CSI: NY - Episode 5.11, "Forbidden Fruit" Recap

CSI: NY Episode 5.11: Forbidden Fruit
Air Date: December 17, 2008

While cruising down a dark road, patrolmen spot a man pulling a woman’s body from the trunk of a car. They drive up, and he runs. As the officers catch up to him on foot, he falls from a fence and impales himself on a piece of rebar.

At the grocery store, Mac runs into Ella McBride, the owner of the confessions website SecretsU from episode 5.07 Dead Inside. Ella invites Mac to breakfast, but he gets a text, though, about the new case.

At the scene, Don tells Mac that the man is Tony Clark, a department store buyer. The woman has no identification, no signs of trauma, defensive wounds, no missing or disturbed clothing, or any of the usual clues to what happened. Her mouth does show internal bleeding. Danny hears Clark’s cell phone. He is receiving a text from a blocked number:

“Is it done yet?”

Danny finds a red stain on the floor of the car with traces of vegetation, but neither Tony’s nor the victim’s shoes have anyting similar on the soles. The car title has the name Isabelle Vaughn. Mac, though, has already run the plates and received preliminary info on the victim. She’s a talented, successful, young handbag designer. Danny wonders if the the red stain was blood came from an accomplice.

As Sid makes his Y incision on Isabelle, liquid oozes from her abdomen. He calls Hawkes down. The liquid is her stomach, liver, and other internal organs. Sid tells Hawkes that this…saponification…is the cause of death, and the breakdown continued long after her death. He shows Hawkes the contents of both bodies’ stomachs: citrus peels, dandelion, raw onions, vinegar, tobasco, and duck blood soup. Isabelle, though, also had sodium hydroxide, drain cleaner, in her stomach. She would have had to drink at least 18 ounces to do this damage. It appears that she drank it voluntarily. Hawkes wonders why, if this was a suicide, would Tony dump the body.

In a pawn shop, Detective Angell leads Stella to the body of Declan Rooney, 29. He is lying with a snapped neck and broken fingers, the torture methods used by the killer of the Rat Fisherman, the same man who threatened Stella. [See Episode 5.05 Cost of Living.] Stella says the killer, Sebastian Diakos, is “on the wind.” Angell counters that he may have just blown back. Stella notices that the only apparent missing item is whatever was on a mat lying on the counter.

Adam tells Danny that Isabelle had elephant dung under her fingernails. Danny offers Adam a beer if he figures out where that came from, but Adam tells him that he and Lindsay are going to have some big expenses coming up with the new baby.

Lindsay walks up, and wonders why Danny isn’t at Isabelle’s apartment. He says it was clean, but he’s about to go over to Tony’s apartment. She tells Danny that she felt the baby kick earlier. They go to a quiet hallway, where he tries to feel it, but the baby has settled down. He wants to be alerted right away, the next time, though.

Lindsay returns to the lab to find Mac looking over a variety of strange foods laid out on the counter. She offers Mac a berry to put in his mouth for a few seconds. She says it matches the trace that Danny found. It’s a “miracle fruit,” Synsepalum dulcificum a very trendy West African fruit that makes sour foods taste sweet for about an hour or so after coating your tongue. Mac tries an onion, but it tastes sweet. They realize that this would explain how she drank a caustic substance without realizing.

Danny, Hawkes, and Don find the remnants of a “strange foods” party in Tony’s apartment. Danny finds the miracle fruit, and the foods on the counter and tables match the contents of Isabel Vaughn’s stomach.

Don gets a call. Quincy Feeney is the one who sent the text message to Tony. Quincy tells Mac and Don that she idolized Isabelle Vaughn, but she didn’t know her. Tony was friends with her. She says Tony didn’t kill her, but found her dead at his party. He sent everyone away from the party, then led Quincy to the bathroom, where Isabelle was lying. They thought she’d had an allergic reaction. She claims that they were going to dump the body, because the scandal would have ruined Tony’s image and career.

Mac asks if the clothes she’s wearing are the same clothes from the party. They are, so he asks to see her boots. There are red stains on her soles that seem to match the stains on the carpet in Isabelle’s car. She helped Tony put the body in the car. Quincy got in the driver’s seat, but Tony insisted on doing it himself. She says the plan was for Tony to dump the body, then meet her in Long Island City to dump Isabelle’s car. Tony never showed up, though.

Back at Tony’s apartment, the Danny finds a blood trail leading to the bathroom. The sink and its surrounding area are splattered with bloody vomit. There’s no sign of struggle, but a dirty glass on the vanity. Beneath the vanity, Danny finds a half-empty bottle of drain cleaner. They suppose that Tony took the opportunity to spike Isabelle’s drink.

Ella McBride meets Mac in his office. She’s seen news of Isabelle’s murder all over the internet, and thinks she can help. She shows Mac a card sent in a few months before. It has the logo and signature pieces from Isabelle’s handbags glued to one side, and the words “I want her dead” on the back.

Mac and Don visit Isabelle’s business partner, Marina Melton. They tell her that they know that Isabelle was suing her to regain full control of her label. She denies having any reason to fear Isabelle’s “frivolous” suit, claiming that she had become one of the biggest women’s accessories manufacturers in the country on her own. She owns the rights to the label, the contract means Isabelle works for her. She had found her making bags in her dorm room. Mac shows her the death threat card. She recognizes the design elements as Isabelle’s but claims not to know who would have made it.

Danny finds Hawkes in the lab. Hawkes has been testing all the drinks from the party that might have delivered the poison in Isabelle’s glass. Most of them, though, are too acidic to have be sodium hydroxide. The exception is the liquid in the blender. It has a pH of 14. There are no useful prints, but Hawkes hopes to isolate all the ingredients to find a lead to the killer.

Danny receives a report that the sodium hydroxide in Isabelle’s system was pure, so it couldn’t have been the drain cleaner. Otherwise, it would have included bleach. The hope that looking at the guests at the party, they can figure out who would have access to laboratory quality sodium hydroxide.

Sid talks to Stella and Mac about Declan Rooney’s murder. He says that this type of neck-snapping requires a rare skill. He shows them that the direction of the head turning matches that of Woolford Bessie, the Rat Fisherman…left to right. Mac lists the types of special forces that could have trained the killer.

Stella insists that it is Diakos, but Mac says that they only have cause of death connecting the murders. Stella tells him, though, that Diakos was introduced to her as an expert in ancient Greek artifacts. Woolford Bessie was killed over a priceless antique coin. Rooney owned a pawn shop, and Stella believes that he may have come upon something that Diakos wanted. Sid says the kill was pretty clean, but that there was a metal splinter in Rooney’s arm.

Stella rushes out of the lab with the splinter. Mac follows her. He’s concerned over her obsession with finding the killer.

Stella tests the display mat from the pawn shop counter. She shows Danny that she was able to do a surface mapping of trace metals. An image of King Phillip II appeared, just like the image on the coin that the Rat Fisherman had. The splinter from Rooney’s arm matches the metal used to encase the first such coin they had found.

Stella and Detective Angell meet with Stan Trovato, a former counterfeiter. Stella offers to have his brother moved to a closer prison, if he’ll craft them some fake King Phillip coins. At first, he thinks he’s being set up, but gives in, if they’ll put it in writing, and move his brother first.

Mac finds Hawkes disassembling the DNA analyzer. Mac is concerned that he’s taking a $200,000 machine apart, but Hawkes tells him that it requires recalibration. Running elimination samples from the party guests, in particular Marina Melton, he got no results. Mac says he took Melton’s reference sample himself. Hawkes tells him that either the machine needs fixing, or he’s discovered the first human with no DNA.

Adam tells Danny that a smelly bag from Tony’s apartment contained elephant dung, just like that found under Isabelle’s nails. The vegetation in the dung matches that from the Manhattan Zoo. Colby Fisher buys dung from the zoo, and uses it to make paper. Fisher was at the party.

Danny and Don visit Fisher. He says he meant it as a joke. He says he didn’t pick Isabelle. She was just the first person he met at the party. He says he just wanted to see if the berries worked. He claims he didn’t offer her anything else, and that he wouldn’t hurt her. He says he was very close to her, having had a casual sex relationship. He also made hang tags for her bags until a couple months ago. As he’s telling them this, Danny notices jars of sodium hydroxide sitting nearby. Fisher says they use it to bleach their products.

Lindsay tells Mac that she found no identifying marks or traces on the SecretsU card. When she removed the logo and handbag parts, she found a detailed sketch drawn on the card, but nothing else significant. Ella’s prints were the only ones on it, and the glue used to make the card match the glue Ella uses to hang the cards on her office wall. On the computer, Mac brings up the “handbag” card and the statement that Ella wrote out when she was a suspect in her father’s murder. He matches pencil strokes in the new card’s handbag sketch to elements of Ella’s handwriting.

Mac visits Ella, and asks why she made the card. She tells him that she wanted someone to talk to. She asks if the way he treated her in her father’s murder investigation meant nothing. He’s angry that she made him waste valuable time on a fake lead. She apologizes for such a stupid stunt, but he leaves, still angry.

Danny tests the sodium hydroxide from Fisher’s factory. It matches that from Isabelle’s stomach.

Don and Danny question Fisher. Don tells him that the phone company records show that they talked all the time for two months. After that, she ceased calling, but he kept trying to call her. Eventually, she had Fisher’s number blocked. He says that he didn’t tell them about the extent of their relationship, his cheating on her, and his desire to get her to come back, because he knew they’d arrest him. He figured it wouldn’t have mattered once they found the real killer.

He explains that the affair with Isabelle’s partner Marina went on for two months, before Marina called it off. She stopped the affair, then told Isabelle about it. He says Marina is diabolical. Don says he thinks he killed Isabelle. When they tell him that the sodium hydroxide from his paper plant matched the substance that killed Isabelle, Fisher seems shocked that it would be possible.

Mac calls Stella into his office. He says that the chief’s office wants to know why a CSI is moving Marty Trovato to a downstate prison. She says Stan Trovato is helping her. Mac insists that she stop what she’s doing.

Danny tells Mac that Fisher has contacted a lawyer. Hawkes comes in with news on Marina Melton’s DNA swab. He found flakes of betel quid in the blender. The leafy plant produces a mild stimulant that also isolates DNA from saliva making it appear that there is no DNA in a sample. It’s also used primarily by southeast Asians. Melton is from Thailand, and, when she was hooking up with Colby Fisher, she had access to his sodium hydroxide.

Mac brings in Marina Melton. He tells her that officers found her snuff box, full of betel quid, as well as…sodium hydroxide. He tells her that she couldn’t take it when the woman whom she’d used to make a lot of money, Isabelle Vaughn, stood up to her, and wanted to take her designs away, she couldn’t stand it, and she killed her.

Detective Angell finds George Kolovos in a diner. Not identifying herself, she hands him one of the fake coins. He tries to act uninterested. She starts to leave, and he asks what she wants. She tells him she’ll be in touch, and leaves. She gets into Stella’s car and tells her that he took the bait.

Mac receives a call from Ella McBride. She’s crying, and keeps repeating that she’s sorry. He rushes to her apartment and finds her sitting on the kitchen floor. She has cut her wrists with a kitchen knife, but not deep enough to hit the arteries. She says she’s so tired of being alone.

As Mac carries Ella out, the camera closes in on a card on the wall. It says, “I WILL MAKE HIM LOVE ME.” The “O” has the the peculiar curl at the top that Mac found in her drawing and her handwriting.

Talk about your themed sets of subplots: Obsession…much?