CSI: NY

A body dump has been located near the Manhattan Bridge. Detectives Mac Taylor and Don Flack study the victim, a Caucasian woman in her late twenties. Her body shows signs of contusions on her neck and has been redressed by the murdered after putrefaction has started.

Back at NYPD, Mac goes to the M.E., Sheldon Hawkes to discover more about the circumstances. The vic died after two strokes. Her body has lividity slats on the back as well as bedsores. Shortly before death she also inhaled something toxic. Meanwhile Stella Bonasera is able to ID the victim, her name is LeAnn Goodman.
She and Mac meet the husband who recognizes the body as his wife after a private viewing. She disappeared after they had lunch. The tox report indicates that she inhaled Fry sticks, a new date-rape drug. This is surprising as the there was no sexual assault on LeAnn.
Another body is found on a garbage barge. The victim is a young woman, who shows the same contusions on her neck and slats on her back. A serial seems to be dumping bodies in New York City. While Danny and Aiden are left to sort the evidence from the garbage, Mac and Stella go to Hawkes to find parallels between both victims. The cause of death, this time, is asphyxiation through strangulation and the woman has no bedsores. Her neck was broken post-mortem. The rest is consistent with the injuries of the first victim. the contusions on their necks are remarkable, as they seem to target the arteries going to the brain. In studying her mouth, Mac recognizes Russian dentistry.
A camera was found in the garbage. Several pictures were retrieved, showing the Russian victim with an unknown man in several sightseeing places of the city. One shot is more mysterious, the woman is shown in front of a house, blowing a kiss to the photographer. Stella finds her missing person report, her name is Zoya Pavlova. She goes with Mac to Zoya's sponsors, the Ivanov. They recognize the young man as her boyfriend Jason, who is a street vendor, but have no information about the house. The interrogation of the boyfriend doesn't give them more details.
Back at the AV lab, Mac and Stella process the last picture with triangulation and find out the house is located in Queens. As they storm it, they hear cal music being played from the basement. As they search it, they discover a woman, lying on a wooden table, her eyes wide open. She is still alive, has two IVs and a respirator to help her breath. The basement is full of mostly out-dated medical equipment.
While Stella is in charge of the basement, Danny and Aiden process the bedrooms. They found DNA traces on a bed, but no finger prints. Mac goes to the hospital to process the victim. The woman is in a deep coma. Her condition is critical but stable, but she doesn't react to painful stimuli. As Mac apologizes to her for the discomfort of his actions, the victim blinks. The interrogation of the owner of the house leads them nowhere. The man can't give the identity of the tenant.
Mac discusses with Dr. Giles the situation of the last victim. He thinks that her blinking was not random and that she probably suffers from the locked-in syndrome. With the exception of her eyes, all her muscles are paralyzed. The condition is irreversible and possibly the result of a perverted science experiment. Mac thinks that the serial was perfecting his manoeuvre and that the first two victims were discarded failures.
He goes back to the hospital to the victim, who they couldn't identify. He starts to shows her pictures, asking her to blink once for no and twice for yes if she recognizes someone. She blinks no at the pictures of the first two victims and their husband and boyfriend. When Mac shows her a picture of the house owner, she blinks uncontrollably and has a stroke. She slips in a deeper coma, the doctor judging she is brain-dead.
Back at the NYPD, the DNA results on the bedsheets show no match to the boyfriend or the house owner. Mac wants to process the medical equipment found at the house, as he is convinced that the victim wanted to tell him something. They decide to process everything again with rhodamine and a dye laser. They discover that the doctor's bag, present at the scene, has Cyrillic initials on it: BI, Bogdhan Ivanov, Zoya's sponsor.
Mac interrogates the former Russian doctor. His sample is a match to the DNA found on the bed. Bogdhan explains they loved each other and met in the house. Mac shows him his cab driver ID. This is how he picked his victims. When he wants to know why he did that, Ivanov explains that Zoya wanted to be taken care of. All those women wanted to be free from the burden of daily life. He helped them with that, it was the pact. Mac doubts Zoya meant that. Mac stresses that this wasn't about freedom, but about control. He hadn't been able to kill the last woman, because his experiment had finally worked. The women died for the same reasons he got caught. He didn't know when to let go.
A distraught Mac goes to the last victim. He tells her his wife Claire died on 9/11. He got rid of everything that reminded him of her, because it was too painful. He just kept a beach ball because her breath was still in there. He leaves the hospital, takes a cab and goes to Ground Zero. It ends with Mac at the fence, looking at the emptiness there.