CSI: Vegas – Episode 9.02 “The Happy Place” Recap

Episode 9.02 – The Happy Place
Air Date: October 16, 2008

The show begins with Sara and Grissom sharing moments in bed. As obvious as it is that they still care deeply for each other, he can’t convince her to stay in Vegas. His phone rings. It’s the lab.

A woman, Sprig Grenigier, leaps to her death from an apartment window. The team begins investigating the apartment and surrounding scene. They are unconvinced that Sprig committed suicide. Minutes before her death, she had received a phone call from a payphone across the street from the apartments.

Meanwhile, Grissom leads the investigation at the scene of a woman’s body in the alley behind a pawn shop. Her eyes have been poked and ruptured like a pair of grapes, as if by a pair of thumbs.
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Sprig and her fiancé were getting married in a just a couple weeks. He told Willows that she had just lost her job as a bank teller, accused of stealing ten thousand dollars. She had recently applied for unemployment benefits.

Sara arrives at Pam Adler’s hospital bedside, where she had just died. Her husband had “pulled the plug”for his wife. Police were cautiously waiting outside the door for her. Her husband, Tom, sat next to her still body. Tom tells Sara that he had received a newspaper clipping from Tony Thorpe.

Thorpe, who had raped and beaten Pam, had written on the clipping, claiming to have visited her in the hopital and raped her again. Tom said that pulling the plug on his wife was the only way he knew to save her from Thorpe. He tells Sara and the police, though, that he had burned the note. Sara goes with Tom, as he heads to the station to give his statement.

Willows and Nick watch surveillance video from the bank. It shows Sprig giving a man, obviously a woman in “drag”, one hundred hundred dollar bills as change for two fifty dollar bills. There are, however, no signs of duress. There is no note, no gun, and no other evidence that she was coerced. The bank manager, though, said that Sprig claimed not to remember the customer or the transaction.

Nick shows Willows a video from a different bank, where another teller lost her job, having given the same “change”. The customer was the same “man” from Sprig’s bank.

Willow questions other teller, Linara Powell. She had no memory of the transaction, just as Sprig had claimed. Willows asks Powell if she had done anything to lose weight, recently. She says that she quit smoking, recently, with the help of a hypnotherapist. She hands Catherine a business card for Viviana Conway, AKA Madame Marvelous.

Willows discovers an entry in Sprig’s checkbook, a check made out to Viviana Conway. She and Nick visit a Madame Marvelous show, where Conway has a stage full of people clucking like chickens.

After the show, Viviana tells them that most of her work is with private clients. Sprig Grenigier was one of her weight-loss clients. She says Sprig lost twelve pounds to get ready for her honeymoon. She explains that all hypnosis is self-hypnosis. She just provides visualizations of what the client really wants. She had Sprig picture herself in a “teeny bikini”. She explains the different states of mind between awake and asleep. She says, though, that she can’t convince anyone to do anything they wouldn’t otherwise do.

Detective Williams tells Brass that they’ve identified the body of the woman in the alley. Paula Bonfilio was a high school guidance counselor. The Tangiers room key belonged to a pit boss who used the room to entertain high rollers. Bonfilio would hit the casino like clockwork, every time she got a paycheck. The night before, she was in pretty deep. The pit boss claims he helped her get out of the hole. His DNA sample matched semen found in Bonfilio’s vaginal vault.

Grissom and Williams visit Bonfilio’s home to try and find out what she might have been doing in the part of town where they found her. Her son, Scott, drives up, and says he talked to his mother the night before, and that she was fine. She was with his baby sister, Lexi Bonfilio. The police initiate an Amber Alert for Lexi.

Scott brings the team a pacifier, unwashed, for a DNA sample. He tells Grissom and Williams that his mom said she and Lexi were going shopping. Around 10 PM, she called and said she’d be out for the night. According to Scott, her staying out all night was normal. Taking Lexi out late was not as normal, except when Scott had to work. Scott tells them that he and his mom didn’t have a good relationship. He’s a straight A senior, but was going to community college, thanks to her gambling addiction. He hid his paychecks, but she found them. Grissom asks about the possibility that Lexi is with her father, but Scott says that she had always been a party girl. She never brought men home, but always met them. Paula told Scott that Lexi was a “gift from God”.

Archie shows Grissom that Paula’s card had been used at the Tangiers Casino child care. On the casino surveillance video, Archie shows Grissom that Paula spent a long time at the tables, losing big for a couple of hours. Around 6, she gets up and finds a pit boss, whom she walks away with for a bit. At one point, she received a call on a disposable cell phone, then a white-haired man arrived. The man grabs her shoulders, she picks up her last $500 chip and they leave. Grissom notes that the larger value chips often have Radio Frequency devices. At 8:15 PM, Paula and the man pick up her baby. Later, they all appear on video at Pete’s Pawn Shop, near the scene of her body. Around 9PM, her ATM card was rejected at the pawn shop. A while later, she showed up dead in the alley.

Sara watches Tom, as he’s escorted into jail. Although he pulled the cord to help his wife, euthanasia is a felony. Though he was trying to help her, he failed to save the note from Thorpe, hurting his case.

Grissom tells Sara that none of Adler’s incoming calls came from Tony Thorpe. She figures he used a cell phone. Grissom also says that they found no evidence that Thorpe had ever hean inside Pam Adler’s room. There’s also no sign of sexual assault. Grissom doen’t believe Adler’s story. He appeals to Sara’s belief in science, making a case for the possibility that Tom Adler is just covering up for his own action. His words, though, make her wonder whose relationship he’s describing.

A hypnotherapist tries to help Grace remember the day of the robbery. She says the man wants change for two fifties; she gave him 100 singles. The hypnotherapist says the hypnotist must have put a “block” in, preventing her from remembering the details. The hypnotist must have used a post-hypnotic suggestion with a word or phrase to trigger the scam. Nick asks if the person could have used post-hypnotic suggestion to get them to do something they wouldn’t normally do. He says you can, depending on how you word it. If it sounds like something the person would do, it’s possible. He says, also, that the trigger has to be from the same voice that gave the post-hypnotic suggestion. Grace said the “man” had small hands…”little sissy hands”…and “jacked up” fingernails. Archie zooms in on the video to the man’s hands. “His” nails show signs of ripped off acrylic tips. Willows has Archie compare the facial features of the “man” in the teller windows to those on Viviana Conway’s DMV photo. They match!

Sanders tells Sara that Thorpe may have been harrassing Tom to get him to euthanize his wife. According to a new law, he could still be tried for her murder. At one time, if Adler’s died over a year after the assault and rape, he would have been free. Now, however, at any time, if her death could be attributed to Thorpe’s raping and assaulting her, he could still face charges. If Tom did it, though, it would remove him from the list of potential charges for the murder.

Williams and the police spot Paula Bonfilio’s car. A prostitute, “Trixie,” says an old man with a baby gave her the car, on the condition that he drop the baby off for him. Trixie leads them to the Palermo hotel nursery, where she had taken the baby. Williams claims Lexi, and Scott holds her briefly. Williams says CPS will have to decide if Scott can take custody of Lext, though.

Willows and Nick confront Viviana. Nick asks why she would take advantage of these people, who had trusted them. She says she “had to try”. She said she gave Sprig a free session. Viviana’s prints were on the payphone that called Sprig. Apparently, she told Sprig to picture herself in a bikini, at the beach, and jump into the water.

Viviana: There is no way that you can prove I had anything to do with her death. It’s like I told you. I cannot make people do anything that they don’t want to do.
Willows: I can. Get in jail.

Sara and Detective Vega visit Tony Thorpe. He’s in a wheelchair, and had been since Christmas.

Williams questions Leon. He says he roughed Paula up, and relieved her of her car and her baby. He says, though, that he left her alive in the alley. About the $500 chip, he says that she owed him $12,000, so it wasn’t enough to worry about.

Sara confronts Tom about Thorpe, asking why he lied. He says he wasn’t living, just sitting with Pam in the hospital. He tells Sara that he couldn’t move on, and leave Pam in the hospital like that. He couldn’t ask the doctors to help, though. He couldn’t ask them to kill his wife so he could have a weekend to himself.

Archie receives a call saying that the $500 chip showed up. Scott was trying to cash it. Back in the Bonfilio house, Grissom finds a bloodied gold chain matching the one near Paula’s body. Grissom also finds sexy photos of Scott and Paula. Grissom believes he had Oedipus issues.

Lab results, however, show that Scott and Paula didn’t share any DNA markers. Lexi, however, is Scott and Paula’s child. Records show that Paula worked in Akron, Ohio, until 2 years before. So, she brought Scott and Lexi to Vegas, when he was 15. Scott’s fingerprints are in the missing children’s database.

Scott claims that Paula didn’t kidnap him. He says, though, that it was better than his parents. Paula was Scott’s guidance counselor. She listened to all his problems. Scott tells Grissom that she only liked him while he was more risky. He tells Grissom that Lexi is better off without Paula, even if she is without her father.