CSI: Miami

Season 3 - Episode 4 - Murder in a Flash

Teleplay by Anne McGrail & Sunil Nayar
Directed by Fred Keller

As a trio of golfers approach a green at Miami Palms Country Club a group of teens appear out of nowhere, converging on the hole flag, where they wait silently until all at once they shout “best of all the lost arts!” three times, each time tossing golf balls away from the hole, providing a fountain-like effect.  After the teens complete their strange show and depart, one of the golfers looks beyond where they were and notices, in a sand trap, the body of a young male with a trickle of blood running from his nose.

 Calleigh, Alexx and Horatio are on the scene, questioning the three golfers, who estimate the crowd of teens who “performed” the weird ritual at about 100 or so.  Calleigh explains that they were a “flash mob,” contacted by email to do something odd at a specific point in time for no reason other than perhaps a social statement of some sort.  Later, Delko finds a belt clip for a PDA near the body, possibly indicating forcible removal.  Horatio finds an empty scotch bottle, an expensive brand, near the body as well.  A golf ball is located among the flash mob balls belonging to J. Van Horn, whose son, Chad attends Palm Crest Academy, a tony private school

 Autopsy reveals the victim’s ID as Daniel Kleiner, eighteen, also a student at Palm Crest Academy.  Horatio talks with Palm Crest Headmaster Phillip Brooks, who does not like having his territory usurped.  Calleigh and Eric collect laptops, cell phones and PDAs from students in order to check out messages relating to the flash mob.  Student Justin Gillespie is ID’d as the originator of the flash mob.  Another student, Sarah Mitchell, doesn’t show up for the cell phone lineup, making her seem suspicious.

 Calleigh and Delko visit Justin, and Eric collects sand that he discovers on the floor of the Gillespie kitchen.  Gillespie’s father, Martin, one of Miami’s top defense attorneys, arrives and demands that they leave.  Horatio and Yelina visit Palm Crest student Sarah Mitchell, and learn that she is hooked on crystal meth and sold her cell phone.  Horatio sees a baggie of meth with blood on it, takes her in for questioning.  Danny Kleiner’s (the victim’s) tox report comes in, shows high levels of GHB, the date rape drug.  Alexx figures that his scotch had been drugged.  Also discovered is red lipstick on Danny’s boxer shorts – with “lip plumper” in the lipstick.  In the tread of his shoe is a piece of ground oyster shell, commonly used in garden paths – much like the faculty garden path at Palm Crest . . .

 Calleigh deduces that Danny was having an affair with Marie Mancini, his chemistry teacher at Palm Crest, who has very full, plump lips.  Calleigh confronts her and Mancini admits to the affair, but nothing more.

 While searching for Madonna, the woman whose blood was on the meth baggie Sarah had in her possession, Horatio meets her brother, Raul Arias, who is also looking for her – at the apartment building where she bought her drugs.  Raul tells Horatio how he has been trying unsuccessfully to get Madonna off dope and is worried for her life.  Horatio and Yelina enter the meth apartment where Madonna and Sarah had been buying.  They discover blood-spattered baggies, then more

 blood spatter on the couch in the apartment.  Horatio figures Madonna was beaten there and dumped out the window into the dumpster below.  This is how Madonna’s blood ended up on a baggie that wound up in Sarah’s possession.  But when Horatio sees Raul’s ripped shirt, he suspects that it might be Raul who killed his sister.

When Danny’s PDA is found, it reveals a number of frantic messages from students asking where he is, and a threatening one from Chad Van Horn.  When questioned, Chad reveals that Danny was to provide the answers to Mancini’s Chemistry exam.  The report on the sand taken from Chad’s kitchen floor reveals a match to the sand in the sand trap where Danny’s body was found.  Not one grain, however, is ultimately found in his clothing.  However, it matches with sand found on Jenna Brooks’ clothing, and Jenna was in Justin’s kitchen the morning Calleigh and Eric questioned him.

 Justin admits to Calleigh that he overheard his father talking on the phone to some golfers about a body on the golf course, so Justin arranged the flash mob so that the body would be discovered, nothing more.  He had nothing to do with the death.  Jenna Brooks, the headmaster’s daughter, and a study geek, used her access to confiscated GHB locked in her father’s office to drug Danny Kleiner as punishment for cheating his way through school while she had always worked so hard.  The plan backfired when he overdosed, and Martin Gillespie and her father had tried to cover up the death.  Jenna confesses and accepts her fate.

Further investigation by Horatio and Yelina lead them to Fidel Barroso, a Cuban drug dealer/thug who is trying to make money using Madonna’s credit card at a gas station, selling gas for cash and charging it to the card.  They put him under arrest, then further link him to Madonna’s death when it is determined that some of the blood on the couch where she was killed is male.  The case is clenched when a tiny piece of leather is found on Madonna’s body, from the gloves Fidel wore when he beat her to death.  When all the pieces of the puzzle are pulled together, the team realizes that Fidel was Madonna’s dealer, who had fronted her drugs to sell.  When her brother, Raul, caught her with them, he flushed them down the toilet.  Later, when she told Fidel that her brother had flushed the drugs, Fidel assumed she was lying, and beat her to death.