CSI:New York

Season 1 - Episode 6 - Outside Man

Written by Timothy J. Lea
Directed by Rob Bailey

Detectives Danny Messer and Aiden Burn test their skills when they are assigned to the brutal slaughter of employees in a Brooklyn restaurant, Quality Café. The body count; two victims in the basement, one upstairs behind the counter and two survivors, Terrell Davenport and Octavia Figueroa, their hands tied with duct tape and plastic bags over their heads. The glass front door of the Quality Café was smashed in by the cops; there are no other exits, the alarm wasn’t set and the place closed at 11 p.m. sharp. Danny thinks it must be an inside job.

In the trace lab, Danny and Aiden retrieve prints from the duct tape which belong to Terrell Davenport, who served five and half years for armed robbery. At the hospital Terrell Davenport, head swathed in bandages, is indignant at the implication he’s involved in the crime. He tells Aiden and Danny, that Octavia, his manager, called him downstairs, where a man put a gun to his head from behind and forced him to tape the other victims hands and put bags over their heads, then to do the same to himself. He tells them to ask Octavia who will verify his statement. He is told Octavia died from her injuries.

Also at the hospital, a distraught Jose Figueroa, brother of Octavia, is crying. Octavia died. Two young children around him begin to weep. Danny and Aiden watch as Octavia’s kids get into a well-maintained sedan, belonging to Luis, father to Octavia’s kids.

Danny and Aiden examine the garbage in the dumpster behind the café. They find multiple syringes, and fingerprints, which they scan into AFIS and find a match: Jose Figueroa. Danny interrogates Jose and confronts him about the syringes. Jose admits to going to the café that night to see his sister but when he arrived she was already dead. Aiden has a hard time believing he saw his sisters dead body then shot up. Danny retorts that Jose is a junkie and it probably made sense to him at the time.

The investigation leads Danny and Aiden to Luis Torres, father of Octavia’s kids. In the Interrogation Room, Danny and Aiden show Luis wilted flowers found in the café’s dumpster. They found traces of stamen on the glass door and his fingerprints on the flower wrapper. Reconstructing the crime, they confront him with the fact that he used the flowers as a ploy to get Gina (the waitress) to open up the door. He got everyone to go downstairs to the basement, but one of the employees tried to escape, so Luis shot him. Terrell was forced to bag and tape everyone. Octavia was taking her kids to Albany (upstate), and Terrell got “caught in the wash.” Luis put bags over the victims’ heads because he couldn’t look them in the eye and kill them.

Meanwhile, Mac and Stella investigate the discovery of a male left leg severed just above the knee. Dr. Hawkes examination reveals that although there didn’t appear to be anything wrong with the leg, it had been surgically amputated.

Their investigation leads them to the apartment of a dead Frank Hertzberg who is missing his lower left leg. Mac is annoyed when he sees uniformed cops and an EMT (emergency medical technician) look into the apartment. Mac sprays the area around the bed with luminal and finds that someone has washed the place down. The “surgery” was conducted in the bed. Stella finds a human pinkie finger in the freezer that doesn’t belong to the dead Frank Hertzberg.

Stella finds a match from the finger to Joe Garford. They find him at the NY Transit Authority office missing a finger and a leg. Joe tells them that Frank felt “oppressed” by his left leg and couldn’t feel whole until he’d have it removed. When Mac asks him who performed the surgery on Joe’s leg, he replies that, like Frank, he is an amputee “wannabe,” but he lacks Frank’s determination. He stands up, releases a hidden cord and his healthy left calf folds down from behind his thigh.

Stella talks to Dierdre Hertzberg, the angry wife of Frank. On a computer screen, Dierdre shows Stella a photo of Frank, his left leg missing. Photoshop retouching. She tells Stella that it was obvious that amputation was on her husband’s mind: he’d drill his leg, cut himself and once he froze his leg in dry ice.

Frank suffered from Apotemnophilia, a body integrity identity disorder. People hate some parts of themselves, thinking it is causing all of their problems, and try to amputate it.

In the Reconstruction Room, Dr. Hawkes shows Stella the femur from Frank Hertzberg’s leg. A black edge at the bottom of the cut indicates that the saw jammed and stopped. They replicate the sawing on a femur sample. Stella deduces that cutting through femur puts a tremendous strain on the electric saw and that the electricity must have cut out.

In the Hertzberg apartment, Stella finds a breaker box and dusts for prints. Mac and Stella interrogate the EMT who was at Hertzberg’s apartment who claims he was there in response the police radio call. Stella shows him photos of a clock in the apartment that reads 9.55. She and Mac arrived at 10.45. The EMT appears in a photo with a clock that reads 9.54.

Mac and Stella reconstruct the crime. The EMT started the surgery and it was going well until the electric saw got jammed in the bone. He finished the cut with a handsaw, sewed up and got out. The CSIs have his print on the breaker box. He blew the fuse, he took off his surgical gloves and threw the switch.

The EMT confesses, saying that Frank begged him to amputate his leg. He was paid $10,000 for the procedure, and since he was a premed student he thought he could do it.

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