CSI: Miami

Season 2 - Episode 16 - Invasion

Teleplay by Jonathan Glassner & Brian Davidson
Directed by Felix Alcala

In the quiet Miami neighborhood of Kendell, former professional surfer Ted Henderson is settling down to watch a video with his wife Joanne and eighteen-year-old son Jason. Expecting their usual pizza delivery, Jason answers the door and is surprised by two masked men. They beat Jason with a baseball bat and a sawed off rifle. Ted tries to help his son but is beaten down and forced into the garage by the man with the gun. Joanne is ordered up to her bedroom by the bat wielding man and she hears a gunshot come from the garage on her way up.

Horatio pulls up to the Henderson household, now surrounded by uniformed police. The pizza boy discovered the crime scene and the uniforms are waiting on SWAT to clear the house. Horatio decides he can’t wait and leads a group inside. He finds Joanne Henderson tied up and gagged in the bedroom and Jason locked in a meat cooler. Ted is missing – by the amount of blood in the garage, Horatio knows they are looking for a corpse.

Later, Joanne describes the break in to Horatio. She wants to stay and wait for a ransom call, but Horatio convinces her to go to the hospital. Speedle and Delko determine that the robbers stole antiques and Indian figurines from a display case. Delko comments that the surfboard mounted on the wall was probably worth more, as it was the first off the line from Ted Henderson’s successful sporting goods company. Outside, Calleigh finds a ski mask in the weeds but fears the sprinklers may have washed away any physical evidence.

The search of the house continues and Speedle finds a home pregnancy test that reads positive. Horatio hears that Jason has checked himself out of the hospital and is heading back, but he has already discovered a large quantity of heroin in Jason’s room.

Back at the CSI interview room, Jason claims he owed a drug dealer money for pot and agreed to hold the heroin to settle the debt. Horatio and Delko track down Jason’s drug dealer and discover a small Indian figurine among his guns. The dealer tells them that Jason gave him the figurine in exchange for the heroin; Jason is a dealer himself.

Horatio figures that the robbers were probably junkie clients of Jason’s. Jason gives them a list of people he sold to, and fiberglass residue in the ski mask leads them to Joe Zeller, an employee at Ted Henderson’s surfboard manufacturing plant. Zeller admits to buying drugs but denies any knowledge of the robbery; the CSIs need more evidence.

Delko traces the rope used to tie up Joanne Henderson to a local hardware superstore. A check of store records show that rope was purchased by a Steve Davis the night of the robbery and Steve is a co-worker of Joe Zeller’s. An interview with Davis yields no interesting information, but Horatio sees a dirty shovel in his trunk when he follows him out to the parking lot.

From a helicopter, Delko and Horatio use a thermal image viewer to do a sweep of Zeller and Davis’ neighborhoods. They spot a likely target and are soon exhuming the body of Ted Henderson. Alexx’s autopsy reveals a single bullet and Calleigh quickly identifies it from coming from a sawed off .22 rifle.

Calleigh and Delko decide to talk to Davis again, but they find him dead in his car. It appears that he committed suicide using the murder weapon and a handwritten note backs this up. Gunshot residue tests confirm that Davis fired the gun and a handwriting analyst agrees that he wrote the note, but the fact that he had three bullets in his heart make it less than clear.

The case seems all but wrapped up until Ted Henderson’s autopsy reveals that he had a vasectomy, leaving the now pregnant Joanne with an ever growing motive to want her husband out of the way.