Sunday’s episode of CSI began with a man in a suit walking toward a van where CSI Finlay is sitting. Her car has a bomb that is wired to go off within 15 minutes. The bomb squad is figuring out how to get her out when CSI Cooper gets a call on his cell phone from a caller with a distorted voice. He orders Cooper to tell him who he is, but Cooper doesn’t know. But when the clock changes to one minute, Cooper is stunned to see the man in the suit step back after Finlay told him to go. As the caller comes back to call, we see the clock go down to three seconds as the credits roll.
Next, the scene takes us back to three days earlier. CSI Finlay is kissing Daniel Shaw, a private investigator. They discuss her working with Russell Cooper again after knowing each other previously. Finlay gets a call about a murder and meets Cooper at the scene. CSI Stokes arrives, thinking the place has been processed since the crime scene was staged, although he doesn’t know this. Cooper informs him that the killer did this and the body was removed. Jared Briscoe, the Gig Harbor killer had done this kind of attack before.
Cooper thinks someone is mocking him and doing this crime, especially since Briscoe is scheduled for execution. Then we see Cooper walking the interview with Briscoe, where he mentions stalking his daughter, Maya. Ecklie comes in and they discuss the fact Cooper went above Ecklie’s head to get Briscoe transferred to Vegas for an interview. Ecklie tells him not to let himself get caught up in the past. They mention Brass, who still refuses to leave his daughter’s side.
Nick is taking photos of the crime scene when Sarah Sidle comes in. She notices from the blood spray that it’s the primary scene where the victim died. Nick finds a digital recorder and they hear a distorted voice describing the scene. After telling Nick she’ll take the evidence to the lab, he begins photographing the room with a flying pod.
At the lab, Greg Sanders and Morgan Brody process the evidence that was discovered. Hodges then finds the strings from the scene were made using actual human tissue. After they discuss the findings, we see Finlay talking to Shaw again. The parents of missing girl Emily Bartson apparently sent a PI, Keri Torres, after him, who is missing. Shaw didn’t know she had died. He mentions Keri, who works in homicide and worked with Shaw. Keri hasn’t been answering his messages, so he is trying to find her. He wants Finlay’s help.
At the lab, they look at camera footage of Keri in a coffee shop. Keri had been looking into a lead about Emily’s whereabouts, meeting someone who was possibly a client, since Emily worked in the sex industry. They see that the man is holding the underside of the table, so they get the table sent to the lab so Greg can lift prints.
Morgan comes in and they find print belongs to Jared Briscoe, who is supposed to be in jail. They look at the digit that matched his profile and it is his middle finger.
Then, the next scene is a flashback of Cooper back in 2009 while he was in Seattle. He is searching a boat at night and finds photos and mementoes. After spotting drops of blood, he finds an ice chest. He finds a body and is calling it in when he sees Briscoe behind him. Russell holds his gun to him and Briscoe pretends to put his hands up before trying to attack Russell. As they struggle, Briscoe is shot and Cooper is close to shooting him again. We are taken back to the present where Briscoe arrives in the lab.
Cooper shows Briscoe a photo of the new crime scene, asking if he knows why someone would be inspired by his crime. Briscoe asks if Emily sold herself and Cooper tells him her body is missing. After seeing the digit that matched his, Briscoe shows him the middle finger that he lost. He claims he would never share his crimes with anyone and figures the person who cut his finger off sold it to someone.
Nick is replicating slicing motions with his hand while a screen projects a hook making slashes. Greg comes in and teases Nick. The 3D mapping system he is using doesn’t match up with some of the castoff from the blood. They believe that it was planted and Greg tells Nick how Briscoe taunted Cooper by writing his daughter’s name all over the last crime scene.
Finlay and Shaw discuss that they both lied to each other regarding his visit and where she got information for the case, both calling it “sin of omission.” Shaw wants to help since Keri is his partner. Morgan comes and tells them that the police found Keri’s car and Sarah is processing.
The car is completely clean and tells Shaw and Finlay there is no trace of anything including dust, but she did find high velocity spatter that is not consistent with blood. She found notes Keri made about the case and the Gig Harbor Killer. They deduce that Keri may have stumbled onto the theory of the copycat killer and that the client who booked a Vegas with Emily killed her. They discover the name of the mystery man in the video is Mark Turner, who Finlay recognized as a man who visited Briscoe multiple times this year.
Finlay and Shaw go to Turner’s place of work to speak to him. They learn that he apparently did not meet with Keri and that he was in Washington. He reveals he has been asked to fend Briscoe for wrongful imprisonment and when they ask who, they hear a voice and turn to discover a man who looks exactly like Briscoe.
The man is Jared’s brother, who had been adopted and raised separately from Jared. He introduces himself as Paul Winthrop. They show him the coffee shop photo and he uses his middle finger to touch it. Finlay asks if it’s possible he’s the man in the photo. He suggests they are looking in the wrong place and claims his brother is innocent, citing his horrible childhood. Winthrop tells them he offered DNA, but his brother wasn’t convicted using DNA. Finlay tells him they had evidence on the boat, but Winthrop counters it was circumstantial.
When Winthrop claims she has a need to be right, the scene takes us to the night Cooper caught Briscoe when Finlay ran toward the scene on hearing a struggle. She apparently shot Briscoe. We then see Ecklie, Cooper, and Finlay together, where she says she holds to what they did that night. She believes Paul was working with his brother. Ecklie warns her not to make things personal when she feels that Paul, who despite an unblemished record, came to Vegas to get his brother out of prison to go on a killing spree to mock them.
Cooper is thinking that Briscoe may not have been the mastermind just as Morgan comes in to reveal that Henry got the DNA back from the markers that had been made of human tissue. They were from the three victims from Seattle who had never been found.
Nick is looking at a digital map of the crime scene while Greg looks at photos from Keri’s car. He uses an astronomy book to compare photos. He tells Nick that the pattern is the constellation Gemini, the twins. He asks Nick if he’s crazy and Nick reveals he found something possibly similar. On the monitor, he moves it around where we see the layout of the green strings, with the same constellation. Greg also found out that the abandoned building where two companies with the names of two constellations, Pollux and Castor, owned the crime scene. Keri was apparently planning a visit at Pollux Petroleum.
They discover a scene where the killer made a crime scene complete out of a mass grave and set up a field morgue. Nick shows Cooper the bodies of the victims. The victims were mummified and they were moved. Cooper discovers one of the victims is wearing a class ring and it belonged to Nicole Davis, one of the former victims. He knows they are the bodies of the missing victims from Seattle.
Doctor Robbins arrives and Cooper thinks maybe the reason the victims were found meant the killer was closing Seattle and opening himself to Vegas. Dave comes back and reveals one of the victims had skin beneath her fingernails, suggesting she bit her attacker.
Shaw and Finlay discuss the bodies being found and they suggest they bring in Winthrop, but Finlay goes alone. However, when she gets into her car, it locks on her and she discovers a bomb beneath her seat.
Nick and Cooper are working when Nick’s computer beeps. The samples don’t come back the way they hoped so Cooper tells him to rerun them with Henry. Cooper gets a call and then he gets a shocked look on his face before the next scene takes us to the parking lot where a bomb unit is setting up.
Russell gets the call from the distorted voice from the first scene and we see the clock change. He finally tells the man he is the Gig Harbor Killer and the bomb is disarmed. The men move to get Finlay out of the car. She rushes up to Russell to hug him.
Back in his office, Ecklie and Cooper argue over the fact that Paul Winthrop will try to use his actions against him in a suit. Cooper tells him the DNA under the fingernails did not match the twins and he tells Ecklie if he was wrong, he will catch the correct man. Ecklie orders Cooper to catch them if they really are the murderers.
The next scene shows Paul and Jared walking down the hall in the lab with cops. Meanwhile, Cooper puts all the information on the board and we see Finlay in her bed, Sarah processing the car, Nick mapping the crime scene, and Greg working on the Torres notebook. He discovers a page ripped out of the notebook and uses his tools to see what was on the page. Morgan stares at the three bodies and then we get an image of Emily’s murder before we see Cooper again.
image via INFphoto.com