Death Is A Washout In 'Playing With Matches'

See Also: 'Playing With Matches' Episode Guide

A woman's life gets washed down the drain.

According to CSI Files sources, "Playing With Matches" finds the team investigating two polar opposites: fire and water. In the final episode penned before the writers' strike, Mac, Stella and Hawkes look into the case of a young woman who is found dead in a public restroom. Flack tells the team that the body was found by a woman who claimed that she was pushed back by water when she opened the bathroom door. It turns out that the bathroom was automated and that it was scheduled to go through a cleaning cycle after every third use. Unfortunately, this isn't such good news for the team: the evidence has been compromised.

The dead woman has wounds on her arms, and they find a knife in the bathroom. The water has washed away any blood or prints that might have been on it. When Sid performs the autopsy, he informs Stella that the cuts on the woman's arms were superficial and that none of them nicked a critical blood vessel. She didn't bleed to death--she drowned. The automated bathroom is only set to use three gallons of water per cycle, so the team realizes that the bathroom was sabotaged.

As they look closer, they find that the drain in the bathroom was blocked to keep the water from escaping. They now have to find out how the automated system pumped enough water into the bathroom to fill it. However, that's not the only mystery that needs to be solved. Sid discovered blood sheltered underneath the victim's fingernail during his autopsy--blood that they hope to match to her attacker. When they run the DNA through their database, they find a match: Seth Riggins, a man who is already behind bars.

Stella reminds Mac that there is a chance that the DNA from another person could be a match to Riggins--it's an astronomical chance, but a chance nonetheless. While they try to solve the riddle of what happened to their victim, Mac goes to the penitentiary to speak to Riggins. The man says that this evidence is proof that he was wrongfully imprisoned and that he plans to use it to get out of jail. Mac says that it will never happen, but Riggins tells him that it doesn't matter what Mac believes--it only matters what the judge believes. Science, after all, has limitations.

While Mac is dealing with death by water, Danny and Lindsay must investigate a death by fire. A young man is killed while street luging when his body is engulfed in flames on a street referred to as the Graveyard. Danny and Lindsay find accelerant on the road, and they also find that the victim was stabbed in the leg with a meat thermometer. When Danny goes to talk to some other street racers with Detective Angell, they see a guy with a meat thermometer attached to his luge, the needle touching the wheel for some reason. Danny asks him what it's for, but when he flashes his badge, the young man takes off, using his luge as a skateboard.

Please note that the above plot details have not been confirmed by CBS, Alliance Atlantis or Bruckheimer Films, and until such time you should treat this information as you would any other rumour. The above information comes from early script drafts and the details of the episodes are liable to change before the episodes are shown.

"Playing With Matches" is expected to air February 6 on CBS.

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