Nick & Catherine Chase 'Snakes'

See Also: 'Snakes' Episode Guide

A Mexican boy is going about his morning rounds, refilling up local newspaper boxes with the day's edition of the Spanish-language newspaper, Hoy, when he discovers some unpleasant breaking news jammed in one of the boxes — a severed head.

Swing shift supervisor Catherine Willows is first on the scene and faces the difficult task of sawing out the head in this upcoming episode of CSI, entitled "Snakes". According to CSI Files sources, the badly-mutilated head, which is wrapped in an edition of Hoy, has a snake stuffed in its mouth. Dental records confirm that it belongs to a young Mexican woman called Andrea Juarez. After the CSIs learn that Andrea used to hang around in a Mexican bar, Leonardo's, Nick and Detective Vega head over there to talk to anyone who may have known her.

Leonardo's is a narco bar, frequented by local gangs and drug dealers, where bands sing "narcocorridos", Mexican ballads which pay tribute to the actions of drug traffickers and guerilla fighters. Many extol the deeds of the patron saint of drug smugglers himself, Jesus Malverde, a quasi-mythical outlaw described as Mexico's answer to Robin Hood. The bar is filled with dealers and their hangers-on, many wearing accessories emblazoned with Malverde iconography.

Nick and Vega question the bartender, Juan, a boy not yet out of his teens, and show him a photo of Andrea. Juan says he knew her as Carla, not Andrea, but she was a regular at the bar and came to hear the narcocorrido band Trancazo Norteno play on a regular basis. As Nick listens to the band sing in Spanish, he becomes alarmed at what he's hearing. Worried that he could be mistranslating, he turns to Vega, who confirms he heard the same thing — the band is singing about a woman who was killed and ate a snake.

Javier Lileez, the manager of Trancazo Norteno, prevents Nick and Vega from speaking to the band members themselves, but defends his clients' choice of song. He says the narcocorrido they were singing, despite its eerie resemblance to Andrea's murder, was written over ten years ago. But Javier does confirm the bartender's story that Andrea (whom he also knows as Carla) was a big Trancazo Norteno groupie and never missed a gig.

Back at the lab, Nick examines the newspaper Andrea's head was found wrapped in, and starts to dust it for prints. Soon he discovers something far more interesting: a front page article entitled "Narcocorridos: Race Traitors", written by an investigative journalist by the name of Andrea Juarez...

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 and the airing order of the episodes are liable to change before the episodes are shown.

"Snakes" will likely air in early 2005.

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