CSI begins with a woman dancing on what appears to be a stage and talking seductively about going for a ride before we see Crawford and Nick walking through the woods after a call comes in. They find a woman’s body covered in chrome. Dave says she has blunt force trauma and her time of death is between 12 am and 3 am.

The woman’s body is taken to the morgue where Morgan processes her. After she is finished, Dave cleans off her body to prepare for autopsy. Robbins tells Cooper later on she had silver paint inside her lungs. She has some bruising on her back that came from a struggle. Morgan comes in with an ID, Ava Moltrose.

Sara talks to Ava’s mother, Ruth, and her husband. Neither had heard from Ava and tell Sara she had done drugs and ran with crowds they didn’t approve of.

Hodges talks to Finlay and tells her the silver on the body was chromic potassium sulfate, or chrome, and she had glass shards on her elbow that came from a car headlight. The car they believed she died near was a classic car made prior to 1939.

Julie does some investigating and finds a match to a 1938 Packard Touring Sedan. She was able to find that there were two Packards left in Vegas, one that was destroyed, and another owned by Carlo Derosa.

Sara and Julie go to talk to Derosa, who is on his cell phone and ignores them. Sara sets off the alarm on his car to get his attention and he is shocked to learn Ava, who is his ex-girlfriend, is dead. They ask where his car is and he indicates it is in “The Vault,” more specifically downtown in a warehouse.

Derosa takes the girls to the warehouse, where he tells them his dad collected cars and liked to unveil them. His brother, Aron, who thinks Carlo is there with buyers, soon meets them. Sara and Finlay indicate who they are before Julie goes to look at the Packard, where she spots the car and a tub of chrome, with drops of chrome leading to an empty parking spot. The guys are shocked to find that a ’76 Cadillac is missing.

Julie talks to Aron, who tells her the only other person who knew their security code to the warehouse was a man named Rubio, who they had known for years. He tells her that the ’76 Caddy is valuable because it was the car his father was murdered in and he also tells her he was home painting at the time of the murder. Carlo tells Sara about his dad too and the reason he and his brother were fighting was because Carlo was ready to see the cars, but his brother wasn’t. He tells her he was in his office around midnight.

Greg is looking at photos when Finlay comes over and asks him about the history of Alfonz Derosa since he made a book about mobsters in Vegas. He tells her about his past, including how a hit man for Pete Bamonte murdered him. Julie and Greg both have trouble believing the sons had nothing to do with their case, so they begin processing the Packard. Julie finds blood on the hood ornament consistent with wounds on Ava’s body.

They continue searching for evidence and Greg finds a magnet for a pizzeria underneath a car near where the Caddy had been parked. Back at the lab, Henry and Hodges (in between bites of pizza) tell Cooper that Ava’s fingerprints were found on the touch pad for the security key to the vault and Hodges demonstrates a trick to show what happens to a magnet when it is stuck to a car that has not been repaired. It falls off and he reveals a car appraiser used his credit card at the pizzeria.

Sara talks to Mr. Bixler, the car appraiser, and he lies at first, saying he hadn’t been to the vault to do an appraisal since two months earlier when he was hired. However, Sara knows he is lying since one of his magnets for a current pizza special was found near the crime scene. He tells her Carlo Derosa had asked him to appraise the ’76 Caddy.

Cooper and Sara talk about the possibility that Derosa got Ava to steal a car and maybe she had a partner who got greedy and stole the car. Morgan stops them to reveal that trace on Ava’s choose matched a particular industrial pavement in an area where Ava had rented a storage unit that was large enough to hide a car.

Nick and Crawford go to the unit and find a broken lock. They open the unit to find the Caddy inside. They hear someone rustling and Crawford tells them to come out. It turns out to be Aron Derosa.

Crawford interviews Aron, who swears he didn’t kill Ava or take the car. He tells the detective he loved her and that Carlo got her involved in everything. Aron says he got the bills for Ava’s credit cars and saw the purchase of a storage unit and figured the car was there. The reason he doesn’t want to sell the car is because of the memories he had have driving with his father.

Finlay and Cooper discuss the case. Carlo had posted the car for sale on a website for $100,000 and hadn’t returned the deposit that was made by a buyer. Julie thinks it is possible they are looking for someone else since the shoe impression found at the scene didn’t match any of Carlo’s or Aron’s.

Greg and Morgan are processing the Caddy and Morgan finds a fiber in the backseat of the car. They also find a piece of chrome on the floorboard. When they open the trunk of the car, they find a tarp covered in chrome and blood, as well as a copy of Bixler’s appraisal that they believe they can get a print from.

Greg finds a partial print on the top of the letter and soon, Cooper comes to find out who the buyer is of the car. Morgan informs him that the DNA came back to a female who was a family member of Ava’s. The only person who fits is Ruth Montrose, her mother.

The next scene shows a flashback of Ruth asking her daughter for the car, since she borrowed money from shady characters. We see Sara talking to Ruth in the present, who has admitted that she asked her daughter to help her with the car. She had met a man from Dubai who was interested in Mob stories and cars and had offered the Derosa car. She had borrowed from a loan shark to get the money. Ruth tells Sara she wasn’ there when her daughter was murdered.

Cooper and Sara discuss the mom and neither are sure if she is really the killer. Cooper gets a text from Greg asking about “a ride back to the past.” Greg has laid out photos, including one of Pete Bamonte. Greg tells Cooper the research for his book led him to discovering Bamonte had a son named Duncan and his last name was changed to Reidel, who turns out to be Ava’s stepfather. They both deduce it is possible that Ruth made up the Dubai story and Duncan is the buyer.

Finlay is in the Caddy trying to think about things as Greg comes in. She tells him the fiber came from hemp and would not have come from the car, and the chrome flake they found is not from the girl’s body. Greg goes over to the passenger’s side door where the trace was found and discovers the chrome under the headrest is flaking. They figure out that the headrest must have been replaced.

Knowing the seat was covered in blood when Alfonz and his mistress died, Greg sprays the seat with luminol, but finds none on the headrest. They figure there must have been a bullet lodged in the old headrest and maybe the killer of Alfonz was actually Duncan Reidel.

Finlay runs forensics on the headrest and finds a DNA match to an unexpected source. In the interrogation room, Crawford and Cooper talk about the car’s meaning to the sons before turning back to Mr. Bixler.

They inform Bixler they have evidence linking him to having committed the killing of Alfonz Derosa and his mistress, Vera, who was Bixler’s fiancée. One of the bullets he fired was lodged into the headrest. When he heard the car was being sold, he was worried that the bullet would be discovered and as he was trying to get rid of the evidence, Ava came back to the warehouse. He killed her when she tried to see what he was up to.

Greg tells Finlay that Carlo sent someone to get the car and the brothers decided to donate the car to a Mob Museum. They lament on the car not getting one last ride before Greg tosses the keys to her and they get in.

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