CSI: NY

An upscale party with a live news report going on. Commissioner Stanwyk, chief investigator of the Dove Commission, is dancing with a woman in red dress. Suddenly, the two are shot down. Stella and Mac arrive at the scene with Flack. Flack believes that the woman, Charlotte DuBios, is collateral damage. The people were celebrating a successful commission.


Stella gets everyone onto their duties, but tells them to save the bullets for her. Flack shoos out the reporter and cameraman. Mac questions Grace Walderson, friend of Charlotte. Charlotte was in the City from Kentucky just for a visit. Stella notices that the window glass is shattered downward, and also finds some bullets. The bullets came from a rifle.


Danny and Aiden are on the scene of a man dead by his car, a gypsy cab driver, Fernando Reyes. Danny seems to have issues with gypsy cab drivers. The driver was robbed, then stabbed. Most taxi drivers are shot with guns, not stabbed. The murderer seems to have escaped by subway entrance nearby. Aiden asks a transit guy if he saw anything, but gets no useful information.


Mac is with Hawkes. Both victims were shot twice. One bullet hit both bodies through and through. Hawkes finds one of the bullets still inside the commissioner's body. Mac is at the precinct and asks Donna for Lt. Smith.
He's not in. Lt. Smith has a prelim copy of the Dove Commission report, and Mac gets Donna to let him thumb through it, to find out who's on their most wanted list.


Hawkes checks out the corpse of the cab driver. He finds trace under the fingernails and bags it. The dead driver is full of defensive wounds. He did a lot of fighting back. He died from a stab wound to the neck; the killer also sliced his throat. The victim was out-muscled.


Mac confronts Chief Robinson, a cop, about the Dove Commission Report. Apparently the report implicates people under him, and apparently his cops did a lot of shady dealings and used a lot of excessive force (such as abducting a gang leader and dropping him off in a rival gang's territory with cuffs on). Robinson gets angry as Mac tells Robinson he was number one on the most wanted and that the guy who put him on the list is now dead, more than enough motive, so he needs to investigate him. He asks Robinson's hands to check for GSR and Robinson tells Mac that of course he's going to find some; he was just at the range. But Mac still tests for it.


Giles informs Aiden and Danny that the DNA under the cabby's nails is, to their surprise, female. No hits in CODIS.


Stella is in the lab looking at the two bullets from the crime scene, but they are different - they have different stria - meaning two rifles - two riflemen (or, as the tech points out, snipers). The tip of the bullet has reflective trace, which means the shots went through glass first and must have come from outside the windows - 65 floors up. Mac and Stella look out the window, and try to figure out where the snipers were shooting from.


Flack takes Stella to the 50th floor balcony of the building of the shooting where they find broken glass all over. Stella finds a number of shell casings and picks them up. Flack has found one, she has five. From where they are, the 65th floor is way above them; there is no way the snipers could have shot from there, so the casings fell from mid-air, which leaves Stella and Flack confused.


Mac is approached by an Internal Affairs inspector, who has heard that Mac leaned on Robinson. Robinson is not happy, and got IA on Mac. But the inspector says that with the report, he's on Mac's side, and if there is anything that Mac can do to help him get Robinson off for life, he'd appreciate it.


Aiden and Danny investigate the car. There is blood on the seat, and Danny finds a photo of the driver and his son. Aiden finds a business card wrapped around chewed gum. They are at a building asking for the Reyes residence. They find the son just about to leave the building, who immediately says, "He's dead, isn't he?" He says he's been expecting to hear this for years. They inform the son that his father was robbed and stabbed but that he fought very hard, and that they are here to ask questions to try and catch who did that to his father. Antonio, the son, is willing to help. Mom is at work. However, Danny starts causing trouble, saying that the father might have been seeing another woman, might have short temper, and so on. Aiden is angry at Danny for his attitude.


Mac is with Chad, who says he did find GSR on Robinson but with traces of tin, not found on the shell casings found at the scene. The difference was in the primer. Robinson was telling the truth; he was shooting at the range, not at skyscrapers. Mac calls Flack to contact the reporter whom Flack had kicked out from the scene for any footage. Flack goes to him, but the reporter says no, he's not giving footage without a subpoena. Flack says he will get one.


Danny is in the lab checking out the business card with gum. He uses liquid nitrogen to freeze the gum and gets it off the business card, revealing a name, a Mr. Arnold. Mr. Arnold claims he doesn't use gypsy cabs but uses limo services. He says he was at a strip club last night, and that he did slip a stripper the card. Her name? Savannah.


Stella is with a ballistics tech who has't been able to find a match for any of the shell casings. But the tech says she has something better. All the ballistics were from a 30 caliber solder nose with a copper jacket. The only people in New York that use them are ESU and TARU - and only TARU and aviation unit are able to shoot way up high. Which means TARU is it- Technical Assistance Response Unit.


Mac and Stella are at TARU where a TAG chopper is landing. The mini helicopter is able to shoot where people can't. The only problem is that the batteries don't hold well. They question the man operating the chopper, Officer Jasper, who says that that murder is impossible. He was there last night working on the late shift - 2 am to noon. The range of the chopper is 3 miles. He claims he is the only one person authorized to fly it, and that this chopper is the only one like it he knows of. Mac and Stella are going to have to take the chopper, the remote...and the officer.


Stella and Mac are in the lab checking out the chopper and the remote control. Mac dusts. Stella takes the guns off, and gets them ready for ballistics testing. Ballistics confirm that the bullets are the ones used in the shooting. The prints on the remote come back to Officer Jasper. But Mac is concerned about the window. The shooting happened at 10 at night, and Jasper's shift started at 2 am. There is a four hour window. The bullets came from the chopper, but they still need to prove that Officer Jasper was the shooter. Since every officer is equipped with pass-and-go counters for the toll bridges, Mac wants to track Officer Jasper's movements for the day of the murder.


Aiden and Danny go to the strip club. They find Savannah, with a scratch on her face. She explains that she was dropped off by the gypsy cab at her place, then a guy grabbed her from behind, then the gypsy cab driver came back and saved her life. She ran and saw nothing, but is willing to give her DNA. Back at the lab, they find metallic substance on her shirt, steel. But her DNA isn't a match to the trace under the driver's nails. Danny finds hair on Savannah's pants, possibly from the attacker.


Officer Jasper is cleared as the pass-and-go photo from the Triborough Bridge shows him driving north at 9:48pm, and there was no way he could have gone back south where the shooting was. The IA Inspector tells Mac he needs a name. Stella enters Mac's office, and Mac says he thinks it's less and less about the report. They should process the clothes and just forget about the report. They find lipstick stain on the collar of the commissioner's shirt, and check to see if it belongs to the female vic. Flack enters; he got the subpoena and the news footage of the shooting. They see both the TAG footage and the News footage. The female vic was also hit with surgical precision. She was a second target.


Mac questions Grace. Stella is also there and says that the lipstick stain on the shirt didn't match Charlotte's DNA. Mac tells Grace that she must be involved. She starts getting upset, claiming she knows nothing. Mac points tissues to her. Stella tries being buddy buddy with her as Grace sobs. Stella mentions how since both Grace and Charlotte were wearing red dresses, it may be that Grace was the intended target. But Grace won't talk; she's protecting herself, and hiding something. She won't say anymore. Mac picks up the tissue with Grace's lipstick from the trash and goes to compare. Stella goes to check the pass-and-go computers, trying to find a connection.


Danny and Aiden are with Giles again, and the hair analysis is again female, and matches the blood under the nails. One possible explanation is that a mutation on the Y chromosome can cause the DNA to look female when it's really male. The hair also had steel dust which indicates working on the subway. Danny and Aiden remember the guy who was at the crime scene. Bless the poor cab driver who was only in it to save the girl. Danny, who seemed against the gypsy driver at first, seems upset for him.


Mac finds prints on the battery of the chopper, belonging to Inspector Markoni, the IAB investigator who had been approaching Mac all this time. Markoni was flying the TAG chopper. A pass-and-go photo shows him driving a TARU van without authorization. At first they thought the commissioner was the only target, but Grace was also the target. But he was so eager to kill that he killed the wrong woman. They find out what the connection was; it was a crime of passion. Markoni admits that Grace was his before she became the commissioner's. The commissioner stole her from him. Mac asks the inspector if it was worth it. He says: yeah, it was. Markoni is led out.


Danny is at the house of the gypsy diver. He is there to apologize to Antonio, the son. The reason he hates gypsy drivers is that when he was only 10, he and his father went into the wrong cab one day and got beaten up. Danny wanted to tell Antonio that his father was a good man and was trying to save a woman from being raped. He gives him the photo of him and his father. He says NYC needs more men like his father.