CSI: Crime Scene Investigation

There's an Amber Alert out on the wire: two boys, both age 10, are missing. Brass briefs the force on their identities and where they were last seen. Elsewhere, Nick is working a case that might be related: someone set fire to a trailer where a convicted tier two pedophile lives. Carl Fisher complains that he's been attacked by neighbors in some way every time there's an Amber Alert. He likes boys, young, pre-teen ones. Just like Jason Crowley and Lucas Hanson, the missing boys. Brass isn't convinced that Carl's been victimized. "Sometimes bad things happen to bad people," he tells Carl.

Dawn Hanson, Lucas' mother, is waiting in Brass's office when he gets back. She's now convinced that her ex-husband took her son. Lucas usually stayed with his friend Jason after school, and from Lucas's habits, she's convinced he never stopped in at home. Dawn doesn't recognize a photo of Carl Fisher and drops her head in her hands, frustrated.

Meanwhile, Sofia and Catherine speak to Jason's grandfather at his home. He's convinced Jason will be back any moment, that he and Lucas simply ran away. Terrance has been raising Jason since Jason's father took a job in Houston; the boy's mother is dead. It seems that Terrance doesn't have much concern for his missing grandchild, which piques Sofia's interest. The man is more worried about footing the bill for the search than finding the missing boy.
When Sofia looks closely at Terrance, she notices that two of his pre-molar teeth are missing.
Nick uses a HANDHELD RAMAN SPECTROMETER on Carl Fisher's burned out car. He's identified the fire's point of origin as the car and knows an ACCELERANT was used: gasoline. A footprint was left behind as well, since the culprit stepped in the gas before the fire was lit. Inside the trailer, Sara photographs the burned up evidence, including loads of DVDs, candy and expensive games. "The house might as well be made out of gingerbread," she observes.

Brass approaches a hot looking convertible its former two occupants, recently cuffed by an LVPD officer. It's Dawn's ex Perry Hanson and his stripper girlfriend. Brass finds Jason Crowley's baseball glove in the back seat as well as a stolen key to Dawn's house in the glove compartment. When Perry can't explain why he has the glove, Brass arrests him. He gives Brass a sob story about wanting to see his son, saying he went to the house just to visit. The detective doesn't buy it.

The LVPD moves in on an abandoned house, searching it for any trace of the boys. The search dogs bark and whine at the door of a closet--there's some blood and some dark hairs caught in the splintered wood. Blood is also smeared on the floor and Catherine finds a dental bridge on the ground. Two pre-molars. "Grandpa lied through his teeth," Sofia says, unsurprised.

Terrance is ornery when questioned; he tries to convince Sofia that he acted in self-defense when he pushed the much smaller 6th graders around. She is stone-faced and continues to press for information, discovering the kids ran off after the altercation. Sofia is about to let him go until another man, Gerald Crowley, arrives and rushes at Terrance. He's furious his own father couldn't handle a 10-year-old for a few months without bullying him. He even tells Sofia Terrance was fired from a football coaching job for abusing his player. Gerald swears, "If you hurt Jason, I'll kill you."

Sara works on Carl's burned out car in the CSI garage. She digs around, finding a whiskey bottle cap and a napkin stuffed in the armrest filled with mushrooms from a pizza. Nearby, Greg scores when he uncovers a melted gas container under the steering wheel. Did Fisher set the fire himself?

Nick doesn't have much to offer in the way of evidence, since none of the shoes Fisher owns match the accelerant print found at the scene. Gris is tough on Greg, who's doing his best to tie the gas can to Fisher. After Greg leaves, Sara reminds Gil that Greg has an inquest coming up about the boy he hit and killed recently. "Maybe you could be a little nicer to him," she says gently. She offers up an empty cup of fruit punch, the whiskey cap and the mushrooms as evidence that Carl had someone young in the backseat. Her reasoning? "If you're an adult and you don't like mushrooms, you don't order them."

At the station, Brass plays to Carl Fisher's ego by asking him to help in the case. His underlying motive: keeping Carl off the streets in case he's stashed the boys somewhere. Carl agrees, but he'll only talk to Grissom, who listens silently to Fisher's own story of abuse. When Grissom hands over a number of known offenders in the area, Carl profiles them but doesn't feel that any of them are responsible. Grissom gets curious when Fisher assumes the kids are dead, but Fisher doesn't crack.

Bad news arrives in the form of a body found on a golf course: it's Lucas Hanson, and his mother arrives at the scene and breaks down screaming when she sees him. Warrick checks out a drainage pipe nearby and spots a pair of glasses inside. They look like Jason Crowley's.

Lucas's body bears defensive wounds and marks of shoddy CPR. Nick wonders, "What kind of killer performs CPR on their victim?" A subdural hematoma killed the boy, probably from when he was knocked down by Terrance. His blood alcohol level was .16, twice the legal limit for an adult, and there was a concentration of aspirin in his system. Combined, that meant disaster for someone with a concussion,

Sara questions a woman who saw Lucas the night of his disappearance with an older man, but Jason was nowhere to be seen. She identifies the make of the car as a Mercury Marquis, just like Carl Fisher's. Greg delivers samples of neighborhood gasoline to Hodges in the hopes of finding out where the gas can from Fisher's car came from. Hodges runs the liquids through the GCMS and gets a hit: a Buffalo Canyon station, pump six.
Grissom's frustration with Fisher grows as the pedophile expounds on how someone, hypothetically of course, can lure a child into his life by building trust. Grissom wants to get Fisher to say he met with the boys and had pizza the night they disappeared but has no luck. During a break, Grissom tells Brass, "I know [Fisher] wants something from me, or he wouldn't still be here." But what is it?

Sofia seems to be on a wild goose chase to Arizona, where a woman has tipped off the cops with Jason Crowley's supposed location. But to her relief, it's the truth. Jason hopped a bus, alone and terrified, in the hopes of finding his father in Texas. Sofia gently holds out a hand and leads him off the bus.

Grissom wonders where Jason got the money to take the bus. "Maybe he stole it," Fisher suggests. And since Jason is alive, Grissom plans on finding out the truth. He puts Carl in a line-up, and Jason points him out. However, Jason's been terrorized into not accusing the older man, and he doesn't rat him out.

Hodges' gasoline match eventually leads to video footage of Fisher buying extra gasoline, and he admits to scamming his insurance company out of money. But he doesn't say anything about trying to destroy evidence that Lucas died in his car. His explanation: if he'd killed Lucas, he surely would have killed Jason as well. He says Lucas was looking for a father figure and picked Carl out to spend time with. Fisher has an explanation for everything that happened that night. The boys were upset after the episode with Jason's grandfather, so Carl took them for pizza. They wanted to try the whiskey and they didn't want to go home, so Fisher took them to a golf course to retrieve golf balls for a dollar a ball. Lucas didn't feel well, so he stayed in the car. Grissom accuses Carl of molesting the boy, but Carl swears up and down that it's not true. "I loved him," Carl says. But Gil knows that someone who really loved Lucas would have noticed he wasn't feeling well, that he needed to go to a hospital. The combination of aspirin and alcohol Carl gave him was lethal, preventing the boy's blood from clotting. He killed Lucas and Jason realized it, hiding in the drain pipe till he could escape.

Carl is charged with parole violations and arson along with negligent homicide, while Jason's grandfather is charged with child abuse. "Everybody wins," Grissom says, but he doesn't feel it. The air is charged with loss, and it's getting to him. He goes to his office and shuts the lights off, trying to block out a world that's become darker and darker each day.