CSI: CRIME scene investigation

Season 4 - Episode 18 - Bad to the Bone

Written by Eli Talbert
Directed by David Grossman

A gambler is found beaten to death in a casino parking garage, in what Dr. Robbins calls the most brutal attack he has ever seen. A bathroom attendant identifies a possible perpetrator, a man she saw leave the men’s room covered in blood just after the murder, and Brass quickly apprehends Walter Darian. During questioning, when Grissom begins to take scraping from under the suspect’s fingernails, Darian explodes in a violent rage, attacking Grissom.

Brass and uniformed officers step in and struggle to subdue the man, and he winds up dead, bringing Sheriff Atwater (guest star Xander Berkeley) and an internal investigation down on Grissom, Captain Brass and the police department.

Dr. Robbins relieves some of the pressure when he reveals that Darian did not die from the beating, but from cardiac arrest. And Darian’s own sister, rather than pressing charges, expresses relief that her brother is dead, explaining that he had hurt a lot of p

eople. “If you had something he wanted, he took it,” she said. “If you got in his way…” When Sara and Nick find a roadside waitress’s uniform and nametag in Darian’s car trunk, they are alarmed. “A guy who takes on 5 cops in their house,” Sara muses, “makes you wonder what he could have done to the waitress.”

 Even though the police are cleared of wrongdoing, and even though a dead man can’t be prosecuted, Grissom wants to know more about Darian. With his history of violence, Grissom finds it odd that the 38 year old man with a troubling pattern of behavior had a clean record up until the time he died. When he and Warwick check out the motel that the man owned and lived in like a pack rat, they also make a more gruesome discovery -- the grave of a young female buried under cement in Darian’s backyard.

But further investigation shows that body is not a match for the missing waitress, and confusing matters further, the CSIs soon discover that the victim buried in Darian’s yard was pregnant, but the baby’s missing. “Walter Darian never threw anything away,” Grissom says. “Where’s the baby?”