Synopsis  

Told with the whispery voice-over of a little girl, Nick, Sara, Warrick and Greg delve into the tale of what appears to be a quadruple homicide with no bodies. The McBride family (mother, father, son and daughter) live a quiet life and are known in their community. When the local doctor calls in a 911 call, spotting blood on the floor, the local police are stunned at the amount of blood in the house. The CSIs determine (with Catherine’s help in the lab) that the parents and the son were shot and thus caused the blood in the house, however of the youngest, daughter Cassie, there is only a shoe full of cough syrup.

The CSIs investigate the house, which has been ripped apart but nothing appeared to be stolen. In the basement, they find an indoor marijuana farm. Much of the dried pot was stolen. They also learn that the son was another entrepreneur, selling essays to the other kids in his grade. One of the prints matches a kid in ROTC, who turns out to have the pot in his car’s trunk. The son told his classmates about the pot in order to be thought of as cool, but when they came over, his parents were still there. The three teenage boys shot the son and the father, and then the mother when she came down stairs.

One of the boys was sent to drug the daughter, but she poured the cough syrup into her shoe and faked it, dropping ‘cubes’ of Bubblicious gum as a Gum Drop trail. The boys then took the family out on a boat and dumped them in the middle of the nearby lake. One of the boys didn’t want to dump Cassie, as she wasn’t dead, and another boy slit her throat.

Cassie, however, was alive and managed to swim to shore, where she was found by Nick and thus able to speak (in whispers) and give us the voice-over for the episode.

=Notes=  

As originally written, the team was supposed to spend the night at a hotel since they were so far out of town; during the night Gil Grissom (unable to sleep because of Greg’s snoring) goes to Sara’s room, and she lets him in. Three scenes were originally written for this, and the first had been filmed when Billy Petersen’s nephew died and he had to leave the set for a week. The script was re-written, and the scenes were deleted. Several weeks after the episode aired, Your Tax Dollars at Work (YTDAW) posted what they purported to be the original scenes. In a TV Guide interview in February of 2006, Jorja confirmed the setup (if not these specific scenes), saying that in the fifth episode (‘Gum Drops’), Sara was supposed to sleep with Grissom.

Review  

Sara is the voice of reason and reality in this episode. When Nick blows up at a suspect, Sara gently calms him down and tells him she’s worried about him. When Nick is too obsessive that the little girl is still alive, she reminds him of the odds.

In the beginning, Sara is called by Grissom (who’s giving a lecture) to provide backup for Nick and brings Nick some coffee. She determines the crime must have happened somewhere between Friday night and Saturday morning, based on the gold stars Cassie should have received for her Saturday chores. After processing the house, Sara follows bloody footprints from the kitchen and discovers the marijuana farm in the basement. Sara also questions the doctor who called 911, pegging him correctly as being there to pick up his Mary Jane fix. It’s Sara who finally gets the last teenager to admit to the crime, calmly asking him if he felt like man, killing a little girl.

Through the whole episode, Sara is solid and a good criminalist, on her top form. She tells Nick that in their job, it may not be best to hope that they find people alive. She also says that when it’s your time to die, it’s just your time. She remains cool and controlled throughout the case.

Notes  

• Sara is very accepting of the fact that children die, which possibly reflects on her mother having killed her father.
• Sara appears non-committal when talking with Greg about gold stars and childhood, but then finds the marijuana in the basement.

Quotes  

Sara: Grissom said you needed backup. I figured you needed coffee. But it looks like you took care of that.

Sara: I was really into gold stars when I was a kid.
Greg: As opposed to now?
Sara: (frowns and walks away)

Sara: I hope you’re right. But everything in our experience tells us they’re dead, all four of them.
Nick: Doesn’t mean we just give up.
Sara: No one’s giving up. It’s just that … you’re acting like you’re going to rescue a person, not recover a body. And on this job … that’s just not usually the case.
Nick: (quietly) I was rescued.
Sara: (smiles) It was not your day to die. When it’s your day, it’s your day, you know?