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Meet Market
Meet
Season 7
Number 14
Writer Dustin Lee Abraham
Director Paris Barclay
Original Airdate February 1, 2007
Navigation
Previous Episode: Redrum
Next Episode: Law of Gravity

Meet Market is the fourteenth episode in Season Seven of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation.

Synopsis[]

An ex-con is found charred and burned and several of his body parts, even his skeleton, have been removed, leading Keppler and Nick to the possibility that the parts were sold on the black market. Elsewhere, a married woman is beaten to death with a champagne bottle and the investigation unearths that she had been having a "relationship" with a younger male escort.

Plot[]

Victim: Roger Lapinksy (deceased)

On the case: Greg Sanders, Mike Keppler, Nick Stokes, Sofia Curtis

In an car junkyard, the body of ex-con Ross Neddy is found burned to death in the shop on the property. The shop has also been badly burned. There are two points of origin for the fire, one of which is Ross himself. In autopsy, Keppler cuts open Ross's shirt and finds staples along his vertebrae. When the body is put through the x-ray machine, Keppler and Doc Robbins see that they're not looking at bones. Upon opening up the body, they find different objects where the bones should be, including a PVC pipe and an umbrella with an insignia on its handle.

Doc Robbins explains to Greg, Keppler and Nick that piping is sometimes used to replace bones that have been donated for transplant in order to make the body look presentable at an open-casket funeral. Keppler wonders what the point of all this is, since torching the body would eliminate staging the body in an open casket. Almost everything has been taken from the body except for the kidneys, heart, and liver; Doc Robbins says that organ donation is heavily regulated, while bone and tissue donation isn't. The doc is unable to label the cause of death, but he says that Ross has been dead at least a week.

The yard manager, Joe Boony, denies killing Ross and re-piping him, let alone burning the body at his place of business. He tells Sofia that he picked up Ross from outside of a hardware store where he was looking for work. Joe claims that he last saw Ross four days ago, but Sofia tells him that Ross has been dead for longer.

Keppler cuts a burned finger off of the victim and plumps it up to get a viable fingerprint. When he does so, he discovers that the print actually belongs to a Roger Lapinsky. Nick sums things up by saying that Ross dug a body up, sold some body parts, filled the body up with piping and umbrellas, and burned it to make it look like he was the victim. When Nick wonders why no traces of embalming fluid were found, Keppler points out that Roger was Jewish, and that observant Jews don't believe in embalming or donating organs.

Roger's coffin is brought into the lab, where it's found to be unsurprisingly empty. Keppler finds a piece of plaid fabric caught on the inside of the coffin, while Nick spots some blood and notes that dead men don't bleed.

The blood from the coffin comes back to a Heidi Sultz, who did time in prison for domestic assault and is currently on parole. Keppler notes that Heidi committed the same crime as Ross Neddy. Heidi is arrested at her residence and tells Keppler and Sofia that her new boyfriend, Charlie, and her baby are in the backyard. Charlie is found, but Keppler and Sofia can clearly see that this is Ross. When told of all the charges he'll be facing, Ross admits to digging up Roger's corpse in order to fake his own death and give himself a fresh start; nobody was willingly going to hire an ex-con. However, he has no knowledge of the body parts and believes the cuts on the body were from an autopsy.

Greg finds that one of the two tissue procurement companies in the area, Longevity Tissue Services, has a logo that matches the insignia found on the umbrella recovered from Roger's body. Nick and Sofia visit the clinic and collect all of Roger's body parts that were being kept in a refrigeration unit. Records indicate that the body parts came from the Silver Hills Mortuary.

Keppler heads to the mortuary and talks with Salvatore Heinz, a certified tissue recovery coordinator. Salvatore admits that he "recovered" Roger's body parts and stuffed the body with an umbrella when he ran out of PVC piping. When Salvatore goes to get Roger's records, Keppler notices an umbrella stand containing at least a dozen umbrellas from Longevity Tissue Services. Roger's file lists the cause of death as cardiac arrest, which is consistent with Longevity's records. However, before he leaves the mortuary, Keppler receives a call from Doc Robbins; the doc tells him that Roger's actual cause of death was leukemia.

Keppler discovers that Roger's death certificate from the hospital and mortuary don't match, as the hospital had correctly listed leukemia. Nick tells him that the owner of Longevity Tissue Services, Ty Miloni, isn't actually a doctor and dropped out of chiropractic school. Furthermore, Nick goes through Longevity's records and finds that, in the last three years, 37 bone and tissue donors that went to the Longevity clinic were from Silver Hills Mortuary. Twenty-three of those cases were cardiac arrest, with most of the victims being in their thirties and forties—in other words, an alarming number of young people were succumbing to heart attacks. They figure that they'll now have to compare every one of the donors with their official death certificate.

Keppler takes the desktop calendar recovered from Salvatore's office and sees indentations in it. When processed, he can see that Salvatore was forging signatures on top of the calendar. Keppler interrogates Salvatore and accuses him of selling spare body parts for extra cash; however, since nobody would want diseased parts, he forged doctors' signatures and changed the causes of death. Salvatore insists that Ty came to him and told him that what they were doing was safe.

In another interrogation room, Ty tells Nick and Sofia how disappointed he is in Salvatore, believing him to be an honest guy. He admits that he never followed up on the patients who received parts from Silver Hills Mortuary and is horrified to find that some of them died due to the infected parts. Sofia gets him to change his tune when she tells him that families are going to sue his clinic, but he says that he has signed release forms from them. Nick threatens Ty and tells him that he's going to come to the clinic and go through it piece by piece to make sure everything is legitimate; an undeterred Ty says that he'll give his full cooperation.

Victim: Margo Dorton (deceased)

On the case: Catherine Willows, Sara Sidle, Warrick Brown, Jim Brass

Sara and Warrick are called to a scene where the bloody body of Margo Dorton is found in her living room. Her husband, Bill, a wealthy home builder, came home from a business trip and found the body. There's no sign of forced entry and, according to Brass, Bill says that his marriage to Margo was solid. Sara spots a void in the bloody couch and figures that someone was either sitting there or sitting on the floor and resting up against it. They both wonder if a third person was involved in a love triangle, with Warrick thinking that Margo caught Bill in the act and he killed her.

Bill tells Brass that his flight landed at 10:30 PM; he arrived home at midnight to find the bloody scene. Back inside, Warrick finds Margo's keys and sees that there's a valet ticket attached to them. Combined with the nice dress Margo is wearing, he guesses that she went out the night before. Sara, meanwhile, finds a pink fiber on the body. Warrick follows a blood trail into the bathroom. He swabs a spot on the toilet and finds that a ring-shaped stain on the floor tests positive for blood. Sara immediately knows that the ring came from the champagne bottle on the table; however, when she goes to process it, she finds that it's been wiped down.

The hair found on Margo turns out to be synthetic, while the substance Warrick collected from the toilet comes back as vomit. Sara tells Catherine that the champagne glasses recovered tested negative for DNA and that there were only smears and partials on them. Additionally, the blood found on the bottle came back as Margo's. However, she was able to find that the valet ticket on the keys came from a batch at the Over-Under Cabaret, a nightclub.

At the club, Sara and Warrick see that one of the strippers is wearing a pink wig, it's synthetic fibers quite similar to the one found on Margo's body. The stripper, whose stage name is Cotton Candy, admits to them that she got into a fight with Margo the night before because Margo was always hanging out with her fiancé, Jesse. Jesse, as it turns out, works upstairs.

As Sara and Warrick make their way through the upstairs hallway, they pass by several rooms where men and women have congregated; one room shows women flipping through a binder full of photos of men. After Warrick goes to speak to a busboy, a host explains to Sara that this is a host club where men entertain women; however, they're selling relationships, not sex. Sara finds Jesse's photo in the binder and asks to see him. Jesse identifies Margo as one of his relationships. Meanwhile, the busboy corroborates Cotton Candy's story about her fight with Margo. Men are seen rushing to the bathroom to vomit; the bus boy explains to Warrick that the hosts get paid by the bottle and they drink more than their stomachs can handle.

Jesse tells Sara that he can handle 25 relationships at a time and confirms that Cotton Candy is one of them. He says that his relationships get jealous with each other sometimes, especially when one relationship spends more money and monopolizes more of his time. Sara tells him that Margo was found dead, bludgeoned by a bottle of champagne. When asked if he spent time with Margo at her home, Jesse says that he never sees his relationships outside of the club, and doing so would mark the end of the relationship. He adds that Margo told him that she was divorced, so Bill didn't know what was going on.

In autopsy, Doc Robbins shows Catherine that Margo suffered multiple facial fractures and has defensive wounds consistent with a cylindrical object. When asked, he confirms that a champagne bottle could've done the trick. He adds that the death blow came when the object struck Margo's neck, causing pulses to be sent to the brain, eventually leading the brain to shut down the heart. Later in interrogation, Cotton Candy tells Catherine and Brass that she went back to work after her fight with Margo. Her alibi is five $100 bills she was given by a married casino employee that have his prints on them.

Sara and Warrick are seemingly at a dead end, as both Bill's and Cotton Candy's alibis have checked out. Warrick looks at the crime scene photos and is still perplexed as to what could've caused the void in the couch. The void suggests the evidence of a third person, but they don't have any evidence to back that up. Sara wonders if it's not a person they're looking for, but an object. She goes back to the crime scene and discovers that a photo album on the bookshelf is out of order. When she opens it, she finds a few pages covered in blood; the photos are labeled "Christmas 1987" and they're of a young Margo holding a baby.

Under interrogation, Bill tells Sara and Brass that Margo gave birth when she was 17 years old and gave the baby up since he didn't want any kids. The birth father took the baby, but the child eventually ran away from home. Sara notes that Margo was looking at the pictures when she was killed, and Bill says that she was going through premature menopause and the finality of not having any more children.

Sara tells Warrick that she did a little background on Jesse and found that he was in and out of 11 different foster homes and has a record for prostitution and drug possession. She knows that Jesse won't just give up his DNA, but Warrick remembers the vomit found on Margo's toilet and notes that the busboy told him that the hosts usually throw up blood.

The blood and vomit from the toilet come back to Jesse, and he gets brought in for interrogation. He denies killing Margo, but Brass theorizes that Margo gave him some pretty heavy news. A flashback shows them on Margo's couch when she showed the photo album to Jesse and revealed to him that she was his mother. Jesse, outraged at being given up at birth and eventually seduced by his own mother, picked up the champagne bottle and beat Margo to death. He then went into the bathroom and threw up in the toilet.

Jesse tells Sara and Brass that Margo lied to him, as she came up with an elaborate story just to get close to him. He explains that all of his clients have their tactics, but hers was just insane. Sara tells him that Margo wasn't lying to him, as they have 13 alleles in common. Jesse killed his mother. Upset, he says that he's guilty of murder but that he never had a mother and never will.


In an important side story, Keppler walks into his office and curiously looks at one of the envelopes he got in the mail. When he opens it, he sees that it's a funeral program for an Amy McCarty, who died in 1983. There's an invite to a celebration of Amy's life along with a note on the back that reads "We missed you this year kiddo. Be well.—Fr. Anthony."

At the end of the episode, he looks at the funeral program again and puts it in a folder in his office. As he assists Nick with evidence bags from Longevity Tissue Services, he enters the morgue and looks at one of the dead bodies. Suddenly, he sees Amy's body lying on the table dressed in a nightgown. A voice whispers "Keppler?," causing him to whirl around.

Cast[]

Main Cast[]

Guest Cast[]

Quotes[]

Keppler: This guy isn't even a doctor.
Nick: He did drop out of chiropractic school.
Keppler: You're telling me that any Tom, Dick or Harry with a sign can open up a tissue bank?
Nick: If you're FDA registered, yeah.
Keppler: How do you get FDA registered?
Nick: You just fill out a form.

Notes[]

  • Keppler notes to Nick that the Vegas lab seems to like performing exhumations. The body of one of the Jane Doe's was exhumed on the case he was working on in the episode Sweet Jane.

Trivia[]

  • The organ harvesting conspiracy is inspired by the Biomedical Tissue Services harvesting scandal.
  • The search engine called "Spyder Finder" which Keppler uses to find information about the victim (Roger Lapinsky) at the beginning of the episode is fictional and was also used in numerous CSI episodes.

See Also[]

CSI:Las Vegas Season 7
Built to Kill, Part 1Built to Kill, Part 2Toe TagsFannysmackin'Double CrossBurn OutPost MortemHappenstanceLiving LegendLoco MotivesLeaving Las VegasSweet JaneRedrumMeet MarketLaw of GravityMonster in the BoxFallen IdolsEmpty EyesBig ShotsLab RatsEnding HappyLeapin' LizardsThe Good, The Bad, And The DominatrixLiving Doll
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