(A/N: listen to Renesmee's Lullaby while reading this. Short chapter to satisfy my fans)
Narrator Present Tense POV------
Night in Vegas. A man stumbles through a casino parking lot to his car and drops his keys. As he gropes to pick them up a truck comes barreling toward him stopping just short of collision. He looks in the car and sees a dead body.
A maid pushes a cart through a motel parking lot and sees debris on the ground. As she sweeps it up she sees that it's maggots. She opens the door and sees a trail of maggots leading to a woman dead on the bed.
A pool cleaner walks through a swanky house and sees blood on the ground near the pool. He follows it to a dead body floating face down in swim trunks.
At each scene the CSIs snap photos. At the first two, a magazine called "Society Watch" lies near the body. At the pool the man is revealed to be the man on the cover of the magazine.
At the swanky house Langston theorizes- and we see- a wealthy art dealer comes out for a late night swim and is assaulted and has his face smashed on the bricks. He, Abby and Wendy wonder if it was a crime of passion.
Inside Brass interviews the man's fiancee. She says Karsten Pennington was an art dealer who was well-loved. Outside Langston wonders why a five million dollar property had a 50 cent lock. He thanks Wendy for helping in the field. (Lot of bodies today). He notices a blood trail. It leads to a cat licking it's bloody paws.
The fiancee says Pennington went for a swim to calm down, she's not sure why. He had some kind of fight at the party with a client she'd never seen before. (We see him ordering guests from a party.) He wouldn't tell her what happened and she went to bed alone. The pool guy discovered him.
Langston, Abby and Wendy notice video surveillance but none of it appears to have a view of the pool. In his office, which is filled with art, there are signs of struggle. Wendy swabs for DNA as Langston and Abby take picture of different objects including yogurt containers and a certificate of authenticity. The cat, Gareth, reappears and starts licking broken stuff/evidence on the floor.
At the lab: Archie, Abby and Langston pick out the guy who made Pennington mad at the party off the video. Wendy shows Langston that pieces of the broken vase the cat was licking. She thinks it was stolen from the Iraqi national museum and smuggled into the U.S. drug dealer-style. Wendy gets a text saying the PD need a DNA sample on an actor. She asks Langston to let her put the vase back together since she loves jigsaw puzzles.
Langston examines some putty that was on the crate the vase came in. And Abby suggests yogurt.
Archie searches for the video dude via face recognition and gets a match on Jeffrey Luvan.
Brass interrogates him. He saw Pennington at the party and says he had previously purchased an antiquity from him for an exhibit. Pennington called him to see a new piece at the party but he didn't want it. Brass asks if it was because it was stolen from Iraq. He shows him a before and after. The purchaser says that kind of thing is illegal and dangerous and his boss wouldn't stand for it. He says if Pennington was dealing in the black market perhaps he got what was coming to him, but he didn't deliver it.
Wendy is laboring over putting the vase back together. She can't find a piece. Langston brings it back in an evidence jar. She places it in. Abby says it's fake and explains the cat is key. As he explains the process we see Pennington do it- creating a fake by smearing yogurt on a replica base, painting it like the original, sprinkling minerals from the appropriate region on it, storing it in a hot place so it sets and ages, and fakes out experts and analysis. Except the cat would still think it's tasty. We see a scenario where Pennington tries to pass off the fake to Luvan who realizes it, smashes it and threatens Pennington.
