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Cheating Death
Cheating Death
Season 7
Number 7
Writer Krystal Houghton Ziv
Director Sam Hill
Original Airdate November 10, 2008
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Next Episode: Gone Baby Gone

Cheating Death is the seventh episode in Season Seven of CSI: Miami.

Synopsis[]

Horatio and his team of CSIs investigate the murder of a con man who conned married women into sex to steal their money. They wouldn't go to the police because they didn't want their husbands to find out that they cheated on them. They are found in a hotel by the manager, the woman covered in blood with no memory of what happened, and the man cuffed to the bedpost and stabbed to death. The team believes it was either a revenge killing by one of the women or their husbands, or could it be something more?

Plot[]

A woman wakes up in a posh Miami hotel room with the dead body of a young man handcuffed to the bed beside her. The woman, Christina Dodd, claims she was drugged, and Horatio has her sent to the hospital for tests. Ryan finds the man's ID, identifying him as Steve Howell, and notices the handcuffs binding him to the bed have the hotel's logo on them. The concierge, Mario Vega, tells Delko that he brought the handcuffs to a woman in the room. After she finishes up at the hospital, Calleigh and Delko question Christina, who confesses to the CSIs that after an illicit encounter with a man in a hotel room who mistook her for a prostitute, she began having sex for money at the Tremaine Hotel. She swears she didn't kill Steve, but Calleigh reminds her solicitation is a crime as well.

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Dr. Price is frustrated after Delko and Ryan play a practical joke on her that involves moving Steve Howell's body, making it more difficult for her to determine the weapon used to kill him him. She sends Delko up to the lab with scrapings from under Steve's fingernails. Valera is able to uncover multiple DNA hits from under his fingernails—the biggest contributor being a woman named Audrey Yates, who has a prior for pandering. Horatio questions the former madam, who claims she got out of the business after her arrest. She tells Horatio that Steve was her tanning butler, and suggests that perhaps one of Christina's other clients got jealous and killed Steve. Valera gets the results of Christina's sexual assault kit and finds another major donor: a man named Dan Becks, who is in the system for assault with a deadly weapon. When the CSIs track him down, Dan tells them he's Christina's husband—and that he was at their son's little league practice at the time of the murder. Ryan and Delko determine Christina was dosed with GHB in the room, while Calleigh helps Dr. Price recreate the position Steve was in when he was killed to make impressions of the stab wounds he sustained, in hopes of identifying the murder weapon. Delko gets prints off tiny shards from a shattered glass vial found in the room and assembles them, matching them to a woman named Lisa Radley. Lisa, who tells the CSIs she had a personal shopping appointment at the time of the murder and shows a receipt to prove it, admits to getting a hotel room to sleep with Steve despite the fact that she's married. She tells the CSIs Steve drugged her and robbed her, even going so far as to steal her wedding ring. The CSIs realize that if Steve was drugging and robbing married women, one of them could have been his killer. Christina must have surprised him by handcuffing him—and then passed out, leaving Stephen a sitting duck for his killer.

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Calleigh and Natalia search Steve's house and discover pictures of Stephen's targets. Using state-of-the-art technology, lab tech Jane Barrett is able to get an image of the photographer off of reflections in the pictures: it's Audrey Yates. When questioned, Audrey admits to being frustrated that these soccer moms were honing in on her business, so she helped Steve find marks so that he could rob them. Horatio notices she's wearing Lisa Radley's wedding ring and confiscates it. Using a silicone mold, Dr. Price determines that the murder weapon was a double-edged knife with a single serrated side. Delko determines it's a combat knife, causing the CSIs to turn their attention back to Dan Becks, a former marine. Becks admits to following Christina, finding her in the hotel room passed out and to threatening Steve, but denies even hurting the man. When the CSIs learn that the hotel concierge was selling fake receipts as alibis, their suspicions fall on Lisa Radley, who gave them a receipt from a personal shopping trip. They question the woman, who says she went to the hotel room to get her ring back. When Steve mocked her, she picked up the knife Becks had left behind and stabbed him desperately out of not finding what she was looking for. She said he had to be stopped, but Horatio reminds the distraught woman that it wasn't her job to stop him.

Cast[]

Main Cast[]

Guest Cast[]

Trivia[]

  • Megalyn Echikunwoke, who plays Tara Price, is added to the opening credits and as such, is now a series regular.
  • Xena actress Lucy Lawless plays Audrey Yates in this episode.

See Also[]

CSI:Miami Season 7
ResurrectionWon't Get Fueled AgainAnd How Does That Make You Kill?Raging CannibalBombshellWrecking CrewCheating DeathGone Baby GonePower TripThe DeLuca MotelTipping PointHead CaseAnd They're OffedSmoke Gets in Your CSI'sPresumed GuiltySink or SwimDivorce PartyFlight RiskTarget SpecificWolfe in Sheep's ClothingChip/TuckDead on ArrivalCollateral DamageDissolvedSeeing Red
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