CSI: Miami

Season 3 - Episode 8 - Speed Kills

Teleplay by Sunil Nayar & Marc Dube
Directed by Fred Keller

South Beach’s Neuron Lounge hosts a speed dating event – where busy singles pair up for five-minute “dates” before switching partners; one of the participants is Richard Laken, a handsome 38-year-old.  The morning after the event, Laken is the focus of a CSI investigation, after he’s found bludgeoned to death on a side street and his car vandalized.

 The marred paint on his car and the accompanying smell of acetone with lemon tells Calleigh that nail polish remover was used, suggesting a female vandal. Caine and Tripp review the list of female speed daters, and Horatio hones in on Mary Kinnan, a hair stylist with likely access to large quantities of acetone. Tripp and Delko interview the embittered Mary at her home, while her soon-to-be-ex-husband packs belongings into his car. She acts surprised about Laken’s murder, but admits to throwing acetone on his car because, despite the fact that Laken had ended his relationship with her by telling her he was getting back with his ex, he was at the speed-dating event.  She felt humiliated when she saw him and wanted to get even. They test her statement by timing the rate acetone eats auto paint.  Her story checks out – the car was vandalized during, not after, the speed-dating event. Mary claims that Laken was in a hurry to leave at the end of the evening, and Horatio becomes convinced that this is may be a key to his murder.

 Alexx boils the victim’s head in order to remove its flesh to more closely examine the injuries on his skull. Ryan is assigned to observe the gruesome autopsy as his “hazing.”

 Working with the club’s floor plan, Tyler Jenson helps Horatio determine that Richard Laken was matched with a Rebecca Briggs at the end of the night. Rebecca admits to having followed him, because she had met him at an earlier event and suspected him of robbing her apartment. She admitted to confronting him just before he left. Caine and Tripp check out her apartment and find that she was robbed, but the print they lift is not from Laken, it’s from another speed dater – Chad Gilbert, a convicted burglar. Horatio and Tripp arrest Gilbert, who tells them that Richard Laken saw someone that spooked him just before he left the speed-dating event.

 They question Rebecca Briggs and learn that Laken mentioned something about “The Heat” just prior to leaving, leading Caine and Duquesne to discover that Laken witnessed a fan altercation in the parking lot outside a recent Miami Heat game, in which two white assailants attacked a black man named Marcus Washington. Laken’s statement indicated that one of the assailants crouched

 by the victim after the other attacked him. Napkins found at the crime scene indicate the assailants were sitting in the skyboxes that night.  Exotic food residue on the napkins narrow the search to a skybox registered to Stanton Hayes and Jack Webster.

 Horatio interviews Stanton Hayes, who claims he tried to assist the victim after his friend punched the guy in the nose. Horatio then questions Jack Webster, whose ring gives away the fact that he was the assailant, since flakes of the victim’s temporary tattoo are still lodged in the ring’s raised lettering. Jack Webster was the guy Richard Laken saw at the speed-dating event –

 upsetting Laken and causing him to leave as quickly as possible. Jack Webster is now the prime suspect in Laken’s murder.

 But, when they check the cell phone Laken dropped at the crime scene, it’s determined he was murdered while Jack Webster was still inside the club, letting Webster off the hook.  Re-examining the scene, Calleigh discovers cement flakes scattered in the area, which are used by contractors – such as Mary Kinnan’s contractor husband, Fred. Tripp searches Fred Kinnan’s car trunk, finding matching cement chips, as well as a bloody tire iron, and arrests Kinnan for the murder of Richard Laken.

 Fred Kinnan swears his wife has set him up for Laken’s murder. She, in turn, claims that she saw her soon-to-be-ex murder Laken in cold blood, but she didn’t turn him in because she needs his child support payments. Horatio asks her if she touched Laken after the murder, but before she re-entered the club. When she says that she didn’t he asks her how she got Laken’s blood on the speed dating card she turned in at the end of the night, or how the tire iron used as a murder weapon doesn’t belong to Fred’s car, but came from hers. She admits to killing him because he had used their relationship only for sex.