CSI: CRIME scene investigation

Season 4 - Episode 22 - No More Bets

Teleplay by Naren Shankar, Carol Mendelsohn & Judith McCreary
Story by Andrew Lipsitz & Dustin Lee Abraham
Directed by Richard Lewis

A young man is found shot to death in a wig and a fat suit, and all signs point away from robbery and toward a professional hit. When Grissom discovers that the victim’s day started off good – there is a Rampart Casino tax declaration form for $435,000 in Ernie Menlo’s pocket – he guesses he may have been killed for the money after all.

 Once Grissom knows that the killing may be connected to the Rampart he insists that Catherine cannot work on a case that involves her father, casino owner Sam Braun (guest star Scott Wilson), and he sends her home, much to her frustration and dismay.

Braun admits that they caught Menlo -- aka Teddy Keller -- cheating and he was “questioned” about his system, but insists that the man walked out of the casino alive and he can prove it with security camera tapes. “What bothers you more,” Braun asks Grissom, “that you can’t pin a murder on me or that Catherine cashed my check?” When he adds that here were no strings attached to the gift he gave Catherine and she accepted, Grissom replies: “Just because you can’t see something doesn’t mean it’s not there.”

Warrick soon discovers exactly how the victim cheated – there is a computer in the heel of his shoe. But if Keller was the receiver of the signals, someone had to be transmitting. The team goes to Keller’s apartment, where they find his roommate dead, and more rigged shoes. But it is Catherine who, despite her banishment, provides Grissom with one piece of the puzzle he didn’t have, and her hunch leads to Braun’s arrest for the murder. When Warrick suggests the system the dead men came up with to cheat the casinos might have more to do with physics than a betting system, the team knows that Keller and his roomy could not have been that sophisticated. They track down electrical engineer Seth Landers, who admits he built the computers, but that everything went wrong when his partners got greedy. He also claims he had nothing against Braun, but Warrick proves otherwise, leading the team to suspect that hitting up Sam Braun – and setting him up -- was intentional.

 Meanwhile, when Sara finds out that Grissom recommended Nick for a key CSI promotion, she is crushed.