CSI: Miami

Season 3 - Episode 10 - After the Fall

Teleplay by Ildy Modrovich & Marc Dube
Directed by Scott Lautanen

From the edge of a third-story condominium balcony a man hangs precariously, struggling to maintain his grip, before falling out of sight.  Soon thereafter, Horatio Caine surveys the scene, standing over the crumpled and lifeless body of Michael Johnson.  Before long, Alexx determines that the victim is not the man who fell from the balcony.  Instead, the victim died because someone fell on him.

 Paint found in the victim’s hair leads the CSI team to Unit #308, which had its balcony freshly painted recently.  Resident Edward Mathis seems innocent enough, a perfect gentleman.  The only damage to the apartment is that his desk was broken into, and he claims that an engagement ring worth nearly $100,000 was stolen.  After checking out the balcony, Horatio surmises that the robber entered the condo from above.  When he goes to the roof, Horatio encounters a suspicious character who palms a black object, then punches Caine.  Delko assists, and the suspect, named Doug Ramsey, is subdued.  On the roof, Delko and Caine discover equipment needed to repel down the side of the building.

 Wolfe and Delko are called to Winchester Auction House to recover the stolen diamond ring, and the man trying to sell it is none other than Edward Mathis, having attempted to double-dip on the insurance claim.

 In autopsy, Alexx and Calleigh discover a semicircle-shaped laceration on the victim’s shoulder.  Horatio learns that Ramsey has filed excessive force charges against him.  Stetler interviews Delko regarding the brutality charges against Caine, during which Stetler attempts to vilify Caine.  Delko deftly avoids Stetler’s trap.

 DNA evidence found on the rooftop cable leads to a convicted felon in the CODIS file, a professional burglar named Stanley Hemming.  Duquesne and Wolfe question Hemming, who is obviously suffering injuries from a fall.  Presenting him with a warrant, they force him to empty his pockets, where they discover a burglar’s tools of the trade, along with a circular DVD case with blood on it in the same semicircular shape as the laceration on Johnson’s shoulder.

 However, when Tyler Jensen and Ryan view the DVD’s content, Ryan recognizes Isaac Greenhill, a prominent Criminal Court Judge, participating in the kinky sex act taking place on the disc.  Since Mathis, from whose condo the DVD was stolen, was Greenhill’s former court clerk, Calleigh convinces Horatio that Mathis was probably using the disc to blackmail the jurist.  Horatio visits Greenhill, who is just wrapping up a chat with his boss, Chief Judge Ratner.   Horatio tells Greenhill that he thinks Mathis was blackmailing him and that Greenhill hired Hemming to steal back the disc, but that a felony murder was committed in the process.  Greenhill denies everything and refuses to cooperate.

 Ryan and Tyler Jensen work with the disc to determine who the girl is and the location of the tryst.  After zeroing in on the location, Ryan and Delko check out her apartment, admitted by her landlord.  The girl’s name is Donna Scott and she is conspicuously absent, her purse and keys on the coffee table, sex toys half-hidden in a linen closet.  Noticing traces of blood on the silver talons that were depicted in the DVD, Ryan and Eric sense foul play.  Yelina runs a check on Donna’s credit cards, ATM and phone bills and finds no activity since October 30, nearly a month prior and the day the DVD was made.

 Stetler interviews Horatio about Ramsey’s shoulder and attempts to pin brutality charges on him, but Crane steadfastly defends his actions, and even tosses in a barb about Stetler having struck Yelina.  Calleigh offers to look into the lawsuit on Horatio’s behalf; he reluctantly, and gratefully, agrees.  In response to Horatio’s request, Rebecca Nevins has checked into Greenhill’s past caseload and found that he has worked on only a couple of high-profile murder cases which could speak to this particular case – mainly, the Surfside Strangler case, where the murderer buried victims in a peat bog to preserve them for later viewing.  Should Donna Scott turn up there, her death would be blamed on the Strangler, a convenient turn of events for her real murderer.

 An exhaustive search of the peat bogs by Wolfe and Delko reveal Donna’s preserved body, along with preserved evidence – vomit in her hair.  DNA testing reveals the bile contained in the vomit to be that of Edward Mathis, Greenhill’s former clerk.  Horatio suspects that Mathis buried Donna for his boss, but Mathis won’t admit to anything.  In autopsy, Delko and Alexx figure out that Donna was killed by an overdose of nitrous oxide during sex, so Eric and Ryan set out to find the equipment that administered the deadly overdose.  They find it in a shoebox in Edward Mathis’ closet.

 Calleigh discovers that Ramsey’s shoulder has, indeed, been dislocated, but investigation of his clothing tells her that he was not smoking pot on the roof as he says he was when Horatio approached him.  She accuses him of accepting the joints from Stanley Hemming who, in fact, had fallen and killed the victim.  She then explains to Ramsey how his shoulder injury is actually an “impaction fracture,” something that could only be caused by repeated contact with a very hard surface, like the cinder block wall in the holding cell – not by another human being.  Defeated, Ramsey agrees to withdraw his lawsuit.

 DNA on the inside of the nitrous mask matches Donna Scott’s.  It is definitely the murder weapon.  The nitrous tank is placed in the superglue chamber for testing.  Horatio meets with Greenhill and Chief Judge Ratner to tell them that his team has solved the case and identified the murderer as Chief Judge Ratner.  The judges had shared not only criminal cases, tee times and a court clerk, but a prostitute as well.  When Ratner’s little sex party went sour and Donna died of an overdose, the judge called on his clerk to do the cleanup for him.  An indignant Ratner maintains a semblance of cool and tells Horatio that the case will never get to trial, that his power is too great in South Florida.  Horatio says he’ll stay the course as long as it takes to do right by Donna Scott.

 Rick Stetler tells Horatio that he has a mandatory counseling appointment for post traumatic incident counseling on Friday, as a follow-up to Speedle’s death.  Later, at night, Horatio talks of a recurring dream he has that takes place in the jewelry store where Speedle died in which his gun jams . . . to Rebecca Nevins.