Episode 524 - Born to Kill - Plot Details
“Born to Kill” opens with a shot of hard bodies on the beach, then moves across the sand to downtown with the sun glimmering off the skyscrapers as it sets. Night falls.
At the Warehouse Club downtown, club goers arrive in their black SUVs, while beautiful people enter and exit the club. Shelley Seaver and Alexis Darby, early 20s, wearing great smiles and short dresses leave the club. They discuss going to another club, Nikki Beach. Alexis points out that they’re too drunk to drive. They decide to walk.
The girls don’t see a man on a motorcycle lurking behind them. His hands, belt buckle and boots are visible, but his face is unseen. He pulls up out of the shadows and stops ten feet in front of them. He pats the back of his seat. Alexis reasons that he’s kind of like a cab, but cheaper. She asks if he knows where Nikki Beach is. He nods and reaches toward them. Shelly is afraid and declines, but Alexis takes him up on his offer of a ride. Shelly says she’ll meet them there.
In the morning, Shelly lays dead on her apartment floor. She’s on her stomach, face down, with the back of her dress hiked up. She’s been stabbed. Her cell phone rings. The display indicates her mom is calling.
The sound of keys are heard in the door. The bare feet of a woman enter. She drops her keys on the floor and freezes. It’s Alexis. Her hair is wild from the motorcycle ride and now her eyes are equally wild. She calls out to Shelly, begging to know who did that to her.
A short while later, Alexis talks to a first responder while Horatio and Jake Berkeley lift the crime tape and enter the crime scene. Berkeley is filling in for Detective Tripp who took the day off to take a sergeant’s exam.
Alexis tells Jake that she last saw Shelly at 1:00 am outside a club downtown. Then she came home and found Shelly dead on the floor.
Shelly’s body contains an unusual signature marking – a “Y” pattern is cut into her chest, under her throat. She was stabbed with a serrated knife, then Y’d with a smooth blade.
Calleigh and Delko talk to Alexis to find out if she saw Shelly in the rearview mirror of the motorcycle, wandering if anyone approached her. Alexis doesn’t know. Jake notices something on the floor, under a piece of furniture and flips it over with a pen. Delko reminds him that he just contaminated evidence. Jake tells Delko to pick up the crap and he’ll do the interviews.
Alexis tells Calleigh that she doesn’t know the name of the motorcycle man, but he paid for bottle service at Nikki Beach. When she wouldn’t “pay him back” he got mad and left. Alexis told him where she lived, but he said it was too far and left her there. It was about 3:30 am. Delko observes that he was free during the time of death.
Horatio does a computer search on the NCIC database for similar crimes – murders with a “Y” signature. He uncovers a number of young women killed in the same manner in Boston in 2005. They were all bound by fishing wire. Detective Tripp speculates that perhaps they’re looking for a fisherman.
Calleigh, Delko and Alexis go to Nikki Beach so that Alexis can point out which cabana she and the motorcycle man shared. She points it out. Delko notes it’s the only cabana that’s missing an umbrella. Alexis says the guy threw it.
Delko and Calleigh find the umbrella in the sand and dust it for prints. The prints match an expired Massachusetts fishing license issued to Travis Xavier Riggs, who has a prior conviction for sexual battery.
Horatio and Delko bring Riggs in for interrogation. Horatio points out that Riggs picked up a girl outside a club, now her roommate is dead. Riggs says that’ll teach her because he invited her too, but she wouldn’t come. He says the last time he saw her was when she wouldn’t get on his bike. Horatio notices a knife concealed in the leather of Riggs’ boot. Delko grabs it. It’s a military knife. Serrated near the hilt, with a flat edge near the tip.
Episode 523 - Kill Switch
After Sherry Williamson is carjacked, Ryan Wolfe, now working for On the Scene News, analyzes video footage on the air and isolates the carjacker's image. A few hours later, the man is dead on the beach, the victim of what appears ot be vigilante justice. Calleigh takes Ryan to task for the broadcast, and the guilt-ridden former CSI hands a list of death threats against the carjacker called into the station. The DNA of one of the men on the list, David Hewitt, is found on the clothes of the dead man, and Hewitt claims he came across him on the beach and killed him. Paul Billings IDs the carjacker as his brother Jason. Alexx expresses skepticism about Hewitt's claim after she finds a bite mark from a shark on Jason's body, indicating he may have died in the water, not on the beach as Hewitt claims.
Tripp pays a visit to the marina to examine Jason's boat and speaks with Cole Tilford, the teen Jason hired to care for his boat, who has an alibi for the time Jason was killed. Tripp notices the boat's kill switch has been severed and calls Delko down to examine it. The CSI notices evidence that the boat had a "blister" attached to it that might have been used to transport drugs. Calleigh and Natalia comb the beach looking for the blister, but Ryan, chasing the story, and his hapless cameraman find it first when the cameraman walks into a trap set over it. After the cameraman is sent to the hospital, Calleigh and Natalia retrieve the blister and discover uncut heroin inside. Jason's brother Paul confesses that Jason was running drugs for drug lord Tony Decker. Decker admits that he thinks Jason was stealing from him, but denies killing Jason.
Cole's prints are found on the drugs, but he insists he wasn't a willing participant in the smuggling. He claims Jason forced him to help, an assertion the CSIs disprove when they find his prints on the trap set above the drugs. Ryan turns over the surveillance footage the news station obtained, and shows Delko that someone fired a gun at Sherry's car before Jason took off in it. Delko confronts Sherry: she's been part of this all along, and she gives him the name of the shooter: Paul Billings, Jason's brother. Paul admits to shooting at Jason, at Decker's behest, after the drug lord learned Jason was stealing at him. Sherry set Jason up, but Paul couldn't bring himself to shoot his brother. When Jason learned his brother had shot at him, they scuffled on Jason's boat and went overboard. Jason disappeared underneath the water. But Jason died on a broken neck, and Horatio goes after Decker on his boat, finding evidence that Jason managed to swim to Decker's vessel only to be killed by the drug lord. Ryan quits his job at On the Scene News and Horatio promises that the team won't abandon him.
Episode 524 - Born to Kill (Season Finale)
After a night of clubbing, Shelly Seaver ends up dead in her apartment, her hands bound with fishing wire and the letter Y carved into her chest. Alexx determines she was stabbed to death, and points out two different knife patterns--one straight, the other serrated. Shelley's friend Alexis tells the CSIs she left Shelly at the club to go off with a sexy man on a motorcycle who ditched her when she wouldn't sleep with him. The CSIs track down the biker, Travis Peck, but the knife he has doesn't match Shelly's wounds. Tripp uncovers three similar murders in Boston with an identical signature, leading Horatio to think a serial killer has set up shop in Miami. Traces of red fish scales lead the CSIs to Mosquito Island, where they zero in on Lucas Wade, who has suspicious scratches on his face. Lucas admits to hooking up with Shelly after Alexis left with Travis, but claims he left her alive.
Ryan Wolfe is going over all his old cases and tickets he gave out as a patrol officer, trying to account for a sizeable deposit in his account in hopes of getting his job back. Lucas's sister Lindsay arrives at the station hoping to post bail for her brother. She tells the CSIs that Lucas has an extra Y chromosome, making him predisposed to aggressive behavior and earning him the scorn of their parents growing up. While Lucas is in custody, another woman, Jennifer Royce, turns up dead, a Y carved into her chest as well. Prints on the murder weapon lead to Rita Bolton, Lucas's girlfriend, but she insists she simply packed his fishing kit for him. Jake leaves in a van to transport Lucas to prison, but one of the wheels becomes loose and flies off, turning over the van, injuring Jake and allowing Lucas to escape.
Delko finds severed handcuffs and biker boot prints at the scene, leading the CSIs back to Travis. Travis, who served time in a jail cell next to Lucas in Boston, was his partner in crime, luring women away from their friends so that Lucas could prey on them. Alexx shows Calleigh that the Y incision on Jennifer's chest was done by a left-handed person, not a right-handed one like the others, leading the CSIs to Lucas's sister Lindsay. Lindsay tells them that Lucas took her daughter, Holly. Calleigh looks up an old story in a Boston newspaper about the death of Lindsay and Lucas's sister, Emma, when they were all children. Lucas was blamed for her death, but Calleigh is able to get Lindsay to admit to being the actual killer. Using a child tracker attached to Holly and information from Ryan, who after going through his tickets realized he once pulled Lucas over, the CSIs find Lucas with Holly. He is arrested, and both Wade siblings are taken away. Jake leaves the hospital and makes his interest in Calleigh clear by kissing her in the lab, while Natalia helps Ryan go over his past arrests. Horatio stands on top of a building looking out on the city he helps keep safe.
