CSI begins with Nick and Greg arriving to a deserted road at night where Dave is looking over their victim. There is a trail of blood and glass leading them to the body and because of his injuries, Dave thinks it could be a hit and run. However, Nick doesn’t find any skid marks and the angle that the victim’s body rolled would make it hard for a car to go through. Because there’s so much glass on the victim, they think he could be a jumper, but there are no nearby buildings. The victim is identified as Bradley Weaks, who works on the 30th tower of Silver Springs.
Crawford, Cooper and Greg go to his office building and see it is completely trashed. Greg finds similar glass inside. There are two broken windows, meaning something flew into the room and then flew out the other window. They find scorch marks and Greg wonders if it could have been a rocket-powered device. Greg figures they should find the device to figure out who would want to kill the victim and Cooper says they should put the window back together and puts Greg on the job.
Greg and Finlay work together to put together the broken pieces of the window. They are able to see the impact zone shows the device was around 24 to 30 inches long and neither of them are able to figure out what it was.
Morgan goes to talk to Sara and she says the victim’s firm, Baker, Smith and Capaldi, has ties to the Colombian cartel, but she’s not sure if it’s related. Meanwhile, Hodges is going through the scorch mark evidence to try and figure out what it is. Henry comes in and Hodges tells him he found jet aviation fuel in the scorch marks. He also found charcoal in the residue. He may be able to find out how hot the engine was and whether the jet was throttling up or down. Hodges also figured out that the jet was slowing down.
Nick is not sure how far the unidentified object could have gone since there was still “significant velocity,” as he tells Cooper. Nick has been working the numbers to figure out how far the object could have gone and found a general area where it could have landed.
The next day, Nick and Finlay find a damaged taxi with a body inside. They figure it’s the cab driver, but then a man comes out upset about the damage to the cab. When Nick finds out he’s the cab driver, he has an officer speak to the man while he tells Finlay the news. Nick looks inside the cab and finds a possible engine and then they find a helmet and someone’s boot with his foot still inside. Nick begins to think their missile was a man.
Nick and Russell are watching a man flying in what is called a wind suit, or a squirrel suit. It can go 200 mph. Nick tells Morgan and Hodges are trying to put the man back together so he goes to see how they are doing.
Nick goes to see Morgan and she tells him an ex had a wind suit himself, but nothing high tech like their mystery man did. In addition to the exoskeleton and equipment on the chest and the jet engines, they realize that the suit was made in a sophisticated fashion. Morgan also found what appeared to be a box like the black boxes on planes.
Henry comes in to tell them their dead man is a military man in the air force, Robert Holland. His wife lives on base in Nellis.
Cooper meets with Major Mills, Holland’s C.O. and Mrs. Amanda Holland. Robert was not on duty the night before and Mills tells Cooper the wing suit came from TRP Aeronautics, which is a Department of Defense contractor. Mills thinks that Holland could have been logging some extra flying time for fun, but Amanda doesn’t believe her husband would risk his life. Amanda tells Cooper it had been three days and Mills tries to put the accident in the hands of TRP Aeronautics, but Amanda feels he is blaming Bobby.
As they are leaving, Amanda says she forgot her phone and instead, she talks to Cooper. She tells him her husband would never do what Mills said he did and she thinks they are trying to cover something up. Cooper promises to find anything he can.
Greg talks to Nick about the parachutes in the wing suit. There was a primary one and a reserve one, but they hadn’t been deployed. They wonder if Holland was dead or unconscious and Greg also found a parachute that should have been set off automatically, but didn’t. There’s no sign of damage and it doesn’t look like the device popped, despite the fact Holland was falling fast. They decide to “scare” the device into popping.
They pump air inside a machine to make the object feel like it is flying and then falling. But as their monitor shows a drop in aptitude, nothing happens. Greg opens the device and he finds it was tampered with. Greg tries to bridge the circuit and it pops.
Nick and Crawford go to speak with Ms. Mason at TRP, but she immediately accuses Holland of stealing the device. She is very stoic as they tell her Holland crashed the suit and killed a civilian before he crashed. Mason mentions Project Icarus and Nick recognizes it as a Greek myth. They go to a lab and meet Lance Ferris. He wants to see the suit when he finds out about the crash but Nick says they have it. They notice Lance’s tools, especially one that is made to adjust the angle on the wing suit. They want to talk to him downtown, but he’s not sure. Mason tells him to go since there is nothing they are hiding.
Nick tells Ferris that a tool that is similar to the one he made was used to sabotage the automatic activation device as he and Crawford interview him. Lance tells them TRP knew about them logging extra hours with the suits and that Robert had made 25 grand the month before. He begins complaining of a headache as he tells them Claudia Mason urged them to work after hours. But then he begins to talk funny and collapses to the ground, before violent convulsions take over and he dies at their feet.
Robbins talks to Finlay and tells him Ferris had a cerebral edema. He thinks he could have had High-Altitude Cerebral Edema. He also found HACE in connection with Holland. Finlay wonders if both men could have had their strokes the same way. If Ferris had been in a hypobaric chamber, like the one used at TRP, then it could have had dangerous consequences for him.
At TRP, Mason is talking to everyone at the lab as Nick comes in. She is once again stoic hearing about Ferris dying. Nick tells her he got a search warrant to get information on the project. Nick feels she is hiding something even though she claims she has been cooperative. She tries to argue that he needs approval from a military judge, but Nick knows better. He wants the key for the black box, but she tells him that it’s from the Air Force.
Cooper tells Mills they need the encrypted data from the recorder. Mills tries to argue it’s classified information, but Cooper tells him TRP is responsible for his men’s deaths. Cooper tells him he should do right by Holland. Mills says he will send it to him.
Hodges is going through the data retrieval but he tells Greg he is running into trouble. He found that the pressures from Holland’s vitals were all at zero, meaning he was basically dead the whole flight. Greg quotes Sherlock Holmes saying, “Eliminate all factors, the one which remains must be the truth.” Greg looks at the altimeter reading and finds he didn’t jump from a plane. They figure they can use coordinates to find where he jumped.
Greg shows Cooper the flight path he calculated, which he began at the Delmore Towers, which has been used by Mason and TRP. They deduce that Mason and Holland had an affair and it’s possible Holland had a stroke in the middle of a passionate moment, so Mason put him in the suit and sent him off to avoid losing her company. But to prove it, they have to see if she missed anything.
Morgan and Greg go into the hotel room, but the room is clean. Morgan takes photos and Greg finds blood on a piece of furniture. Greg uses luminal to find a huge blood pool and blood drops. However, the blood pattern shows that Holland suffered a brutal beating instead of HACE.
Nick tells Finlay that Mason denied knowing that Holland used the condo and that they had an affair. They look at Mason talking to her lawyer as Morgan processes the condo. While Greg bags the carpeting where the blood was found. Morgan also finds a possible weapon. They take evidence to the lab to process and then Crawford shows them security footage from the night of the murder, where Amanda is seen following Holland into the elevator and slapping him.
Cooper talks to Amanda as Crawford shows her the footage. Cooper is not happy since she came to him asking for help and she explains to them that Bobby had been acting different and she felt he had been straying. She followed him to the condo and confronted him. In the elevator, he promised he was only doing a BASE jump from the tower. She had only lied to keep his death benefits and make sure his memory was preserved. They ask her for a blood and DNA sample.
Hodges talks to Nick and tells him Ferris had furosemide in his system, which is a diuretic. He didn’t have a prescription and the one he had in his system caused the sodium inside him to become imbalanced. Because of that, it would have been a lethal combination since he was in the hypobaric chamber.
Henry processes the piece of art that is believed to be the murder weapon, as well as the sheets on the bed. Greg comes in when he gets the result. The blood matches the victim and he stumbles as he tells Greg which boss was in bed with him.
Crawford and Finlay interview Mills, whose DNA was found on the sheets. Crawford asks for an explanation. Mills reveals Holland had decided to leave him and they weren’t just having an affair. Holland didn’t want to live a lie anymore. Mills began beating him after being rejected. When confronted about Ferris, especially since Mills had furosemide in his home, he admits he did it since Ferris likely knew about him and Robert.
Cooper sees Amanda, who is unsure of where she can go. Cooper apologizes for everything that happened, but she understands. He tells her he doesn’t keep anything from his wife anymore and she calls the woman “lucky” before leaving.
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