A Food Truck Explosion Gives The ‘New York’ Team ‘Food For Thought’

The nineteenth episode of CSI: New York’s seventh season finds the team investigating the death of a food truck chef, and Hawkes’ love life heats up. (Major spoilers after the jump!)

According to CSI Files sources, “Food for Thought” opens on a mobile food festival. Food trucks line the street, and they’re serving gourmet cuisine to an eager young crowd. Hawkes is here with Camille Jordanson (Lesley-Ann Brandt), the nurse he helped rescue in “Smooth Criminal”. Camille is excited, but Hawkes is skeptical about the idea of eating food that’s made in a truck. He orders some special gourmet french fries from Derby Chasen, the chef in the World on Wheels truck. Hawkes is still wary as they walk away, but Camille tricks him into trying one of the french fries, and he is not disappointed.

The fun atmosphere is destroyed when an explosion rocks the mobile food festival. The World on Wheels truck disappears into an inferno, and Derby dies in the blast. The team looks into anybody who had a motive to kill the chef, and two names come up at the top of their list. A street vendor named Odelin Gonzales has been selling hotdogs on a certain corner for more than ten years. He gets up early, and he goes through all of the proper channels to sell food legally. For the past six months, Derby has been stealing Odelin’s business by parking his truck illegally on the curb and selling food to all of the customers who line up down the street. Odelin has filed numerous complaints against Derby, but the truck keeps coming. When Flack and Jo tell Odelin that Derby has been murdered, he is surprised. He might have complained about Derby’s actions, but he would never kill anyone. He is a religious man, and he came to this country to build an honest life for himself and his family.

Derby recently filed a wrongful termination lawsuit against his former employer, a celebrity chef named Broxton Langley. Langley fired Derby after he found out the younger man had been putting his boss’s reputation on the line by working on food trucks during his off time, and he was using Langley’s recipes. When Langley found out about the wrongful termination lawsuit, he got angry and went after Derby. He punched him and said he wasn’t afraid to go to court. Langley is shocked to learn that Derby is dead, and he’s even more shocked when Mac and Jo arrest him for murder.

Things get more complicated when the CSIs discover that Derby might have been selling more than food out of his truck. Meanwhile, Hawkes encounters a bit of trouble when he goes to Camille’s apartment and sees several people smoking marijuana. He leaves, and Camille apologizes. She didn’t know that was going on, but she wonders if Hawkes has ever tried it. Later, an NYPD Health Services representative comes into the lab and tells Hawkes and Danny that they have been chosen for a random drug test.

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.

“Food for Thought” is expected to air April 8 on CBS.