CSI: CRIME scene investigation

Season 4 - Episode 21 - Turn of the Screws

Teleplay by Josh Berman
Story by Carol Mendelsohn & Richard Catalani
Directed by Deran Serafian

The carnage is stunning when a roller coaster car jumps the tracks at the Sphinx Amusement Park and careens into a parking lot, crashing into a car and leaving 6 people dead. But when Grissom and his team arrive at the scene and begin their investigation, they soon discover they have one body too many. One of the victims, a park employee named Jim Nevins, was killed earlier. Says Grissom: “So either the collision uncovered a homicide, or a dead man was riding the roller coaster.”

 As they begin their investigation, the park’s chief engineer, Woody, a roller coaster expert, insists that Pharaoh’s Fever was kept up to code, and cannot understand how the coaster could have jumped the tracks. In fact, he says there has never been an accident like this anywhere. When Grissom examines the suspect tracks of the ride, he discovers a screw lying on the cement, but Woody explains that with 8 wheels per train, they would all have to be loose to cause such a tragedy. But the team soon proves that nuts have, in fact, all been loosened, and the killer might have left an important clue behind -- the tool marks on the nuts may lead them to the pipe wrench the killer used.

Further digging reveals that Nevins was the park Casanova who favored after-hour coaster “dates” with willing young women. The digital camera that takes souvenir photos of the coaster shows that Cleopatra, the concession girl, was busy serving Jim on one of the last rides, but she insists that she left him very much alive in the parking lot. Is this Cleopatra telling the truth, or is she really the Queen of Denial?

 Meanwhile, Catherine and Warrick investigate the death of thirteen year old Tina Press, killed somewhere else but whose body was left out in the open at Lake Mead. When the coroner asks why someone would bother to drive all the way out to the lake to dump a body and not bother to take another 10 minutes to bury her, Warrick has the answer: “Wasn’t worth the killer’s time.” The CSIs bring the mother to the morgue to ID the body, and wonder why she had not reported her daughter missing after more than a day, but Mrs. Press says she thought Tina was at a sleepover at her friend’s house, which she did a few nights a week. “When was the last time you went 24 hours without talking to your daughter,” Warrick asks Catherine.