When a moonlighting Wolfe sees Cardoza at a highbrow fundraiser doing his James Bond thing, he’s more than a little curious as to how his colleague got through the front door. He’s even more curious about the beautiful woman shooting Cardoza such hateful looks, even though Cardoza insists he doesn’t know her. That all gets put on hold, though, when some poor janitor named Jeff Lofton falls from a balcony into a fish tank filled up with poisonous jellyfish. Pretty lousy way to go, right? Enter Horatio Caine and his
CSI: Miami team to get to the bottom of it.
Horatio and Walter determine that the balcony railing was too high for Lofton to go over on his own, which means someone threw him over. But while Horatio and Walter deal with Max DeSalvo, the owner of the building where Lofton died, Wolfe is very curious why Cardoza lied about the party: He wasn’t someone’s date, he paid to get in. Ten grand on a cop’s salary? Curious. Still, Calleigh’s discovery that the company employing Lofton took out his life insurance policy is even more so.
After Cardoza finds some sequins in the tank, he and Natalie check with every woman who was wearing a sequined dress at the party, which is when we finally meet Anna, the girl who was staring daggers at Cardoza. Meanwhile, one of DeSalvo’s execs, a guy named Yates (the great
Chris Eigeman) bogs down Walter and Tripp with over a half ton of paperwork regarding all the company’s employees. When the team discovers several other mysterious deaths by people working for the company, Horatio thinks perhaps the company might possibly be killing off its workers for the insurance money.
They track down the body of one woman who supposedly killed herself, but when Dr. Loman does an impromptu autopsy in front of a lab full of med students, he finds that it’s possible she was actually murdered. Walter and Horatio then prove it: She was murdered and the suicide was staged. The evidence points to Yates, who then quickly sells out his boss, DeSalvo, as the mastermind. DeSalvo admits to killing Lofton, but claims self defense: Lofton attacked him first. DeSalvo seems to get away with it. Until, that is, the brother of the woman whose suicide Yates faked shoots and kills DeSalvo on his yacht.
What did you think? We thought this one was sort of… humdrum. Not much intrigue, was there? And Cardoza’s stalking of that woman Anna has to be a kernel placed for later in the season, right? Tell us what you think in the Comments section below!