grissom while he’s eval­u­at­ing her for her CSI 2 exam. She’s a lit­tle more spunky than Grissom prob­a­bly expected, maybe because unlike the oth­ers she hasn’t been men­tored by him, so lacks the blind rev­er­ence I’m used to see­ing from the crew. She’s every bit as sassy in her first inter­ac­tion with the ME tech. While exam­in­ing the corpse, Riley asks him to flip the body over. The ME tech­ni­cian looks to Grissom for his approval first. Riley tells the ME tech, “I saw that…and I’ll never for­get it.” He looks unset­tled until she tells him she was only joking.

Riley’s encoun­ters with the rest of the team are sim­i­lar: spunky, sassy, and funny. Like when she tells Catherine she smokes mar­i­juana, but keeps a bot­tle of clean urine in her locker for drug testing…just in case. Hopefully she’ll develop into an inter­est­ing char­ac­ter. She’ll def­i­nitely bring a dif­fer­ent dynamic to the estab­lished crew.

The homi­cides in this episode are a lit­tle dif­fer­ent than the Vegas norm. The req­ui­site dead bod­ies are posed, look­ing incred­i­bly life-like, one is even stand­ing. There’s only one sus­pect, an artsy killer who poses the bod­ies in var­i­ous life-like posi­tions, plac­ing them around the city to be dis­cov­ered later.

Onto the foren­sic aspects:

1) Grissom made a mis­take! Grissom made a mis­take!!! Remember that the next time you’re in the jury box. Luckily Hodges caught the mis­take, or it prob­a­bly would have slipped through the cracks and gone undis­cov­ered. During sam­ple prepa­ra­tion for head­space analy­sis (mea­sur­ing the con­cen­tra­tion of volatile chem­i­cals on the air­space above a liq­uid layer of blood in a closed/heated sam­ple con­tainer), Grissom for­got to add a required chem­i­cal. If Hodges hadn’t caught the error, they might not have detected the car­bon monox­ide present in all the vic­tims’ blood samples.

Scientific test­ing is done by sci­en­tists. Scientists are human. Humans make mis­takes. Scientific test­ing can there­fore be wrong.

2) The other foren­sic bits of inter­est were iden­ti­fy­ing com­mon fibers found on all the vic­tims as being burlap fibers. From that the crew deter­mined all the vic­tims had all been in a par­tic­u­lar type of ware­house. Not that much of a stretch actually.

The other bit was find­ing low lev­els of a sleep­ing drug in all the vic­tims. I’m not famil­iar with the drug they men­tioned, but once again pretty rou­tine for crime labs.

So the foren­sic sci­ence por­tion of this episode was actu­ally very well exe­cuted in this episode.