CSI: Vegas – Episode 9.04 “Let It Bleed” Recap

CSI: Vegas Episode 9.04 Let It Bleed
Air Date: October 30, 2008

A man in a police uniform runs out of a liquor store. Nick and Riley give chase. When the man runs into a building, Nick follows, but tells Riley to call for help. The man, cornered, jumps out an upstairs window, landing in a dumpster. Inside the dumpster is also a woman’s body. The man had small bills, beef jerky, and a porn magazine. Riley notes that the woman smells fresh.

An ink stamp on the victim’s upper thigh leads the team to a club. There, Catherine finds her daughter, dancing with a man, and sporting a fake ID. Catherine scolds her, and sends her with a patrolman. Riley says that she must have come in through the back, not having a wristband indicating she paid the cover at the door. She must have been in the VIP area.

Catherine and Riley show the Craig Hess, the club owner, a photo of the victim. He says he doesn’t recognize the girl. Catherine tells him about her own underage daughter being there, and threatens to card the other patrons and shut the place down. He smugly retorts that her parenting is the problem and she’s only seeking to ease her guilt by placing the blame on a legitimate club for accepting her daughter’s valid-looking ID.
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Nick tells Brass that the fake cop’s gun is unregistered, and has no useful prints. The patch on the shirt is a Reno police seal. Brass uses the light to show ink lines in the shirt pocket, a telltale sign of a real police uniform that suffers from constantly putting away an open pen. The shoes, though, are weak patent leather.

Greg and Riley find footage on the club’s surveillance video of the victim leaving. She looks upset, then the Hess says something to her, and she seems to calm down.

Catherine pulls glass from the woman’s body, none of them having produced vital response in the her tissue, indicating that they were post-mortem. She has recent needle marks on her arm, and white power in her nose. She has hives on her abdomen.

Vartann tells Grissom that the woman showed up in the Homeland Security database. Angela Marie Carlos, 19, comes from Colombia, and goes to college in Salt Lake City. Her father is Juan Ramón Carlos, a major drug lord. He’s linked to every drug dealer in Vegas, and has a sister in Henderson. Vartann and Grissom visit the sister.

The aunt is upset over Angela’s death. She said Angela was living with her, going to school, until two months before. She went to Utah to be away from the partying in Vegas. The aunt tells them that Angela was a partier, like her mother. Juan Carlos didn’t approve, of course. She says she had only one true friend, Sylvie, who went to high school with Angela. She laments not being able to protect her neice, saying that Juan will never forgive her.

Nick talks to Officer Brady, the Reno policeman who owns the stolen uniform. He’s in Vegas to testify in court, and says he met a girl, who seduced him. He let her wear his uniform in the hotel room. He sent it to hotel housekeeping to have it dry cleaned before his testifying. It never came back to him.

Greg talks to Sylvie. Angela wanted to come to Vegas for Halloween, and they went out to the club. She heard Craig Hess tell her to leave, indicating that she was endangering his life. Sylvie stayed with a guy that she hooked up with and texted Angela to meet up with them at a party.

Riley and Catherine confront Craig Hess for lying about knowing, and talking to, Angela. He claims ignorant of who her father is.

Hodges finds a large piece of glass in the top of Angela’s head, along with red tissue, making it look like it lodged there at the time of death. David shows Grissom that Angela’s blood is hemolyzed, which might indicate several different things, including transfusion reaction, serin, risin, and autoimmune hemolytic anemia. He says he’s waiting on her medical records, tox, and DNA tests, before certifying the cause of death.

Mandi checks the armed robber’s prints, having to reconstruct them from his damaged, disembodied fingers. They match those of Thomas Taylor from Bakersfield, California. He has priors, including assault charges, breaking and entering, and DUI.

Catherine finds her daughter in her office. She apologizes for using the fake ID, and tries to convince Catherine that she doesn’t need to worry about her.

Hodges invites Grissom out to a lecture with an open bar. Grissom deflects the invitation, and Hodges tells him the powder in Angela’s nose wasn’t cocaine. It was atropine. Used to cut cocaine or methamphetamine, it’s also used to tranquilize fish and other animals. She had no signs of meth or cocaine in her system, leaving the question: how did it get in her nose?

Brass tells Nick that Taylor would have had to be a guest or a hotel staffer to get access to Officer Brady’s room. He didn’t work there, though, and wasn’t registered as a guest. Nick wonders about the shoes. Were they rented for a wedding or a reunion?

Greg and Riley follow up on a GPS hit on Angela’s cell phone. It’s moving. They it down to a garbage truck. They stop the truck and find it in a inside her purse, in a garbage sack, along with with a lot of blood stained glass.

Riley shows Catherine the map of the garbage truck route. It hadn’t stopped at any of the clubs where Angela Carlos had been.

Wendy tells David that Carlos’ blood sample reveals multiple came back as a mixture of blood from one woman and two men, making the sample appear to be tainted. After a testy interchange over whose fault it was, David takes a new sample from Angela’s leg.

Nick tells Brass that “Barry Wunderlich” had rented two tuxes and two pairs of shoes, three days earlier. Wunderlich, also from Bakersfield, had the room across from Brady’s. He was supposed to check out the day before, but his stuff is still in the room.

David and Wendy tells Grissom about Angela’s blood test. Retesting reveals, again, a female B-, one male O-, and one male A+. Blood from the glass in her skull revealed the first mixture. The mixing of A+ blood with her B- must be the cause of death. Transfusion explains the fresh needle marks and the hives.

Nick and Brass question Barry Wunderlich. Apparently, he has been in custody for three days for drunk and disorderly charges. Wunderlich says they’d rented the tuxes for his bachelor party at the Acid Strip. At the strip club, the owner and the woman appeared to have been trying to rip them off. So, Wunderlich…who says he’s an Ultimate Fighter…beat up the manager and two bartenders, and was arrested. He asked Taylor to get the money to bail him out before the wedding. So, Taylor seems to have stolen the uniform at the Palermo, where they were staying, took Wunderlich’s 9mm handgun, and committed four armed robberies, before losing his life in the chase with Stokes.

Hodges examines the glass pieces, and a skin fragment from the garbage bag and Angela’s purse. The skin turns out to be a goldfish scale. Hodges reconstructs the glass from the garbage bag, finding that it was fish bowl shaped. Catherine asks Hess about feeding his fish. He claims his “boy” Goya feeds them. He says Goya has a warehouse.

Police arrest Goya and Joe…Goya’s partner or employee (?)…at Goya’s Fish, finding cocaine in the “sand” cartons they are carting across the warehouse. Catherine and Riley examine the warehouse, finding a large number of atropine vials. Riley finds an aquarium, a pump, and blood-stained tubing. Catherine finds blood on a glass-top coffee table.

Goya….whose blood is A+…tells Catherine that Hess sent Angela to them to get the cocaine she wanted. Because of Carlos’ violent vindictiveness, Hess was trying to ensure that Goya would take the heat for taking part in Angela’s partying, not himself.

Joe tells Riley that he had been cutting cocaine in the room where Angela was waiting for him. She must have decided to try some of the coke, but snorted the atropine instead. Finding her unconscious over the broken fish bowl, he and Goya tried to “swap out” her blood like he had heard Keith Richards did.

Joe dismisses Riley’s assertion that Richards’ “swapping out” his heroine-saturated blood is just an urban legend.

“It makes sense.” He and Goya tried to replace her poisoned blood with their own, using aquarium pumps and tubing. When she died, they planted her body in a dumpster near Hess’ club to make Carlos think that Hess was to blame.

Grissom gets a call. The team members arrive at various locations to find everyone at all involved in Angela’s partying and death: Hess, Sylvie, Juan Carlos’ sister, Goya, and Joe all murdered, execution style.