The Happy Place
 |
| "The Happy Place" |
|---|
"The Happy Place" is the second episode in the ninth season of the American crime drama CSI: Crime Scene Investigation.
Plot
Nick and Catherine investigate why a woman who was about to be married would have taken a swan dive off of her balcony. Also Grissom investigates the brutal murder of a woman found in an alley. The investigation gets tougher when Grissom discovers that her two-year-old was with her when she was murdered. Sara visits an old friend who first appeared in "Too Tough To Die".
A young woman in her apartment receives a phone call while working in her kitchen. She hears a voice through the phone then goes to her bedroom, changes into a bathing suit and grabs her towel. She walks up to her balcony and puts down her towel on the bench. She steps on the bench then off the ledge, causing her to plummet to her death into a bus full of passengers.
Catherine and Nick are sent to investigate the scene. They go on top of the bus and watch the rest of the CSI team unload her broken body off the roof. They learn that the lady is Sprig Grengier who lives with her boyfriend in the apartment above.
Nick and Catherine enter Sprig's apartment and find no signs of forced entry. Catherine smells something cooking and goes to the kitchen. Nick walks up to the balcony and finds her towel on the bench. Catherine looks in the oven and finds a pot roast and a timer showing 32 minutes remaining. She finds a recipe showing that the dish requires 10 hours to cook. Suicide does not seem to be the reasoning for her death. Nick finds that Sprig received a call moments before her death and Catherine calls the lab to trace its origin.
Meanwhile, Grissom is with Sara when he receives a call from the lab. The CSI team is short staffed with the loss of Warrick. He forces himself to go to work.
He goes to an alley where he meets Detective Williams. They find the body of a woman wearing high heels. Grissom finds a pool of blood where she may have had her head bashed in. The body shows signs that she has been forcefully grabbed. They turn her over and find that her eyes have been thumbed in. He notices a link of a gold chain on the ground. They also find a pair of broken glasses. On her, they find a keycard to the Tangiers hotel.
Grissom takes the body back to the lab and finds chain marks on her shoulder and signs that she had sex just before she died.
At the hospital, Greg is there to investigate the death of a coma patient. A woman who has been in a coma for the past eight years after a brutal rape was killed after her husband, Tom, pulled her life support. Greg finds Tom sitting by his dead wife.
Sara, who volunteers to help, meets Tom to ask him what happened. He says that the man that raped his wife, Tony Thorpe, has been harassing him. Tom says that Tony sent him a newspaper article with a note saying that he will come to her room and violate her again. Tom says that he did not want that to happen to his wife, so he decided to end her life. Sara asks what he did with the article and he says that he burned it.
Back at Sprigs apartment, Sprig's fiance is brought in for questioning. Catherine tells him that she is sorry for his loss and begins to fingerprint him. He cooperates and tells the detectives that he doesn't understand why she would jump. He says that Sprig was not depressed and was planning their wedding for weeks. He adds that to get ready for their honeymoon vacation, she put herself on a diet. He tells them that she lost her job recently at a bank because of a misunderstanding. Sprig was fired after being accused of stealing after her drawer came up short ten grand.
Later, Nick and Archie view a tape from Sprig's bank. They watch as a bearded person wearing a hat hands Sprig two fifties. Sprig then calmly hands the person 100 hundred dollar bills.
They find a similar incident involving another bank worker, Grace Powell. They call her in and show her a tape handing the same bearded person 100 hundred dollar bills. Grace tells the detectives that she does not remember handing over the cash. Catherine asks her if she has tried to lose weight recently and she says no, but she has tried to quit smoking using hypnosis. Grace gives her a card of her hypnotist, Viviana Conway.
Nick and Catherine, go to a Vegas show featuring Viviana. She has a group of audience members on the stage clucking like chickens. She then instructs a man to eat an onion as if it were an apple. After the show, Viviana admits to Nick and Catherine that Grace and Sprig were clients of hers. She explains that her powers of hypnosis don't make people do things that they don't want to.
The team later meets with Grace and she tells them that she remembers the bearded person having 'sissy' fingers and messed up fingernails.
Archie later analyzes the tape and zooms in on the robber's hands. Catherine says that the condition of the fingernail may be caused by someone using nail glue. She asks Archie to compare the photo of Viviana to the robber. The facial structure matches.
Nick and Catherine return to Viviana's theater and tell her that they know she was the disguised bank thief. She admits to robbing the bank, but says that they cannot prove that she killed Sprig. Nick tells her that her prints were found on the pay phone across the street from Sprig's apartment. They arrest her and take her in.
Back at the station, Detective Williams tells Grissom that the victim from the alley, who they now know as Paula Bonfilio, owed the casinos a lot of money. They go to her apartment and find a young man pulling up to the residence.
The man identifies himself as Scott Bonfilio, Paula's son. They inform him that his mother was murdered. Scott tells the detectives that he talked to her last night around 10 o'clock. He asks if Paula was with his baby sister, Lexie.
Immediately after, the team calls in an Amber alert for Lexie. Scott explains that his mother would take his paychecks and gamble it away. Grissom asks if he thinks that Lexie could be with her father and he says that Paula was a party girl and he does not know who the father is.
Archie receives a video from the casino showing Paula losing money at the tables. The tapes show her receiving a phone call then a man with glasses approaches her. The man takes a 500 dollar chip from her. They leave the table, pick up her baby then are spotted at a pawn shop. Grissom figures that the glasses found at the scene belongs to the man. Because high denomination chips have RF chips inside, he orders the team to keep an eye out.
Later, Sara meets with Grissom and tells him about Tom, who was brought to jail and charged with murder. Grissom examines the case and finds that there were no signs of the woman's rapist being in the hospital or contacting Tom. He asks Sara to consider the alternative of Tom making the story up.
Sara meets with Tony the rapist and finds him in a wheelchair. Knowing that it is not possible for Tony to rape Tom's wife again, she meets with the husband. He admits that he pulled her plug because he was the only one suffering and wanted it to end.
After the case, Sara packs her bags and leaves town.
Detective Williams locates Paula's car and waits to find who is driving it. A hooker named Trixie activates its alarm and is about to enter the vehicle, but is stopped by the detectives. She says that she got it from a man who also gave her a baby.
Trixie takes Williams to a day care and retrieves Lexie. Scott is there and tells Williams that he took care of her since the day she was born. Williams hands Lexie over to Scott to watch her until social services sorts things out.
Leon, the man from the casino video tapes, turns himself in to the cops. He tells the team that he roughed up Paula, but did not kill her.
Later, Archie receives a call from a casino reporting that someone is trying to cash in Paula's $500 chip. Archie downloads an image and sees that it is Scott, Paula's son.
Grissom and Wallace go to his apartment and take him in for questioning. They enter the home and find a broken gold strap with blood on it and pictures of Scott taking racy photos of Paula.
They interrogate Scott and he admits that Paula is not his mother. He says that she was his guidance counselor at school and that they ran away and had a baby, Lexie. He admits to killing her after she gave away their baby for a gambling debt.
Trivia
- The song "42" by Coldplay plays during the opening sequence.
- This episode was watched by 19.28 million viewers, got rating of 11.8 and demo of 18.