CSI: CRIME scene investigation

Season 5 - Episode 22 - Weeping Willows

Written by Areanne Lloyd
Directed by Ken Fink

After a particularly tough day shift, Catherine tries to recruit her team to join her for a few drinks, but when everyone begs off, she goes out alone to The Highball and meets a man, Adam Novack (guest star Rosenberg) who seems very attractive at the beginning of the night. But when he insists on walking her to her car, he also insists on more of her attention than she is willing to give, and when he gets physical with her, she tells him to get lost.

Catherine thinks her night, as rotten as her day, is over at that point, until Grissom pages her to investigate the shooting murder of Alice Granger, a young woman who may have been carjacked. Her car is found in The Highball parking lot, and Catherine is appreciative that the bartender recognizes her but doesn’t give her up to Detective Vartann. Instead, she tells them that Alice asked the bartender to call her a cab.

When Sara turns over a matchbook found with the dead woman’s belongings, and Catherine becomes even more uneasy: would the number on that matchbook be the same as the one Adam Novack gave her the night before? Unfortunately, Catherine’s daughter has thrown out the trash, and the matchbook with it, so Catherine follows up a lead supplied by the victim’s brother. Alice had just broken up with her boyfriend, who claims he used a GPS system to protect Alice, not to stalk her, and while he admits to tracking her the night she died, he insists she got in a car, not a cab, and the man she left The Highball with matches the description of Adam Novack.

The matchbook is the lead that brings Adam Novack in for questioning, and Catherine must come clean with Grissom, who is disappointed that she has put him so far behind in the investigation. She admits that while Novack is telling the truth about their encounter, she also tells Grissom he was not the man she thought he was when she first met him.

 But then a second young woman is found dead, who looks much like Alice Granger and was also shot to death. Is Adam Novack a serial killer, or should they be looking for someone else?